Ferns

We’re in the boring part of January where the weather is starting to stabilize and even get a bit better, so I’m eager to start planting. Forrest spends most of January and half of February shaking his head at me, telling me it’s too early to start seeds inside, the ground is workable but a frost could still come, and one sunny day does not make it spring. That’s the problem of living in Seattle. There isn’t much difference between February and May, so it’s easy to mistake one for the other.

Nevertheless, I will turn to houseplants for inspiration. Which means I must be really desperate because everyone knows that my house is the place where plants come to die. I have killed more houseplants that I can count, and even now, on my counter there is a dead bromeliad, a jade plant with one sad stubby stalk, and the world’s hardiest spider plant. It’s frankly embarassing.

I forget to water them. Or I water them too much. I don’t clean my windows so the sun is not great. The cat gets up there and eats whatever she can. Outside, plants seem to love me. Inside? Not so much.

Except.

Except.

The fern in my bathroom.

We redid our bathroom about 5 years ago to get rid of some water damage and dry rot. I did it up nice and at the time, I wanted something that would accent the teal and white theme. So I got a Boston Fern. My thought was - it’s humid in the bathroom, so I won’t have to worry about watering. It’s dim in there, but ferns are good with shade. And most of all, I’ve killed a lot more expensive plants, so how much could it hurt?

And that fern is so happy. I don’t know if my kids secretly water it or if my “humidity” plan is working, but it has outlived my greatest expectations. It makes me so happy. There is just something soothing about a well-grown houseplant, isn’t there?

And ferns are one of my favorites. They’re hardy and bushy and green, and I do absolutely no upkeep for it, so they must be low maintenance. Around here, ferns grow in every spot they can find, so I think my bathroom fern gives off a little Northwest-y vibe.

But that fern is perhaps overinflating my sense of competence. Yesterday, I told my daughter that since apparently our bathroom is so wonderful for ferns, we could step it up to an orchid next time we’re at the garden store. I think she’s still laughing.

Onions

Every year, when Forrest and I decide what to plant, he says, “We don’t need that many things - let’s just plant lots of what grows well that we like. So, like three things - potatoes, onions, garlic.”

And then I roll my eyes and say, “What about cucumbers, and green beans, and peas, and carrots, and swiss chard, and lettuce, and…”

He always responds, “Oh yeah.” I know that he mostly wants to decrease complexity, to make our gardening lives easier, and (probably most of all) keep me from using gardening space to try to grow watermelons which will absolutely never work in our climate. And he’s right. If I were going to grow three things for the most yield and ease of gardening, it would be potatoes, onions, and garlic.

They can all be planted pretty early, making the season nice and long. They hang out under the ground, which means that I don’t have to stress too much about weeding them. They’ll keep down there for awhile, too, so I can harvest at my leisure. And they store well. I have never had to throw out a single onion because it didn’t get used up.

But let’s admit it, they’re a little bit boring. I don’t notice a huge difference between storebought and homegrown onions, unlike tomatoes or carrots, where it’s night and day. And I do appreciate having extra onions right out there in case I run out, but we’re not exactly eagerly awaiting the harvest. I don’t have to shoo my kids away from the onions they way I do with green beans or cucumbers.

They’re the Toyota Corolla of vegetables. Solid, steady, reliable. And I do appreciate them, but not nearly enough. I should appreciate how early they come up, making my garden feel fruitful long before the curcurbits have deigned to germinate. I should appreciate how happy the sight of an onion braid makes me, hanging in my garage. I should appreciate how they don’t attract slugs or bugs or mildew or anything else. They keep themselves to themselves.

For some reason, it’s the finicky plants that grab my attention. The ones who give me the dopamine rush, who can let me down year after year but still keep me coming back for more. (It’s good that I have this gardening thing going on, or you might find me down at the horsetrack.)

So, this year, I’m going to make an effort to give my onions a little more attention. Weed them a little more often and get them out of the ground in a more timely manner. It really is the least I can do.

Garden Maps

The seed catalogs started coming this weekend. Or maybe it was last weekend. We don’t check our mail very often around here. Either way, the arrival of the first Fedco catalog always makes me feel more New Years-ish than any ball drop or fireworks display. The new year shouldn’t sneak up on me, between all the hoopla around Christmas and then kids off of school and trying to un-decorate our house and then whatever New Year’s Eve shenanigans we get up to. But still, the last year doesn’t feel really over until I am sitting at a quiet kitchen table, kids back in school, half-full mug of tea, deciding what to plant next spring.

