I agree to it. Why not? I’ve got my father’s support, after all. But as I crunch into it, he smiles, gives me a good-natured clap on the back, and heads out the door to go back to work. This was all part of the plan.
The next several minutes are a blur, but I believe at the time I lacked the wherewithal to pour myself a glass of milk, and my body, unable to process the experience otherwise, launched into a bout of deep, jagged hiccups.
I told this story at my dad’s service. I tell it fairly often, I suppose. But why?
For me, it illustrates a few points. One, I like to think it provided me with a glimpse of my dad before he was my dad. I could have been a roommate or a friend at summer camp. Two, it’s a good example of the special combination of humor and bravado he could insert into an otherwise uneventful day. And three, it showcases the plain and simple fact: he could grow one hell of a garden.
I never appreciated it at the time, because I had never tried to replicate his success on my own. At that house in east Montgomery, he had a wide patch of earth next to his shed where he could grow all manner of things: beautiful tomatoes, massive squash (my brother and I once used a zucchini as a pool toy), corn, a wide assortment of herbs, okra, peppers — jalapeños included — just to name a few.
The house where we lived when I was younger, near Old Cloverdale, had concrete footings for an old greenhouse in the back yard. I believe the greenhouse had been razed before my dad had a chance to use it, the only vestiges of its existence being an occasional worn shard of glass in the dirt, but he tilled the earth between those footings to serve the same fertile purpose. It was there I learned the few secrets of gardening I carry with me today: marigolds keep pollinators around but pests away; sometimes you have to thin your rows if seeds are planted too close; and a carrot tastes just fine fresh out of the ground.
When I think of my dad in that back yard, I see him on a spring day, in shorts and a hat, no shirt, working his way on hands and knees through the garden.
I wish I could say I had the same luck with gardening. For years, my first issue had been not making the space for one. A couple years back I set out to change that, rallying my kids (ages 3, 7 and 9 at the time) to help me piece together a little raised bed, fill it with sacks of garden soil, and plant it with whatever seeds or seedlings caught their eye in the garden section. That last part was, in hindsight, a bit overzealous.
We packed that little plot out with a beautiful array of plants that held so much potential in the spring. There were squash, cucumbers, onions, carrots, tomatoes, green peppers, corn and watermelon. A few empty pots were soon filled with mint, thyme and cilantro. My kids had yet to try some of these things, so I swelled with pride watching them water and tend to the garden, imagining the late-summer feast we’d have as they plucked their bounty from the vine and came up with new recipes to put it all to use.
But then summer came.
The Dixie squash was the first sign of trouble. While the surrounding plants crept along in their growth, the squash plant far outpaced them, growing thick, aggressive tendrils that wove through the garden, only to splay out mammoth leaves blocking all light beneath. The onions? Gone before there was any more to them than a wisp of green reaching from the earth. The carrots? Well, let’s just say I didn’t have to worry about thinning them.
The icing on that cake was when, after I had made peace with the carnage the Dixie squash had caused, one day I found it completely shriveled and dead. Not a squash to show for it.
The tomatoes were my last hope — we had five plants climbing high on spiral posts I bought to keep them somewhat tamed. They had shaded out and killed the corn and watermelon, after all, but the tomatoes! How on earth would I use all those tomatoes? By July, I was researching various means of preparing and freezing all manner of salsas, soups and sauces.
And yet, the tomatoes never came. We would occasionally spot a small cluster of green fruit, no bigger than marbles, but they never grew beyond that. I assume birds or squirrels got them, though none were ever caught in the act. Any shred of hope was dashed one hot afternoon when I found their leaves riddled with fat, contented hornworms, each roughly the size of my pinkie. They were green and beautiful, but, true to hungry caterpillar form, ravenous. Oh, and they themselves were covered in hundreds of white eggs. Future baby caterpillars, I assumed. At least we’d spawn a prosperous generation of moths! But further research added the final nail in our failure of a garden’s coffin: they were, in fact, parasitic wasp eggs.
Last year I gave it a break. It was too soon. But as fate would have it earlier this spring, I was at my publisher’s house when, as a passing thought on my way out, she offered me some tomato and squash seedlings she’d grown in her greenhouse. So my kids and I raked over the old raised garden bed and replanted.
It’s early days yet, but I’m hopeful. We have a few things going for us. It’s a modest garden: four tomato plants, one zucchini squash and some strawberries. Nary a Dixie squash to be found. Also, we now have an eager and energetic rat terrier who’s made it his mission to keep all squirrels as high in the trees as possible. I’m not asking for much — a few tomatoes would be nice — but I suppose that’s not really the point. Although my dad never had the chance to fully impart his garden secrets to me, we may manage to pick up our own along the way.
Just don’t ask me to grow jalapeños.
The Incidentalist 
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