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

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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

Why I Garden

Posted on 2025-02-04 by Hecate

For a change, this post doesn’t include photos. Otherwise, it might never get posted! Hope the featured photo at the top of the page can satisfy your yen for optics. Just this once!

If it’s New England, this must be winter…

After a November that couldn’t decide whether to do August or April, winter arrived in December at long last. Not just snow, but (sometimes) daytime temps well below freezing, and some nights barely into double digits. The kale, after realizing that the low 20s meant business, finally gave up the ghost. All that persisted, for a longish spell running to December 10 or so, was a lone oriental poppy. The poor baby got confused and started generating foliage in October, and it had me worried all November that it would try to bloom. The low teens eventually convinced it that would be a bad idea.

So, although we did get rain now and then (it’s still New England!), the garden really was done for the nonce. That gave me time to focus on the holidays for a while. In my house, that meant putting up jars of varicolored chutneys, cranberry-apple preserve, and pickled carrots. And baking. (It should have meant pickled cauliflower too, but there’s plenty of winter left. Because it’s still New England.) And knitting. There was a sweater in the works.

All those pursuits encouraged reflection. And since eagerness for the next gardening season already plagued me even while the forecast said single digits coming, I got to wondering: why on earth do I garden?

Days gone by

It’s not just about watching things grow. For one thing, with the exception of weeds, the plants in my garden don’t grow all that fast. Believe me, with the exception of peonies in late April, paint dries faster. And you wouldn’t form an obsession for watching that. Plus, if you really want to watch things grow, you could go for walks out there in Nature and save yourself the grunt work.

The answer to Why Garden was clearer in my grandparents’ day. My grandfather-of-the-green-thumb maintained a huge vegetable garden during the Depression and World War II. Even after he and my grandmother retired to a tiny cottage, he cultivated a seriously large veggie patch and several fruit trees. Although he undoubtedly enjoyed puttering outside, this was mostly an economizing measure. First he had a family of seven to feed, and later, hordes of grandchildren descending like hungry locusts.

He may have kept his earlier garden organic by default. Those fertilizers and insecticides cost money the family didn’t have. But by the time his Social Security kicked in, I recall his resorting to some of that better living through chemistry, if only for fertilizer. The grandchildren obviated some of the need for insecticide; we came in right handy for picking the Japanese beetles off.

Paradise?

In my childhood memories, that stretch of beans and corn and tomatoes and greens remains an Elysium of green abundance bound up with grandfatherly affection, with shelling peas on the back porch with my grandmother, and with feeling on  my palm the scritch of the Japanese beetles’ feet. My memory has conveniently erased whatever happened to the bugs once they left my grasp. All is sweet and peaceful in my memorymovie of that backyard. The crops sprang up and prospered under my grandfather’s loving touch.

Is it that sensation I’m trying to recapture? Maybe that’s part of it: the serenity that steals over me as I dig and weed and tie up the pea vines and deadhead the beardtongue. The zing of joy I feel when I round the corner of the garage and see that the cactus (yes, Virginia, there’s a native cactus in Massachusetts!) has produced several raving yellow flowers. Or the silly bliss that freezes me staring as a bumbling bee plods with clumsy grace from one to another to yet another dozen of the snowy flowers clustering on the elderberry bush, or among the buttery trumpets on the Diervilla. She always seems on the verge of tumbling off, but invariably recovers and buzzes on.

That all sounds idyllic, so why wonder why I garden?

A little dose of reality

Let me introduce the cold hard facts. I doubt that I’m saving any money with this gardening gig. If I haven’t sat down and added up the cost—the composted cow manure, the fencing, the cedar raised beds, the assistance for the grunt work, the seeds, the plants, the digging knives and pruning shears and digging fork and spade and wagon, etc. etc. ad walletum emptium—it’s because I’m too busy during the growing season and too lazy in the winter. But I guarantee that the total would far exceed the value of the peas, lettuce, kale, and sundry other veggies I’ve managed to harvest.

The monetary value, that is. Clearly I value the harvest beyond price tags. I Grew It Myself! How do you put that into dollars and cents? Still, this obviously ain’t my grandfather’s penny-pincher’s patch.

Taking charge?

I sometimes suspect that many people turn to gardening because they like the feeling of exerting control over nature. I used to aspire to such control. To establish a flower garden the likes of Gertrude Jekyll’s, with the perennials and shrubs placed just so, producing a well-composed symphony of color and shape and scent. My results seem more like the cacophony of a long pre-concert orchestral warmup. Elegant instruments bleating away at each other while you wonder why the hell the conductor hasn’t shown up yet. If you add in that the French horns have sprouted an aphid infestation and downy mildew has started to carpet undersides of the first-row violins.

