For the Gusto

This is for my husband Marlo, the vegetable gardener.

Last evening, we ate fresh snow peas and raspberries, picked just before supper—along with Crappie, caught by fisherman friend Dave Daining two days ago.

As I savored each bite, I felt my ties to the earth and its maker.

Others, too, feel that tie. Mary De Jong says it most simply: “Because I enjoy living off the land.”

Stan Heersink feels ties to the land—and to his childhood. “My folks had a big garden, We each had our own row. I tried some dwarf cabbages and other fun plants. The garden did very well. As an adult, I enjoy going out to the garden to pick fresh vegetables.”

Karen Schiebout says, “I think gardening is in my blood, part of my genetic makeup. Every time I can tomatoes, the satisfying pop of the sealing jars brings me back home to Minnesota, to my mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens. It only seems right that I connect to them in this way across the years and miles.”

And we all enjoy the mealtime pleasure that results. Some of us don’t even wait for mealtime. Gayle Wyma says, “While working in the garden, there is nothing like popping a juicy, red tomato into your mouth!”

So, thanks Marlo—and all you vegetable gardeners—for bringing gusto to our meals and building bridges to God’s world.

Creative Hearts

Lois Vermeer says she enjoys “the opportunity to design, arrange, and landscape.” She also enjoys going to nurseries and other people’s gardens, “always open to new ideas.”

Gayle Wyma calls it creative experimenting. “I make a plan, then see how myl ideas for color combination and texture turn out. If I don’t like it, I can move things around and try another plan.”

I share their creative pleasure. This spring, I moved a dozen coral bells from miscellaneous locations to create a curved border for my shade garden, alternating new varieties my multiples of the traditional one with etched green leaves and pink flowers.

I decided to give the new roadside bed a background of tall grasses. In a few years they will form a nice backdrop and lend privacy to our backyard.

I found a location for the cracked plate whose potter had labeled “Mercy”—in front of a seated angel.

Sometime we shape the garden; sometimes it almost seems to shape itself. If I am quiet enough, sometimes I hear it ask for changes. At the moment the front yard orange day lilies—the ones that do so well in Iowa ditches—are asking to move to a larger space in the backyard. When they finish blooming, I will do as they ask.

Responding brings joy. Lois says, “I love to see the perennials burst forth in spring. Every garden season has its surprises.”

When our gardens summon our creativity, our hearts respond to the Great Creator. And joy blooms.

Gardening as Therapy

A psychotherapist once gave me a relaxation exercise: focus your eyes on a spot on the floor. Slowly name five things you see with your peripheral vision, then five things your body feels, then five things you hear. Repeat the process naming four things you see, feel, hear, then three, then two, then one. When you finish the process you are relaxed and at peace.

It works amazingly. When I finish, my body and soul and mind are slowed down. It is great therapy.

Gardening does the same for the members of my gardening group. Sheryl Hixson went right to the point when she described her reason for gardening: “It is very therapeutic and I enjoy it.

Karen Schiebout expanded: “Greg and I call our garden our therapy, even at this time of year when it looks more like a weed haven. But just wait. There’s always next year. . . .”

For Linda Jansen, the therapy is a contrast to her job. “It is calming for the mind and soul. I felel renewed when I can go outside and work in the garden after sitting behind a computer all day.”

For these people and for many other people, gardening produces feelings of peace and wellbeing, probably in multiple ways. We get fresh air and exercise. Our spirits brighten in the sunshine. We experience a change of pace and place. We become part of a process that is bigger than we are, and it produces hope. It opens our eyes, ears, and senses to the world outside of us.

The gardening process does this—as well as the garden itself. Mary De Jong commented, “When I come home to a plant blooming in my yard, it is like coming home to a smile.”

What could be more therapeutic than that?

Why We Garden

Last year a few gardeners from my church decided to organize. They called themselves, appropriately, “Gardening Group.” I didn’t join. I wanted to garden, not talk about it. “I’m a solo gardener, not a groupie,” I thought.

A few meetings into their year, the group planned a tour of De Jong Greenhouses and invited me. I had been to De Jong greenhouse years ago when it was a red sea of poinsettias. I wanted to see it again.

Mark De Jong led us through space after cavernous space of mums, impatiens, roses. . . . He told us about flooding the tables with fertilized water, preventing disease, maintaining temperatures, creating artificial darkness to set bloom, refrigerating plants that bloomed too early. Listening, I knew that running a commercial greenhouse demands a far more expertise than my two decades of experimentation with perennial beds. If I make a mistake, I replace the plant and learn a lesson. If Mark makes a mistake, his livelihood may be in jeopardy.

But my interest in the group was piqued. The dozen people on that tour shared my loves, my hates, my feelings, my fascinations, and my questioning. Sometimes we knew names and habits of the plants, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes a few of us lagged behind the tour, comparing notes. Other times a few plunged ahead, drawn toward the beauty of a new cultivar.

I became a gardening group convert. In the months that followed, I joined them in visiting local gardens, meeting to exchange plants, and attend gardening seminars. We shared frustrations, we shared joys, we shared knowledge, and we shared lack of knowledge. Gardening was an exciting common bond with people I had only nodded to in passing at morning worship.

I asked them about their reasons for gardening, and I met my self. If I had to find one umbrella term for their answers, it would be the same thing I discovered on that De Jong greenhouse tour: it gave us all pleasure. But they articulated that pleasure in ways that gave me insight into my own—and increased it.

Even though none of them were trained writers, they were so passionate about gardening that they became poets.

