A sweet kitchen garden, once a feast spot for hungry animals, morphs to flowery space
Several of my sisters have wild, wonderful gardens filled with summertime veggies and fruits, along with fragrant herbs. Mine is a “kitchen” garden, meaning a patch outlined in rock, nicely framed through the window over my sink. As a kid, I found these old-fashioned gardens in tales found on our family’s bookshelves. Herbs, tomatoes, peppers and other staples of the everyday cook were close by.
I could also call mine a squirrel and bunny market, because that’s who moved in on our groceries.
We had planted a cherry tomato bush behind the garage in our first house, where a hole in the rain gutter watered it when we’d forget. The produce was lush and sweet, and toddler Sophie was just tall enough to pull off the fruit and put some of it in her basket — though most of it in her mouth.
Then we moved here, and, inspired by our success with the solo bush, we planted tomatoes and a few herbs in the small kitchen bed. The previous owners had raised peony bushes there, which must have been lovely when they bloomed. But we weren’t into long-term maintenance and its showy petal payoff. We wanted more interactive kid stuff. When they were toddlers, our two children liked playing in the dirt, and we fancied ourselves suburban farmer-wannabes.
The yard was fenced and surrounded by trees, so it was shady in the afternoons. Against the laws of gravity and height, Steve somehow managed to throw a tennis ball tied to a rope over a high branch to start a tree swing, so we spent a lot of time outside the first spring and summer.
Though the girls didn’t remember the previous bush behind the garage at the old place, they put together quickly that something might happen here. The concept of watering sprouts began to make sense as the plants got taller, and once the first blooms turned into little green globes, they displayed guarded anticipation.
They kept track of every bud and its progress, dreaming of the bounty to come.
We scoured library shelves for children’s gardening-related topics and discussed other delights we could grow once we had stuffed ourselves with sweet cherry and Roma tomatoes. I should have probably noticed in some animal storybooks that fictional protagonists were resourceful rodents, many of whom had side gigs as fruit and vegetable thieves. Some were angrily pursued by red-faced humans in overalls waving rakes or other dangerous tools.
These books were professionally illustrated with adorable bunnies, chipmunks and squirrels who we thought were simply hungry. We found ourselves rooting for the endearing-looking scavengers, who we assumed shared our anticipation of home-grown food that could be enjoyed once ripened. (Perhaps it’s not an accident that both grown daughters today stand up on behalf of the world’s downtrodden everywhere.)
Our aggressive very non-fictional animals took sloppy, tentative bites of almost-ripe food, thus ruining it for our consumption.
We noted our daughters’ growing disinterest, as they dismally assessed the nightly burglaries by hungry and not-so-furtive outlaws oblivious to our big plans. They quietly dropped gardening and got busy creating a hidden and less tasty secret neighborhood, inspired by the book “Roxaboxen,” as an outdoor project.
And I gave it up to the furry residents who are naturally prepared to wait us out. With the help of a pro who is handy with plants and also knows what he’s doing, we host butterflies and other migrating travelers floating through. Gardener Kent stops in several times a year to work his magic, which is paying off while bunnies watch patiently from the bushes.
Reach Ellen at murphysister04@gmail.com.
