Advice From a Humble Gardener

The trick to hand-weeding a fifteen-foot stretch of overgrowth between the raised beds of your garden is to keep your head down and deal just with what’s in front of you. The catmint, quack grass, edible and plentiful plantain and purslane will all bend to your will if you don’t cast your eyes down the long expanse of All That Is Still Left To Pull. Once that happens, the siren call of a cool kitchen and iced tea is stronger that the weeds’ roots themselves. Ye be warned, my friends.

It also helps not to face the sun or expect the cats to offer any assistance. They’ll pounce and gambol about, chasing the seeded end of that clump of tenacious annual bluegrass that missed the garden cart when you tossed it over your shoulder, but not even try to put it in a tidy pile with all the other near misses when they’re done playing with it. They’re cute and absolutely the opposite of useful to your gardening ambitions (enjoy them anyway).

I remember a summer when my dear friend Rhonda came to visit. I was sick and she offered to hand-weed the old potato patch to help me keep up on my list of outdoor chores. Patrick was well away at Sundance and not expected home for about two weeks. Rhonda confessed to thoroughly enjoying pulling weeds and I stayed out of her way. She did a marvelous job and then moved onto cleaning the chicken coop while I napped. I remember the joy on her face and have carried that image into each gardening project ever since. She’s welcome here anytime.

There was another summer when my niece Rebecca took on the entire 20 x 40’ rectangular tangle of weediness on her hands and knees, looking for the onions and chard patiently hiding beneath a shaggy carpet of nutsedge, bindweed and Canada thistle that you just don’t want to approach with your bare hands. Her sunblock must have given out about an hour into the endeavor; she’s fair-skinned and a trooper but looked like a blond-headed strawberry by lunchtime. I gave her the afternoon off and a full day’s pay while the burdock kept reaching for the sky. That’s what burdock does.

By now, some of you may be wondering if we know what a weed whip is or how to use one. The answer is “yes” to both, but they’re finicky gas-powered things and not as reliable as my own two hands. Plus, you can’t hear the mockingbirds’ encouragement from the shagbark hickories on the ridge to the west of the garden’s edge with all that whirring and buzzing going on just inches from your bare ankles. Most years, we don’t let things get so out of control as to need such equipment to tame the garden wilderness. On those occasions, Patrick will yank the pull-start cord for all it’s worth, felling nettles and pokeweed like a logger. I follow him around with a rake and a grateful smile, a firm resolve to do better in future.

But no matter how you slice them, weeds will return, laughing and pointing at our folly with their ever-uncurling fingers, giving us constant employment as gardeners and path-tenders well past the season’s harvest. I show up each week like a devout church-goer, on my knees, head bowed to purpose and inching my way toward tomato salvation.

Can I get an “Amen”, people?

Enough.

When will we grow tired of burying our children?

Filling the bullet holes in their skin with wax, tinted to match their tender coloring (almost, but not quite the same…not ever the same) before calling hours begin?

When will we no longer need to hold their sobbing parents whose knees give way beneath shock’s weight?

I will not elect cowards who care more deeply about power and position than a child’s future, a parent’s sleep not interrupted by the nightmare of grief.

I will not vote for those who shrink from their moral duty, whose hands are forever stained with the blood of small futures that will never get to be big.

Our hearts are emptied of all their tears, eye sockets dry, blinking without relief.

Throats hoarse once again with the cry
”Enough!” “Enough…”

Enough…

When?

Today. Now.

ENOUGH.

Betting Against the Sky

The shifting orange and red mass on my phone’s weather app crawled menacingly closer to the pulsing blue dot that marked our place on the map of those areas doomed by the approaching band of storms. The description was grim: 60mph wind gusts, quarter-sized hail, power outages and downed tree limbs, take shelter immediately.

I headed outside to hang a load of laundry.

