Adventures in Gardening

Here in Ethiopia I’m regularly reminded of my own ineptitude. There are just countless tasks (which are regularly performed by children) that I have absolutely no idea how to do. When I was a child, no one taught me how to kill a chicken, roast coffee, walk in the mud, fend off an angry cow, remove chiggers, or sort wheat. My ability to text, walk in high heeled shoes, or operate a lawn mower simply has no value here. So I often find myself standing frozen with a hopelessly pathetic look on my face waiting for some Ethiopian to jump in and show me how to balance a pot of boiling water over a fire without having it spill and burn my lower extremities.

But I was convinced that there was one area where I wouldn’t need any help--growing vegetables. Now I can’t claim to have grown up on a farm, but I can claim to come from a long line of Iowa farmers (who were Irish farmers even before that). During my childhood we rented a plot of land in a community garden in which we grew countless vegetables. Often our harvests were so prolific that my mother (who was desperately unwilling to waste even one of the 40 million tomatoes that she grew) resorted to secretly leaving excess produce on friends’ doorsteps. My friend Sarah once called to ask me if my mother had left a zucchini the size of a small child at their door in the middle of the night. Sadly, she had.

And so it was with extreme confidence that I planted my first seeds in the expat garden behind our house. And soon, sprouting from the ground, were baby tomato, pepper, bean, lettuce, beet, carrot, and radish plants.

The first to go were the bean plants. In one night the monkeys and/or rabbits ate the little green shoots down to the roots. Some things—the beets, spinach, and peppers—just failed to grow. And the monkeys quickly stole every fruit that the tomato plants produced. A few hearty vegetables remained and continued to flourish. But then came the ants. They burrowed into the roots of the carrots, radishes, and lettuce and pretty soon all that remained were a few shriveled stalks. My garden was defeated. And so was I.

Then came my parents—expert gardeners—with fresh energy. The spent a week re-building my garden, applying fertilizer, and planting again. This time we had gathered more advice. Tomatoes should go near the house where we can watch them. Ash mixed into the soil will prevent ant infestation.

With this second garden, we still had many failures—an extremely wet “dry season” has done a number on the pumpkin and squash. The broccoli met the same fate as the beans, and the spinach never germinated. But within all that failure—one success! A large healthy zucchini! Nothing my mother would be impressed with, but enough to add to a yummy stir-fry. Then came a large patch of radishes and an entire bed of lettuce. We now have cilantro and parsley for our Mexican and Italian dishes respectively and I’m anxiously watching my tomato plant to see if we’ll catch one of its fruits.

And yet again, Ethiopia provides another reminder of how much I have to learn, and also how sweet success can be.