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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
