Not a Gardener

Teresa looked at the water pooled on the large leaves of the Mexican squash plant from an early fall rain. She inspected the green leaves closely, looking for signs of pests. She’d been battling a cucumber beetle all week, the black spots on its back the only thing to distinguish from the plants it invaded. When she spotted it again, she carried it to the southern fence line and deposited it over the edge.

She was not a gardener. She had killed more house plants than she could count on all her fingers and toes. She would forget to water plants in the corner of her apartment or leave the shades drawn all day.

“The green thumb skipped a couple of generations,” her father said.

Her grandfather had cultivated a bountiful harvest year after year when she was a kid. An urban farm filled the backyard of her grandparents’ corner duplex. They had once lived on a ranch but now they were reduced to a 4,000 square-foot lot.

As a kid, she didn’t understand the point of a backyard without grass and play structures. Her grandfather’s yard only had a rusty old rocking horse for her and her brother Joe. It had once been brown in its heyday when her older cousins were small, but by the time Teresa and Joe came along it had faded to a milky white, the springs rusted and red, so that it squeaked and squealed when they sat on it.

Everything else in the yard was off-limits. Perched on the rocking horse, with Joe clambering at her legs for his turn, she watched her grandfather putter around as he watered the trees. He grew peaches, oranges, limes and avocados. When she slipped off the horse to give Joe his chance, she kept her distance from her grandfather for fear she’d hear his exasperation.

“Mija, you’re in the way,” he said often, without looking at her, when she crept too close. “Get back to the house.”

Her grandfather was a tall man, or he had seemed tall to her when she was just starting school, but his back sloped as he bent to check on the neat rows of alternating moats and mounds where his plants lined up in unison. His silver hair glinted in the sun, slicked back with pomade. She knew some of the vegetables from the meals her mother cooked—corn, green beans, carrots. But the lush garden was filled with varietals that were still exotic back then and couldn’t be found in local grocery stores. She pulled at the husks around the green tomatillos with small hands and stayed back from the four different kinds of chiles that filled plants with bright rainbow colors, warned often that they could burn her eyes.

Green herbs spilled over the sides of planters near the house—cilantro, cumin, oregano, marjoram and sage. Her grandfather used them fresh in a chicken soup he made all winter long. He chopped up homegrown nopales and slid them into the pot. They turned slimy and Teresa picked around them with her spoon, aiming instead for the carrots, celery and peas.

Her grandparents used everything they could. They’d come to California and had come of age during the depression. They sent vegetables and food home with Teresa’s father, then canned or dried the leftover bounty. Bunches of herbs tied together with twine hung from the wooden beams in their garage waiting for the arrival of Christmas.

That was a special time of the year, when her grandfather stood on a stool to pull down the herbs and her grandmother mashed them with a stone pestle and mortar into a fine powder. Teresa’s aunts and grandma worked all day to make tamales seasoned with those herbs. The only rule for the tamale-making tradition? Never sell them, only give them away.

Teresa and Joe spent so many weekend hours at her grandparents during the years when her mother worked weekends and their father was at a loss for how to entertain two small children all day long.

“Ma, can you fix her hair?” her dad said when the braid he’d put in it came loose.

Teresa’s grandma combed her long brown hair and yanked at the tangles. Her grandma’s wrinkled hands pulled the ponytail holders with the bright red beads at the ends tightly around Teresa’s thin hair.

“Your hair is so stringy,” her grandmother said. “Como tu madre.”

Her dad had thick, glossy black hair that curled around the nape of his neck. Her grandma had short white hair, but in the picture on the living room wall of her as a young woman, her hair was curled into dark victory rolls in the front and it cascaded down her back. Joe had the dark, thick hair and black eyes of their paternity. Teresa had gotten what all her cousins teased her were “white people brown eyes.” Her eyes were flecked with green and gold, her hair light and fine like her mother’s.

The three adults spoke Spanish when they didn’t want the children to know what they were saying, a conspiratorial language that left her and Joe out. Most of the time her grandfather was quiet. If he wasn’t outside in his garden, he sat in the recliner in the corner of the room closest to the front door, a spittoon on the floor next to him. He smoked cigars and spit into the bucket as he watched bowling or golf, or his favorite soap opera, Santa Barbara.

