Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (16 page)

Above the weedy lawn, next to the house, chaos had broken out. Lacking a shed or storage space, my mother had leaned all the garden tools up against the house, under the broad overhang. Flowerpots and bags of fertilizer and soil fought for limited space with pitchforks, wheelbarrows, piles of cardboard for future mulching projects, watering cans, hoses, rolls of chicken wire, and garden stakes in a variety of sizes. There was no system of organization, no sense to the mess. Between the rusty shovels and pickaxes, the towering stacks of unused flowerpots, and the dandelion-strewn lawn, the yard had a dilapidated air to it. In well-tended North Seattle, it looked like hillbillies had moved in.

I was annoyed my mother had gone off for the summer and left such a mess. I couldn't invite anyone over with things looking like this. What would they think?

But then there was the pie…

I sprang into action, hauling abandoned flowerpots—
wheelbarrows
full of abandoned flowerpots—back to a storage area behind the cottage. I wrestled bags of compost and fertilizer and wood chips around to the north side of the house where no one would see them. I stacked cardboard neatly, tried to organize shovels and rakes, and sorted through piles of twine, gardening gloves, various soil testing kits, bits of copper wire to ward off slugs, and stakes to prop up drooping plants. I threw out plastic plant tags, broken pottery, and a packet of lima bean seeds from 1986 that had come up from California with my mother. I was covered in dirt and sweaty, but eventually some semblance of organization had been imposed on the clutter my mother left behind.

Why does she keep all this crap?

I hadn't cleaned everything—it would take an entire summer to do that. Instead I dragged things I didn't know what to do with around to the north side of the house, where a narrow passageway ran along the fence that marked the property line. Here I piled up pots, cardboard, pieces of a large composter, and the ladder that had no other home. It blocked the path but would be out of sight for the friends I had invited, who would be arriving soon.

I had sent Marianne and Viv the address, with careful instructions that they should follow the path around the south side of the house. I would be in the back, I explained. I could have met them at the front door, but all these years later I was still uncomfortable with friends entering my mother's home.

Looking at the garden, I wondered what they might see. They'd notice the weeds, the cracked patio, the kale plants nearly as tall as I was. It was a riotous mess. Even with all my cleaning, it was ramshackle and cluttered, overgrown and untidy.

I hoped they'd also see the light glinting through the wild grasses in the field, how plump the pea pods were on their vines. I hoped they'd notice the clematis flecked with magenta, the blooming honeysuckle, the small tree covered in tiny little apples. I hoped they'd see the wonder as well as the weeds.

“Hello! Hello!”
I could hear my friends' voices. I looked up the path to the driveway; it was empty. Where were they?

“Hello?”
The disembodied voices floated into the yard, and I rushed back to the patio.
“Where are you?”
I could hear them even if I couldn't see them. Suddenly I knew what had happened.

There, coming around the north end of the house, picking their way through the garden junk I'd carefully hauled away, were my friends. All that crap I'd hidden to make sure no one could see. Blood rushed suddenly to my face.

“Wow,” Viv said. “Look at this place.” I couldn't tell if the note in her voice was awe or horror.

“Yeah, it's a little out of control.”

“It's so
big
!” said Marianne. “I can see why you've been so busy.”

Viv had pulled out her camera and was taking pictures of flowers, lettuces, the blackberry vines blooming along the fence. It made me nervous. Viv was always taking pictures, but I hadn't calculated on our mess being captured for posterity. Or worse, for the internet.

“Here, let's sit in the shade.” I had set up the table on the patio, next to the raspberry bushes, where we would be sheltered from the afternoon sunlight. Marianne and I began to arrange food.

I turned to find Viv taking pictures of the rusty garden tools leaned up against the house: rakes, shovels, pitchforks, a scythe.
“What are you doing?”

She laughed, a tinkling sound, light and pure. “It's just all so…” She paused, searching for the right word while I cringed, the harsh language of the neighborhood children rushing back to my ears.

“…
novel
,” she said happily. There was no judgment in her voice, only pleasant curiosity about a life unlike her own. Viv and her husband lived in a downtown high-rise, far away from pitchforks or scythes.

I laughed. We all laughed. And I realized something I should have figured out long before. I had been too wounded, too guarded, to see it.

When you find your real friends, they will not judge or mock you.
They are your friends
.

I brought the pie down from the kitchen and set it on the table. There was a honey-rosemary soda I'd made with herbs from the garden, and my friends had brought a bottle of Lillet and vanilla ice cream to go with the pie. The raspberry filling pooled around the crust and melted the ice cream so a single bite was both creamy and tart, warm and cold. On a summer day, to
sit in the shade with friends and eat pie and drink wine felt like the best thing ever.

