More Than Meets the Eye

Hidden gems.

 

Ever since the hailstorm rained destruction on our garden in late June, we have repaired what we could, pulled up what we couldn’t, and valiantly hoped for the best.  For the most part, our hopes have fared better than our expectations.  Squash plants and chard – the broadleafed bullseyes of the storm – resiliently revived, as numerous recent mealtimes can attest.  Our coolers are jammed with beets and turnips unfazed by the battering, and early evidence portends a bumper potato crop in the making.  We’ve harvested enough garlic to keep all of Transylvania “vampire free”, and the broccoli, kohlrabi and peppers are well on their way with downpayments on future harvests already in hand.  

 

Tomatoes, however, incurred a more enduring setback.  Though most of the plants survived in various states of woundedness, the fruit that was already maturing on the vines was knocked to the ground or pocked into disfigurement.  Gratefully, more have come along to whet our anticipation, but the few we have brought in, reddened and ripened, wear their scars.  “The spirit is willing,” the old saying tells the truth of it, “but the flesh is weak.”  We have passed the subsequent weeks trimming off broken branches, clipping to trellises drooping ones, scavenging for beans and zucchinis and the occasional pepper, and weeding.  

 

Weeding, indeed.  The hail occasioned scant interruption for the purslane, miscellaneous grasses and intrusively choking “this and thats” which, if evidence is to be counted, found the onslaught stimulating, even vivifying.  Row by row we have worked our way from one end, across the center aisle into the next section, and then the next before arriving this morning at the final row, bordering the easterly fenceline.  It was, after all, the least urgent – occupied by the newer asparagus plants that have long since completed their springtime flourish.  It turns out, however, that the asparagus was not alone.

 

Lost amidst the overgrowth was a volunteer tomato plant, an echo of last year’s crop.  Deprived of a cage or a trellis, its vines were left to meander among the grasses…

hidden; 

held; 

sheltered; 

protected.  

And there, revealed by Lori’s yanking and clearing, were two perfect and perfectly ripened tomatoes.  

 

Gifts.  

Delivered lovingly into our disbelieving hands by these grassy Good Samaritans who had taken the errant vines as their own and kept them, protectively safe, until they could hand them, trustingly, into our care.  

 

As if to say, “we’ve done what we could.  The rest is up to you.  Enjoy.”

 

Of course, we will.                   

With amazement, delight, and slightly chastened gratitude.  

For the “good” that has been accomplished by that which we were convinced was “evil” - 

alien, 

invading, 

choking,

pernicious, and...

...rescuing.

As with so many things, it turns out that there is more to be seen than what is readily seen.

Crowing, Exploding, and Concern for Each Other

I’ve been thinking a lot, this week, of Sam and Gallo – our two unintentional roosters who both perished last summer during the “Great Raccoon Invasion;” the rooster, and the notion of community. As indicated, we hadn’t planned on having the cockerals.  They were, so to speak, an accidental acquisition.  By the time we recognized their true identity, however, they had wheedled their way into our hearts – the crowing, notwithstanding.  In truth, we adjusted to their daily vocalizations, and once the chicken yard suddenly fell tragically silent, we missed them.  There was something grounding about their antiphonal song.  

 

We don’t, however, live in a vacuum, and we had talked with our neighbors.  We place a high value on neighborliness, and the last thing we wanted to do was alienate those who share our adjacent space.  It is a fiction, after all, that roosters only crow at dawn.  They do that, indeed, but they don’t stop there.  They crow when they are feisty, they crow when they are bored, and if there happen to be two of them they crow when they are feeling especially competitive, mounting a “call-and-response” chorus to rival any gospel choir.  Our neighbors scoffed at any perturbation, and even lamented with us when the crowing ceased.  They said they missed the sound. But still, one never knows.  The birds can be precociously loud.  In truth, we couldn’t help but guess that the roosters made significant withdrawals from our relational bank account, with few enough compensatory deposits.  

