Garden Stories

Some fragmented thoughts on planting seeds, tulips and daffodils, lunch with my in-laws, Top Chef, and Evolving Faith 2022

Friday, May 13*
Houston, Texas

Greetings, gentle reader.

I’m now fully recovered from COVID-19, and my doctor gave me the all-clear to head out on another reporting trip. So here I am, writing to you during a long layover in Houston, fully masked up and wishing that more folks would acknowledge that this pandemic isn’t over.

As I wrote last week, my time in isolation meant more hours in the yard, usually with Fozzie. He loves being outside in the sunshine. As much as I like to imagine the Fozz as a helpful assistant, he is not. Mostly, he eats dirt, sniffs around, and barks at passersby. 

In the side yard with Fozzie

In the hours and days after I plant seeds, I have a tendency to go outside and stare at the soil in search of some sign that the seeds have sprouted into furious life. Okay, honestly, sometimes it’s just a matter of minutes later, and there I’ll be, nearly kissing the ground, trying to find a wisp of green breaking the soil’s surface. Even though I know that the garden refuses our wish for instant gratification, I do it anyway. It’s weird. It’s illogical. It’s real.

April was gray, cool, and wet, but we had a burst of unseasonably warm weather in recent days. So some of the seeds that I planted last week began to germinate within a few days: I see the beginnings of spinach in the backyard, along with the babiest bok choy and Asian greens. But the thrill of seeing these things grow and my eager anticipation of meals to come are tempered, just a little, by my laughable inability to plant things in any tidy way. Once again, the seedlings reveal that my garden rows are about as straight as I am. 

Our side yard sits to the south of the house. It gets plenty of sun, but the soil is poor. The garlic that I grew there last year ended up about half as big as the garlic I grew in the backyard. The yield of the potatoes I planted there was maybe a quarter of that of the ones in my community-garden plot. This year, I added some peat and some topsoil, and I mulched well. I’m trying a bunch of different things there: potatoes again as well as cosmos and phlox, basil and tomatoes, a bit of butternut squash. We’ll see what grows. But I know it will take time to improve the soil—another call to patience. 

Occasionally, I’ve gotten messages from folks commenting on my allegedly green thumb, and here’s what I want to say in response: I am an inconsistent gardener, with big plans and mediocre follow-through. I forget to water. I harvest haphazardly: The garlic now growing in the side yard is a sign not of my care but of my negligence. Somehow I failed to gather all of what grew last season, and so it just kept on doing its thing. After I mulch, say, a third of my garden plot, I think of something else I’d rather do, like just sit in the garden and stare at the sky. Then the weeds rise up, as if to laugh in my face because they knew this would happen and they were just waiting for their moment. I do actually enjoy weeding, except when it’s hot, so basically, anytime except during the growing season. 

I write about growing things not because I’m good at it but because I am really not. If I can do this, anyone can. When something grows, it is a surprise more special than I know how to explain. I didn’t expect, for instance, that the bulbs I stuck in the ground in December would actually turn into tulips and daffodils. I was late, and the ground was pretty hard. But every time I have come out of the house over the past few weeks and seen one of these blossoms, I’ve felt such gratitude—and it only really took two skills to grow these: first, I picked out some bulbs online, based entirely on pretty pictures, and then, I dug some small holes in the ground, plopped the bulbs in,  and tucked them into the soil for their needed cold-season rest. 

This gorgeous tulip is called “Finola”

Truth is, the thing I plant often doesn’t grow to fruition. Over the past two summers, I have started dozens of pepper seedlings and harvested no peppers. Last year, I planted a whole section of tatsoi and didn’t get a single usable leaf. I have repeatedly planted zucchini and yellow squash, and the yield has been precisely zero, though we did get one appetizer’s worth of zucchini blossoms, which were delicious and absurdly expensive, given how many seeds I had to buy to get that single dish. 

Despite the crop failures, despite my own mistakes, I keep doing it because growing things is humbling in the truest sense of the word. 

The garden invites us into beauty and joy. There’s nothing like the thrill of picking a Sun Gold tomato from the vine, plucking a leaf off your own basil, and popping the pair into your mouth right there in the field. It’s one glorious bite of summer—and a summons to acknowledge grace, because all I did was plant the seeds and maybe add a little water, but so much more had to happen for those things to grow. 

The garden tells me a story of resilience. Yes, I need to do my part, as a good neighbor to the seeds and the soil. But the perennials will testify that they can mostly take it from there. Our chives are back for a third season, the thyme that seemed to be struggling in that poor side-yard soil last year has filled out nicely, and the sage that looked dead three months ago is rejuvenating in the springtime warmth.

