From veggies to flowers and back again

Ever since we bought our house in Dunbar in the mid-1970s, I have grown only flowers. But now perhaps it's time to return to my farm-girl roots and try to raise some vegetables, especially since the Covid panic is making grocery shopping uncomfortable. Unfortunately, as I well recall, veggie gardening is hard work. John found that out for himself  when he cleared out an area by the back fence for our vegetable plot. Here he's hauling out a big rock; see his video at the end of this post for the entire process.

This area housed a decaying compost bin for decades, which seems to have left behind some beautiful soil. This is the fine pyramid John created when he dug up the area and filtered out the detritus. 

The cleared-out area, with the soil spread. We'll replace the back fence with something more see-through to allow the sun in, and cut back the laurel hedge further.

For most of my life, I’ve had the great luxury of being a flower person. Even though I grew up with not one, but two, vegetable gardens, it was roses over radishes as soon as home-ownership gave me the say over a chunk of garden-able land. I delighted in forests of six-foot-tall blue and purple delphiniums, banks of white daisies, towers of multicoloured sweet peas, and pink climbing roses that grew so high they had to fall to earth again.

My flower-filled garden in summer; veggies are never as spectacular as this!

Now that the Covid pandemic is turning everything upside down – and emptying some supermarket shelves – I’ve been thinking about my gardening choices. Why no vegetables? Especially since I know as well as anyone that fresh home-grown anything is immeasurably better than anything from a store.

The answer may lie in the job jar that mom would produce every Saturday morning. My siblings and I would reach in and draw out thin slips of paper on which would be written, in her fine, ladylike hand, tasks like, “weed two rows of carrots” or “pick and shell one row of peas.” Gardening, I learned early, was hard work, involving lots of what we’d now call “stoop labour” – you bend over, for a long time, usually under a hot sun.

But I suspect something deeper was also involved. My parents had two gardens – a little one near the house and a big one near a slough for water – not because they loved gardening or the taste of fresh vegetables particularly, but because there were seven people who had to be fed all winter long. That meant canning beans, peas and other vegetables all summer and filling the cellar storage bins with carrots, onions, turnips and a truckload of potatoes every fall. Vegetables were a biting necessity in my childhood, and oh! the luxury of not having to grow my own as an adult.

Things have shifted lately, as I have said. When a friend in California recently announced he was starting a vegetable garden because pandemic panic had made it hard to find certain produce in the stores, John and I began eying our own garden differently. Within a week, he had torn apart a decaying compost bin near the back fence, dug down deep, hauled out rocks, and sifted the soil to create a respectable-sized vegetable plot. We’ve ordered seeds and are considering the seedlings now beginning to show up in stores. After decades as a flower person, it may be time to learn what my parents knew about surviving hard times. 

My delphinium beds, shown at their beginning last summer, will remain in spite of our new venture into vegetables.

And I'll still be growing sweet peas, shown here with the white daisies in the background.

I've already planted the seeds for this year's sweet peas, but they're a long way from looking like this.

This year's blossoms so far include mainly hellebores (white) and blue hyacinths, at the front of the house.