 

The roosters have been on my mind this 4^th of July holiday weekend.  It is fireworks season – fireworks having become synonymous with independence for some unknown reason.  Nothing apparently says “freedom” like artificially colored gun powder.  Once upon a time, fireworks were prohibited in Iowa, what with the obvious nuisance of them, the fire hazard and susceptibility to personal injury and property damage.  All that changed a couple of years ago, ostensibly for “libertarian” and recreational reasons, though I wouldn’t be surprised if potential tax revenue had something to do with the loosening of restrictions.  And so we have it now that fireworks are sold by licensed merchants within some calendar parameters that are presumably honored, and exploded by citizens according to other parameters that are largely ignored. 

 

I’ve got no vendetta against fireworks, by the way.  I have a sentimental spot in my heart for fireworks for unrelated reasons having to do with the opposite of independence.  But it is an interesting phenomenon in the context of what it means to be “in community”.  Like our roosters crowing, they don’t explode in a vacuum.  They have a social impact – on pets, on combat veterans, on those who simply prefer quietude.  A community fireworks display, at a designated time and place, is one thing.  Random neighborhood explosions are another.  Exclamation points on the notion of personal freedom, they are, with their percussive disruptions – like the willful truck pulling a long flatbed trailer hauling some piece of heavy machinery that pulled into our driveway recently in order to turn around by backing out and into our mailbox with both destructive consequences and apparent impunity – an exercise in not giving a damn whether anybody else gives a damn.  

 

We are in a public time in which it is hard to be bothered by anyone else’s bother.  We are, after all, “free” – from what is pretty clear; for what is harder to discern.  But we are pretty sure our patriotic forebears died so that we could be free to annoy each other.  Perhaps when the fireworks sales tents have closed and the darkened skies have cleared and the night has finally fallen silent, we can concentrate enough to think about it, and come to some clearer understanding about the tension between freedom and responsibility; between the relative significance of me and you and us together.

 

In the meantime, “Bang!”  And “cock-a-doodle-do.”  Sleep well. 

The Humble Acceptance of How Little We Can Do

And then the hail fell.

 

Since early March we have been diligently sowing seeds in the greenhouse, watering and watching, coaxing and smiling as the stems curled up through the potting soil and stretched their way into true plants.  With spring came clearing and reviving beds in the garden, loosening the soil, spreading compost; readying.  Since mid-May we have been transplanting seedlings from the protection of the greenhouse to the expansive vulnerabilities of the garden – row upon row like a marching band in careful formation.  

 

Gradually the spaces were fully populated, the irrigation tapes positioned, and the weeding undertaken in earnest.  Thick squash stems supported wide leaves; green and yellow bean bushes rose and stretched; small purple kale stems peaked through the veiling grass; and tomatoes wondrously began to swell on the vines.  Never mind the cacophony of weeds and intruding grasses, it was beautiful – perhaps the handsomest garden expanse since we moved to Taproot Garden 10 years ago.  Guests nodded in vegetable envy.  Family marveled at the investment of energy and time and wondered aloud what we would possibly do with all the harvest. 

 

And after years of waiting and watching, the fruit trees were promising reward.  Apples and pears, apricots and plums were growing heavy on the branches.  And cherries.  It’s hard to say how the cherries had become the Holy Grail of our orcharding, but somehow they had risen to that nobility.  Perhaps it is my affection for a good cherry pie, and Lori’s constant indulgence.  We had planted and waited, and this year the bushes and trees were covered – announced in the spring by profligate blossoms, and answered by plumping berries.  We had tasted them the day before and they were ripe and ready.  We would pick them the following evening – the cherries, and the remaining honeyberries nearby.

 

And then Tuesday afternoon the sky darkened, the wind whipped, the lightening ripped open the thundering sky, and the hail assaulted the landscape.  Pea-sized, then marble-sized; on and on in a deluge of destruction.  It pounded the deck; covered the lawn; buried the flower bed and ravaged the potted plants.  We stood at the window, silently and helplessly watching the destruction.  To step outside would surely be injurious.  And to what end?  Covering would be futile; there was no way to drag it all inside.  And then, as suddenly as it had begun – what had it been?  Fifteen minutes?  Thirty? – the conflagration of ice was over.  An ominously silent stillness replaced the deafening percussion.  And all around us spread a carpet of leaves and limbs, exploded blossoms and ice. Fearfully approaching the garden, we opened the gate and stepped into a dystopian wasteland.  Stems stripped of their leaves.  Stalks broken into pieces or pulverized out of existence.  And the cherry trees robbed of their sweet promise.  Not a berry remained.  London after the German bombings couldn’t have looked more ruined, nor the scene of a biblical plague.  It was an open-air morgue of the shredded and maimed victims of a meteorological assault.  

