Memorial Day 2024
“Who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see believes in God.”
I don’t know who wrote that but it has become my prayer; seeds the currency in God’s economy of creation. With wonder and amazement, I plant tiny treasures, each with its own special DNA and God’s spark of life that determines what it will become.
Shortly after we were married, Steve took me out to the glass and cedar building on the northwest corner of the property to introduce me to the 12’ X 16’ greenhouse, designed and built by his own hands more than 20 years ago. Long forgotten, it had become the repository for broken and unused things, miscellaneous and mismatched lawn furniture, random tools, and a village of mice. Beyond the greenhouse a garden plot, also gone dormant and covered with a tarp.
I knew nothing about a greenhouse, how it functioned, what use it could be to me. I backed away from the stranger and relegated it to the other outbuildings that stored lawn mowers, garbage cans, and rusty car parts, giving the mice free reign. The only gardening I would be doing involved flower pots and landscaped beds. I had given up on vegetables years ago.
There had been a small garden space in our Bothell home. Vegetable gardening was a happy little activity to share with my kids when they were growing up. With varied success, I planted single crop veggies: one year only corn. That was abundant, yielding succulent ears, enough to freeze for winter. I gave up on carrots when the grubs took over and strawberries hollowed out by slugs. One year I planted only pumpkins which delivered a mountain of the orange orbs, enough for all the neighbor kids to have one for Halloween. There was a huge rhubarb plant at one end of the garden that no one wanted to eat and, despite our violent attempts, could not be killed. The kids grew up, life drifted into other directions, and gardening was forgotten.
The first summer after Steve and I were married was my first real interaction with the greenhouse. I cautiously approached it, first to clean out the debris and then to fuss over a couple of tomato plants. They like heat, right? The glass house temps sweltered and the tomatoes obliged and I came to love home-grown basil. I attempted a large pot of lettuce but as soon as its first tender leaves popped up something ate it off at the ground. Do mice eat lettuce?
Something happened in those early days of the greenhouse: we began to make friends. I realized the benefits of sheltering tender green things out of the elements. I remembered the peacefulness of watching plants grow and produce, the satisfaction of bringing the juicy red fruit in to slice for dinner. Maybe I could grow more veggies in containers, a small clustered garden within. But I needed to know more.
Coinciding with my renewed interest in growing vegetables was the looming threat of broken supply chains and food shortages. I collected seed packets but came to realize if there is a sudden paucity of food one doesn’t just decide to throw some seeds on the ground and expect to eat anytime soon. I needed to educate myself.
Did you know you can find out how to do anything on YouTube? YouTube is the Amazon of information and I shopped at will with no damage to my credit card.
Videos of home gardeners, master gardeners, and homesteaders opened a whole new world of gardening to me. My vocabulary began to expand to include terms like no-till, wicking beds, companion planting, succession planting and vertical growing. I needed to catch up quick and was going to need stuff to do it; I was going to need Amazon after all.
The more I learned the grander my plans became. My original plan of container gardening in the greenhouse expanded to raised beds; two giant ones in the greenhouse, plus three more outside in the garden plot. The outside beds arrived in boxes of corrugated panels, each one requiring 96 nuts and bolts. God bless him, through the rainy winter months Steve laboriously assembled them. A 16’ X 8’ cattle panel arced between two of the beds to create a trellis for vining squash, tomatoes and melons to climb. Half barrels would soon fill with potatoes and corn.
We converted the three-foot tall beds into wicking beds. The bottom six inches held a reservoir of water, topped by layers of rock, sand, peat moss, compost and soil, each layer designed to draw the water up to the surface, creating a self-watering environment. If it worked, the beds would sustain their garden for at least a week, probably longer, without needing to be watered . Their height should protect my sprouts from rabbits and slugs, while our boxer keeps the deer on their side of the fence.
Amazon delivered things daily through the winter months and quickly caught my gardening bug, suggesting things I needed, tracking me on Facebook, Instagram and even my email.
Meantime, I became over-ambitious and impatient on another front. Seedlings! In late January, way too early, I began planting seeds indoors, ordering heat mats, thermostats, special planting medium and grow lights.
“Who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see believes in God.”
Lo and behold, the tiny seeds germinated. Before I knew it, I had a large crop of plants outgrowing their pots and the upstairs bay window, and we were months away from our last frost date.
Steve loves tomatoes and eats them like candy, popping a juicy little cherry tomato in his mouth before his first cup of morning coffee, so I plant literally dozens, along with lettuces, herbs, zinnias, nasturtiums, and marigolds (to deter bugs), and stuff that had no business growing indoors, creating a jungle as I obsessively checked the night-time temps.
Amazon said, “Ooo, oooo, look! WE need this!” A thermometer and humidity gauge for the greenhouse that sinked with an app on my iPad. In the dark of night from my cozy bed I could check the conditions and when the time was just right, I began moving my adolescent garden from our house to the greenhouse.
Steve restored the thermostatically controlled ventilation system that exhausts heat out high in the 14’ peak of the ceiling. Cool air replaced it from automated vents low on the opposite wall, helping to maintain as near to 80 degrees as possible.
That should have been enough but succession planting says to start more, to keep a steady supply of seedlings going to mature at different rates. Consequently, the greenhouse began to overflow like a little shop of horrors. Plants began to mature in the jungle, inhaling and exhaling great quantities of humid, fecund air. When it rained outside the windows inside fogged and ran with moisture. If I entered into the midst of this rainforest my glasses fogged up, too. The greenhouse was no longer a cold and neglected shed but a living, breathing organism, restored and filled with life. But I needed to get plants outside and soon.
Then YouTube introduced me to frost cloths, shade cloths, and bug cloths. Frost cloths allowed me to plant outside early. My precious pets could shiver in the cold and still be spared a killing frost. Tented within, the Beefsteak and Gold Nugget tomatoes brooded in the cold but the cool-loving Cherokee red lettuce thrived and grew robust. Yellow onions, Little Finger carrots and French breakfast radishes merely sunk deeper into the moist soil. Sugar snap peas and bush beans too could not have cared less. It was a revelation to me that I could outsmart nature and actually grow vegetables outside.
The days have grown softer and when the sun warms the raised gardens, I lift the frost cloth to allow the spring air to breathe in fresh life. The bees have found the blooms and buzz happily, spreading pollen. Outside the greenhouse door in huge planters are cabbages and brussels sprouts growing to prehistoric sizes. Inside, plants and seedlings rotate from incubation to all grown up and out into the big world. Planters on the deck flourish with six different varieties of succulent strawberries.
I have customized the greenhouse, creating my own she-shed, my happy place. The squatter mice have been evicted. A framed print next to the bronze garden clock mirrors my prayer to me. Two miniature rose bushes in white and lavender remind me of my grandmothers and a white iron pedestal birdbath adds a touch of old-world charm. My tools and supplies assist me as I putter, prune, water, transplant and fuss over the plants I had a hand in bringing to life. I daily walk through both indoor and outdoor gardens, checking, admiring, watching and waiting. My summer successes are yet to be fully realized but I have found deep joy and satisfaction in the journey.
Special thanks to my dear husband Steve, “Thank you, honey. I could not possibly have done it without you.”
Belonging 