gnomen

They've just blocked a long section of Adelaide St, and I have been dutifully observing the melee. It's my obligation, as a chronicler of my small little world, to document this for all of posterity.

(Aside: That word always makes me think that future generations will benefit gluteally by the efforts of our prose. Here's to posterity!)

Wait, something's just happened. The fire trucks are moving around! One has just left, another one has backed up!

Of course I'm supposed to be working, but how am I to help it? I count SIX sets of flashing lights. Six! Combined with the visual spectacle of traffic diversion, curious spectators, and the veritable hush of history unfolding before our very eyes, and I ask you, what else would you have me do? There are people on ROOFS, on ROOFS!

Also, I have no work to do.

Oh MAN, there's a helicopter, I can hear it! Oooh, oooh, and now I can SEE IT! And there's a man on a mechanical arm!

My goal was to maintain a gardening journal. Write about one aspect of my life, try to maintain focus. Commit to it, dedicate myself to it, overcome the years of behavioural programming that make it nearly impossible for me to do this sort of thing. Write about gardening, as often as I can, with resolve. The kind of resolve you see in people in January, when they're faced with both the first page of their "Word A Day" calendars and a pernicious smoking habit/extra 10 pounds/lack of savings in their savings account. I resolve to lose this, gain that, nip this, tuck that. Cosmetic surgery of the soul.

Well, gentle reader, it looks like I left the waiting room before I even got my metaphysical injection of collagen. I never even went through with my metaphorical face lift.

So, to hell with all this artificial enhancement. I'm going to accept me for who I am, behavioural pathologies and all. Sometimes I'm going to write about gardening, and sometimes I'm going to write about plastic surgery, and sometimes I'm going to write about a whole lot of nothing. So there. Take that! Hah! Shazam! etc.

Speaking of which, the woman who was the recipient of the first facial transplant is "meeting the media". Showing the world her new face. I'm not a facial reconstructionist, or a scientist, which is to say that my interest hardly lies in the advance of human knowledge. I just wanted to see what her new face looked like.

And with that, just a handful of words, I've powerfully reinserted myself into the world of blogging, as a nebbishly grotesque voyeur of human misery. Thanks for reading!

Seriously, though, the major motivator for my content readjustment is that it's kind of dumb to maintain a gardening journal when you no longer have a garden. Um, yeah. That's a long story wrapped up in another long story and tied with a long-story bow. Let's just say that the blogging hiatus came as a direct result of no longer being able to handle the pressure of captaining a massively popular show on the Comedy Network, and consequently finding myself in South Africa when I should have been writing. All essentially true. Well, the emotional truth is there.

So here I am, back in the city of my birth, the city of second-rate angels, the city that sometimes sleeps, Hollywood North. It's good to be here, the city of underground currents. Maple Leaf Gardens floats on a bed of water, and has been converted into a grocery store. Such a weird and lovely city.

Last night I stayed over at my mother's place. My brother, his wife, and their three children have come to visit from Zurich, and are presently occupying the only beds in the Mama S. household. I stayed on the sofa. You may have noticed that I am carefully avoiding the use of the word "sleep" to describe my nocturnal activities at the S. home last night, and the reasons for this particular lexical aversion are as follows:
1. From 11:00 p.m. until about midnight., my niece Tatiana couldn't sleep, and her plaintive exhortations about the injustice of being confined to her crib kept me up.
2. From about midnight until perhaps 2, I slept fitfully. My father, a profound snorer, was sleeping on the sofabed in the same room as my ill-chosen bed.
3. At about 2 in the morning, my mother started to bake, an activity which involved, in varying measures, a microwave, a mixer and an unidentifiable clanging sound. The kitchen is open to the living room in which I was "staying".
4. Around 4, having discovered that her first batch of biscuits was destroyed by old yeast. my mother started to make another batch, and the very same microwaving, mixing and clanging that had caused me so much consternation two hours earlier kept me wide-eyed and castigating every inventor of kitchen appliances.
5. At 6 in the morning, a man chatting on his cellphone outside the homestead was the cause of my mother's early morning tirade.

By 7, I was so resigned to not sleeping that I got up a half hour before my alarm, and stumbled into the bathroom, carefully touching the fat lip that Tatiana accidentally gave me last night. The kind of exhaustion that you can swallow gripping my insides, I continued the stumbling towards work.

The S. family from Switzerland have been here since mid-July. Somewhere between then and now, the fake enthusiasm I used to cover up my real depression has turned into real joy. I'm happy they're here.

Speaking of gardening, the bounty is now. I am happily chomping away on broccoli that I grew; it resembles broccoli in taste only, though. Rather than thick stems supporting a profusion of little buds, my broccoli consists of thin wispy stems supporting a meagre number of oversized buds. Still, it does taste so good. This was also the week that I ate my first beefsteak tomato. Deliciously delicious.

I was supposed to track what was blooming when, but I haven't been very methodical about keeping track.

What's in bloom right now is the following:

echinachea purpurea
- started to bloom last week
- not the echinachea I planted, the stuff in bloom was planted at least a year ago.

rose of sharon
- started to bloom on the weekend, confirming what I suspected before - the previous owners loved rose of sharon. There are two shrubs at the front of our house - one with white blooms, one with purple blooms - and two in the backyard - both purple.

daylilies
- still blooming

Grandma Audrey's roses
- a new flower has bloomed. It's very pretty.

Coreopsis
- a profusion of pink flowers. I like it a lot.

snapdragons
- white and awesome looking. these bloomed much later than the purple ones I planted alongside (which started blooming at the end of May I think, and finished sometime in June).

