Wanted: A Dozen Warm Spring Days in May

It's the end of April and the soil
temperature is still just 50 degrees

Never have so many wanted or needed something so much.  And never has the weather been so uncooperative.

The Medfield Community Garden formally opened on April 1 and, by April 3 more than half of the 70 gardens had fences.  By April 10, many gardens showed stakes and strings inside; strong evidence seeds for ‘cool weather’ vegetables had been planted.

Then, the heavens opened up and the temperature plunged.  On April 23, it snowed.  Yesterday, it rained.  All day.  The radar map showed a blob of dark green over eastern New England that slowly rotated counter-clockwise, sucking in an unending supply of moisture from the Atlantic.  The high yesterday was 46 degrees, which was also the low, and which was also the ocean temperature.

Wood chips make paths
passable and keep down
weeds.

Two weeks ago, we ran out of wood chips to create paths around the garden.  Medfield’s Department of Public Works has more chips than it knows what to do with because of all the trees that have come down in the parade of nor’easters that buffeted the region with winds north of 60 miles per hour.  For days, my contact at the DPW apologized that the town couldn’t deliver those chips because they feared making ruts in the sod around the garden.  Then over the weekend (and amid a driving rain) a load of chips appeared. And, yes, with the load came heavy-equipment tire impressions that will be with us for weeks to come.

Unending rain and cool
temps well into May

It isn’t just the rain that is unseasonable.  After a winter with well-above-average temperatures, southern New England now finds itself on the wrong side of the jet stream.  Nighttime temperatures have routinely dropped close to – or even below – freezing.  The soil temperature was a chilly 50 degrees on Sunday, and the 15-day forecast shows just five days when the daytime highs get to 60 degrees or better, and 11 days when overnight temperatures will be in the upper 30s or lower 40s.  This does not bode well for home-grown lettuce or spinach.

I do not complain for myself.  Betty has been growing vegetables in New England since 1974 (when I first helped turn over the soil behind her apartment in Lenox).  We planted our first garden in Medfield in 1980.  We know some seasons are doomed to mediocrity (or outright failure) by flukes of nature, while other years yield bonanza supplies from any seed you drop on the ground.

This year, though, is different.  We have 77 families in our little acre.  Of those families, 16 are new and the number one reason they signed up was COVID-19.  The garden ensures food.  The garden provides the perfect reason to be outdoors when state and local health organizations are repeating a mantra of ‘shelter in place’.  The garden provides an opportunity to socialize at a safe distance.

New England will stay cool, but I
want gardens to grow lush with
vegetables

I want those new gardeners to have a great season.  I want them to have terrific yields of adventurous crops.  To that end, I’ve supplied fencing and stakes to gardeners who found there was none to be had at stores.  Betty is making certain everyone knows what is safe to plant and what is not (there is a special section of hell reserved for the decision-making folks at Home Depot who put out annuals and vegetables sets that are a full month or more ahead of the season).

In other words, while I care about the success of the garden in any year (to volunteer to manage one for a decade with any other motivation would be weird in the extreme), this quarantine spring of 2020 carries a special onus.  I feel I’m helping people get through this, and I’m certain Betty’s sentiments echo my own.

Garden Therapy

Though I was not present at the meeting, apparently sometime toward the end of March, Medfield’s Covid-19 Response Committee discussed which additional community activities (in addition to schools, libraries, restaurants, etc.) could or should be discontinued in order to discourage unnecessary public gatherings.

A returning gardener
carries in her plot's
'mascot' - a terra cotta
pig

The Community Garden was one of the ‘group activities’ up for consideration.

I would not have known this except a town employee forwarded a copy of an internal email noting the Community Garden had been spared, and permitted to go forward on schedule.   A few days later, in one of my periodic ‘updates’ to the 75 families who have plots in the garden, I mentioned the decision in passing.

The response from gardeners was swift and vocal.  The most memorable one came from a wonderful lady whom I think of as giving the garden a certain ‘classiness’.  She is always in a good mood; she maintains a glorious garden; and she dresses better than any gardener I have ever met.  Her response was as follows:

Betty dispenses gardening advice from
a socially responsible distance

“So help me God, if they were to close the garden I would have a HUGE problem with that. The garden is my ONLY solace from home- schooling these animals, and my escape from the “office”.

The message concluded with a number of emojis, the exact translation of them I could not ascertain, but which appeared to threaten to visit some ancient Egyptian curse upon anyone who dared to mess with the status quo.

Betty and I have spent multiple hours the past few days at the Community Garden.  Betty answers questions (from a CDC-acceptable distance) about what it is safe to plant.  I introduce myself to the new gardeners (signup is via email) and explain why we recommend burying the bottom six inches of fences. 

It's too soon to plan anything but the
hardiest of crops, but everyone is
getting prepped

What we have received from gardeners is universal thanks.  Back in January and February, I was having trouble getting people to sign up for plots.  After the ‘shelter in place’ orders went out, demand exploded.  Not only were all plots filled; I had a wait list with eight names on it.  Everyone, it seems, is in need of some garden therapy.

A group of volunteers always stakes the garden at the end of March and we ask gardeners to have a fence up by the first weekend in May; a very reasonable four or five weeks to accomplish a task that provides ‘proof of gardening.’ Yet, in a ‘normal’ year, I have to don my Ogre costume to get people to meet the deadline.  This year, the first half dozen fences were in place the day after I put out a memo announcing that the garden was open.  Today (April 12) I counted just nine plots out of 70 that are not fenced, with the deadline still three weeks away. 

