My gardening skills are very elementary and I lack the patience to improve. That does not prevent me from having aspirations though. I can easily imagine myself harvesting herbs and vegetables - something I have actual experience with. My father cultivated a decent vegetable garden all his life though now he is limited to what he can plant in the balcony of his flat in Kolkata. Through the planting season he would try to enlist my help with preparing the soil, planting seeds, pulling the weeds and watering the plants. I did some of everything but without a great deal of enthusiasm and sought every excuse to avoid the "hard" garden work. But when it came time to harvest the fruit of his labor I could not be more eager to do work. Those habits might have been imprinted in me. While I am very familiar with the steps to getting to the happy harvest stage, in my mind all the steps leading to it have been compressed to a small slice of time. One minute there are seeds an untilled earth and before you know it you are harvesting the bottle gourd. Real life just does not work like that.
The plant gets over or under watered inevitably. The trellis it's meant to climb is discarded in favor of the neighboring plant which it is supposed to leave alone. Some leaves yellow and die for unknown reasons. The buds come out in large numbers but most do not bloom and you get to measly gourds for you months long effort. You watch them everyday and they don't grow that much but some insects get interested in them anyway so you decide to pull the plug and harvest them before the reach their peak. I shared the picture of my two gourds with my father and he responded very enthusiastically. They tasted quite mundane and were no different from anything I could buy at the grocery store.
The vegetables from my father's garden tasted wonderful - it made sense that he would toil so hard over them. I still remember the amazing aroma for the specialty green chilies he loved to grow. You added them to boiling hot dal and took it off the flame immediately. It made sense that he tended to those plants for months for this moment to become possible. Such is simply not the case with what I manage to produce. I have to believe love may be the main ingredient in growing a good vegetable garden - I don't have nearly enough of it.
Comments