Also, I should mention my annuals, which never really get mentioned. I wonder why I haven't been mentioning them? Hmm. Well, I planted these two planters in May, and they're still looking fantastic. They have white trailing bacopa, pink wave petunias, and hot dayglo pink geraniums. I salvaged two beautiful stone planters from my neighbour on Bulk Trash Pickup day (I love that day, btw), and they look so fancy.

I've got this cleome climbing for the highest reaches of the sky and then blooming. Strange 7 foot tall plant.

And then there are pansies. Those pansies I planted in April are still blooming. Some of them are looking a little leggy, but they're still blooming.

That's it. I'm not in the mood to write more.

In the past two months, I have had to struggle with the deaths of two people who were just too bloody young to die. One was Shawn, who died at the age of 28 doing what he loved to do most - driving at reckless speeds on his Ducatti. When I heard the news that Shawn had died, I honestly thought it was a sick practical joke, and that while his friends and family (and scores of ex-girlfriends, holy cow) were mourning his death, he would stroll down the aisle of the church at just the right moment, saying "wha's goin' aawwwn" and smiling with that salesman-of-the-century smile of his. He never did, and it was only at the end of the service that I realized the truth of it. Shawn was dead. I would never see him again.

Last week, I found out that a woman I was just beginning to get acquainted with had died in a car accident. Sakura, whom I had gotten to know through "yougrowgirl.com", was only 37 when she died. I didn't know her very well, and was content to let my knowledge of her grow slowly over seasons. But the season of her life has now passed.

Really, before this year, I had never been so mentally thwacked by the deaths of others. Sounds callous, I know, but all of my recently-deceased relatives, save my grandfather, had died when I was a child. I was 26 when my grandfather died, and I remember the call from my mother, the moment of awareness which detonated in my chest and spread quickly like a hot wave through my body. I had expected that call, my grandfather having "taken a turn for the worse" in the month which preceded his death, but the griefbomb which shook through me had been a surprise. We all knew that he was ready to die: the indignity of colon cancer was too much to bear, and death was a relief. He died not 24 hours before my mother would have been at his side, her flight to Europe mere hours away. I often think that he wanted to die before she came. He would not have wanted her to have seen him so stripped of the formidable strength he once possessed.

All the same, it made some sense. He was 78 - he lived a full lifetime. Sakura only got to live half a lifetime; Shawn, a third. It mentally undoes me to think about this.

Gardening, surprisingly, helped me deal with a small portion of the overwhelming anger and disbelief I felt when Shawn died. I have learned to view a garden as a living thing, with its seasons and flamboyance, its subtleties and surprises, its lives and its deaths. It makes it easier for me to deal with some part of the reality of death, if not the emotional process of accepting a friend's absence. I've tried to turn to it now, to deal with Sakura's death, but I've been met with a deluge of rain.

On Sunday morning, I dug a new garden bed in the pouring rain. Digging the compacted soil, sweat mixing with the fat raindrops, grief mixed with exhaustion, soaked to the core. I planted False Indigo, a plant I know Sakura had herself, a plant she wistfully hoped would bloom, looked forward to seeing in bloom next year.

It changed nothing, though. I still feel the same kind of rotten misery I felt when Shawn died.

Although, something's a bit different. When Shawn died, I tried to cover up my feelings and pretend that everything was fine. Going through my journal entries, I noticed that I didn't even talk about his death. But it doesn't seem right to do that now. If there's something that touched me about Sakura, it was her integrity. She wouldn't have been that dishonest.

So, neither will I.

Sakura,

I didn't know you very well, or for very long. But you mattered to me.

And you mattered to so many people. You were wondrous.



I will not forget you.

I can be a huge jerk at times. One such time occurred last week, when T forgot to water the garden. Admittedly, pledges elicited at six in the morning are not often well-remembered pledges at, say, any time after that. But I was still irate when, arriving home late that day, I discovered a parched and exhausted garden, and a videogame-playing and utterly oblivious boyfriend. After the outpouring of colourful and snarky phrases, he apologized and insisted on watering the garden. So there we were, T's arm around me, a big grin on his face, proudly watering the garden with the high-pressure setting on the hose. You know, the kind of spray that wreaks mass damage to plants while not actually watering anything? Yeah, that setting. "T, could you use another setting on the hose?" I kept squeaking at him. "Honey, I'm watering the garden," he kept saying, as he thwacked away at my plants.

As a relevant aside, I recently saw this show on the Discovery Channel called "How It's Made". In one short segment, I learned how to make airplanes. To cut out some of the finer holes in the instrument panel, you use a stream of sand and high-pressure water to cut through the fuselage.

Anyway, the whole time he's desiccating my plants, I'm thinking, "dammit, why did I ask him to water my garden? he doesn't know how to water anything!". Never mind that my plants survived the high-pressure hosedown. No, I apparently have some inflated sense of my gardening acumen. I can water, and he can't.

It gets worse. T and I went up to his dad's cottage for most of last week, and we asked T's mother to tend to our two most precious children: our cat, Callisto, and the garden. She did a great job of watering the garden and keeping our cat fed. She didn't do such a good job in keeping our grass alive, which sent me into a nasty, nasty tirade, the details of which I'm too ashamed to mention here. The nasty comments are even more jerktacular when you consider my persistent refrains on the topic of Getting Rid of the Stupid Lawn.

Good god, what have I become? The obnoxious child whose misplaced sense of superiority prevents her from letting others play with her new Sega Genesis, or in my case, Lavandula Angustifolia, because only SHE knows how to use it properly? The ungrateful curmudgeon who can't accept kindness from others? A hideous she-beast, clutching her tomato plants close to her chest while squawking "mine! mine!" to anyone within earshot?

