Yarrow

It’s the time of year when I decide what new plants I’m going to try next spring. And this year, among others, I’m experimenting with yarrow. Unlike many of our other experiments, I’m not in any doubt about whether or not it will work. Yarrow seems tailor made for our dry summers - it likes full sun, long days, and near drought conditions.

It also likes poor soil, which I think is a funny term, since a lot of the plants that we like best prefer it. I know that it just means nutrient-poor, but since lavender, rosemary and daylilies all like it, I’ve always smirked a little. In fact, we had a hard time growing lavender for a while, I believe because our soil was too well nourished.

That shouldn’t be a problem for the yarrow. It’s going on the side of our house in an area that can’t really be cultivated for much. Forrest spent the summer and fall ripping out ivy and some kind of thorny vine that had been taken over, and then building some basic beds to contain the plant matter in a hugelkultur set up. He laid half-rotting logs, covered them with pruned branches, then finally, some topsoil. The hope is that over time those logs and branches will break down, but in the meantime, the location of the beds means whatever goes there pretty much has to fend for itself.

So, yarrow it is. I’m interested to see just how little time I can devote to it, given that the rest of the garden will be full of much greedier plants. There is something special about those plants that can look after themselves, like a cat that is happy enough to sit in the sun without constantly needing attention. We give so much adoration to the beautiful but difficult plants, don’t we? The roses that need to be perfectly pruned, the melons that must have gallons of water and hours of sun, the orchids that need special, well, everything. But I delight in the species that find a way. At the lettuce that will grow in the earliest, coldest months. At the garlic that will overwinter, ignoring frosts and rain alike. At the mint, which will take over the whole yard if we’re not careful.

They’re not the stars of the show, that’s for sure. No one is talking about their prize yarrow plants. Still, the sturdiness, resilience and sheer stubbornness of these plants is worth taking a second look at. I’m looking forward to spending a summer doing just that.

Rhododendrons

We decided to name our house a few summers ago. You know, like Green Gables or Tara or Wuthering Heights. The girls were all in favor of naming it Kitten Manor or something, but in the end, I got my way, and we live in Rhododendron Cottage. I’m still looking for the perfect sign to announce it to our suburban neighborhood. I’m sure people will be confused, or worse, sigh over yet another Dillaway oddity.

I chose Rhododendron Cottage because directly in front of our house is a very large red rhododendron. When it blooms in May (late because it’s on the shady north side), our entire living room basks in the pink reflected light. You can barely see the greenery. When it’s in bloom, the rhododendron also makes noise. Ok, it doesn’t make noise. But it is so covered in bees that you hear the buzzing from a dozen feet away. My children are terrified of being stung, but I am delighted every year. So many pollinators! And they’re so happy!

If it sounds like I’m bragging, I’m not. First, I have done nothing to cause our rhododendron to be so large and productive, except perhaps ignoring it. We barely prune it. We let the fallen leaves rot on the ground. We don’t use fertilizer. Second, here in western Washington it’s not exactly hard to grow rhododendrons. They’re the state flower and they grow nearly everywhere. Just down the road from us is a park that has a huge collection of them. I once saw one towering over a two-story house. It feels like everyone has a rhododendron.

But to us, it’s our rhododendron that’s special. Because it blooms later than most. It blooms only when spring has actually come to our house, to our yard. And it blooms so spectacularly that even the interior of our house is transformed. We can’t ignore it. Whether we’re coming or going, that rhododendron is right there, shouting, “Spring is here!” I love its brashness. There’s nothing delicate or fragile about it.

Maybe that’s why we settled on Rhododendron Cottage in the end. Because our home is all of those things. Brash, sturdy, and probably a little indelicate. Just the way we like it.

Rosebushes

I want to chop down my rosebushes. I’m told I have to wait until midwinter to do it. I’m not sure exactly why but I think it has to do with them going into a less active, more hibernatory stage, and therefore being harmed less by being pruned. To be honest, I don’t really care.

I like roses, in their place. And to me, in their place means in someone else’s carefully cultivated garden. Like grapes, roses seem to require such meticulous cultivation. Painstaking pruning, constant vigilance, and work-intensive trellising. Unlike grapes, roses will stab you.

I did not plant these roses. They came with the house and every year, they take over. We cut them back and they take over again. Why not get rid of them, you ask? Probably for the same reason I do a lot of things: my children. My kids love them. They love eating rose petals in the summer. They love making bouquets of the flowers. They love the way the look and smell and even the way they seem to grow six feet every year.

It’s funny, the things we put up with for the people we love. Forrest and I were watching some old videos last night and we both remarked on how messy our house was. It was ridiculous. He and I have never been the most organized of people, but add in three kids in two years along with all the toys and clothes that entails, and every single surface of our house was covered. I used to feel bad about it. People would comment, remark on it, tell me they couldn’t imagine living in such a small house with so many kids. It hurt then, but now? It was a product of that time. Life was full. Full of work, full of fun, full of stuff. So we put up with it.

And as the kids aged, the stuff disappeared. The art supplies moved out to the garage, where secondhand tables make artists’ workspaces. The toys were traded for laptops and board games, which are both conveniently storable. And while the occasional pile of laundry does build up, there are no more diapers and extra onesies stashed around the house for easy changes. (You forget how you really can’t leave them alone in a room, even if their sibling needs a change. So you learn to stash diapers everywhere, I guess.)

Those roses have been there since the beginning. And even though my kids have had their run-ins with the thorns, every time I talk about pulling them out, they protest. “How could you even think about getting rid of them?” Those roses have been used in a hundred mud pies and secret potions and flower crowns. How could I even think about getting rid of them?

And so, the roses stay. We’ll be cutting them down, of course, pruning them brutally, but roses, contrary plants that they are, like that sort of thing. They’ll grow back again and again and I wonder if, even after my kids are grown and flown, I’ll keep those rosebushes. Just in case they’re home and want to make another bouquet for my kitchen table.

