(Photo from Pixabay, No Rights Reserved.)
God births the soil, the soil births us, and all our lives, we grow and thrive from their hospitality. This is partially why some of my favorite memories relate to community gardening. When people garden together, it acknowledges our reliance not only on the soil, but also on one another, inviting us into a host of interlocking relationships based on nurture, growth, and thanksgiving.
So, as a small thank-you to the earth and to the communities that have experienced it with me, I’m going to share anecdotes about four different vegetables (or three vegetables and one fruit, if you’re finicky about the pumpkin) and how they’ve intersected with my life. I hope that you enjoy them! Also, if you have any experiences with gardening or vegetables that you’d like to share as well, I’d love to hear about that in the comments section.
To begin, I give you this post’s only fruit…
The Pumpkin
Cucurbita pepo
Bluff View Drive, Pegram, TN
When I was about seven or nine years old, sawing a toothy, jigsaw smile into my pumpkin, I knew that it might perish before the night was out. On many Halloweens in my sloping, near-treeless suburb, teenage ghouls would emerge by night, raid the neighborhood, and smash our jack-o-lanterns, which had guarded our homes so faithfully.
But my older brother Joel had worked especially hard on his pumpkin that year. Picking out a hefty squash, he’d peeled, stabbed, and pried at it until he’d sculpted a glaring Eye of Sauron, complete with the vertical pupil and—once we set a candle in it—that hell-orange glow of Mordor. Understandably, Joel was reluctant to set it outside to die.
As night fell, though, Joel did place the Eye on the porch banister, where its gaze flickered over our front lawn. I’d imagine that this demonic sentinel was unnerving enough to any teens who’d visit our porch, but as a further act of defiance, Joel had also carved this message into the back:
“Break me, I dare you.”
That following morning, we found many pumpkins quartered and smashed. Their guts splayed like jellyfish tentacles across the asphalt. Joel’s Eye of Sauron, however, was still intact.
The Okra
Abelmoschus esculentus.
Edens’ Garden, Pegram, TN
I worked at Mrs. Eden’s garden when I was in third or fourth grade. She lived towards the outskirts of the suburb, looking out over a grassy hill towards the Harpeth River, and her rows of tomatoes, pumpkins, and okra spread over the hillside. Alongside a boy named Cody, and sometimes my younger sister Sophie, I’d work for three or four hour shifts among the vines and rising stalks.
Mrs. Eden had us pluck tomatoes, wash lettuce, and stack haybales, but my most vivid memory is the one time that I picked okra. Spearing out from lime-hued stalks, the okra broke off in my hands with chalky snaps, fang by fang, and covered my hands with their tiny, furry spines. My hands burned and reddened. Mrs. Eden had given me a pair of old socks to pull over my hands for protection, but they were somewhat frayed, so the spines went right through. As the burning intensified, I became more reckless, karate-chopping the okra stems to try and knock them off without having to curl my whole hand around them. The socks ripped further as I did so, and my hands scorched.
Thankfully, Mrs. Eden never had me pick okra again, but that memory stuck with me. When I finally encountered okra again (about a decade later) at my college dining hall, chopped into little wheels in a jambalaya, I remembered those burning spines against my palms. But I tried some anyway. It was spicy, with that same chalky crunch from the stalk, but it was very good. After all those years, the okra had finally redeemed itself.
The Daikon Radish
Raphanus sativus
Brooksdale Environmental Centre, Surrey, BC
(India- Koyambedu Market. Photo taken by McKay Savage, October 2009.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
What do you cook with a daikon radish? During my internship in British Columbia, when I lived with eleven other interns near a wetland and a Douglas fir forest, this bizarre root had somehow made its way from our garden to our kitchen counter. Bulbous, cow-white with black speckles, the radish looked like a carrot’s chubby cousin, and it was roughly the length of my forearm. We had no idea what to do with the thing.
As the daikon lingered at our house, however, people began finding more creative uses for it. It began appearing and disappearing in odd places. One evening, I was lying down in bed when I felt a hard knob press out through the pillow. Even then, as I was just about to fall asleep, I knew what it was immediately: the daikon. I pulled it out of my pillowcase, then stashed it in the microwave the following morning for the next victim to find.
This went on for a while, the interns passing on that ill-fated, vegetative limb from one person to the next, until its skin darkened and threatened to rot. At that point, one of us finally chopped the thing up and pickled it. It hovered in a puce brine in the fridge. A couple times, I tried to do my part and use it up as a side to my meals, but it was bitter and vinegary.
Cursed, even in death.
The Parsnip
Pastinaca sativa
The Secret Garden, St. Andrews, Scotland
(Photo taken by Sharon Mollerus, March 2008.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
For me, the parsnip is the emblem of the “Secret Garden,” a small, walled-in patch of soil sticking out of St. Mary’s Quad. My younger sister Sophie and I started volunteering there in January or February, when the soil was still hard and chilled, its fruits hidden under tiny leaf parasols beneath the dirt.
The garden was headed by a tall, dark-haired, bespectacled college student named William, who’d often bring home-baked muffins and cake slices to share with us, and he always let us harvest some vegetables to take home. For the first several times Sophie and I went to volunteer there, I’d select one of the parsnips to use in my vegetable stir-fries at home.
Out of all the vegetable memories included in this post, this seems an appropriate one to end with, because the Secret Garden stands out to me for the little community we formed there. I tried to visit each week. Often, Sophie, William, and I were the only ones there, so we’d work together plucking weed sprigs out of the soil, thumbing beet seeds into it, forking compost between moist wood bins, and shoveling wood chips. The chips were freshly shorn from apple wood and literally steaming with decomposition, so as we piled them into our wheelbarrow, chatting about everything from international adoption to Irish legislation over mad cows, the chips would puff warm, fruity gusts into our faces.
Tasting the Seasons
In every garden that I’ve worked in, I only stayed for a brief time—maybe a season or two—so I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of what it would feel like to be fully integrated as part of a community into the earth and its cycles. If I were to work in one place from season to season, the cycle of plantings and harvests would form layer over layer of habit, memory, and experience, spreading with each passing like the spheres of an onion. If I were to then grasp that familiar bulb, I’d feel countless past seasons pressing out against my fingers.
Even in my limited experience, though, I experience some of those cycles and layers. Whenever I see a pumpkin, I can remember Joel’s Eye of Sauron, and whenever I eat okra or roast parsnip, I can remember Mrs. Eden or William. Once, at Berry College’s dining hall, I was happy to see pickled radish appear one day—not for its taste, of course, but for the memory it held of Brooksdale and its interns.
With each meal, and with each anecdote I share, I’m adding new layers and new memories to these vegetables. In this way, my eating becomes an act of recollection, celebration, and thankfulness.