Gad. I suck.

And now, for something completely different, a list of garden highlights from this week (which I spent at the cottage, so this is really a list of garden highlights from yesterday):

- I harvested a pepper! I harvested a pepper! It's a hot banana pepper, and it looks, hot damn, just like a hot banana pepper! Also, when I went into the garden today, I noticed that another hot pepper had fallen off its plant, so ripe it was for the falling.
- Obviously, some animal came into the garden and completely defoliated all of my carrots. Nothing else was even on the menu that day - just carrot tops. So, I pulled most of them out of the ground, even thought they were, well, crappy and little. I don't think I'm going to grow carrots again next year. I remember my mom and I growing the same kind of obscenely shaped and mediocre carrots when I was a kid. Kind of weird, though. You go away for a few days, you come back, and everything's the same, except there are no tops to the carrots you planted. Bizarre.
- Oh, the hostas. Oh. They're flowering now, but their leaves are looking overwhelmed by all the sun they shouldn't be getting. Maybe I should slather them in sunscreen.
- I planted butternut squash and it's such a stupid plant to grow if you don't have about 8 feet of open space to grow it in. It's making a mess of the garden. I had FOUR seedlings. One of them is sprawling out onto our deck, another one is actually thriving in a planter box and is spilling out onto the brown lawn.
- I've got chamomile flowers galore. I keep harvesting them to dry. I think this is one of my favourite herbs this year - I've been drinking a lot of chamomile tea. In addition to chamomile, I've been making tea from mint, lemon catmint, lemon balm, and stevia. Next year, I'd like to grow lemon verbena for tea.
- Calli LOVES the catmint I planted for her. The lemon catmint she won't acknowledge, but the regular catmint! Wowee. It's great, because now she spends less time chomping on the zebra grass which always makes her vomit.

See, the problem with randomly broadcasting unfamiliar seeds over your garden is this: sometimes, little birds randomly broadcast poop over your garden, containing different seeds, and sometimes the wind randomly broadcasts dirt over your garden, containing even more different seeds. So while you're waiting for your calendula to come up, you're carefully nurturing invasive weeds as well. After a full week of flipflopping between googled images of my future seedlings and real life examples of plants growing in the garden, I finally came to the inevitable conclusion that the two groups are two completely mutually exclusive groups. I had nothing but weeds.

Well, now that's a gross exaggeration. The truth is, I had maybe 6-8 plants that were mature, flowering, and well-poised to take over my garden if that's what they did for a living. I have no idea. They were being quite coy about their true vocation. So, I pulled them all out, except for three, which really do look like they might be...something.

It has been as dry as a sandstorm next to a dehumidifier on top of a salt mine. But I've been keeping up with the watering, for the most part. There was a dodgy period last week where the weather people kept suggesting rain, without ever ONCE seeming contrite about their utterly false declarations, and I stupidly believed their spurious reports and didn't water. Eventually, I just made up my own mind - I sniffed the air, and decided that it didn't smell like rain. A good decision.

The garden looks like this right now: the oversunned hostas look like they've just come back from their Carribbean vacation. I REALLY need to find a better home for them. The hot banana pepper plants each have at least one good sized pepper on them (almost full sized! Yeah!!!). The tomatoes have tomaters on them. The lettuce is no more, after the last remaining head of lettuce grew 1 whole foot in a day and immediately went from heavenly to armpitty. The black plum tomato plants have little green plum tomatoes on them. My thyme is beginning to flower. My red bell peppers have wee little green peppers on them.

As for the perennials, the daylilies are in the middle of their bloom cycle. Just like every other neighbor's daylilies. Seriously, I feel like the blooming of my daylilies signals my membership in some kind of weird unholy neighborhood secret cult. Almost every front lawn has daylilies, and we're talking the EXACT same orange daylilies. EVERYONE has them, but NOBODY talks about them. We all just silently walk by the rows of orange blooms, and nonchalantly swat bugs away from our third eyes. I don't know, it seems weird to me...

And one of the previously unidentified perennials has turned out to be shasta daisies, which are beginning to bloom. And to my joyful surprise, my lupins are blooming. Well, one of them is. It's so light pink it's often white. Lovely, lovely, lovely. And now my white snapdragons are blooming too. Oh, let's all frolic and dance in fields of happy blooms!!!!!

Um, dance in fields of happy blooms? That doesn't sound...like me.....obviously...the...hive mind...is...taking...over...my...brain...orange...daylilies....must....fight....orange....back...daylilies.....mlleehhhhh......orange...

I harvested some chamomile flowers this week. I could spend a whole day sniffing chamomile, and to be honest, I devoted more than a few minutes to the task. Like with many other things in the garden, I stuck a little bit of it under T's nose and dared him to smell it. He rolled his eyes, inhaled, and said, "you know, of all the things you've stuck under my nose and demanded I smell, this one's the best." Sweeter words have never been uttered.

I also harvested some basil. I had a fantastic plant which was well situated about 3 weeks ago, before my tomato plants tripled in size. The poor little plant didn't have a chance. Well, it was quite large, so I figured it would be better to pull the whole thing out of the ground than let it get beat up by the garden bullies.

Not to say that my tomato plants are bullying other plants - they can't help it. I planted things way too close. I gave my tomatoes about 16" of spacing when I should have given them twice that. I'm a ghastly gardener.

But I'm learning.

"Austria's finest beer" has become my finest slug destroyer. Okay, I'll admit it. I actually went out and bought two new cans of beer - the cheapest stuff I could find - because I wouldn't use the Guinness in our fridge. That a nation's most prized lager is the cheapest buy in the liquor store impresses me. Of course, anyone could put those three potent words on the side of a can. Heck, I could tattoo "Austria's finest beer" on my bicep.