Pruning

Although I think about (and write about) gardening a lot, I hope I’ve made it clear that I am by no means an expert gardener. In fact, I often plant something, entirely forget about it, and then find myself delightfully surprised by an unexpected harvest! It’s one of the things I like most about outdoor gardening, how most plants can pretty much keep themselves alive as long as you make sure the soil has enough nourishment.

My other main failing as a gardener is that I tend to lose enthusiasm and fail to finish out the season. By the time October or November come around, I’ve spent so much time weeding, harvesting, and then figuring out what to do with all that harvest that I don’t have much motivation to do things like pruning. Or pulling out the dead plants. Or keeping my garden from looking like an overgrown graveyard of last summer’s hopes and dreams.

It doesn’t help that in my area of the world, the line between still growing and “no, really, that brown thing is dead” is a bit blurry. I still have flowers on some of my plants. The apples are still happily hanging on the tree branches. And our snap peas are still green! So when it comes to things like pruning back raspberries, which all the books say I should be doing right now, it’s a little hard, because two weeks ago my kids were still eating them. Are they really dormant? Or should I let it go a few more weeks?

But in a few more weeks it’ll be really cold and miserable here, perfect for curling up by the fire with a book and less perfect for crouching on the ground with some garden shears. Suffice it to say that my end of season gardening game could use a little work.

But this year, unlike years past, I’m finding myself gravitating towards my autumn garden more. There’s something about stepping away from my screens, my books - even the thoughts inside my head - stepping away from all of that is appealing to me. It feels a little like pulling up the drawbridge on my life. Like not inviting in the voices that mean to manipulate, enrage, or hurt me. Like creating my own little echo chamber where all I can hear are the birds, the occasional car passing by, and the snip snip of my clippers.

It’s hard to prune away those branches that gave such good fruit last year. It’s sad to cut the browning perennials now to the ground. But if I don’t, those root systems will keep feeding dead branches. The plant’s grown will be stunted, it will flower poorly and fruit even worse. There’s a wisdom in getting rid of old growth so that we can let our resources go to where possibility awaits. As the year comes to an end, it’s only right that we gratefully let go of what served us in the past, and start redirecting our energy towards what will serve us in the future.

Floriography

For The Hellebore Society (which comes out January 10th!), I spent a lot of time researching and thinking about the Victorian language of flowers. For those of you who don’t know, the language of flowers, or floriography, was a practice done in the late 1800s/early 1900s where people would send messages to each other in the form of bouquets. Different flowers/foliage meant different things. So, arborvitae meant “everlasting love'“, azalea meant “be careful”, and yellow acacia meant “secret love.” Sent together, that might communicate, “I love you forever but we have to be careful and keep it secret.”

We still retain some of these meanings - red roses symbolize true love, while yellow roses are for friendship. Even if you didn’t know that, you probably kind of knew that red roses are more romantic than yellow. Some flower meanings have developed since then, such as the red poppy representing those soldiers who have died, which was popularized by the poem In Flanders Fields.

I’m not sure why floriography became so interesting to me, nor why it became such a part of my book. By the time I get to the end of the writing process, I’ve picked up and put down so many ideas that I don’t always remember how I got to where I am. But what I do know is that there is something so appealing to me about the meanings we humans give to the smallest of things.

I’m a gardener, which means that I spend a fair amount of my winter months thinking of what I’m going to plant. And although I’ve always leaned toward vegetables, flowers have a way of weaving themselves into any garden. Whether that’s as natural pest control (nasturtiums and marigolds) or as attractions for pollinators (bee balm and clover) or even as herbs that happen to flower (sage and lavender), flowers are always around. And in the Pacific Northwest, with our mild winters, the stubbornest of flowers stick around long past when you’d expect them to disappear.

So, I began to get used to them. And to learn which ones worked here and which ones didn’t. And which ones worked too well and started taking over everything. (I’m looking at you, California poppies). So I suppose it was no surprise that when I started writing my next book, I had flowers on the mind. And now, when I plan my garden for next spring, I’m not just ordering yarrow, gladiolus and bluebells. I’m also thinking about “healing”, “strength of character”, and “loyalty”…and smiling about how humanity always makes even the most mundane of things that much more interesting.

Garlic

Yesterday a planted a lot of garlic. What I wanted to do was harvest a lot of garlic and then plant some more for next year, but last summer’s garlic wasn’t ready yet. You see, it was supposed to be planted in fall but, because of life, it got planted closer to spring. And now, all these months later, it’s not ready.

I don’t know if it ever will be.

Perhaps the mistakes of the past will stay buried in the ground, stagnating until finally they get thrown into the compost. I plant a lot of things and some of them never germinate, or get choked out by weeds, or fail to thrive in inhospitable soil. Gardeners don’t usually get bent out of shape about it.

So yesterday, I planted next year’s fall garlic. It’s the right time of year, the rain stopped for an hour, and thanks to Forrest’s hard work, the dirt was easy to work and full of worms and humus. Everything came together perfectly. I have high hopes for this garlic.

It still might not work out.

We had a beautiful lavender bush when we first moved in, which died off one year. Since then, I have been trying to get lavender going again. I’ve planted it a dozen times - from seed, from plants - it doesn’t matter. We have the perfect climate for lavender - out on the peninsula there are acres and acres of lavender farms. But every year, no matter how much I fertilize, care for and try to make it work, it doesn’t.

Now, garlic is a lot less finicky than that, but there’s something about planting something that is a bit of a gamble. Gardening is a lot of work and often it’s done in less than pleasant circumstances. At the end, more often than not, there’s a harvest, but every gardener I know can tell you what didn’t work in their garden this year. Or what they’ve tried to grow a dozen times and never quite been able to coax into fullness.

