The Bottom of My Garden

With each passing day, I sneak further back among the bushes to a place where I can remain unnoticed.  I want to watch how Ukraine is growing.  Lately, I’ve been pacing out the differences between what happens in the countryside of Ukraine and what happens in the vast countryside of America.  The daily morning news briefs from NPR and BBC that bookend my walk to school have got me thinking. When, exactly, did a dented can of beans from the grocer become more economical than a homegrown handful of haricots from your own backyard?

The peacefulness that arises from the ground, arching up from the absolute roots of the wilting pepper plants is profound. The half-acre of land behind our house feeds more than a winter hunger.  To walk among the rows of short, just-begun seedlings makes these days.  Always, one thinks independently about the food of our stomachs and the food of our souls.  But not here. Knowing full well that I shouldn’t be, I am envious of the necessity for such a garden.  Only when fulfilling its purpose of sating hunger can a kitchen garden be consumed for what it gives the soul. No pleasure comes from eating a decorative hen. Or a lady apple, for that matter.  What the world we live in has become.

The dust, dry spell starting already in this late May, rumbles up between my toes and my sandals.  The midday stare down from the sun makes the green sprouts look miraculous – to survive such a blaze!  I wonder about the short burgundy  sprouts among the potato patch.  Are they meant to be growing here or has the low wind up from the center of town allowed them to take seed?

I try to identify the plants to my left and right as I walk down the central row.  From the farthest point westward, facing the hardly visible roof of our house, I name beets on the left, carrots to the right.  The light green lace of the carrot stalks make for a distinctive and simple identification.  Next comes a healthy patch of peppers that shine like lily pads low to the ground.  The dark, green sword shoots of onion prove easiest to spot of all.  I look left again and lament the lazy tomato plants nearly flat to the ground on account of the strong wind and their thin spines.  I think further along that these must be more carrots (can you ever get enough?) and then I come right up face to face with the golden boy of every autumnal harvest in Ukraine – the potato.

A long stretch of short, stout potato plants runs along in front of me.  Happy melons with wider, flatter leaves are spread out generously along the opposite patch of earth.  But, as every other soul in this town, it’s not the melons but the fireworks of leaves sprouting above each spud that catch my attention.  I know that under the ground are the potatoes that, just a month ago, I was pulling out from the cellar.

As Luba and I were hauling up last year’s potatoes from the cellar to spread out on a blanket it the sun, she lamented the state of the crop.  She’s right, we didn’t have a great year last year when it came to potatoes.  And we weren’t the only ones. A wicked drought passed through this eastern part of the country for most of July and August, making it nearly impossible for the potatoes to grow.  This not even mentioning the evil Colorado beetle that has plagued potato crop in Ukraine since the beginning the early ’80s. Remember when I first learned about those little buggers at the banya last February?

Yet, there we were spending another late April planting bad potatoes again. What can we do, she capitulated, we’ve got to plant them!

At the time, I didn’t agree.  With all my American pragmatism, I rationed that if you know that a bad potato will grown another bad crop then what is the point of planting them at all? It’s a cruel kind of resistance to the process of natural selection. The jury concludes: a bad potato begets a bad potato.

Yet, standing out here and surveying the garden I begin to see certain flaws. Having spent the past weekend fruitlessly trying to explain to my Ukrainian and Armenian friends about what it is Americans do with all that land if they don’t have kitchen gardens, I’ve lost some faith in pragmatism.  There are only so many times you can try to explain simply how government subsidies for big farming have boxed out subsistence farmers from reaping the benefits of eating off their own land.  It’s enough to make a girl seriously consider slamming down the basket of beefed up, blood red Dole strawberries and getting a kitchen garden of her own.

At least, here in Ukraine, people work in earnest to feed themselves from their own land. I return to the potatoes.  I inspect the leaves for bites from the striped and infamous Colorado beetle.  The black and tan stripes look like a cape pulled taut to the back of their orangey-red underbellies; its face is orange with a mask of black eyes. It’s a bug that’s more attractive than most but that doesn’t help the fact that it’s got a whole country angry and on the offensive.  The poison that will keep this country fed has been doing the trick, though and  I see mounds of Colorado beetles belly up today among the potato patch.  I’m almost sorry to see them struggle so, the last efforts of  little legs hung helplessly in the air almost endears them to me. Almost.

But staring down at their dried-up skeletal structures is far too interesting. Dried up like this they resemble a necklace my yiayia used to wear.  It was made of cat’s eye or some such stone and there were hundred of them strung together into a long, elegant chain to be worn over a black top.  Yiayia’s always had such style.

And then, before I push my feet back through the chicken yard and into the house, I catch the delicious scent of mint among the wild flowers.  I can nearly taste it mixed in among the grasses and flowers of herbal remedies that Luba drinks for tea in Winter. I dare to tear off a few leaves and rinse them under the ice-cold spring water that comes of the kitchen faucet.  I light the kettle and sit at the winder waiting for the water to boil.

It’s a wonder the things that  speak up when the house is empty and quiet save for the pen scratching and the radio rattling off about drug addiction and American rock bands.  I mash up my newly minted tea leaves with a spoon of sugar. The crystals crunch against the bright, green leaves and I can’t wait to drink it down.

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