Anyways, beer pedigree aside, it worked. I went out yesterday morning to survey the garden, and the beer traps claimed five slug lives. And this morning, there were four more. Nine slug lives, and no other significant damage as far as I could tell.

****
I have been asked if I could post pictures of my garden. I would love to, if only my SO could find the charger for his digital camera. Several pathetic, cursory attempts to find it have proven to be useless, which has solidified in my mind the belief that it's much better to do anything else other than fruitlessly look for lost things. Whenever things go missing now, I go for ice cream. I know, not an effective technique for finding lost things, but neither is active searching, it seems. I do hope the universe decides to splurt it out sometime soon, and heck, while the universe is at it, I've got about 17 sets of keys and a much-loved moonstone ring I'd like back too.

****
My journalling efforts have been spotty lately. I'm overworked and tired. Working less and sleeping more will certainly do wonders for the quality of my prose, not to mention the sanity of my brain. And most of all, my garden won't get overrun by pests that I completely ignore for a week!

The slugs are feasting like they're hungry Norse warriors and my garden is Valhalla. The only difference is, my garden is not the final resting place for fallen warriors. It's the place where war is being waged. Slugs versus my garden, and the slugs are winning. If only I could be a Valkyrie, escorting the slain to their final resting place far the hell away from my beautiful plants.

So here's the status: the slimelords have, thankfully, steered clear of the newly established bed. I have compost and manure on top of the bed, but no other kind of mulch. The perennial bed at the back of my yard, which I had lovingly mulched so as to conserve water, is being ravaged. There's the previously noted, as-yet-to-be-identified, perennial which I now miserably refer to as "laceweed". They've taken to one of my lupines. They've attacked another plant. Damn stupid late-night stealth missions of defoliation.

Two cans of Guinness. That's what I have in my arsenal. Damn. I'd rather not waste GOOD beer on the stupid slimelords, but, well, sometimes a person has to part with something dear to them for the greater good.

When I get home from work, I usually trot out into the garden to see what's up, pull out the rogue party crashers of the garden, and make sure everybody's bubbly is topped up. Last night, I didn't get home until nine, and ran out into garden to make sure that I could get some much needed water to the new invites to the summerlong bash. It seems I had been beaten to the task. Mama Nature came along, bringing rain drops. Didn't get to check out the state of the garden, and the mosquitos were out, so I headed in.

Well, what a riot I found this morning! My butternut squash had grown to TWICE ITS SIZE since I had last checked up on it on Tuesday night. My newly planted black plum tomatoes were blooming! The broccoli I got from Ben went from diminuitive to massive in two days. Must have been some party.

( Incidentally, the best party I ever went to was at Erika's house when I was 17. We carried on like coked-out Hollywood stars, minus the coke. I remember surfing a mattress down a full flight of stairs. Obviously, Erika's parents were out of town. )

And, more ominously, two of the branches of my newly planted rose had gotten entangled, and as I began to pry them apart, I noticed that the leaves on one of the branches were...well, obviously tasty to something. Something large enough to chomp off half of each leaf on one side branch.

And then, when I looked at the as-yet-to-be-identified plant in the back of my yard, I noticed HUNDREDS of little holes on its foliage.

What could that be? Aphids? No, aphids don't do that. Caterpillers? Maybe....

I spend the morning searching the internet for some clue as to what turned my beautiful plant into a lacy mess. One: flea beetles, which, for practical purposes, we'll call microscopic. Two, slugs. Three: water droplets. Four, none of the above.

I'm guessing slugs.

On Sunday, I met up with a bunch of people from the "You Grow Girl" web forum. I know, I know, getting together with people you meet on the internet is at best, sketchy, and at worst, a really good way to get abducted and sold into slavery to some swaying socialite from the Hamptons looking for an Eastern European woman to keep her house clean. Honestly, though, if the people I met knew that I half-anticipated an abduction attempt, they would probably take offense. Well, they should take offense. After all, they are all very decent, warm people.

I've been pretty reclusive as of late, even with my friends, so this kind of social activity left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. And when I'm overwhelmed, off I go, jibber-jabbering about whatever barely coherent thoughts I have at the moment. It's always a wonder to me that people endure my frothy and inconsistent thoughts when I'm in this state. Maybe they were being polite. In any event, it was really nice to hang out with people who, like me, loved plants.

Gayla, one of the people there, brought some seedlings and cuttings, and she gave me a few things - a nutmeg geranium, some lemon catnip, and a little cutting of a jungle cactus. I forget what it's called. In addition to this bounty, I picked up some comfrey (good for cuts and bruises, great for plant nourishment, fantastic for getting really sick when taken internally), bergamot (yummy tea), banana mint (it SMELLS LIKE BANANAS!!! Oh strange Nature, what wondrous odours emanate from the most unlikely of sources!), stevia (yeah, I'm not sure about growing stevia...I figure I'll try it and see how it pans out), a Vicks plant for inside (oh strange Nature, what wondrous....etc etc.) and two black plum tomato plants. I've got a small section of the tomato genus covered now.

When the heat finally fell below the 30 degree mark, I planted my goodies.

First, the rose, which T's grandmother gave us as a housewarming gift on Saturday. I kept it watered and happy until Sunday, which is how long it took me to figure out where the hell the thorny, petulant beast should go. I dug a large hole, added some organic fertilizer and organic triple mix to the hole, and carefully splayed the roots around that, and then covered it with soil and watered it thoroughly. It's big - I'd say almost 3 feet tall. And I know, I just KNOW it's going to sit there and sulk at me, while I try desperately to figure out what it needs. Still, a very generous and lovely housewarming gift.

