Racing the End of the Season

The end of the gardening season is always abrupt.  One day you have a thriving vegetable plot.  Then, via the simple expedient of an overnight frost, it turns to mush.  Your annuals succumb to frost and old age.  Your perennials look fine and are in flower.  Then, for no ascertainable reason, they’re brown.

Mother nature has wreaked havoc
with our garden clean-up schedule

As conscientious stewards of the land, Betty and I strive each year to put each of our gardens to bed in an orderly fashion.  This year, Mother Nature has been mucking with the calendar.

What do I mean?  Let’s take pine cones as an example.  We had a wet summer and the pines at the borders of our property rewarded us with a bumper crop of cones.  We picked every last one out of the garden – more than a thousand cones – in late September.  Why do we bother?  Well, for one thing we don’t want a pine forest sprouting in our garden.  Just as important, though, pine cones are food for squirrels and other unwanted rodents.  But then came a surprise nor’easter.  The pine cones re-appeared in the garden as if by magic.  We picked them up again.  Last week, a storm with gale-force winds blew through.  Another pine-cone-picking party.

A nor'easter brought us a second
plague of pine cones

We took down our vegetable garden as plants ran their course.  The stalks from three squares of corn, for example, were taken out as the last ears were picked.  But, in the absence of frost, some plants kept producing (we had zucchini and tomatoes into late October).  The ogre who runs our community garden requires plots to be cleared by the end of October.  As a result, much of our final vegetable garden cleanup was hurriedly done on the last day of the month.  A week later, in our capacity as overseers of the community garden, we were back out to clean up the detritus of three abandoned plots.  Naturally, it rained.  Fortunately, seven volunteers made the work go much more quickly.

In addition to clearing our own plot we
cleaned abandoned ones... in the rain

Our first hard frost (October 20) took out our container gardens – twelve ‘major’ ones and another twelve ‘minor’ ones.  Each container had to be emptied, the vegetative matter taken to the transfer station, the potting mix added to a low spot, the miscellaneous bottles and other ‘ballast’ in the containers cleaned; and the containers themselves bleached, washed and put away in the basement.  That was a three-day process.

On October 21, UPS came calling with our fall bulb order – 500 of them.  We set it aside.  The trick with bulbs is they must be planted early enough that they can still generate roots, but not so early that they’ll produce greens.  If the ground begins to freeze, it’s likely too late to plant and you’ve just wasted beaucoup dollars.

Racing to get bulbs planted

We began taking down the multiple-hundreds of perennials that form the heart of our garden in late October… which is also when it began to rain in earnest.  We would cut back amsonia, baptisia, eupatorium and the like for a few hours; then watch as the clouds darkened.  This hide-and-seek with the rain went on for the better part of a week.

Finally, last Saturday, we could wait no longer.  Starting just after dawn, and with a forecast of heavy precipitation for the afternoon, we began digging out six large spaces for our new bulbs.  Everything was excavated to a depth of five to seven inches, bulbs were placed, then a parfait of limestone and soil layers were added and topped with mulch.  The rain started just as we patted down the last bulb patch.

We've had triple our normal rainfall

Yesterday afternoon, we limed the garden because our soil test came back showing a calcium deficiency.  The trick to putting down lime is to do so when there’s no wind to blow it away, but also near to the time when ample rain is expected.  We nailed the timing perfectly.  Our rainfall total overnight was more than an inch, and it’s still falling as this is written.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Be careful what you wish for.  It will all come back to bite you in the fall.

All those containers had to be
taken apart and cleaned

This spring I encouraged Betty to plant container gardens… lots and lots of container gardens filled with glorious annuals than allowed us to place points of color all around out landscape.  In all, she planted up a dozen ‘major’ containers and that many ‘lesser’ pots.  In mid-October, a killing frost wiped out those containers.  It took half a day to empty them, separate out the spent potting mix from the bottles and such we use as ‘ballast’, and clean and bleach the containers and store them in the basement so they’re ready for next year.

We left a dozen pine trees standing at the edges of our gardens because I wanted tall evergreens with deep green needles to contrast again the snows of winter, or dull browns when the snow has melted.  The late October nor’easter deposited several thousand pine cones from those trees onto our garden.  Sticky, sap-drenched pine cones.  Each one had to be picked up by hand and transported to a far edge of the property.  Elapsed time?  At least two hours.