But we keep doing it, don’t we? Digging a trench in the muddy dirt, separating stubborn cloves and shoving them down into the dark. Covering them over and then…waiting. Hoping that whatever work we’ve done is enough. And then, if harvest time comes and it’s not, we till the bed again, add some compost, and take another chance.

Because there is always, always, always next spring.

The Last Cucumber

I’m certain I’ve posted on here about cucumbers before, if only because they are my family’s absolute favorite garden produce. There are some plants that aren’t made much better by being grown in the garden - storebought is just as good in my opinion. But there are some that really benefit from that extra burst of freshness. Cucumbers are the epitome of those.

It’s funny, the little family rituals that develop over time. Every year, when the first cucumber is ready to be eaten, whoever finds it runs into the house, inevitably cheering for the long awaited harvest, and cuts it into five pieces, which are distributed to the rest of us. It’s nothing formal, just what happens. The idea of keeping that first cucumber for yourself, of selfishly eating it alone, is almost unthinkable. And so, this small harvest ritual is re-created every year, without fail.

What we don’t have is a ritual for the last cucumber. Perhaps we should somehow memorialize the end of the growing season and the return to the storebought. Instead, in the hustle and bustle of fall sports and school, Forrest usually decides enough is enough and rips out the yellowing vines, pulling off whatever cucumbers are still hanging on. They’re always tiny, usually unripe, and far too bitter - the fruit that came too late, in unwelcoming conditions, just trying to grow some seeds before the frosts come.

Right now those last few cucumbers are sitting on the table in front of me. We’ll munch on them, but I doubt anyone will notice when the last one’s gone. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it actually ends up in the compost after being ignored for days.

We don’t have a lot of “ending” rituals around here. Everyone puts up the Christmas tree together. I take it down alone. The first day of school is full of hoopla. The last day is celebrated with take-out on the couch. Even New Year’s is more about welcoming the new year than saying goodbye to the last one.

I didn’t grow up in a culture that had a particular harvest festival. We had Halloween, of course, but that was about candy and pranks and costumes. Even when we did the pumpkin patch thing, that wasn’t about the end of the harvest, not for me, anyway. I guess I always believed Harvest Festivals were like carnivals - full of delicious food, frivolity and family. But I think the old festivals must have also been about loss. The loss of light as days grow shorter. The loss of space as life moves indoors. The loss of variety as cuisine moves towards easily stored foods.

All of that food and frivolity takes on a different meaning then, doesn’t it. It becomes about enjoying that which does not last. About making sure that the last cucumber is cherished because the next one is months away. About appreciating what we have while we have it, secure in the knowledge that it will come around again.

This probably sounds made up, but while I was writing this, Forrest has been munching on those cucumbers right in front of me. No joke, somewhere in the last hour, that last cucumber disappeared. Perhaps next year I’ll hold on to it, carefully cutting it into five pieces. Perhaps next year, I’ll remember to celebrate the end just as meaningfully as we celebrated the beginning.

Basil

I came here today to write about having too many tomatoes, but I looked back a year and alas! I’ve already written that post. I suppose the feeling of overabundance is somewhat seasonal. For what it’s worth, I do have too many tomatoes and not enough time or storage space. But I suppose I’ll have to write about basil instead.

Right now we have a lot of fresh basil still hanging on despite nighttime temperatures dropping. And if you know me personally, you know that a fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil salad is one of my favorite meals. Not just mine either, apparently. I woke up this morning to a cutting board with some extra basil leaves on it. I was puzzled for a moment until I realized my eldest made her lunch late last night, after I was already asleep. Which means she ventured out sometime after eleven o’clock to get some fresh basil for her Friday lunch.

Something about that made me smile, even at six a.m. I love the idea that my kids feel both ownership and accessibility to the plants we grow. Every time we walk to our car, one or another kid is grabbing a handful of mint or sage to eat on the car ride. When cucumbers are in season, they’ll often grab one out of the garden on the way home from the bus. And my kids, my husband, and even my dog are notorious for eating the kale that grows on our property like a weed.

If that sounds idyllic, please understand: the presence of the garden doesn’t really change much about their general behavior. We still fight about screen time and chores and homework. They still bicker about sharing a room and who left a puddle of water on the bathroom floor after their shower. And for the rainy season, our yard may as well not exist to my kids.

We don’t have a garden out of some grand desire to give our kids a cultivated childhood. We have a garden for the exact opposite reason. Forrest hated mowing the useless front yard and I was looking for something (anything) that I could do to get a break from parenting while still being present enough to be technically home. It was almost a bonus that the kids didn’t really enjoy it and didn’t spend much time out there. If that sounds unfeeling and unkind, well, I encourage you to spend five days a week alone with three kids under five. A quiet refuge can be worth more than gold.

I’m realizing I’m supposed to be talking about basil here. My point is, I’m only now realizing that I view it as a privilege to have access to garden-fresh produce in my front yard. But to my kids, that’s just life. “It’s time to make lunch, and oh yeah, there’s basil outside, let me go grab some.” Every once in a while, I wonder if I should make them aware of their good fortune.

Then I decide not to.

I want them to grow up thinking this is normal. Thinking that fresh basil and too many tomatoes and kale everywhere is just what life looks like. So much of our world seems to revolve around the idea that there isn’t enough, so we’ve got to put ourselves first, and screw everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, this overabundance will show them the truth. That if we plant the seeds and tend our gardens, there will always be enough. More than enough.

Harvest

Harvest is upon us. These days, every time we go somewhere or someone comes here, someone in the Dillaway clan makes sure to grab a couple zucchinis or cucumbers to deliver, too. A friend, upon receipt of a truly gargantuan zucchini, said, “You grew this?” And my only reply was, “We grew thirty of those.” And there are more coming.