Then, the herbs. I watered them all, and gave all of my veggies a dash of worm poo. I got a bag of it at the store. It wasn't cheap, but since I'm not fertilizing with anything else, and since I ran out of compost a month ago, I figure I need some nice organic form of food. Maybe I should get some worms....

The other thing I did on Sunday was draw a detailed map of my garden, writing down what each plant in the garden is, when it was planted, and what its current condition is. Some of the plants, I have to say, are doing....quite well?!!? And while some of my plants may not do so well in the future (I'm not saying that I planted Brian's shade-loving hostas in the sunniest part of my garden - someone else might say that, but I can't control what other people say!), everything looks generally pretty good.

I hate it when people say those horrible truths that you just haven't had the courage to say out loud yourself, but there they are, all brash and honest and crap, standing over your garden bed, eyeing your seedlings, saying things like, "uh, you've got WAY too much planted in here." I mean, of course, I KNOW I've got way too many things planted in my garden. It's called INEXPERIENCE. I had an initial plan which was very sensible, drawings and proper spacing and such, but then I just had to plant the hostas which my neighbor gave me, and I just had to plant the lilac which my mom bought for me, and I just had to plant the broccoli which Ben brought over.

(okay, and I just had to go out and buy more seedlings, including four stupidly large butternut squash seedlings. And I just had to sow some seeds straight into the ground, because most of my seedlings had perished in the Great Deluge of Cat Curiosity. And I just had to plant the 4 seedlings which had survived my cat's pawing and chewing.)

Seriously, it's ridiculous. In one garden bed, which is roughly 5 feet by 20 feet, I have:

1. VEGETABLES and FRUITS
- carrots - maybe 20 in total
- beets (maybe 10 seeds planted, who knows if anything will come up?)
- 3 filched and horrible strawberry plants
- 4 tomato plants
- 4 pepper plants
- 4 cauliflower plants
- 4 broccoli seedlings
- 3 butternut squash seedlings which will HAVE to go. Katie will appreciate them.
- 6 heads of lettuce
- 6 little spinach plants

2. HERBS
- 8 basil plants (1 big, 1 tiny after most of it died off due to being planted WAY too early - yes, the beginning of May!, and 6 which my mom brought)
- 2 chamomile plants
- rosemary
- 2 kinds of thyme - regular thyme and superfantastic lemon thyme
- oregano
- sage (3 seedlings)
- lemon balm (2 seedlings)
- catnip (1 seedling)
- 4 lavender plants (3 healthy, 1 pathetic and dying)
- echinachea purpurea
- calendula (sown)
- valerian (sown)
- burdock (sown)

FLOWERS AND OTHER PLANTS
- 4 hostas
- a LILAC for crying out loud!
- 2 purple coneflower plants
- 2 as yet to be identified plants - they have red edges to their leaves
- 2 peony trees
- 8 alyssum plants

That's 124 plants, if all my seeds grow. That's about 0.8 square feet per plant.

Everything is little right now, so it kind of works. But give it two, maybe three weeks, and it's all going to start looking like The Jungle Book.

Okay, okay, I need a plan of action. The lettuce is ready to be eaten, so that will clear some space.

And....

Er....

Crap. I've got a problem.

I figure that in the span of a week, which is 168 hours, I worked 90 of those hours. I slept about 45 hours, I travelled for about 20 hours, I probably spent about 5 hours in the whole week performing bathroom functions. That comes to a grand total of....160 hours. Which means, for the whole week, I had about an hour a day to eat, feed my kitty, hang out with T, and garden.

My garden doesn't look so good.

I tried really hard to get up early to water my plants, but every morning I slept in, waking up with only enough time to run water through my hair with my hands. I've completely neglected it. And it shows.

How depressing. I worked so hard just to get it looking decent.

The tomatoes are unhappy. The peppers are miserable looking. Most of my herbs look worn out. My lavender is hanging onto life with contempt.

It's probably about how I look right about now.

Finally, I had a few moments to tend to my garden. I made an immediate beeline for the hose, and watered everything thoroughly. Sad looking seedlings looking up plaintively, like sad starving urchins in a Charles Dickens novel. Please, oh capricious neglectful provider of water, can I have another drink?

And so I gardened, cursing to myself about how pointless it was, since I was such a bloody dunce, yet gardening nonetheless. All this time I've been feeling pretty cocky about my immediate garden success. As if I MAKE plants grow. Ha! I make plants grow no more than I make the earth revolve around the sun. As if I am Mother Nature incarnate, giving birth to little seedlings. Yeah, I was born the divine mother. Please.

So it was in this state of constant low-pitched self-loathing that I met Roy.

Let me be perfectly frank about this: Roy scares me. He's a scary, scary man. Before our encounter, I had only known of Roy's tree-killing bloodlust. He had been clearing trees from his property a few weeks earlier with a chainsaw. Roy likes chainsaws. The sound of his chainsaw punctuated by triumphant laughs or repeated entreaties to his wife to let him hack up more things, quite honestly, scared me shitless. The only other thing I knew about Roy was that, when our 6-month old kitty had gone missing and my boyfriend and his brother had wandered onto Roy's property to look for her, he expressed disappointment that they weren't hooligans because he was hoping to "rough them up".

And here he was, greeting me with a neighborly "hi, there. Looks like you like to garden too."

Swallowing my stomach back into place, I said, far too loudly, "HI! Nice to meet you!! I'm S____!"