Both for ecological and esthetic reasons, I demanded a driveway that would be asphalt-free and allow water to percolate through to replenish the groundwater, rather than adding to what goes down our town’s storm drains.  This past weekend, I spent two hours raking an inch of leaves and pine needles from the aforementioned nor’easter off our 90-foot-long stone driveway.  In the next few weeks, I have to attach skis (quite literally) to the bottom of our snow blower so I can remove the white stuff this winter without picking up buckets full of stones in the process.  And, does it take longer to clear a stone driveway than a macadam one?  It does, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Stalks of perennials have been cut
down, stuffed into bags, and taken
to the transfer station

Betty said she didn’t want any grass in our new garden, and so we planted the half acre that is not wetlands in native trees, shrubs, and perennials.  I not only agreed with her on the subject, I encouraged it.  And I keep urging her to fill in the ‘holes’ in the landscape with yet more perennials.  This fall, I have spent several days cutting back the now-dead stalks on those perennials, bundling them up in tarps, and transporting them to our transfer station for disposal.  Betty has spent even more time trimming back shrubs.  I get to bundle up and remove those as well.

I refuse to pay Whole Foods prices for fresh, organically grown vegetables and so we have a plot at our town’s Community Garden.  The garden has to be tended several hours each week, but it’s a small price to pay for placing food on the table that we have, ourselves, grown.  However, come October, plants stop producing and fruit stops ripening.  There’s an arrogant, overbearing ‘ogre’ who runs the garden and he sends out obnoxious emails telling everyone that must have their plot cleared by the end of the month.  And so, on multiple days, Betty and I have taken apart the garden, cleaning and storing the fencing and cages we’ll use next year, and taking everything else to the transfer station (the corn stalks alone filled the back end of our Prius to its limit).

Everyone loves our driveway

The magic question is, of course, why?  If it’s so much work and backbreaking labor, why not just pay someone to do it for us?  Or, more sensibly, stop doing it at all – dispense with the containers, plant some grass, cut down the damnable pines, and pay Whole Foods their extortionate prices?

The answer is that I wouldn’t change it for the world.  I love those 50-pound containers and the unusual plants Betty finds for them.  Those pines do look majestic against the snow and brighten up our cold, New England winter.  That driveway has a distinctive style all its own that further sets our property apart from the ‘usual’ suburban home, and that all-native and grass-free garden draws compliments that no flower bed out front could possibly get.  And pay Whole Foods prices?  Never.  I’d stop eating first.

Oh, and I’m getting serious exercise doing all this.  People ‘my age’ are supposed to be slowing down and becoming sedentary.  I carried 60 pounds of metal stakes in my arms last week and unloaded tarpaulin after tarpaulin filled with plant debris at the transfer station without resorting to pain-relieving drugs.  And, on top of that, it’s fun.  If all those wishes are, in fact. coming back to bite me, I’ll just put it down to the price of having a good time.

Thank you, Dorothy Jasiecki

This is a blog about gardening, which can be reasonably defined as growing, nurturing, caring, and cultivation.  However this edition of the Principal Undergardener will not be about the gardening of flowers or vegetables but, rather, the nurturing of young people's minds, the cultivation of their intellects, and urging the growth of their curiosity.  More specifically, it will be about a very special gardener of young minds: a teacher named Dorothy Jasiecki.

Me in 1967.  The less
said, the better

I am by trade a writer, and I say that with pride.  For 35 years, I plied a very different craft that occasionally required me to put words to paper, but which I can say with complete honesty never gave me anything like the personal and professional satisfaction I have felt for the past 13 years.  The reason this blog exists is because writers, like (for example) pianists, need to practice.  Just as a pianist does not sit down at a concert grand and begin playing ‘The Appassionata’, so a writer does not go to his or her keyboard and begin writing that Great American Novel.  The pianist begins with ‘etudes’ – literally, study pieces - that stretch the fingers and make the mind warm up. 

This blog is my equivalent of an etude.  It is about gardening because I am married to a virtuoso gardener and I am her helper, and also because writing about gardening is considerably more interesting than opining about, say, politics or wine.  Each entry is as carefully thought through as a short story and is polished to fit within a prescribed length.