We’ve already frozen fourteen cups of shredded zucchini, another ten of diced, and I plan on doing the same with stewed tomatoes this week. I don’t feel up to canning, so our freezer is getting the brunt of it, so much so that I found myself searching, “Deep Freezer Organization Ideas” this morning. When I measured the potatoes, I realized we’d gotten a bushel and a peck, which has of course been stuck in my head ever since.

The funny thing about it is that, at least around here, the plants that give the most are often the ones that demand the least. Beyond watering and the occasional weeding, potatoes and onions are pretty happy. The tomatoes demand a little bit of babying at first, but not much more. The pumpkins, which are happily ripening, have needed no encouragement at all to take over both the front and the back yard. As for the zuchinnis? I’ve actively considered killing them after a few weeks of chopping and shredding, so I can promise you they’re not getting any special treatment.

The plants that get babied are the ones that, to be honest, are not all that impressive. Forrest loves growing peppers, so for months we nurtured little plants under our grow lights, long after everything else went outside to brave the elements. He carefully planted them, ensuring not to disturb their roots in the transfer. And so far we’ve gotten three mini peppers.

Compare that with my eldest and I playing “potato toss.” We dug four-inch-deep holes in the garden bed, stood at one end and earned points by successfully landing the seed potatoes in the holes. Halfway through, Forrest asked, “Shouldn’t you be making sure the eyes are facing upward?” Well, we got a bushel and a peck, so I guess we didn’t need to make sure after all.

I love the economy of the harvest. It’s so ridiculous. Extravagant. Extra. You give a plant the least bit of attention and all of a sudden you’re pulling up onions the size of a softball. There’s a lot more to it, I know, but so much of that happens long before anything comes up out of the ground. So much of the work is composting and starting seeds and planning for the weather which all happens long before the frosts end and the spring sunshine returns.

I long to be ridiculous. Extravagant. Extra. To return kindness with abundance. And on my darkest days, I find myself returning to the garden to remind myself not to overthink it. The key to a good harvest is in the preparation. Maybe if I put in the work to keep growing, keep exploring, keep challenging myself - maybe if I do that when the days are too short and the nights too long - when the sun comes out again, I, too, can create a harvest worth waiting for.

Onions, Part 2

I sat down to write today, hoping that I hadn’t already done a post on onions. As you can tell from the title, I already have, about a year and a half ago. In that post, I mused about how as useful as onions can be, I find myself gravitating towards the more interesting, less predictable veggies. This spring, between one thing and another, boring and predictable became exactly what we were looking for. Long story short, I’ve just come inside from harvesting about 25 pounds of onions.

It was one of those gardening sessions fueled by frustration - a long line and a grumpy clerk at the post office, a day filled with too many errands and not one, but two seemingly easy tasks that I just can’t seem to check off my list. No one in my house deserved my mood so I pulled into the driveway, grabbed my gardening gloves from the garage and got pulling.

Onions are really fun to harvest. Unlike zucchinis and cucumbers, which have prickly vines, or lettuce and herbs, which have to be treated delicately so they will keep producing, onions are pretty straightforward. You grab the green part and pull. Voila! Out pops an onion. Some years I have in me to braid the onion stems to create a pretty and functional kitchen ornament. Not this time. I gleefully took my gardening knife, hacked off the onion greens and tossed the bulbs into a sack.

It was cathartic. By the time I’d harvested half the bed, the sack was full and my frustration had simmered. And, at that point, even with all my uncompleted tasks, I had at least done something productive today. Anger management isn’t the reason we have the garden but it’s certainly an important side benefit. Now, after gardening, and writing, and taking the time for a cup of tea, I’m just about ready to reenter family life…about an hour later than I wanted to, but I think we’ll all be happier that I took a much needed break.

Vacation

Our garden is looking spectacular this year. I’d like to take credit for it, but this year, it’s really been a family affair. Forrest has been out there working just about every sunny moment and with our girls getting older, even they enjoy the odd bit of weeding here and there. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve learned what plants are happy in our garden (potatoes! onions! lettuce!) and which ones don’t enjoy the unique northwest mix of long days and short summers (watermelons…)

But we’re leaving in a few days and although Forrest has been working overtime to implement our watering system, I’m not sure what we’ll be returning to. Forrest and the twins will only be gone for two weeks but there’s an even chance we’ll return to either a desiccated front yard of dead plants or an overgrown jungle of weeds. Last time we went back east, we arrived home to a gorgeously happy garden that was ready to harvest. I’m crossing my fingers we’ll have the same luck this time.

Last night I went outside looking for my eldest to let her know that dinner was ready. I called her name a few times, but I couldn’t see her until she called back. She was hidden in between our two rows of raspberry canes, picking and eating her fill. It was just the right temperature and the sun was setting behind us, casting an orange glow over our whole neighborhood.

“I don’t know why I keep planning trips for the summer when it’s so pretty here,” I said.

She shrugged, knowing the answer as well as I do. School. It’s too hard in these older grades to make up the work, and there aren’t long breaks in the rainy winter, at least not long enough to justify the expense.

“It’ll be hard to leave,” I continued. I’m at the stage of travel planning where I wonder why I ever decided to go anywhere in the first place, why I ever thought it was worth the packing and stress.

“Yeah. But we’ll be happy there too, I think. It’ll be an adventure at least,” she said grimly.

I’m still chuckling at her tone. For people like her and me, “adventure” doesn’t have the positive connotations it should. We like things to stay the way they are, for life to be pretty much the same tomorrow as it was yesterday. I used to have wanderlust, maybe. But now we’ve built a little oasis and I like my little family and traveling with kids is hard and what if everything goes wrong?

At least with a garden you know where you stand. Not much can go wrong. Well, a lot can go wrong but it doesn’t really matter in the end. Maybe that’s why we should travel, her and I. Because it’s a little too easy to forget that whether or not the garden grows isn’t exactly life or death. It’s a little too peaceful, a little too pleasant, a little too comfortable. And I forget that I know exactly how to deal with everything going wrong. So we’ll head out, across the world, and Forrest will anxiously check his bluetooth enabled watering system timer and I’ll do my best to take deep breaths and when we return from our adventure, I guess we’ll see what’s changed. Both in the garden and in ourselves.

