a season for all things

And right now it’s tomato season. Reflections from the garden:

It’s better to plant tomato seedlings sideways, roots too deep make for slower growth and leggy plants—at least this is what my farmer friend Mr. Mckean told me, that their heads will quickly find the sun and turn upwards anyway. 

We began planting them one late May evening. A rainstorm from the following night had left the earth muddy and dark. My knees indented the malleable ground as I reached across rows with my spade to place the tomato plants.

As we laid seedlings down the long stretch, the strong fragrance of tomato leaves never left my nostrils. Tomato leaves smell the way I wish tomatoes tasted—sweet and fresh with a slight tang or spice, also earthy, and bright, but rich and deep—it's hard to explain, okay. We plant three tomato plants in every other row to prevent overcrowding, tomato plants grow big and tall and bear fruit throughout the summertime, which is great for their farmers market booth, but cumbersome to Mrs. McKean who spends countless hours in the summer sun harvesting fruit from hundreds of plants.

Also on the McKean’s farm is asparagus, which comically grows out of the ground exactly as you see it in the grocery store. While it’s strange seeing stems of asparagus sticking straight out of the soil, even more impressively, once matured stems are snapped and harvested, a new leafy top regrows soon after. Raspberry bushes and rhubarb stalks also fill great space on the four-acre lot. Raspberries, rhubarb, and asparagus were actually the origin of their small family farm. After the recession hit in 2008, their family was looking for another means to support themselves and decided to take a chance and start growing.

“I thought, at the least, we’ll have raspberries, asparagus, and rhubarb to eat.” Mr. Mckean recalled.

It’s worth muddy knees, cracked palms, and hours spent swatting mosquitoes away to at the very least enjoy snacking on raspberries as you pick on a summer evening, as Mrs. Mckean loves to do, or watching asparagus stems regrow in a day, or taking in the fragrant smell of tomato leaves as you place each one in the ground gently on its side. It’s easy to enjoy berries, and the scent of tomato leaves, and harvest the hard work of your hands.

As my knees sank deeper into the mud, I thought about how easy it must be to be a tomato seedling, how naturally it must come for them to grow roots, and take up water, and lay on their sides, and find the sun.

It’s what they were created to do.