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.