Best Laid Plans

If there is one thing I need to let go of, it is the obsession with meticulous planning.

That obsession has accompanied me throughout my life. Like any obsession worth its salt, it has grown steadily stronger. But I finally reached the Moment of Truth this spring.

It all started oh so very innocently. In January (January 22, to be exact; I checked my records), I began dreaming of the coming summer’s vegetable garden. Flourishing snow peas. Two kinds of arugula. Sassy loose heads of lettuce. French breakfast radishes. Baby Nantes carrots, Russian pickling cukes, long skinny Japanese eggplant, maybe even okra, all in the 25′ X 25′ section newly fenced in last year. (Take that, Thumper!)

As I nursed those fantasies, I ordered myself a ring-bound copy of The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook. For an obsessive planner-gardener, what could be better for getting a good start in mid-April—six weeks before the assured last-frost date in late May—without having to make your own week-by-week lists? By following the book (written by two super-gardeners hailing from my own valley), I could pursue weekly plans. I’d ready myself step by step to sashay out in late May with assorted seedlings to break ground.

The book arrived. I gleefully tore open the package and dove in.

Gang aft a-gley*

From Dawn Hudson, watercolor image of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” License CC0 Public Domain

I’ve never done an actual, in-the-swimming-pool deep dive. I’d heard about the people who misjudged the depth and ended up hitting the bottom of the pool hard.

Now I know how that feels. The planning, the book informed me, was to start twenty weeks before the last frost. Not the April 15 I’d so blithely assumed, but January 1. It was still January and I was already twenty-eight days behind.

My first impulse was to play catch-up. You know, pull all the January tasks in with February’s. Compress the accordion. Do-able, I thought. Lots of January tasks related to inventorying old seeds and readying seed-starting supplies. I already had those, since I’d planned several years ago to get an early start and bought the grow lights, heating mats for seed germination, seed-starting mix, tiny cells and flats for seed-starting, and even a timer for the grow lights—but never got around to using them, because… well, I never got around to it.

Did I get around to it this time? What do you think? I reminded myself the garden store next door always has lots of lovely veggie plant starts ready and raring to go just after last frost date. Finessed!

But…

Then came the February tasks. Clean and sharpen gardening tools (heaven knows they needed it, but… hard to get at in the garage with the car sheltering inside against the wintry blasts. Plus, I couldn’t remember where I’d put the sharpening files). Build a cold frame (couldn’t get at the old windows in the garage rafters with the car in there, and it was too cold outside to do a building project anyway). Start more seeds (nuh-uh, see above). I did, however, read lots of seed catalogs and ruminated about how to get two crops out of every square foot of garden bed.

You don’t have to dig it!

And so we went, through March and into April. Inspired by a sidebar in the book, I pursued reading on no-till gardening, a technique for gardening in concert with nature by doing next to nothing. This approach appealed more strongly to me with every passing week. It added the gloss of virtue to the inconstancy of this inconstant gardener.

Not that I lounged in complete idleness. I ordered asparagus roots, and with my sister’s help, put them in in early April, but not a one of them had come up five weeks later (had I waited too long before getting them into the ground?), so I had to order more.

Some Method in My Madness

The asparagus is part of my plan to devote substantial strips of the garden to permanent crops. Once they’re in, all I have to do is harvest and trim back as needed. Asparagus will line the eastern edge of the garden; red and black raspberry bushes will take up the northern front. Between the asparagus and the berries, I can practice no-till with complete abandon in those beds. Granted, they still need to get planted, but that’s after I pick up the order.

Ready for the second asparagus order

[PS: I also postponed posting this post. So, I’ve already picked up that order. Meanwhile, the recalcitrant asparagus did come up, anemically, so now there’s not enough room for all the new asparagus roots. If you want some free asparagus roots and you’re in the Pioneer Valley, tell me immediately!]

I’d intended to move the low bush blueberries and strawberries to occupy the north side. But the birds always get to the berries before I do and it meant a lot of digging and the rabbits went and ate most of the strawberry plants, and now we’re well into May and what the heck, I need room for herbs and flowers too. I just planted coneflowers and hollyhocks (perennials, yay! More no-till), and come June 1 the seeds for borage (another perennial) can go in, and I’ll transplant the French tarragon and lemon verbena there, and maybe some lavender.

Epiphany

Sweet potato babies, ready for their new home… someday

I don’t know what the week-by-week book has to say about all this, except that (tsk tsk) the asparagus should have gone in much earlier. You see, at some point in early May, as I pondered anxiously how far behind I’d gotten and wondered whether it was already too late to start seedlings indoors (but where? The sweet potato slips took the only sunny windowsill), I suddenly realized that no matter what I got done or didn’t, it would be okay. Really, okay.

Last year the peas that I planted in a rush in late April (it’s supposed to be April 1, too bad) churned out snow pods and sugar snaps so bountifully that I made weekly deliveries to a neighbor down the street and started turning green from consuming so many myself. The four zucchini plants went in late and got mostly eaten by the groundhog shortly after they started producing, but they still churned out enough to satisfy. One squash grew so big it could have scared the groundhog off. The tiny lettuce starts that went in in late July burgeoned so bigly that neighbors passing by were likely to have a head of lettuce, or two, pressed upon them. Those babies were still producing in October.

Embarrassments (of Riches)

How many vegetables is too many?
Photo by Sheila Sund on Flickr; CC by 2.0 license

So I figure no matter what I get planted, or don’t, at some point I will face excess. The perfect vegetable garden that I’d envisioned would probably have supplied a large soup kitchen. It would definitely have overwhelmed the capacity of my freezer and tried the patience (and appetites) of my friends.

Now I have a penciled plot sketch suggesting what could go where. In the past two-three weeks, I’ve contravened the particulars of that plan several times, with about half of what’s gone in. Planning may be fun to do, but executing increasingly seems de trop.

Oh, I still recognize some constraints. Peas gotta get into the ground before May, or around August 1 for a late crop. The sweet potato plants can’t risk the outdoors until the end of May, and if our first fall frost comes early, sayonara to harvesting any potatoes from those. Outside of limitations like those, though, I incline more and more to the Whatever school of gardening.

And all those seeds I don’t get around to using? Almost all of them stay viable for two to five years. I know that for sure, because the seeds for the peas already 6″ high out there dated back to 2022. I’m in the Whenever school of gardening too, I guess.

Philosophical Reflection

Do I have to, this time? I’m afraid that the horrors going on in the wider world these days haven’t clicked well with the burgeoning life in the garden. No reflection readily occurs to me, and I don’t want to strain it. I will say, though, that if you, like me, are distraught at the news pouring in on your feeds, there’s nothing like digging an asparagus trench to take your mind off the dreadful. At least for as long as you dig.

Meanwhile, your turn!

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___

* The line comes from Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785″:

  But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,
Gang aft a-gley,…