Posts from — June 2007

Or how can being 1/4 from finished make you feel less than halfway done?

Or… forget it!

The point is that our beaten-up center circle garden needed to be reclaimed from the ravenges of renovation. At the start of spring, I was overwhelmed by the task of getting the whole bed cleaned up and re-dug before we could begin to plant our garden.  Instead, Jim wisely pointed out that the whole bed didn’t need to be fixed before some of it could be planted.  Aha, so simple a temporary solution!  So we planted several sections with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, beans, and snowpeas.

For reasons obvious to anyone who is part of a partnership, the completion of the bed too a little longer than expected.  It seems there was a difference of opinion of how best to go about the task.  The unfinished quarter section of the bed loomed larger than its size.

As Jim eloquently noted a few days back, we overcame of differences of opinion and strategy, and together finished resetting the edging and brick, turning the soil and planting our remaining sets.

The garden circle no longer looks half finished.  It feels complete.

It takes a couple weeks each spring to get my garden fingers back. Just as sailors need to get their sea legs in order to gain their sense of balance on water, I need my gardening fingers to give me confidence and lessen any lingering squeemishness.

Readjustment starts with the dirt. I don’t like getting my hands too dirty, so I wear gloves when planting seedlings or weeding, especially at the start of the season. Mine are well-worn and well-loved. My garden fingers adjust a bit more for pulling weeds; part of that is in my head too since I want to be very sure that I’m not pulling up something intentional or some worthy volunteer. Thinning seedlings too takes a certain hardening of heart that I equate with being in gardening mode.

The real test of garden fingers is bug squishing. Seeing as we are organic gardeners by heritage and persuasion, we don’t use pesticides, which means that we do have some little critters living in our area. (I prefer to see it as a sign of a healthy ecosystem rather than a problem.) Early in the season, I have a hard time with the squishing of the bugs however; I don’t mind them being squished, I just don’t want to be the one doing it. I point out the usual suspects to Jim, who easy mashes them with his bare fingers! He’s brave! I, on the other hand, wear my gloves for bug squishing. If my gloves are out of reach and something must be killed on the spot, I’ll catch the bug in my palm, carry it to a flat rock surface, drop it and step on it.  (A lengthy post or two about who gets squished and why will follow shortly.)

By fall, though, you may occasionally see me squish a bug between my fingers. Ugh. By then, thank God, gardening season is almost over.

In one of her first posts, 20MinuteJan mentioned her hope about how our backyard could be a little bit of the garden of Eden. Maybe so. Recently we experienced something more akin to the Expulsion from Eden.

A couple weeks ago, Jan attempted to finish the edging on the circular bed which would allow us to put the final plants in the ground. I thought I had several good reasons not to help, some of which were actually agriculturally sound–but beside the point. While she toiled, I stood on the back porch and offered my constructive criticism. Heck, I basically explained how she was going about the whole task incorrectly. I’m sure she worked longer than her 20 minutes because I had more than enough material for a good hour long lecture. It ended with Jan throwing down her tools in disgust and storming past me into the house. In retrospect, I’m fortunate that it didn’t end in her planting that spade squarely in my chest.

Jan and I are equally intelligent, equally opinionated and we’re a matched set when it comes to stubbornness as well — even if I think I know more about gardening. For days now, the edging has sat out back like a reticulated, black snake lolling on the straw. There was a pile of bricks knocked over and abandoned like the Tower of Babel. And most galling, in the garden wedge where our eggplant and kale should be, there were weeds a foot tall.

Today, we were given a miracle. Somehow, Jan and I worked together to get the edging on the circle bed finished. The hot bright sun made it seem much longer than 20 minutes but I think the edging only took 20 minutes while the bricks and preparing the soil maybe took another 20. The technical details aren’t as important as the miracle. The circle of our garden was broken and something even more miraculous than apology and forgiveness — in my case, mostly forgiveness — was needed to make the circle whole again. And that miracle happened. The bed feels fuller than before. The eggplant are there. The kale too. Planting them was nearly no effort whatsoever despite the sun.

I usually bristle when folks try to apply religious images too directly to everyday life; I never would have compared our backyard to Eden. But when I look out the back window at the garden’s perfection — temporary, partial — I can think of no other word to describe it except “miracle.”

I no sooner finished writing the post on the volunteer “sunflowers” then they reveal themselves to be something far less desirable. I should known better than to attempt to guess the species at the two-leaf stage, but I got a little carried away. My supposed-sunflowers grew freely for a couple more days before they turned out to be what Jim calls pokeweed.

So I spent my 20 minutes in the garden today pulling it up.

On my knees sorting foliage, I did have the good fortune to discover another one of my favorite volunteers mixed in with the pokeweed in the asparagus bed. I carefully worked around that, pulling the weeds and laying them down for a mulch layer. I found 10 or 12 datura plants.

We’ve never planted datura or moonflower in our yard, but we’ve had some growing for the last four or five years. They are a really pretty plant available at gardening centers. The large dark green, roughly heart-shaped leaves grow profusely in a bush-like shape and the flowers are lovely white trumpets that open in the evening. They have a pretty reliable chance of re-seeding themselves too. Once again, the spot where they have come up in the past has been greatly disturbed by the construction so I am happy and thoroughly surprised to find the moonflowers returning to our backyard.

One of my special garden delights are the volunteers, the plants you don’t plant but that you find growing there anyway. I’m not sure that volunteers are something that everyone loves, but I do nonetheless. Because we use a lot of homemade compost, perhaps we get more than the average amount of volunteer plants in our garden.

Cherry tomatoes have been one of our traditional volunteer plants. We haven’t planted a cherry tomato plant in probably 5 years, but we’ve enjoyed a small harvest of cherry tomatoes each summer. These come up later in the season and usually in the same back area of our garden, although given the construction of the last year, I’ll be really surprised if they return.

For me, one of the coolest volunteers was stinging nettles. They grew up on their own accord behind our old barn where they thrived in several small clumps for the last 10 years. Nettles can be used in homemade remedies that I’ve pondered making, although I haven’t made them yet. They also make an good stir-fried dish when they are young and tender in the spring; when they are cooked, they completely loose their sting. Jim is a happy tester for the weird things I come up with.

Volunteers provide mystery. Why do they decide to grow where they do? And, occasionally, what are they? Several years ago, when our garden reached the late-summer unruly stage, I moved some huge yellow squash leaf to discover something already quite big and round and green. My heart leapt and I decided on the spot that we were going to have a watermelon– a volunteer watermelon! I couldn’t wait! The plant got bigger and rounder as late summer came. Then the ribs sunk in more and the plant obtained its true form: a pumpkin, still green, but slowly becoming orange. I was admittedly disappointed when it wasn’t the watermelon I so desired, but we did get a jolly jack o’ lantern out of it at Halloween.

This year we have a massive patch of volunteer sunflowers emerging next to the new asparagus bed. I’m trying to decide if I can leave them there or how many; I don’t want the asparagus bed disturbed. Sunflowers have rather shallow but good-sized roots. I’ll need to decide in the next couple of weeks how much I want to thin out this sunflower volunteer army.