My garden never ceases to blow me away. Almost the hot second that I pushed "publish" on my post lamenting my tall, healthy, but flower-less sugar snap pea plants, what should I see sprinkled all over the top foot or so of the plants? And thanks, Nell, for urging me to "just wait." Wise advise inceed!
Oh, and guess what's happening in the orchard?
A bona fide peach! Yes, sir. Things happen in gardens.
This morning my neighbors sprayed their trees for winter moth. The spray is "non-toxic," so says the company and some mild Internet research. It's water-soluble as well. But...it's bug spray, and the tree hovers right over my vegetable patch (which the winter moths could care less about), from whence comes tonight's salad.
Last year I got on a list the company maintains to be notified before the spray went on, and I was super-impressed that they actually followed up and called to let me know it was coming.
So last night, this happened:
And this morning, when the spray rained down and floated across my backyard in a white cloud, wow was I glad I did it. Another hour or so and the stuff should be dry, so Operation Rescue My Sweltering, Tented Plants will go into effect.
By "bald" I mean that my sugar snap pea plants are almost 3 feet tall, healthy and strong, yet are sporting not one single flower. Some initial research suggests this might be due to a potassium deficiency in the soil, so I'm contemplating ways to get a quick jolt of potassium into the soil (unless that's a bad idea....anyone out there have thoughts on this?).
But there are some beautiful things going on in the garden. Chiefly, our very first strawberry harvest. They weren't the sweetest berries we've ever tasted, but they were red, they were ripe, and we grew them from some spindly little seedlings we bought at the nursery last year. As my great-aunt Minnie loved to say, God is good.
Two bits of "second chance" inspiration in the garden -
First, the cloned New Dawn roses that we started in our condo before we moved here almost 2 (!) years ago are springing to life beautifully....all 4 of them! We couldn't have ever imagined such success, and now all we have to do is wait for the buds and blossoms. We even had to trellis them, not bad for a year-2 plant that started as a cut-off-the-original stick.
The other second chance is the hanging planter ball, which I had failed miserably at with lettuce, and which sat fallow last year in our garage in the frustrated-failed-projects corner. I decided to give it a fresh start this spring, and I put mint in instead of lettuce. The legend is that you can't kill mint, and although I've always managed to find a way around that adage, hope does indeed spring eternal.
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Growing parsnips is a one-year project - sow the seeds in early spring, heavily straw-mulch the green shoots when they emerge, leave them alone over the winter, and dig them out the next spring. Exposing the plants to winter cold is what sweetens the 'snips and gives them their distinctive flavor. And there's nothing quite like freshly-dug parsnips roasted, pureed into a soup, or sauteed in some olive oil.
At first I thought I was in for bad parsnip news when I read in "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible" that parsnips should be harvested before the green tops re-emerge in the spring. My greens were lush and about 8 inches tall, so I thought the veg could be mushy and icky when I dug them today.
But it appears I may have dodged that bullet, as I loosened the soil and revealed (well, tugged frantically to reveal) these other-worldly beauties:
It's a damp, mild day today, so the soil was yielding. I did nick a few of the parsnips with my shovel, so that's a "note to self" for next year--probably better to use a pitchfork and give myself wider digging berth. But now, all I have left to do is ponder what to do with these amazing specimens. Ideas?
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Hello, my verdant old friend. My rods and cones have been starved for you!
But now you're finally roaring back, in the cover crop that's fixing nitrogen in my soil, the rosemary that hopefully will green back to life...
...the strawberry patch that's starting to wake up...
...the lettuce seedlings that are poking through the soil...
...and the leaflings on the spirea bush!
Also, welcome back yellow! You're invited to this party as well.
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So here's where things stand in our garden.
Spring is, slowly, springing...
Despite an impossibly snowy winter...
With snow drifts so high, the neighborhood bunnies were empowered to, um, "prune" our fruit trees for us...
But the snow also gave our raised beds a deep spring drink, encouraging news for the vetch/rye cover crop mix we planted to strengthen the soil....
Next stop, sugar snap peas, Easter Egg radishes, arrugula, "Flashy Trout Back" lettuce, green crisp lettuce, and spinach seeds....and the happiest gardener I've been in years.
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Friends, I can't tell you how happy I am to be writing again in this space. Happy, but overwhelmed, both with all that's happened since my last post back in August, and with the complete transformation my life has taken since last year at this very time.
You see, the thing is, Rob and I went through a four-year battle with infertility. I have never written publicly about our struggle before, for reasons including wanting to avoid unwanted advice to wanting to keep infertility from infiltrating every part of my life to, later, a fear of alienating readers who may still be in the infertility trenches (I'm all too aware how reading, "We're pregnant!" can be tragic, even if the news pertains to a stranger.) Even now I'm clutching to find the right words to sum up the shattering, bottomless experience of tests, medications, procedures, disappointments, disappointments, and disappointments.
Except...exactly one year ago, I finally got to see two lines on the stick. And deep in the winter of 2010, our Ben was born.
Nothing I can write about infertility sounds right to me - everything I peck out seems either overwrought, insufficient, or too contained to capture the journey, especially in retrospect. So I'm not going to try to pontificate on the experience or dwell on the details. But I do want to finally whisper "thank you" to the group of bloggers (especially her, her, her, and her) whose writing has sustained me (correction: is sustaining me) in ways they'll never know. It takes courage and energy to write through such a process as infertility (and pregnancy after infertility...and parenting after infertility). These women have both in spades.
So. What does all of this have to do with my garden?
Everything.
The "fertility" metaphor was powerful and all-consuming to me, to the point of imbuing my time in the soil with deep meaning....and all but shutting down my garden writing. I was obsessed with all things that grow - or don't. But the "why" of it all felt so huge, it ultimately choked out my ability to articulate any insights or feelings about it.
Later, once I actually became pregnant, I found myself so superstitious, so haunted by the spectre and possibility of loss, that my "pregnancy journal" was written on pages torn out of a yellow pad, one by one, so as to avoid having to face words written lovingly and excitedly in a fresh, expectant book.
And, I didn't even keep a garden journal last year, the first season in our lovely new backyard, because if things didn't go well with the pregnancy, I would have felt equally destroyed by either a lush or desolate vegetable patch.
But today, Rob and I set Ben up in his stroller, parked with a view of our three raised beds, and we planted seeds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we found ourselves reflecting on the process in a profound and emotional way. Last time we sowed, thank God, thank God, thank God, we were able to reap. Not that peas and lettuce are comparable to what we "planted" a year ago, but ultimately, a seed is a seed, right? A spark in the soil.
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