How Does Your Garden Grow?

Ruby Marks writes about how planting a vegetable garden can teach us a lot about seeding, watering and nurturing a life.

“We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?” - Wendell Berry

I was a little sad that I could not attend the 40th anniversary of the United Democratic Movement last year. An umbrella structure that seeded, watered and nurtured my political consciousness for many years. I am immensely grateful and proud of what we were able to build collectively, and I will always live its legacy through service.

And so as consolation, I spent a few hours pottering in my little vegetable garden and considered its own busy little growing.

I think one of the best things about planting a vegetable garden is watching how their little personalities unfold. The stalks of corn grow quickly, and before you know it, ranks into smaller green leafy stalks with their baby gummy mouths that will soon grow little yellow teeth. How quickly they grow! And then the beard appears, which signals that they are ripe for plucking!

They remind me of the little boy I met in a small village somewhere near Rustenberg where I went to do some gender training. We were waiting for the local chief to grant us an audience so that we could get permission to talk with the villagers under the big tree in the centre of the village.

To pass the time, I asked a small boy what he wanted to be when he was grown up: “I want to be an old man!”, he piped up. And you could only understand that wish when you looked at what he saw – old men sitting on benches under the shade of trees where women served them with food and calabashes of beer!

The personality of my corn grows from small little seedlings into rows of earnest, industrious looking soldiers, fiercely upright and ready to march straight into a boiling pot of water to release their sweet taste, firm right to the end!

My tomatoes, though, are a riotously rambunctious lot – they just sprawl and lounge in all directions with complete abandonment. They don’t care that they make it impossible to walk on the little pathway right next to them – no, they take over every inch and won’t be contained!

Rebellious little teenagers, they just do their own thing, proud of the little yellow blossoms that slowly turn into hard little green balls that slowly mature into luscious globes of lefty red. And they don’t care one wit whether you call them a fruit or a vegetable! Once ripened, I slice them thickly, and then acquaint them with their neighbours and cousins, basil and parsley.

I pulse these friendly cousins with some olive oil, a clove of garlic, grated Parmesan cheese and salt and pepper, add in some pine nuts, mix the bright green sauce with the sliced tomatoes, lay them neatly – in a way they would never have consented to while they were growing – on some phyllo pastry, bake them and enjoy the intensity of a roasted tomato’s final salute to life! And in true left tradition, the salute is a middle finger!

By the way, is there anything more gloriously life affirming green than a homemade pesto sauce? A joy to make, see and eat!

My carrots are a bit of a surprise – they seemed reluctant to leave the damp darkness of their little earthly womb. But once they send their green scouts to peer up into the light they get on with the business of growing so that they can be pulled up and into the source. And now I wait patiently for the time that I can have the lovely surprise of an orange root tugged out from its comfy earth embrace.

The parsley, mint and basil just do their own little riotous things, and grow higgledy piggledy across and into each other. There they are, growing quickly and waiting patiently to find their way into a tasty mating with mozzarella or into boiling water for a refreshing pot of mint tea or into a nice soup or stew.

I’ve never understood the point of garnishing with parsley – what a waste of goodness! Is there anything sadder then limp parsley laying discarded on the side of a plate, never to be eaten and scraped into a trash can? Rescue the parsley, I say!

But then I’m consoled by my lettuce, who are always thirsty. I swear they transmogrify water into green leaves, because they have an endless appetite for the stuff. They grow profusely, and I cannot keep up with eating them and giving them away! I think that maybe I should go on a lettuce diet – my staff all say, “thank you, we have enough lettuce for now” before scurrying away. I swear they avoid me when they see me approaching with my latest bounty!

But my greatest joy is probably my cabbages – how amazing to watch them grow. They remind me so much of our own life stages. They start out with leaves joyfully spread wide open, revealing their all to the sun and the rain and the wind, and then slowly they start thinking that their best chance of surviving is to close themselves off from those ‘threats’. And so the leaves start folding inward on themselves, until they form a perfectly hard ball of tight green leaves that refuses to reveal its core.

Until they are plucked, and a knife used to slice through all that resistance so that they can be placed gently into a pot of hot water to cook until they are soft and yielding to the touch. Oh, it takes time to become soft when you’ve been closed off for so long. But yield you must, because only then can your essence be revealed. And enjoyed.

I often think of an analogy we used in gender training to explain how women and men are mostly socialised and grow into their respective roles. That it’s okay for men to be like pumpkins, who can spread their seed wherever they want to with no regard of the consequences, while women should be like a cabbage, and keep herself enclosed until she gets married!

Yes, planting a vegetable garden can teach us a lot about seeding, watering and nurturing a life! And what kind of pumpkins and cabbages and corn and tomatoes we want to be!