Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
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A few years ago, I spent good money on having a raised-bed garden built in my downtown Toronto yard. It was maybe one metre by two, in the only spot with direct sunlight. I imagined myself harvesting chervil and frisée out of my little patch, to add to my social-media worthy meals.
Too bad I forgot to water, neglected to weed and let the squirrels run roughshod. I’m pretty sure gardening friends were completely disgusted with me.
But then I cashed out and moved to the country. Three months after the move, COVID-19 hit Canada. Everything was all so uncertain and unknown. By April, my new friend, Lorraine, was dropping off a book on how to create an organic garden from nothing. She’d noticed my sunny backyard of mono-culture, pollinator-repellent grass.
It seemed like a lot of work. I’m hardly a princess, but I couldn’t imagine an old city rat like me pulling off a full-blown vegetable garden, even though millions of people do it every day. It’s not brain surgery. It’s not even math. But still, it seemed hard.
I bargained with myself. Yes, life sucks right now, but if you just do a small, curated garden it might be fun. (The possibility of fun is the one thing that can get me to do stuff.)
According to Lorraine’s garden book, in year one you collect a bunch of cardboard boxes, flatten them out, place them where you want your garden to go – right on top of the grass and weeds – and then drop a bunch of dirt onto the cardboard. I was skeptical but I liked the idea of not having to do a lot of digging. Somehow, this no-till method prevents CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.
Because of people’s panicked buying sprees at the liquor store, I scored a lot of boxes. I flattened them and arranged them into a giant square. I ordered top soil. How many yards did I want? Umm, what does a yard of soil even look like? I ordered five. A two-metre high mountain of earth got dumped on the front lawn.
Once the dirt was lugged and spread onto the designated spot, I made a loose frame with old two-by-fours I scrounged. At that point, my 87-year-old father said, “Jesus Murphy, the first rain’s going to wash all that dirt onto the grass.”
A little worm of doubt bored into my brain.
I planted all the usual veggies and a few wild cards, such as ground cherries and shishito peppers. Carrots and beets were for year two, when all the cardboard had decomposed. The tomato plants I threw in a few bags of potting soil, as the book suggested.
Miraculously, even with the heavy spring rains, the earth stayed put.
I had purchased a huge bag of wild flower mix before the pandemic, thinking I would create a magical wild flower meadow on top of the septic bed. I imagined it blowing cinematically in the wind. But neighbour Tanya suggested that since we were in a global pandemic, maybe the whimsy could wait. So I made a second garden on top of the septic bed. With my help, Tanya sowed potatoes, pumpkins, butternut squash and zucchini. I had little faith in myself as a potato farmer, but a big bag of potato seeds from Hindles, the local family-run hardware store, was only $5 and there were so many I gave half to the next-door neighbours. I had zero to lose. Most conventionally grown potatoes have one of the highest pesticide counts among fruits and veggies, so growing your own organic ones is good for basically anything that lives.
That was late May. Somehow the seeds sprouted and the seedlings grew. Sun, rain, sheep manure, compost and TLC made the garden grow. I got invested. Every night, I went online and watched amateur videos about how to garden organically. I beat off most of the aphids. I fished beetles out of squash flowers and composted. Earwigs became my nemesis. Every egg shell was saved to grind up and repel the slugs. I watered and weeded.
I wasn’t perfect. One day, in a heat wave, I may have overindulged in rosemary-infused gin and tonics and forgot to water. The next day the kale looked like it had been shot.
Now it’s fall and countless people have devoured the produce from my garden. That one pumpkin seedling has produced six big orange pumpkins. I’m not exaggerating. Heaping baskets of vegetables have been consumed, given away, frozen, canned (not by me), hardened off and put in the dark. My carbon footprint is smaller than Cinderella’s.
I’ve discovered a few things not on the internet, too. Turns out basic gardening is not a talent, it’s something practised, like yoga. You sweat a lot, so don’t bother showering before you garden. Another steep learning curve for city folks is learning the difference between straw and hay. Hay is for horses and straw is for spreading on your garden to keep the weeds down. Try not to judge yourself when you mix them up.
I’m already planning for a bigger, better garden next year, with a few changes. I definitely won’t be using snowplow driveway markers as tomato stakes again – that was a smart idea that turned out to be stupid. And I’ve just planted garlic to be harvested next July. Apparently, nematodes, thrips and onion maggots (bleh) are my new enemies.
Yes, it’s a weird time. Yes, we may die. But I promise if you plant a vegetable garden, no matter how miniscule, you’ll get a pharma-free hit of dopamine every time you look at it.
And if you want a sweet or savoury way to use the zucchinis home gardeners are always trying to unload, there are a million recipes out there. I know, because I’ve made most of them.
Kim Harris lives in Clarksburg, Ont.