We had decided to come straight home after the market instead of meandering around the city, warm containers of phad Thai carryout in hand, having our usual post-market date. The weather guessers kept changing their predictions throughout the morning, pushing the expected storms from early evening back to late morning, then to maybe mid-afternoon. What did they care? They wouldn’t have to wrestle a 10’ canopy into a soggy ripstop nylon carrying case and heft folding tables into the back of a pick-up truck between showers. Patrick made fun and casual conversation with our customers, offering odds on when the day’s fortunes would shift from dry to wet. While several insisted the storms would arrive at three p.m., he held fast to the hour of five o’clock, dismissing the little cloud-with-rain icon next to 11 a.m. time slot on the app’s hourly tracking display. We packed up at noon under hazy skies, dug a bag of vanilla chai granola from one of the totes for a last-minute customer and pointed the truck toward home. Fifteen miles out, Patrick announced he was going to cut the grass.

I hope it’s not arrogant of us to test the grand and natural scheme of things with our piddly little household and land chores. We have no misconceptions about Who is in charge of such things and arrange our work accordingly. With our heads bowed, we try to think of it as planning ahead while living a bit close to the edge, where sensible meets reckless. We can hang laundry inside, thanks to a retractable clothesline installed in the upstairs guestroom, but the hot sun and increasingly strong winds almost begged to help dry and iron the clothes we would wear to work in the week ahead. I couldn’t resist as I kept one eye on the kitchen clock and the other on the skies. Storms have skirted around us before; anything was possible. In the distance, I heard the mower slicing an even three inches off the walking paths and open field east of the ridge. Patrick was having a ball.

Laundry hung and blowing parallel to the ground, I took a seat in one of our green reproduction vintage metal lawn chairs on the front porch just under the overhang to watch the unfolding show. Thick, dark gray clouds from the southwest were swallowing the blue skies in great gulps and I could see the silver backs of every leaf on the cottonwoods that stood in their creek bank sentry positions. Just a few hours ago we were on a patch of hot asphalt, handing out samples and wiping our brows between sales (in one exciting moment, a gust of wind slid our canopy, sand weights and all, a good six inches across the parking lot and nearly into the neighboring artisan cheese vendor’s stand; Patrick grabbed the canopy’s metal framing overhead as two market patrons passing by ran to steady the metal poles. See? People are still good and want to help). Unmoving and peaceful now in my perch on the deck, I closed my eyes as a sister wind mussied my hair, thunder rolling and rumbling in the distance. The droning of the mower’s motor was fading as Patrick cut deeper into the meadow and toward the fields near the woods.

When I moved from my chair to the deck’s wooden steps so I could put my bare feet on the freshly cut grass, I felt the tiniest of raindrops land on my arms. An hour had passed since I hung the laundry; might be wise to check it, but no rush. Warm spring days are meant to be savored. I strolled leisurely past the flowerbed in front of the living room windows on my way to the clothesline behind the house, noticing that the bleeding hearts were finishing up their sweet pink and white blooms for the year and the bloodroots beneath the maple had no intention of going anywhere soon. More drops of rain. I took my time plucking the damp clothes from the line, balanced the wicker basket on my hip and headed upstairs in complete disobedience to the “touch nothing twice” rule of work efficiency. Most of the clothes were in dry and foldable condition (thank you, Wind and Sun).

I found my place back in that metal chair on the front deck as flashes of lightning lit up an ever-darkening sky. The sound of the mower grew slightly but not reassuringly closer as the rain increased, filling in the dry patches on the wooden planks. Patrick cuts the grass will full ear protection over ear buds that deliver one of his favorite podcasts or playlists. I’m sure he could feel the rain on his bare forearms but wasn’t confident that he heard the thunder or noticed the lightning. One large BOOM! later, and the sound of the mower grew louder as Patrick came quickly into view from around the back of the house, racing (responsibly) toward the open door of the barn. He made it to the shelter of the deck just as the skies opened up, drenching the grass clippings and launching the cats from their hidden positions in the weeds beneath the bird feeders. Before we could comment, three cracks of lightning punched the sky with simultaneous cannon shots of thunder. If the windows had shattered, we wouldn’t have been surprised.

The hands of the kitchen wall clock sat comfortably at 4:45pm.

Well played, Patrick. Well played.

