Digging In
I bought some perennials on Monday. Things with silver foliage. Straw-like flowers. A scented geranium. Something with purple leaves. Variegated sage. A lupine -- because two tiny ones came back on their own and they're too fragile to accomplish much bloom this year. Cut them some slack -- give them a big sibling to do the work for this July and then next year they'll be big and this one will be setting up shop more permanently.
Last year I pulled out a corner of the endless pachysandra that wraps around our house and started planting a few things: a little mint and oregano and the lupine. They got all gangly by fall but they came back this year with more heft. Just today, I planted the whole corner full of what I bought.
I think it's because Zack rototilled a big area in the yard, serious about getting a vegetable garden in. It messes with the pristine yard effect, which I like. I raked about a third of it, put in beans, pumpkins, lettuce, and cilantro. Then I gave up for a while (although I have some things started indoors -- but those always disappoint. Start out strong, miss a day of watering and they turn into sad, dead, floppy things. Maybe this year they won't...).
But then he went and bought fencing material this week and in between bouts with allergies ("Is this allergies? Do you think that's why I'm tired?" "Yes, now just take something already.") is putting in the metal fence posts. Nothing fancy -- wire and those ordinary metal green posts, a temporary gate -- but the beans are already popping up and the deer here come in ravenous hordes, so we'd better get it protected before too long.
It's weird gardening in suburbia. We're on a corner, on the road that many people take to get into the development, although it's grassy on three sides, woods in the way back, and I haven't heard a car all day (lawn mowers, however, are constant. If I were a good backyard activist, I'd be dropping my dandelion seeds all over the place and sticking flyers in their mailboxes about reduced pesticide use). Still, when my butt is up in the air and I'm weeding, the cars that do go by certainly slow down and stare. These are the kind of people who talk when there's a rake left on the front steps or your fallen oak leaves aren't removed until Thanksgiving.
Why should this matter? I haven't done a vegetable garden since we first moved to Pelham, over 13 years ago. When we first moved out there, we were on what counts as a busy road in Pelham, enough so that we never wanted pets for fear they'd get hit by a car. When students left town, it became a thoroughfare, so we called it "the beach," sitting on the deck listening to waves and waves of cars. But the garden was in the back, by the big shed, Marcia and Lynn's cottage, and the tree with the orioles, so it seemed removed and protected and since I had no children to eat up my time, grad school to avoid, and a sunny flat yard, we had abundant vegetables and herbs. No fence.
Our next house -- the one we still have in Massachusetts -- was too deep in the woods and while my perennial beds and rock walls were nice (not as cool as my serious gardening friends, but hey, there's a big Buddha statue and gooseneck lustrife and a giant blue hosta), there were no veggies except in pots and window boxes. That's when we joined the farm and my love was channeled in the direction of well-tended acreage in Hadley. I wasn't doing the tending, per se, but I could go and pick whenever I wanted, walk around the fields, get cool in the store room, and soak it all in. I'm not lying when I tell people I miss the Food Bank Farm more than anything else in Massachusetts.
Three years into the experiment with life away from New England and into western PA suburbs, I am still not settled, always looking to find a way home, stifling my "it's because we're in Pittsburgh" response when something goes awry or an acquaintance says something stupid (because my friends and acquaintances in Massachusetts never said anything stupid. Never. And they could fly. Take that!).
But the rototilled space draws my attention. It made the decision to buy the perennials possible. I don't know why, but maybe because I've had the experience over and over of making things grow. Not perfectly, mind you. No one has that -- there's always squash bugs and drought or mold and rabbits. But successfully. My daughters have grown up in the house where veggies come in pots, getting their experience with agriculture at the Farm, a different kind of rooted-in love for over 10 years.
I guess I'm saying that the deer may eat every last seedling to the ground (my friend claims they even eat her jalapeno pepper plants!) and things may die when we do go to Massachusetts for July, but maybe it's good for me to dig in, put in some plants that will return for me next year, if I'm still here, or if not, give someone else a reason to poke around in the dirt.
What I hope I'll get in a few years:
image from "All That Grows in Gardens and Nature"
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