Tannia Schrieber - What Grew Instead

 

So, a few years ago, I got really, really into gardening. My husband had been injured and he was at home, but I was taking care of him. I was bored out of my mind, I was looking for a way to distract myself, because everything the specialists and surgeons were presenting as our future was just terrifying. And I needed to find something to distract myself, besides the radio, which kept talking about this virus in China, and then they were talking about the virus in the cruise ships, and then Italy and Iran. I decided to build these raised beds on my front yard. It had to be in my front yard, because my backyard is an alleyway and so there wasn't a lot of other space. And so, I was just going to make something beautiful. I was going to get some physical exercise.

 

It was February, but, you know, I could dig as soon as it started to get a little damp and I could start digging in it. So, along the way, between I guess the seed catalogs and looking at COVID and Zoloft, Facebook kind of created this algorithm [audience laughter] and decided to feed me to the Liberal Preppers Facebook group, which did wonders for my anxiety. [audience laughter] The raised beds were only-- I mean, they were the width of my yard, which is about 30 feet. No, it's like a third of the size of this stage is my entire property. So, I had not nearly enough land and had not been prepping. So, these Liberal Preppers had nothing. All they could suggest was, get seeds and learn something.

 

At this point, the only thing I'd ever grown was some tomatoes and some pepper plants. But with nothing but time, I started to do research on how I can maximize this land and go vertical. So, by the time the world shut down, I had cabbage, [chuckles] I had Brussels sprouts. Every time the weather got cold, I have been throwing plastic tarps down to keep these things alive. My neighbors thought I was out of my mind. They were all just living their normal lives. They had no idea why I'd been trapped in the house for the last few months.

 

But by the end of March, I was the entertainment of the neighborhood, [audience laughter] because nobody had anything else to do but walk their kids by my house. [audience laughter] We were hanging out and had nothing to do, but explain to them what little we knew from reading a few books. And so, we got to teach little kids who-- Their parents swore would never eat vegetables. And we'd be like, "I promise you, if I let your kid pick something, they'll put it in their mouth." Broccoli, cauliflower, the works. We felt very, very proud of ourselves. 

 

My mom, I would pick her up every day and bring her over and we'd sit on one side of the six-foot, thank you God, raised bed, [chuckles] and the people were on the other side and we would just hang. I got to listen to people talk about their grandparents' farms, and visiting them and growing up. People asked me how they could start their own stupid-looking garden. As the summer hit, I realized that I'd learned a lot about irrigation, and making compost and amending the soil, but I hadn't read enough about pests. And so, the squash vine borers came through and killed a lot of that stuff. And then, the cabbage moths came and got the rest. 

 

But the beautiful thing was that, during this time, where nothing in my life was going the way I had thought. I mean, if you looked at me a year ago, I didn't expect to have my husband disabled, I didn't expect to be living through a global pandemic with my kids learning how to garden. But all of a sudden, I had this beautiful garden where I'd met so many neighbors. And the wild thing was that even as things died, and [chuckles] almost everything I planted died, [audience laughter] something else grew in its place. My neighbors knew me as the chick with the corn, right, [audience laughter] at the corner. And so, my kids are getting all excited about researching new things to grow, and I'm getting to meet all these people. 

 

We're pulling about 10 pounds of food every day out of this thing. But it was almost all tomatoes. [audience laughter] My friends got tomatoes, my family, the food banks, friends of family, family friends, everybody was getting tomatoes. And in all that time that I spent digging, all I kept thinking is, you might not get to choose what the world gives you, but if it gives you plenty and it gives you connections and it gives you joy, then just be grateful for it. Thank you.