A Victory Garden for Trying Times Read online

  I, of course, made no mention of the surgeon’s worries. Friends were grateful for the post and relieved to hear that Peter had survived. It didn’t take much to reassure people, and I was sorry I hadn’t thought to do it earlier.

  The nine days after Peter’s surgery when he remained in hospital were lost days when all I did was function. Our American friends insisted I not drive back and forth to the house every day and said they were sending me money for a hotel room. I had driven home the night of Peter’s surgery to a driveway that needed to be shovelled in the dark and a cold, empty house. But my friend A said caretakers often die in highway accidents because of the stress they’re experiencing. She was a doctor; she’d seen the evidence. I accepted the offer and for a few nights walked to my hotel room after Peter tired out, stopping to find something to eat on the way there.

  During the first days Peter was in intensive care, food became something to stuff into my mouth. Pizza, grilled cheese, fries, potato chips, they all went in without my having any awareness of their taste. When I finally did come to my senses and realized — again — that I needed healthy food to keep me strong enough to cope and to care for Peter, I started to eat salads, soups, and simple egg dishes. The secret, I discovered, was to stay away from the hospital cafeteria. The place that was supposed to be healing Peter was making me sick. I discovered a coffee shop nearby that made good, wholesome food, and I camped out there whenever I could. It was on the ground floor of an old Hamilton house, decorated with mismatched chairs and tables, and was so much more relaxing than the cafeteria that I had to drag myself back to the hospital.

  Both Peter and I hated being in hospitals; he had been in way too many in his life; I had too many memories of my grandmothers and parents, who all died in hospital wards. One of the reasons I always take care of myself is to avoid doctors and hospitals as much as I can. Ironically, I’d fallen in love with a man whose health meant I spent more hours in hospitals than I ever imagined I would.

  One evening, when I did drive home from Hamilton, I stopped at a market store in my town and spotted Belgian endive. Each yellowish cone tinged with green was wrapped in brown paper, too precious to mingle with the other vegetables. That endive took me back to Dijon, France, where I’d spent one year as a university student. When I’d allowed myself the luxury of eating out, I’d always ordered the appetizer known as crudités — round piles of grated beetroot, carrots, and celeriac in mustard dressing arranged on a platter. In the best places there’d also be a serving of minced endive.

  I bought two endives, and as soon as I got home I chopped them and mixed up a mustard dressing. Then I put the endive salad on a clean white plate and savoured each tart mouthful at the table where Peter I shared so many meals and games of backgammon. Comfort food that brought true comfort.

  On postsurgery day six, Peter got his first mouthful, not of food but of a foul-tasting dye so that technicians could watch to see if the stitches inside him held. When he passed this swallow test, his reward was a salty chicken broth, a cranberry cocktail drink, and tepid tea. He never drank tea — he was a faithful coffee man — so he made do with the fruitish drink and the broth. And once he was ready for soft foods, the menu didn’t get any better. When the dietitian came into his room one day to check on him, she noticed he hadn’t finished his portion of Salisbury steak and boiled vegetables, and she expressed the concern he wasn’t eating enough. Peter pointed out he didn’t like beef and he didn’t find the industrial food particularly tasty. And that I’d been bringing him muffins from home and coffee from my favourite spot since he’d been able to eat.

  The dietitian didn’t disagree with Peter’s assessment of hospital food, but she was still afraid he wasn’t getting enough nutrition. She decided that when he was released from the hospital, he should keep the feeding tube that had been inserted in his belly during surgery to get nutrition into him. Even after he’d started eating the small hospital meals, the nurses had continued to use the tube to supplement his calories with a liquid product. Peter was not pleased at the idea that the tube would go home with him, but he agreed to learn how to keep it clean and fill it because he wanted to get out of the hospital.

  On the last Saturday in February, Peter got his wish to go home. During his final days in the hospital, he’d had a large room to himself with a wall-sized sunny window that overlooked the front of the hospital and the road beyond it. It was about the best room anyone could get in a hospital, but both of us couldn’t leave it fast enough. Some of Peter’s old impatience, which I recognized from his days of chronic pain, resurfaced as we waited for all the doctors and nurses who had to see him and sign off on his release before we could go.

