Gardening by Luanne Armstrong

In Service to Place


Gardening season in this part of the world begins in February, in the grey time, the cloud lid heavy over the grey flat lake and dim blue mountains, light and heat driven far away. But the snowdrops are pushing push out of the frost; the buds swell, dap, unseen, begins to run in the maples and birch.
I whisper to the sad leggy geraniums; soon I promise them, light and heat will come.
And this week, my friend Kuya came and we did our seed orders together, acknowledging our goofy willingness to fall for words like heritage, Russan, French, in the vegetable descriptions. But we ordered them anyway.
The seed orders will arrive in a couple of weeks, and then I can crank up the greenhouse, put in lights and heat, start putting seeds in pots.
And then, in early April, the ground will be dug and rototilled, though not by me.
And then finally, will come the first soft day in April when the sun smacks my shoulders with actual heat. The mud has dried. The garden soil crumbles under food.
I will gather a rake, a shovel, string, seed packets, dump them all in the wheelbarrow, and plant a first row of spinach or peas in the dug, raked garden soil. Usually, on such a day, the sun comes and goes as abruptly as someone turning out the lights. Snow squalls barrel across Kootenay Lake; what was sun is suddenly rain or sleet or hail and in fifteen minutes, the squall has chased merrily its tail merrily over the Purcells and faded away.
I will bend and dig until I’m tired, which doesn’t take very long and then retire to the deck to watch the clouds and the sun on the shining lake. And then I go back; I will work like this all day, in small rushes, and stretches of time, until the cold spring evening sets in and I retreat to the house.
And all the while I’m pounding stakes and tying string to make a straight line and digging a trench with the hoe and laying in the seeds, I wonder all over again, what I’m doing and why. I know all the obvious reasons. I believe in growing my own food, in independence, in growing local, in not being dependent on gas and oil for my food. Every spring, I wonder why I am here, doing this, all by myself?

When I step outside on a spring night, the earth reeks of waking; the call of birth, of living, of being dragged out of dark muck and curled sleep by light and heat. There’s cruelty in it. Part of me is exhausted by this call; the demand of all that sweat and stooping and bending.
But I serve my garden. And it serves me. It’s not clear just where this service, these kind of obligations begin or end, Nor am I at all clear who is serving who, or what and how we got into this somewhat mad relationship in the first place.
Still, it feels like a call to service; a call to tending, a call to caring and midwifing seeds into plants and plants into food and food into nurturing people’s lives. It’s the smell of soil warming, of mould and rot and worms and buds breaking. It moves me without any conscious volition to stoop over the soil and see clustered, rows of sprouts, two tiny primary leaves, breaking the crusted soil, heading upwards.