When the Rain Barrels are Empty, It's Better Than a Hose

There are inevitable compromises.  I would prefer a garden that stands free and unfettered, diligently if inelegantly carved from the prairie.  Nibbling rabbits and grazing deer, however, necessitate a fence if we are to harvest anything at all.

I would prefer that the emerging stems and spreading leaves simply have the freedom to grow unmolested.  Last year's holocaust wrought by invading beetles, aphids and miscellaneous worms convinced me that some defensive, albeit organic, measures were in order.  

I would prefer to simply cut the soil and sow the seeds and let nature do the rest.  Heat and drought and unpredictable rains, however, mean some hose time is inevitable.  The rain barrels, after all, can only hold so much. Last year that "only so much" was exhausted in a matter of days, meaning the hose and I got very well acquainted -- a hundred feet of it plus a spray nozzle, row by row by 40-something rows.  This year, then, I compromised yet again.  Surely there is nothing particularly salvific about standing there for hours holding a hose and guiding a spray.  Surely my time could be better and more productively spent if water could be delivered a more automatic, less mind-numbing way.  I could do something else...like weed or...perhaps even read...or write.

This spring, then, with the kind assistance of a patient retailer who listened to my description of what I thought I wanted and morphed it into what he could tell I actually needed, I became the proud owner of a drip irrigation kit.  Consistent -- even excessive -- rainfall gave me permission to avoid opening the box (these sorts of mechanical forays not being my forte) until recent days.  To my surprise and relief, assembly and installation turned out to be simple...and successful.  This, with only minor grimacing, jabs into that, with the strip of the drip tape rolled out into the trenches and tied off at the ends.  As of today, both sides of the garden are outfitted and, with a simple quick-release of the hose to shift between the two, the entirety can be effortlessly slaked while I go about my business.

There is, of course, yet another compromise.  All this tubing laying around makes it precarious to mow between the trenches.  Alas, nothing is completely easy.

This is, after all, a garden.

Dinner as an Exercise in Partnering

There is something inherently winsome about filling your dinner plate with food that you have grown.  And suddenly that is easier to do.  The lettuce has been looking for an appreciative audience for a couple of weeks now; the squashes and tomatoes are just beginning to offer themselves.  We snipped spinach and kale and chard last night for the first time, and plucked several peppers along with a single prickly cucumber.  All that, and it is clearly just getting started. It's as though the garden has taken a cue from the marketing slogan used by my beloved Blue Bell Ice Cream made at that "little creamery in Brenham, TX" -- "Eat all you want; we'll make more."  The miscellaneous bushes and vines are industriously making more.

It's time to dig the garlic.  The potatoes and carrots are well underway, and the okra is beginning to come on -- miniature spears, at this point, that in no time will be finger-long and aching for the skillet.  And the tomatoes are taunting -- heavy orbs sagging the branches, tenaciously green and aloof; indifferently, or perhaps defiantly waiting for their day.

But that day will come, and it will have been a partnership.  Nature will have done the lion's share, of course, but I have done my part -- seeding, warming, watering and lighting; transplanting and transplanting and tying and and protecting.  And watching.  Of that I have done more than my share.  Watching and waiting and tasting in my sleep.  Once upon a time, I have read, the seeds grew wild and free -- independent and reckless.  The fields were a salad bowl; the ditches were a tray; fence rows trellised whatever the birds had planted.  But with our domestication of the varieties has come a certain dependence.  They need us if they are to productively grow.  Which is only appropriate since is becoming more and more plain that we need them to productively thrive.

Clumsily, then, I'll do my part -- at least the parts I know to do while hopefully stumbling onto the rest of things I need to do.  I will feed them in the trust that they, in turn, will return the favor.  Thus far, I think, I am getting the better end of the deal.  I can't wait to see what will be ready for dinner tonight.

Remembering to Enjoy the Fruits of the Labors

It has, after all, been busy.  I won't go into the details but it has been hard enough just keeping up with the basics -- mowing, trimming, weeding and the like.  Blessedly, periodic rain showers have thus far taken irrigation off the task list, and so far the bugs have kept their distance.  Still, attentions have been squeezed.  Some key opportunities have been overlooked -- like enjoying the fruits of my labor.  There is lettuce that needs cutting and consuming.  Spinach is almost ready to enjoy, and the radishes -- planted quite late as something of an after-thought -- are swelling pink above ground.   I spotted a juvenile cucumber yesterday, and any day one or another of the squash varieties will push itself from blossom to bulge.  I will need to keep more careful watch.  Harvest, after all, is the point of it all.

That said, we plucked our first "Egg Yolk" tomato from the vine on the deck last evening -- bright yellow and  bite-sized -- and slurped down its heavenly first-of-the-season sweetness before I could even take a picture of it.  More are mustering their colors.

It's time to commence some seriously savored eating!

