April 23, 2022
It’s Saturday, and I’m ready to tend my garden. We’ve been back since Tuesday evening from the third of four spring trips (accidentally running nearly back to back from March to early May, when I’ve been planning to take a very long nap). Trip three was a much planned and eagerly awaited vacation visiting friends overseas. But a few days in, fun and games came to an abrupt end due to a surprise positive Covid test. Ten days of Covid isolation ensued for the whole family, huddled together inside a small apartment. Getting back into the swing of things after the massive lift of packing up and transporting our family of five for an overseas adventure, after jet lag, after being totally disconnected from work for two weeks, after unwillingly extending our stay until we all tested negative, after needing to comply with various non-overlapping ways of demonstrating recovery for each of child’s childcare, has been like marching through quicksand with weights on. Since we returned from 10 days of Covid isolation and a 10+ hour flight, we’ve had maybe 3 total hours with all children out of our care and in someone else’s. We are all out of patience, struggling and mostly failing to have compassion on the constant whining and bickering that is probably just how a five and three year old process stress and complex emotion, and dying for some alone time, adult time.
A seeming law of nature is time away means garden neglect. You cannot wander and tend simultaneously; both good, but mutually exclusive. At some point, you have to make choices about what you will pursue in a given season. An attempt to have it all inevitably means selling something short. This spring, after two years of mostly staying put, we chose adventure. And so, I never had time to start warm weather seeds, never made it to carpeting my beds with an early crop of cool-weather greens. (The lettuce, chard and kale I did plant was hailed upon and unceremoniously uprooted by a digging visitor within days.) In spurts between trips I managed to eek out time to finish up the pruning and post-winter tidying but even so, after nearly two weeks away, adventure not all it cracked up to be, there’s plenty to do in this weekend’s gorgeous spring weather, and I’m itching to get out and tend.
On the way home from our son’s soccer game, we stop by the local hardware store for my semi-annual influx of mulch and good soil to supplement my pots and raised beds. Unbeknownst to us, until we park and hear the music blasting, the store is hosting a spring garden party celebration this weekend, a DJ in front of the store, a grill on all cylinders, and 20% off of everything. I snatch up a tray of starter flowers to go with as many bags of mulch and soil as we can cram in our trunk, already half full with all the paraphernalia of an ordinary day with kids, and head home for some long-awaited gardening.
There’s lots to do, as usual, more than I have time for. In addition to the plants I just bought (always buying more plants!) I have some dahlia bulbs in the fridge waiting to be set in the ground and some potato seeds I left in our basement to chit while we were away. Chit, being, I’ve only recently learned, the word for cultivating on purpose those funky growths that protrude from eyes when you’ve left potatoes too long in a cozy dark environment. It’s a technique, or so I’ve read. To grow potatoes, you want as much funky growth as possible, giving the potatoes a head start on developing foliage and, if all goes to plan, more tubers. I had debated getting mine planted before we left, but this was one occasion where having little active time to spare worked in our favor, providing a couple weeks of unattended pre-growth before setting them outside.
I grew potatoes last year, too, inspired by my brother and sister-in-law’s photos of potato bags seemingly spilling over with snug tubers. We got a bit of a late start, but I was proud of myself for making a whole educational experience out of it, planting with my son and his classmate, bringing them back to help me top off with more dirt as the vines climbed. We left them in seemingly good shape when we left for the second half of the summer to spend 6 weeks on the west coast, with family. But when we came back to harvest, there were no potatoes to claim, save a meager handful of bird-egg sized orbs. We used them in one fell swoop, in a soup. Not quite the starchy paradise I was hoping for.
From my research, my best guess is that we planted too late in the summer, such that soil temperatures climbed too high before the plants could make tubers. I’ve learned when soil temperatures go above 75, this signals the roots to pull the plug on making tubers. Hot air around the plant is fine, but hot legs is a crisis. This year, I’ll try to avoid this fate by planting earlier, and moving to a cooler spot as spring turns to summer. I’ll aim to harvest earlier, so anything that grows stays intact. My potatoes say the first harvest is ready in 60 days–that’s end of June, if I start now, a good two months before I had the chance to harvest anything last year. So getting the potatoes going is a priority today.
As usual, when perusing the catalog I struggled to constrain myself. Last year’s crop didn’t go well, so naturally, double down and try for more! Last year I bought two potato grow bags and two varieties to grow–and probably overcrowded the bags while I was at it. A full ten pound grow bag only take five golf-ball sized seeds. (In potato parlance, a seed is basically an old potato, sprouting funky eyes and ready to convert all its potato energy into making tuber babies.) This year I buy four more potato bags and five total varieties. When I finish planting, my six bags rolled down and filled with a few inches of dirt line the path from our front door to the street in a tidy row, leaving just enough space for our stroller. It’s an arrangement I’m sure my husband will love, giving him ample opportunity to elbow errant potato vines as he unloads the kids all summer. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than last summer, but I followed the instructions, and they’re supposedly easy to grow–at least, it looks so easy in photos of people harvesting mounds of potatoes. What will come from my labor this year?