 

In the hours and days since the hailstorm all we have been able to say is, “we’ll see.”  Life, we know, seeks life.  Bodies lean toward healing.  We’ll see what resurrects after this Good Friday affront.  Maybe much; maybe nothing. We’ll see.  The fruit is certainly gone, but perhaps the vegetables will renew.

 

Regardless, we do not need to wait to see afresh how limited is our control of those things that matter.  We can do what we can do for our bodies, our kids, our careers, our gardens, but neither good intention nor vigilant attention insures a fruitful outcome.  Viruses come out of nowhere.  Choices in which we are not involved change our course.  Hail falls here but not 4 miles away.  If, as Tennyson observed, nature is “red in tooth and claw,” it is also flayed in gale and icy stone.  Standing amidst the vegetative rubble, we comprehend again the essential impetus of our efforts, and the necessary ministrations beyond those beginnings, but above all the puniness of our powers to bring it all to fruition.  Life is infinitely larger than we are; far beyond us, the movements and machinations of the universe – until they reach in or down or whatever their directional approach, and caress or coax into ripeness or twist and crush into oblivion.  

 

We will do what we can. 

 

And then we’ll see.

Weeding and Reaping

The summer solstice has passed, and summer officially welcomes us.  The new season arrived with thunder, lightning, rain and…cold.  It’s an ironic beginning – the accouterments of summer having baked us dry for weeks – but the unseasonable break was a welcomed exhalation.  We could relax the seemingly continuous irrigation of the garden and the hand watering of the potted flowers that had depleted the rain barrels, at least for a time.

 

We are now well into the first harvest of the season:  weeds.  Having been preoccupied with filling the next row – sowing seeds, transplanting seedlings from the greenhouse, caging and trellising tomatoes – the first rows were left vulnerable.  Reaching the end of the planting and looking back to where we began, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the profligate precociousness of the more native species resident in the soil.  That, coupled with a period of other-focused neglect, the garden is a riot of this and that threatening the viability of all our good intentions.  Grass is choking the chard.  Dandelions hide the okra.  Ragweed towers over the potatoes, giving them full view of the Colorado Potato Beetles that have chosen this moment to nibble at the latter’s leaves.  There is reclamation work to be done.  I know that scripture says, “what you sow is what you reap,” but that is only superficially accurate.  With all due respect to the Apostle Paul, I might amend his truism to say, “what you weed is what you reap.”  

 

Newly refocused, then, we lean in.  Pulling.  Hoeing.  Piling extracted encroachments.  I rediscovered beets yesterday, and curly kale I had forgotten I had planted.  And turnips actually ready to pull.  The initial sowing of carrots is likely lost, choked out by the competition, but there are additional seeds in reserve to which we can now pay more attention.  We often read how “nature abhors bare soil”, but it is always a marvel to witness afresh how many weapons nature keeps in its arsenal.  It’s impressive, even if its effectiveness means constant vigilance and labor.

 

In the end it is a valuable discipline – a reminder that starting is no predictor of finishing; that the giddiness of sowing and harvesting must be matched by the tenacity of tending throughout the season between. 

 

Paying attention.

Observing.

Intervening.

Protecting.

Providing.

Breaking a sweat.

 

Because the gardener who can’t be bothered with the hassle of the hoe won’t be bothered by any happiness of the harvest.

Blind, But Beginning to See

 We are drawn to the prairie.  Intellectually, we know it to be habitat for any number of species, and forage for a range of pollinators.  But there is more to our affection.  There is the graceful ballet of the tall grasses in the breeze; the complex diversity of its plant population.  There is the echo of Iowa’s past when most of this state was covered in this way.  There is the allure of its opaque mystique, veiling any real certainty of what might be hiding, sheltering within its reaches.  

