Dwindle Days

Posted on 2025-09-30 by Hecate

Tempus fugit

The nice thing about high summer was that I could spend early morning and late afternoon into evening in the garden, and still have a full day of sunshine to do other stuff. There was a downside, of course (isn’t there always?): if I stayed in the garden until sundown, I wouldn’t get to eat dinner until 9:30 or 10:00. Unless I took the chips-and-salsa shortcut.

Photo showing three clocks of different sizes, each ringed in metal, placed on a multicolored fabric base.

Tempus fugit
“Old Clocks” by servus is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

No dinner shortcuts needed now. The daylight hours trickled off slowly in July and early August. I could pretend that fall wouldn’t really happen. September has squelched that sweet illusion. I could swear that only a month ago I could pack up all the tools and close the veggie garden gate at 8:20 pm and not have to grope my way to the garage to put things away. Now, I’m actually swearing because I can see nothing outside by 6:45.

Just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming the loss, I looked it up. And yes, September sees an accelerating loss of suntime. In my slice of the globe, we’ve kissed goodbye about 80 minutes of daylight in these 30 days. Maybe not so bad when you learn that Alaska lost 193 minutes this month. But Alaskans know better than to try to garden in September, don’t they?

You don’t always reap what you’ve sown

The garden still produces, I grant you that. Weeds, of course, it produces in profusion, and every time I go in or out at the front of the house, they mock me with their hold on the perennial and shrub beds. As we all know, weeds can grow in the dark, or even in the split-second that you turn your back.

The plants you want, though? They’re another story. I put in the late-season veggies around mid-August. In June they might have zoomed to maturity in a month; in September they don’t inch along; they millimetre. And the chard can’t even grow fast enough to keep ahead of whatever bug has been chomping it. The cabbage moths had no trouble finding the yummy young kale. Wait till they find out there’s bok choi and chard in the next row.

Freshly harvested zucchini (green and yellow varieties), beets, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, parsley, carrots, and okra on a glass table.Granted, some of the summer plants keep producing. Earlier this summer I briefly toyed with the notion of keeping a record of the garden’s daily output. The cukes and zucchini soon disabused me of that fantasy. I can tell you the cukes’ output, roughly: 5 quarts of dill spears, 7 pints of bread-and-butter pickles, 5 pints of pickle relish, and a whole lot of salads. Mercifully, the cucumber vines have contracted some malaise that shrivels their leaves, and have about given up. The zucchini, however, continue their furtive progress. The yellow ones I can usually spot before they reach epic proportions, but every week or so it seems I locate a green one the size of a baseball bat that somehow eludes my notice until I trip over it.

Closeup photo of tomato vines, tied to stakes, with branches bending down heavy with tomatoes--some still green, others yellow, and two or three red ones.And the beefsteak tomatoes, oh my! Dozens of green ones have weighted the plant down so much that I had to add stakes twice, and exhausted my supply of homemade ties. Some of the tomatoes oblige by turning red at two- or three-day intervals. But they aren’t all going to ripen fast enough to beat the first frost. By which point it’s green-tomato chutney time. I foresee multiple pints.

Plotting along

But here’s my dilemma: with that produce burgeoning (don’t get me started on the beets, please), I should be spending more, not less, time in the garden (and in the kitchen cooking it up or freezing or canning). I should also be catching up on the weeds that got away from me in August (well, August and July and June). But the early mornings are uncomfortably cold for digging up encroaching crabgrass, and the early evenings end much earlier.

Top view of plum torte in round baking pan. Plums are arranged in concentric circles and half sunken into the browned cake.I solaced myself by baking a couple of Italian prune-plum tortes one rainy morning. Those plums are only available for a short time every year, so it was now-or-never-ville.

One marvelous morning, I did get out front and thoroughly weeded one small bed, and piled on plenty of mulch. That bed looks great. It also made the rest of the beds look sleazy, unkempt, and ridiculous. My sister pitched in heroically to do a larger one, which looks even greater and makes the rest of the beds look, well, like somebody had better tend to them quick.

You might question my sanity when I tell you that in the midst of all this, I ordered several peony plants, which have got to go into brand-new, as-yet-nonexistent beds, by early November.

