The Veggies of Our Labor

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”

May Sarton

I’m a first-time vegetable gardener.

In May, my husband and I planted yellow peppers, green peppers, cherry tomatoes, sweet peas, green beans, zucchini, kale, and honeydew melons in our small plot in a community garden. With anticipatory excitement, we watered; we waited; and we witnessed a miracle: tiny sprouts of pea plants in a tidy row! Within weeks, and before our very eyes, more prodigies rose up from the earth.

Soon, a drought came, and every other day we faithfully lugged water-filled plastic jugs and sloshing buckets to our garden plot. It was exhausting.

Will it be worth this much effort?

Then, late one night I heard the rhythmic pit-a-pat of rainfall, and I became positively giddy.

At last, a refreshing drink for my babies!

I ran outside into the darkness and opened my mouth wide, like a nestling bird does, and welcomed a shower of raindrops on my face and tongue. Listening hard, I could almost hear my kale shoots sigh with joy.

My appreciation for sunlight and precipitation grew daily, right along with my plants. And more and more, when I looked at produce in the grocery store, I imagined my own … maturing, ripening in the field.

Today marks my first harvest.

I think back to the little green darlings I nurtured at their most tender, vulnerable stage — and in this moment, it feels worth the hard work.

For dinner tonight, we will feast on crunchy kale salad and sizzling veggie stir-fry.

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”

Michael Pollan