Gardening starts right after Christmas when the seed catalogs and gardening center ads arrive. After long weeks of disagreeable weather, we are eager for outdoor activities. The promise of fresh baby peas, crisp radishes and crinkly early spinach sends us out to the garden plot to turn the sod and dream of tomato seedlings and onion sets. We check for signs of emergent spikes of rhubarb and asparagus and smile back at the first brave crocus blossoms. All this leads, of course, to the order blanks at the back of the seed catalog (it’s fortunate they have thoughtfully provided several order blanks, because at this early date we are sure to change our minds about what to order.)

Remembering past garden successes and disasters is a necessary step in raising a successful garden. Few of us bother to keep a garden diary and only recognize the wisdom of such an effort when we encounter problems that remind us we failed to solve the same mysteries in the past and are no more enlightened this time. For now, we’re allowed to operate in the realm of the ideal, so fill that order blank all the way to the last line. Do not send it! You’ll have a shorter, more realistic version later.

I think my interest in gardening began the summer my dad planted peanuts. That’s right – peanuts in Iowa. In the late 1930’s, just about everybody had a garden and a few fruit trees, grape vines or a berry patch. If your yard was big enough, you probably had a few chickens, a goat or even a cow, for milk. Most adults had grown up on farms and inherited the urge to grow their own food. We lived in a house with a large lot. The house and lawn faced the public street and took up about half the lot. The private back yard sloped downhill, turning gradually into a small orchard and garden with grape vines climbing a fence separating our property from the next-door neighbor.

I was about four years old and a dedicated daddy’s girl, usually found eagerly “helping” with whatever he was doing. He showed me how deep to poke the little onion sets into the soil and how to mix the littlest seeds with sand so they would have room to grow into lettuce, carrots and radishes. I learned to let the late spinach go to seed to insure those crinkly, early leaves next spring. We built a miniature greenhouse from unused storm windows and started tomato, cabbage and bell pepper plants for adding to the garden in May when the threat of frost was past. We buried potato “eyes” in trenches filled with a mixture of soil and last fall’s dead leaves so it would be easy to pull out some early “baby” potatoes to go with the plump, sweet peas in Mother’s buttery cream sauce.

Always eager to show us girls the wonders of nature, he ordered raw peanuts from the seed catalog and we prepared a trench next to the grapevines, filled it with a sand and soil mix and planted the peanuts. I had expected to see peanuts following the blossoms as on the pea and green bean plants, and was amazed when we later found them underground, clinging in clusters among the roots. Over the years, Dad introduced me to such oddities as tomatillos and golden ground-cherries, both of which grow their fruit neatly wrapped in papery husks. We harvested gherkins like prickly cucumbers and gourds, inedible but decorative, that we dried until the seeds rattled inside. Some were multi-colored and small enough to make interesting additions to autumn bouquets. Others, large enough to be turned into hanging birdhouses. We left the seeds inside as welcoming gifts to the first renters.

I learned about the insects that hang around a vegetable garden. The fat black and yellow spiders didn’t bite and I often played with them, letting them crawl along my hands and arms before gently releasing them back among the tomato plants where they waited for their lunch to creep by. I learned that lady-bugs were good for the garden, eliminating aphids, and that those squishy green tomato worms could be coaxed onto a stick and dropped into a soup can of kerosene without having to actually touch them. And I learned to “graze” in the garden and relish the earthy taste of tiny carrots and radishes that had to be sacrificed from crowded rows.