Everyone is working on fences

Granted, people have far more time on their hands in the spring of 2020 than in previous years, but there is also a palpable sense of pleasure on the faces of everyone I see.  Moreover, there is more courtesy.  For example, every year, I grit my teeth as I find many of the three-foot walkways between plots have been prepared just half the width; gardeners figured they were responsible for only ‘their’ half of the pathway.  This year, whoever does the path puts down cardboard or paper plus bark mulch for the full 36 inches.  Another example: we discourage gardeners who share a full plot (dividing each 20-foot-by-30-foot space into two 15-foot-by-20-foot ones) from dividing the plots with an internal fence (it wastes space and promotes weeds). Last year, perhaps four of the 15 gardens bore just a length of string or row of flowers to ‘suggest’ a demarcation.  This year, I’ve seen just three plots with interior fences.

Four plots are prepared

Most of all, I’ve seen gardeners luxuriating in having a legitimate and ‘responsible’ reason to be outdoors.  There were 15 cars at the garden this afternoon.  A few had back ends bulging with fencing or stakes, but most people were there just to find something to do in their plots.  They were building raised beds, marking out rows, and creating obelisks on which peas will grow this summer.  Betty warned everyone soil temperatures are still in the 40’s, meaning it is too early to plant anything except the hardiest of ‘cool weather’ vegetables (spinach, onions).    Yet, people were hoeing or on their hands and knees as if a heat wave was expected, rather than the two days of cold rain forecast for early this coming week.

This is the earliest we've been busy.
Usually, early April is very quiet.

Had the garden been ‘disallowed’ because of coronavirus concerns, I could have made all the valid arguments in favor of reversing the decision (chief among them that opportunistic weeds would have swallowed the garden by the end of May), but the likelihood I would have prevailed was slim.  As a nation, we are trying to flatten the curve of a pandemic.

But, for 75 Medfield families, we are providing the best kind of therapy.  We’re offering hope.  I suspect the bins we put out to aid the town’s Food Cupboard will overflow this season.  I have a feeling disagreements will be settled amicably and (fingers crossed) vines may even stay inside fences come August.

 

I predict people will wave greetings to one another from their respective plots until it is once again safe to offer a hug.  In short, I think it’s going to be a great season for the Community Garden.

Thank Goodness for Gardening

March 2020 may go down as the month that gardening saved my sanity.

A month that began with such promise went sideways with a speed and whip-lash-inducing severity that, in my memory, is unprecedented.  No, I didn’t test positive for Covid-19; but more than a dozen speaking engagements as close as my town library and as far away as South Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Missouri fell like dominoes and evaporated out of ‘an abundance of caution’.  It wasn't fair; I had a new book to talk about and people to entertain.  I confess to having fallen into a funk that no amount of binge-watching Cheers reruns could cure.

Ten days into the month, Betty appeared in the bedroom that serves as my office (where I was, of course, immersing myself in contagion statistics).  She had a rake in her hand.  “Stand up, Mister Gloom and Doom,” she said.  “I would like you to help me clean up the garden.”

Betty had the kind of look of her face that said the use of the words, ‘would like’, was not intended to be taken at face value.  This was a command, and was to be obeyed now.

I found crocus along the sidewalk

I rose from my chair and, for the next three days, we pulled a winter’s worth of leaves out from under shrubs.  I mended a stone wall.  We cut back the four-inch stubble on perennials, and carefully trimmed out broken branches.  And, along the way, I found dicentra already leafing out; awaiting only the removal of six inches of oak leaves to start on their early spring flowering.  Daffodil greens were three inches high and, where there was bright sunlight, heads were forming.

The aconite planted last fall bloomed

I removed a mulch of pine needles and discovered a small forest of greens that meant the winter aconite bulbs we planted in October were going to bloom.  Off our patio, a clutch of hellebores had probably been in bloom since February, but were under so many leaves, I had forgotten they were there.  When I carefully pulled off leaves and pine needles by hand, I found myself with a pink and white reward.  Those small signs lifted my spirits more than I can express in words. 

It was not all ‘rake and discover’.  Cleaning the garden also meant hours on my knees pulling out thousands of inch-tall pine seedlings and a nasty green weed with world domination hard-wired into its DNA. 

The garden was staked and fences
bloomed immeiately

Then, the sun warmed the soil and, a week later, miracle of miracles, we had crocus by the hundreds.  My spirits had done a 180.  I was looking forward to working in the garden. 

On a Friday toward the end of the month – when the temperature rose into the mid-40s and no rain was in the forecast - we gathered a group of intrepid volunteers and put down 220 stakes to mark our town’s Community Garden.  The next day, we put up our fence – or at least tried to.  A cold, nasty wind whipped up and drove us indoors.  But we will be back out.  We have to: the garlic is already three or four inches high and will be fodder for deer if we don’t protect it.

The hellebores were there all along

Perhaps the rejuvenation of my spirits has some kind of cosmic, Karma-like reverberation.  One morning in late March, an email appeared in my in-box.  The garden club convention in Missouri I was to speak to in early May was one of the first to cancel the event at the beginning of March.  But they were now planning their 2021 event.  Everyone had been looking forward to my talk.  Might I be available the first week of May a year from now? 

Of course I could; and I wrote them back immediately.  No sooner that that email was posted, my phone rang.  The group in Illinois was cancelling my talk, also scheduled for May, but was anxious to know if I could be re-booked for the same date in 2021.

I write this looking out my office window.  A few weeks ago, I saw only missed opportunities I thought would never come again, and contagion as far as the eye could see.  Now, I focus on the mass of yellow, white and blue crocuses and aconite.  And I know we will all get through this.