Listen to this post:
My master gardener spent time digging in the dirt just about every day she could from springtime through the summer, and as she approached 70 years old, she began to talk about her mortality, saying, “I don’t know how many more gardens I have left, so I’m going to enjoy this while I can.”
It turned out that her last gardens were the year she turned 70, in 2022. Carol Jean was in the hospital and then hospice the following spring, and lymphoma stole her from us on the seventh day of summer.
The perennials and wildflowers she had planted hardly noticed. When I came home after saying goodbye that day, the first echinacea of the summer had bloomed, as perfect a coneflower as I have ever seen. The daffodils, daisies, black-eyed Susans, day lilies, roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, and all the rest have been reminders of dear Red every season.
But I let the vegetable gardens go fallow. And the apple trees in the front yard? The first year I packed as many apples as I could in bags and put them away in the garage refrigerator. After using a handful and eventually leaving the rest in the neighboring meadow for the deer, I left the fruit on the trees in 2024, and they “rewarded” me by refusing to produce apples in ’25.
This summer, they’re giving me another chance. Branches laden with hundreds of apples are drooping towards the ground. Bugs and worms and other critters are taking their toll on most of them, but I have more pretty good apples than I can use. I pulled down a half-dozen or so on Thursday afternoon, and I sliced one up and ate it while composing this blog post.
I also took a baby step and bought a couple of tomato plants, and they have been getting morning to midday sun in planters on my front porch. And so, for the first time in four years, I’ve been able to sample a little taste of homegrown sunshine this month. There is nothing like the taste of a tomato fresh off the vine.
Gardening was Carol Jean’s passion. I would help out now and then, especially around planting time, but she was the one who relished working the soil. My main contribution to the effort was enjoying the fruits of her labor at harvest time.
But those tomatoes have reminded me why she did it. I started thinking about what to grow next spring: Tomatoes, of course, but I remember savoring fresh Swiss chard, snap peas, green beans, radishes and carrots, and more. Mary says she wants to help, and so we will do our best to approximate what Cj left with her legacy of life.
It’s long past time to start digging again. After all, I don’t know how many gardens I have left.
