A Toast to the Realistic Garden

You’ve seen all the social media and glossy-paper magazine gardens. They’re lush. They’re perfectly weeded. Their plants are in proportioned rows without a single hole in any leaf, and they fill baskets of picturesque produce without a hitch.

In short, they are photogenic perfection with huge amounts of repost-ability and very low amounts of achievability.

For those of us who don’t have a team of editors and stylists in our lives, and who also have the goats, chickens, cows, house building, children (with homeschooling), timber harvesting, well-digging — and hundreds of other concerns constantly up in the air — most of our gardens aren’t perfect. They’re often in desperate need of more weeding, more mulching, and more pruning. To take a photo of them only shows that frankly, our gardens don’t look much different from the fields surrounding them.

Now, is this an article of whingey complaint? Or of garden-neglect justification? Neither! I instead, would like to give our weedy, unkempt, and dearly loved gardens some long-overdue recognition. A toast, if you will, to the messy, un-instagrammable, realistic, and generous gardens that feed our families, even if there’s still a lot of work to be done. I’ve seen enough immaculate garden rows to last me a lifetime, and the garden I love best is the one outside my door full of edible weeds, buzzing bees, and ripening produce.

Please note: This article is not a hate letter toward those picture-perfect social media accounts. I just think it needs to be recognized that the presentation of gardening as a constant, photogenic endeavor is false at best and depressing at worst. Many of those accounts that are so beautiful are that way because often, there are multiple people working on them. It’s far easier to keep the gardens at Monticello or Baker Creek, or the ones attached to Ree Drummond or Martha Stewart, looking spectacular. There are literal teams of workers spectacularizing them every day.

So grab yourself a cup of sun tea, raise it up, and give your realistic garden a little appreciation. To accompany our toast, I’ve included photos of my own #nofilter #wokeupthisway #messy #idonthavesocialmediabecauseihateit garden spaces. They’re ugly, they’re weedy, and they’ve been feeding me and mine faithfully.

Without further ado …

Here’s to the Weeds

Of course I’m starting with you, gangly, invasive, grassy garden invaders that never give us a moment’s peace. You remind me there’s only so much I can control. And yet, you’re some of the best things to happen to my land. “Weeds” are really just super-successful plants that happen to grow where we don’t want them, but what we want and what we get are two different things.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing. The lamb’s quarters that invaded the spinach bed ended up being more productive than the spinach, and yielded excellent greens long after the official greens went to seed. The plantain has been patiently offering its leaves for cuts, stings, and bruises, even when we rip it out for the compost heap. And buckets upon buckets of greens have gone into the chicken coop, feeding the birds nutritious food for the low price of weeding the squash patch.

Weeds, I salute you, though we admittedly have a love-hate relationship. May you pass on some of your never-say-die persistence and grit to my needy, prissy-princess eggplants. They need it.

Here’s to the Surprises

Yes, we see you little marigold that somehow appeared in the beans. Here’s to your parent, that last-year plant that went to seed and secreted you away in the soil all winter, just so you could arrive, unannounced, and make us smile.

Here’s to the mysterious appearance of bok choy, dill, sunflowers, and tepary beans that appear totally out of place, reminding us of the wondrous seeds that can somehow sleep away in the soil all winter, and still sprout come spring.

Yes, these garden plants may now be domesticated and need a bit of tending to grow well, but the random last-year relics remind us that plants originally took care of themselves: Growing, flowering, going to seed, and growing again, totally without human supervision. May we never forget the original tenacity and resilience of our plants’ wild ancestors, and maybe remember our own human tenacity before everything was provided to us with a mindless boop on a smart phone app.

Here’s to the Seed-Plants

Oh you wild-haired, floppy, out-of-bounds mess of seed pods, umbels, and ripening-past-their-prime fruits. You take up space without offering food. You’re anything but photogenic as you fall over yourselves (and into the beans) with slowly-developing seeds. You take your sweet, sweet time finishing those seeds, while I chomp at the bit with your replacements getting pot-bound and leggy.

Yet, despite my apparent impatience, I wouldn’t be without you. Ever. You are the unsung supports of self-sustainability because without you, all of us gardeners would be married to seed packet orders or expensive garden-store starts every year. You are the inheritance of both peasants and kings. The seeds that feed the future, saved by those in the past.

Here’s to the Plants That Fail

We admit we make mistakes. We planted you too early, or too late, or just in the wrong spot. Maybe we shouldn’t have planted you in the first place. We forgot to or didn’t know how to protect you from the rabbits, squash bugs, and voles (though honestly, that’s a battle few win). We overwatered or underwatered you, or just plain forgot about you. The dog dug you up. It rained too much, or we had a drought.

Whether you died from pests or disease, neglect or overenthusiasm, ignorance or unavoidable environmental circumstance, we salute you. You taught us what not to do, and that counts for something.

Here’s to the Plants That Succeed

This whole partnership — this garden plant and gardener human arrangement — has been going on for a long time. But it’s still amazing that we’ve come this far, and when we taste that first, sun-ripened pepper, those never-make-it-to-the-house sugar snap peas, the first summer sweet corn, we share a moment with all humans through time who went into a garden, ate its produce, and thought “Dang, that’s good” (or whatever variant applied to their language).

For all the sweat and toil of tending you, it’s something special to feed our families from you. Here’s to the exquisite, can’t-be-bought, can’t-be-duplicated feeling of going out with an empty basket and returning loaded with good food.

Here’s to the Adopted, Formerly Stray Cat Who Patrols the Garden and Eliminates Voles and Looks Dang Cute While Doing It

You’re the best, buddy.

Here’s to the Garden Influencers

May they someday be able to eat from and enjoy their gardens without the self-imposed burden of photographing, editing, and posting about it. May they remember that the world of gardens existed far before the world of social media. May their batteries die so their gaze rises from the tiny black-mirror screens, and may they remember what it was to be in a garden just to be in a garden.

Here’s to the Gardeners

Here’s to you, ardent devotees to Ruth Stout, Masanobu Fukuoka, or Paul Gautschi. Here’s to the straw bale gardeners, the keyhole gardeners, the raised bed gardeners, and the all-I-have-is-a-few-pots-on-the-porch gardeners. Here’s to the seasoned veterans who have decades of food-raising under their belts, and to the unsteady novices who have never put seed to soil until this season. To those who wage daily battle with hoe and cultivator, and those no-till missionaries who feel their hackles raise at the mere mention of a tiller. Here’s to those of you who learned everything you needed from your grandparents, and to those of us who still go back to the soil without experience or help guiding the way before us.

May your fingernails never be clean.

Here’s to the Messy Garden

You’re always in a state of becomings and endings, and never finished. You’re sloppy and sweet, productive and prohibitive, and there’s always, always more grass to pull. We rejoice over you when we finally bring in that first tomato, and we stand in slack-shouldered, private despair (nooo!) when drought kills off that squash plant. We always wish we could have done that one thing better, and we learn more every year because of it. You’re our classroom, and our living, plant-y painting. We weed you, feed you, and eat from you, and we are tired come winter. Then we lovingly tuck you in before the snow flies, and anxiously wait for the thaw when we can revisit you, and begin the cycle anew.

Hope you all enjoy an abundant harvest and a well-earned rest come winter. Here’s to all of you and your gardens.