  Back home, he took to his favourite chair in the great room and savoured his first coffee from our machine. I took a picture of him pointing at his mug in victory and sent it to Jane.

  For the first time in months, Peter and I both felt like life might get back on track. His esophagus was still sore from the surgery, but he could swallow again without feeling any obstruction. The tumour had left his body. He knew he’d have to find foods that were nutritious without being too filling and learn to eat smaller portions so he wouldn’t overload his reduced stomach, but he felt he was up to the task. As he reached for a book, content to be home, I settled at the counter and opened the file on my Victory Garden project, which had sat on my desk since the days before Peter’s surgery.

  I took out the two pieces of paper where I’d drawn scaled-down versions of the garden beds and began to plot the rows of vegetables. As I pencilled in the rows, I kept in mind two principles I’d read about: the amount of space required by different plants and the need for plant rotation. Changing the position of plants in beds each year helps prevent disease and maintains a balance of nutrients in the soil. Different vegetables use up different chemicals and micronutrients, so growing the same vegetable in the same spot year after year means all those chemicals and micronutrients will become depleted. To be safe, once a vegetable has grown in a spot, it shouldn’t be planted there again for four years.

  The tomatoes were hardest to relocate. I knew where I’d planted them the last summer and where the previous owners had grown them one year earlier, but I had no idea where they’d been the year before that. I drew two rows where I was certain there hadn’t been any tomatoes in the past two years and hoped the winter had killed any tomato virus in the surrounding soil. My beans, on the other hand, had added nitrogen to the soil where they’d grown, so I drew them in on the other side of the garden to do good there.

  By the end, I had a map for the largest vegetable bed with a row across the back where I’d put a net for peas and cucumbers. Nine rows ran out from the net toward the lawn. In the two rows for beans and dwarf curled Scotch kale, I’d plant radishes first, since they would be eaten before I needed to get the beans in and before the kale grew too big to overshadow them. And I split several rows in half to get more varieties for my harvest. One row would have pak choi for stir-frying along with several varieties of lettuce, which I would keep resowing through the season as I’d learned to do from my Victory Garden readings. Another row would be divided between Redstart peppers and Burpee’s golden beets. I envisioned different kinds of chard in another row; it would be a colourful line of red, orange, and yellow stems with deep-green leaves. Carrots and purple beets would claim the next two rows. The cabbages I planned to start from seed and then grow through their first stages in pots on the deck could go in bare spaces in those rows. I left another row for experimentation with rapini and later broccoli, where I could also fit in some late cabbages. In the two tomato rows, which needed more space around them than other rows, I’d also grow arugula and early types of lettuce before the tomato plants grew tall.

  The map of the second vegetable bed was easier. In the end with my garlic, I’d add onions and leeks. In the other end, I’d plant my zucchini and Waltham butternut squash in hills of soil.

  Smiling, I glanced at Peter, w
ho was deep in his book, and past him to the yard, which was green again after the blast of winter we’d had. And then I turned my attention back to my file and the business of filling in the forms for ordering my seeds. Each of the catalogues had shipping charges, so I decided to order all my seeds from three catalogues: Stokes, Heritage Harvest Seed, and Ontario Seed Company. Since part of the victory in a Victory Garden is keeping costs down, I chose most of the seeds from Stokes, which had the best shipping rates. I knew I was ordering more seeds than I needed, but reasoned I’d keep what I didn’t use in the dark and cool basement room as an act of faith that I would be gardening the following year. In past years, I wouldn’t have given that notion a second thought. There were a lot of acts of faith going around that winter.

