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Lessons from the Garden

© Kathy Reiffenstein

Growing up in the picturesque, upstate New York college town of Ithaca, I had the abundance of the Cornell University gardens practically in my back yard. There were not only roses of every color and perfume, but also lush apple orchards and acres of experimental corn fields to excite my young mind with horticultural sensations. And to complete the agrarian picture, there were huge barns filled with plump, black and white dairy cows. For a special treat, my father, who worked for the university, used to take me to watch them being milked. I was always fascinated by the snaking route the milk took, through the miles of glass tubing up near the ceiling, making its way to the huge silver vats in the next room.

In comparison to this stimulating adventure, our own modest garden patch didn’t seem very interesting from my 10 year old perspective. We had ordinary vegetables and no roses and the only animals grazing in our backyard were raccoons. It is also entirely possible that some of my lack of excitement was because I was assigned the mundane task of pulling up weeds.

I spent sunny summer mornings in our vegetable garden, an 8 x 10 patch of dark, fragrant earth, snuggled up against the back of the garage. My task was to keep ahead of the sneaky weed shoots that wove their way in and out of the neat rows, painstakingly planted from seed by my mother -- no nursery grown, pre-started 2" pots for this garden! With the help of several maternal lessons on distinguishing vegetable friend from weed foe, I think I generally pulled out the right ones.

Always looking for an excuse to do something other than weeding, I was thrilled the summer we got a beagle puppy, Tykie. She and I ran around the green beans that climbed their way up string trellises, and played catch across the tomatoes, lettuce, carrots and radishes (my father’s favorite) growing throughout the rest of the plot. Tykie jumped and fetched and chased the little insects; she thought that garden was her personal playground. I can still see her little brown and black body flying down the backyard, escaping from the soft bedroom slipper thrown by my father after he discovered the 3 foot hole she’d dug in his vegetable garden!

With the arrival of my teenage years, my garden activities were eclipsed by the world of rock and roll music, makeup and boys. I was just as glad to be rid of my boring weeding chores. I mean, the garden was O.K., but there was an exciting world ‘out there’ for me to explore. As college, a move to the big city, marriage and a career followed one after the other, my life somehow seemed way too busy and stimulating to worry about a garden.

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