The power of the unpredictable

Just as my angst about the state of the garden was reaching frenzy pitch earlier this month, I had an accident that helped put things in perspective. I fell hard down the basement stairs, landed on my forehead, and ended up in the ER. Miraculously, nothing broke. I did need twelve stitches and carried a couple of huge deep-purple shiners around for about ten days. But the accident has slowed me down and made me a bit more reflective. As in, less inclined to think that any deficit in the garden spells the end of the world. I’m lucky to be alive; the rest is gravy.

And a good thing. The garlic and shallot babies just arrived. They have to go in in October.

Tomorrow is October.

If it were not for my accident, I’d panic. But panic never works in the garden anyway. I’ll do what I can. That’s all I can do.

If that’s not a motto for life, what is?

Your turn

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Late in the Game

Posted on 2025-09-02 by Hecate

[Note: this post was drafted weeks ago, but didn’t go up because… I was too busy in the garden. Good excuse, no? Look for a more up-to-date post soon.]

Previously, in the veggie garden…

Earlier this summer, Inconstance was feeling rather insouciant about execution of garden plans. Whatever, she claimed, was her approach to the garden now. Something would grow. The harvest would yield something—probably too much of it.

Asparagus trench with a wire fence along its left side. The asparagus is barely visible, being mostly covered by bright green weedy grass.

There was asparagus under here somewhere…

Well, guess again. I (Ms. Inconstance) have worked like a stevedore since early June, at least when it wasn’t raining or in the nineties. (Which, come to think of it, was most of the time, but still…) And my sister has come over to help out a couple times a week.

Nevertheless, the weeds kept winning, some things got planted a wee bit too late, and even by the beginning of July despair began insinuating its nasty self. All that work and MooDoo, and the scallions languished if they sprouted at all, the cucumbers were playing coy, and the peas—oh, the peas produced only disappointment. While the weeds took over the asparagus trench and crept insidiously inward from the veggie garden’s perimeter faster than you can say I’ll-deal-with-that-tomorrow.

I found some consolation in Margaret Roach’s newsletter in early July, wherein she admitted that by July 1 she’s always tempted to “throw in the trowel.” That one sure resonated!

Inspiration and perspiration

Of course no true gardener would ever act on that urge. The siren call of green growing things is too powerful, and just when you feel like giving up, the liatris sends up its spectacular magenta spires or the zinnias bob their creamy white heads when you walk by.

photo of a poster titled Late Planting Guide, with colorful images of various vegetables against a tan background, along a timeline of weeks until first frost

Keeping track of what’s not gotten done

But while these sights might energize me, I haven’t had time this summer to do anything about the perennial beds. The veggie garden has claimed all my energies. Not just the fenced-in garden, but also the old raised beds closer to the house, where the late-season veggies had to go in.

Before that could happen, my sister and I cleared a ton of weeds from those beds and the area around them. My long-suffering handyman extracted the chicken wire crop coops from the garage rafters. All was in readiness for the late summer garden. I even unearthed my late season gardening guide poster, stuck it into a frame, and hung it on the dining room wall, where I could guilt-trip myself every time I headed into the study (which, I admit, was not often enough).

Past the halfway mark

I was r-e-a-d-y. No fooling around with seed this time. Around July 20, I popped in at the garden store for veggie starts, ready to bung those suckers into new homes before they knew what hit them. Alas, my timetable didn’t match the garden center’s. Come back after Aug. 3, they told me.

Yes, Virginia, romaine lettuce can form towers!

So I had time to note how brazen the rampant bunnies are this year. They won’t run away until I get within a foot or two. After fattening up by chomping the blackeyed Susans and coneflowers down to the ground on two sides of the house, they’ve contented themselves with nibbling the clover in the lawn while eyeing their favorite asters (ooh, they love those juicy asters clear down to their roots!) and carrot greens inside the fenced garden. If they’d gotten in, they could have done a lot of damage.

A hole made in the garden soil by (most likely) a vole, seen from above. Most of the soil is a bare brown, but the left side of the photo is covered by a zinnia plant sporting a bright red and orange flower.

