A thriving garden will wake a person up two hours before he ought to be out of bed.
—CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER, My Summer in a Garden, 1870
I woke up on Memorial Day to the sound of shovels hitting the dirt rhythmically, one shovel and another right after it, and then the sound of dirt landing on the ground. I crawled out of bed, quietly, trying not to wake Scott or disturb the cats, and squinted out the bedroom window. Across the street, three men worked in my neighbor’s yard. A woman had moved in recently, and so far, she didn’t seem too interested in meeting the neighbors. In fact, I’d only seen her once or twice, and this was the first time I’d seen anyone out in her garden. It had only been daylight for a couple of hours, so the crew couldn’t have been at it very long, but already her brick—lined beds were cleared of weeds and a pile of dirt and weeds stood in a wheelbarrow next to the garden.
Pay someone to work in your garden. This had never occurred to me before. Through a crack in the curtains, I watched the men work as I pulled on my sweatpants. Their shovels fell into the earth and they lifted them back up, full of rocky soil and tangles of weeds. They dropped each shovelful into the wheelbarrow and continued along the bed, leaving behind a perfectly clean, unspoiled expanse of soil. Five bags of manure sat next to the wheelbarrow, ready to be worked into the earth. They would be finished with her entire garden before lunch.
I thought this over as I stepped out into my own garden, the air still damp at eight o’ clock. I had six tomato seedlings in my hands, all purchased from San Lorenzo the week before. The tomatoes I’d planted from seed were only a couple of inches high and growing slowly, so I thought I’d better buy a few from the nursery as insurance. It was nearly June, and the signs at the nursery told me that they were ready to go into the ground and begin the summer growing season. I gathered up a few tools: a hand trowel, a shovel, and a rake to smooth the ground over before I planted. I dragged a bag of compost over to a bed that I had begun to clear a few weeks before.
Since I’d already pulled most of the weeds, I was ready to start working the compost into the dirt. I had heard that tomatoes were hard to grow in Santa Cruz, between the clay soil, the cool foggy summer, and the pests and viruses that plagued virtually every backyard tomato patch. I wasn’t taking any chances. I had bought every organic tomato product that San Lorenzo had—dried fertilizer, liquid Big Bloom fertilizer for later in the year, and mysterious powders and soaps that were supposed to prevent diseases that I hadn’t even heard of before: blossom end rot, fusarium wilt, septoria leaf spot. I mixed everything up with the compost, spread it around on the ground, and added a little compost that I’d been saving from my own pile; I even worked in a few shovelfuls of earthworm castings from the worm bin. I turned the soil, one shovelful at a time, pushing the shovel into the dirt with my foot and turning it upside down so that the compost would end up on the bottom and the original soil on top.
It felt good to be out in the sun, planting my tomatoes at last. Although there was still a chill in the air, I got so warm from the work that I stripped off my sweatshirt and continued working in short sleeves, panting a little and rocking back and forth as I pushed the shovel into the dirt. My tomato plants sat in a neat row alongside, looking on expectantly, as if they, too, were glad to be outdoors and ready to go into the earth. It was a perfect day for planting. The fog was clearing and a slight breeze brought the smell of the ocean to me. There was no better place to be than out in my own garden, planting the summer vegetables. I couldn’t imagine paying someone else to do this. It would be like paying someone else to walk on the beach or pet the cats. What’s the point?
I planted the tomatoes in two rows of three each and lashed them to bamboo stakes with twist ties. They looked so young and hopeful in their neat rows. They had no idea what they were in for, between the wilt and the fungus and the air raids from aphids. I squatted down to look them over. “Well, troops,” I said. “Do your best. I’ll be here to help out when I can, but you’re basically on your own now. Don’t let me down.”
