Illustration by Vian Wrya
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
I despair often about the world. It’s tempting to give up and retreat into endless seasons of The Great British Baking Show. Instead, this spring, amidst the swirl of wars, climate disasters and rollbacks of human rights, I started a small community garden.
My grocery co-op agreed to host it and provide water; a soil company donated soil; I bought planters at a discount with a microcommunity grant. Seeds and seedlings flowed from local urban agriculture groups. The food would go to a community fridge, hosted by a church and maintained by volunteers.
When the day came to install the garden, I had a new sorrow: I had just said goodbye to my beloved cat of almost 15 years. My brain was like a radio stuck between stations. But my grief got quieter as Paul Simon and the Beatles played on my portable speaker, the spring sunlight poured into the parking lot and co-op volunteers assembled the beds and filled them with soil. A kid carefully pressed radish seeds into the soil, and even in my season of mourning, new life began.
The gardens, about 60 square feet of raised beds in a parking lot, sit by the store’s entrance, and I water, prune and harvest twice a week. Listening to a podcast while I do is tempting, but I deliberately avoid earbuds, staying open like a flower inviting pollination.
And so strangers have told me about plants from their childhoods, about their own garden successes and failures. (I could have hung a shingle like Lucy in Peanuts: “Horticultural Help, 5 cents. The doctor is in.”) Parents stopped by with children, and the garden became a living picture book: vegetables from amaranth to zucchini.
The zucchini grew into a monster, each leaf as big as a steering wheel. It would have stretched five feet tall if it hadn’t bent under the weight of its own fecundity.
Planting sunflower seeds gives me the resolve I need for a fresh start after a move
Of course, there have been some setbacks. One bed was the victim of a hit and run, and now its side is crumpled like an aluminum can. (However, it still grew almost two pounds of beautiful fingerling potatoes.) Come August, aphids coated the kale and started to pepper the tumbling nasturtiums. I was spraying them off fiercely with a hose when a shopper said quietly, “The garden is so beautiful. Someone should paint it.” I saw the aphids. She saw the fuller picture.
One woman had just gotten a community plot after many years of not gardening. “It’s the most healing thing,” she said. “Plants are like children, you’re just tending, tending, tending. They’re so fragile and also so strong.” My grief had mostly receded by then, thanks in part to that tending.
The garden had other unexpected yields. One day, I was tying up the tomatoes when a woman stopped and asked about pruning. I explained the basics, but she still seemed perplexed. “Can I pay you to come prune mine?” she asked. “I live next door.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can do it!” I reassured her.
A few minutes later, the woman came back. “Really, I could pay cash. It would make me feel so much better. Maybe you could come take a look some time?”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll come look now, and how about you put a couple things in the Community Fridges donation bin in the co-op some time.”
We went into her yard, and the tomatoes had vined wildly, limbs a tangled snarl and flopped over their cages. We chatted amicably as we tried to tame them. At the end she invited me to stop by any time and presented me with a jar of Indian chutney, which I gladly took home.
When I arrived at the co-op later that week, a staff member said, “Someone left a whole bin of stuff in the cooler for you.” I almost teared up seeing the crate of canned goods, organic fruits and veggies and bread. It was like we’d planted a zucchini of generosity.
I thought aging had made me invisible, when really I had become camouflaged
The conversations continued away from the garden. I bike the harvest over to the community fridge, where one or two regulars are often waiting. In a world where food bank use climbs year over year, fresh food can be a luxury. “I left the basil in water and it made the whole kitchen smell good,” said one shopper. Another taught me how to know when the cherry bomb hot peppers were ripe: “It’s not the colour; it’s the smell.”
By the end of August I had harvested about $600 in organic, hyperlocal produce from our small veggie patch for our neighbours in need. We created, too, something for people to talk about, a point of connection in our often isolating world. As a fixture at the garden, I gained even more: solace in grief, hope under yellow wildfire skies and conversations I didn’t know I needed. The community came together to turn a parking lot into so much more.
The co-op, by the way, is called Karma, and garden was karma in action: We literally reaped what we sowed, yes, but so much of the harvest couldn’t be weighed on a scale. Farmers feed cities, as the bumper stickers say, but public gardens can provide a whole other form of nourishment.
Jennifer Knoch lives in Toronto.