The Things I Meant to Write Down

Last December I walked out to the garden for what turned out to be one of the last visits of the season and tried to take inventory. The air had turned frosty and the last of the winter greens were winding down.

It had been a big year. Our first full season with the new raised beds, the trellis, the native flower bed, and the orchard. The kind of year that deserves a proper retrospective. Not just the frost dates or the garden plans. Everything else. I stood there in the cold trying to remember what I’d learned, what I’d want to carry into next spring, and what I absolutely could not afford to forget.

Some of it was easy. The tomatillos, for example. They were prolific beyond my wildest expectations. Which sounds like a compliment until you’ve spent three months trying to keep them wrangled and out of everyone else’s business. If you haven’t grown Tomatillos, you should know that they take up an unreasonable amount of room, require constant taming, and the yield, while impressive in a purely statistical sense, does not come close to justifying the level of husked chaos. I now have a bumper crop of tomatillos in the freezer that will last longer than my retirement savings. I will not be growing tomatillos again. Next summer, Okra takes over the tomatillo spot. That one I wrote down.

I also wrote down a new squirrel hack. For years the squirrels have been sneaking into the garden and stealing our tomatoes. It has been a constant battle. And a humiliatingly losing one at that. Sometimes they’d take one bite and leave the rest of the tomato on the walkway just to rub our noses in it. I tried everything. Rubber toy snakes. Irish spring. Cayenne powder. None of it phased them. I suspect they even enjoyed it.

Until last summer I discovered, entirely by accident, that if I kept a bird feeder filled in the backyard, the squirrels became so focused on stealing food from the birds that they completely forgot about stealing food from the humans. Sure, it cost a small bank loan worth of bird seed, but it was worth every penny for a season of (mostly) unscathed heirloom tomatoes. That one went in the journal.

But there are a few things that didn’t make it into the garden journal.

The afternoon I was working in the garden and a hummingbird came to visit. It hovered a few feet in front of me for a long moment, just watching. I was doing something (tying up and cursing tomatillos probably), looked up and there it was, studying me curiously with an expression that could only mean “why on earth would you put tomatillos there?” It was my Snow White moment. I’ve thought about it dozens of times since. But I didn’t write it down.

Or the moment in May when we discovered that our dog was OBSESSED with the sugar snap peas. She’d watch us harvest them with an intensity she’s never once applied to actual dog responsibilities. If you were picking peas and didn’t share the harvest, she’d bark at you. Not aggressively. Demandingly. As though you were violating some agreement you didn’t remember making. Before long, the kids harvested peas primarily for the dog. I’d need to plant more peas to account for the goldendoodle garden share next year. I didn’t write that down either.

And then there’s my daughter.

At some point last summer I realized she was the right age to need pocket money and the wrong age to be interested in earning it through any traditional means. She was however extremely gifted at finding bugs. Slugs, rollie pollies, fireflies. She was a critter-whisperer. So we made a deal. She would remove the cabbage worms from the kale and collard greens in exchange for an allowance. She was meticulous. She relocated the worms to the other side of the yard and built them an elaborate fairy house habitat replete with sticks and extra leaves to keep them distracted from the garden. She’d report her findings, I’d pay her, and she’d be back to it. It was our best kale season ever.

I didn’t write any of that down. Not the way she carefully turned the leaves over to find them or how gently she removed them to their new housing development. Not the satisfaction she seemed to take in the work, or the pride she took in showing off the dozens of hungry hungry caterpillars that would no longer be a menace to our brassicas.

Someday I’m going to try to tell her about that summer. The summer she was this age, in this garden, doing this thing. And I’ll have the frost dates and the squirrel hack and the tomatillo verdict well documented, all of which by then will be completely uninteresting. The things that might actually matter to her, to both of us, are already beginning to soften at the edges in the way that memories do when you don’t tend to them.

I built Percy because of this.

Not the forgetting exactly. Everyone forgets. That’s not the problem. The problem is that no garden tool has ever made space for the moments that actually make a garden feel like a garden.

The hummingbird, or the pea-loving dog, or a little girl holding a kale leaf up to the afternoon light looking for something small and destructive to evict.

The squirrel trick belongs in a garden journal. So does my daughter.

I don’t want to look back on this season and only have the planting data.