My mom always had a garden. Her mom always had a garden before her, and for a time they were one in the same, as we lived with my grandparents. I have fond memories of snapping peas with grandma on the back stoop in the slanting light of an August evening.
We also didn’t live near a convenience store, and my hippie parents didn’t keep sweets in the house. Do you see where this is going?
The treats I snuck were mostly vegetables stolen from the garden. Cherry tomatoes, in season, were hotly competed for among us kids, but I had a special fondness for radishes, for the easy pull, the red bulb like a Christmas ornament, the dirt falling away with a brush, the snowy insides.
My mother suffered from mental illness, and it got worse, and the gardens faded from our lives. For about four to six years, the free lunch at school was the only food I got on weekdays, and weekends were fasts if Dad didn’t get visitation. I could talk more about going hungry, what it’s like… but maybe that’s for another post.
I think it was third grade when I joined Horticulture Club. Center Road Elementary had a greenhouse, and you could be in Horticulture Club, which was mostly providing free labor to the greenhouse. I remember the teacher who ran the greenhouse vaguely as a woman with colorful cardigans, showing us how to weed, how to water, how to transfer seedlings into pots. The greenhouse mostly grew flowers. We had a special presentation one day on miniature roses from a woman who bred them.
At the end of the year, as a reward for our work, we were each entitled to a packet of seeds. Almost all the other kids, boys included, took rose seeds. I asked for radishes. I remember the teacher giving me a funny look, and I feared I’d asked for too much. A vegetable was valuable. I said something like, “or, um, whatever you want…” but she went to her drawers and cubbies and flicked through envelopes until she found a packet of radish seeds.
We each got a six-cup flat to plant our seeds in and take them home.
How excited I was! I dug up an oval about three feet across and ringed it with a fence I made myself from various bits of junk, sticks, and plastic wrap. The fence was taller than the oval was wide. I carefully planted my radishes immediately, though the little flat cups were plain dirt. I watered them every day.
Little sprouts came up, but I wasn’t sure what was a radish and what was a weed, so I didn’t pluck anything for fear I’d kill a radish. By the end of summer, the plot was full of tall weeds.
I was starving, and no matter what i pulled up, nothing was a radish. Nothing had even the slightest swelling of root that could be mistaken for one.
I lied to Grace. I told her there had been one, a very very small one, a white root gone thick and pink, and I’d eaten it immediately.
For a long time, I couldn’t even look at that patch of yard, at my visible failure. Not only was I a terrible gardener, I had killed my radish babies with criminal neglect. If only I’d plucked the obvious weeds! If only I’d marked the sprouts that first came up!
This story has a happy ending. I survived. I grew up. I got a good job, and I got a better job. I planted a garden of my own.
I’ve successfully grown cucumbers and tomatoes, peppers and herbs. I’m intimately familiar with the shapes of weeds and how often to water. I’ve realized that an unsupervised ten-year-old could not have been expected to garden successfully.
Still, it’s weird how hard it is to forgive myself that crime of inexperience. If I hadn’t had such hopes of sustaining myself and my sister with those radishes, would I still be brooding over it?
Now I go sometimes to the fancy grocery store, the one farther from home with the wooden ceiling and wide aisles that has better produce and higher prices. I can easily afford to grab a bouquet of fresh radishes, their hard little spheres bouncing off each other as I shake the moisture from them. I take them home and I eat them as snacks. Any time I want, I take one, rinse it off and devour it over the sink. Sometimes I am slower, savoring. Sometimes I toss a bit of salt on the radish after the first bite. Sometimes, even, I slice them up on a salad.
There are radishes in my refrigerator right now, and that makes me endlessly happy.