 

And so it is that we found ourselves wanting more.  We feel no devotion toward conventional lawns, and our property supports more than it needs.  That, and there is a hillside we thought could use some “dressing up” with native flowers and bluestems.  The prairie contractor whose skills and knowledge we routinely leverage stopped by to review what we had in mind.  “This area gets too little sun,” he observed about one targeted area; “this section will take multiple rounds of attention,” he qualified about another.  “And this one…” he paused to wade into the foliage for a closer look, “…this one is filled with wild bergamot.  Your bees will love them.  And these wild legumes are good for the soil.  This is Illinois Tick Trefoil, and that's Canada black snakeroot, and there is goldenrod.  Even this variety of thistle is important, though the farmers don't like them in their fields."

Time and again he pointed out, and gave a name to, value.  "They are the same species you would be planting with the prairie mix.  You want them.  It doesn’t make much sense to clear them out only to reseed them.”  About still another he matter-of-factly asked, “haven’t you noticed it blossom?” – as if to wonder why we would destroy what so generously offers up its natural gifts.  For me, still lamentably stuck in the banal binary of “good” plants and “bad” plants, it was helpful to have these native stems reframed.

 

Blindness is the result of any number of conditions, I know, but ignorance is likely chief among them.  It isn’t, of course, blindness of the literal, physical kind - my corrective lenses compensate for any of those current deficiencies; simply the inability to actually see what you see.  Jesus, as I recall, warned against such a condition.

 

Ignorant, then, and thusly blind, I sheepishly thanked the contractor for his knowledge, his patient instruction, and his integrity.  He could have simply taken our money, after all, and done what we were asking him to do, never mind the idiocy of it. Instead, he invited us to actually inhabit the world that presently surrounds us; to see with more appreciative eyes; to eschew the fiction of what we wanted, in favor of wanting the beauty we already have.  That serving as such an environmental, horticultural “Sherpa” for us wouldn’t put money in his pocket didn’t seem to bother him.  The land, itself, is apparently more his employer than two aspirational farmsteaders. 

 

We smile now, passing along these trails; more appreciatively curious than aesthetically judgmental.  Even when we can’t identify what we are seeing – which is, yet, most of the time – we start with the assumption that this or that stem or petal is, for its own expression of life and beauty, worth noticing.

 

Even the thistle.  

 

And I wonder to what other and broader beauties my ignorance blinds.  Hues and shades.  Shapes and stories.  Wonders that my pre-conceived delusions about loveliness prevent me from seeing.  

With Potatoes in the Tomb

 Yes, it’s Holy Week. Whatever theological significance that might hold, from the time we first moved to the farmstead and began to plan a garden we were routinely told - even by those with less experience than we (if such a thing was possible) that it had great horticultural significance. “Are you going to plant your potatoes on Good Friday? You are supposed plant potatoes on Good Friday.”

Never mind that central Iowa - solidly situated in the heart of agricultural growing zone 5 - is as likely as not to have soil still frozen below planting depth this time of year, very possibly with a fresh blanket of snow covering the surface. In fact, just yesterday the sun awoke to 21-degrees; thankfully the snow was conspicuous by its absence.  There is a month swing between the earliest possible Good Friday and the latest - March 20-April 23 - and so it seems like an odd cultivational benchmark to adopt.  Even that latter box on the calendar barely falls outside the last average freeze date for this area. Hardly a climatological sweet spot. 

So how did Good Friday and potatoes come to be such storied bedfellows - at least in the mythology of gardening wisdom?

According to the Farmers Almanac, the tuber traces its religious roots to fear, superstition, and theological role modeling. 

Amber Kanuckel writes: “In the 1600s, potatoes were just arriving in Europe and Europeans were suspicious of the tuber, believing that it might be evil. The French, believing that potatoes caused leprosy, officially outlawed them in 1748. 

“To try and safeguard themselves against potential misfortune, daring farmers started planting potatoes on Good Friday, but only after sprinkling their gardens with Holy Water.” (Amber Kanuckel, "Good Friday and Potatoes,” Farmers Almanac)

Good Friday, Kanuckel goes on to suggest, because of its connection to Easter. Death and burial, followed by resurrection. Burying sin so that new life can emerge. Potatoes, presumably, are suppose to “get” the hint and follow suit.  “What you sow,” the Apostle Paul noted, “does not come to life unless it dies.” (1 Corinthians 15:36)

Ok, then.

