This week Anna and I spent a lot of time getting our garden ready.
This year we’re growing three, four? kinds of peppers, eggplants, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatillos, kale, lots of herbs, and even though I say every year that I’ll never grow tomatoes again — we’re growing tomatoes again.
I also planted a big patch of radishes for the first time ever.
A friend told me to plant radishes. I don’t eat a lot of radishes, but my friend said that radishes are an absolute non-negotiable because they almost never fail, they produce really quickly, and they’re the very first things to pop up. In short, they give you early-season hope in they way only a reliable, fast-producing early crop can.
Hope is honestly what keep the garden going. Weeds, drought, pests be damned! Everything will be ok.
During Covid, when everyone else was starting a pandemic garden, I didn’t have one. It was the first time in my adult life that I didn’t at least go to Home Depot and buy a potted basil. There was just too much. Four kids (AND TOM) at home all the time, dealing with virtual school and no breaks and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that doom-scrolling didn’t take up a heck of a lot of my free time. Something had to give. For me, it was a vegetable garden — something that gives me a lot of joy.
But it’s 2022 now. The kids are back in school, we have a new president, we have vaccines, and we have radishes.
We’re going to eat radishes on fresh-baked bread with avocado, we’ll pickle them and put them in salads.
Then we’ll put those tomatoes and peppers into the ground. We’ll plant eggplant and zucchini because in May, when spring is still warming up, those long hot humid summer days seem like a myth. It’s impossible that in a month it’ll be too hot to be outside digging in the dirt.
We’ll eat radishes and think about how spring 2022 feels so wildly different than spring 2020, and how good it feels to have hope again, and how the hope never left. It was always there.
It’s good advice, plant radishes.
