Jeff Taylor first wrote for GreenPrints in our very second issue, and, boy, was I glad to get such a wonderfully hilarious story in my just-started magazine! In fact, even though, Jeff has contributed to GP scores of times since then, I’m still (for sentimental reasons?) partial to that very first piece. So I can’t resist sharing it with you here.
By the way, Jeff now spells his first name Geoff (it’s a long story). One more fact: His beautiful Tools of the Earth (Chronicle Books) won the Gold Award of the Year from the Garden Writers Association in 1999.
For now, though, you are in for a treat, namely . . .
The Joy of NONgardening
What Happens When a Born Gardener
And a Born NonGardener Meet.
From Weeders Digest
By Jeff Taylor
Illustrations by Jack Vaughan
Some people are born gardeners, and some are not. When representatives from these two groups meet, they slam together like magnets, for some reason. There’s instant rapport:
“What kind of mulch do you like?”
“Oh, gravel, I suppose. Noisy party, isn’t it? Let’s go somewhere. . . . “
Sometimes they marry. The born gardener brings seed catalogs on the honeymoon, and the born nongardener is told stories of the art of grubbing in the dirt to make vegetables. A newly recruited fieldhand myself, I would soon discover that sweat, like tomatoes, also comes in quarts. Right off, I learned that it was easy to concentrate, zen-like, on one thought only while turning a hectare of hardpan into clods. “This,” I thought, “is hard work.”
Slowly, our garden took shape. To my eye, it looked like loose dirt with expensive filth in it. But we worked an entire day to shape it, shoulder to shoulder. The next day, while the chiropractor worked on me from shoulder to shoulder, she planted. The difficult part was over, she said. Now all we had to do was water and weed a few hours ever day, and relentlessly kill every insect on earth.
Perhaps many great thinkers have enjoyed murdering slugs and bugs, but I was quite content to let them live.
“But they’re eating our chard,” Joy said. Which brought us to our first crisis of opinion: My wife had planted many beds of debatable vegetables. Frankly, I had expected only an acre of tomatoes and three or four good-sized corn trees. Eating our chard didn’t strike me as a capital crime; and anyway, I added with an airy laugh, chard should only be eaten during wartime or famine. And ditto for turnips, double ditto for squash, and definitely ditto squared for daikon radishes.
She asked me to elaborate.
“Well,” I said, “let’s start with chard. Its very name sounds like a term for the residue left in the waste treatment pipes of a paper mill. And it tastes exactly like it sounds.”
“Oh, come on,” she said.
“And turnips: Children are forced to eat them solely for the disclipline and vitamins, swallowing forkfuls of backtalk and grey turnip casserole. But they taste no better, 30 years later.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
“As for squash, their orange flesh is only edible if drenched in butter and fed to the dog. Or you can slice ‘em up, dry them, and eventually use them in compost recipes.”
“Give me a break,” she said.
I’m happy to report that we didn’t have a fight right out in the middle of the garden. That sort of thing shows no class at all. We went inside first.
Born nongardeners should be advised that a day of reckoning comes, spread out over several weeks. This is called “The Harvest.” We picked and pulled and shelled and peeled and dried and canned and blanched and froze from can’t see to can’t see, and still the garden upchucked more bounty. Even Joy was concerned.
“You know what we plumb forgot? Eggplant. Next year we’ll have to . . . “
From my bed of pain and weariness, I looked up. My knuckles were swollen to the size of walnuts, and my body craved the solace of the grave. Surely there was something else we could raise. Anything else would be easier than this.
“Let’s have children,” I said, innocently. “Lots of them.”
By the way, for this and 39 other classic stories from the first 5 years of GreenPrints, including the rare, little-known, immensely beautiful "My 90 Acres" and the incredibly deep thought piece, "Weeds Are Us," (two of my favorite things ever written), order the remarkable collection,