Me, as I look these 
days. The less
said the better

I am a writer because, from September 1964 until June 1967, Dorothy Jasiecki taught me to love language, literature and words.  She had been recruited by a young principal named John M. Jenkins to teach at a spanking new school, Miami Springs Senior High .  I was in one of her classes that first year strictly by happenstance.  The following two years, she was my English teacher by design.

Dorothy Jasiecki circa 1968

Miss Jasiecki (the notion of calling teachers by anything other than ‘Mister’, ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ lay many years in the future) created and followed a lesson plan that ensured we read and mastered the material that would appear on tests.  What made her so extraordinary was how she conveyed that information and that she demanded we go far beyond what was required by the Dade County Board of Public Instruction.  She effectively had a second syllabus, one of her own devising, that was intended to stretch – and open - our minds. 

Our reading list was designed to
stretch the mind

Part of her methodology was to reach deep into her own knowledge of literature to awaken our own senses.  She spent much of one class session reading Beowulf in a way that I felt I was gathered around a hearth fire, listening to oral tradition being made.  We delved into poetry far beyond Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost and spent several days dissecting The Wasteland and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; titles that almost certainly were not sanctioned by the bureaucrats at Lindsey Hopkins.

The balance of her teaching style was to challenge us to think about what we were reading.  To be in her class meant you came to school prepared, and ‘prepared’ meant you had not only read the assigned book but that you had understood it.  And God forbid you came into class spouting something from Cliff’s Notes.  (I tried that once and was found out almost immediately.)

All of this was leavened with philosophy and humor.  The final five minutes of class could comprise a discourse on the importance of shaking hands or a treatise on elbows.  These ‘sermonettes’ as we called them stretched us further still, if for no other reason than because we had no idea of what was coming next.

Miss Jasiecki was a tough grader.  I made very few ‘A’s’ in her class.  But I tried harder than I did in any other subject both because she expected it and I knew it pleased her. 

She was recognized for her skills.  Florida named her a ‘Star Teacher’ and sent her on a statewide tour with a similarly high achieving student from my class.  My great hope is that she inspired other educators as much as she inspired us.

At the 2007 reunion with Ms. J.
That's classmate Jane Greer at right

I last saw Miss Jasiecki eleven years ago at my 40^th reunion and spent much of one evening doing nothing but listening to her reminisce about her years in the classroom.  Time had taken its toll on her body, though not on her mind.  It turns out that her best memories were of her first years at Miami Springs and at her predecessor school, Norland High. 

She passed away in 2015.  Were she alive, she would have turned 93 on October 30th.  And, in an important sense, Dorothy Jasiecki is still very much alive in 2018.  She touched thousands of lives and, for a certain number of them (including mine), she left an indelible impression that transcends time.  She still looks over my shoulder as I write; ‘tsking’ at lax grammar and use of ‘easy’ adjectives.

Ms. J circa 2015

We did not all become writers or poets.  We went into computer science, sales, engineering or education; we raised families or went into the military.  But we all learned how to think and, regardless of future occupation, that skill made us better individuals.

Principal Jenkins attracted a pool of talent in those first years that made Miami Springs a school unlike any other.  I had many teachers – Jack Gonzalez, Agustin Ramirez, and Phil Giberson come immediately to mind – who were outstanding and committed to quality education.  But I can draw a direct line back to Dorothy Jasiecki and say, without hesitation, that she was the teacher who most inspired me.  I would not be the person I am today were it not for her.

Happy birthday, Dorothy Jasiecki, and thank you for being the teacher you were, and the inspiration you still are.

Farewell to the 2018 Gardening Season

What can you say about a gardening season that was perfect for growing… weeds?

The detritus of our 2018 garden
makes its way to the transfer station

New England summers are notorious for being fickle.  May frosts, monsoon rains in June, July droughts, humidity festivals in August.  You name it, New England can deliver it.  And, this year, boy, did it deliver.

The lettuce, spinach, and beet seeds we planted in early April were washed away.  We replanted, and it was so cold that nothing germinated.  In mid-May, we had a 600-square-foot garden that was barren except for a large patch of dill that sprang from self-planted 2017-vintage seeds.  We were so desperate to show progress in the garden, we left it in place.

Our first square of corn was also a no-show for three weeks, even though we covered the area with netting to dissuade marauding crows.  Finally, in mid-June, we had sufficient sprouts that we could assemble a passable seven rows of corn – from the ten we originally planted.