Sage

I’m not sure exactly why, but the sage I planted two years ago has decided that it loves my garden more than anything else and I should probably let it keep taking everything over. I don’t disagree, exactly, except that I only need so much sage and while the flowers are pretty, I’m interested in a little more variety than sage everywhere, all the time. So I prune it back and do my best, but unfortunately, I’m married to Forrest, who has never seen an unwanted plant he wouldn’t be happy to find a space for.

Every year, our local elementary school holds a plant sale and of course we go up and buy some things. This year, I mentioned to them that our cucumbers had died in some late spring storms so any extras that they had, I would be happy to buy at the end, after all the parents had had a chance. When I sent Forrest up to get them an hour later, he returned home with not only the cucumbers, but also every single extra plant that they hadn’t sold.

“They were just going to compost them!” he protested. I have no idea if this was true, but what I do know is that he has carefully found a spot for every single one of those plants, including in other people’s gardens. For a week or two there, if you came to our house, you were leaving with a pumpkin plant.

Which brings me back to the sage. We have a brick planter in our front yard, one that has been here since long before we moved it. At first, it had a beautiful lavender bush, but during the baby years, we didn’t have time to prune it, so it got too woody and ended up dying. We’ve tried replanting lavender a number of times, but the trees around it have also grown up and now it’s too shady to take. I’ve gone back and forth on what to plant there, usually just giving up and letting ferns take over, but this year, I was too busy or preoccupied and before I knew it, he’d snuck in four sage plants that I had been keeping in an old pot on the back porch.

Like the plant sale starts, I had been planning on composting them. The plastic pot was old and starting to crack, the sage was rootbound, and the whole thing was a bit of an eyesore. But stubborn as he is, he carefully separated them, unwinding the intertwined roots and giving them new life. To his mind, they might not take to their new home, but some chance is better than just throwing them out.

And of course, that sage is thriving. Even with the spring storms, it has grown, flowered, and is covered in happy bees bouncing around. And I’m simultaneously pleased and annoyed. What am I going to do with all that sage? Because let me tell you, when summer comes, my kids will be out there harvesting it and drying it and presenting me with old jam jars full of the stuff. I’ve still got some from last year!

As for Forrest, ’m not even sure he has noticed. In fact, I know he hasn’t, because if he had, he’d definitely be smiling frustratingly and very specifically not saying, “See? I told you those plants were still good.” But luckily for me, he’s too busy trying to rescue some overgrown raspberry canes, carefully splitting them up and finding new places to stash them, planting them where I’m sure they will happily thrive.

Wattle Fences

I don’t know when I first learned about wattle fences, but I do know that I’ve wanted one from the very moment I heard of them. For those of you not in the know about various types of garden borders, 1) congratulations on having much cooler interests than me and 2) a wattle fences are made by weaving flexible branches around posts made from sturdier branches. Basically, you take branches that are wrist-width (ish) and put them upright in the ground, and then you take thin, whip like branches and weave them in and out. As you weave them, the whole thing becomes quite strong and sort of holds itself together. Traditionally this is done with willow branches, which is where my desire to have a wattle fence stopped. We don’t have a willow in our yard and the idea of sourcing one just so I could make a wattle fence seemed a little absurd.

Enter Forrest. His spring project this year was to clear out an area that had once been covered in a beautiful forsythia but had long been choked out by blackberries and ivy. We’d left it all up for a long time, probably longer than we should have, because it provided a really nice barrier between us and the road that goes along our house. But, enough was enough and if we were to have any hope of saving the forsythia, he needed to clear it out and salvage what he could.

And clear it out he did. After having a lot of fun with a chainsaw, we were left with a lot of dead blackberry canes and a fair amount of sickly looking forsythia. A friend of ours who just happens to be a master gardener advised us to do a lot of trimming, only leaving the strongest parts, in the hopes that without so much foliage to support. the forsythia can bounce back.

The upshot of all this is that Forrest found himself with a lot of vine-like branches. And I think you can imagine that I’ve mentioned the wattle fence to him more than a few times, so, while I took a bunch of tween girls for boba tea this Saturday, he took the initiative and surprised me. I returned home to half a fence and a very excited Forrest.

Not just him, either. Two of my girls got into the fun and it was eleven o’clock at night when I finally called them in to stop wattling and go to bed already. I guess there’s something rather meditative about the weaving process and they can’t seem to resist how magical and charming it makes the kid garden look.

It’s funny, isn’t it — I’m the one who wanted the fence, but in the end it was them that built it, who caught on to the excitement and who rightfully feel the satisfaction of a job well done. There’s a lot of things like that for me right now. I’ve been dealing with some moderately annoying health issues - nothing terminal, but just enough that I don’t exactly have “build a fence” energy right now. And as anyone who has had chronic health stuff knows, you try not to ask too much of the people around you because you never know when you might have a day where you need to ask a lot of them.

So I would never think of asking Forrest to do something like that, let alone my kids. But when I say that, when I say, “You didn’t have to do that for me,” they just laugh and smile and remind me that they didn’t. They did it because it’s cool and fun and yeah, maybe a little because if makes mom happy and who doesn’t want a few brownie points with mom? But it’s that in a life that can seem a little too online, there’s something wholesome about building something from nothing.

I get tired a lot these days. It’ll pass, I know, but I spend more time than I would like staring out the window, watching the bees flit from flower to flower and the most amazing part about it is that although I planted those flowers, I didn’t do it for them. I did it for me. But in the end, they’re the ones that love it most. I’m not really sure what that means, except maybe that we don’t get to decide what other people do for us. And sometimes the things we do for ourselves actually end up giving back more than we could have ever anticipated.