June 28, 2022
The upper deck is full of volunteers. Amidst the beans I planted on purpose, which have replaced the radishes I planted too close together and grew, stunted, a plethora of greens and too-small roots, removed now that the temperatures are climbing…As an aside within an aside, a radish left to grow too long as summer heat sets in loses its rotundity, there is no crispy globe; instead it becomes elongated, thin, and wizened, like a carrot without the juice. The root left too long in summer heat is all leather, no crunch. You can salvage the greens but if you don’t pick it soon enough, before it shoots upward into yellow flowers, the root is entirely for the compost.
Anyway, amidst this bed’s second crop, bush beans, I’ve been watching two seedlings emerge over the last month. The seedling’s first leaves are thick, oval, dark green with some striping. Cucumbers? Squash? Indecipherable at first, no matter how many times I google image search examples of the seedlings. I think I’ll let them grow out a bit and see what they are, then transplant if necessary. More leaves appear, hairy and spiky, suggesting squash, although summer or winter I can’t yet discern. As the vine starts to thicken, becoming muscular and tough, I may have lost my chance to transplant. If squash, can’t it just grow amidst the beans, two sisters? The third, corn, is too demanding for my soil, and with only bush beans I don’t need poles for the vines to creep up.
Come late June, there are small blossoms forming, all male; I know, because they are all flower, no fruit. It’s normal for the first flush to all be male, I’m not sure why. What’s the point of all that ability to pollinate, with nothing to be pollinated? There’s a crass joke there somewhere but I don’t want to make it. Regardless, it’s fun watching the plants transform from mysterious first leaves to a sturdy structure moving steadily towards providing food.
As always, there are tomato volunteers. Year after year, fruit falls off the previous year’s plants, or is half-eaten by nature’s visiting guests and half-discarded in the dirt. Either way, it rots in place only for the fermented seeds to jump back to life at the sun’s invitation, shooting up surprise new stalks the next spring. In one bed here’s a sprouting patch of 20+ tiny tomato seedlings popping up, gathered tightly in a circle like a strange fungus. I pull most out, replant a few elsewhere, and leave the sturdiest in place.
Of course the strawberries are sending out runners every which way, determined to colonize every inch they’re permitted to.
But it’s the far right beds that amuse me most, a wonderland of different volunteers from across the vegetation spectrum. Strawberry runners, tomatoes of course. A few fledgling borage plants, also a fairly common occurrence up on the deck beds. But then there is an out of nowhere forest of tomatillos. I grit my teeth and whittle down to the top 3; this bed can’t support so many in close proximity. Right next door, amidst the shallots I planted on purpose, are two surprise pepper plants, glossy angular lime leaves sticking out against all the greens and curlicues of the other plants. It’s as if someone planted a jar of salsa directly in the soil.
I work so hard to get so many plants to grow, and many of them don’t. My roses these days, for example, seem generally miserable. Every few days I’m spraying foliar spray and neem oil and organic anti-insect soap and fungicide to keep at bay the myriad things wreaking havoc on the sorry looking foliage. They don’t get enough sun, I know. The trees outside our house fill in more each year, blocking more, for longer. I dreamed about this a few weeks ago–my roses were unhappy and I had to prepare to uproot them all to move to a sunnier location, a steep (but requisite) price to pay for a better long term chance at flourishing. Definitely no metaphors there.
For my actual roses, it may be a losing battle, but not one I willingly cede. I will keep pulling off yellow leaves, keep destroying the spider mites and sawfly larvae turning the leaves to swiss cheese. I keep supplying nutrients, top the soil with fresh compost, cover with mulch to conserve water. I keep pruning dead growth and checking for new growth. And I spy, today, a hint of new bright red new growth on my devastated Oklahoma rose. Out back, there’s a big healthy flush of new green on the Arctic Rose. It’s like a rainbow after the storm; they can recover, all is not lost.
But still, hard work. And yet, these volunteers just pop up willy nilly, wherever they please, outside of my plan and control but offering me their bounty nonetheless.
At the far corner of the top left bed there’s even a volunteer potato plant, happily sending up foliage. I root around underneath and pull out 4-5 small purple potatoes, a bigger crop than my entire potato bags last year. How does a creature of the underground arise as a volunteer on my upper deck garden bed?
I harvest the potatoes, some Japanese red mustard greens, mint. Treat as scallions the greens of the shallots, a solid harvest of which is now braided and drying on the back deck. My garden supplies a good portion of a pasta dinner, eaten in the calm hour after kids are in bed, some part me, some part luck, some part grace.
