How Our Garden Has Grown: A Chronicle in Pictures

Clearing out the space for one of two raised-bed gardens.

Putting down cardboard, a barrier for weeds.

Smoothing out the soil and mulch.

We made it a square foot garden, using twine.

Our original plantings:  beans, lettuce, eggplant, tomatoes and marigolds.

Lots of Central Texas rain = a bumper crop!

Diggin' It

When I was a child, I wanted to be a grave digger.  There.  You see your face?  You see your reaction?  I got that a lot when I would tell people that.  They would ask me the question:  "Danny?  What do you want to be when you grow up?"  And I would say, quite sincerely, "I want to be a grave digger."

You know, as I write the words down, I can see why people responded the way they did.  It's a pretty dark thing for a sweet little boy to say.  Kind of "Addams Family"-esque.  When most people think of grave diggers, they probably think of this guy:

"The Tall Man" from Phantasm, a movie that truly terrified my brother and me

So I can see why it may have creeped some of my parents' friends out when I shared my career aspirations with them.  But, by way of an explanation, I need to share what I was "into" at that time in my life.

I really dug digging.  I used to go out in my back yard and dig holes, just for the sake of digging them.  I wasn't looking for buried treasure.  (I did, however, find the occasional deer jaw, which was pretty cool.)  And I wasn't trying to get to China.  Archeology was a notion I enjoyed, but I wasn't that specific.  I simply liked the experience of making a hole in the ground where there had been no hole before.

I hadn't thought about my grave digger dreams at all, for maybe the last 40 years or more, until this past weekend, when I got out in the yard with my rake and my shovel in order to dig out an 8 x 8 foot patch of grass in preparation for our 4 x 4 raised bed garden we're constructing.  My yard, like many in this area, is populated by a strain of super grass called Bermuda grass.  It grows in a heavy, clay-like soil, and is not your run of the mill pretty sod grass.  You won't find Bermuda grass at any well-manicured baseball stadium or golf course, let me put it that way.  Digging in this stuff should be an Olympic sport.  Or, at the very least, an event in one of those "Tough Man" competitions -- the ones you see late at night on ESPN 2, with giant Lithuanian dudes going up against giant Swedish dudes, pulling trees out of the ground, or doing a 40-yard dash with a refrigerator over each shoulder.

This grass is No Joke.

As I dug out the plot for my vegetable bed, smelling the wormy soil, watching the grub worms roll into shrimp-like balls, and seeing spiders skittering for cover, that simple pleasure came rushing back to me, and I was in the back yard at 18 Hartford Lane once more.  I found myself smiling -- not so much at the nostalgic flashback, but at the simple joy of digging.  It still does it for me.  (The arthritic wrists and throbbing back are new, but hey, that's just part of the package.)

There is a derisive cliche in the world of education.  Some asshole, somewhere along the line, was quoted as saying, when faced with a student who just "didn't get it," "Hey, the world needs ditch diggers, too."  It's a quote I've always hated, but if and when they divide us up, one line for the intellectual phonies, and the other for the ditch diggers, you better believe I am going to reach for that shovel.

(Maybe I'd sneak a pencil into my pocket, too.  I might just want to write about those other assholes, after all....)

The Soil Connects

Jeanette, Diego and Jackson, showing off a recent crop of beets in our back yard

Jeanette and I recently began attending something called a "Citizen Gardener" class.  Sponsored by the Sustainable Food Center of Austin, the class is designed not only to help novice gardeners understand what they're doing -- or trying to do -- in their back yards, but also to train a corps of volunteers who presumably will go out and share their skills in community gardens around the Austin metro area.  It's one of those great ideas I wish had been my own, because it manages to incorporate both the fun of gardening with the larger idea of service, and connecting with the community around you.

I'm all for the idea of connecting, though I'll be honest:  this class is more about connecting with my wife and children than it is about any grander sense of the word.  Yes, I do like the idealistic notion of breaking down the barriers between myself and my Fellow Man, but I'm even more excited about doing something special with Jeanette.  My wife and I don't see each other enough.  It's a simple statement, but it's also one that resonates.  It's the kind of sentence you read and then nod your head and think, "You know what?  My spouse an d I don't see each other enough either..."  It's the nature of the world we live in.

So to have an activity, a hobby, or a passion we can share is something I think we've always looked for.  Lately, we've tried yoga, which has been great.   In the past, we've played a little tennis together, worked out at the gym on occasion, and even went roller blading, albeit briefly, which we joke about, because it was supposed to be what we did on our first date, and it only took me about fifteen years to make good on that promise.

Gardening is something that I think will work better than these other activities, only because it ihas always been a connector for me.  When I think of home gardening, I immediately think of my father, out in our yard at 18 Hartford Lane.  (Once again, as my friend Gayle Saks-Rodriguez points out, all roads lead back to Hanno.)  He enjoyed waking up early and getting out into the yard.  He planted many trees, including a row of poplar saplings he ordered through the mail -- forty-inch twigs that became, eventually, a sixty-foot fence of dappled sunlight.  (I noticed last time I passed by the house at 18 Hartford Lane that they'd cut down the trees.  It's their right, I suppose, to prune and start anew.)

In addition, my father grew a beautiful rock garden that flanked the front entrance to our home, filling it with what I remember to be a wide variety of multicolored flowers.  He planted rose bushes and an apple tree.  He had a back patio built, around a lovely mimosa tree, whose leaves I recall being silk-smooth to the touch.

And he did try has hand at vegetables.  The way time distorts memory, I couldn't tell you how many varieties of vegetables there were, or for how many seasons he grew them.  This would have been in the early 1970's, some 40 years ago now.  Of course, when I close my eyes and think back, there were tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and lettuce, all of it shiny and bright as the produce rack at the supermarket, just after the piped-in recording of distant thunder rises up and the sprayers have spritzed the merchandise.

I do know he tried his hand at corn one summer.  I specifically remember it climbed the posts of our back porch, along with some grape vines.  Where it gets spotty is when I try to recollect whether or not a crop was ever produced.  Things get further confused by a story my father used to tell about his own childhood.  He told it every time we ate corn on the cob, and though my brother and I groaned each time ("God, Dad, not that story again."), it's a good one, and I tell it myself, as I've no doubt my younger brother does at his own dinner table, to his own family, some 1,700 miles away from mine.

When my dad and his family arrived from Europe in 1940 or so, they came together for a dinner at a cousin's house in Larchmont, New York.  It was a big meal -- maybe a holiday (Thanksgiving, if you like) -- and one of the dishes on the table was corn on the cob.  This was exotic to the Fuchs family.  They'd never had it before.  When he and his older brother (probably 12 and 15 respectively) bit into the strange vegetable, they looked at each other, eyebrows raised at the amazing sweetness and flavor.  It was so good, my father told, that they began to laugh, and the two of them continued to laugh, eating ear after ear of delicious sweet corn as they went.  It was for this reason that my father always classified corn on the cob, for the remainder of his life, as either "Laughing Corn" (worthy of his stamp of approval) or not.

I don't know whether the Citizen Gardener course will ever fulfill its promise to connect me and my family with the members of our larger Austin community.  I will say this, however:  Getting out into my garden has connected me to my wife, to my children, and to the memories that keep my ancestors alive within me.  I am creating memories for my own children, just as my father did for his.    And in this way, the class has paid itself back already.  Tenfold.

The author, getting ready to build his first palette composter.