Intensive Gardening

It finally got nice here and so Forrest and I spent most of the weekend outside. Well, he spent most of the weekend outside. I spent most of the weekend down a rabbit hole, learning about historical styles of intensive gardening. If that sounds really nerdy, that’s because it is. I will get to the point, but first, buckle up because you’re going to learn about them too.

Our garden is basically just our front yard, which over the years has grown to include 15 raised beds. (For the record, Forrest says it’s 19 but he’s being ridiculous. My tulip planters do not count as raised beds.) Since the beginning we’ve done a variation of French intensive gardening, which means we grow our plants in raised beds that we keep extremely nutrient rich, and when possible, we plant compatible vegetables side by side to maximize production. (Think planting lettuce, which matures early, next to brussels sprouts, which take a while, so you can get the lettuce grown and harvested while the sprouts are still…well, sprouting.)

French intensive gardening is old news around here; it’s just what we do. But a few weeks ago, Forrest tilled our flower beds and I realized that the three of them created a terrace of sorts, with three different levels. Figuring out what to plant there is what dug my rabbit hole. Because English intensive gardening very much uses vertical space to allow access to plants that are grown right next to each other. It’s not usually called English intensive gardening, though. It’s more often known by its more fanciful name: the English cottage garden. These days, the cottage garden mostly holds flowers, but its origins in medieval times included medicinal herbs, seasonings, and practical flowers that would attract bees, who then provided honey for the household.

I decided to repurpose our flower beds into a cottage garden, one that will attract bees, but also grow sage, thyme, chives, rosemary, mint, and lavender for our house. Forrest and I spend a fun few hours with me telling him where to dig holes and him trying to save every last chive plant. It’ll take two years to come to fruition, but I’m excited to use the space better than we have been.

Because that’s what intensive gardening is all about. Using space better. And while America does have its own version of intensive gardening (called square foot gardening and pioneered by Rodale, Inc. from my hometown of Emmaus, PA), the historical antecedents of limited space and needed productivity date back centuries. As I was regaling Forrest with all of my new found facts, he looked at me and said, “What about this makes it so interesting to you?" I chose not to listen to the implication that he didn’t share my fascination and instead, I considered his question.

The answer is…I grew up in a world where everyone acted like there were no constraints anymore. The Cold War was over, the glass ceiling was broken, and the recessions of the 80s were over. Everything from cars to houses to fast food portions were big and getting bigger. There was no reason to stop growing…ever. And now, I am raising my children in a very different world.

I agree that there are no reasons to stop growing. But growth doesn’t always mean getting bigger and taking up more space. Sometimes, it means putting in the work to make the space you have more functional. Growth for my garden has meant changing what I plant and where I plant it. For Forrest, it’s meant turning a hill that used to be a mere annoyance into a terrace for more cucumbers. For my kids, it’s meant learning to live around the bugs and bees that also find our garden delightful.

I don’t look to the wisdom of the past all that often. Technology has taken us much too far for me to believe that we should give up on modern science. But there’s something about working within constraints that encourages creativity, beauty, and appreciation. We have a small house and a small yard and that means that every square foot counts. It also means that the compost from our home is enough to fertilize all 15 of those beds, if we use our space wisely.

Our world is both very large and very small. And if we can find the possibility in both, then we are equipped to meet whatever life throws as us. Especially a sunny weekend where we fall down a rabbit hole.

P.S. - For all my talk about French, English, and American intensive gardening, German intensive gardening caught my attention the most. Called hugelkultur, or mound culture, it involves basically piling up different types of biodegradable materials that break down over years, and then covering it all in dirt, and then planting on top of that. The mounds are often straight but can be spiral or horseshoe shaped and all I can say is…I am extremely curious.

Sun Break

The weekend was supposed to be ridiculously rainy, which it was…until it wasn’t. Yesterday afternoon, the skies cleared and the temperature rose into the 60s and without batting an eye, Forrest said, “I’ll be in the garden,” and walked out the door. Within an hour, I was out there planting onions and my kids were variously picking bouquets, walking the dog around the neighborhood and sitting on top of the car writing in her journal. We each had our own agendas, but all of us knew that if the sun came out, there was no better place to be.

Every February, Forrest and I look at the kids and lament the screen time, the bickering, and the boredom. Why happened to our active kids? Why don’t they go outside anymore? And then, within the month, all three happily drop their tablets and flee, just like their dad, to the garden. I have to remind myself that a lot of the behavior we decry in kids, especially around screen time, is a normal reaction to environments that aren’t welcoming to them.

I have to admit that if most of you came to my house, you’d probably expect a beautifully pruned Eden. Instead, for most of the year, it’s more like a muddy work in progress. And for the other three months, it’s an overgrown jungle. It’s not idyllic…but what it is, is welcoming. My kids were so terrible about planting random plants in our garden that we tore up half the backyard so they could meddle there. And they do. It’s not uncommon for me to reach for a seed packet only to find it empty because some child got there first.

On the one hand, that’s infuriating in the moment. On the other, that is exactly what I want them to be doing. To get an idea, find what they need and figure it out how to make it happen. And if it leads to some small disasters along the way (see: the mint that is taking over my lawn) that is the price that I will pay for kids who don’t whine about just one more episode of TV.

Because boy, oh boy, can my kids whine. In our house, the rule is no screen time in the mornings. That sounds really enlightened, probably, but it’s because I like to take naps on Sundays and if the kids have used up their screen time then they are annoying when I am trying to sleep. And through the winter months, you would think that making them wait until lunch for the TV is akin to sitting through a five hour lecture.

That whining alone makes me think I’m a terrible parent. Forget that I grew up in the 90s, on a steady diet of The Price is Right and Saved by the Bell. Forget that the sun goes down at 4:30 in January. Forget that my kids are in the tricky age where they don’t want toys but they aren’t fully independent yet. I assume if my kids want screens that badly, it must be because I have failed to teach them to entertain themselves.

