Food for the Spirit

Jimmy’s boy wants blackberry bushes.

All the children want blackberry bushes, and I’m partial to blackberries myself. All of my strawberries are Junebearers, so it would be fun to have fruit to pick in the middle of summer when the strawberries are exhausted. Blackberries, I’m told, spread like weeds, so it’s best to put them in a container. I am terrible at container gardening, but I’m keen to learn. A bare root blackberry bush costs nine dollars and we’re broke until Michael starts getting paid from his new job. I’ll grab one as soon as I can.

All the children want to dig potatoes. Digging potatoes is such a fun activity that they look forward to it all year. I’ve been throwing myself into researching why my potatoes don’t yield very much. It turns out that there are two types of potato. Determinate potatoes don’t need to be mounded over; they produce tubers in a single layer near the surface of the ground. Indeterminate potatoes need to be grown in hills or deep containers. And you shouldn’t cut off all but the strongest eye of you potatoes either; you should use all of them. I’m going to plant a few of each kind of potato, so we can dig more than once in late summer.

I want ground cherries, but I am concerned. Ground cherries have poisonous leaves. I don’t want a curious child to be hurt. I want sweet corn, but I’m daunted. I’ve never grown sweet corn before, only popcorn. I hope it’s just as easy. I also want heirloom tomatoes, but I can’t grow the seedlings in my house because Michael is allergic to tomato vines, so I’m looking around for a good nursery.

Jimmy has offered to ask all his friends who work in landscaping and construction if any of them could help cut down the trees that have encroached onto our porch. The landlord’s handyman keeps forgetting to do it, but the landlord might pay someone else to get it done if we ask. Then I’ll have more room to grow things. I’m looking into bushes that are pretty enough for a front yard but produce something people can eat.

I think back to that five-episode story arc of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood I watched in the 1980s as a preschooler. The one that affected me more than any sermon I heard in church or any of the Bible story cartoon VHS cassettes my parents kept in the TV room. It concerned the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe attempting to grow gardens with magical “Speedy Seeds” that would bear fruit in time for dinner. While their backs were turned, the produce was pilfered by a raggedy goat puppet who yanked up the carrots with his mouth. The Make Believe characters hid to see who was stealing their produce and then pounced on the goat, who spoke  in funny bleats and explained he was from a neighboring country called Northwood, that was suffering a famine. He was only stealing the food to take back to Northwood because they were starving. And the characters responded not by punishing the goat, but with an “all-out effort:” they sowed the entire Neighborhood of Make-Believe with Speedy Seeds. They planted whimsical gardens at the Museum-go-Round and the Platypus Mound and even at King Friday’s castle. They gathered up crate after crate of whimsical toy food and loaded it onto a barge for the goat to take home.

While the grown-up characters were growing vegetables, the shy Daniel Striped Tiger buried some cans in flower pots, to see if he could grow soup. When the soup crop failed, he despaired that he didn’t have a gift to bring the starving people, but the grownups explained that he could come with the goat on the barge to Northwood so he could play with the famine-stricken children and become their friends.

When the story concluded, Mr. Rogers looked gravely at the camera and explained “Vegetables are food for the body, and friendship is food for the spirit.”

I guess I’ve been obsessed with gardening from that moment.

Vegetables, fruits, food for the body, those I can manage easily. Friendship has been harder, but gardening has brought me that as well. I’m no good at meeting new people, but I keep befriending the families whose children come see my garden.

I am, in so many ways, still a child. The philosophy and ethics I studied at the graduate level are all well and good, but the parable that taught me the most was that ridiculous children’s television show.

If your neighbors are hungry, grow a garden to feed them.

If your spirit is hungry, try growing a garden for that as well. It might bring you friends.