Misadventures in Gardening
Reflections on life, death, and the very real struggle to grow one damn tomato in Colorado’s unforgiving climate
I am exceptional at killing plants. If I’m being honest, it’s one of the things that I’m best at. It’s important to state that at the top. I used to try, in the past, to keep them alive, I really did. It’s bad enough that our family just buys disposable house plants. I mean, they aren’t technically disposable. When we purchase the plants, they are very much alive. We just treat them as though they are disposable, because we know the plants will very soon perish once they are under our care.
We go to Ikea every six months or so, buy a variety of plants, bring them home, and just see how long it takes for them to die. I’ll admit that it’s not very sporting for the plants. Now extrapolate this to a garden — I’m sure you’re just shaking your head at this point.
Only with gardening, I should by all accounts be able to figure it out. I come from a long line of exceptional gardeners and farmers (on both sides). So you would think it’s in my blood. I mean, I grew up on a quarter section of prime Kansas farmland for heaven’s sake! You would think that some measure of botanical education found its way into my brain. But it’s not in my blood. Apparently that’s not how genetics works. And when I dig into the deep recesses of my mind (not for the faint of heart) I come up empty (at least as far as gardening is concerned).
I found this out about myself a few years ago. Shortly after we moved to Denver. And this misadventure has suddenly become relevant because I’ve decided, against my better judgment, to have a garden again this summer.
We bought, with our hearts and not our heads, a Victorian cottage that was built in the 1890s. It was adorable and was in “the best” neighborhood. We could walk to sushi and the light rail and it was 1200 square feet on a postage stamp of a lot. We were set to get married at the end of that summer, so we had all kinds of romantic ideas about the house. We were going to remodel it, build a garage, and put in a garden, among other things.
As it turns out, we did put in a garden, or really I did, but we didn’t do any of those other things. The garden, though, was a doozy. I didn’t start small. That was probably my first mistake.
I dove in head first with the seeds. I ordered packs and packs and packs of seeds. I ordered all of the vegetables and all of the herbs. I ordered unique heirloom varieties. And when that wasn’t enough, I ordered special seeds from a company that basically operates as an agricultural research center.
The company, called Row 7, was founded by a chef named Dan Barber. He runs Blue Hill at Stone Barn and wrote a very intriguing book titled The Third Plate, which more or less summarizes everything that is terrible about the American diet and then proposes a new way to eat, focused on seasonality, sustainable growing practices, and taste.
I was fairly obsessed with the book a few years ago, to the point that my wife took me to Blue Hill as a birthday present. We took a tour of the farm, saw the chickens and the pigs, and then had a multi-course tasting menu unlike any we have ever experienced. But I digress.
Row 7 is a collaboration between chefs, farmers, and plant breeders to specifically develop vegetables that are grown for their taste (rather than the any number of other reasons that vegetables have been selected in the past). The seeds are cool, or at last as cool as seeds get. They have something called a Badger Flame Beet that has the sweetness of a beet but without the earthiness. And Habanada Peppers, which have the taste of habanero peppers but without the burn. They also have special tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and an intriguing garlicky leek.
Suffice it to say, I had a lot of seeds at my disposable, and again, I had a very small yard. Sometimes, when I go deep on something, I go really deep. That’s what happened with this garden.
I started some of the seeds inside while it was still cold. As those seeds sprouted, I sketched out what the garden would look like, like an architect working on his masterpiece. I did a ton of research, looking at gardening websites late into the night to plot out by candlelight (not really) where I would grow each vegetable. I talked to my mom at length. She always has a massive garden, so I picked her brain about how to navigate the unusual growing climate in Denver. I bought books, lots of books, most of which I did not read. That’s a go-to move of mine. Anytime I want to learn something, I buy at least three books, read a little bit of one, and then just put them in a nice pile and admire them. Oh, also, I went to Home Depot a lot and just walked around aimlessly trying to absorb horticultural knowledge.
In late April, just as the weather started hinting at the arrival of summer, I started building the gardening beds. Putting the wood pieces together was easy. Filling them with dirt was not. I have never purchased so much dirt in my life, bag after bag after bag until I managed to fill up numerous wooden beds. And as the weather got warmer, in the middle of May, I began planting. By this point, I had already killed a number of the seedlings that had sprouted, and as I recall, pretty much all of the fancy Row 7 seeds died before being transplanted. The few straggler seedlings, those hanging on for dear life, got moved as carefully as possible into the beds.
Along with those few seedlings, I added an obscene number of plants that I found at Home Depot and other gardening stores. I must have had five to ten varieties of heirloom tomatoes alone, not to mention all of the normal tomatoes that I planted, like the workaday Romas and bite sized cherries. I planted zucchini, cucumbers, just an absolutely obscene number of peppers, and enough lettuce to make salad for a year (or at least that’s what it seemed like). By this point, the little garden project was more than a small line item on our family budget. It got discussed, at length. But I was excited and was in the process of creating our very own CSA in the backyard. If only I knew what was to come.
