Ammi Midstokke: When imagination is the greatest joy
It has been two years since I have been able to garden. Actually, I’ve never really been able to garden, but that did not stop me from pretending.
It’s been two years since I pretended to garden. Which means I have mostly forgotten all the loss, grieving, vermin carnage and the ceaseless flow of money that still landed me at the Farmer’s Market to buy tomatoes.
“Are these tomatoes from your garden?” my guests would ask.
“Indirectly,” I would say.
This leaves me with the naïve optimism of having better luck in a new environment. As if all my previous garden woes were the product of placement and my lack of raised beds. Raised beds are probably the answer to everything. Certainly live traps were not. They were walnut warehouses that just kept getting emptied while the ground squirrels declared the famine over and procreated at fertility rates worthy of scientific inquiry.
The new land has no ground squirrels (yet). What it does have: rabbits, deer, moose, coyotes and one lettuce-eating brown dog. It has city water, so I don’t have to worry about a hose being left on and my well running dry or my pump draining the batteries. Sometimes I feel like an off-grid traitor. Other times I feel like the move to civilization is a gluttonous luxury world of leaving-lights-on and city-maintained roads.
My hope is that all this convenience and easy living translates to gardening success. This year, the garden will be an absolute triumph. Because I’m not actually growing anything. I’m just designing.
I read a study once about people who release as much dopamine by thinking about a potential as they do by actually achieving it. It’s a dangerous superpower to feel joy and satisfaction just by imagining a lush, productive garden. It has also been the only joy and satisfaction I got from gardening, due to my hopeless ineptitude. Until now.
Or, until next growing season. I’m already busy imagining it while I peruse supply stores and deep dive into the pros and cons of metal versus wooden raised beds. In all the internet pictures, those raised beds look like they perform well, zucchini leaves and blossoms billowing over their edges. I will probably even be able to grow finicky southern crops. Eggplant! Okra! Peppers! Soon, it will be time for me to start trying to source exotic seeds!
My husband will watch this excitement and quietly acquiesce to my childlike enthusiasm. He must find my undaunted love of gardening rather charming, because it certainly is not providing sustenance for my family. Though once we got a beautiful beet and a volunteer asparagus that almost made enough food for an amuse-buche.
I have been excitedly showing him pictures of raised beds as if they come with full-grown plants in them. It makes the investment seems reasonable. I map garden layouts and move my gardening books to an accessible shelf. So I can look at them. I never read them because I’m happy imagining I can if I really want to. I ask Charlie to acquire different gauge fencing and sink some posts, and then I describe with poetic passion a trellis of watermelons in little melon-hammocks. It all sounds like I know what I’m doing.
Before I realized raised beds were my panacea, I convinced Charlie that a drip water system was. Before that, those squirrel traps. Before that, mass-producing seedlings so I could just share the garden with the squirrels (they were not good at sharing).
He drew the line when I suggested having my own sheep would reduce my yarn expenses. Probably because I never actually knit anything, I just own a lot of yarn and imagine gifting beautiful sweaters at Christmas.
I do gift great sweaters, but I have to buy them.
Most of my hobbies are at least inspired by a commitment to craftsmanship and self-sustenance. My ability never seems to quite match my good intentions.
This week alone I’ve adopted two new ones (martial arts, pottery) and begun the exciting process of acquiring all the materials and imagining alley fights I’ll win and dishes I’ll make.
That is, after I’m done imagining my garden harvest.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com