Learning to Garden During a Pandemic
From the moment I’ve moved into this house, I’ve hated the lawn. It doesn’t want to be there. During the rainy season, it turns into a swamp and dies. During the dry season, it dries up and dies unless it is watered and pampered very carefully.
If I owned this house, I would rip up the whole lawn and replace it with planter boxes, trees, and moss gardens. As a renter, whenever I do something to the yard, I always have a nagging voice in the back of my head worrying that my landlord won’t like it, and it won’t be reversible when I leave.
One of the few good things about the plague is that that voice has gone away. I spent an hour this afternoon in the back yard with a shovel tearing up the grass to make space to plant snap peas, and it felt so good to feel the blade cutting through the roots.
Over the weekend, I went to the grocery store for the first time since they started really locking things down in Oregon. No one was panic-buying when I was there, but most of the shelves were empty. Anything that could be bought in bulk and was a reasonable source of protein was gone. There was no pasta, bread, or beans. The meat and cheese shelves were empty except for a few very big, uncured salted hams. Anything that could possibly be used as toilet paper was gone. I left with a jar of peanut butter, two bags of rice, some produce, a bunch of seeds, and sprouting jar lids, and I felt very lucky.
I think that suddenly not having access to a fully stocked grocery store whenever I want one has triggered some kind of survival instinct in me. I understand now why my grandfather, who grew up during the depression, planted potatoes every year until he couldn’t lift a shovel anymore.
I took a workshop a few years ago on identifying wild edible plants. Whenever I go for a walk now, I find myself naming the edible weeds I see growing along the side of the road--chickweed, plantain, dandelions. It’s been so long since I took the class, I can’t really trust myself to identify anything but dandelions--and I wouldn’t eat anything that grew in a place with such heavy foot traffic, anyway.
But dandelions grow in my backyard, and I like dandelions greens, so I’m trying to grow them. The other day, I pounced on a couple of seeding dandelion heads in the garden. I cupped them in my hands so the winds wouldn’t blow the seeds away, and I carefully carried them to one of my planter barrels full of blooming daffodils and scattered the seeds around the flowers. Every morning, I check my flowers to see if the weeds have started to grow yet. For once, I’m cheering the weeds on.
I don’t know very much about gardening. Until I moved into this house, I spent my entire adult life in tiny apartments without balconies or patios. I’ve experimented with container gardening most summers in the six years since we moved here, but the summers here are so hot and dry, I’ve struggled to keep simple perennials like mint alive.
But seeds are cheap, and I have a lot of time now that we’re all stuck at home. Trying to grow my own food feels like doing something to help.
Maybe, if I can eat some of the things I’ve grown, I won’t have to go to the grocery store so much.
Maybe, if I don’t have to see the empty shelves, I won’t be so afraid.
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