The tomatoes planted, I went around front to do some weeding. The workers across the street had already finished their job. They were washing off their tools and getting into their truck as I flicked a couple of snails off a stepping-stone and sat down among a sea of dandelions and nut grass, an entire day’s work spread out before me. The men across the street drove off, and my neighbor came out of her house in a spotless white shirt. She walked around the cleared beds slowly, surveying them from each angle. She must not have been out there very long, because when I had finished weeding everything within reach and had moved to the next stepping-stone, I looked up and she was gone.
I COULDN’T IMAGINE doing as much manual labor as my neighbor’s work crew, day after day. Pulling weeds and hauling dirt and cutting branches is serious work. In fact, I don’t think I was ever prepared for how hard gardening would be physically.
I put my back into this garden, quite literally, straining myself so badly with the bags of manure and the shovels and pitchforks that some days I could barely limp back into the house at sunset. Once, a couple of months after we moved in, I wrenched my back so quickly and painfully that I fell onto the ground I had been preparing and lay in the newly turned earth for a half hour or so, unable to move, staring up at the sky, the clean smell of dirt wafting up around me. This is what it would be like to be a plant, I thought, unable to roll over or turn my face away from the sun.
It seems funny now, looking back, to think of myself stuck in my own dirt, unable to move. But I was terrified at the time. I was twenty-five when we moved into the house, and I had never dealt with a physical limitation like that before. It took weeks for my back to heal, and my work in the garden was severely restricted because of it. I couldn’t bend, I couldn’t dig, I couldn’t lift. As soon as I got back to my regular work in the garden, I injured myself again in the same place. And again, and again.
“If you don’t start doing sit-ups every day,” my chiropractor told me, “this will never really get better. You’ll just keep injuring it over and over again. Let me see you do one sit-up.”
I did one for her on the examining table, my whole upper body trembling from the effort.
“See that?” she said. “You won’t shake so much after a while. But you’ve got to build up some abdominal muscles so your back doesn’t do all the work for you.”
I took her seriously. I was beginning to worry that I would have to stop gardening, which was out of the question. I did sit-ups all spring, starting with ten a day, then twenty, then fifty. Eventually, I was up to a hundred a day. I never got the rock-hard abs that I saw on television in-fomercials, but I got much stronger. When I carried a bag of compost around, I felt my stomach muscles kick in and hold me in place. My tender, injured back felt safe, protected. Slowly, it began to heal.
Gardening continued to push against my physical limits, though. I could still haul around only the smallest and lightest bags of dirt. I still had trouble shoveling the beds and I was stiff and sore at night after a day in the garden.
If exercise worked for my midsection, why not my arms? I wondered. Who says I need somebody to help me carry bags of manure out of my car? Why can’t I do it myself?
I started doing push-ups and lifting weights-slowly at first. My first hand weights were only two pounds each. But I had learned something from the sit-ups. You work your way up, slowly. I went from two pounds to five pounds, then seven, then ten. It was like the garden itself. Nothing happened overnight.
Then one day, I found myself at the cash register at San Lorenzo, asking for a bag of steer manure. “I’ll call someone for you,” the cashier said.
“Nah, that’s okay,” I told her. My mind was already on the gardening chores waiting for me at home. Distractedly, I pulled my car around to the pallets and tossed a bag of manure into the trunk. I was out of the parking lot and three blocks down the street before I realized what I’d just done. The improvement had been so gradual that I hadn’t even noticed it. Over time, I had become strong enough to take care of myself in the garden. I had become good at something I had never imagined I’d ever wanted to be good at—manual labor. I could keep up with those guys in my neighbor’s gardening crew, I thought. Better yet, I could keep up with my own garden.
NOT LONG AFTER THAT, I had a chance to prove myself right. I worked for a housing agency that found itself in possession of an old boarded up house in a run-down neighborhood near the Boardwalk, just a couple of miles from my house. We planned to fix it up and sell it to a lowincome family in the neighborhood. I had no direct involvement in the project, but I occasionally sat in on project meetings to make sure we were following the rules, keeping up with the paperwork, and spending the money on schedule, all the bureaucratic details that it was my job to worry about.
