How It All Started

It all started with a simple visit to a friend’s parents’ house outside the city of Lisboa. We went there for lunch and while we waited on the food, we took a quiet stroll through their lovely garden and I was instantly transported to my own grandparents’ garden in Moldova,where I spent so many summers growing up. I remembered seeing some of the same plants, fruit trees and herbs that I was used to, along with some new ones that I promptly asked all about and proceeded to touch and crumble between my fingers to get a proper whiff.

You see this is, apparently, already a gardener’s trait that not everyone possesses in this day and age. Noticing unfamiliar vegetation and having the urge to touch and smell the leaves to see if it triggers any memories. This is definitely not something everyone does, as it has been pointed out to me throughout the years of hikes and walks in parks. “But it could be dangerous”, they say, and I fully embody one of my aunts when I reply “only if I eat it”.

As we reached the furthest end of the garden, a jungle of green speckled with tiny red fruit appeared, and our friend’s dad informed us that that was an overgrown cherry tomato patch. “I planted some here a couple of years ago, and now it comes back by itself!” he said. And so, from all the souvenirs from home I could have taken with me on my move to Sweden, I took an old ice cream box full of those cherry tomatoes.

It was the beginning of september then, and it didn’t take long for the short, cold days to come. I think it was around October when I figured I wanted to see some color back into my life, and decided to plant the tiny tomato seeds I had left to dry on a paper towel.

I watched them sprout, one by one, until they were more than 10 in a tiny, tiny pot. I remember feeling so much joy looking at them every morning by the windowsill, and seeing the tiny leaves grow and the stems stretch more and more towards the sun that was so very rarely there. Those plants were fighters though, and one of them made it all the way to summer and produced an astonishing 5 tiny tomatoes!

This was the very first gardening experiment, that kicked off all the other ones. It was thanks to it that I learned that tomato plants will, with 100% certainty, try to take over your house, and that tomato flowers need wind, or pollinators, to be pollinated. Sadly for mine, it was in a pot indoors. Luckily for me, I got to be a human sized pretend bee, and hand pollinated all the flowers with a small makeup brush, which was very entertaining to everyone involved. So much so, that I fully expected a bee suit as a surprise at any moment.

Our next apartments all had balconies, and that was all the incentive I needed to expand my newly found obsession and design as many gardening experiments as fit in those small spaces. I invested in soil and pots, grow lights and seed starting equipment, and fully embraced the gardener traits in me, checkered shirts and all.

Without even realizing, I started to yearn for the summers more and more, and the thought of planning the new garden kept me going though the long, dark winters.