So I need to start paying better attention, and better organizing time.  The garlic planted last fall was the first to show its foliage, and I have been mindful of the graceful scapes spiraling from their centers for several days now.  But it has stood their bereft and ignored -- an inexplicably low priority.

Until this morning.

Dripping from the exertion of some post driving in the humid heat and late for an appointment in town, I was hurriedly closing up the shed when the scapes, in the back of the garden, waved their hands like eager school children imploring the teacher to "pick me; pick me."  And so I did.  Retrieving the knife I had set aside for precisely this purpose, I slashed my way down one row, then another.  There are more to cut -- there was time for but two of the seven rows -- but it's begun.

And tonight there will be garlic pesto to show for it.

You'll want to keep your distance --unless, of course, you are hungry.

It's Only Excessive If You Keep it All

I suppose I should take it as a compliment.  After all, the stretching stems and healthy leaves look beautiful -- and tasty -- to me.  The rogue rabbit or two breaching the defenses have long since weighed in with their opinion.  But last evening, while enjoying dinner in the sunroom overlooking the garden, Lori spotted a deer -- first on one side of the fence, then beside the garden shed, and before long inside the fence.  I have known from the outset that my flimsy little fence represented precious little defense -- more of a comfort to me than a deterrent to anything that really wanted in.  And deer had explored the garden space all winter.  This, however, was the first encroachment of which I have been aware during growing season.

I am perhaps over-zealous.  Down the road from us just a little way is a farmhouse with a nice size garden situated between the house and the vast acres of crop rows.  Wide open; not a stick of anything erected to keep anything away.  It is the portrait of horticultural hospitality -- as if to broadcast, "come and get it; supper's almost ready."  From the looks of the house and the field and the garden itself, they have been at it considerably longer than I have, and quite likely know something I do not about the vicissitudes of garden sharing.  Maybe it is the drift of pesticide from the fields nearby at which the rodents and rabbits and deer turn up their noses.  Maybe it is a corollary to the ancient parenting wisdom that "kids" only want what they can't have, and are completely disinterested in that which is freely available.  Or perhaps they have a rifle perched in the window.  I'll be watching through the season to see what I can observe.

We, on the other hand, sprang into action -- Lori first, flying out the door to the deck to clap her hands and speak a loud and discouraging word.  Ex-principals are good at that sort of thing.  The deer paused its culinary survey, returned Lori a sullen stare, and finally obliged -- leaping from a standing start and effortlessly clearing the fence, then sauntering without concern into the woods.

No doubt to return sometime after dark.

Perhaps, as with the poison ivy that has begun to trouble us, it is a not-so-subtle reminder that we are not in charge here.  We share this place with nature -- which, of course, was something of the point of moving here.  We co-exist -- sometimes happily, sometimes bucolically, sometimes symbiotically, and as just now, sometimes competitively.  The challenge, I suspect, is less about prevailing -- "winning" in any conventional sense -- and more about adapting; finding here, even in the garden, some expression of common space.

As I have confessed from the beginning:  I don't "know" anything about what I am doing out here -- other than this humbling recognition of how much I need to know.  I was prepared for the books and the mentors and the internet and seed packets to teach me.  It hadn't occurred to me that the wildlife would take their turn at the podium as well.

Perhaps that's the real reason I have planted excessively:  because I will need to share.

Prayer at the Roots of the Row

There is something almost prayerful about weeding.  The posture bears more than a passing resemblance -- down on knees, head slightly bowed.  And like the most enduring of those spiritual disciplines weeding is methodical, repetitious, and centering.  The world, for all its complicated grandeur, shrinks to the size of this one blade of grass that must be extricated in the name of purity.  In fact, purity is the prevailing value and the guiding rubric.  Only the intended is permitted to stay -- although I have come to a better appreciation of the biblical parable's resistance to separating the weeds from the wheat too hastily because of likely mis-identification.  Last year I was ruthless in this regard, tugging out any frilly green wisp that didn't immediately announce its identity as an almost certain interloper.  Which is another way of admitting that I unwittingly uprooted lots of nascent carrots and beets and beans.  This season I have tried to re-calibrate a bit, practicing a measure more of patience, and extending the grace period of ambiguity.  I remind myself that Nature doesn't weed clear rows.  This is required to grow alongside That, companion planting before it was popular.

Of course not everything survives the competition.  As Tennyson rightly noted, nature is "red in tooth and claw" -- an observation as true in the soil as in the forest or the city.  A Darwinian ruthlessness plays itself out among roots and microbes competing for space, for moisture, for nutrients, for light and life.  But there are synergies, and occasionally simple detente.

In prayer, then, and in gardening there is a benevolently careful discernment of what belongs and what interferes; what needs protective nurture and encouragement and what requires excisive action.

de·rac·i·nate  (d-rs-nt)

tr.v. de·rac·i·nat·ed, de·rac·i·nat·ing, de·rac·i·nates

1. To pull out by the roots; uproot.

2. To displace from one's native or accustomed environment.

That, it seems to me, is the work of life -- figuring out what oughtt to stay and what must be deracinated and rid.

