Tools to grow tomatoes

My exit out of Iowa happened almost faster than I could have imagined. I made a trip out to California to visit a friend in mid-April, and at the time, my party line was that I was looking for jobs and might move out here, might not.

Two weeks later, I flew out for an interview. Two weeks after, I flew out to find an apartment. Two weeks additional, and I was walking through the door of my new place.

This weekend will mark my second in the area, and it still feels more like I’m on some kind of vacation, or work trip, or something—I am constantly having these moments where I catch myself thinking I’m just a visitor, just passing through, bound for the airport any day now.

A few people asked me what I was going to do with my plants. Dig them up? Take them with me? Well, besides the lavender plant, the truth is that I didn’t have anything but annuals planted, and the idea of digging up a bunch of lettuce to carry with me in the car simply wasn’t appealing. I love to eat lettuce, and therefore I refuse to develop a personal relationship with it.

But I am a woman who likes her stuff, and so I expected to want to take all my garden accoutrements with me.

As I found myself taking inventory of the various tools, pots, stakes and cages in my possession, I was surprised to discover I didn’t really have that much attachment to any of them, and to be honest, I didn’t have time to get them all cleaned in time to feel like they were worth packing.

There were some things I kept, of course—for two Christmases in a row, Susan has given me great gardening gifts: monogrammed gloves this past year, and a really cute little gardening toolkit the year before. Those made it into the packing rotation. But the big stuff? Because I knew so little about what my gardening situation would be when I landed in the East Bay, it just didn’t make a lot of sense to take them all with me.

I have long been a fan of Freecycle, and its mission to keep things out of landfills that might otherwise end up there, and so that’s where I turned. I emailed a woman asking for pots and gave her a heads up that I had a bunch available. Within a couple of days, all my pots made their way out of my driveway in the back of her car.

Then I saw someone post that they were looking for a garden shovel, so I wrote the woman to tell her I had one available, and, incidentally, was she looking for anything else? She wrote me back to tell me her 11-year-old wanted to learn to garden, and she wanted to help him, so anything would be helpful. I gathered up what I had left and leaned it all against the front porch.

The woman’s father came to pick everything up on one of the days I was home packing. “Really? All this?” he said. “This is great.”

We carried it to his car, where he told me he and his wife were visiting from Maryland. “My daughter’s a single Mom,” he said. “She’s got two boys, so she can use a lot of help. She’s going to put all this to good use. She wants to grow tomatoes.”

Truth is, I would have given the tools away to anyone who wanted them. But I’m glad they went to someone who really needed them—especially to someone who wanted to use them to pass on the gift of a fresh, homegrown tomato to her kids.