“Are
those
the raspberries?” Viv had caught sight of the stalks next to the patio. She knew the fruit was from the garden but seemed surprised to see it growing inches away from where she sat.

“Yep.”

“Really?” she said, a note of wonder in her voice.
“They're right there?”

I laughed. To me this was no longer novel. “You can pick some if you want.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I'll get you a container.”

I hadn't realized how accustomed I'd become to eating what I had grown. About 70 percent of what I consumed came from the garden: morning berries, lunchtime salads, the vegetables in evening noodles or frittatas. I still bought beans and pasta and eggs, but that was about it.

If Viv was the romantic, Marianne was more practical.

“This place is a lot of work,” she said, looking around.

“I know. I can't keep up with it all.”

“You need help. This is not a one-person job.”

“If you want, I could come help you weed one day.” Viv was back from the berry bushes, her hands cupping a small mound of red.

“Really?”

“Sure—and Carl would love to weedwack those dandelions.”

I smiled to think of my high-rise-dwelling friend and her husband mucking around the garden with me.

“You would do that?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “It would be fun.”

We sat in the shade of the patio as the sun sank slowly toward the western edge of the sky. The magnolia swayed in the breeze,
the chilled wine slid down my throat, and I laughed and talked with my friends, the sounds of our conversation weaving together and floating out over the grass and flower beds to the meadow beyond.

Later, when we were packing up the trappings of our pie party, I handed back the bottle of Lillet. It was still half-f.

“No,” Viv said. “Keep it. For the next time we come up here.”

I looked at my friends, at the berry bushes, at the fruit I had grown and the pie that had brought us together, and suddenly the neighborhood kids and their harsh words felt a far distant memory. Ancient history.

I took the wine bottle, I smiled at them, and in that moment my imperfect garden felt very perfect indeed. As sweet as raspberries, not a thorn in sight.

I
N THE GARDEN OF
my childhood my mother grew corn and asparagus, beans, zucchini, and more, but the thing I remember most is the cherry tomatoes, bushy in their cages, the leaves slightly sticky, funny smelling. My mother wore long-sleeve shirts to weed the tomatoes.

I remember her plucking them off the bush, my brother and me opening our mouths like baby birds for her to pop them in. I closed my eyes to experience the exact moment my teeth pierced the smooth skin and the tomato exploded in a burst of acid sweet, the seeds slightly bitter in their jelly pouches. The sensation was so unexpected each time it happened that my eyes flew open. And there was my mother, smiling at me. That is what I remember.

My mother did not smile often. We have pictures where she is smiling, me or my brother nestled on her lap. You can tell she loves us. Her body language shows it. But mostly we knew she
loved us because of how hard she worked for us. Usually elsewhere.

But the garden—the garden was her project. In the little time she had not devoted to work and cleaning and trying to hold her small world together, my mother grew food.

My brother and I didn't help in the garden, but we were usually playing nearby. We always wanted to be nearby when she was home. I remember her letting us crawl through the dried cornstalks after the ears had been harvested. I remember running my hands through the asparagus that had been allowed to go to seed. I remember eating plums from the old tree that lived in the corner of the yard. I remember her feeding us tomatoes fresh off the vine and still warm from the sun.

When I think of those tomatoes, it is not the flavor that moves me. They were shockingly sweet and tangy, but that is not what I remember the most. It is not what I yearned for.

Eating cherry tomatoes meant my mother was home; it meant she was smiling at me.

The Good Shepherd Center in North Seattle was formerly a home for wayward girls. The ornate stone building and surrounding parkland now housed an elementary school, senior center, artist studios, and nonprofit organization offices. One of these nonprofits was devoted to gardener education and support—with classes, children's camps, a demonstration garden, and a P-Patch. Among the many programs and events that the gardening organization Seattle Tilth sponsored was a big spring plant sale that they held one weekend in April or May.

As I approached the building the Saturday of my first plant sale, I was surprised to see a line snaking around the wide lawn and under gnarled old apple trees in full bloom. I wondered if there was a music concert nearby—surely there must be some trendy event to pull this sort of crowd. But all these people were
waiting for the plant sale. I felt a slow swell of pride at the realization that I lived in a city where people lined up for parsley and lettuce, tomato seedlings and chard.

Heading for the back of the line, I noticed people carrying plastic or cardboard flats, some pulling small red wagons. I hadn't brought anything to carry my plants home; I hadn't known that I should.

This was my first clue that I was entirely unprepared for the experience.