Let me be perfectly frank about another thing: I'm a judgmental bastard. Roy is probably the nicest guy ever. He and I chat for maybe an hour, forgetting about the gardening work we're doing and just enjoying a conversation about gardening. Roy's trying to start up an organic garden business, and he gives me some amazing tips, which I wont share here because they're his trade secrets. He invites me over to see HIS MOTHER'S garden, which he planted and maintains, a few streets over. Then darkness surrounds us, and we both warmly say goodbye.

Something about the encounter makes me feel good again about my garden. Maybe it's the advice, but more likely it's just connecting with another gardener - sharing common problems and mistakes we've made, and talking about way's we've overcome those obstacles.

Of course, I've got about 20 hours of sleep to catch up on, so I'll have to neglect my garden for a little bit longer.

My plants are growing.

Despite my weeks and weeks of gardening efforts, which involved watering, manuring, transplanting unhappy plants to more suitable locations, and rampant planting, I never really expected to be very successful. I half-expected to discover, only too late, that my hands secreted a potent biotoxin which spelled death for any living thing. Some kind of anti-chlorophyll, for example. It would come as no surprise to me, then, when all of my hesitant plantlings would hesitate no longer and collectively die as some kind of morbid suicide pact. Goodbye, cruel gardener.

But they're alive. And, dare I say, thriving. The strangely lovely and as yet unnamed yellow-green shrub is doing well. The half-dead heuchera my mom got for me is beginning to reverse course. Even my lilac branch is beginning to bud, a surprising turn of events. Sticking a bare stick into the ground and watching it grow is about as surprising to me as sticking a bare finger into the dirt and watching it sprout another hand. But there it is, with definite buds.

So with little left to do for the time being, I started to dig up more grass.

This time, the excuse was that I wanted to improve the aesthetic flow of my garden beds. I actually used those words - aesthetic flow. Which, if it doesn't refer to the menstrual cycle of an aesthetician*, means a whole lot of nothing if you ask me. But, with these two corporate catchwords at my hilt, my grass was powerless to defend itself.

Here is a description of the task, in which I am now expert:

Position the spade. Step on it so that it cleanly slices into the ground with a decisive "th-wit" sound. With the blade in the ground, lever the handle backward until it almost is parallel with the ground. Continue in this fashion to pry a square of grass from the ground. Lift up the turf and loosen as much soil as you can. Shake the grass to loosen even more dirt. This action not only guarantees that as much soil is returned to the earth as possible, but also guarantees that weed seeds will been liberally dispersed over the surface of your soon-to-be-formed garden bed. Do not, under any circumstances, transplant the newly-removed sod unless you know what you're doing. The consequences of not following this piece of advice include lumpy areas of ground, ugly yellowing grass, and public derision.

That's pretty much it. Such a deceptively simple description for what actually amounts to a whole lot of self-mutilation. And yet I continue to wage war against my grass. I think because it's just...well, just too perfect. This is grass that has had a full range of cosmetic treatments - chemical peels, face lifts and implants. This is grass that was never permitted to show a single blemish. This is beauty queen grass.

Now don't get me wrong - I like grass. I do. Grass is lovely to sit on, nice to look at, and yowzah, when it's cut, it smells like happy would smell if happy were a smell. But this grass - the grass in our backyard - looks cheap to me. It looks like the sort of thing that was aggressively dominated but persistently unloved. It embarasses me. When I look at my backyard, it looks like this: "well, I regularly hand-weed my herb and perennial beds, I give my flowers lots of loving compost, I gently cut back some of the more vigorous plants, and when some things just don't thrive, I accept it, and try something else. But my grass, well, obviously I just spray and spray and spray it into submission."

So, I cut it into little squares and cart it off to my impromptu 2nd compost heap. I single dig the soil and mix in some top soil and organic manure into the top layer. I try not to cut through the roots of the not-so-nearby hedgerow (gee, these guys grow roots that extend laterally over 8 feet! and the hedges themselves are not that tall!), and I curse when I invariably do. And then, my next door neigbor hands me some of his hostas, a gift I happily plant in my newly prepared bed. The bed looks uneven, and the hostas look less vibrant. But when I look at the de-grassed area of my backyard, I think of neighbors, community, uncertainty, and potential. It makes me feel good.


* Yes, yes, I KNOW that aesthetic does not mean "relating to the practices and philosophies of aestheticians", but dammit, if I can't prance crazily through the meadows of language, then what are they THERE for?

Yesterday my mother and I did some work in the garden. She had not been to see the backyard since I had a'mulched most of the healthy green lawn. She takes one look at my 16-foot wide circle of wood chips and says, "I don't like it. Why did you do that?". I nervously try to explain the Five Year Plan, which would see my atrocious pile of newspapers and mulch transform into a beautiful cobblestone patio, surrounded by tall lilacs, towering delphiniums, peony trees, and low stone walls which I would mason by hand. She looks at me and says, "that's the stupidest thing I've heard. You're going to have an ugly circle of wood chips and soil for years, where you used to have healthy grass." I convince her to dig out a section of grass surrounding the brown scar, and transplant some peonies there. We dig. We dig some more. But not much more, mind you, before we hit a thick screw-you-and-your-hopes-of-gardening-here layer of rock. "Uh, maybe it's just this one spot," I say hopefully, and thwack at the soil two feet over. Rock, at exactly the same depth. I bite my dirt-covered finger in anguish, and spend the next 5 minutes spitting out soil.

