The Process vs. Product Garden (Blog 3)

My mother and my sister garden for the process. They like to do it. My sister agonized over what to put in her garden to attract butterflies and hummingbirds.  She read books and looked stuff up on line…. And she DESIGNED her garden – like actually planned where to put stuff, and thought about what would bloom when and how long it would bloom.  She planted things that require attention and tender loving care and then she provided it.  I plant things that say HARDY on the tag.

She grows things you can eat and then she makes things out of the things you can eat and puts them in jars and gives them away all winter, like she was Ma Ingalls.   One year it was a salsa garden, the next a marinara garden.

She grows trees that bear fruit and then she makes jam.   Okay, I make jam. I buy the fruit at the roadside stand and mix it with sugar and pectin and throw it in jars in the freezer, if we just don’t eat all the berries first.  My sister actually makes it the old fashioned way, with a canning bath-thing-a-ma-jig pot and mason jars.

This year, she PEELED the peaches that grew on her tree and made jam and she enjoyed it.  Now you may be thinking that this was about having peach preserves to eat all winter. Nope. She is mailing it all to me, because peach is my favorite kind of jam.

She’s totally about the process (and making her little sister blissfully happy doesn’t hurt, either!).  She doesn’t get mad when the birds eat her strawberries, because that means she can go out in her garden and fidget with the stuff growing there…. I don’t know why the birds eating her strawberries means she can go fidget, but that’s what she does.  The birds continue to eat her strawberries, she continues to fidget- and everyone is happy. I, however, don’t get it.

My mother has in the past grown things to eat, but now that there aren’t a herd of kids in the house to eat the things she grows, she has moved on to flowers.  She still grows her own tomatoes.   She likes bulbs.  I think she likes them because in Colorado they seem to require a certain amount of fussing.

One year, while on vacation here, she bought an entire garden of tulips – one variety per grandchild, and one variety per child (My parents have 11 grandchildren, and 4 kids…. that’s 15 different kinds of tulips.) She planned which ones come up early and which ones come up late and mixed them in the bed so that the whole bed would have blooms all the time, all season long.  She measured the holes so that they are the right depth for the variety of tulip going into the hole.

She likes to dig- she loves the feel of the dirt in her hands, and often doesn’t wear gloves. Oh yuck! I wear two pairs of gloves (latex under the garden gloves), and if I have to dig a hole and the going is tough I make a ring of rocks and fill it with dirt I bought at the hardware store and plant the stupid thing in that.)

She mulches with just the right kind of mulch for tulips, and when tulip season is over she moves on to lilies.  Which seem to me to even more complicated because sometimes you have to dig them up and divide them…. What is that all about?  Actually, I know what it’s about, it’s about the process.  She loves the process, and so does my sister, and I love the results.

Recently, my sister was here visiting and she paid me a very high compliment.  She said my garden was lovely, and that sitting in my back yard was like food for her weary soul.

This is just what I wanted – a beautiful, sanctuary behind my house, a place of peace where conversation and iced tea could be enjoyed on a sunny day.  My mom and my sister have these lovely outside places, too.  But these two wonderful women in my life approach gardening from a completely different angle.

All three of us are successful gardeners, but we have completely different reasons and motivations behind our need to plant things.   My mom and my sister crave the process that their professional lives don’t give them; I crave the product that my professional life doesn’t give me. In the end, we can share an iced tea in each other’s back yards in the abundance of nature that we’ve cultivated. AHHHH- SUCCESS!!!!

-posted by Miss Allison, who got to have both process and product in writing this blog!