The Accidental Garden
Who says you need a deep-rooted love of gardening to reap prize-winning produce?
Some vegetable gardens are just meant to be, like this one!
Idon’t garden. All the other members of my family, all the way back to my grandparents, are avid gardeners. My yard looks nice. My husband John mows the grass and trims the hedge and shrubs regularly. I, very reluctantly and with much grumbling, weed the border and keep the rest of the perennials, bulbs and flowering shrubs more or less alive.
When I was growing up, my father planted a huge vegetable garden that my sisters and I spent a great deal of time weeding, hoeing and harvesting. I have not grown a vegetable garden since I got married more than 40 years ago.
I have a little triangular garden at the end of the driveway that contains some mini-irises and a few daffodils. There is a small stump-like water fountain that the birds bathe in and the crows use to soften any pieces of dried bread they have ac- quired from who knows where.
In the spring of 2015, I decided that the mini-irises were getting too crowded and should be dug up and replanted. John used this opportunity to replace the container under the fountain with a larger one. When John had finished with the fountain we repositioned the rocks around it and John filled any low spots with a few shovelfuls of dirt from the base of the compost pile.
This little project was completed in April and we were away for the first three weeks of May. When we returned, our little garden was full of weeds. As I was pulling them out, I noticed that quite a few of them looked different. Thanks to a childhood spent in Daddy’s vegetable garden, I immediately recognized a couple of tomato and a potato plants, what looked like some corn and a neat row of melons along the side of the retaining wall. Apparently, the seeds in our 25- year- old compost soil had germinated!
Neither of my sisters came to get the plants to put in their vegetable gardens, so I decided to leave them and see what would happen. I was pretty sure they would all die as we were leaving on a six-week holiday at the end of July.
Between late May and midJuly, however, the little garden exploded! The melon vines were encroaching on the driveway and we had to take a more circuitous route to the door. They also flowed down the short retaining wall and crept across the paving stones to the side of the house.
As it grew, we discovered that the “corn” was in fact a sorghum plant ( small- seeded grass), so we left it for the birds to feed on. The two potato plants had potatoes bursting through the ground due to their limited growth space, so we dug them up and enjoyed them with our next few meals. Before we left on our holiday there were dozens of plump tomatoes on the vines and many, many cantaloupes and honeydew melons hidden among the large leaves.
While we were away, our daughter came by occasionally and watered the little garden and helped herself to some of the bounty. John’s nephew and his family stayed in the house for a week and also enjoyed the fresh tomatoes and melons. We returned home on September 5 and I couldn’t believe how lush and productive the little garden had become; there were clusters of delicious ripening tomatoes on the vines and I counted more than 30 melons in various stages of maturity.
My youngest sister always submits entries to many categories at our local fall fair and as a bit of a joke, she entered John’s name for tomatoes and mine for melons. We chose four similarly sized tomatoes and two honeydew melons and dutifully took them down to the fairgrounds on the appointed day.
Much to my delighted surprise, I won first prize! Every time I think about my unintended garden, I chuckle and imagine the grin that would have been on my father’s face if he were alive to see his non-gardening daughter win a prize for the best honeydew melons at the fall fair. n