Our vegetable garden
was under row covers to
keep out bugs

Because of the rains of May and June, we tented everything with row covers.  Our garden began to resemble a refugee camp.  Eggplant, zucchini, green beans, and winter squash were all sequestered until they burst out of their covers… whereupon the squash borers and Mexican bean beetles descended on the plants.

Some vegetables were a bust.  Five pepper plants mysteriously became three.  In the end, we harvested four usable peppers.  Our re-planted lettuce crop bolted so quickly we picked enough for perhaps half a dozen salads and I never did harvest any spinach.

All was not lost, of course.  Eight tomato plants thrived in the midsummer heat and began producing prolifically.  Our corn, not quite ‘knee-high by the Fourth of July’, grew like a teenager in July and early August; so much so that our first and second squares of corn looked identical despite having been planted 20 days apart.  A modest-sized third square produced enough September corn to be worth the effort to cajole it along. 

It was a banner year
for tomatoes

The weather was, apparently, perfect for cucumbers because we handed out dozens of them to our neighbors.  Our zucchini exploded between mid-July and mid-August to the point we had to pick twice a day lest they turn into baseball bats between sunrise and sunset.  We had our best crop ever of fennel, and harvested enough green beans before the bean-beetle onset to feed us through the winter.

We also had a bumper crop of weeds.  They grew everywhere, cozying up to plant roots, hiding between rows, and boldly popping up in pathways.  When we pulled the row cover off our second crop of green beans, the weeds were higher than the surrounding vegetables.

I have spent the past two weeks taking apart the garden - hauling it to the transfer station by the carload to ensure the hitchhiking bugs and diseases do not have an opportunity to burrow in for the winter – and, now, much of the garden is again bare ground.  The late arugula is thriving and I have hopes some late tomatoes will ripen. 

You might think from reading this that I’ve begun to despair of gardening.  Not for an instant.  It took three years to figure out how to grow fennel in our garden and, now that we’ve mastered it, we will enjoy its unique flavor for years to come.  We just enjoyed the last of our corn and marveled at its sweetness. 

Give up gardening because of a little rain and a lot of weeds?  Not in a hundred years.  Once it’s in your blood, it’s there forever.

Color at the End of September

Dull in October?  Not our New
England garden!  Double-click
for a slideshow of the garden

There's a truism among certain gardeners that says New England gardens are shot by mid-September.  Pull it out and plow it under because, until the leaves turn, the garden will be a wasteland of spent plants and brown flowers.  There's a rationale for the belief.  Days are less than twelve hours long and the angle of the sun is all wrong.  And besides, an early frost will kill everything anyway, so why bother?

Perhaps our garden is the exception, or maybe it's a product of Betty's thoughtfulness coupled with serendipity, but 26 Pine Street is still barreling along, blissfully unaware that we should have put away our gardening tools on Labor Day.

These purple dome asters add
long-lasting fall color

Take the fall-blooming perennials, for example. We planted a clutch of purple dome asters two years ago, and they've spread quite nicely.  Two weeks ago they were green.  Today, they're a blaze of purple.  We also planted wood asters to border the wetlands at the back of our planted area. They've been a sea of white for the past three weeks and we're beginning to re-think how many of them we want on our property.

One of our Aconitum

Our pod of Chelone (turtlehead) 'Hot Lips' is also on full display as is a growing array of white Chelone 'Glabra' we planted specifically to attract the Baltimore Checkerspot butterfly.  Close by is a cluster of Aconitum (monkshood) with its vivid, and long-blooming purple flower.  The Aconitum is mostly my idea as I used it as a murder weapon in one of my books, Deadly Deeds.

Birds love our bright red
American dogwood fruit

We have berries on display.  The leaves of our Cornus florida (American dogwood) are just starting to turn but, as they do, the tree's fruit is quickly ripening.  In a week or so, migrating birds will see or smell it and descend upon the tree to devour its nutritious berries.  The fruit of our neighbors' Asian kousa dogwoods will fall to the ground and rot, uneaten.  On the rise at the front of the property, our three Ilex have produced their bright red berries.  They'll stay on the shrubs until they've been frozen and thawed multiple times, after which they'll be palatable to over-wintering birds.

Purple beutyberry with a backdrop
of still-blooming geranium

Our Callicarpa americana (American beautyberry) had exploded in its second year and now has arching branches laden with dark purple fruit, which will feed a variety of both migrating and over-wintering birds.  It pairs nicely with our 'river' of Geranium 'Rozanne', which will stay in bloom until the first hard frost.

