The simplicity files: One seed at a time

Apr 30, 2018 | 5:36 AM

KAMLOOPS — I am breaking the rules of local gardening. It is still April yet the patch of garden in the backyard is all dug up, ready to be seeded. I open the big bag of compost manure and spread it all over, a wish for good luck in each handful that I mix with the dusty soil. The smell is thick and heavy and there’s a promise of garden bounty in each black blob I break and spread around.

I remove long couch grass roots as I comb through the dirt, yet again, and I will keep on doing that all summer. Then comes the seeding. One hand forms the dirt gully, the other rains seeds into them: carrot, basil, thyme, and kale. Small nests for beans and pumpkin.

My little guy places peas in a row close to the wooden lattice, carefully covering each with a thin layer of dirt. Green shoots will soon weave their slenderness through the crisscross design. Last year’s kale is testament to resilience and so is the lavender; the small patch of garlic and a lone green onion too. The long winter had nothing on them.

It’s a ritual I love and return to every year. If I close my eyes I am eight and watching my Dad planting the garden. He would always explain where everything goes and why, and he would tell stories; I could never have enough. By the time evening was setting, I felt like the world had been put in beautiful order, completed with my Mom walking to the garden to let us know dinner was set.

When I started growing my own garden the learning curve proved a steep one at times. When my parents were still around I would call them to ask about one thing or another. I had to relearn the gardening secrets I had stored too deep in my memory when I was little, as my eyes were too busy registering the many smells and textures around, and my Dad’s hands, dusty and still elegant as he would grab a cigarette and light it with a satisfied sigh.

Yes, I learned to dislike smoking over the years, and still I do very much, but it feels incomplete to remember anything about my childhood, more so the beautiful evenings in the garden without my Dad lighting a cigarette (he never smoked in the house) and telling stories so enticing I would forget to breathe.

It takes a lot of work to fill a bowl with fragrant cherry tomatoes, and to put together a ‘50-meter garden-to-plate’ dinner. I have learned very early on to be averse to food wasting, because every mouthful was reminding me of my Dad’s tanned arms turning thick slabs of dark soil into baskets of veggies my Mom worked into delicious magic. You don’t toss magic out the window (or God forbid, in the garbage!) no matter what. Our chickens always enjoyed whatever was not suitable for consumption or became too decrepit to be yummy.

Not everyone is suited to do gardening but trying to grow the equivalent of a dinner puts things in perspective. Yet another reason I could not miss the opening of the farmers’ market last week, though it was a cold and shivery-kind of day (can you imagine standing at the market for hours and still being able to smile and even hug the occasional customer – like me, when I show up?).

To be aware of the graceful push of a tiny plant out of the ground and understand what it takes for it to reach the sunshine, drink it all (plus the water you do not forget about even at the end of a long, tiring day,) and become a crisp green pod you are but too lucky to notice and pick at the right time, that is to understand one of the simplest secrets of life, the one we cannot exist without. One that we get away from too easily, forgetting that what holds everything in balance is the very soil we walk on.

My little guy walks up to me with a large smile on his face and yet another bunch of dandelion leaves. ‘For your snack,’ he says. I ask for flowers too, and he picks some, but only a few. ‘That’s all I should get for now, Mom,’ he says apologetically. ‘I feel sorry for the bees to pick them all, they are so happy to find them on our lawn.’ I never believed in carefully manicured lawns, but if it must be one, it’d better be a dandelions-strewn one.

I smell the bittersweet bouquet of dandelions and wish for lots of bees, for birds, and for the world to be put beautifully together again, one garden at a time, one child tenderly caring for bees and their beloved yellow flowers. As I stand barefoot among dandelions on the new soft grass planting a new garden, I get reminded that it is the simple things that keep us and the world around us going. Hence the obligation and urgency to do so, one seed at a time.