Ammi Midstokke: Gardening supports the local economy

For two years, I’ve been in landscaping limbo, unable to plant a garden as we’ve been busy building a house. This has served as an emotional rehabilitation period during which my memories of horticulture carnage have been erased or replaced with revisionist history in which I recall only the four delicious asparagus I harvested and that year the anonymous tree produced dozens of delightful plums.

Despite the facts or evidence of any actual learning, my blind optimism has been fully restored as measured by how much cash I left at the gardening store this week.

I was afraid they might not remember me, seeing as I’ve only been purchasing saplings to feed the moose in the new neighborhood, but they lit up at my arrival, probably because I am the definition of a cash-cow customer.

First, I buy seeds and soil. Then I buy fertilizer in the form of exotic animal scat. Then I buy several pairs of gardening gloves as an excuse to ask why things are not growing, despite the Peruvian albino bat guano harvested on a full moon by a shaman hand-feeding them mosquitoes only nourished by the blood of nursing calves.

Within weeks, I return again to buy trays of robust vegetable starts. I’ve inevitably killed all of mine. This continues all summer until I end up at the farmer’s market to buy mature tomatoes, as the two produced on my remaining plant appear stuck in adolescence.

It is not just the gardening store and the farmers we support. We also support the bakers, because when we go to the market to find produce or an eager basil plant, I need to buy some sympathy pastries for my dejected spirit, sometimes some sympathy earrings, and almost always some extra soap to wash my garden-dirtied hands, plus a loaf of homemade sourdough, goat cheese, a bouquet of flowers and something that has been tie-dyed. And a $32 cribbage board made out of a two-by-four and some toothpicks.

There is also the trip to the hardware store to spend a morning looking at fencing options, which appears to be my husband’s love language. He wants to hold hands and romantically utter words like “galvanized” while we stroll up and down the aisles looking for something that keeps the vermin out.

The hilltop critters would only consider my garden as a desperate act of survival or game of chance. They might try for the compost bin and perhaps discover a resilient radish. To protect that lone, hopeful vegetable and preserve my claim as a hobby gardener, we drop a few hundred dollars on fencing and chicken wire.

About the time we’re trying to fill the overstuffed car with rolls of metal, we remember we need to go to the co-op to get some irrigation parts. Irrigation parts are the grown man’s version of connection toys, so the cart gets filled with tubes and buttons and tiny bags of corners and valves and a box with dials and another $400 or so later we could circumnavigate the globe with tiny pipes, but can only have one zone.

This conversation makes us hungry, so we have to stop for lunch on the way home, and also we want to start working on the garden when we arrive and not be distracted by making food. We remember that, as we have teenagers, we have no food (only ingredients, as they will tell us) and stop at the grocery store to buy overpriced bags of precut, organic french fries – the nutrition staple of most high schoolers. Don’t worry, they get their vitamin C from the ketchup, so no one has scurvy yet.

By the time we’re done unpacking, we’re exhausted and need a nap.

After that we probably have to teach the kids how to play cribbage, so no actual gardening will happen. I’ll water the trays of starts sitting in the garage until a hot day dooms them. I hope it’s a Friday because then I can replace them at the farmer’s market on Saturday. One would think the grief would wear me down, but I find solace in knowing how much we’re supporting the local economy, year after year.

Also the memory of a Hokkaido pumpkin I once grew by accident glows in my heart like a beacon of hope, though I believe its value was approximately $12,000, not including the blood, sweat and tears.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com