I started a tray of cabbage and marigolds in February when Walmart first got bright with seed packets. Now I’m asking myself: Why did I do this, when I have nowhere to plant the seedlings? Maybe it was my agriculturalist grandfathers calling to me from beyond the grave. Or maybe it was just hope. Or maybe those are the same thing.
Like many people around Asheville, I’m actively looking for an affordable house to buy, hopefully with a little land, and have been for months. Asheville has started to feel like home. So this spring I’m not quite a man without a country. But I’m certainly a woman without a garden, and I feel the state of limbo acutely.
Now as my 3-year-old collects sprinkler water in a pink bucket, I remember how that same sprinkler fed our garden in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, last summer. There we bought our first house and expected to stay for a long time. I thought my daughter would walk down those long living room stairs on her way to the prom. In this faith, we built the garden beds ourselves from overpriced pine during the height of the pandemic, then a guy backed up his truck and showered bone-dry topsoil into them. All this dirt cost what then seemed like a lot of money.
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I mixed in what compost I had accumulated in the short time since we bought the house, and planted. Soon the zinnias poked their hardy heads from the craggy clay. The bok choy and cucumbers did not. The zucchini grew but mildewed, and the cherry tomatoes hoarded a hateful twinge in their aftertaste all summer long. And then we moved for a new job in Asheville.
I don’t miss the Northumberland garden, because it never really had time to come alive. What I miss is the garden we had before that one. It lay in the backyard of our first little rented house, the place we brought our babies home to. That garden, worked by the prior tenants, gave me feasts of peas, loads of beefsteak tomatoes, armies of nasturtiums, and a pantry full of beets for six years in a row. To that garden I hauled home seedlings from the Amish market and two Flemish giant rabbits to fertilize and nibble. The more time passes, the more I realize how much I owe those mysterious past tenants who left their tomato cages in our garage and fed the soil even though they would never own it.
But I do miss the hope I had for the Northumberland garden, especially the trees I planted. When we found we were certainly leaving, my oldest girl said tearfully, “What about our apple trees?” By the time our first tiny apple had showed, we knew the name of our prospective homebuyer. So we called that tiny gift “Omar’s apple.” I hope Omar ate it and I hope it was delicious.
Making good soil takes time. That’s an obvious tenet of conservation. But when will I get all the time I need in one place that’s really mine? That’s an obvious question of the human soul.
Back to my grandfathers for a moment. My maternal grandfather, Charlie, farmed grapes in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. He tenanted one rented farmhouse after another, cultivating small vegetable gardens on his own plot and asking neighbors if he could garden in their yards too. My other grandfather, also named Charlie, could grow anything, and specialized in the roses beneath which he buried the carp he caught in Canandaigua Lake. His son, my father, grew up to manage a sugar bush of maples.
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So though I feel worn thin with hoping, I doubt I’ll escape my love of the garden. I even love to assemble the daily compost on the counter in a big open bowl, unplanning, surprising myself. At the end of the day, it’s a work of art — egg shells, memories of the morning coffee in the paper filter, purple onion skins, browned bananas, potato peels, watermelon rinds. I can’t bear to throw these treasures of nitrogen into the conventional garbage. Not when they might nourish next summer’s marigolds and peas. Not when they carry within themselves the reversal of waste. Not when they might reward me with the mounds of black soil my father will praise me for.
I’ll probably have to give my cabbage and marigold seedlings away. Yet at night I still carry the compost out to a plastic bin I keep beside my rented porch in Arden. To the next home, I’ll tote this garbage. Or should I call it hope?
Chelsea Boes lives in Arden and works as a writer for WorldKids Magazine in Biltmore Village.
