Garden Vegetable | My Garden Failed, But I Grew As A Parent
It was the full-colour catalogue that did me in. Page after page of luscious fruits and vegetables, dripping with dew and ready to be harvested. Like many first-time gardeners, I had visions of a cornucopia of fresh organic produce: heirloom tomatoes nestled against European lettuce varietals, strawberries still warm from the sun.
How does your garden grow? Marjorie Harris took your questions
I’m firmly rooted in my mother’s garden now
My roots are growing along with my garden
Foolish? Perhaps. In my own defence, I had recently moved back to Vancouver after more than a decade of living in New York and was embracing the great green space that is the lower mainland of British Columbia. When a spot was made available in a community garden, I leapt at the opportunity to introduce my daughter to the experience of growing our own food, certain that we would spend happy afternoons in the dirt, learning about the ecosystem and eating fresh vegetables. Would it involve work? Of course it would. But we were ready.
When I say “we,” of course, I mean me. My daughter is not quite 3 and so her participation in the garden is neither voluntary nor participation. Woody Allen once said, “Eighty per cent of success is just showing up.” No one better embodies that philosophy than a toddler. But I had my hopes of winning a gardening-parenting-teaching trifecta, and so, armed with an array of organic, West Coast-friendly seeds, I was ready to recreate Eden for my little girl.
I had planned a roster of vegetable all-stars: green beans, snow peas, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots. Carrots, I felt, were the perfect garden vegetable for kids. Easy to grow, fun to eat straight from the ground.
Easy. Fun.
I was so naive.
As all gardeners know, growing anything successfully involves both luck and skill, and I had neither. A cold, wet spring became a cold, wet summer. Nothing to be done about that, I sighed, disappointed but not defeated. No sign of the sun. No sign of the carrots.
As the weeks went by, the neighbouring garden plots began to produce waves of snow peas, lettuce and – yes – carrots. I looked at the pale green tops sagging over the dirt in our garden bed. Could they be ready? I decided to jump in, uprooting the largest one I could see.
“Look,” I said triumphantly. “A carrot!”
My daughter raised her eyebrow at me, clearly shuffling through her mental dictionary of words learned. Carrot. Orange. Long. Crunchy. Nope, her look suggested, you can’t fool me. What I held in my hand looked like nothing so much as a disconsolate parsnip – pale, stunted and ashamed. It was as though the thing had exited the earth with a sigh of “Why bother?” This was a question I was beginning to ask myself.
My mother, an experienced gardener, offered a box of all-purpose plant food that promised
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