And then, spring comes and I can’t keep them inside. By the time summer rolls around, I’m in full on crisis-management mode, making sure there are enough clean clothes and dry towels, the kitchen counters aren’t covered in small bowls of blackberries harvested from the roadside, and, in one instance, no one is trying to fill a kiddie pool with the kitchen sink sprayer.

So what’s changed? Not my parenting. Not my kids. What’s changed is that being outside is now fun. It’s not a chore. It’s not cold, or wet, or in the case of Seattle, hot or humid, either. It’s simply…perfect. And my kids, like all people, choose to go places that are pleasant. But not just pleasant. Places where they can exist without feeling like they’re a bother.

I’m probably up on my soapbox now but there aren’t many of those places left for teens and tweens. They get looks in parks because they’re too big. They get looks in stores because they’re too little. Even in their own yard, there are neighbors who glare at the homemade bird feeders and gardening experiments, and I know they wish it all looked nicer.

You know what? I wish it looked nicer too. And someday it will, but right now, if I want my kids off those screens for an afternoon, I have to tolerate the mess. I have to say yes to everything and choose enthusiasm over criticism. Because these kids, especially teens, they’re just waiting to be told they aren’t wanted. They’re used to it. Even at school they get the message that they are only wanted if they fit within the mold. It is middle school, after all.

So yesterday, the sun broke through the clouds and we broke the mold, each in our own way. And the garden, like it always does, faithfully welcomed us all.

Rosemary

We used to have the most beautiful rosemary. It was huge, at least six feet wide, and we used it all year long. I haven’t bought rosemary in years. If I needed it, I would just send a kid outside with a pair of scissors. But two summers ago, we had a “heat dome” where the temperatures reached 112 degrees. And after that, the rosemary just withered and died.

There was probably something I could do to prevent the bush from dying, but it honestly never occurred to me that the rosemary wouldn’t be ok. It was here when we moved in back in 2009 and I never once tended it. I took it for granted. But since it’s been gone, we just…don’t cook with rosemary anymore. I should just buy some from the grocery store, but I tell myself I’m going to replant it and regrow it and it’s one of those things where you don’t throw away that sweater with a pull because you’re going to fix it but you never do so now there’s just one more sweater in the drawer you never wear.

Well, on Sunday. Forrest took the girls to Fred Meyer to buy some running shoes. (For non-locals, Fred Meyer is like halfway between Walmart and Target.) And when they came home, they’d picked up some seeds. Some cucumbers because we’re all so in love with them that we always want more seeds. A bunch of flowers - zinnias and snapdragons and marigolds - that will doubtless end up in the girls’ garden and, when they bloom, in mason jars and vases on every surface in my house, even the weird ones like the top of the microwave.

And rosemary.

I guess they decided it’s time to try again. Which is funny, really, because so did I. When I put in my big seed order two months ago, I included a live rosemary plant. It hasn’t come yet, because our seed company has my back and won’t send it until it’s time to plant in the ground. They know us gardeners. If we get it too early, we can’t help but plant it, even though it will probably die.

So, after I finish this blog, I’m going to start some more seeds, and rosemary will be one of them. And then, just about the time that those seedlings are ready to plant, my order will come in too. And we’ll plant them all and hope that it works.

And maybe this time, I won’t take my rosemary for granted.

Tomatoes

It has been a truly overwhelming month around here and yesterday, I found myself with my first really quiet day in a long time. Part of me wanted to just sit and stare at a wall for an hour or two, but instead I did some planting. We’re still holding off on starting the plants that need really warm weather, since last year the sun didn’t come out until July, but for the first time in a long time, I’m going to have to make room for tomato starts.

I have a love/hate relationship with tomatoes. I like the way they taste and they are useful in so many dishes. Plus they’re easy to preserve as sauce or salsa. But they always ripen at the time of year when I’m out of energy, those long August days before the kids go back to school but after they’ve run out of ways to entertain themselves. Usually at that point, the last thing I want to do with my quiet moments is go wade through bushy tomato plants and harvest them, just to have to figure out what to do with them before they go bad.

And, to make it worse, I always miss one or two so that if I try to rotate my beds the next year, I’m picking out tomato plant volunteers left and right. And to make it even worse, the last time I started tomatoes inside, I didn’t have room for all of them in one bed and wanted to compost the rest, but Forrest couldn’t bear the waste and planted them in our flower beds instead. Our flower beds!

All of that to say, I’ve spent the last few years just tending whatever volunteers come up and mostly ignoring them. But this year, I’m giving up on having a dedicated raised bed for tomatoes and just putting them in containers in my backyard. It feels a bit like failure for some reason, admitting that I am simply not up to processing 15 tomato plants’ worth of produce. Capitulating to the fact that while I love planting the things and enjoy tending them, the whole canning/preserving side of gardening just isn’t my jam. (Pun intended.)

I think part of that is because to me, the appeal of gardening is that I get to be outside. I get to enjoy the most beautiful part of the year in a way that is both peaceful and satisfying. The idea of taking some of our short summer and spending it over a stove in a hot kitchen? No, thank you.

There’s something about living where we live - life is so indoors for so much of the year, that when it gets nice, we do everything outside. Our yard has various stations so we can follow the shade around throughout the day - Adirondack chairs on our shade deck, outdoor couch on the grotto, hammocks in the girls’ garden. It all sounds very fancy until you realize that our shady retreats are interspersed with the messiness of life with kids - a discarded art project on the deck, an unraveled hose sprawled across the yard, and lots and lots of ratty dog toys.

And now, we’ll be adding some pots of tomatoes to the mix. Hopefully they’ll be pretty, but knowing me, I’ll just grab whatever old plastic buckets I’ve got to hand and make it work. And we’ll grow as many tomatoes as we can eat (and hopefully not many more than that!). And I’ll give up on one dream of maximum tomato production in exchange for another dream - a lazier, more relaxed dream of sun warmed tomatoes and kids eating them off the vine.

