It’s December and we just completed a final harvest of our pandemic vegetable garden. December! Considering our first planting was in March, that’s one helluva long time in NJ to be eating veggies grown in one’s backyard. We grew rainbow carrots, a medley of radishes, pole beans, bush beans, snow peas, sugar snap peas, kale, chard, mustard greens, collard greens, cabbage, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, arugula, lettuce, peppers, and many herbs. Oh and lest I forget, 47 tomato plants (ask my husband Eric about that).
We didn’t plan on having a vegetable garden this year. We travel too much. But we all know what happened to our packed travel schedule. When the stay at home orders hit, we had just returned from Florida where Eric’s band played four days at Epcot’s Garden Rocks festival. The music and film industries completely shut down overnight, rendering both of us jobless. NJ was one of the states hit hardest by Covid-19 in the beginning, and with the loss of my regular routine, I was spending the bulk of my days reading horrific, apocalyptic local news and then sitting in a catatonic state as I tried to process what was going on in the world.
The entire world had shut down – how does one make sense of that?
There has been so much loss for everyone in 2020—the loss of jobs, deaths of loved ones, canceled vacations and business trips, separation from family, shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, a loss of trust in the food supply, and in the case of two different families we are friends with, the loss of their homes in fires. I quickly realized that without a routine, there was also a loss of a sense of purpose. Jigsaw puzzles and making pandemic music videos (no matter how much fun we had doing it) don’t feed your soul for long.
Lucky for me, Eric thinks quickly on his feet and immediately ordered organic seeds and a truckload of mushroom mulch to be dumped in the driveway. We were going to plant a garden! It was hard labor at first, tilling our clay soil and mixing in the mushroom mulch that we hauled to the backyard in wheelbarrows. The lettuce grew quickly and before we knew it, we were able to eat salads straight from the garden. Early on we weren’t able to get fresh produce from the grocery store because they were out of stock of just about everything (not to mention that at that point we didn’t know if the virus could survive on produce), so cultivating our garden to grow food we knew was not contaminated by a deadly virus quickly became the focus of each day.
Every morning we would have coffee on the back deck overlooking the garden. Woods surround us, so instead of the hustle and bustle of a coffee shop, deer and birds were our morning companions. After coffee, I’d throw on my mud boots and begin the most fulfilling routine of each day: hunting garden slugs. I’d spend an hour or two in the yard removing slugs and cabbage moth caterpillars from our plants. It’s an endless task—one that was initially overwhelming and gross (I may have squealed once or twice)—that I eventually learned to love. The new daily routine gave me a sense of purpose, kept me from reading the news, and I found myself singularly focused on winning the game of hide and seek with garden pests. Then later in the day I’d spend another couple hours with my hands in the dirt weeding, planting seeds, transplanting the seedlings Eric started indoors under grow lights, and harvesting vegetables to either have for dinner or to share with friends by dropping off a bag of home grown produce on their porches. The gardening was often backbreaking work that left us exhausted at the end of each day. But it was also meditative work and I quickly recognized that by connecting with the earth and working with the rhythm of the garden, my anxiety was decreasing. Starting each morning with slug hunting was bringing a dose of shama, or inner peace, to each day.
Who knew? Slugs=Shama!
My favorite part of every day was when Eric and I would walk around the yard together, often holding hands, excited to see the daily 
growth. We were surrounded by so much death in the world, and the new life in our garden created a sense of security and hope for better days ahead.
Now that the first people are starting to get vaccinated, that feeling of hope is growing. But nonetheless, there are still dark days ahead. It will be a long time before life can even begin to look like the old normal. Until then, and until we can plant another garden in the spring where I can find shama through slugs, I’ve already established a new winter routine that makes me feel rooted and connected to the cycle of life: sprouting seeds and beans in glass jars on the counter. For the time being, our salads will come from a mason jar instead of from the soil of the earth.
After a few winter months, we’ll start seeing the first buds bursting on trees. Spring brings forth new life and a renewed sense of hope for the future. The Shama Sanctuary does will have their babies, and with any luck, Fortune the fox will be a female and we’ll get to watch her pups playing in the yard. As we move further into spring, more and more people will be vaccinated, and we’ll be that much closer to being able to hug our families again.
And before you know it, we’ll be slug hunting again. That’s a good thing, because slugs=shama. I’m going to remember that long after we put this pandemic in the past.
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Your Hoosier husband just went back to his roots with the farming. I have a Hoosier husband too from LaGrange, Eric will know where that is. I grew up on a farm in Michigan, so of the two of us I’m the better farmer. Picking slugs and tomato horn worms went into a coffee can to be dumped in the chicken run when you were done.
He does know where that is! I’m from Wisconsin, so like you two, the Midwest in us both means we have farmer DNA. 🙂 That said, I haven’t yet gotten over the squeal factor with the tomato horn worms – so those are Eric’s job to deal with,
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