  With the maps drawn, the seeds ordered, and Peter home, I felt a satisfying sense of accomplishment. Days in the summer garden seemed a little closer, and that was all I wanted to think about that morning. But there was still the fragile process of turning seeds into seedlings, and Peter’s lengthy recovery, ahead of us. The rows on the map seemed straight, the promise of the vegetables in the catalogue vivid, and Peter enjoying his Americano reassuring. As much as I wanted to live in the moment of those thoughts, I couldn’t completely shake off my doubts and my fears. Gardening, like life, can be full of uncertainty and shocks. Cancer recovery could go off the rails. And even the thought of a juicy tomato could not drown out the voice in my head that repeated the doctor’s words: “I don’t know if I got it all.”

  Chapter Eight

  SPRING, AS WITH SO MANY THINGS that year, came like a slap in the face. The mild winter and the kale that still grew in March had raised my expectations of getting my vegetables in early. But spring arrived cold and cruel. A hundred years ago, in the Niagara Region they’d have called it a backwards spring, the kind of spring that kills the tender tips of blossoms that dared to emerge in the first warmth. Certainly, my own dream of beautiful rows of vibrant plants by late May was nipped in the bud.

  Our expectations had also been raised by Peter’s surgery. During the months he’d forced himself to eat and had undergone toxic treatments, we’d held fast to the idea that if the surgical procedure cut out all the cancer, he’d be cured. But on that front, too, we had to face a fearful reality and a slow recovery. There was always the uncertainty over cancer cells that might still be lurking in Peter’s body. He had an incision running down his chest that refused to heal. And he experienced difficulties with the adjustments he had to make to the changes in his body. One of those adjustments was learning to sleep at a thirty-degree angle to keep stomach acids from flowing freely into his remaining esophagus, because surgery had destroyed the “door” that used to keep them out. But all the methods he tried in order to stay at the correct angle through the night caused him pain. And now that he could taste food again, he sometimes ate more than he should, making him uncomfortable for hours. Victory still felt a long way off, and we were worn out from the first round.

  I returned to the distraction of reading about my garden. I signed out all the books on vegetable growing and soil amelioration I could from my local library. I was drawn most to the ones that were heavily illustrated with photographs of plump tomatoes and tall climbing vines. Like I’ve said, I’m a sucker for luscious-looking vegetables. Whenever I’m in a hardware store and spin the rack filled with plant seeds, I want to buy them all and want my produce to look exactly like the pictures on the packets. It’s a bit like the old joke from the movie Educating Rita, when a heavy woman with thin hair points at a photograph of Princess Diana and tells Rita, a hairdresser, “I want to look like that.” Of course, transforming seeds into presentable vegetables is more doable than a miraculous makeover, but seed-packet photos and book covers never show rotted ends or leaves eaten by insects or yellowed with blight. In the early spring there’s still hope that vegetables will come out just as they should: picture perfect.

  I liked the books best when they reassured me that I knew what I was doing. For instance, when several books suggested pinching the suckers that grow in between the stems of tomato plants, I felt my head nodding in agreement. It’s something I’ve always done ever since my father showed me how to do it as a child. Each time I get rid of a sucker I feel I’m giving the rest of the tomato plant a boost of energy. As an adult, in Toronto, I’d shared that information with a fellow backyard gardener, a friend, who followed my advice until she visited a farmer or a nurseryman, who told her to leave the suckers alone as they would produce tomatoes, too. I remember her laughing at how my father had done it wrong for all those years. I continued to pluck my suckers anyway, and each time I twisted one off, I found myself figuring out new comebacks in my head: Yeah, well, maybe there’ll be tomatoes eventually on those suckers but not in our gardening zone or Yeah, well, my father had more big, fat tomatoes than we knew what to do with. Snappy repartee like that. I was continually surprised by how much my friend’s comments rankled. So when I read again and again on those cold spring days that pulling off the suckers was sound practice, I found myself shouting in my head, See, my dad was right. So there.

  I do realize how childish it all sounds. But two things I take seriously are my father’s reputation as a grower and tomatoes. When I was in high school, I had no choice but to go to the only secondary school for the town of Grimsby and the outlying district where my father was the principal. As an authority figure, he was an alien to me. At school I avoided him, and when a new, cool hippie guy moved to Grimsby and asked me in the hallway if I was related to the principal, I said, “Sort of.” I couldn’t wait to finish high school and get away from the gossips who knew everything I did. One time, before I could get home from a date in nearby Hamilton, a busybody had called my father and reported that the boy I was with had smoked marijuana. Once.

