On my first Mother’s Day, my gifts were all plants. My husband bought me a sansevieria and heirloom seed packets, and offered to build me a garden bed. My mother gave me twelve tomato seedlings and a bundle of basil.
Unfortunately, plants are not my gift. Before my daughter was born, my grasp on low-maintenance houseplant care was tenuous at best. But new motherhood for me coincided with a global pandemic in which the prospect of growing your own food was growing in appeal. Besides the back-to-the-land fantasy of being self-sufficient, I wanted my daughter to have the kind of mother who knew things about seasonal produce and planting zones. It seemed like the kind of things mothers should know.
Also, I was bored, and confined to my house and yard. And the yard was not pulling its weight.
I’d grown a whole human, right? What were a few vegetables?
The first step was to tackle the beds, neglected since the last tenants, and covered in branches bleached white from the sun. In one, an unruly jalapeño plant was riotously, obscenely fertile — sprouting hundreds and hundreds of peppers, far more peppers than any one person could ever know what to do with. For some recipes, I need one jalapeño. For most recipes, I need no jalapeños. And yet the jalapeño plant carried on, flowering wildly behind a modest chicken-wire fence.
This seemed to bode well for the tomatoes. In the spring, I parked the baby in a reclining chair under a Salt Life umbrella, who happily gurgled and looked at her hands as my husband and I sprinkled nitrogen-rich plant food into the freshly weeded dirt and staked the cages. In the other bed, we planted cherry tomatoes grown from an egg carton. Little like you, we said, tickling her in the tummy.
The reason we had chosen tomatoes as our starter crop was no accident. One winter, we had gotten into a whisper-fight in the downtown Kroger over buying tomatoes out of season: he claimed to not to be able to taste the difference, while I told him they were ripened artificially with ethylene gas. I knew this fact from an old article I’d written about an heirloom tomato festival, whose varieties still danced in my mind: Cherokee Purple! Black Krim! Brandywine! I’d show him, and my daughter, there was no pleasure quite like biting into a fresh tomato off the vine. By the time they turned red, maybe she’d be old enough to eat one.
Within weeks, in our subtropical climate, the fragrant vines were taller than our heads. Even in their cages, they were beginning to collapse on each other as they towered over the fence, the first green fruits poking through the leaves. We’d hardly done anything but water them each morning with Julia in tow on my hip, who was surely impressed with the gardening skills of her parents. She had just gotten here — she must have thought we did this all the time! I considered starting an Instagram account devoted exclusively to the plants, charting my progress from novice to garden goddess. I could practically taste the juice dribbling down my chin as I sunk my teeth into them over the kitchen sink which, judging by the massive plants, would be any day now. As the Guy Clark song goes, there’s only two things that money can’t buy: True love and homegrown tomatoes.
There is other folk wisdom about tomatoes, though: that nightshades cause madness. And we would come to know that before our first bite. By July, when we went out to inspect the garden with Julia in the morning, we found something else had been munching on the fruit, taking one nibble and moving on the next. Squirrels? Possums? We sprayed the green tomatoes with cayenne mixed with water in a spritzer bottle. Still more bitten. We purchased inflatable snakes and arranged them menacingly among the plants. Still more. By the time we bought nets, every single one was gone.
Disheartened, my already sparse pruning of the tomato plants — after all, they’d spoiled me by not needing any help at the beginning — grew even sparser. I would see the yellowing leaves, branches turning brown, and would think, I should do something about that.
But where was the time? Since we had started the garden, my daughter had grown from an affable lump into a crawler, who windmilled her arms as plump as Hawaiian rolls to get around. When I sat her in the yard, she grabbed grass by the fistful and brought it into her mouth in a continuous shoveling motion that she applied to everything she could get her hands on: Rake, raise to mouth, repeat. During her nap times, I learned I could do one thing: clean, catch up on work, or work out. But not more than one. When my parents watched her while I was working from home, it felt wrong to go out in the yard — and it was so damn hot! During the dog days of summer in the South, there was no place you’d less rather be than outside, musing darkly about climate change beneath the sweltering sun.
Each day, I woke up with vast plans about what kind of day we’d have, what kind of mother I’d be. We could go to the outdoor farmer’s market or sit in the courtyard of a coffee shop with a pastry. I’d make all my own baby food and meal prep into oblivion, every steamed vegetable in a teeny-tiny container with a matching lid and labels in neat handwriting.
And then, each day, my grand plans disappeared into board books and nursery rhymes, the constant gear-shifting between work and keeping my home surface-clean, stroller walks around the park, feeding and napping and singing and crying. I put her down for bed and collapsed on the couch in the evenings, with pruning plants the last thing on my mind.
I was an ambitious person used to accomplishing every item on her to-do list.And now I was finding, I could only stay one step ahead.
Perhaps sensing their place in the pecking order of my priorities, the tomato plants stopped producing fruits at all, even though I’d planted the indeterminate variety meant to flower until first frost. I could have investigated what was wrong — add fertilizer? Water more often?— but I never did. Taking care of my growing little girl had superseded my ability to take care of plant babies, too. Another domestic-goddess dream gone to dust.
And yet. An adjacent garden bed lies fallow, with freshly overturned soil. Just like for Julia, the possibilities seem endless. A fresh start. What could I grow next?