February 9, 2022
My garden aspirations far outpace my time, talent and knowledge. My mom has been gardening all my life, tends a gorgeous, enormous yard att my childhood home and to my mind, knows all there is about cultivating beautiful plants. But she’s still taking a master garden class, has books like “Edible Perennials” on her coffee table. I haven’t had the discipline for any kind of systematic learning. I just Google things furiously or flip to the key page in one of her gardening books when the question arises. I remember only a smattering of what I learn, like my mother-in-law’s reminder to dig a $100 hole for a $20 plant (my holes are probably closer to $40 holes) and prune roses on Valentine’s Day, the way crushed eggshells mixed into the soil below the newly pruned roses amend the soil and keep away squirrels.
“A rich source of calcium, eggshells help roses by strengthening the walls of the plant’s cell tissue . . . promot[e] general plan vigor . . . contribute[] to healthy green foliage on rose bushes as well as to strong root systems.” (SF Gate Homeguide)
Who doesn’t want healthy green foliage on the strong root systems of their roses bushes?
Last year I diligently save a gallon bag of eggshells throughout the winter—all those cakes, all that ice cream. We fill the bag full, until, like something from a low grade sci-fi horror flick, tiny critters start hatching inside. But I won’t be deterred! Dedicated to my dream of healthy green foliage, I bravely overcome my disgust long enough to stash the mutant bag in the cold outside, before the critters grow large enough to be identified, take over the kitchen, and eat us in our sleep.
The eggshells were salvageable, and later the kids helped me squish down the bag and scatter the shells around the base of the roses. And wouldn’t you know, the first flush of rose blooms was top notch, definitely outpacing past years. A good year for the roses indeed. Was it the eggshells? There are so many variables in the real world conditions of a yard that A-B testing is nearly impossible.
I’m saving another bag of eggshells this year, preemptively staying outside.
To try and remedy my ad hoc approach to garden learning, one Sunday in January I sit down to a desk facing our third floor rooftop garden and embark on a flurry of planning. I start with listing out the plants I love most. Each year I’m seduced by innumerable seeds and seedlings, and find myself locked in to growing more than I can manage. Inevitably there are plants I don’t love, vegetables I dutifully harvest I’m not even excited to eat, even mystery volunteers I oblige to see what they’ll become. Like compulsively finishing a book because you’ve started it, I keep on tending everything living. No more!
Henceforth I shall give my limited garden time only to what I truly love, the roses, the tomatoes, the lettuce and kale, peas and beans, cucumbers and peppers, dahlias and lilies, poppies and peonies…the problem is, I kind of love everything. Writing off any plant, full stop, is hard. I settle on eliminating cruciferous plants. I have never managed to grow much worth salvaging in our humid climate before they flower and attract a whirlwind of bugs. I’ll settle for buying cauliflower and broccoli going forward. But just about everything else stays.
I start making my way through my stash of existing seeds. What do we have? I always order more than we can possibly grow in our few tiny little plots; this year I’m determined to be judicious. I mark the months on different pages, make my way through the seed packets and Google searches, and feverishly jot down notes about each coming garden task, by date, a baby work plan. It’s a banner start. But I only make it through the cold weather plants before the girls wake up from their nap and it’s time to rejoin the family. February comes and goes, and the warm weather plants—the tomatoes and peppers I’m supposed to start indoors 8-10 weeks before last frost date, in other words now– remain in a cozy padded envelope where I left them last summer after ordering them, procrastinating, and ultimately and giving up in favor of the starts at the farmers’ market, waiting for me to carve out another few hours I again can’t seem to find.
It’s 8-10 weeks before the last frost date, and I’m already feeling behind. As of February 9, I still haven’t cut out the last of last summer’s plants, the ones I didn’t get to last fall that finally succumbed to winter, dried out and froze. I haven’t yet swept up the leaves from the Japanese maple that curl around the pot on our garage roof in wind-shifting dunes. I noticed yesterday a few dog-walks worth of unclaimed poop in our front garden box, some trash from the sidewalk blown into our yard. I need to patrol the garden with a trash bag, clippers and some sturdy gloves to start reclaiming what looks, every winter, like a barren, neglected space. I want to harvest roses in June and eat toast with homegrown raspberry jam in October, but picking up someone else’s dog poop is never the way I want to spend a free hour right now. It’s easier to scroll garden websites and add seeds and bareroot rosebushes to a perpetually pending cart.
In addition to the poop, I notice the tips of something living pushing up through the front bed. I can’t even remember what I planted there last fall – the plastic markers scrawled with a plant names in Sharpie I tucked into the bed have been heaved out through stray footsteps, or just the freeze/thaw cycle. I will have to brush them off and see if the Sharpie is still legible, examine the shoots to discern if they’re the green spear of a daffodil or the reddish nub of a peony. But for now, I know for certain something is alive down there, under the dog poop and trash, with or without my garden labor, intent on making its way to the surface.
