Nap Day!

Editor’s Note: there’s a backlog of material from earlier in the year I haven’t gotten to finishing up yet, but I’m finally home after a long season of travel, and it felt right to write about what I’ve just been doing. Expect to see more of the early spring make an appearance in the weeks to come.

May 9, 2022

It’s the day I’ve been dreaming about for weeks. All spring, I’ve told anyone with the endurance to listen to me prattle on about how we accidentally planned four trips to run nearly consecutively from mid-March to early May (five, if you count the impromptu road trip for kids’ mid-winter break in mid-February), stacked up like ill-fitting Tetris blocks with intense work deadlines and events, and tax season to boot. It was set to end with two solid weeks of my work events and travel. I’ve been fantasizing about how on May 9, finally done with all the movement, packing, deadlines and hustle, I would take the day off, and, kids safely ensconced at school and daycare, collapse into bed for a mega-nap.

It is May 9! Nap day! 

Except, I haven’t napped, I’ve gardened. Physically, this is the opposite of napping. You don’t look at ladies in the garden puttering about the rose bushes and think, wow, physical fitness queens! But don’t knock it til you try it. All that shoveling dirt and hoisting heavy bags and kneeling, stretching, bending–it makes me sore in ways a HIIT workout can’t. 

This weekend was also Mothers’ Day, time for my traditional gift of free time for the garden based manual labor of my choice, as well as a selective looking the other way when I overdo it on plant purchases. I can track the development of portions of my garden to Mothers’ Days of years past. There was the year I spent hundreds of dollars at the wonderland that was Behnke’s (RIP), my first foray into setting up a garden in our then-new house. The year my own mother helped me plant my first over-the-rail planters for our front porch, filled with stunningly color coordinated herbs and perennials. The first year of Covid, when a bunch of plants from an online plant sale were delivered to my front porch just in time, and spent the day shoveling compost into terrible soil in a part of our neighbors’ yard and populating it with colorful annuals. The next year I extended my efforts to the far side of their yard, marveling at how much nicer the soil had already become on the side I’d worked the year before. And every year I swoon over some neighbors’ gorgeous peonies, which tend to open up at just this time of year, like God intended them as a Mothers’ Day gift. And for the past few years my husband has not only tolerated, but downright encouraged me to expand our own growing peony garden, even digging the holes. 

This year, I had no selection of hand-delivered plants to find homes for, but a long chore list: 

• Soak beans
• Buy annuals
• Buy bone meal and rose fertilizer 
• Supplement raised beds
• Weed
• Fertilize potatoes
• Move rose
• Fertilize roses
• Plant beans
• Plant annuals
• Buy tomatoes
• Buy peppers
• Plant tomatoes
• Plant peppers

Ok, woman. Too much for one day. But that’s OK, because it’s Mother’s Day weekend AND my special kids-at-school-day-off day! I don’t need to limit my ambitions! I can buy plants AND plant them!

The adventure begins Friday, when I drive my three year old through a misty drizzle to Ace Hardware. We nab fertilizer and pick out a flat of new plants before the declaration, “Mama, I have to pea!” cuts short the plant frenzy. A parent disregards such an announcement at her peril. Just as we head to the door with our haul, the drizzle suddenly opens into an intense downpour. But she’s got to pee, so I zip up my raincoat, leave her with a kindly Ace employee and instructions to stay put, and dash to my car with an armful of plants. As I finish loading, Mr. Ace opens an umbrella and bravely escorts her to her car seat. Even with the gear, we’re both dripping–but at least it’s rain, not pee. We make it home intact.

Saturday I collect some tomato plants from the farmers’ market and order some plants from Gurney’s to further expand into the neighbor’s yard (all with permission, of course). But it rains steadily all day, so there’s little to be done outside but wait. During morning snuggles, which I’d been looking forward to for two weeks I’d been away with work, my cruise-director daughter presents me a list of her own aspirations: we can read books, play a game, paint, watch soccer, have smoothies, have sweet treats…OK? OK!

In the morning we cover the first half the list. After our son’s rainy kindergarten soccer match–four a side, no subs!–we change into dry, cozy clothes and watch ten minutes of a Boca Jr. match before kids get bored and we switch to a movie. I make them smoothies and hot chocolate, served with slices of cake. It’s exactly what they wanted, and it’s perfect for at least a half hour before they start going crazy and we’re counting down the minutes til they can go to bed.

Sunday I have good weather and soft, compliant soil to work with. Which works well, as I’ve decided to move one of my nice Heirloom Rose roses. It is too far back along the fence, covered by those darn peonies. You never really realize how big peonies will get by May; back in March you couldn’t even see them, and in April they were just a few stalks sticking their noses out. But now they’re totally cutting off light and air circulation for my Purple Plum. I consult some rose websites, and the general conclusion is: if you need to move a rose for rose-health reasons, do it now. It is a little scary airlifting the plant; I can’t dig in far enough to get around all the roots and some of the longer strands definitely get torn in the process. I hope in its new, better suited home for a long warm season it has plenty of room to replenish the root networks I’ve just disturbed. It might not be a good year for this rose, but biting the bullet and moving it now is probably the best way to make it a good year in the future. I guess you could apply this lesson to anything: when well-being requires a costly change, better to get it over with and be on a better trajectory sooner.