  In my teenage years, I even tried not to be seen with my father around town. I’ll never forget — or forgive myself for — the look of disappointment on his face when, in grade nine, I announced I had no interest in our annual fall trip to gather hickory nuts on the escarpment. But during the summers, when my father walked the farm and vegetable patch in his striped T-shirt, dirty pants, Wellingtons, and farmer’s tan, I had complete faith in his ability to grow anything. And eating his tomatoes picked after a hot day in the sun remains one of my favourite childhood memories.

  If life were simple, the answers on whether to pluck suckers and how to come back from cancer would be clear. However, life is not simple. And the internet doesn’t make it any easier. On the internet the way forward becomes muddier the more you read. What should a patient eat after esophageal surgery? Not completely sure. What kind of wedge should Peter sleep on to prop him up without pain? Not sure. Is it always right to pull the suckers off tomatoes? Apparently not.

  I scanned dozens of sites for an answer to the sucker question that I could live with. I found one YouTube video with a photograph of a man standing on a ladder between his twenty-odd-foot-high cherry tomato plants. I had no ambition to grow giant plants, but I still thought reading the man’s secrets might be informative. Many of his “secrets” (just he, people who buy his book, and the internet know them) were plain common sense, but when it came to his method of plucking the suckers off tomato vines, they were beyond anything I’d ever have the patience to attempt. He had some odd combination of taking off five suckers from the lower branches and six from the top, or maybe it was three from the top and twelve from the bottom. I didn’t bother to bookmark the video. It was never going to happen.

  Finally, by sifting through all the books and sites, I came to a method I could manage, and it had to do with the two kinds of tomato plants. There are determinate tomato plants, ones that grow to a specific size before they flower and set their fruit. They are the bush tomatoes like the variety of Romas I planned for one row and the patio tomatoes I’d grow in pots. It is best not to pull the suckers off these plants so they will have as much fruit as they are predetermined to have in the righ
t conditions. Then there are the indeterminate varieties like the Big Beef tomatoes I’d put in another row, which will grow and grow and grow for as long as they can. They would need pruning, or they’d put too much of their energy into their branches and become ungainly. These I would sucker.

  I don’t know if my father knew the difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes. But likely he did. He had studied agriculture at the University of Guelph before going into teaching. It’s possible he only let me loose on the indeterminate tomatoes, or that’s all he grew since sauce tomatoes weren’t part of our WASP diet. I’ll never know, so I decided to hold my tongue with my friend (maybe) and sucker with my newfound knowledge.

  The library books forced me to rethink some of my other plans. I had thought rotation and spacing were the only two principles I had to follow when I mapped out the arrangement of the plants in my larger bed. But the books soon convinced me I might have to adjust my map to include a third principle of grouping the plants according to their nutritional needs. And I would only understand exactly how to meet the needs of leafy plants versus root ones versus fruit-producing ones like tomatoes if I knew more about my soil. I thought of sending soil samples to the University of Guelph to be analyzed. I had no idea if my soil needed more nitrogen or more calcium, was too acidic or too alkaline. But with the coolness of March, the slow pace of Peter’s recovery, and my own fatigue after the trying times of his surgery, I never got around to it. Another year, another Victory Garden, I told myself. Like Peter’s postsurgery recovery, it was all getting too complicated. I gave myself a break, told myself that when I got around to planting the garden, I’d see if I could group some similar plants that I could feed together and still respect the principle of rotation, which seemed more important to me. In terms of the soil, I decided to go with the organic gardening books that said compost and other organic matter would build up the soil for all plants if done consistently. In the fall, I’d added a summer’s worth of compost and bags of sheep and cattle manure to a bed that was already filled with organic matter, and I planned to add more when I prepped the beds before planting.