Garden Gab

There is something beautiful and soft about a meadow with knee deep grass and wildflowers- at least to me, something natural that not even the best gardener or landscaper can truly replicate.  But my dad likes short grass, he even makes good points about it.  It’s tidier, it doesn’t grow into a rough mix of hay and straw and grass, and above all, it doesn’t let ticks hide in it. 

He always thought I didn’t want to mow the field because I was lazy.  But I secretly love mowing the lawn (it’s the whole power tool thing- we’ve been over my issues with god-like abilities on yard and garden), it’s very relaxing to me, as long as no one’s left their shoes in the way and I don’t run over a hornet’s nest.  But my dad was a man obsessed.  He was like a military barber for the lawn.  I swear he challenges himself to lower the blade another centimeter every time he mows, just to see if the lawn can take it.  I always knew if I let him have his way with the field, we’d be living on a dirt patch one day instead of grass.  So we battled for years, reaching uneasy compromises on the field, wherein half of it got mowed to the quick and the other half straggled into straw and weed where my dad had run out of time to mow it and I (and my siblings) refused, “ran out of gas” or became mysteriously and suddenly occupied with other yardwork when it was time to mow that half.

So why am I telling you all of this?  I know it seems like I’m going to draw a big parallel between my father’s ideas in other areas like politics and religion and my opposing views as a teenager, but honestly, my dad and I never fought, still never fight about anything except mowing the lawn or when to cut back the raspberry patch (same fight, different plant).  No, our landscaping arguments weren’t hints at larger conflicts in our lives, they were simply the different ways we felt about caring for our piece of the world.  Thinking about it made me think about the other gardeners I’ve known, the advice I’ve taken from so many people, and the passion each has had about their little plot. 

Why the world is filled with zucchini

Reading anthropology has taught me a lot about how people feel about property, why they build fences, have planting and harvest rituals, even why they fight wars over land.  But I think gardening and talking to other gardeners has taught me vastly more about all of these things than any anthropology course ever will.  When you talk to a gardener about their vegetables, their flowers, their trees, it’s a little like talking about their kids.  People take and give gardening advice almost as often as they take and give parenting advice.  And with about as much good will (that is, unasked for advice is always received badly, even when it’s given with the best intentions).  We trade pictures of our plants and expect the appropriate appreciation for our efforts, we trade clippings and expect others not to kill them (even if we cut the plant wrong), we trade zucchinis and expect people to smile and say thanks even if it’s the fifth zucchini they’ve received this week and they don’t know what the heck to do with a zucchini in the first place.

There’s politics in there too, not just environmental politics about what sprays we’re using either.  There are arguments about heirloom seeds and fair trade agreements on seed patenting.  There are arguments about fresh food allotments for elderly folks who can’t grow their own any more and haven’t got the funds even to pick up vegetables at the roadside farm stand.  And of course, there’s the ever popular neighbor’s tree overhang/ravaging dog/lax borrowing habits issues as well.

Do good fences really make good neighbors?

We may bicker and extend advice, but we know when we go home behind our fence or stone wall or property line, we’ll live how we want.  We’ll let the field lie or we’ll mow it into order.  Just like I know the field is probably bald as a cueball by now and my dad is in bliss.  Just like he knows my field will be rampant with flowers and straw and I’ll be happily swearing up a storm in spring trying to get the rototiller through it all.  And that would be okay.  Except that I found that tick the other day.  And I started thinking about my daughter walking in fields of long grass and came home panicked and searching for a picture of deer ticks.  And I started to wonder if my dad wasn’t right after all.   Is it age or parenting that’s changed me?  Or is it that I have my own little piece of the world to take care of now, my own field to mow or let lie?

p.s. here is a picture of a deer tick if you ever need to know

“Dear Garden Gabber, What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever grown in a container?” (via email)

Everyone thought we were insane.  And they weren’t quiet about it.  But there is something intoxicating about gardening.  Every spring an overwhelming tide of megalomania hits me and the garden in my head takes on delusional proportions.  In their secret heart, I think every gardener feels the same.  Then, about a week in (or less if you are hand tilling), reality sets in and my grandiose dreams and head shrink to appropriate levels.  But the year my husband and I met, the year we planted our first container garden, no such reality check ever happened.  Eventually, the squirrels had to intervene. 

We had a third floor apartment that year and no permission or space to start a garden.  We did, however have a small stair landing.  Not much larger than a fire exit stairway, but exposed to lots of light and too high for garden pests (or so I thought). 

