OBSERVATIONS FROM A FRONT PORCH IN BEREA

Back in the '90s there was a fella on PBS named Mel Bartholomew.

Square Foot Gardening. That was the show.

I'd sit there and watch this man pull a wheelbarrow of food out of a patch of dirt no bigger than a card table. Tomatoes, beans, lettuce, the whole grocery store. Out of one square foot.

I was hooked. Couldn't grow a thing myself, mind you. But I could watch Mel do it all day.

Because back then, gardening wasn't something I did. It was something I got assigned to.

Dad ran the garden. I ran the rocks.

He never once handed me a plant. Not a seed, not a seedling, nothing with a root on it. That man wouldn't trust me with a dandelion. My job was to dig where he pointed and throw the rocks over the fence, and if I was real lucky, run the tiller in a straight line.

I was the labor. Dad was NASA.

Tried it on my own once, years later. Put a few things in the ground like a grown man ought to. It did not go well. I won't get into the particulars, but the weeds ate better than I did.

So I quit.

Then I retired. And a man with time on his hands starts remembering old Mel and that card table full of tomatoes.

I got to reading. Found this thing called container gardening, which near as I can tell is just square foot gardening for folks whose knees have filed for retirement too.

That was the magic word. Container.

Because I can't work the ground anymore. Can't bend down and stay down. My back files a complaint after about ninety seconds, and my knees second the motion.

But a pot? A pot I can reach.

So that's the whole operation now. If it grows, it goes in a pot with dirt in it. Doesn't matter what it is. I read about it in the seed catalog or somewhere online, I get the itch, and next thing you know there's another bucket on the porch.

The tomatoes are the funny ones.

Nobody told me to top them. So I didn't. Now they're taller than I am, waving around up over my head like they're trying to flag down a plane. Big beautiful jungle of a plant.

Tomatoes on it are about the size of a marble.

All show, no supper.

The banana pepper, though. Lord, the banana pepper.

I don't know what got into that one. It's put out more peppers this year than I could eat in three lifetimes. I've given them away. I've pickled them. I've thought about renting a booth. That one plant is trying to feed the whole county by itself, and all I wanted was enough for a sandwich.

Got basil. Got rosemary. Both doing fine, both smelling like something worth cooking.

Put in a bush bean about a month back, late in the game, so I'm not asking for much. A handful would do me.

And just here lately I set out some little melons. Tiny ones, their name escapes me. We'll see if they know what they're doing, because I sure don't.

None of it's in the ground. All of it's in pots I can get to standing up.

Mel would probably shake his head at me. All that talk about the perfect square foot, and here I sit with a porch full of five-gallon buckets and a pepper plant that won't quit.

But I grew something.

All these years after throwing Dad's rocks over the hill, I finally grew something.

And nobody had to hand it to me.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

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