Garden update

I’ve been fighting depression again lately, and a touch of illness, but —

I get to plant things today!

I just got a plant order in from Richter’s Herbs in Canada, a combination of prosaic (Italian parsley and lavender), intriguing (nepitella, which tastes a bit like an oregano-mint) and fun (scented leaf geraniums). Most of these will go on “the hill”, a dirt-covered rip slope whose sparseness actually duplicates the origins of many of the herbs we love.

I also have to harden off my indoor seedlings so they can be planted without sun damage. Tomatoes and peppers and flowers and more herbs!

I will probably plant my roots and greens this week, which is the breathing room between end of semester and internships/online class/other things I need to do. Then I will spend an hour each morning making sure I give my plants the attention they deserve — weeding, picking produce, etc.

Some of the weeds we will eat. Lamb’s quarters taste better than spinach when cooked. I considered eating the poke sallet that keeps infringing on the shady spot I want to transform into a hosta garden, but I just can’t warm up to a green that you have to cook three times over to make it non-toxic. I’ve also not cooked dandelion greens this year — by the time I notice them, they’ve flowered, and they’re too bitter to eat.

The other thing I should mention — everything I plant is edible, one part or another. This year there will be an exception — I am putting in a moon garden by request of my husband. The moon garden will be romantic but deadly, which sounds like a stock antihero in fiction, doesn’t it?

I am hoping the summer hours and the gardening will get me out of my depression. I don’t tell you a lot about what the depression is like, so you’ll have to take my words for it. Wish me luck.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.

Seed starts

It’s gardening season.

I have spent the whole dreary winter working in my basement greenhouse planting seeds, most of which have grown into cute little seedlings (or in the case of tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers, big monsters.)

I’m trying to find places for all of them in my yard. This is a good problem to have.

I’ve had far worse years for plants. The only seedlings I completely lost were hyssop, purple mitsuba, and Canadian garlic. Most of the herbs that I’d planted last year survived the winter; the exceptions were parsley and rosemary (the sage and the thyme are fine).

I can’t plant the monsterous tomatoes, pepper, and eggplants out till Mother’s Day, nor can I plant their overly abundant basil companions, but I have lots of baby perennials that, in the worse case scenario, can put up with a little reemay over them. Basil thyme and savory; campanula, pinks and yarrow; hablitzia; the humongous perilla (who knew?)

I don’t know if I said this before, but all the things I plant need to be edible in at least one part — the rampion has edible roots; the cardoon has edible leaf stalks as does the surprising fuki that I planted two years ago and just saw peek up from the ground yesterday.

Someday, I will have the urban Garden of Eden I’ve always wanted.