THE GARDEN DISCONNECT

Murray's indoor vegetable starter kit

Please have plenty of vegetables cooked for our first meal and a big cake, canned or fresh fruit. If handy, chicken. Love, Momma – Ina, traveling on a shoestring and hungry, writes to daughters Myrtle and Ethel back at the farm – Aug. 9, 1926

There’s a disconnect between the gardens of my imagination and the reality of the thing.

In my mind’s eye, I see the farmhouse sitting in the midst of a beautiful cottage garden – lots of flowers, including roses and peonies. And we should have a prolific vegetable garden, too, producing enough to last at least into autumn. And fruit trees everywhere.

Well, the reality is something else. At altitude in central Idaho, we’re apt to have a wet spring that delays planting. Then we’ll have an early hot summer and no appreciable rain until autumn, meaning that the ground dries and becomes hard and undiggable. (It’s basically clay, you know.) The prediction for this spring is warmer and drier than usual.

And that’s just the weather. We might be able to do more if the deer and rodents would just leave us alone.

And then Mike wants to keep the grounds free of random planting and fencing so that mowing is easy. Well, my dad was the same way. He removed Grandma Ina’s roses and peonies.

My grandparents didn’t face these challenges. It’s dry land farming, and it rained enough in the summer that they got by. I admit that they were better gardeners than I am, but still, they had some things going for them. The summer climate was better then – cooler with some nice gentle summer rains. I remember those.

Having grown up on the homestead, my dad was a good gardener in his day. Yet, his last efforts before he passed came to naught. “Kathy,” he said, “something ate the corn right out of the ground.” That was the mid-1980s.

Nowadays, gardening at the farm is basically a nightmare, but we keep trying. The garden websites are pressing me to order seeds and plants, and with that, I daydream again about prolific gardens.

Well, I have to “squash” my enthusiasm to keep from ordering too many seed packets. I’d like to add another raised bed or two so that I can better rotate my vegetable crops. But in the end, it’s usually not a rewarding venture anyway.

Mike always reminds me that spinach and snap peas are so-o-o good when fresh from the garden. Unfortunately, these veggies like cool weather, and by the time I can plant, it’s too late because of the aforementioned early summer.

Son Murray, who gardens here in town, says he only plants a garden because he loves fresh produce. He’s already started seeds in his new tray with grow light. I’ll just start tomatoes, squash, and peppers in my kitchen window. I could buy the plants, but starting from seed offers better variety. AND – it is fun to watch the young plants grow. KW