These woodland asters, backed by
Solidago, catch the eye

Container gardens are supposed to be on the compost pile by mid-September and, indeed, we have pulled apart several that gave out after they stopped blooming in August.  But several are still brilliant with color.  Two are anchored by Alternathera, (one is Purple Prince, the other's tag is missing).  We consider them 'thugs' that crowd out other plants, but two containers in particular have equally aggressive specimens of coleus and Agastache.  The result is two, brilliant potted gardens that look better today than they did in August.  The photo at the top of the page shows one of those containers.

A profusion of Melampodium

Finally, one of our in-ground annuals is putting on a spectacular show.  We planted a short row (eight plants, if memory serves) of Melampodium 'Showstar' last year to disguise the unattractive hyacinth foliage along our driveway.  By September of last year, the Melampodium had turned into a foot-wide row of dense plants with yellow flowers.  The plants died with the first frost and we pulled them out and agreed we might purchase a comparable number this spring.

We needn't have bothered.  The seeds from those Melampodium flowers overwintered and began showing leaves as soon as we cut back the hyacinths in June.  This year, the row is two feet wide, denser, and showier.  They're also blooming prolifically.  Yes, they'll die with that first frost, but we now have a terrific eye-catcher that has earned a place in the landscape.

Here's Mulch in Your Shoe

Life is always interesting for the spouse of an active gardener.  You have an enormous garden at home and a 600-square-foot plot at a community vegetable garden to look after.  Even with all that to take care of, though, my wife can never turn down a cry for help, especially if it’s from a friend.  Which is how I came to be up to my calf in mud this past week.

‘Sally Kahn’ is a lovely lady.  I know because she is the first person I ever murdered.  That was more than a decade ago when I was writing A Murder in the Garden Club, and I use her fictional name here to spare her unwanted notoriety.  Sally maintains one of the most prominent wayside gardens in town and, last week, she called Betty to ask for her help in planting a new sedum at the site.  I should probably mention that Sally is closing in on 90, though she looks and has the energy of someone twenty years her junior.

Last week these were a pristine white.  Then I offered to
water a tree...

Although not specifically included in the invitation, I came along and ended up removing the mulch, digging the hole for the new specimen, toting the water, and then looking for opportunistic weeds in the bed while Sally and Betty did the actual planting. 

As they planted, Sally described another issue bothering her.  The parking lot at one of our town’s civic buildings has been something of a horticultural desert since its construction several years ago.  While maintaining the foundation plantings at the building. Sally and a group of friends have pressed for the addition of trees for the parking area.  Earlier this year, Sally got her wish: four trees were procured and planted by the town.

The problem Sally described to Betty was this:  the trees were a mess.  Although they bore sales tags from a highly regarded nursery, the specimens came with dead or broken branches and had clearly been grown with inadequate space to its brethren trees.  Everything pointed skyward; nothing grew laterally.  Could Betty help?  And so, the next morning, I once again piled tools into a car and drove with Betty to the site. 

The role of an Undergardener is to dig holes and move rocks.  A Principal Undergardener (that would be me) may, from time to time, be asked for advice by the Head Gardener (that would be Betty).  However, my charter has never extended to ‘skilled labor’.  On this day, my writ would be to move Heavy Stuff (ladders and hoses) and create mulch rings around the four trees.  In the meantime, Betty assiduously climbed the aforementioned ladder and pruned extraneous branches from the trees; reshaping them to allow air circulation within the tree and prevent branches from crossing and rubbing.

And so I began watering.  However, I could not help noticing an odd phenomenon: no matter how much water I put on that first tree, the water did not puddle.  And I am not talking about water trickling out of a hose.  This water was gushing out at the rate of four or five gallons a minute.  And it just disappeared into the mulch surrounding the tree.  I was standing on pavement while watering.  Intrigued, I stepped onto the mulch to investigate.

And promptly sunk my crisp, white sneakers into more than a foot of a thick, swamp-worthy slurry of mulch and water.

These trees had been planted in good, old-fashioned wood mulch.  There was no soil underneath what we all assumed was a veneer of mulch.  Like the turtles that support the earth, it was mulch all the way down.

