Digging "for the good turf" in the Garden State

In one northeastern New Jersey backyard, raised beds, rocky soil and a family’s shared stories have turned a simple garden center trip into something far deeper than a seasonal chore. For Seamus and Ruairi, each spadeful of earth is part adventure, part inheritance and part tribute to the roots that still shape their family.

It has become a ritual. It has elements of time-travel. And it’s one of my children’s — and probably my husband’s — favorite days each year.

Each spring since our boys were 5 and 4, my husband, Pete, has taken them on a pilgrimage to a local garden center. There, they together select herbs and vegetables to plant in their garden. They return home, and they prepare, dig, and plant.

Pete takes this seriously, as he’s teaching Seamus and Ruairi, now 9 and 8, to care for the garden from start to finish. He built raised beds in the corner of our back yard — one for each of the boys, and two extra (tended by Pete, since I have not a green cell in my body — let alone a green thumb).

Each year, as I watch them work through the window or from a distant corner of the yard, and the boys are digging with their daddy, the evergreen words of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” come to mind.

I see them digging in the rocky soil of our tiny piece of northeastern New Jersey, and the “clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground” brings me a mile north and a half mile west, to Garret Mountain in the foothills of the Watchung Mountains, where my grandfather worked in the quarry nearly 70 years ago. The “living roots awaken in my head.”

The truth is that digging is one of the boys’ favorite pastimes. They’ve enjoyed classes at the local community farm, and they’ve learned a lot from Pete about caring for a garden. But they also love to dig for “treasure” — archaeology and geology fascinate them, and they always hope to make historical discoveries in the ground. I see them digging in the dirt, and I see myself in the back yard at my parents’ house, at age 8, trying to see if I could make it through the crust of the Earth. And these boys dig — do they ever! — through our family history, and our Irish heritage, by asking voluminous questions and reading voraciously.

As the boys get older, they exercise more agency in the gardening process, just as they should. And at the same time, their interest in their heritage is becoming stronger by the day. At a time in our family’s life when many of our older relatives have been passing away, it is clear that the boys see tending their garden as a way to stay connected to their roots.

The weather has not been cooperative this spring, so today, the final day of May, which was finally sunny and warm, was the appointed day to get the garden going. I accompanied the gentleman to the garden center to select this year’s plants.

They searched through the available selections. “Potatoes!” Seamus exclaimed. He began lobbying strongly for this as an addition to his raised bed. Pete and I were unsure that they’d thrive in the very rocky soil, so we eventually convinced him to turn his attention elsewhere.

Cabbage caught his eye. “This is great! The Irish eat cabbage! And Great-Grandpop Logue grew cabbage!” And grew it he did! Pete and his mother have told many a tale of the rows upon rows of cabbage that Pete’s Donegal-born grandfather grew, year after year. No one knows why he wanted so much cabbage, but fittingly, the family does have an heirloom recipe for coleslaw. “We can grow the same thing Great-Grandpop grew!”

“Mommy, do the Irish eat zucchini? Eggplant? Lima beans?” Ruairi asked, trying to make his selection.

“For now, let’s just focus on getting things we know we’ll eat, and that you’re willing to try,” I replied. No use in growing all the turnips in the world if I’ll be the only one in the family who’ll eat them!

We’re home now, and they’re outside…digging. “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them” — so I’m sitting inside, writing about it.

***

I’ve just been summoned: “Mom, Mom, Mom! Come see our garden, before it gets old and dies!”

I’ll go out and see. I’ll watch Ruairi dig, his “coarse boot nestled on the lug.” I’ll take a look at the notebook Seamus is keeping to track the plants' locations as he lays plans for an irrigation trench system. I’ll hear them ask their daddy about the garden his grandfather kept. I’ll listen to the clinking of the granite that was chipped from the quarry where my grandfather worked, as the boys keep clearing the stones from their garden beds. Digging.

It will be a few weeks before the vegetables are ready for harvest. But the preparation for this garden began years ago, when Pete built the raised beds. Decades ago, when he learned from his father and grandfather. Generations ago, when both of our families farmed in Ireland.

Somewhere between reminiscence and imagination, between memory and hope, between the past and the future: That’s where you’ll find our little slice of Irish turf in the Garden State. We’ll cultivate it.

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