Oh, why? The bed I prepared only a few feet away didn't have a concrete bunker 12 inches from the surface. I had PLANS for that area. While the nighttime temperatures were still below freezing, I had spent hours diagramming the Perfect Garden. I had toyed with the idea of having straight raised beds and an austere concrete slab near the back of the yard. I sketched out an alternative plan consisting of a meandering path surrounded by lush perennial beds, herb beds, and a bed devoted to nothing but strawberries, which I lovingly called my strawberrium. I even entertained the notion of erecting a 12-foot tall monolith in the middle of my yard, a salute to both Kubrick and my geekiness, when I conceded that a 12 foot tall slab casts a mighty annoying shadow. But I finally settled on a plan which seemed perfect. A spacious patio, at the back of the yard where an established sloped and rocky garden would serve as a focal point. Two paths gently curving through the yard and gracefully arcing my herb garden, my lilacs, my veggie patch, and widening at the point where they touched the patio. It was perfect.

But with the knowledge that there was something large and inpenetrable lurking under the ground, my plans begin to fall apart. My giant circle of mulch starts to look absurd. I had made a mess of things.

"Don't worry, honey", my mother says at just the right time. "You're just overexcited. Stop digging up the grass, and look at what you have. You have a beautiful garden."

And I look. Really look. The back of the yard, slightly elevated, was hedged with a row of trees. I can't tell what they are yet, but the neighbor's crab apple tree, beautifully draping over the fence, sure looks beautiful covered in gentle blossoms. There's a plant with beautiful soft leaves. My mother recognizes it instantly, and said "oh, that thing is beautiful, whatever it's called", suggesting columbine as a possible name. "I know plants, I just don't remember the names," she tells me. There's a peony tree, thick bushes of what I think are daylilies, a fantastic plant with bright yellow feathery tips. There are lots of things I can't identify, many of which have variegated leaves. There are my newly planted lupines, which are joyously thriving. There's zebra grass growing like mad, velvety lamb's ears, and tulips. In my new bed, there are three types of lavender, all looking a bit unhealthy, great looking lemon thyme, bright green lettuce, rosemary, chamomile, echinachea, some of my baby bellflowers that were being squeezed out by my towering daylilies in the other bed, and the infamous strawberry plants. We plant some tomato plants and pepper plants - I have high hopes for the tomatoes, and low hopes for the peppers, but we'll see. There's another peony tree, absurdly planted in the hedgerow that runs along the side of the property, and struggling to survive. We transplant it, but leave the equally-misplaced and suffering rose for now.

And then it hits me: I have been enjoying gardening more than I've been enjoying my garden.

With that ridiculous realization, I make some New Garden's Resolutions. I'm going to stop desecrating my grass and focus on tending to my already established beds. Well, I'm going to try really hard to stop ripping out grass. I'm going to stop planning what new seedlings I should buy, and I'm going to start writing about what plants I already have - what shape they're in, how much water they've been getting, what the temperature's been like, what nasty bugs are lurking in their midst. Even though I didn't plant the established plants, I'm going to adopt them and love them as much as my seedlings. And I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing right - watering, weeding, and watching.

And the circle....well, maybe that can stay....for a little while...

****************************

Part of my walk home from work takes me through a glass corridor which skirts the edge of an urban pond. In it, a Mallard duck was tending to her little ducklings - TEN of them in total - and a crowd of people stood and watched the duck babies do adorable duck baby things, like waddle or drink water. I laugh out loud. I've got a good laugh, I think. It's rich and meaty. (Meaty? Like hamburgers? Gah, I must learn how to self-edit...). Well, anyway, I laugh. And I only realize afterwards how strange it is to laugh loudly to yourself in public. But nobody minded. No, I don't think anyone minded at all.

My mother came today, obstensibly to partake in the First Barbeque Of The Season, but truthfully, a barbeque was an excellent excuse for her to be outside long enough to say, "oh honey, why don't I help you garden?", while chewing on scorched corn. And to be honest, I needed the help. I had been devoting as much loving attention to my thistles and bindweed as I had to my lavender. I had previously decided to leave the small, well-established perennial garden in the back of my yard well enough alone, but I had yet to discover that weeds were not perennials that I should include in the "leave well enough alone" category of growing things. All the same, I still felt a little uneasy after the previous Sunday. Oh dear, that was a horrible day.

So, gentle reader, sit back as I whisk you back in time to that fateful day one week ago. It was Mothers Day, and I had made the trek back to the homestead to hang out with Mama S. As crass as it may sound, hanging out with the matriarch of the family S. usually requires antinauseants; it's not due to any defect in her character or predilection for serving blood sausage, but is a result of her spinning me through an endless procession of shopping malls, discount stores, grocery stores, and Walmarts at high speed. I tolerate shopping poorly, and I tolerate it even more poorly when my mother invariably asks me if I think that the tacky but inexpensive shirt she's selected will look good on my father. So I knew that this Mothers Day would be no different, but it being Mothers Day, I was willing to take some dramamine and keep my arms in the car at all times.

So, off we were to Walmart, a store I abhor if only for the throngs of anxious people who always seem to be crowding me in whatever aisle I'm in, throttling me with their carts. Mom wanted to spend Mothers Day, her day, buying flowers for my garden. Well, hell, I figure I can probably handle a throttling here and there for some free flowers. We see a hanging basket of strawberries for 9 dollars. "That's pretty cool, but I mean, 9 dollars? Strawberries grow like crazy, you could easily get a cutting from someone for free", I say, unwittingly. "Why, of course," my mother replies. As we're driving back from the store, my mother turns to me and says, "seen-eh, why don't we drive by the old house?" And off we go, and before I know it, my mother is in her old backyard - and may I say this clearly, SOMEONE ELSE'S BACKYARD - stealing strawberry plants. Neighboring patio loungers and barbequers watch her with suspicion. I try uselessly to get her to stop. She gives me all sorts of excuses, like, "oh, I know these people well, they won't mind", and "well, I'm doing them a favour, look at how overgrown these plants are", and so on. She selects 3 out of about 25 or 30 plants, and presents them to me. "Here you go", she says. I look down at the plants with the kind of horror that I imagine I'd express if I was holding up a handful of fresh vomit. Someone else's fresh vomit that we had just stolen. The dramamine is clearly not working.