We started out humbly enough, with a pot of cherry tomatoes, a single green pepper plant and a tray of jalapeno plants.  But we let our early success go to our head.  Growing things is filled with contradiction.  Sometimes you plant and weed and water, rejoicing and feeling omnipotent when you see those green shoots.  Even though I know it’s wrong, deep down I always think, “I did that!”  But then usually there’s a row farther down that you have toiled over, practically sweat blood to coax it to life and you get nothing.  It always reminds me that the growing really isn’t up to me (especially when a plant I pulled up because I thought it was dead is going gangbusters in the compost pile a week later).

But this little apartment garden made us want to grow more.  So we stole a long flowerbox no one was using and bought two of the deepest plastic pots we could (they were about 2 1/2 feet deep).  I told everyone we knew that we were going to grow corn in our potted garden and they thought I was nuts.  It took 5 big bags of potting mix to fill the pots and I was able to plant about 20 seeds all told.  After all, I thought, I don’t want to crowd them (as if the pot was room enough).

Why is it always squirrels?

It took a few weeks but we started to get shoots and then stalks of green corn.  I showed everyone who came to the apartment our fine, strong stalks of corn.  “They’ll peter out.  They’ll never have ears on them,” everyone said.  But lo and behold, a few weeks later we had two or three small ears on every stalk.  And then, I got cocky.  “I can grow anything!” I thought and I would check the ears every day to see if they were ready to eat.  I refused to let my husband buy corn.  Even at the local farmstands.  “Why do you want to buy corn?” I said, “Ours is almost ready and it’s going to be the best corn ever!”  A whole month my poor husband waited after the summer corn was available.

Slowly, the ears grew fatter.  They never got past the size of cow corn.   I came home one day to find the cat yowling at the back door (where the garden was) and I opened it upon a dreadful scene.  I wish I could say it took a squirrel army to dash my dreams of gardening glory and my husbands sweet summer corn hopes.  I wish I could say there were more squirrels per square foot than I had ever seen before.  But to tell the truth, I only saw three.  Three fat little squirrels that didn’t even have the courtesy to drag the corn away before feasting on it.  How they went through all those plants so quickly, I’ll never know.  But they got every single one.  Instead of scampering away when I opened the door they dragged the last few ears slowly over the railing and waddled away.

So, to answer your question, I almost grew corn in a container.  I’ve known other people to grow watermelons, monster pumpkins, even fruit trees.  Container plants may need extra fertilizer and more manual watering sometimes, but really they aren’t much different from “free range” plants.  And they can be much easier to maintain, having fewer weeds, being movable in inclement weather and (if you are wiser than me) easier to protect from pests.  At the Garden Gabber we’ll be trying out new containers and plants and we’ll let you know how it goes.  If you have a container garden, send us pictures and stories of your success (or failures or garden thieves) as well to dk.gould@live.com and we’ll post them here!  Stay tuned for how to make friends with or discourage your own squirrel nemeses.

When my parents moved into their first rural home in central Maine, their first priority was starting a vegetable garden.  Like all good adventurers, they plunged into it with plenty of gusto but not very much knowledge.  When it came to planting potatoes, they didn’t even know where to start.  As any humble flatlander (as new arrivals are called in Maine) would do, they asked a farmer friend for help.  With a perfectly straight face and (I’m sure) the friendliest of intentions, these are the steps she told them to take: 

1. First dig a long trench in the garden, rather than poking holes for each plant as you would do with seeds

2. Next, find a potato with lots of green sprouts, called “eyes” and cut the eyes off the potato

3.  Wrap each eye with a little waxed paper

4. Lay them in the trench about 3 inches apart and cover with 1 to 1.5 inches of soil

My parents followed her exact instructions, painstakingly cutting each eye and wrapping it in small pieces of waxed paper before planting them.  When their farmer friend good naturedly asked them how the potato patch was coming along, my father said, “Great, but I just have one question.  What’s the reason for the waxed paper?  We wrapped each one but I’m just curious what it does for the plant.” 

Their farmer friend couldn’t stop laughing.  “You really wrapped each eye in waxed paper?” she asked.  “Yeah,” my dad said, “You told us to, it took us forever.”  His friend was laughing so hard she almost cried.  “You wrap them in wax paper to keep the mud out of their eye!” she laughed. 

So, for those of us, like my parents, that have the best intentions for their gardens but maybe not all the technical abilities necessary, this section of the blog is your friend.  Twitter us, email us, note us your gardening questions, misadventures or crises and we’ll do our best to get you the answers you need.  So you won’t get mud in your eyes.