Betty gave Sally the delicate task of communicating to our town’s Department of Public Works that a slight error had been made in the preparation of the site.  With luck, a crew will be dispatched to the building to dig out the mulch surrounding the trees’ root balls and replace it with something that will hold moisture and contain nutrients to allow the tree to grow. 

As for my sneaker, an afternoon in OxyClean followed by a bath in bleach left my shoestring a dazzling white, but the canvas of the shoe a dispiriting brown.  That is the fate of an Undergardener.

August at Grandma's Cottage

It’s a modest snapshot from everyday life.  Two rocking chairs on a front porch, one is adult-sized and made of wicker with a cushioned seat; the other is a colorful wooden one, sized for a young child.  There’s a small table laden with books and two glasses with iced tea.  Looking closer at the table, you get clues about the absent adult: a stack of classic mysteries (Lord Peter Wimsey! Amelia Peabody!), but tucked in the middle is also a copy of Enchanted April. Surely, this is a woman of eclectic taste.  On the edge of the table are two other slender classics: Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

Sprawled across the seat of the small rocker is an adorable plush brown doggy.  At the base of the rocker you see a beach bucket, its treasures emptied out onto the porch floor: sea shells (clam, mostly, but also a few periwinkles), sand and, if you look very carefully, a shiny penny washed by the ocean.

And, everywhere there are flowers.  One side of the porch has as its border an ornate, rectangular planter overflowing with purple flowers. Two round planters hold other annuals, including one with a cascade of gray foliage falling below the lip of the porch.  A terracotta sign in one of the pots says ‘Bees Please’.

Behind these objects is a peek at the house: light gray siding and white trim.  A classic New England style.  There’s the lower part of a window, but it’s too dark to make out anything inside.

A few feet from the porch, a four- or five-year-old girl, explains the scene to her mother.  “The little girl was down at the beach and has come back to sort her shells.  They’ve had something to drink and her grandmother has promised to read to her, but they’ve gone inside to take a nap.”

The little girl is probably too young to read the small sign at the edge of the porch:  August at my Grandma’s cottage, but I couldn’t have described it better myself.  Mother and daughter then walk a few steps to admire the floral designs and the horticulture while, fifty feet away outside the barn doors, there’s bright sunshine and a fair going on.

My lone disappointment is that they didn’t pause to look at the blue ribbon appended to the scene and the name underneath it: mine.

Roni Lehage

I have admired Roni Lehage for many years.  She is a bundle of energy and management skills, overseeing Horticulture at the sprawling Marshfield Fair.  She is also the South Shore District Director for the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts and, in that capacity, invited me to speak earlier this year at the District’s annual luncheon held, naturally, at the Fairgrounds.

There, she pressed the 2018 Marshfield Fair schedule into my hand and said, “You are going to enter this year.”  There may have been a nominal question mark at the end of that statement, but what I heard was more or less a command.  I pored over the schedule and found an interesting competition: ‘The Front Porch’  A 4’ x 8’ vignette’.  No other specifications or conditions.  How hard could that be?  It even carried a cash prize!  I signed up.

I can honestly state that I started thinking about my vignette almost immediately.  I wanted a backdrop of an actual house.  I wanted to tell a story with objects.  It shouldn’t be cluttered.  It should have container gardens filled with flowers.

My problem was I didn’t have any of those things.  Sure, Betty would plant up containers in May and I could nudge a few smaller ones into the production line.  Everything else would have to be scrounged or borrowed.

Fortunately, Medfield is blessed with a ‘swap meet’ at its Transfer Station.   People bring stuff that’s too good to throw away with the hopes of those objects finding a new home.  Betty and I became habitués of the three-day-a-week meet when it opened in May, looking for cast-off treasures.  They slowly accumulated: the child’s rocker, a cute sippy cup.  Betty planted up more containers than she had otherwise planned and I watched them grow.

In mid-July I began tackling the backdrop.  There was no requirement for one, but I felt that, without it, my ‘stage’ would look empty.  I purchased lumber and a 4’x10’ piece of heavy muslin cloth... and discovered I knew nothing about painting a backdrop.  Betty, who has theater in her collegiate background, walked me through the process of priming the canvas.  I discovered many interesting things along the way, including that muslin shrinks when painted.  I would guess I spent two weeks creating that simple panel.  I was disappointed in the look of the siding and so purchased gray artist’s chalk to create shadows and depth.

