IF you are a dedicated gardener, it's likely that your mother was one before you. Whether it's genetic or environmental or just because you couldn't think of a way of avoiding her summonses to the soil, gardening mothers breed gardening children.
Well, my mother was a gardener too; she took up growing things in her 50s, as the last of her brood was preparing to flee the nest. It was as if she had been waiting all her life for this call and she went at it like a person possessed fervently relentlessly. And organically - much to the bafflement of her red-blooded, all-American, Minnesota neighbours. In the rural mid-west of the mid-1970s, lethal chemicals were the accepted way of zapping cutworm and aphids, and powdered fertiliser was the preferred soil additive.
"Betty's `organatic' garden", as one neighbour called it - in a lovely unconscious meld of organic with lunatic - was viewed with interest, amusement and no little forbearance by those around her. My mother was a born pack-rat, and when she took up gardening, suddenly there was a worthy function for the flotsam and jetsam she had collected over the years - and a good reason for gathering more. My father's empty tobacco tins were fashioned into bird-scarers, a bundle of damaged ice-hockey sticks rescued from a dumpster was reincarnated as a batch of tomato supports, old bits of lumber were laid down as paths between the vegetable rows. It was a terrible sight.
But it was massively productive, this crazed-looking place at the end of our lot. She transformed the dry, sandy dirt into a rich and fertile soil by smothering it with tons of homemade compost and mulch. Every summer and autumn it offered up bushels of produce: workaday tomatoes, peppers, carrots, beets, leeks and spinach, and exotics like white aubergines, oriental greens and spaghetti squash. It was not unusual for her to have 70 kinds of food crops on the go, a fact that used to horrify my father, a city-boy at heart: "The garden is getting out of hand - too many things growing in it and more, it seems, to come," he wrote in a letter shortly after I had left Minnesota for Ireland.
My mother was preoccupied with foraging, especially for mulching material to protect the soil from drying out under the hellish Minnesota sun. We all kept an eye out for recently cut grass on the college campus that surrounded our house As soon as a "shorn field was sighted, we shot off in the car an inherited Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon (it could hold a lot of mulch) - and loaded up the cherry-red interior with hot, scratchy grass and bore it home to my mother's patch.
Later on, she got things better organised, pressing a young man who worked at the college into her service. "It's been quite a burden, collecting enough mulch for the garden," she wrote in a letter. "But this past week, Brian O'Connell who works on the grounds crew saved St John's clippings for me, and the Galiardi boy delivered them, so I am suddenly v. wealthy in mulch, and have been spreading it lavishly, but slowly, for one has to weed and water before putting it down."
Her letters on thin air-mail paper and bearing the grey print of a tired typewriter ribbon - kept those of her children who lived in Ireland abreast of the latest campaign news from the garden. It was a war-zone, at the mercy of a climate that produces temperatures that zing up from below freezing to blister-hot in a few hours, or June hailstones - "golf-ball size, but flat, not ball shape, about three-quarter inch thick . . . like those French paper weights". The summer heat provoked population explosions of hungry pests who multiplied exponentially, while outside the perimeter fence, crop-destroying animals patrolled, searching for the torn wire, the botched join or the gate left open for an unwary instant.
One year there was a plague of squirrels: "At times we can count a dozen at any one glance. They get inside my fence and eat the beet greens and possibly pea tendrils," she wrote. "We are also warring with pocket gophers ... they throw up huge mounds, sometimes more than a bushel of dirt. They attack gardens from underground And at night, in the adjoining cornfield "the raccoons are out there shuckingcorn, as the debris shows in the morning..."
Despite the wildlife and the weather, there was always the harvest, when "all the little seeds placed hopefully in the ground in April, May and June have become great vines or towering plants. The first crop of beans has been harvested . .. The tomatoes are coming on. The melons are ripening..."
Well, the melons aren't ripening any more for my mother in Minnesota, but I know they are in that great organic garden up there - where she went nine years ago.
And because tomorrow is Mother's Day, let us raise our trowels and salute garden-mothers the world over. And I raise mine to Betty Wahl Powers in her heavenly vegetable patch where high winds and hail are unknown and where rain falls softly, only at night-time. And where moles, voles, gophers, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, chipmunks, mice and cut-worm keep a respectful distance from her abundant crops and voluminous compost heap.