When you look back on a disaster, it can be hard at times to pinpoint exactly when things started to break bad. Different people observe the same events at the same time and come up with starkly different interpretations. Memories are faulty. And we all construct our own narratives after-the-fact. You’ve probably heard that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable, this is why, it’s because history is literally open to interpretation.
If I had to put my finger on when the house of cards started to fall, though, I would point to the second or third week in June, which is about when I figured out that I needed to water the garden. By then, as a recall from my own faulty memory, we had been hit by at least one frost. When I saw the frost coming, I haphazardly tried to cover the plants, but most of the tomatoes were destroyed anyway. So I went back to the garden store, spent more money, and got even more plants, especially tomatoes. Have I mentioned that I really don’t see the point in a garden unless you grow tomatoes. There are few things that are as satisfying as a tomato at its absolute peak. This will become important later.
After I fully replenished the garden, it was time to focus on the lack of water. It turns out that one needs to water a garden even in the best of circumstances. In Denver, where it hardly ever rains, where there are three hundred days of sunshine per year, and where the elevation makes the effect of the sun even more pronounced, watering plants becomes a question of life and death (for the plants, obviously).
I called my mom for some sage advice. Get a hose, a timer, and a sprinkler, she said, and set it up so that it waters the garden at regular intervals. Great advice, I acted immediately and checked each item off the list, done, done, and done. Once the sprinkler was in place and the timer was set, I was convinced, in my mind, that the little garden project was back on easy street for the rest of the summer.
Around Independence Day we started to see some lettuce, maybe a cucumber or two, a few little squash, and some jalapeños. The tomato plants kept growing, or at least the ones that weren’t murdered by the frost. It was at this point, in the first few weeks of July that a false sense of security started to take hold. I was reaping what I had sown. The little CSA in our backyard was becoming a reality. My excitement at the little experiment started to peak in late July or early August, once the little red tomatoes started to appear.
And then that false sense of security was shattered. Day after day I would go outside to check on the tomatoes, and there would be less fruit, not more. As August wore on, I would regularly identify specific tomatoes that were just about ripe enough to pick only to have them disappear the next day. It became an infuriating, keep me up at night, kind of mystery. One that, to this day, I never solved. But it happened, over and over again. Sometimes I would see half-eaten tomatoes on the ground. More than once I seriously considered whether the poor tomato, laying there helpless on the ground, was salvageable — the answer was always a regrettable no.
I conducted numerous investigations. I tried to find identifiable tracks. Eventually I narrowed down the list of suspects that could engage in such malicious vandalism and outright thievery. Our horribly behaved Goldendoodle has always been a prime candidate, though he’s not especially fond of tomatoes. There were stray cats, unlikely I think. Probably not the neighbors either, though one can never truly rule out neighbors when mischief is afoot. And then there were the rabbits and squirrels, the scourge of backyards throughout Denver. If I was a betting man (which I am come to think of it), I’d put my money on the rabbits or the neighbors.
The source of these hideous acts is largely beside the point. A good gardener would have figured out how to protect his tomatoes from rabbits and neighbors and giant dogs. I fell short, and because of that, I failed to harvest a single damn tomato that entire summer.
I held out hope into early September, crossing my fingers that maybe there would still be a caprese salad or gazpacho in my future. It was not to be. Late one night in the first week of September, a cold front moved down off the mountains and extinguished what little life the tomatoes had left. I woke up to a dusting of snow and an avalanche of despair as I picked through the shattered remnants of my blood, sweat, and tears.
And I’m signing up to do it all again this year. Why, you might ask, would you do something so stupid, didn’t you learn your lesson?
Well, there’s the cerebral answer, which is sometimes we want to accomplish something or learn a skill so badly that we don’t let bad experiences deter us. That’s laudable, it really is, but it’s not the only reason.
There’s the simplistic answer, which is that we have short memories, and only now as I write this do I recall how devastating it was to put in so much effort for so little reward. It’s true that memories are short, and the sting of that summer is less now, but the driving force behind this project isn’t my hazy memory, it’s something else entirely.
And then there is the heartfelt answer, which is the real driving force convincing me to try again. Our daughter is three and I want to share something with her. Gardening seems like the perfect thing that we can learn together. If the above is any indication, I don’t have a significant head start on her. It’s also a way for us to build and grow something side by side as she gets older and I get savvier about protecting the tomatoes from opportunistic predators. The garden can be our shared space, our adventure, our chance to succeed (or fail) together.
So stay tuned, as the calendar turns to spring and then summer, there will hopefully be more to report.
As always, thank you for reading. Please send me a note or leave a comment with any reactions.