The Whatevers

Whatever Happened...

When last heard from, Inconstance had thrown up her hands about trying to keep up with any orderly approach to the vegetable gardening project, and decided on Whatever as the best strategy.

Whatever can be a perilous path. Especially if it includes visiting the garden store in a car. Which means you can carry off whatever appeals to you, including a lot of things that wouldn’t be on your list. If you’d taken the trouble to make a list.

Of course, the visit (well, two visits—or was it three?) was absolutely necessary, since I hadn’t gotten around to doing all that seed-starting rigmarole in early spring. I absolutely needed the veggie starts, and a few nasturtiums to repel bugs from the veggies.

Shopper’s Quandary

However, as any of my dear readers afflicted with plant lust know, the garden store abounds in nonessential species that excel in looking indispensable. Yes, I absolutely needed the pickling cucumbers and the romaine lettuce. But why did I buy the eggplants? Okay, they’re the long thin Asian variety, which you can’t always find in the store. But I can’t eat eggplant! As members in good standing of the nightshade family, they exacerbate my arthritis, making my knees less amenable to essential gardening tasks like weeding.

Dreaming of green globes…
Photo by medialrs on Pixabay; free use under Pixabay license

They were so tempting, though, with those gorgeous borderline-palmate leaves tinged with royal purple. Into the cart with them. I wanted okra, and found some of that. Then I stumbled upon the artichoke starts, looking like a happy cross between aloe and thistle. How could I resist, once the thought of those lovely prickly globes springing out of my garden beds took hold in my brain? (Using the term “brain” loosely here; clearly my frontal cortex had taken a hike.)

Way back before the dark ages, Cicero remarked in a letter to a friend, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Obviously he didn’t live near a garden store.

An Urban Interlude

I came home with boxes of baby veggies and herbs, and a deadline for getting them in. They had to hit the dirt before I hopped a bus for a weekend in NYC. Meanwhile, I’d also picked up an order of raspberry plants/canes and 25 more asparagus roots. A couple of rainy days and an attack of the lazies had interfered with getting them into their homes. The consequence: a frenetic three days of asparagus-burying, raspberry-planting, and veggie-starts-tucking-in, capped off by popping several rows of calypso and French haricot beans into the ground. I finished just after sunset the night before I had to catch that bus.

Maybe I could blame the next stage on my New York experience. If you’re imagining Broadway shows and elegant gallery openings, you’re off the mark. No, I spent a substantial part of the weekend at the Brooklyn Grange. At least, the part of it that’s a rooftop farm in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Brooklyn Grange farm at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

You would not believe the profusion of plants that can grow on a roof. Oh my, the purple broccoli! The tomatoes marching in endless tidy rows! The lettuces, the cabbages, not to mention the zinnias and basil and peppers and … and not a single woodchuck or rabbit to spoil the fun. Nirvana!

So what did I do immediately upon return? You guessed it. Back to the garden store. I found a couple of tomato plants and a couple of zucchini plants (my sister’s desiderata). Somehow two sextets of zinnias and more basil and two kinds of marigolds jumped onto the cart too.

The Cup Runs Over

Not looking like much–yet.

The fenced garden is full, though it may not quite look it yet. Except for the garlic planted last fall, the rest are still babies. By the time they hit their teens, they’ll have covered the whole scene.

One tomato and four zucchini have now landed in their assigned spots. Which is to say, the spaces I’d previously intended for the cilantro, arugula, borage, dill, and pole beans. The zucchini, I should explain, multiplied because there were three, not one, seedlings in each of the pots I’d grabbed. While their larger siblings snuggle their roots into the garden beds, the two smallest from each pot now sit in a salvage container waiting for assignment to a likely victim an adoptive parent. (I had about 15 extra asparagus roots too, until a kind neighbor agreed to take them off my hands.) Next to the orphan zucchini, the second tomato taps her toes while I wonder whether I can make a liiiittttttllle more space somewhere in the fenced garden, or maybe I should pop her into one of the unfenced raised beds next to the deck.

The ladies in waiting

Maybe maybe maybe I could find a tiny bit more room. The artichokes already look like an unhappy cross between dismal and desperate, like they’d rather be in California and intend to head out soon. That would free a couple feet of space. I have reserved a small spot for the scarlet runner beans, or maybe the zinnias, or maybe tomato #2. But were it not for the two overflow raised beds up by the deck, I’d be in despair: the ao shiso, the arugula, the beets, the carrots, the chard, the cilantro, and a host of other seeds D-Z all wait upon my industry.

Clouds Gather

Does this sound like work, or like fun? It’s actually both. But not the fun of previous years.

Until this year, within a few minutes of setting foot in the garden, I would drop into The Zone. Nothing mattered but the green things in front of me, or their various flying, creeping, or crawling visitors. Hours would pass, and I’d notice nothing beyond the small circumference before me, until the light got so dim or the mosquitoes so ravenous that I gathered up my paraphernalia and headed indoors.

This year is different. This year, the work and fun have provided some distraction from the world’s and the country’s horrors. But the distraction doesn’t last.

Now, trudging down to the garden, I remember the latest antisemitic violence and start counting the incidents. As I spread MooDoo over the next bed, or plunge my digging fork into the soil, I suddenly wonder how farmers in Ukraine manage to work under threat of bombardment and advancing Russian armies. While I encourage the pea vines to grab onto the netting on the pea tunnel, or nudge the young cucumber plants to twine around their bright red climbing frame, I recall the thousands facing starvation in Gaza, the fathers of families shot down as they try to reach food distribution points, the devastations that will take decades to remedy, if they ever are. When I lean on the fenced garden’s gate before leaving for the evening, imagining I can see the green things growing, my peace shatters with the recollection of the thousands of immigrants being rounded up by storm troopers all over this country.

What Will We Reap?

We’re no longer in a world of it-can’t-happen-here. A bit over a week ago, masked agents of who-knows-what grabbed two people in public here in our little “sanctuary” community. Days later, their loved ones still had not been able to find out what happened to them. As I write this, the Trump administration has dispatched Marines to Los Angeles and I shudder, anticipating the declaration of nationwide martial law Trump seems to have been itching for since 2020.

Cicero’s head being desecrated by Fulvia, Marc Antony’s wife
“Fulvia steekt met een naald in de tong van het afgehakte hoofd van Cicero,” by Bartolomeo Minelli, 1819, Rijksmuseum
Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Dedication

A few years after avowing his contentment with garden and library, Cicero lost his head. Literally. In an attack by a gang supporting his political nemesis Marc Antony.

Some might take this as proof you should stay out of politics and tend to the plants. I take it as an object lesson: when any are not safe, none are safe.

I’ll be demonstrating on June 14. I’d love to hear what else you think we all could/ should do. I don’t think Whatever will answer now.

Your turn

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