Tag Archives: Gardening

Kites

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in Gardening, Kites, Seasons, Spring

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This morning out on the running path several people passed me carrying signs. There was one young couple and one family group with two small kids. Their signs read Stop Trump and Protect Women’s Health and such. They were headed to the MetroLink train station a half mile away, no doubt to take it downtown to a rally. This will be a busy protest season for many people. I may participate in some, but I realize it won’t do anything. If losing the election by 3 million votes can’t convince a man that he has no mandate from the American people, I doubt that marches will. But I understand the urge to do it, and that it will likely intensify as the weather moderates.

I had been thinking about spring. It’s pretty warm out for a January day, and the first sunny day in over a week, so even though we still have a few months of winter left, it felt like spring was in the air. I thought of what my spring activities might be, aside from political protest. For many years, both as a suburban homeowner and as an owner of rural property, spring meant revving things up, getting ready to plant things, plow things, prepare soil and beds, check the lawn equipment, all with a sense of mixed anticipation and dread. Now, I have no lawn at all to worry about and no garden to enjoy.

Last year I put four pots of herbs in the window of my small apartment. I harvested and used those herbs, and plan to do so again this year. But that’s about the extent of my ‘gardening.’ So what do I have to look forward to in spring, that’s different from what I do all the time?

Fishing—I like that. Trout season begins in March. But I can only go fishing so many times. The best streams for trout are far away enough to make it a full day’s endeavor just to fish for several hours. What else do people who don’t care for lawns and gardens and orchards and beehives do when the weather gets nice?

I have thought about kites. I wonder how much this is a reversion to the joys of my youth. I used to love the thrill of feeling something so far above me tug at the string in my hand. I imagine it’s something like the thrill of flying without actually leaving the ground. But today is fairly windless, despite it being otherwise an optimal weather day, so I think the kites will have to wait.

I also wonder how expensive this seemingly simple pastime has become. When I was a kid, we used to walk to a little market down the street from our neighborhood. If you had a quarter, you could buy a paper kite for ten cents and a ball of string for ten cents. If you could get your mother to give you a worn out shirt or an old sheet to tear in strips you made a tail and were ready to take to the skies. For less than 25 cents. I’m guessing I won’t get off so cheaply these days.

But you’ll notice that as I think about what to do with my upcoming warm spring days, I am thinking about leisure activities—fishing, kite flying. In years past everything was about important seasonal tasks that needed doing. Planting the garden, weeding the flower beds, cutting the grass. Somehow I miss those things, even though they are a lot of work. But not enough to want to return to them. In my life I have never been wealthy, never actually been that comfortable: I have made a living, but I have gone from being house poor to being land poor. Never have I had the time or the resources to enjoy myself with any regularity. Now the thought of doing exactly that looms before me, and I approach it with apprehension.

I am leaving the apartment soon to get groceries and do a few other errands. I wonder where they sell kites? I may stop by and see what’s to be had, ask a few questions. It has been over forty years. Nowadays they probably have remote controlled kites. I can imagine the conversation:

‘Do you have kites?’

‘Sure,’ says the guy behind the counter, ‘what kinda phone do you have?’

‘Phone?’

‘Yeah, what kinda phone? So you can download the app.’

Or maybe not. Maybe they’re still made simply, with paper and balsa wood. I doubt it, but there’s always hope.

 

 

Cucumbers

12 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in Gardening, Seasons

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When I was a boy my grandparents lived in a succession of small western Tennessee towns. The names of the towns were typical and prosaic—Edith, Ripley, Dyersburg—but my siblings and I had a field day when they moved to a spot called Frogjump. We’d visit in summer, and the funniest thing to us was that we found the place to be truly almost infested with frogs. I was young and nothing of a naturalist or explorer at the time, so I don’t know if it was because there were nearby creeks or ponds, but there were frogs everywhere. My grandfather was the Baptist minister, and we attended church twice every Sunday. In the cool of the settling evening after late services, the local boys occupied themselves with catching frogs and hurling them to their deaths against the stone walls of the church.