The hole of the vole

But somebody has gotten in. Voles, I suspect. First I found two messy piles of dirt and two neat round holes outside the fence by the carrots and the asparagus trench. But no evidence the critter had gotten past the 18” of buried fencing. Ha ha! thought I smugly. Then I went to clear out the romaine that had rocketed up to three feet, and found between them and the zinnias a neatly executed hole—inside the fence. Ha ha! said the vole.

So I hauled out and planted my secret weapons, solar-powered gizmos that you shove about 6” into the soil. They emit a high-pitched intermittent shriek, like a soprano version of those thumpers in Dune, but with (we hope) the opposite effect of driving away the quarry. I’ll get back to you about whether that works.

A patch of the garden soil (basic brown) disturbed by the vole, with a wire fence along the right side. Inserted into the soil are two solar-powered gadgets that look like tubes topped with black circles with square battery cells in their middle.

The heavy artillery

Zooming out

Do I sound obsessive? Well, duh. If you’re gonna garden beyond your cute little deck, you’d better be. Unless Whatever truly is your philosophy of life.

An orange full moon rises in a dark blue sky over darkened woods and a fenced garden whose plants are barely visible clumps of dark green

Tomorrow is another day

Speaking of which: I can’t help but reflect how much the struggle in the garden matches what’s happening in the wider world. You labor mightily to remove ugliness or insipidity, you see the bloom of lovely results, and then along comes a vole or a woodchuck or a deer or Der Furor DJT and bam! All that work has gone for naught.

With the garden, at least, I can console myself that there’s always next year. The frost will put everything to rest and then I get to start again, wiser, cannier, more strategic than last time. You might say we get seasons in politics too, and maybe the midterms will see a regrowth of democratic sprouts. Or maybe it’ll be the next presidential run. But meanwhile the goons have been bulldozing away the topsoil the nation’s roots depend on.

The best I can say is, we gardeners know the only way out is to keep on trying.

Your turn

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The Whatevers

Posted on 2025-06-12 by Hecate

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.

Closeup photo of an artichoke in center foreground, with green leaves slightly blurry in background

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.

Photo showing rows of low-growing vegetables and grasses at Brooklyn Grange's rooftop farm, with view or river and Manhattan skyscrapers in the background.

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

Photo of fenced-in vegetable garden, with very small plants and shoots. Garden is surrounded by green lawn, with successive lines behind it: shrubs, then some flowers, then a green strip, then a substantial field with gold-colored grasss, then a woods. In the distance is an extended hill, just a patch of dark blue against a blue sky.

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.

Closed-up of some deck planters with marigolds and a tomato plant in foreground, with several kinds of herbs and some squash seedlings after them. Planters are white, on a white railing. In the background a bit of green lawn, some flowering trees and some large evergreens are visible.

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.

A print showing Fulvia (seated), wife of Marc Antony, with the severed head of Cicero in her lap, piercing the dead man's tongue with a nail, while two onlookers (a woman and a man in Roman military armor) lean on a small table beside her. The figures and the table are etched in 3-D detail; behind them a low wall topped with three columns are sketched like outlines in two dimensions.

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

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which just gets you an e-mail when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please feel welcome to post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you needn’t include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

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Thanks, as always, for reading, double thanks for responding, and triple thanks if you sign up for a subscription, or encourage a friend to do so.

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Best Laid Plans

Posted on 2025-05-26 by Hecate

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!)

Photo of the cover of the book <em>Week-byWeek Vegetable Gardener's Handbook</em>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*

Public-domain watercolor copy of Edvard Munch's The Scream

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.

Photo of two books on low-effort, no-dig gardening: Ruth Stout's Gardening without Work and Charlie Nardozzi's No-Dig Gardening

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.

A freshly dug trench for asparagus roots, with garden fence on the right and a tarp piled with soil to the left; a couple of small coneflower plants are in the foreground.

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 cuttings on a windowsill in 3 small water glasses, with roots growing in the water. In the background, unfocused greenery of a backyard.

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)

Pile of vegetables (tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, leeks, lettuce, exotic cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, fennel) on a lacy tablecloth, with a black background

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!

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which just gets you an e-mail when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please feel welcome to post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you needn’t include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

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Thanks, as always, for reading, double thanks for responding, and triple thanks if you sign up for a subscription, or encourage a friend to do so.

