For the past 5 or 6 years I have put in a small vegetable garden.  It’s a month to month process of work, and I have the help of multitudes.  What I mean is the presence of the botanists who developed the “Better Boy” hybrid tomato plant, the chemists who worked out the method for distilling gasoline from crude oil, and the inventors who engineered the internal combustion engine, that powers my garden rototiller.  All are present in resources available to me.  Their life’s work is at my disposal.

Why do I keep planting, and tending the garden?  In part because by the doing, I make the connection with our common ancestors, and more importantly my family progenitors.  Maybe motivation is partly instinct.  I grew up in the Piedmont of North Carolina.  That is the midsection of the State between the mountains and the Atlantic ocean.  The land is forested with tall pine trees.  When cleared the ground is fertile, good for growing food.  My grandfather on my mother’s side was a typical North Carolina yeoman farmer, owning a few acres, on which he grew corn, tended cows, chickens, pigs.  That farm was his life.  He loved the land.  The land in Johnston County, by natures will and his good labor provided everything that he needed and wanted. 

I put in a garden year by year, to know the only way that I can know, my families way of life extending into the past for generations.  Can anything be known apart from the doing?

In the past I worked to keep the garden as weed free as I could, pulling by hand the plants competing with the vegetables for nourishment, water, etc .  I pulled them up, row by row, almost every day a session of weed pulling.  I didn’t mind.  It was usually agreeable work.  Deep into the growing season though, the weeds would always win.  I couldn’t keep up.  Nature always

wins.  Maybe that is as it should be.

This year I remembered a fragment of a sentence spoken by my mother.  Something about “chopping weeds.”  I think the comment came in conversation with one of her sisters.  Something about chopping weeds in the sun, on a sweltering day.  I can imagine a young version of my mother standing in the hot sandy soil between the rows in a bean field.  The emotional content of her comment was a recollection of hard but necessary work.  With the memory of my mother’s words, I experienced a flash of insight.

That is why I bought a hoe.  So far this looks to be the best year yet for the garden.  I have a greater advantage over the weeds.  I still can hear mom’s voice.