My grandmother always kept a garden, but her garden in Frogjump is the one I remember most vividly. Maybe it’s because it was more successful than others. For one thing, she got a bumper crop of cucumbers one year. I would go out with her in the afternoon and while she weeded I would lift leaves and scrounge until I found a cucumber. It was a thrill, finding the big vegetables, all dusty and covered with scratchy prickles. And it was a thrill when she’d say to me, ‘Another one! Look at you! You’re so good at finding them!’ I was good at finding them. It was my special skill, my first indication that I was going to enjoy gardening, that I was going to be good at it.

When I was older and had homes of my own, I always put in a garden. Whether large or small, I always feel best when there is something that I am growing. Which is a funny expression in itself, because nobody truly grows anything. They just initiate the process by putting seeds in likely soil, watering that soil, and waiting for sunshine and warmth to have their effect. But again, I always feel best when I am participating in that process. It’s semantics, I guess.

But what stood out mostly for me is the fact that in general, I wasn’t that good at it. I didn’t take seriously the need to prepare the soil properly. I was impatient and would plant seeds that called for warm soil weeks before it was time. I’d complain to anyone who would listen about the bad seeds I had bought, secretly knowing the seeds had probably been just fine until I had consigned them to a frosty death in early March. I didn’t fertilize much, so plants that did grow were reluctant to produce any vegetables or fruit. And weeding was a chore I never took seriously, even though if I harked back to memories of my grandmother, weeding was the activity I saw her do the most in her gardens.

I eventually learned. I had some good teachers, and I read a lot. I have had plenty of successful gardens. I have learned that gardening is one of the most seasonal of activities. We mostly think of it as spring planting and summer’s abundance. But in autumn, after everything has been picked, the process of turning the soil begins. Even in the winter months, on any day warm enough to allow, you can be out there checking on the soil, tilling it one more time, getting it ready for spring planting.

Harvesting, the actual thrill of picking ripe vegetables, occupies less of your time than any other gardening activity, although to most of us, it is the payoff. And that’s what else I have learned. To experienced gardeners, every step is part of the payoff. All the preparation of the soil, laying out rows, patiently waiting to put in the seeds or bedding plants at the proper time, each step is gratifying and understood to be part of what leads to the harvest. Picking those cucumbers is the delight of children, and of fond grandmothers who seek to encourage little boys.

 

In the Rain

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Rain, Rain Gardening, Seasons

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I am smart enough to come in out of the rain, I want to make that clear right up front. But I was on vacation a few weeks ago and I spent hours working in the yard and fields under varying degrees of rainfall. One day I was moving wheelbarrows of compost to our range of blackberries and while I was doing it a light sprinkle developed to a steady shower and finally to a pelting rain before I decided it was time to quit and go inside. Even then I wondered if I should have gone on, despite the rain.

The fact is, if you’re very hot from physical labor, a cooling shower, along with the breeze that often comes with it, can feel very nice. And what is the difference between having your clothing sweated through from effort or wet from rain, aside from the obvious olfactory associations? I am an amateur, a tyro at this tending to pastures and fruit trees and such. But I wonder if people of considerable experience shy away from working in the rain? I wonder if they ever did in the past?

I know that modern people dislike being in the rain. Once I visited Sea World in Orlando. Before every show featuring dolphins, orcas or seals, the staff warned people sitting close to the pool that there would be splashing and they might want to move back. This caused everyone to crowd to the front for the delightful experience of being drenched in the wake of their favorite aquatic mammals. But this being Florida, there came the inevitable late afternoon rain shower. As soon as it began everyone in the park scattered to find shelter in gift shops or eateries. Clearly the problem is not being wet, it’s being in the rain.

But for people who have a lot of work to do, rain eats into their time. You cannot mow hay or work in muddy gardens when they are rain soaked, but there’s usually something you can get done, if you just tolerate being wet while you do it—or don’t mind working in a rain coat. (I have a nice bright yellow rain coat which always makes me feel like an eight-year-old when I wear it.) We work in all kinds of weather. Deep snow. Blistering heat. But for some reason, even though our skin is waterproof, we shy away from doing anything in the rain.