The mock-up in front of the garage

When it was done, I discovered it would never fit into a Prius.  I would have to disassemble it at home and quickly re-assemble it in Marshfield.  Another learning curve to master. 

At the beginning of August, the perfect ‘adult’ rocker appeared at the swap meet along with the plush doggy.  A neighbor supplied beach toys; we combed our paperback shelves for the right volumes.  I staged the vignette in our basement, rearranging elements with Betty as helpful critic. The final dress rehearsal, with container gardens, was held en plein aire against our garage.

Every artist ought to have the opportunity to sign his or her work, and so I appended mine.  If you look carefully at the stack of books on the table, between Elizabeth Peters and Dorothy Sayers, there is a copy of A Murder at the Flower Show by yours truly.

The Squash of August

I swear it wasn’t there yesterday morning.  I picked our garden thoroughly and, especially, the zucchini.  I harvested six perfect squash which we used ourselves and shared with our neighbors. 

What remained on our four plants were a dozen ‘fingerlings’ – zucchinis roughly two or three inches long.  Cute little baby squash, still with their fading yellow flowers at one end.  They lay, swaddled among the leaves of their mother plant, in a kind of nursery.  All that was missing were little signs saying ‘come back in a few days…’.

3.6 pounds of zucchini

This morning, I returned to the garden and there it was.  This behemoth. The Gargantua of the plant kingdom.  A zucchini so preposterously large it couldn’t be real.  Yet, there it was.

For several years, we played a cute trick on our neighbors. They had a tiny vegetable garden growing by their front door… in too much shade.  It included a lone squash plant that barely flowered and never produced fruit.  And so, every morning as we returned from our own, sun-filled garden laden with veggies, we ‘salted’ their garden with some of our surplus.  Our neighbor’s two daughters would venture out each morning and squeal with delight at the bounty, never noticing that the tomatoes, beans, and squash were not attached to any plant.

But this guy was still firmly on the vine. While not exactly requiring the Jaws of Life to extract it, there was considerable grunting (on my part) involved to twist it out of its position without also removing much of the plant.  The other zucchini had grown by a predictable rate and will be a respectable seven inches long with a six- or seven-inch circumference when picked.  ‘Big Boy’ is 16 inches long and eleven inches around.  Per the photo, it weighs in at a hulking 3.6 pounds.  If it could box, it would be classified as a super-heavyweight.

Clearly, the zucchini are out of hand.
This is one morning's pick from
last week.

I’m sure that many of you reading this are thinking to yourselves, ‘for heaven’s sake, he just missed it… let it go already…’.  To which I respond that I swear it wasn’t there yesterday.

And science backs me up on that.  Or, at least it sort of backs me up.  According to the SF Gate website, given an inch of water a week, a zucchini can grow two inches a day.  And that’s in cold, damp San Francisco where the sun hasn’t been seen since the Giants arrived from the Polo Grounds.  Meanwhile, here in eastern Massachusetts, we were awash in rain in July, and the typical dewpoint for the past two weeks has been in the 70s, meaning you can wring water out of the air at will.  What should that do to a zucchini’s growth rate?  Triple it?  Quadruple it?  Easily, I think.

Finally, according to Food and Wine magazine this Wednesday, August 8, is National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night.  We’re already stockpiling bags of the stuff.  ‘Big Boy’ is going to find an appreciative home.

Garden Courtesy and the Lost Art of a Willingness to Listen

I have two questions for the women readers of this blog: when was the last time you were dismissed by a man by calling you ‘Honey’?  And, does that person still walk with a noticeable limp?

My wife, Betty, and I manage Medfield’s community garden.  We’re in our ninth year of a volunteer job we never asked for, but which we do out of the sense of satisfaction we get from watching people’s gardening skills grow, and seeing parents teach their children to partake of the special pleasures of coaxing food from the soil.

We have 71 plots this year on an acre of land, and those plots are gardened by 80 families.  It’s a heterogeneous group that is representative of a diverse community.  The common bond is gardening.  But keeping everyone on the same page isn’t easy.  Our retirees can devote hours to their plots each day while those with hectic careers see their garden as a brief, zen-like retreat where the outside world doesn’t intrude and weeds are tolerable.

