Last summer, during a brief pause in the construction of our home, I took an opportune moment to build four raised garden beds. It was a desperate effort on my part to establish a space for growing food amid the tumultuous decision-making and work that goes into building a home. With disturbed soil encircling our still un-sided house, I longed for a beautiful space full of life. It was August, and I was going to start my garden.
After setting the bed frames, and with my husband traveling for work, my daughter, Bethany, helped me rake, shovel, and mix our soil, adding peat moss from Peaco Peat Moss & Soils on Flathead Lake to a blend of compost I shoveled out of the bed of my truck. Then just a month shy of 2 years old, Bethany eagerly used her purple rake to drag the soil to and fro, content for a moment before tossing the rake and proclaiming she was finished. It took a few days longer than I’d planned—building and filling the beds in fits and starts with a toddler for a crew—but once finished, we had four beds tucked into the gently sloping hillside. All we were missing were the plants.
Contrasting with my desire to get the garden going was the narrowing appetite of my increasingly picky-eating toddler. She suddenly went from a tomato-, hummus-, avocado-loving infant to an I-only-want-fruit-crackers-and-yogurt child. Staring at those empty garden beds on a crisp morning as fall whispered its way through the summer leaves, I wondered if they might be part of the cure.
During the first week of September, we put seeds in the ground. Bethany eagerly poked holes in the loose soil and trilled when I dropped a bumpy spinach seed into each depression.
We slowly moved from hole to hole, distributing about a third of our seed stash into a precise arrangement in a portion of a bed. Then we swept the soil over the seeds. As I pulled my hand from the dirt, I rubbed my blackened fingers together and watched bits of peat moss and compost fall from my skin while others clung to my cracks and pores. The feeling of the soil—its life, and its promise of what could come—enveloped me.
When I heard Bethany’s eager cackle, I was too late. She’d picked up the seed packet and had scattered the entire package across the bed. She was beaming, absolutely glowing. I took a deep breath and put my hands back in the soil. Together, we brushed more dirt over the scattered seeds as I explained that we were planting a fall harvest of spinach, that we would hope to have a long enough fall that the little plants could grow and develop, that we’d be eating their leaves.
For the next few weeks we visited the spinach seeds, watering as needed. It wasn’t long before the first leaves, tiny as my daughter’s fingernails, poked from the soil. As they grew, they seemed to swell beneath the sunshine, broadening their leaves in pleasure. Some were bunched tight; others grew far apart; while others grew roots atop the soil surface—casualties of a toddler’s planting. We tried to gently cover their roots.
Once the leaves were plump and robust, I invited Bethany to taste them. We knelt in the grass alongside the bed. I plucked a leaf and popped it into my mouth. Then I asked if she’d like one. Bethany grabbed at a tiny green leaf and tore a segment off . She held it close to her face, inspecting its greenness. Then she put it in her mouth and reached for another.
Jessianne Castle
Editor in Chief