I didn’t pay much attention in those meetings. My mind tended to wander in the presence of long discussions about mundane construction details. I used to plan the garden in those meetings, mull over new seed varieties, design a more ornamental lettuce bed, wonder about the best way to stake the tomatoes. Sometimes I’d make a mental list of what was ripe in the vegetable garden and try to think up as many different meals as possible using the food I’d grown: stir-fry, pizza, vegetable stew.
But when talk turned to the little house by the Boardwalk, I found myself perking up. It was such an endearing project, taking a neglected old house and turning it around. The rehab work was almost complete. It had a new roof, a new foundation, new wiring and plumbing, and a remodeled kitchen. It had been painted a fresh, beach-cottage yellow, and all that remained were a few finishing touches. Like landscaping.
Everyone had forgotten about the landscaping. We had to be finished with the project and the house had to be ready to go on the market in two weeks. Excuses were made; there were confused mumblings about a “landscape plan” or lack thereof.
This is the problem with bureaucracies: Things tend to become more complicated than they actually are. I was feeling a little surly that day, and it probably showed when I spoke up and said, “Oh, come on, how hard is this? Go down to the nursery, buy some Mexican sage and some bougainvillea, and stick them in the dirt. This is an eighty-year-old cottage by the beach with a two-foot strip of ground around it. We don’t need a plan. We need to get some plants in the ground and sell the damn house.”
I should have spoken up at project meetings sooner, because the next day I found myself putting on my blue jeans and my old tennis shoes and heading to San Lorenzo instead of the office. I had been promoted to landscaper, just for a day. I pulled into San Lorenzo’s parking lot, parked near the front between two landscape contractor pickup trucks, and strode purposefully through the aisles of the nursery, just me and the other landscapers, the only customers who had a reason to be there so early on a weekday morning. I walked around with one of the employees, pointing to plants, making notes on a little notepad, arranging for delivery to the job site.
This is cool, I thought, as I handed over my purchase order and left the nursery. People do this for a living. Today, I am doing this for a living. I had a work crew showing up at the house to help: Technically, I was not supposed to do the actual planting, since outdoor labor was nowhere in my job description, but I had my garden gloves and a shovel with me just in case it looked like I could get away with getting my hands in the dirt.
I was the first one to arrive on the job site. I sat on the front steps of the house, drinking a cup of coffee, watching for the delivery van from the nursery. This little neighborhood, the Beach Flats, was so close to the Boardwalk that it should have been one of the most expensive and upscale in Santa Cruz. It wasn’t. It was a little pocket of poverty in an otherwise affluent town, a tiny neighborhood known for gangs and drugs and cheap motels. From my house up on the hill, I could look across the river and down into the Beach Flats. I occasionally heard gunshots and police sirens in the middle of the night. But for all practical purposes, I lived in another world. I rarely visited this neighborhood on my evening walks, and the Beach Flats residents almost never came to Seabright, except for the man who went door-to-door on his bicycle, selling tamales from an ice chest he towed behind him.
Sitting on the front porch in the early morning fog, waiting for the plants to arrive, I wondered why everyone was so scared of this neighborhood. The houses around me were covered in peeling paint in shades of faded green, pink, and blue; a few front porches were littered with broken patio chairs and discarded car parts; and several windows had been broken out and covered with yellowing posters of la Virgen de Guadalupe, but the place didn’t feel unsafe because of it, just poor.
Just then, as if on cue, doors began to open down the street. Children emerged, and their mothers or grandmothers followed behind them, carrying their lunches, walking toward the bus stop at the end of the street. They stood around for ten minutes or so, the women talking in quiet, early morning tones, keeping an eye on their children, until a school bus drove up. It stopped for a minute, then pulled away, leaving behind the mothers and the grandmothers, who turned and disappeared, one by one, back into their houses.