Rain is predicted for the next three days, a pattern that has dogged the spring and summer so far in the Great American Midwest. Nothing will get done outside unless I face the fact that I will be working in the rain, at least part of the time. This is especially bad because we are in the height of the growing season: we have beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, and lots of blackberries all ready to pick and eat. I sit at the window looking out on the riotous green under grey skies, seeing all my control of it winding away from me, knowing I could take it back if only I could just face up to going out in the rain.

Februa

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Anthropology, climate, Drought, Meteorology, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Winter

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It’s raining today, and cold, though not as cold as it could be for an early February day in the American Midwest. We are due for a string of fairly mild days. The weather personality at one local TV station is enthusiastic about this warm trend, while her counterpart at another station warns that winter’s worst still lies ahead. That’s February. I disagree with Eliot, April is not the cruelest month. It’s this one.

The month was probably named by the Roman king Numa Pompilius, who was not Roman but a Sabine, for the ancient Sabine purification ritual Februa. It was a ritual meant to prepare one’s home and fields for spring. Perhaps there in the Mediterranean climate of the Italian boot, February did signal spring’s onset. Here, not so much. There is the occasional phenomenon, maybe what we are experiencing right now, known as the February Thaw–one of those half-mythological and ill-defined times, like Indian Summer or Blackberry Winter, which many people believe they can define with certainty, only to find that the guy standing right beside them has a different definition. But whatever the February Thaw is, there is nothing certain or lasting about it, and March can find us buried in snow or still scraping thick frost from car windows in the morning.

And that’s what makes February cruel, this flirting with the end of winter, the beginning of spring. I don’t think I used to mind so much. But as the years go on, I find myself longing to spend more time in the sun and the warmth of spring. I also recently moved to a new home that includes several acres of arable land, and I am eager to start planting vegetables. This feeling that it could be any day now, rubbing up against the reality that it’s several weeks away, is frustrating.

Recently I have been studying the various vegetation gods of the old world. One thing that stands out is the violence that pervades almost all their stories. Inanna visits the underworld and is killed and hung on a hook, where she stays until she offers Dumuzi as a substitute. Persephone is raped by her uncle, with her father’s consent. Adonis is gored by a wild boar and bleeds to death. Osiris, not dead enough to suit his wicked brother Seth, is cut into fourteen pieces which are scattered the length of the Nile. And the Phrygian vegetation god Attis, whose cult reigns supreme for gore, castrates himself and bleeds to death, an act which is impersonated by initiates to his priesthood for many generations to follow.

All of these gods have rites which are solemnized by various ancient peoples in the attempt to ensure the coming of a fecund planting season. It seems that the coming of spring (or of the Nile’s flood in the case of Osiris) would be a joyful time, but in the various rites there is much weeping and wailing, not to mention ritual bloodshed. Did ancient people suffer in their desperation to bring on the spring? I long for spring, and find myself frustrated when it seems long in coming, but there are two important things to remember. One is that it doesn’t really matter to me: I do not feed myself by my own effort, or by the produce of whatever little garden patch I may cultivate. And second is the fact that I know the spring will come eventually, as it always does. I understand enough about earth’s transit around the sun to know this.

In a universe driven by superstition, there is always uncertainty. If you believe that your prayers and rituals, your Adonis garden, Corn Osiris, or some other talisman is partly responsible for seasonal transitions, you would tend to be very serious about these things. It is a leap from that kind of earnestness to priests slicing open their own veins and bespattering altars with their blood, but in trying to grasp these things in human terms, I think I get it. I may only feel frustration at the cruel jest of February’s taunts of the vernal season, but other people, in other times, have felt the need to take action. But while I understand this as a human instinct, I think I am too far removed from that time and place (or those times and places) to understand why their various explanatory tales, and in some cases their own rituals, included such a strong dose of graphic violence.

As I finish writing this the rain seems to have stopped. It’s still gloomy out, but that’s to be expected. One of the weather personalities on TV the other night noted that the rain so far in January and February has gotten close to breaking the back of the persistent drought that has dogged our region for a year. That’s good news, and gives me more to look forward to in spring. I can wait, I tell myself, even as the thought throbs at the back of my head that there must be something I can do. I choose to be ambivalent yet about February, but I am learning to live with it.