On a prairie garden, and where the sweetest things actually grow.
August 18, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung
So … a long time ago now, I grew the most delicious vegetables my family had ever tasted. People would eat them, stop mid-bite, and ask me what my secret was.
I never told them. I’d just smile and say, “It’s a secret.”
It was. And I’m going to tell you, because you’re not eating them.
This was back in the late nineties. Sue and I were serving on a First Nations reserve out on the prairie. Years that changed me more than any others, though that’s a different story. We lived in a small sixty-year-old three-bedroom bungalow with a big yard around it. I used to call it our Little House on the Prairie.
I’ll be honest about prairie life: it is slow. Gloriously, achingly slow. On a clear night, counting stars genuinely qualified as an evening’s entertainment. There simply wasn’t much to do. So one spring of 1999, I decided we would grow a vegetable garden.
I had never farmed anything in my life. I’m a minister. My hands were built for books and coffee cups. But I got a shovel and a hoe and went out there full of ambition at nine in the morning.
By six that evening I was a broken man.
The ground was hard as pavement and matted through with grass. I dug and turned and hacked at it for nine hours. By the end I was shaking. Actually trembling, standing there in my own future garden like a leaf in wind. I’d turned over a patch maybe ten metres by twenty. I had also aged, I believe, several years. I never knew … truly never knew … that farming was that hard. People do this for a living.
I asked Sue to help. I felt I had earned it.
She said she would sow the seeds.
I said, “The seeds? That’s the easy part. You have no idea how hard the digging is. This is not fair.”
And Sue looked at me and said “I have never forgotten it … You need to be useful once in a while.”
Forty years of marriage, right there in one sentence. I went back to digging.
The next day she sowed the seeds. Green onion, carrots, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and several leafy green things whose names I still don’t know. And then all summer we watched them come up.
There is something quietly holy about watching food rise out of ground you broke your back on. You put a dry little seed in the dirt and weeks later there’s a tomato where there was nothing at all. I don’t care how many books a person has read for the first time you grow your own food. Something in you goes still with wonder. Farming turned out to be exhausting and boring and slow, and also one of the most spiritual things I’ve ever done.
We shared the harvest with family, and they could not get over it. The freshest, sweetest, most flavourful vegetables they’d ever eaten. Nothing from a supermarket came close. None of that big, watery, greenhouse produce that looks perfect and tastes like nothing. Ours tasted alive. And they kept asking: Richard, what’s your secret?
And I’d smile. “It’s a secret.”
Here’s the secret.
We never used chemical fertilizer. We used a free, entirely natural, thoroughly recycled fertilizer that the property supplied all by itself.
Our septic tank sat outside, right beside the garden. And every so often, in the warm months, it would… overflow. And the overflow would make its way, gently and generously, straight through the vegetable beds.
That was it. That’s what made the tomatoes sing. We didn’t compost, we didn’t buy a thing. Our only real gardening chore in high summer was to flush a little more often than we did in winter.
I’m sorry. You did ask.
Now, I could pretend there’s no lesson in this, but there is, and all these years later it’s the part I actually keep.
The sweetest things in my life have almost never grown out of the clean, presentable parts. They’ve come up out of the stuff nobody wants to talk about.
The exhaustion of that nine-hour dig. The slow, empty, star-counting quiet of a place where nothing much happened. And yes even the waste, the thing we’d rather flush away and never mention. Somehow that was the ground, the good things rose out of. The richest fruit grew from precisely what I’d have been too proud or too squeamish to name at a dinner table.
I think a life works much the same. We want our nourishment to come from the impressive, tidy, presentable parts. But the flavour … the real, deep, living flavour … tends to come from the hard seasons, the humble places, the messy hidden things we’re a little ashamed of. Break the hard ground. Don’t be too proud to use what everyone else throws away.
And, as I was once told by a woman who knew what she was talking about: be useful once in a while.
The tomatoes were extraordinary. I still don’t tell most people why.
But between us it was never the fancy fertilizer that made anything grow.
Richard
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Prior Newsletters from Slow Wisdom :
Me and My Rabbits … August 11th
The City That Forgot Me … August 4th
The Day Jesus Was Rude … July 28th
My Fifty Dollar Titanic … July 21st
I Shouted At The Prime Minister … July 15th
I Told My Church I Ate Grasshoppers … July 7th
Thankful For The Hospital Food … July 1st
My Goal Was To Finish and Not Die … June 24th
The Wedding Afro … June 17th