The transformation of death, I understand.  That other part?  Hmm.  However specious it all sounds to my rational sensibilities, and nonsensically incompatible to my religious ones, it is a fancifully appealing thought to my more poetic leanings. I’m increasingly drawn to the notion that there is more to this sowing and reaping, living and dying, heaven and earth business than meets our analytical, scientific, either/or eye. We can scoff at any notion of a garden’s spirituality, reducing it all to growing days, moisture maintenance and adequate levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the soil.  But Jesus, himself, while teaching about the Kingdom of God, observed that a farmer “scatters seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how” (Mark 4:26). 

"He knows not how."  That's the part that pulls at me.  Whatever we may think we know about the horticultural intricacies - whatever science we may honor, whatever superstitions we may apply, whatever past learnings we may employ - there is yet mystery at work in it all. If seed potatoes choose, then, to join my Good Friday prayers and share my Easter morning celebrations, I am happy to have their company in the choir. A little garden-rooted spirituality couldn’t hurt.

And so it was, on this 64-degree, snow-free Good Friday, that we opened a few furrows in garden beds, nestled in an assortment of cut potatoes, and buried the lot of them. 

And, yes, prayed. 

As the old refrain once promised, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” Good Friday, and then Easter.

Potatoes, I trust you are paying attention?

An Encouraging Downpayment on Spring

Yesterday it began.  

 

Some vegetables have a longer growing season than our climate routinely allots.  Hence, those seeds need a head start in the greenhouse.  The times vary by variety, but the longest of them in our garden portfolio is 12 weeks.  Twelve weeks, in other words, before we intend to move those juvenile plants out into the rows and soil, their seeds need to be nestled into soil blocks in trays and nurtured and evoked in the greenhouse.  We think of it as a “down payment on spring.”  There will be subsequent additions to those protective shelves.  Ten weeks out will come the next round, then eight, six and four.  The “destination date”, of course, is hardly certain.  Weather doesn’t always follow the calendar and the example of past years; that, and of course, the climate is changing.  Transplanting day – a date beyond the last danger of frost and the soil has warmed – is a mercurial target.  Based on the historical evidence at hand, however, we make a best guess and back up through the weeks accordingly.

 

All the way to yesterday. 

 

Mixing rainwater stored from autumn into a seed-starting soil mix and forming it into dozens of soil blocks, we secreted seeds in one and then another – four varieties of leeks, three varieties of tomatoes, two varieties of peppers, and broccoli.  The heat mats were prepared in the greenhouse to keep the soil warm, and the space heater plugged in to warm the air.  Later today, and everyday hereafter, we will insure that the soil is moist, and that growing conditions are maintained. And we will wait.  And watch.  And anticipate.

 

Later in the day I put a primer coat on the new beehives we had acquired.  More brush strokes will be required over the coming days, but they, too, are taking shape.  In anticipation – of placement; of spring; of the arrival of the actual bees.  By the time that happens, baby chicks will be ensconced in the barn, anticipating their own accession to the chicken yard and the flock within.  

 

Life italicized, we lean forward toward the newness of what will emerge.

 

It has been a cold winter – in more ways than the weather.  Cold, both literally and metaphorically.  We have huddled together and hunkered down; we have crowded close to even the tiniest flame in search of both warmth and light, and we have struggled to endure and process the paralysis of the bitterness without losing hope that reality would change for the better and more habitable.  It has been, we can say together, a long wait – and we are waiting still.

 

Decades ago, I was cast in a community th
eater production of the musical, Annie.  I’m sure there have been more polished and professional productions, but we were proud of what happened on stage.  That, and I still hum, on occasion, the iconic song of confidence that little orphan girl belted out:

The sun will come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!

 

I know it’s a little cheesy.  Every now and then, though, I need a simple and straight-forward reminder of that truth.  

 

The last couple of days the temperature has risen to 50-degrees.  There are certainly times of the year when that temperature feels frigid, but given that only 10 days ago it was -23, 50 feels, by contrast, almost tropical.  And the snow is melting.  Gradually, but steadily.  And beneath it, revealed by the receding white, quite miraculously – as if to say, “thank you for waiting” – is green.  

 

All of which is to say that the sun will, indeed, come up – today, in fact, as well as tomorrow.