The community garden

Betty’s role is the ‘garden guru’.  Yesterday, she spent ten minutes examining someone’s tomato plants, determining why some are robust and others are in the nightshade equivalent of intensive care.  I am the garden ogre.  I email gardeners asking them (at first) or telling them (if they don’t get the hint) to weed, clip back vines, or perform some other task to keep their garden from becoming a menace to those around it.

This week, two incidents in the garden brought our roles into sharp focus while testing our skills. 

The first test was a failure and entirely my fault, with roots dating back a year.  A long-time gardener got lazy or distracted as the season went on.  He grew things that weren’t allowed and hid them behind a corn perimeter.  Then, in August, he stopped maintaining the garden.  Multiple ‘nastygrams’ from me went unanswered.  At the end of the season I was forced to spend an afternoon clearing out his plot.  He wasn’t invited back for this season.

The community garden - large plots
are 600 sq ft, small ones are 300

The person who took over the plot told me he was an experienced gardener.  His 600-square-foot garden had an intelligent design, even if it was ‘way overplanted with tomatoes.  In early July, though, I noted the weeds in the plot were overwhelming the plants and I sent him a polite note asking him to take some time to bring the plot back to a weed-free state.  He quickly wrote back saying he had been traveling but would attend to the problem. 

 Two weeks later, I walked by the plot and it was evident no work had been done.  I sent off a Defcon 3 nastygram saying he had until this weekend to clean the plot, after which I would do it for him – and would cause him to lose his right to garden next year.  I sent it off with a righteous sense of satisfaction.  That plot wouldn’t be mis-gardened two years in a row.

An hour later, he telephoned me.  He explained his son was in the hospital.  The garden wasn’t his priority at the moment, but he promised to get to it as quickly as possible.

Chastened, I offered him a sincere apology.  I ought to have called to see if there was an explanation.  Instead, I used email to vent a frustration that pre-dated him as a gardener.  The garden, by the way, is now free of weeds.  I’m the one who learned a valuable lesson.

But I don’t know how to characterize what happened yesterday in the garden.

Here’s the background: after a wet spring, the rain stopped falling in eastern Massachusetts.  Our town, like many others, declared a drought emergency.  But three days ago, the heavens opened up and we got more than three inches of rain.  The ground was saturated.

What we’ve told gardeners – repeatedly – is this:  water only when you have to.  Put a trowel in the ground and see how far down the ground is damp.  A dry top inch may well be hiding lots of water down where your plants have their roots.  Common sense says you also look at the forecast to see if more rain is expected.

Late yesterday afternoon Betty and I went to the garden to pick vegetables.  Several gardens over, a man we didn’t know was watering what we assumed was his garden (we know most, but not all, gardeners).  Betty went over to him and found he was essentially soaking his garden to the point of having standing pools of water.

Betty is a horticultural educator.  She speaks all over New England and charges a fee commensurate with the quality of her information.  She is in high demand.  I mention those qualifications because no one invites back someone who ‘lectures’ an audience or speaks in a way that people feel they are being hectored or spoken down to. 

She told him the ground is already water-saturated, that he’s likely doing damage to his plants, and that there’s a water ban on in town.  She also threw in that we’re a community of gardeners, and we’re all paying for the water he’s wasting.

His response was to keep watering, and to start referring to Betty as ‘Honey’.  In the rudest possible language, he told her he had paid his fee, it was his garden, and he’d do what he pleased.  This went on for about three minutes.  I saw Betty walking back to our garden, ashen-faced and shaking.

It was my turn.  I walked over (he was still watering).  Upon seeing me, his first words were, “What do you want, asshole?”  I provided the same information and got the same dismissive result. 

I composed a careful email to him last evening.  Using well-modulated tones, I made the same points, but I pointedly added that my wife’s name isn’t ‘Honey’ and mine isn’t ‘Asshole’.  I offered him an out, saying maybe the reason for his rudeness was that he was having a rotten day and we approached him at an especially bad time. 

He responded this afternoon.  He didn’t give an inch.  No one ‘bullies’ him and no one told him, specifically, not to water.  He also added a few gratuitous personal insults.

I have a theory.  This man reports to a woman where he works.  He hates her and therefore probably hates his job.  Betty got the vitriol he can’t heap on his manager, and so she got the sobriquet ‘Honey’ he doesn’t dare use at work.

What do we do about him?  I don’t know.  But I noticed this morning that his peppers are wilting – a classic symptom of overwatering.