Here are twelve of the reasons they gave:
-Therapy, peace,
-Accomplishment, creativity
-Eating produce (for the vegetable gardeners)
-Being outdoors
-Exercise
-Discipline
-Beauty
-Surprise
-Digging in dirt
-Worship

And, having listed their reasons, I’ve run out of space for details. Those will follow in future blogs.

Meanwhile, you are welcome to email me at gardensetc@gmail.com and tell me your reasons for gardening.

Why I Garden

Looking back over my blog entries, I see that critters have dominated. Critters are part of being in the garden—but plants are primary, and it’s time to shift the focus.

Plants began to beckon Marlo and me as the Van Klompenburg nest emptied. “It’s nice to have something around that’s growing, instead of just growing old,” my husband Marlo quipped. I agreed.

We’re both amateurs—and intend retain that status. It wouldn’t be quite as much fun if we knew the outcome instead of taking a leap the leap of gardening faith that begins with the phrase, “I wonder what would happen if I . . .” We have divided our gardening in what I’ve been told is a traditional Dutch division: he does the vegetables and I do flowers. We both think we have the better half.

At first the territorial boundaries were blurred. After mowing, for example, he graciously weeded a driveway bed—and pulled up 24 newly planted mums.

When he planted blueberries, I announced, “You can’t raise blueberries in Iowa!” For three summers, when our friends inquired about the blueberry crop, I smiled as I said, “Nothing.”

He retorted, “When we get the first cup of blueberries, you’ll have to eat crow.”

On year four he harvested a quart of blueberries, and we served our friends blueberry muffins. I ate crow—a crow of black frosting perched on a cake I had created for the occasion.

We’ve decided good fences not only make good neighbors, but good spouses. We keep the vegetable-flower fence in place, and when we glance over it we zip our lips, except to say occasionally, “That’s beautiful” and “This tastes really good.”

According to one maxim, life began in a garden. I like that, because I am convinced God made the first garden. In my garden I get tastes of Eden; life begins there again for me. I have fresh eyes for the world without, the world within. Some say a garden shows God’s desire for the world to go on. Amid the day lilies and roses, I sense him smiling and I feel the warmth of his love. I am renewed—sometimes even when I’m pulling weeds.

In my next several posts, I think I’ll write about why I garden.

If you’d like to share your thoughts on the subject, you can post a response, or you can email me at gardensetc@gmail.com

Have a good day—and spend some time in your garden!

Chipmunks Revisited

For years I have hated the chipmunks who inhabited my yard. They dug under backyard perennials. They deposited dirt on my front yard rockscaping. So for years I fumed helplessly at them.

Last year, Pella inventor Gary Vermeer delightedly reminisced conquering them in childhood with a bucket of water and a dog. Like many Pella natives, he affectionately called them “grinnies.” His dog knew the grinnie procedure so well, that whenever Gary began to fill the bucket, the dog ran to him, already salivating. Gary poured a bucket of water down the grinnie hole, and when it scrambled up to avoid drowning, the dog attacked.

I didn’t have a dog, but I told Gary I could substitute a shovel, and whack the chipmunk when it surfaced.

I didn’t follow through. The thought of blood oozing around a stripe stopped me.

I bought a live-catch trap instead. The first week I caught nothing. I asked my engineer husband to check the trap. “Carol,” he scolded. “The way you’ve set this trap, it would take an elephant to trip it.”

Trap properly set, I began catching them, one after another. I showed my first catch to Gary, and told him I wouldn’t be buying a dog or whacking away with a shovel after all.

I released them on the far side of the Skunk River. Gary teased me they would find their way back across the bridge, but he didn’t convince me.

Some were mature adults, others young. One morning, when I was releasing a young one, I noticed that all the trap’s rubber knobs were gnawed and rough. I knew its mother had been frantically trying to free it in the night. The next day, I was sure I had caught its mother, and promptly brought her to her new riverside home.

I began to picture the Skunk river bank as the site of a vast celebration—a clan of chipmunks rejoicing to be together again and free. I heard them telling stories of their great journeys in the darkness and strange roaring, up hills and down them to this Canaan across the Jordan.

This spring, the Skunk River flooded not only the bank but acres and acres of adjacent farmland. I concluded the great flood of 2008 had ended the great reunion.

I was surprisingly sad.

But I have begun repopulating their promised land, and I will continue to do so as long as they continue to propagate in my yard.

Someday, ages hence, I may even start calling them “grinnies.”

The Twentieth Chipmunk

Last summer I trapped sixteen chipmunks. This summer I had trapped just two more— chipmunks nineteen and twenty, caught in the act of eating together.

I took them across two rivers to release them—as I had seventeen previous chipmunks. (One had died of dehydration and desperation in the August sun.)

These sibling chipmunks waited for their release overnight and through a mild June morning. I went through the usual ritual, placing the cage in a plastic box to protect my trunk from chipmunk pee, driving across Thunder Creek and the Skunk River, pointing the cage toward the tall grass and opening the cage.

Chipmunk nineteen rocketed toward the grass, as had its previous seventeen relatives. But chipmunk twenty wrapped its claws around the cage floor. I turned the trap upside and it clung more tightly to what was now its ceiling. I up-ended it and it remained fixed to the wall. I finally shook its cage, producing level 5 earthquakes in its mini-world. It plunged reluctantly into the grass and crouched there without moving.

In fairness to number twenty, I don’t think he was feeling well. His fur was a bit matted, and he looked a bit thin. Perhaps he had the beginning of dehydration—his sibling must been more hydrated when their foray into the cage began. Or perhaps he had chipmunk flu. Or maybe he had heard horror stories about chipmunks drowning in their bottomland homes in the Iowa floods of ’08.

But, whatever the reason, he chose the familiar cage instead of the freedom of the grass.

Foolish chipmunk.

Foolish me.