I Don't Know What's Growing in Our Garden
Tales of growing and learning from our makeshift vegetable bed.
We have no raised beds, no section of our yard cordoned off for rows of plants. But we do have a makeshift vegetable garden nestled along the side of our house; the row of dirt adjacent to our siding is four years into a farming experiment that started with a few simple cherry tomato plants.
Those two tomato plants have multiplied ferociously as the years have gone by, vines all strewn together, neatly tucked away behind the front bushes so as not to offend our pearl-clutching HOA.
Each year, our family gets a little more ambitious with the diversity of our planting. To be clear, our collective gardening skillset is probably at a third-grade understanding of the plant cycle with a heavy dose of Pollyanna confidence. We know the basics of planting a seed, watering the soil, and making sure the sun can visit plenty.
But we forget that sometimes there are other factors to consider, like that the rabbits in our neighborhood have a special affinity for green bean plants, or that letting the zucchini grow to be the size of small dogs actually isn’t a flex (it tastes gross). We thought if we threw a bunch of pumpkin seeds in the ground, we might end up with a gourd or two, but instead, they all grew into a mass of invasive vines, eerily like a monster from Stranger Things.
This year, the kids added a new veggie to the seed list: carrots. They planted in late April, and, I’ll tell you, we were away from the house for a week in May, and when we came back, one little carrot plant was really cookin’. We kept a close eye on this carrot that, in light of how much it was outpacing its other carrot friends, seemed to have snuck some carrot-growth hormones. “Look at that mega-carrot!” we’d say. “It’s gonna be huge!”
And look at that mega-carrot we did. We watched its green stem grow longer and bushier through the first few weeks of June, when we reasoned it had to have reached its maximum ripeness, and we all agreed it was time to harvest our first vegetable of the season. “But it was only June,” you may be wondering. “How could that carrot have been ready in June?”
Remember: third-grade understanding.
All four of us had gathered around for this exciting moment, the great pulling of mega-carrot. “Alright, here we go,” my husband said, bracing himself with his legs as he grabbed the base of the stem. He gently yanked. “Come on, mega-carrot,” he said. Soon, the excitement of pulling mega-carrot waned as he struggled to make any progress in getting it out of the ground. He tried different angles, digging around it a tad to loosen it. “Let me try,” I said, with the foolish notion that I had some different skill set to offer.
I did not make progress on mega-carrot, and eventually, as our digging wasn’t revealing anything underground remotely orange, my husband and I exchanged a few looks. The kids were antsy. “When can we see mega-carrot?” they wondered.
“This is definitely not a carrot,” Todd muttered.
The photo app on iPhones has this great feature wherein you can take a photo of a plant and use AI to find out what kind it is, an invaluable resource for us third-grade-level horticulturalists. As the boys prowled around us and I futilely dug and tugged, Todd snapped a photo.
“Hemlock,” he said, reluctantly. “Annnd it says it’s…‘highly toxic.’”
“Even just from touching it?” I muttered to him.
“Well, mostly if it’s ingested…but, uhhh, lemme see. Yeah, no, even just from touching it.”
We paused a beat. “What?” P asked, picking up on his parents’ cues of worry disrupting the happy-go-lucky carrot pulling. “What did he say? What does that mean?”
“Alright!” I said. “So this isn’t a carrot actually. And we’re gonna all go inside and wash our hands! With lots of soap!”
The boys hadn’t touched the hemlock at all, but we still foamed up some intense bubble action for all of us, especially my husband’s and my own dirt-stained, now toxic, hands.
Todd dug up the rest of the hemlock and I scoured the bed for any more, like two gardening amateurs. But even with our tails between our legs, we couldn’t help but laugh together. “I love how much we built up mega-carrot,” I said. “And it was literal poison,” he said.
I love the version of parenting that allows you to zoom out and laugh at the absurdity of it all. How else can we get through these days?
We know full well that we’re no experts on growing plants, but you better believe we’ll be planting a garden for years to come.
And we also know full well that we’re no experts on growing children, but we do know that if they ask to plant cornstalks in our garden, the only right answer is to get that corn planted, watch the stalks grow, and marvel at how tall they are.