Pansies

It’s time! It’s time! We’re starting seeds inside the house this weekend!

A few years ago Forrest built this custom plant stand that fits just perfectly into the corner of our dining room. And by perfectly, I mean perfectly. It really can’t be removed without turning it in just the right angle at just the right moment. It holds six trays worth and when it is turned on, the lights make the whole room glow. On particularly gloomy days, I just go and stand next to it for a few seconds just to get a little taste of what spring will bring.

We usually start with flowers, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of them are quite hardy and will last a long time in our above 50 but below 70 degree springtime. Second, if we start them too early and they die right after being transplanted, we can run over to the store and replace them pretty easily. I always feel a smidgen of guilt about that, but I get over it quickly. Third, I’m not too picky about which flowers survive. With vegetables, I want carrots AND cucumbers AND potatoes. With flowers, I just want…flowers. So I can plant a lot of them and whatever survives the early spring will make me happy.

We began starting pansies inside a few years ago. Before that, I had never really considered starting them from seed. You just bought pansies in a flat from the garden store, along with petunias, impatients, and geraniums. But I ordered some on a whim and they worked! Which is pretty much my only criterion for adding something to our garden plan. If it works, it’s in. If not, well, it depends how much I wanted you in the first place. I tried to make sweet potatoes work for three years until Forrest, eating a piece of the world’s smallest, saddest yam, looked at me wordlessly. We both busted up laughing and that was the end of that.

But pansies work, so we grow them. They are such happy little flowers and they last! A lot of our flowers come and go with the season, which I understand, but I’m usually not up to redoing the whole flower garden in July, so it helps if the plants can carry over from spring into summer.

So this weekend, I’ll commandeer the girls for as much of the work as I can – they never mind helping make the soil blocks – and we’ll get to work. By this time next week we’ll be eating in the pinkish light of the plant stand and counting the days until we see the first tiny green shoots come up.

Worms

There’s still nothing growing here yet, so our gardens are looking pretty dead, especially compared to the green grass and towering firs throughout our neighborhood. The only sign of life from my gardens is the occasional worm who escapes onto the sidewalk on rainy days. My kids are well versed at helping worms back onto the grass, even though I’m never quite sure what I’m supposed to do with them. Will that help? Will that hurt? I should probably find out.

It will be time for putting compost in the soil soon, and although it’s a nasty job, I can attest to this: The worms love it. By April, when I start digging, the soil is positively teeming with worms. I’m happy to report that I have no aversion to creepy crawlies (with the single exception of when I saw a spider’s egg sac open and hundreds of teeny-tiny spiders float away on the breeze. That was not my most dignified moment). So I do my best to let the worms do their thing, moving them out of the way if I need to, but mostly feeling thankful that they’re there.

I know there is a lot of science behind the aeration and fertilizing work that worms do, but to me it seems like a strange alchemy. We put in trash - rotting trash - wait a month or so, and the worms turn it into beautiful black dirt. I also know there’s a lot more at play there between bacteria, fungus and insects, but worms are the part that I see and interact with the most.

Back when my eldest was in preschool, she learned about worms and their role in making dirt. They had a soil table filled with worms and the kids got to get their hands dirty and learn about one small step in how their food was made. I remember her coming home and us reading Richard Scarry and her realization that Lowly Worm probably ate compost and pooped out dirt. For her little mind, the idea was both fascinating and hilarious.

I have to agree. There’s magic there, and meaning too, if we look for it. The lowliest of creatures is the very animal that takes our refuse and turns it into something productive. Worms are overlooked and ignored but it wasn’t until we had a good colony of them that our garden started growing. I wonder how many people we overlook and ignore, at our own peril? How many small, unpleasant tasks we fail to appreciate until they aren’t done?

How many of us are working day in and day out, doing the little things that make life livable for the rest of us? I’m not saying they’re worms, although if I were in charge, that would be a term of honor - like a busy little bee or an eager beaver. Because, even when it looks like nothing is happening, when the gardens are brown and worn out, underneath? There’s an entire world, just waiting for spring.

Thermometers

A few years ago, I bought a soil thermometer for our gardens. It was cheap, and I thought it might be useful to tell when the ground was warm enough for certain types of seeds to germinate. I’m not always the best at fall cleanup, so I ended up just leaving in the ground through a couple winters, and somehow it has disappeared.

I’m debating whether or not I should buy a new one. On the one hand, it get a little thrill of satisfaction when the spring weather comes and the ground starts to warm up. It’s like looking at the forecast and seeing only sunny days on the horizon. On the other hand, I don’t really use that information to inform my gardening behavior. I plant based on some vague calendar in my head, combined with my ability to find time in my schedule for a morning away from work and parenting.

It's funny, isn’t it? There is so much science that goes into gardening. The seed catalogs are full of statistics – average germination rate, days to germination, preferred soil pH, preferred soil temperature. And when it comes down to it, I plant based mostly on how I’m feeling and my past experiences. “Last year, we waited until April to plant lettuce, let’s do that again. But the onions held up nicely even in March, so let’s do that.”

I am sure that some of my gardener friends are cringing right now. Like most hobbies, gardening has two types of people: those that really love to follow the rules and those that don’t. I want to be the first type, I really do. And there is absolutely no doubt that if I listened to that soil thermometer, my plants would be happier and my yield would be better.

Buuuuuut…if it’s a sunny spring day and I have nothing better going on, what am I supposed to do? Just not go outside and plant things? Impossible.

And this is why I love having gardening as a hobby but not to make a living. There are a lot of parts of my life where I have to follow the rules, every single time, or else really bad things can happen. And it’s nice, sometimes, to look at the thermometer sticking out of the ground, telling me it’s too early for green beans, and then turn around and do whatever I want.