And so begins my days in this season of indiscriminate growth -- knee-bound, attentively imposing a little prayerful discrimination on my garden rows...

...and myself.

So far the lettuce appears the richer for it.

Set Free -- or at least Set Out

Just last Sunday the Children’s Sermon featured a small bicycle with training wheels, and focused on the guiding and protective care of parents who must eventually detach those extra wheels.  For just over 10 weeks now I have been tending seedlings in the greenhouse -- managing, as best I could, the temperature and moisture and light.  Some withered under my ministrations, but most grew in stature and depth and girth.  This week I finally got them into the ground -- tomatoes and peppers, cucumbers and eggplants, lettuces and herbs plus a flower or two.  Over the past week I had been spreading and covering the seeds, but these toddler plants I continued to nurture and protect in their controlled environment.  

But they had begun to chaff at their confinement.  Stems and leaves that only days ago had looked vibrant and virile now seemed to languish in their cells -- not quite wilting, but despondent; as though weary from running into walls.  I am not so old that I couldn't remember the feeling.  It was time to kick them out of the nest.  

By week’s end they had all been transplanted -- freed from their cups and given over to their innate capacities.  And all the good and evil that await them.

The depths of soil.

The movement of wind.

The nourishment of rain.

The crowding and predations of other creatures struggling to survive.

The training wheels are off.  Foreshadowing the inevitable bumps and scrapes, pea-sized hail peppered that first exposed evening.  Yesterday we chased out an interloping rabbit, and this morning the thunder is slinging down the rain -- the first of several days of forecasted rain. Who knows if it will prove too much?

Gardening is a lot like parenting I have heard others say -- the intrinsic tension between protecting and setting free -- and I feel that conflicted twinge of parental apprehension.  There is, after all, a certain security in the greenhouse, but those 2-inch birthing boxes do not lend themselves to bearing fruit.  They can't stay protected --confined -- forever.

And now it is accomplished.  There is still a part for me to play -- weeding, trussing, feeding on occasion and managing the moisture -- but the real work, moving forward, is up to them.  Any fruit will be up to them, and the growing season is barely begun.

Outside, the plants already look somehow healthier; stronger, despite the perils of their first days in the elements -- or because of them.  It’s too early to know what is happening with the seeds, but as for the seedlings, the transplanted children of winter nurture, they -- we -- are off to a good start.

Just a Little Help Loosening Up

Though there hasn’t been measurable precipitation now in several days, my work boots kicked up sprays of dew trudging out to the garden early this morning.  Days have been warming, but the nights remain cool and heavy.  That, and the ground is saturated.  it has been difficult to get much cultivating done this year in preparation for the seedlings and seeds.  Perhaps it was the last gasp of winter, last week’s bonus snow fall, but I'll not wager too heavily on that “last” part. It’s not even Mother’s Day; who knows what yet could meteorologically happen?  As some measure of my optimism, however, I did return the snow shovel yesterday to its hook in the garage. 

Anxious to seize this interruption of good weather, I grabbed the broad-fork and opened the fence.  I had managed to till several of the trenches last week before the weather reverted, but there is still much to do.  I concentrated yesterday's available time on mixing up and distributing the organic fertilizer.  Today more muscles would be required.  After bumping into descriptions and recommendations in my readings for over a year now, this winter I took the plunge and ordered my own broad-fork -- a very old, perhaps even ancient, completely manual farming implement designed to deeply loosen the soil.  With its two sturdy handles and claw-like tines, the tool reaches down 14-inches, well below the churning capacity of a power tiller without turning the soil’s basic architecture into a homogenized soup like the tiller. 

But did I mention that it is completely manual?  As in its only power comes from the upper body of the user.  So, in other words, it’s work.  Basic, old-fashioned, physical work -- the kind that makes you sleep well at night, at least after the ibuprofen has kicked in. 

But I rather enjoy the effort.  I can see what I have accomplished, I can comprehend and appreciate the intended value, and it feels at least symbolically like, with all this loosening, I am doing something redemptive.  After all, the whole world is uptight, not just my garden.  Neighbors and families, faith communities and governing bodies -- indeed whole nations -- have become so hyper-sphinctered it’s no wonder we pinball through our days intellectually and emotionally and morally and politically and militarily flipping and colliding without ever really connecting.  We are packed and wound so tight.

A couple of hours later and I have forked all but six of my garden rows.  There is much more work to do, but though I have more time, my strength is spent.  Washing the accumulated mud from the tines, I feel some satisfaction at the good I have contributed and the potential for growth and fruit I have encouraged, sore muscles notwithstanding.  And prying off my dew-wet boots to go inside, I can't help wondering what the broad-fork equivalent might be for Congress and the rest of us who could similarly use a little loosening up.