The first thing I ever cut into our yard, I cut with a bread knife. It was the second week of April, cold enough that my knees ached through the flattened cardboard I was kneeling on, and I was sawing a rectangle of sod out of the strip of grass beside the driveway because I did not own a spade and did not want to spend the afternoon driving to town to buy one. The knife was serrated, old, and had belonged to my mother. It went through grass roots better than you would expect and considerably worse than a real tool, which is more or less how that entire first year went.
It took me two and a half hours to clear a patch roughly the size of a dining table. I remember standing up at the end of it with grass stains on both knees, looking at this small ugly brown rectangle, and feeling something closer to embarrassment than triumph. It looked like a grave.
I started because of a tomato, which is a stupid reason
The honest origin is not noble. I had bought tomatoes in February, out of season, and they were pale and mealy and tasted like cold water. I ate one standing at the counter and thought, with the specific irritation of someone who has had a long week, that I could probably do better than this myself. That is the whole of it. There was no plan, no reading, no vision of a different kind of life. There was just a bad tomato and a strip of lawn we never used for anything except mowing.
I mention this because I have read a lot of accounts since that begin with a philosophy, and mine did not. The philosophy came later, and slowly, and it is still not finished forming. If you are waiting to have your reasons in order before you start, I would say from my own experience that the reasons tend to assemble themselves afterward, in the middle of the work, and they are usually more ordinary than the ones you would have written down in advance.
The bread knife phase lasted longer than it should have
For most of that first spring I worked with whatever was already in the garage. A kitchen colander I used to sift rocks out of soil until my husband noticed it had gone missing from the cupboard. I told myself this was frugality and resourcefulness. Some of it was. A good deal of it was that I did not yet trust myself enough to spend money on the thing, in case I quit in June and had to look at a shed full of evidence.
Buying a proper spade in late May felt like a bigger decision than it was. It was an admission that I intended to keep doing this. I still have that spade, and the handle is worn smooth in a spot that fits my right hand, and I would say now that I wasted about six weeks and a fair amount of my own back being stubborn about it. But I also understand the woman who was being stubborn. She was not sure this was hers yet.
What actually grew, and what did not
Out of that first bed, I got beans, and I got a lot of them. Beans are forgiving in a way that felt almost like a joke, given how much I fussed over everything else. I got radishes that went woody because I forgot about them for eleven days. I got two heads of lettuce and then a heat spell that turned the rest of the row bitter and bolting inside a week, which I did not know was a thing that could happen that fast.
The tomatoes, the whole reason for the enterprise, gave me four fruits. Four. Two of them split after a heavy rain. I had planted them too close together and in a spot that turned out to get afternoon shade from the garage after about half past three, which I had simply never noticed in all the years we had lived here. I had looked at that yard for six years without once tracking where the sun went across it.
The part that does not photograph
Nobody warns you properly about the smell of the compost bin in August, or about what it is like to find a vole tunnel running the length of a bed you spent your only free Saturday on. In late July I pulled a squash plant that had gone to powdery mildew and cried a little, standing there holding it, more from tiredness than grief.
There is a genuine physical cost to this that gets edited out of most of what you see. My hands cracked at the knuckles. I got a splinter under a fingernail from a rough stake and had to have my husband dig it out with a needle at the kitchen table while I complained. That year I lost, I would estimate, about two thirds of what I planted, in one way or another, to heat or pests or my own inattention. That number has improved since, but not as much as I expected it to.
What kept me in it
Two things, and neither is what I would have guessed. The first was the beans, because there were so many of them that I had to start giving them away, and giving food away turned out to feel entirely different from giving anything else away. The second was that the work occupied a part of my mind that had been chewing on itself for years. An hour of weeding is not restful, exactly, but it is quiet in a specific way, and I found I slept better in the weeks I was out there.
I want to be careful not to oversell that. There were also weeks when I resented every minute of it and would rather have been reading indoors. Both of those were true in the same summer.
Why this order worked for me
Looking back, I began with one small bed close to the house, and I think that was right for me, though not for the reason people usually give. It was not about learning fundamentals in a sensible sequence. It was that the bed was thirty feet from the kitchen door, so I walked past it eight times a day and could not ignore it. Anything I had put at the back of the property that year would have died of neglect by July, and I know that because two years later I put something at the back of the property and it very nearly did.
If I were doing it again, I would still start with more or less the same square of lawn, and I would still probably do it badly. The only change I would make is that I would watch where the sun fell for a full week before I cut a single line, and I would buy the spade in April.