I contemplate throwing the plants away. I consider sneaking back into our former garden to replant the strawberry plants. I think about planting them in the most inhospitable spot in my garden I can find so that they'll quickly perish. How could she do such a thing? I agonize over it on my way home. The best explanation I can come up with is that this old garden, with its meandering clematis and gorgeous roses, its thriving tomato plants and invasive lily-of-the-valley, its strawberries and its little square of grass, is still hers, at least in her mind. My mother spent so much time out there, picking out weeds, admiring her roses, and watching it ebb and flow, year after year, that it probably still is a rich, earthy and potent memory for her. She was the one who planted strawberries there in the first place, after she asked me what I would most love to plant. And they're still there, in exactly the same spot. She was so devastated when we moved and left her beautiful house and exquisite garden behind.

It doesn't make me feel much better about thieving from people, though.

I come home and decide to plant the strawberries. I know it's wrong. And I plant them anyway. Not because I really want strawberries, because god, those strawberries are going to taste like they've been coated in a thick layer of horrible guilt. I plant them for my mother, for the garden she's lost forever, and for the little red berries that will always remind us of the beauty our lives once possessed.

I'm so fully exhausted that the parts of my brain that form words into sentences, then tweaks sentences into coherent phrases, and adds a little twist of silly to the end, well that part has no interest in doing any more work. It's had enough. So, in the interest of making sure that I have enough energy to expend on the system-critical functions of human life, like bile production and such, I'm going to leave out subjective pronouns. I'm also going to write about Saturday and Saturday only, because Sunday was so memorable, so outrageous and lovely and humiliating and fantastic, it deserves a full head of good brainpower.

Prepared first ever garden bed yesterday. REMOVED SOD using only a spade and desperate hacking motion. Removed a LOT of sod. Spent hours cutting up sod into squares that grew progressively smaller and smaller. Started off with 2 foot by 1 foot squares, ended with 2 inch by 2 inch squares. Listened to the Hidden Cameras on repeat the whole day. Tilled a bit. Added top soil and manure and tilled a bit more. Used the discarded sod to terraform the back yard. Imagined myself as a giant volcanically active mountain, creating new rocky terrain by vomiting up lava. Look back at the beautiful bed and feel accomplishment severly dampened by confused weariness.

Also drew out a giant circle - 16 feet in diameter - that probably looks like a crop circle. Layed down newspaper and mulched over that. No more removing sod, going to let good Mama Nature do it the lazy and easy way. Future home of some sort of patio. Circles feel good. The 7 foot wide odd too small ugly cracked concrete crappy small odd hexagon currently serving as a patio, in stark blinding contrast, does not feel good. Run out of newspaper and mulch about hlfway through the circle.

Stumble inside, somehow manage to shower. Eat continuous shovelfuls of food, probably in the order of two full bowls of pasta, then fall asleep on the couch midmeal.

Yesterday it rained. Not only did it rain, but it rained spitefully. Ben, Katie, Sarah and I decided to go to the "garden sales". I wanted to go to Richters, the elusive herb sanctuary I had only heard of before, but by the time I had gone through my morning routine (which involves reading the paper with a coffee close at hand, wandering out to the neighborhood coffee shop to compare notes with my own coffee-making technique, and being waylaid by antique stores en route), it was already 1 p.m.. So Richters it wasn't, and the Garden Gallery it was. "They've got a sale on rhododendrons, they're eight bucks each", Katie said. We get to the store, and examine the diminutive plants. I pick two, thinking that they'll fit perfectly in the tiny space near our spruce tree.

And the next thing I remember is giving the cashier eighty-seven dollars, and carting tray upon tray of seedlings to the car. How did this happen? Didn't everyone from my mother to the next door neighbor to the stranger at the waylaying antique store tell me to wait until May 2-4? "That's when you plant, dear", they all said. So why was I carting lupins, alyssium plants, snapdragons, spiral bellflowers, rhododendrons, lavender (three varieties), basil, thyme, lettuce (2 varieties), spinach, and a blackberry plant to the car?

Someone should have warned me. They shouldn't have said "wait until May 2-4" en masse. They should have said "beware of bewitching garden centers".

Crap.

So, I decide to plant a few of my plants. I dutifully read the tags and space the plants out accordingly. I plant lupins (tall) in the back, snapdragons (less tall) in front of that, and the bellflowers (wee) in front of that. I plant some lettuce and spinach temporarily, which I plan to move to their new home, a border I'd prepare if only it would stop raining. I leave the herbs indoors, under a bed of fluorescent lights. And then I read the tags on the rhododendrons.

Height: 3' -8'

EIGHT FEET? These plants could grow to be EIGHT FEET TALL? And I have TWO of them?

I spend the rest of the day, and most of the night, trying to figure out where I can grow my baby behemoths. I realize I've made a mistake. The temperature drops to a fraction above freezing. I sleep restlessly, considering the mass herbicide I have likely just wrought upon my helpless seedlings.

I gardened in the morning, prepping the only two possible spots for the rhododendrons. I add compost which Ben and Katie so thoughtfully gave to me, a rich dark blend, and slightly acidic. I mentally compare it to the coffee I just had, and the compost wins. And it seems the little seedlings have survived the threat of frost quite nicely, though I think it's too soon to tell.

I don't even want to mention what I discovered on the back of the tag attached to the blackberry plant.