No, control is not my forte. Truth be told, those most controlled of gardens, like the gardens you’ll find abutting Loire Valley châteaux, all rectangles and triangles and perfect circles and shrubs with French poodle cuts, have never appealed to me one whit. I get glimpses of one such garden, on a far smaller scale, as I pass a neighbor’s place one street over, mostly hidden behind fences. It has stark white stone pathways and geometric shapes in stone, and no weeds. In fact, almost no plants at all. Everything under control. I feel just a tinge of envy, but mostly sorrow, at the sight.

Surrender does not mean giving up

In fact, if you want total control, you’d have to get rid of all the plants. Which finally gets us to some glimmer of an explanation for why I garden: because I can’t control it. I can prepare the soil and put in seeds or starts or already flourishing plants in the location best suited to their needs for light. I can make sure they’re at the right depth, with seeds or roots nestled in according to specifications, and then water them as directed. I can come back and water as needed. I can prune or pinch back where necessary. I can (and often do) even talk to them in honeyed, encouraging tones, and sing to them when the mood hits.

But plants gonna do what plants gonna do.

Unless, of course, insects or marauding rodents or fungi do what they gonna do.

I’m there rooting (rah rah) for the plants, but then, I also root for the native pollinators, who sometimes lay eggs that turn into very hungry caterpillars, which eat the plants and are in turn eaten, sometimes, by birds. Here and there, I may give a nudge to offer a little boost to the plants, and I do try to uproot pesky weeds, but I have long since abandoned the fantasy that I have control over the outcomes. I’m there to try things out, to help a bit, to observe, and as I do so, to feel germinating within myself the seeds of humility.

Surrendering the illusion of control isn’t always easy, but eventually, it’s liberating. I’m just out there figuring out what humans gonna do in the garden. Sometimes that helps me realize that control outside the garden is a chimera too.

Control? Why fuss? Sufficient unto the day is the weevil thereof.

Meanwhile, your turn!

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Posted in Garden, Plants, Winter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Late Starts

Posted on 2024-11-26 by Hecate

Plans, plans, plans

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, dear reader, you know by now that doing things ahead of time is not my forte.

For you, it should come as no surprise that my veggie garden this year didn’t go in on time.

I had good excuses, of course. Most germane: I hatched a grand plan to achieve vegetable self-sufficiency while foiling rodent marauders (the Thumper tribe and Tamerlane the woodchuck). This meant putting in a fenced garden,

Outline of rectangular area dug into very early spring lawn, with backdrop of small conifers and bushes in near background, and woods in far background

March 26

with hog wire fencing sunk 18” below soil surface,

Same rectangular area now fenced with hog wire and metal stakes, with wood-framed gate

April 8

Enclosed garden area with wooden stakes marking area for beds; a man is kneeling at the back of the fenced area installing raised bed.

April 26

and beds edged with cedar boards separated by wood-chip pathways.

Which meant waiting until my lawn guy had the time to do all that.

It also meant ordering organic soil in bulk (4893 pounds of it, to be exact) and then waiting weeks for its delivery.

Then there was my most longstanding hobby, procrastination. I won’t weigh you down with the excuses for that.

Time management?

In any case, I got an even later start than Kamala Harris. By mid-August, though, I had a new fenced-in garden, 25 by 25 feet, sitting in full sun. I had great plans, zillions of seeds, and 180 square feet of brand new, bare beds. But I rashly donated to Kamala, after which I spent a lot more time deleting election fundraising emails as they cascaded in. (Electoral candidates are like seed catalogs. For each one you donate to/ buy from, you get deluged with appeals from another ten or twenty. My spam folder ranneth over. And there were many more candidates than seed companies.) Then I started writing postcards to voters in Ohio and Nevada.

So of course I did what any sensible person would do under those circumstances: I went to the nearest garden center and stocked up on veggie starts.

Closeup shot of green organic lettuce seedlings growing in black-brown potting medium in small individual plug cups.

Organic lettuce seedlings

Photographed by Marvin Bikolano (2017), Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

These would come nowhere near filling all those empty beds, but they’d provide at least the feeling that I’d done something about vegetable independence. Twelve lovely little lettuce starts went into the western part of the perimeter bed. A medley of cool-season youngsters went into a couple of other beds: broccoli, chard and arugula in the one long (15-foot!) raised bed, kale and chard into the neighboring lower bed. Gate closed against the marauders, I had nothing to do but water (rainless August, September, October even) and wait.

Volunteers

And deal with the weeds that had sprung up once more in the perennial/shrub beds.

Weeds seem not to require water, or any other form of encouragement. They creep along underground and pop up where you’d least expect. Or they float in on the breezes, or blow in on the blustery winds we got from time to time. Or they land with the poop of undiscerning birds that stoop to eating the berries of invasive vines.

