I wiped my forehead with my sweat-soaked shirt sleeve. “Finish this one little section, and I’ll jump in the pool,” I mumbled, giving myself a quick pep talk as I weeded my way through the garden row, my gloves caked with dirt.
Weeding a garden is a lot like updating an old house: by the time you think you’ve finished, it’s time to start over and do it again. Weeds proliferate quite naturally. In a weak moment, I ask, “Is it really worth all this effort?”
And it’s not just the weeds that challenge the gardener. A critter I’ve named, “Peter Rabbit,” likes to grocery shop in my garden. Then, the other morning, a deer was sniffing around the garden’s edge quite early. I’ve sprayed an animal-friendly repellant whose aroma is supposed to deter them, but I’m not sure Peter Rabbit and Bambi have read the warning label.
A gopher has also invaded my garden, ruining tomatoes fit for a large burger with one chomp of his gopher teeth. I imagine him dancing, like Mr. Gopher in Caddyshack, taunting me as tomato juice dribbles down on his gopher beard.
The weeds and the critters: just a couple of nature’s challenges to the gardener.
Last year I took my then 5-year-old granddaughter to the garden. She was enjoying picking some okra with me when one of the plants pricked her. Raising her eyebrows, like she was breaking news to her grandad, she informed me, “You know, PopPop, you can literally buy these at Wal-Mart.”
When I’m on my knees, furrowing through the garden like a mole, trying to free my beloved plants from their enemies, feeling like it’s a losing battle, retrieving my eyeglasses that keep sliding off because of my sweat, Emmie’s observation does ring in my ears.
The financial saving seems minuscule when you factor in the time plus the physical labor and multiply the cost of the plants and organic fertilizer.
But, the taste of the fruit and vegetables from my garden beats the grocery store every time, or at least I imagine it does. Maybe all that toil and trouble in the garden enhances the flavor. Protecting my precious plants from weeds and critters goes with the territory. As the Proverb says, “Without oxen a stable stays clean, but you need a strong ox for a large harvest” (Proverbs 14:4).
Wendell Berry encourages the faithful gardener. Berry—author, environmentalist, poet, farmer—wrote in one of his essays that he could think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than gardening. That’s quite an astonishing statement. He places gardening above protests and public statements about protecting the environment.
For Berry, a person growing a garden “is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.” As if I needed more motive, Berry also acknowledged the discomfort with gardening: “If you grow a garden, you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over; you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.”
My garden is still growing, and I trust the best is yet to come. Until the harvest is full, I’ll keep toiling, looking forward to that moment when I can lean back, slice a fresh tomato, bite into some juicy corn on the cob, praise my wife for the world’s best fried okra, and wince with joy as my hot peppers take my breath away.
And if my shoulder and back are a tad sore and my legs fatigued, I’ll thank the Lord that I can make a difference in my little piece of the world as I enjoy the fruit of my labor with family.
But, unfortunately for those critters, neither Peter Rabbit, Bambi, or Mr. Gopher will be invited to the table.