___

* 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,…

Posted in Books, Garden, Plants, Spring | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Are We There Yet?

Posted on 2025-04-13 by Hecate

Remember the French revolution? I sometimes wonder how those in the middle of it knew that they were. When it first occurred to them that all the turmoil and upheaval was a revolution. Is a revolution something you can see only in retrospect?

Here in New England, you could ask the same thing about spring. You know you’re in winter all right, when the first deep frost hits and all the leaves and flowers that soldiered on through chilly days and tinges of frost finally surrender and fall to the ground. Done. But spring?

Harbingers

Five purple crocus blooms pushing up out of dead leaves

You say crocuses, I say croci
Photo courtesy of Mary D. Birks, 2025

Here we can spot the blue scilla popping up next to the last of the snowbanks, the crocuses tossing their tiny yellow or purple headdresses in a suddenly balmy breeze, a few foolhardy daffodils flourishing their buttery trumpets under still leafless trees, and think we’re in spring.

With my sister’s help, I planted my new permacrop of asparagus Thursday before last. (She dug the trench; I mounded the soil and placed each spidery crown-and-roots combo and covered them up, pat pat pat.) The peony shoots have poked up. I want only another rain-free day to put in the sugar snap peas.

Snow-covered back yard with white deck railings showing on right, a few tall evergreens in middle distance, and beyond them further snowy landscape with dark smudge of trees in the distance; grey sky overhanging all.

Early morning, April 12, 2025

But then we realize that the rain ricocheting off the car isn’t rain; it’s sleet. (This past Monday) Or we wake up to see snow coming down outside the window. (Tuesday) And snow had covered the ground before I woke up this Saturday morning. Whereupon I realize rain-free ain’t enough for spring planting weather.

Or we think we’re safely out of the woods in May and sailing towards summer, only to lose the cherry blossoms almost entirely, see the magnolia tree forever stunted and the whole region’s apple and peach harvests doomed by one night’s deep and devastating frost. (May 2023) Sometimes the best we can say of a spring is that eventually summer arrived.

When are we in spring?

More harbingers

I went to a demonstration last weekend. One among over a thousand nationwide on the same day. The weather behaved exactly as you might expect in New England early in official-spring: rainy and in the 40s. The Boston Common may have been sprouting daffodils, but you couldn’t see them for the crowd of tens of thousands and the waving blooms of many-colored signs.

Crowd of protesters, some holding posters, spread through a park area, with concrete surface visible in foreground and part of a huge sculpture visible on the right, rising over heads of the crowd; tops of still leafless trees in middle distance with crowd extending to and beyond them.

Hands Off protest, Boston Common, April 5, 2025

Resist the Broligarchy!

You voted for cheaper eggs, you got measles.

Hands off Social Security.

Stop torching democracy!

Hands off our bodies.

Ikea has better cabinets.

Protect Trans lives.

Due process denied to anyone will become due process denied to everyone.

Give us back our future.

And the one that said it all: I’m here for too many reasons to fit on this sign.

Unlike spring blooms, many of the participants clearly hailed from the autumn end of life. But I did spot some youngsters—even some extremely young ones, like the infant snugged tight to her daddy’s chest. And some not even human ones, like the very large very good boy that daddy held on a leash, one of several dogs I spotted among the participants. You could say we represented a sort of biodiversity of protest.

Protest posters left displayed along stone and metal fencing after demonstration.

After the march
Photo courtesy of Merry White, 2025

But is it spring yet?

Only time and our actions will tell.

More actions are coming. For starters, you could check with Indivisible or 50501.org, or with your preferred local activist organization, to find out about them.

Coda

Meanwhile, don’t forget: it’s time to plant your peas, if you haven’t done so already. Summer will be here before you know it. (You may not know it for sure, because the NOAA website serving up local weather station data appears to have lost functionality. MuskRats gnawing?)

Meanwhile, your turn!

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which just gets you an e-mail when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please feel welcome to post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you needn’t include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment appears after their posts, so scroll down till you find it.

Thanks, as always, for reading, double thanks for responding, and triple thanks if you sign up for a subscription, or encourage a friend to do so.

Posted in Plants, Spring | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments