#47 - Dirt and Related Things

Good things come from the Earth. The first and the best is asparagus. Yesterday I cleaned up the asparagus bed with the first few black flies buzzing around my face. A dozen or so sprouts, paled by the blanket of leaves that spent the winter on top of them, now stood erect out of the soft damp ground. Once I’d finished pulling all the clumps of grass out of the rows, I had created one of the most gratifying sights a just-wintered gardener can behold: a well-groomed, mature asparagus bed, primed and ready for a good two months of mouth-watering production. We should be having our first asparagus on toast for breakfast by the end of the week. 

Meanwhile, on her hands and knees, breaking up clods of dirt with her hands to prepare a seedbed, Susan, my wife, happily declared, “Gardening is good for the soul!” I think she’s right. As ground beetles scurry out of the way and earthworms twist about, I believe some vague recollections in our chromosomes are stirred to life. The nurturing of growing things seems a natural and irrepressible urge, not a burden of duty but rather a gratifying role played out in our close kinship with the Earth.

My wife's father is one of the finest and most successful gardeners I have ever known. He's a meat-and-potatoes kind of man who started life on a big truck garden farm in Dover, Massachusetts, serving the Boston area. In those times, horsepower did most of the heavy work, and when they used to plant cabbage, they planted acres, not rows. Those days are gone, certainly, yet as long as I have known the man (most of my life), he has always had a huge and prolific garden, yielding wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of everything from strawberries and peas to squash and corn. Even today, in his eighties, his garden is where he spends most of his time and probably his happiest hours.

I can easily imagine Susan as a little girl with scraggly pigtails, watching her father or even riding on his back as he crawled along the rows, weeding and breaking up clods with his giant hands. She must have been paying attention, because she remembers a lot about how he did things, and her clod-breaking technique is exactly the same - both hands working like little manual rototillers, leaving weedless and granulated loam in their wake.

Despite Peter Rabbit’s experiences with Mr. McGregor, there is a certain kindness and unity of spirit among true tillers of the soil. I can see it in their eyes under the brims of their straw hats, and, if nothing else, those first few asparagus should do wonders for anyone's soul.