I was sorting through a pile of old books and up on a top shelf, hidden way in the back, was a farm-to-table gardening and cookbook.
It's a nice hardback edition, with beautiful photographs and line drawings and lots of information about the right way to set out garden beds, prepare the soil, plant seeds and seedlings, care for the growing plants and harvest the results. Followed by instructions for turning the produce into mouth-watering dishes for your family and friends who will be grateful to you for the rest of their lives.
And then I realized why this book was stuck in a corner on a top shelf.
It was pure fiction.
This was a book that must have been produced by Hollywood, because nobody I know outside of a Walt Disney cartoon ever has a garden that looks that good and turns out so perfectly.
The gardening season begins right after Christmas with the arrival of the first seed catalogs and the new issue of the Farmers' Almanac.
We gardeners sit in our cozy chairs with a cup of hot cocoa while a blizzard lashes the world outside, and we fantasize about what we want to plant this year. We think about how we can beat the odds and produce bushels of juicy tomatoes and crisp cucumbers and how we're finally going to get a jump-start on that pesky crabgrass and have an almost weed-free garden.
Then April comes, and reality sets in.
The crabgrass already has a foothold in my garden. Field bindweed is holding daffodils hostage, and if I had exotic tastes in food I'd be set because the snails in my yard seem to be as fat as chickens.
Gardening is a fun and fulfilling pastime, but between the time of that leisurely winter planning and actually harvesting vegetables in the summer are weeks of frantic work that make you feel like you're behind before you even get started. It's recognition that you don't own the garden so much as it owns you.
It would be easy to give in to despair, but you have to remind yourself that gardening is not about perfection. It's about being part of the mishmash of nature and working off the stress of the day by digging in the dirt. Even pulling weeds can be therapeutic.
Gardening is about starting out with Plan A and being prepared to go to Plan D after Plans B and C also don't work out.
In other words, gardening is not fiction. It's not always pretty, but it's the real deal.
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Hedberg may be contacted at kathyhedberg@gmail.com or at (208) 983-2326.