The garden reminds me, too, how much I depend on others for my own sustenance. I’m a gardener, not a farmer, which is to say that what I grow sustains neither myself nor my family nor anyone else’s family. About a month ago, we finished the last of the tomatillo salsa that I canned in September. The mason jar was a time capsule—a burst of late-summer heat to warm us up while it was still chilly outside. But like everything else that comes out of my garden plot, it was also essentially a luxury good. It told me to recall the many humans who are, to me, essential workers, because they grow the things I actually eat and drink to survive. 

For all of our attempts to pretend that we’re independent, not a single one of us actually is. When I’m kneeling in the yard, whether I’m observing a wriggling worm or watching the ants scatter because I’ve disrupted their home life or counting the strawberry blossoms (I’m always grateful for even a single berry, because the rabbits usually eat them all), I’m urged to notice how my life is fundamentally interwoven with so many others—human, plant, animal. To be a creature is to be called into community. To forget that—or ignore it—results in the anguish of this good earth.

That’s why I grow things, and I guess that’s why I hope you will too. You might be intimidated by the thought of trying to do it outside, so perhaps you could get a little pot, fill it with some soil, and pop in a few seeds; basil or cilantro usually do pretty well on a sunny windowsill. Or if you cook with green onions, save the little white nub, stick it into the ground in a sunny spot outdoors, and watch how it regrows. Honestly, it can help to think of your plant as a relatively low-maintenance pet. There’s nothing all that weird about saying hello to it and asking how it’s doing. Maybe you can think of it as another way of loving a neighbor. To foster life is an act of beauty, and to pay better attention a sign of care.

What I’m Eating: I intentionally scheduled a long layover in Houston so that I could have lunch with my in-laws. I was lucky enough to marry so well, not just because I adore my Tristan but also because his family is lovely. A bonus: I got to have good seafood, in the form of blackened Gulf red snapper with oyster stew and rice. As much as I love Grand Rapids, it has no fresh local seafood. Some folks have tried to convince me that lake fish is good, but you won’t get me to admit that, other than smoked whitefish, it is anything other than just okay. 

Lunch with the in-laws!

What I’m Watching: It was also great to have a meal in Houston because it reminded me what a wondrous and often underrated culinary city it is. The diversity of its food, as with its people, is formidable: Here, you find excellent barbecue and wonderful Tex-Mex, innovative Viet-Cajun and hearty soul food and so much more. We’ve glimpsed much of it on the latest iteration of Top Chef, which takes place in Houston. Have you seen any of it? Especially over the past two seasons, Top Chef has intentionally lifted up the foodways and the rich stories behind diverse cuisines, which has been not just entertaining but also educational. 

What I’m Reading: The political writer Tim Alberta, who grew up in an evangelical family in Michigan, wrote a devastating, deeply personal look at what has become of American evangelicalism. It was hard to read, in part because the fractures that Alberta writes about are rifts that I’ve seen in the lives of people I know and love. For better or worse, I am a church nerd. I want the Church to be what it was and is called to be: a brave and tender force for love and justice in an aching and broken world. Yet in Alberta’s piece, we see how it is too often hobbled by anger and fraught with fear. God, have mercy.

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Let me put on my Evolving Faith hat for just a moment. Some of you know that I am co-curator of this community, which was started by the late Rachel Held Evans and my co-leader, Sarah Bessey, in 2018. We didn’t hold a conference in 2021, but we’ll be back on October 14th and 15th—online-only, because we don’t feel it is safe yet to gather en masse, and we learned in 2020 that the online experience can be tremendously hospitable. Tickets for Evolving Faith 2022 are now on sale. 

Among our speakers this year: Dr. Kwok Pui Lan, a theological hero of mine; the amazing poet Maggie Smith; and the hilarious essayist R. Eric Thomas. Because this is our biggest lineup ever, we’re introducing our speakers over a series of weeks. We’ll announce 14 more next Wednesday, and then the last group the following. I hope you’ll join us. You can register here. And if money is tight right now, we have both partial and full scholarships available; you can find the application here.

We’ve also moved our community spaces off Facebook and onto our own platform, hosted by Mighty Networks. It’s free to join. And in the past couple of weeks since we threw the doors open, we’ve been heartened by the thousands who have gathered from all over the world, asking bold questions and coming alongside one another.

I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.

Yours,
Jeff

*It turned out there was no wifi on my flight! So it’s actually Saturday as I send this, along with my American-accented Buenos días, from Quito, Ecuador. But I wrote it on Friday, I promise.