I get up close with the roses in preparation for fertilizing and things aren’t looking great. There’s black spot on a few of the leaves, per usual. Two of the roses have branches that look like they’re dying in real time, leaves curling into a fetal dried position from the outside in, and some leaves on the climbing rose seem dusted with powdered mildew. There are some deformed rosebuds–I don’t know what from–and one or two rosebuds-in-process have been snapped clean off by a wild creature or careless human. I even see some dreaded bright orange spots on the back of a few leaves, like my kid did a tiny Jackson Pollock with fluorescent paint. Rust! It’s oddly beautiful, but devastating for the plant. All these nasty fungal diseases are a constant menace for roses here; look it up and you’ll see the diseases thrive in “cool, wet, humid climates.” Textbook DC til it gets hot and humid, sometime in June. For now, the particularly long, cool, wet spring we’ve had would have been great for lettuce, had mine not been consumed by a raccoon, but it’s awful for roses. Roses would rather live in Arizona. 

At least the specialty ones I insist on growing. Sure, there are hardy, black spot resistant varietals. The neighborhood is filled with big bushes of the fuschia-red year-round blooming Knockout rose. But it doesn’t look good in a vase. I’m not here to create a hedge that looks nice from a distance, I want something that stuns at close-range, the fat fluffy blooms of Jude the Obscure, the gorgeous purple ruffles of Angel Face. I’m going to brave the garden diseases and sub-optimal conditions and solider on, doing what I can to rage against the blackspotting of the leaves and cherishing the blooms I do manage to eke out. 

In any event, noticing developing issues like this early is one nice payoff of frequent walks through the garden. The rust isn’t widespread yet, and I make the rounds, meticulously cutting off anything that isn’t healthy, trimming leaves here and there, and in some cases, sacrificing a whole cane. Better a smaller, healthy rose than cancerous spread. Same lesson, different application.

Having subtracted anything that looks sick, I follow with an application of fertilizer, then a good spray of fungicide and neem oil, crossing my fingers that this and more sun to come will keep the fungus at bay. There are so many things that can keep a rose from growing. And yet, every year at least some still do.

All long-weekend long, there’s weeding, a gardener’s constant companion. When you do it regularly, it is a kind of pleasant mindless chore, a saunter through the garden with the occasional bend and snap. I have thick beds of mulch in most places so weeding isn’t bad, but something always needs removing. I’m not the most careful of sowers, and enjoy allowing the sporadic surprise volunteer to make its way, so the hardest part is trying to avoid I pulling things that might turn out to be a friend. I’ve started using a plant identification app, which confidently informs me which of the weed-like clusters are actually poppy seedlings that beat the survival of the fittest odds from those I scattered before that first December snowfall. Poppy foliage looks particularly weedy and I probably would have yanked them out without the app’s help. 

It’s fun to learn the names of the plants I reject–after all, a weed is just a plant where it isn’t supposed to be: Virginia pepperweed! (not unlike poppy leaves, but not a poppy and not what I’m trying to cultivate – OUT!) Spiny sowthistle. (Same deal.) Smooth hakwsbeard. (Same deal! Poppy foliage really doesn’t look like something you would try to grow on purpose. If I get any flowers, I’ll have this app to thank for it.) Treacle mustard. (Sounds like an aspirational special at a British pub). Spanish needles, shepherd’s purse, creeping thistle, Japanese spindletree. All kinds of plants appearing in my soil, as if by magic, and none of them the ones I want to grow. One even turns out to be a baby crepe myrtle, fallen and grown from the tree above! 

Out they go, on goes more mulch, and a few hours in, the garden is looking tidy again. On the advice of gardening book my sister-in-law recommended, Build Your Soil (exactly what it sounds like), I use the weeds themselves, at least those without seed pods–and at this point in the year there many seeds–as mulch or compost, returning them to nurture the soil that produced them. I don’t have the tools to calculate whether or how this actually benefits the soil, but it is less work. And while this is only a part of the story, each year I notice the soil I’ve been tending grow increasingly rich, transforming from the thick, sticky clay I started with. 

I’ve soaked beans overnight, and will plant the pole beans in our back yard and bush beans on the upper decks. After I prep the soil, that is: sift compost, amend the soil, backfill the bed that are running low. Planting the beans takes just a minute, but getting the soil ready to receive it takes an hour. The beans have the most evocative, tragic names: Dragon’s Tongue. Good Mother Stellard. Cherokee Trail of Tears. Contender. Slippery Silks. Will the beans be as delicious as the names? I wonder if in the stew pot they’ll even taste distinctive. Maybe not, but there’s still serious pleasure in selecting, dispersing and eventually harvesting the wide range of colors and shapes. You eat with your eyes, too. 

I ordered enough beans that Baker Creek throws in a free pack, a new kind of mizuna. It has long, spindly stems in a shocking pink, and fringey leaves delicate enough to eat raw, or cook like any of the hearty greens. Another variety I planted last year grew like wavy hedges of feathers. I cover our old blueberry bed, which didn’t get enough sun for the bushes (just like my mother-in-law always warns me!) with rows of the seeds and wonder what will come of it.

What else? There’s always more to be done. May 9, my supposed rest day, and I still need to finish planting beans, plant the Ace Hardware haul, get my Earth Boxes ready for tomatoes and peppers. The summer plants will have to wait, but the over-the-rail boxes get stuffed with new annuals and the whole garden generally looks cheery. Now it’s almost time for the kids to come home. Time to stop working and nap before I miss my chance.