Spanish Roots
It is probably better to start with what I don’t know. I don’t know much if anything about growing plants despite growing up in a garden sitting on a bigger plot of land than my childhood home. My father, an oppressive hard-on with a deep desire to grow a big garden every year. His ambition was always much grander than his ability to manage the weeds that never stopped growing. I likely won’t ever understand if it was his lack of leadership, or his incessant nature to make us children come home early on Saturdays from sleepovers to “weed the garden for a few hours” that made us hate it so. In my mind, we could start with the strawberries, then the potatoes, the lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, corn, squash, and raspberries within a few weeks, only to return to the strawberries being infested with grasses that just won’t die peacefully.
His incessant drive to keep weeding and broken promises of going fishing eventually led to us children referring to him as a “slave driver” and basically refusing to help him each Saturday willingly. I realize that my childhood term for my father is not very appropriate today, but I can’t change that now.
For me, there was more pleasure in helping the elderly neighbors mow their lawns and weed their gardens for a few dollars. A simple exchange of money for work was enough to get the job done. Ariel was one of my favorites. An elderly and morbidly obese man with a morbidly obese wife. Ariel was a diabetic and a Mormon to boot. He would often waddle out to the edge of his garden and with a soft and tender voice would let me know what he wanted to be done. I still knew nothing of the plants I was helping him to weed and grow, but mindlessly doing his bidding was just enough to get the job done. In many ways, he seemed to be proud of my work and gave me an honest exchange for my time.
At home, I grew to hate gardening through my father’s persistent prodding and nagging and grew to enjoy almost any work I could find a way from the house. I often mowed several lawns weekly during the summer from the age of eight or so and even took on a paper route where underage work was allowed for dependable kids with a bike. But I never liked gardening and swore I would never want or need to grow my own plants for food.
I am 36 now. Many years have passed since I moved far from my father but the roots of my youth are branching into my Spanish flat in the middle of Barcelona’s Vallcarca neighborhood. I have recently moved into this place with basically my only friends here. We were lucky enough to find a place that fits our needs, where we can try our hand at growing some edibles like lettuce and strawberries, sage, and lavender. In the coming weeks, we hope to add some cherry tomatoes, basil, and some beans growing on our chain link fence of the terrace. It is going to take some time for us to adjust and grow into our newfound familiar hobby, but I think we are all motivated in one way or another to share the experience and learn to grow plants.
For the last few weeks, I have pushed a bit to get the growing going by cleaning the pots to grow from. First, I cleaned the old dead and thriving weeds that filled them and took out all the dirt. I placed all the dirt on a plastic tarp we salvaged from the bed and then over a few weeks, I bought some ingredients and David helped me collect the pine cones needed to create proper drainage in the pots.
Today we will begin the planting, at least of what we found and bought today. It seems it will be a bit slower work in progress as we begin to start our growing exploration. I am excited for it to begin. Excited to start growing. And excited to begin the healing process I need and desire about growing my food for my own reasons without my father's nagging and incessant prodding. Let’s see where this goes.