I contemplated the scene I’d just witnessed as I finished my coffee. There is an elementary school in my neighborhood, and I have never seen a crowd like that gathered at the school to see their kids off. This neighborhood had something special about it. I looked back up at the house we were restoring. It looked so hopeful, with its coat of yellow paint and its shiny new windows. It looked like it had the power to inspire the rest of the neighborhood to join in and make a fresh start, to mend some stairs, replace some windows, plant some flowers.
The van from San Lorenzo pulled up around the same time the work crew did. I jumped up to help unload plants while the guys went to work clearing the little strip of dirt around the house of the dandelions and blackberries and crusty old aloe plants. They had the weeds pulled and the bags of compost from the nursery spread over the ground, all in the time it took me to help unload the plants and line them up along the sidewalk where I wanted them planted. I pointed and used a little of my high school Spanish to indicate where the plants should go, their spacing from the house, and the need to leave enough room for a picket fence along the sidewalk.
I stood around for a few minutes while the guys started to work, feeling a little silly in my role as plant boss. What was I supposed to do now? Stand there and watch? Give more orders? Go inside and read a magazine? Instead, I did what I’d wanted to do all along: I went to my car, got my gloves and my shovel, and set to work. There were four of us working with our shovels and our pitchforks, but the ground was so hard and dry that it took a good hour or two to work the compost into the soil and get half the plants in the ground.
Around ten, the carpenters showed up to build the picket fence. One of them looked at his watch and nodded in our direction. “Go take a break, you guys,” he said, and I dropped my shovel along with the rest of the crew, stuffed my gloves into my back pocket, and walked with them down to the corner store, where we stood out front and drank agua frescas until our fifteen minutes had passed. This is not a bad way to make a living, I thought, although my back was already starting to stiffen up, and I realized with a feeling of something like shame that I probably made double what the highest-paid guy on the crew made, even at union rates. I was playing at being a gardener, pretending that I got to spend my days with my hands in the dirt, but I knew I had a cushy desk job waiting for me, one with a good paycheck and none of the occupational hazards of outdoor labor.
We finished our work before lunch. The guys packed up their trucks and got ready to go on to their next job, but not before they had turned to shake my hand and compliment me on my hard work: “Eres muy buena trabajadora.” I grinned and shook their hands, too pleased to say much. Before I left, I walked across the street to get a good view of the house and its new landscaping.
The sunny yellow paint, the white picket fence, and the flowers made all the difference. The house was a bright spot in the neighborhood, where before it had stood as a symbol of blight and decay. The plants seemed awkward and new, surrounded by a brown carpet of perfectly raked mulch, but I could just picture how it would look in a year or two, after a family moved in and hung curtains in the windows, after the plants had matured and the entire house was surrounded by the blue and white spires of Mexican sage and purple bougainvillea climbing up a trellis near the front door. Anyone could see that a lot of sweat had gone into transforming that house. And some of it was mine.
Some days, my favorite time in the garden is that hour when the sun has slipped down below the horizon and it is too dark to get any more work done. Nothing to do but put away the tools and retreat inside with an aching back and arms covered in blackberry-vine scratches.
Ah … the postgardening bath. It is worth getting dirty for, worth straining muscles for. I bring an alarming amount of debris into the tub with me-there is compost between my toes, a fine dusting of dirt along my arms, and leaves and dried seedpods in my hair. As if that isn’t enough, I bring handfuls of fresh herbs into the bath with me, so that by the time I haul my newly scrubbed body out of the water, there will be a trail of fragrant rosemary and lavender buds at the bottom of the tub along with the dirt and the twigs, and a teacup alongside will hold the dregs of my garden tea-catnip and chamomile buds.
Here’s my recipe for a postgarden soak that heals my morningglory rash and soothes my tired bones.
1 cup oatmeal
¼ cup baking soda
dried herbs-comfrey, lavender, eucalyptus, mint, or chamomile work well
I make a batch of this up in advance by blending everything together in a food processor or blender until it is a fine powder. When I get in from the garden, I sprinkle some into my bath, along with some fresh herbs or rose petals, sink into the water, and—if I have the strength—I start planning next weekend’s gardening project.