What Spring Does to an Open Heart

In the back of the Tacoma last Friday, two Black Tartarian cherry saplings rested on their sides, their tender slender trunks crossing each other as I took the last corners of the ride home more gently than I usually do. Here we are, twenty-three years later on this generous and patient piece of land, finally planting fruit trees. I don’t know what we were waiting for. A peach tree will soon join these two in the cut field to the east, where we used to pasture our meat chickens in the years when we had that kind of time.

Spring gets us all riled up and we foolishly reach beyond our capacity with wild dreams about that Country Living photoshoot of a garden, only to wind up with bindweed climbing the t-posts that barely hold up the orange snow fencing around the tomatoes and beets. We’re suckers for this season and she knows it, smiling indulgently upon our ferocious weeding sessions, all the while carrying on some secret arrangement with the stickseed and sumac shoots lurking just beneath the soil. We laugh together about it all and shake our heads, wondering when we’ll learn our lesson (so far, the answer to that is a resounding “never”). We know that fruit trees need a sort of semi-constant surveillance and some babying at the start, and we are motivated by the thought of our first cherry harvest to get us off the couch to cover them with netting when the first fruits appear. With summer approaching, I’m even considering pitching a tent to keep watch through the night.

My uncle’s recent gift of about forty tulip bulbs, descendants of my Opa’s collection that he meticulously tended during the last century, has me swooning and focused on their daily safety and welfare, the closest I’ll ever come to raising children (except for the cats, but they can live outdoors for days and no one will call the local authorities on us). I planted exactly ten on the northern edge of the new potato patch (still waiting for potatoes) and have seven left. Someone with paws or hooves neatly removed three of them in the night, not even trying to backfill the holes with any dirt. Three of the remaining seven have either bloomed or are about to burst forth in all their parrot-variety glory. It’s all I can do to not call in sick for work and camp out to witness that moment.

The other thirty are growing nicely in front of an old railroad tie that borders the mulched flowerbed in front of our living room windows. As if signaling some numerical significance, three of these stand in full bloom, lemon drop-yellow cups atop bright green stems. They are perfect and I can’t stop smiling at them. Only yesterday I noticed that the petals had begun to turn orange-y red on the edges and this morning, one is fully blushing with random red streaks (probably all that attention she’s getting…not used to it, I suppose). I remember reading in an “all things tea” magazine that tulip blooms are edible, and a photo display showed a tray of robust red and yellow ones filled with tarragon chicken salad. The accompanying article reassured the reader that the taste would be bland or at least delicate and I found the presentation quite elegant. But I’m not sure I could ever eat one…it feels too extravagant and I’m simply not done admiring them as they are yet. Maybe if I had a field full, I’d feel differently. I’ll keep you posted.

In other springtime land news, the morning walks are leading me to an eventual summer, as evidenced by the increasing number of silken spiderweb strands that crisscross my face as I make my way up the Hill on the western path that is quickly becoming its customary tunnel of green—sycamore and black walnut saplings entwined with voracious brambles. A spider’s real estate dream, every thorn an anchor for that first thread and once they get a-going, it won’t be long before I walk straight into a full-spoked spun wonder that will keep me blinking rapidly (and pointlessly, for nothing adheres to one’s lashes better than spider silk) until I get to the open field again. Most mornings it’s me and my two walking sticks but on occasion, I get this ambitious idea that I can singlehandedly free up each tree from its tangle of blackberry and grapevines on the strength of two swallows of rooibus tea and a pair of lopers. If I just did one each morning, the woods would be un-brambled by August. Yeah, right. I hear the distant laughter of some wiser and sentient being who seems eager for a front row seat to such folly. Of course I’ll oblige them and a good time will be had by all. We signed off on that agreement twenty-three years ago.

As the day’s agenda stretches out before us (and some of it already in the rearview mirror—three trays of granola cooling in the fridge, awaiting a late afternoon bagging and restocking session for the market), I fully expect more of this delicious season to work its way under my skin and fingernails until I’m all entwined like a sycamore sapling.

I hope no one with lopers thinks I need to be freed up anytime soon.