Once the line had slowly, politely moved forward and entered the main enclosure, the feelings of overwhelm began. There was an ocean of basil, fragrant, broad leaves that seemed too big for their stems—Genoa basil, Thai basil, purple basil, lettuce leaf basil. The delicate, feathery leaves of chervil stretched up from pots, as did cilantro and summer savory. There were names I had never heard before: anise hyssop, Vietnamese coriander, pineapple sage.

To walk down the rows of herbs was to feel transported, carried away, almost high from the scent. I hadn't known mint came in such wide variety: licorice mint, orange mint, apple mint, chocolate mint, lemon balm. There were so many kinds of thyme: lemon, silver, variegated, English, French, and Provencal. The fragrance must have gone to my head because suddenly I wanted to grow them all.

This might be the reason for what happened next. Or perhaps gardening is a sort of socially condoned addiction. I'm not entirely sure. But somehow I found myself on the far side of the plant sale an hour and a half later with three flats of seedlings and a receipt for more than a hundred dollars. It took me two trips to get them all in the car.

It was the tomatoes that really did it. Those too came in unimaginable variety. I had known about beefsteak, Roma, Early Girl—and the knobby multicolored fruits sold under the catchall name “heirloom,” but there my knowledge stopped. I had never
heard of Cherokee Purple, Stupice, Juliet, or Siberian. I didn't know about Lemon Boy, Jubilee, Garden Peach. I hadn't realized you could raise a Celebrity! A Champion! An Early Swedish! I wanted to try them all. I had the space now—why not?

This is how I ended up with eighteen different tomato varieties. I was like those people who cannot stop taking in strays and suddenly are living in a house with thirty cats. I kept picking more and more plants: I just wanted to give them a good home.

I would have told you I had a strategy. I wanted to try as many as I could so next year I'd know which ones did best. I was being
scientific
.

I felt rather proud of myself. Just think how much money I'd save come August when the red-filled crates at the market no longer called to me. I would have my own tomato farm at home.

If my mother seemed taken aback by my large investment in tomatoes, she didn't voice her feelings. She let me take up two shelves in the greenhouse and never questioned my haul. She made a good partner for pie-in-the-sky schemes.

That spring was a poor one to be planting tomatoes. For that you needed soil temperatures of fifty-five degrees. You also, ideally, needed it to stop raining. Neither of which was happening in Seattle that year.

We were luckier than most. The tomatoes stayed warm in the greenhouse, sheltered from the cold and the wet. They continued to grow, becoming leggy and unhappy. As the chilly, gray spring dragged on, their leaves began to yellow, and the stems turned purplish.

“You need to do something about those tomatoes,” my mother told me, on a day that was still not warm enough to plant outside. “They need to be in the ground.”

“I know, but it's too cold. I can't plant them yet.”

“Then you should put them in bigger pots. They need more room.”

She was right, but repotting eighteen tomatoes would be a pain. We didn't even
have
eighteen pots the right size. The greenhouse was full that spring. Instead I delayed, thinking next week would be better. Then the next week, and the next. But Seattle that year was a city spring forgot. It was one of the years natives are talking about when they say you can't expect reliably good weather until the Fourth of July. It might be sunny before then, but it might not.

“Don't worry about it,” the man at the nursery told me when I confessed my unplanted tomatoes. “You just want to plant them under.”

“What does that mean?”

“Dig a deep hole, and plant them up to here.” He pointed to a spot halfway up the stem of a nearby plant. “Take off all the leaves below that point. You can put up to two-thirds of the stem underground.”

“What if I can't dig that deep?” The side garden was formed by a retaining wall. I didn't know how far down I could go.

“Don't worry about it,” he repeated. “You can even plant them on their side—they'll turn and stretch toward the sun.”

It sounded far-fetched, but I figured he knew more than I did.

When the weather stabilized, I did as he'd said. I removed the leaves from the lower halves of the tomato plants, loosened their tightly bound roots, and planted them on their sides. Then I hoped for the best.

The problem with my first serious attempt at growing tomatoes was not that I kept them in the greenhouse too long—though I probably did. It wasn't even that I planted them on their sides and trusted the nurseryman that they would find their way upright (they did). The problem with my first serious attempt at growing tomatoes was that, once the weather finally warmed up, the tomatoes took off. They started growing like crazy. They are tropical vines, after all.

I hadn't planned for the sprawl; I hadn't planned for out of control foliage; I didn't know what I was doing. I tried to put them in tomato cages to support the growth, but who has eighteen of those?

A month later the side garden was an acrid forest of sticky green leaves. It was hard to see into the jungle, hard to harvest, and with such a short summer, most of the tomatoes were still green or orange when it started getting cold and rainy again. I wasn't sure what I had done wrong, but my plans for crates of juicy red fruit had failed.

