Rites of Spring

 Two important events marking the arrival of spring took place over this past weekend. The first involved a cast of a dozen intrepid gardeners. The second was a more personal one for Betty and me.

The Medfield Community Garden

This is our (gulp) thirteenth year managing the Medfield Community Garden. Before we became the lone members of the Community Garden Committee (the existing members all resigned), town employees handled almost all aspects of the garden; collecting fees, mowing the perimeter and, especially, marking out the garden plots. One by one, we assumed those duties or, in the case of mowing, doled them out to gardeners in exchange for waiving plot fees. The result is an extremely high degree of self-sufficiency. We ask the town to deliver supplies of wood chips. Other than that, we’re on our own.

Town Department of Public Works employees marked out the garden the first few years. Then, Betty and I tried it on our own, with painful (literally and figuratively) results. When an entire weekend is devoted to the task of pounding 160 stakes into the ground, something is profoundly wrong. So, we asked for volunteers and the task became easier.

There are three-foot aisles
around each garden

As the garden expanded from 40 plots to 50, more volunteers were invited to join the effort, sometime with comical results. All gardens have a three-foot-wide perimeter around them. One year, an enterprising volunteer with an inexact grasp of the concept of elasticity brought a six-foot bungee cord to allow three plot corners to be marked simultaneously. A one-inch error in a 30-foot measurement is forgivable. When the fifth plot measurement was off by a cumulative ten inches, we were forced to declare the use of bungee cords non grata.

My staking diagram

This year, we had 60 plots to mark, and 11 volunteers in addition to the two of us.  Two-thirds of the crew assembled on Saturday morning were veterans armed with yardsticks, mallets, tape measures unspooling in lengths up to 100 feet. I brought 240 stakes, 60 pie plates with names and plot numbers already affixed, and – most important – a Plan. Betty and I had already laid out two long strings indicating the axis of the garden. Now, using the corner plot where the strings intersected, I showed how using the outward faces of the stakes was crucial to ensuring accuracy. Everyone nodded their understanding.

Then, I produced my singular act of genius: a flow chart. While Group 1 put down pie plates (held in place with heavy rocks) in each plot, Group 2 would move southward along the first row of plots, and Group 3 would begin marking the westward column. When Groups 2 and 3 had each marked their second plots, Group 4 would go to work laying out the second row!

And so, we staked the garden

And, lo and behold, it worked. The entire garden – more than an acre – was completed in almost exactly two and a half hours.

We thanked everyone profusely, went home, and took a long nap.

Then, on Sunday morning, we started the task of waking up our own home garden.

Beneath these leaves and pine needles,
perennials are waiting to emerge

Conventional wisdom – at least according to people who make a living taking care of other people’s lawns and gardens – is that at the end of the season, grass and shrubs should be pristine and free of leaves. That belief is horribly wrong on multiple counts, not the least of which is that leaf ‘litter’ protects bulbs and the roots of shrubs, while providing overwintering homes for valuable insects.  Accordingly, in late October and early November, we not only ‘allow’ leaves to congregate under our shrubs, we also deposit pine needles and chopped leaves over our perennial beds.

During the winter, much of that garden detritus breaks down by the natural actions of temperature, bacteria, and precipitation to become future soil and compost. In early April, we remove the excess from our home garden. Leaving everything in place isn’t really an option: a layer of wet leaves will form a mat that keeps the ground cold and prevents air, water and light from getting to the sleeping bulbs and perennials under them.

The stone wall, partially cleared

I began at the long stone wall at the south end of our property.  It collects a lot of leaves. I work with 50-gallon plastic bags, and I filled three of them jump-in-and-stomp-down full (the leaves are emptied into the woodlands that make up the back acre of our property). In front of that wall is a long perennial bed with multiple clumps of spring bulbs.

Each gentle pull of the rake revealed a waiting surprise: Nepeta (cat mint) putting out its first tendrils, wood ferns looking for sun, and daffodil shoots trying to push through the leaf mats. Three Polemonium caeruleum (Jacob’s Ladder) plants we added last spring not only made it through their first winter, but were half again as large as what we planted in the spring of 2021.

This clutch of white crocus was
under a covering of leaves

Betty began her tasks in a different part of the garden, removing leaves from areas where bulbs and perennials were pushing up. In the process, she gave clutches of yellow, white, and purple crocus; scilla, brilliant yellow winter aconite; and Chionodoxa an opportunity to show their colors.  The long border of Muscari (grape hyacinth) was freed of a winter’s worth of blow-in detritus. In a few weeks, we will be rewarded with a two-foot-wide, seventy-five-foot-long sea of blue.

Over the course of the next week, we will tackle each bed in turn, removing excess leaves and trimming perennial stalks we left up so seeds were available for birds. We do all this to please ourselves and the hundreds of walkers that pass by each week, smiling and waving their thanks.

The best part of this garden-awakening process is, when May arrives and our neighbors get out their lawnmowers for the first of a six-month cycle of weekly cuttings, we will be out on the porch enjoying the view, and admiring the very different path we took with our own property.