She and Joe spent most of the time in the kitchen at an oval Formica-topped table with the floral pattern peeling off in one corner. Her grandma filled their bellies with soup or made cheese quesadillas. Teresa especially liked when her grandma made flour tortillas from scratch. The toasty smell filled the room as the dough cooked on a flat pan. Sometimes her grandma rubbed warm flatbread with a cold stick of butter and sprinkled a little sugar and cinnamon on them. Joe rolled them up and called it dulce burrito.

Her favorite treat was the peaches her grandma canned each season from the stone fruit her grandfather harvested. The flavor was lost when her grandmother passed away when she was 13 and the garden was lost six months later when her grandfather died, too.

She doesn’t know what the new owners did with the backyard, maybe several sets of new owners not that it’s been nearly 20 years since her family owned the property. But she’d like to think one at least one of the trees remained.

Jared, Teresa’s husband, had the idea for the garden when they moved a year ago. The yard of their new construction home was a barren wasteland of clay and discarded construction artifacts, bits of cement, nails and screws when they moved in.

“You can do what you want with the yard,” Teresa said. “I’m no gardener, though, so don’t expect me to help.”

Jared bought seeds at the hardware store and filled a used egg carton with dirt. He put a drip tray on the dresser in their bedroom in April where sunlight filtered in most of the day. The first batch of seeds included a few kinds of tomatoes, basil, dill, mesclun and spinach. Jared didn’t know any more about gardening than she did, but he devoted hours to watching YouTube videos. The first batch of seeds went into the ground in late May. He created two parallel rows with a soil mix labeled as garden amend. Nothing died but nothing grew. The plants seemed to be stuck in stasis.

Jared wasn’t deterred.

“I just need to build a raised bed and get a richer soil mix,” he said.

While he worked on designing beds out of 3’x6’ fence boards, he left a new batch of seedlings on the window sill. This time Teresa found herself checking impatiently a few times a day for new growth. On the fifth day after planting, she saw the soil mix breaking apart and by the end of the day a tomato shoot had broken through on of the cells in a plastic container meant for growing seeds.

Everything sprouted within two weeks and she watched closely for signs of the first set of true leaves, a term she’d learned from her husband’s garden video obsession.

When the plants were six weeks old, she brought them outside to acclimate to the temperature fluctuations, the wind and the grabby hands of 2.5-year-old.

“Be gentle with the baby plants,” she told her son. “They are very small and delicate.”

A week after transplanting tomatoes and basil, she walked to the side of the house to fill up a watering can. When she came back around the corner, her son had a toy shovel and had dislodged a cherry tomato plant.

“No, Elliot,” she yelled. “That’s not for you. You are hurting the plants.”

He turned toward her, his dark eyes that look like her father’s cast downward on the ground. His lip pouted out over the dimple in his chin, just the way hers did when she was upset. She remembered the exasperation in her grandfather’s voice that kept her at bay. She moved closer and knelt down next to Elliott.

“Sorry, baby,” she said in a gentler voice. “Help mommy put the baby plant back. We need to be gentle. They need dirt around them to get food. You are such a good helper in the garden.”

The plants in the raised bed flourished. The tomatoes stood taller than her 6-foot husband in mid-September when the green tomatoes finally turned red. Her husband started work on three more garden beds for winter crops.

The landscape of their backyard transformed over the summer with life all around. Songbirds filled the yard with a melody in the morning. A squirrel visited at lunch and wreaked havoc on a bed of greens. White moths landed on her broccoli seedlings and laid eggs.

Elliott squealed with delight when he found a green caterpillar on one. She placed it on his hand and he giggled as it crawled across his fingers. She took a picture. The broccoli leaves were pitted with holes and the plant didn’t survive.

“These bugs are horrible,” she complained to her husband.

“It’s all a sign that our yard is more hospitable,” he responded. “It’s good. And Elliott loves it.”

The weather turned cold and the green leaves from their cherry tree turned yellow, then fell in a small pile at the base of the trunk. Jared and Elliott planted the tree as a Mother’s Day gift months after they moved in. Her husband spent four sweltering days digging a 4’x4’ hole for the tree. Elliott went out with his toy shovel on the last day.

“Plant a tree, momma,” he called from across the yard. “Cheery tree.”

She knew it would be years before they had fruit from it, but they weren’t just planting a tree. They were planting in Elliott a family tradition.