Grown Girl: Pandemic Prompts Another Look at Making this Rise from Seeds

I hated that everybody knew I was the girl with cows in her yard.

I hated the way the stench of pig shit clung to summer air. I hated the heavy fly tape wagging on the breeze, and I hated rising at dawn to bring in the peas before they blanched beneath a Southern sun. I hated cucumber beetles and corn silk and Sevin Dust and itchy ankles. I hated dirt pushed up under my nails and mud making tiny trails on my skin. I hated hauling in wood and snapping beans until my fingers were tinted green, and I hated the smell of stewing tomatoes and the little tap dance of boiling glass jars filled with jam made from local blueberries.

When you’re just 10, you don’t want to be different. You endure these things because you have no choice, but you silently swear that things will be different when you have your own life and your own house somewhere far away from fields and fly-covered cow turds.

And you do.

Then, 30 years later, on an early spring day, you’re standing in a Super Target staring at 30 different kinds of canned tomatoes and thinking how excessive it all seems. Not imagining that in two weeks’ time, the world will stop and those shelves will empty and those memories of little dirt rows in a pasture out back will sprout like little seedlings in your mind.

A homemade hothouse brings tomato seeds to life...and gives new purpose to a milk jug.
A homemade hothouse brings tomato seeds to life…and gives new purpose to a milk jug.

So you call up your sister, who has been growing food for the last few years, and ask her what to do with the seed packets you’ve managed to score from a spinning display at a big-box store.

“You can’t plant the tomatoes yet,” she warns you, “but you can make your own greenhouse. Do you have any empty plastic milk jugs?”

There are three in the recycle bin. She tells you how to cut it horizontally down the middle, to fill the bottom up with dirt, to stick your seeds in there and water it and cover it and put it by the window in the sun. She tells you to go ahead and plant the lettuce seeds and the green beans in the oversized pots that contained houseplants, until you neglected them to death.

Green beans rise from the seeds.
Green beans rise from the seeds.

You put everything in the bay window in the dining room, and you call it your Victory Garden, because God knows we all need a victory right now. We need some semblance of proof that life goes on even when it stops. And, of course, it will be a victory if you manage to grow anything.

Six weeks later, you have tomato plant seedlings 3-inches tall and flourishing green bean sprouts and onion sprigs and lettuce titling toward the sun. You have dirt under your fingernails, and it all feels like some kind of miracle.

Take action: Plant your own victory garden.

Making a mini-greenhouse from trash is easier than you might think. Check out this article on how to make one with a milk jug.  

Never gardened before? The thought of tending a plot to begin with felt overwhelming, so I started with empty pots. Check out this story on container gardening for beginners.

 

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