I felt like a character in a cautionary tale of how not to grow tomatoes.
Did you hear about the girl who tried eighteen different varieties?
I promised myself next year I would do better. That is the mantra of the gardener:
next year
.

I had no excuse for not growing a good tomato crop. I had an ideal tomato-growing climate in the side garden: all-day sun on a southern exposure with a cement foundation behind to absorb and retain heat. The area was sheltered from strong winds and cold. Sure, Seattle was a challenging climate for them. But if I couldn't grow tomatoes in Seattle, nobody should be able to.

The following year wasn't a particularly good summer for tomatoes either (I was beginning to wonder if any Seattle summer was). Another long, rainy, and cool spring kept temperatures low until the end of June. But by then, I was prepared.

I had researched tomato varieties. When I went to the plant sale, I wasn't swayed by Garden Peaches and Celebrities. I went straight for varieties known for ripening well in the Northwest: Cherokee Purple, Paul Robeson, Siberian. This time I was not messing around.

I didn't keep the tomatoes in the greenhouse long. That spring I had driven into the northern mountains of central Washington, to a small town a few miles away from the Canadian border, to interview a farmer for an article. Billy Allstot grows strawberries, peaches, cherries, arugula, and eggplant, but
he is known for his tomatoes. I stood with him in a greenhouse that held thousands of plants, all being trained upright on cords strung from the ceiling. The plastic siding magnified the heat, the soil smelled warm, it was like summer in there—even though it was still cold and raining in Seattle.

That morning Billy had told me he talked to his plants, something my mother did as well; I have always been skeptical.

“I walk the farm twice a day,” he said, “always along the same route. By the end of the season, the plants on that route are twice as big as the other plants.” He laughed. “I kind of feel sorry for the other guys, like I'm playing favorites or something.”

He told me this as we were standing on the top of a hillside, looking out over strawberries, cherry and peach trees, all planted in the glacial till soil of the Okanogan River. Later, when we returned to the greenhouse, Billy knelt and ran his hand through the sticky leaves of the tomato plants, an expression of deep satisfaction on his face.

“Are you going to talk to them?” I asked.

He cocked his head to the side, a slight challenge in his eyes as he kept his hands buried in the lacy foliage. “How do you know that I'm not?”

“What do you mean?”

Billy grinned mischievously. “Haven't you ever been touched in a way that said more than a thousand words?”

I swallowed. I might have shivered. I knew exactly what he meant. I laughed or smiled awkwardly, but I didn't give him the real answer, the one that leapt immediately to mind.

Not enough, Billy. Not nearly enough
.

When I left the farm that day, Billy gave me a tomato plant. It was a Sun Gold, a prodigious producer of tangy orange fruit. “Do I need to keep this in the greenhouse?” I asked him.

“Nah, plant it outside. The stress of the weather will make it strong.”

“Should I plant it under?”

“You can take off some leaves and plant it deep, but don't make it go twisting and turning. I don't like that. Those people who plant their tomatoes upside down—I won't even sell my plants to them. How would
you
like to be hung from your heels?”

I drove back to Seattle with the tomato in the rear seat, delighted to be taking a small piece of Billy's farm home with me. I knew I would not be able to equal the affection he lavished on his plants, but I was determined to try.

I might even try talking to them.

If Billy taught me about tomato love, the other thing I learned that year was tough love. I learned about pruning.

I knew what pruning was, of course. I had grown up around trees and vines. Pruning meant taking off deadwood, or controlling growth, or shaping the plant into what you wanted it to be. Cherry trees get pruned, grapevines get pruned, but I had never heard of anyone pruning a tomato. With their sticky leaves and soft stems, tomatoes seemed an odd candidate.

Tomato pruning, it turns out, is something else entirely.

Tomatoes come in two types—determinate and indeterminate. It was right there on the tag, though I had never noticed before. Determinate tomatoes set all their fruit around the same time; they tend to sprawl. Indeterminate tomatoes will continue to grow and set fruit until frost. Indeterminate tomatoes like to be staked. They like to be pruned.

Left to their own devices, tomato plants will make more branches. For almost every leaf an indeterminate tomato puts out, it starts a new branch, nestled in the crook between leaf and stem. That branch will grow and make more branches, so a tomato plant ends up looking like a family tree—with dozens of new lines branching off here and there. This makes for a lot of foliage. It does not make for a lot of fruit.

My tomato jungle the summer before was a prime example of a family tree gone wild. No wonder nothing had ripened. The sun could barely penetrate the thicket.