Bright yellow blossom of native sunflower, centered amidst bright green foliage and a few scattered smaller yellow blossoms.

Woodland Sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus)

John Phelan (2024), photographed in the Wopowog Wildlife Management Area, East Hampton CT. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Occasionally, an accidental flower pops up. This season, I got a tall, bushy native sunflower whose bright buttery blooms jostled the elderberry bushes, and a native lupine that apparently reserved its flowers for next year. The cornflower that started as one plant several years back has spread its progeny through a wide swath at the north side of the north bed. Barely visible until those cornflower-blue flowers burst forth. Mostly in spots you can’t get at to roust them out without performing contortions I associate with advanced yoga.

Overload

It felt like the Internet out there: things appeared all over the place, and you couldn’t tell where they came from or whether they were worth anything until they got too big to pull out. While the north bed got weeded, the south and east beds went rampant.

The only reason things didn’t get more overgrown was that the bunnies kept them trimmed back. Unfortunately, however, bunny tastes run to the expensive side. They ignored most of the weeds but gave the little asters in front of the house a late-season Chelsea chop, waited until the plants recovered and formed lots of buds, and then a rabbity un-Chelsea chomp finished off all the flowers before they even got fully opened.

A large dark-green zucchini squash next to a metal 12-inch ruler. The squash is longer than the ruler and about 3.5" in diameter.

The second-largest zucchinum I got.

If the veggies had gotten further along faster, I might not have noticed the damage at all. I had my hands full with the little I’d planted in the old exposed beds. The few pea and cucumber plants that had gone in in April and June, respectively, produced enough to keep me busy for a couple of weeks for each variety.

Pick and cook. Pick and pickle. Or pick and find some poor sucker to accept the surplus. When your peas produce by the grocery bag and your cukes burgeon by the bushel, who needs zucchini hills (July, in haste)? I did, however, harvest several small-to-large zucchini and one mega zucchinum (or whatever the singular is) that looked like the business end of a deep green baseball bat. And then there were, as I mentioned, all those voter postcards.

Harvest, sort of

As those of you in the Northeast know, we’ve had a ridiculously warm fall season. The lettuces and kale took off and are still going, even after several November frosts in the high 20s. I tucked the lettuces under a tiny net-and-hoop tunnel in late October to keep them cozy, but the kale stand naked. The broccoli plants have grown to about a foot high, but nary a broccolino has peeped out. The chards have dithered over whether to stick around; I begin to suspect the nays have it. All in all, mixed results. But it’s amazing how much has survived even past the election.

Two kinds of kale (dark green, narrow-leaved dragon kale and medium green lobed kale) growing in hay-mulch in a wood-enclosed bed, with light brown wood chips surrounding it on three sides.

Mid-fall kale, obscuring the dithering chard

Where’s the lesson in here? Well, clearly, even with a late start you can make some progress. Naturally you need to have the sense not to plant the wrong stuff. No beans, no tomatoes. Even so, the harvest may be less than great. You try to celebrate the things that worked, and not repine over the ones that didn’t. Even if you do invariably repine.

And you get ready for the next round.  Thanks to my sister, who has been staying with me while getting herself settled into life in this area, a lot of those weeds got pulled. The garlic got planted in early November for next midsummer’s harvest. We’ve secreted new corms and bulbs hither, thither and yon. If the squirrels don’t get them, I’m trusting them to do their underground magic to emerge as crocuses and hyacinths and anemones in early spring, just when we need them most.

The gardening gurus beg us not to clear the dead growth in fall but leave it all for overwintering pollinators. So I’m leaving cleanup till March. But a few days ago, I finally pulled out the Harris – Walz yard sign. Clearly it would neither bear fruit nor host a pollinator.

All signs suggest the gardener’s winter this year will be mild. But we’re girding ourselves for what may be a long, hard political winter. That garlic could come in handy by July.

And now…

A Sasanqua camellia bush half in bloom, with dark green foliage and some bright pink flowers, many pinkish buds, and many pink petals on the ground underneath.

The sasanqua camellia is a little late this year, too!

Photo by Hillary Hutchinson (2024)

Faithful reader Hillary has once more contributed a Thanksgiving-time photo of her sasanqua camellia (Camellia sasanqua). As you can see, the bush is beginning to bust out in bright pink. Usually the shrub is slathered with flowers in late November in the South Carolina coastal climate. It, too, is behaving a little strangely this year, though. Already dropping petals but not yet covered in blossoms.

If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year, have a good one. Let’s worry later about what comes after.

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 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 using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

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Posted in Fall, Garden, Plants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments