Gardening Healed Me.

There was no place to put roots, I was just trying to survive one day to the next.

I started my first garden when I was eighteen years old, it was spring of 1996 right before I was to graduate high school. I had helped my grandparents with their gardens as a child, but it wasn’t the same as having my own garden. When I was growing up, we mostly lived in apartment buildings, rooming houses, motels, on random people’s couches and we moved constantly. There was never an opportunity to have a garden, there was no place to put roots, I was just trying to survive one day to the next. When my mother moved us to New Hampshire and rented a house with a teeny tiny sunny garden bed out front it changed my life.

I acquired a couple of packets of seeds, holly hocks, rosemary and lavender and a bag of potting soil and that spring I planted the seeds in empty fruit and yogurt containers and placed them in a plastic bag on a sunny windowsill. It was not quite spring, and the house was too cold for seeds to start, we couldn’t afford oil to heat the house and with spring not far away it would have been a waste of money to fill the oil tank anyway. The seeds never sprouted but my curiosity certainly did, and I was determined to grow something. I went to the nursery that was across the street and bought a six pack annuals and brought them home and planted them. I went to the library and sat there for hours reading all about gardening and seed starting. I became obsessed! All I wanted to talk about was gardening, the kids at the small alternative high school I was going to didn’t share my enthusiasm for plants. If I was growing ‘shrooms or marijuana they might have been interested, but I was learning about culinary herbs, perennials, annual flowers and heirloom tomatoes. I started asking my grandparents about gardening and spent my free time wandering around the nursery trying to memorize the names of the plants I liked. We had to move later that summer. I dug all my plants up and my grandparents let me move them to their garden edge where most of them died in the late summer heat. Transplant shock, another valuable garden lesson I learned that first year.

The next summer I was living with my grandparents in the apartment complex that they managed, and I helped them in their gardens with fervor. I learned about deadheading, weeding, top soil, mulch, adding manures to the gardens and expanded my plant knowledge. A young man moved into the ground level apartment below my grandparents, and we would sometimes talk on the front steps while I was watering or weeding. He asked me to plant some flowers in front of his window, he wanted marigolds which I soon realized was the only flower he knew the name of. That fall we moved into a house of our own, a house that already had established organic gardens and perennial beds, we planted deep, deep roots. We lived there for eleven years together where we grew all our own vegetables, learned to can our own food and experimented and grew as organic gardeners.

Gardening was more than just fun to me, it was stability and safety, a way out of poverty and food insecurity. I knew that if I could grow my own food successfully and store it, I would never go hungry again like I had so many times as a child. It was a way for me to be normal, grounded, stable and prove to myself that I could provide. Gardening helped to heal me. Gardening brings me to God. Gardening brings people together as it did Jon and me.

One of the blessings of not milking cows any longer or running the farmers market is that I get to reinvent the farm and have the time to commit to it. I have the opportunity to put that energy back into gardening again and spend more time with my hands in the soil and my head in the sun. I can share my knowledge and teach others how to grow their own food and have food security. Maybe someone else will find their healing in the soil while planting seeds.

With gratitude,

Angie