Because it’s not really next spring anymore, is it? It’s this spring now. Just a couple months away. Seeds are the perennial metaphor for hope and new beginnings and all that, but for me, seeds are also a metaphor for an ending. Because when I start thinking about ordering seeds, I am closing the book on last year’s garden, once and for all. You’d think the six inches of snow and ice storm would have done that, but no. For me, the garden starts and ends with a piece of paper, one that gets taken down when the seed catalogs some.

It’s my garden map. All the rectangles drawn carefully, lined up just right, so that between Forrest and I and the girls, everything gets planted where it goes. This is more important than you would think, simply because with all the gardeners in this yard, it can be easy to till up already planted ground or pull up seedlings that look like weeds. So the garden starts with a seed catalog and a piece of paper.

I think that gardening can be a loosey goosey type of hobby, and I’ll be the first to admit that by June, we’re pretty much shoving plants wherever they will fit, but there’s a peacefulness to planning it out first. A reflectiveness. Did the potatoes do well there last year? Did the basil get enough sun in that bed? Do we want more flowers or more herbs this time around?

The possibility of the future garden is enticing to me. I don’t yet know that the tomatoes won’t ripen before the first frost, or that the new type of lettuce will bolt too quickly to eat. For now, it’s all working perfectly. All of the wonderful lessons I learned from last year’s garden will be implemented. I definitely won’t get tired or bored, it won’t rain too much or too little, and of course we won’t get so sick of zucchini we’ll compost it before I can bear to make another fritter.

I like the imperfection of the real garden too. The weirdly shaped carrots and spindly tulips. But new years are for life before mistakes and oddities. For reflections and planning and pretty little rectangles on a perfect white piece of paper.

I don’t throw out last year’s garden map. I put it in with all of our other sentimental documents. But it’s certainly not a blank slate anymore. It’s got muddy fingerprints and crossed out sections where we made a mistake or rethought a plan. It’s been crumpled and stepped on. It has served its purpose well, and now it’s time to get added to the box of memories that document this life we’re living.

I like to think that my actual life is made up of a little bit of both. The pretty plans based on last year’s quiet contemplation, and the muddy, crumpled guide that gets the job done in the end. Which, upon reflection, might not be the worst thing in the world.

Blueberries

It’s snowing here today and everything looks like a fairy wonderland. I’m not fully able to enjoy it because I need to go out later and Seattle is not known for its snow removal capabilities. Nevertheless, the snow makes all the gross fall detritus look clean and pristine, and the hundred-foot-tall firs look positively alpine. I can’t help but enjoy it.

Most of the plants in our yard have given up the ghost. They’re either perennials, ready to get through a long cold winter, or annuals, which have been harvested and thrown onto the compost pile. Everything looks just as a sleeping garden should. Tucked up and ready for a rest.

But not the blueberries. They’re out there, full of leaves, brashly gathering the snowflakes. I don’t understand why. I’ve never heard of blueberries keeping their leaves after the first frost, but mine do. That said, I haven’t done a ton of research on blueberries, other than knowing they like acidic soil.

The blueberry bushes were one of the first plants added to our garden. Long before we had raised beds, I brought my toddler to the garden center during their blueberry plant sale and bought six little bushes. I made Forrest dig some holes for us, and that was that.

For as long as we’ve had them, they should probably be bigger. Back at Forrest’s childhood home in Pennsylvania, the blueberry bushes were as tall as me. Ours are barely hip height, but they make up for that by giving us lots and lots of the most delicious berries.

It’s funny how that works sometimes, isn’t it? By many measures, these little blueberry bushes are a bit of a disappointment. We’ve been carefully watering them for years, making sure they don’t get choked out by blackberries or weeds, and putting compost on them every spring. They certainly haven’t exceeded my expectations.

Every year, we head out to a you-pick berry farm, ready to fill our freezer with plenty of berries to get us through the winter. And those berries are good. Quite good, really. But none of them compare just one of our pink lemonade berries.

The plant that seems the least impressive, the afterthought, the slow and steady tortoise - it’s also the giver of the rare treasure. And we do treasure those berries around here. It’s pretty rare for me even to taste one; the kids have gotten there first. There is never a bowl of those berries that sits on my counter; they’re all eaten on the way to the door.

So, as I look out at my foolish blueberry bushes, leaves covered in snow, I have to believe that there’s a method to the madness. In their own time, they’ll follow the crowd, drop their leaves, and get ready for another summer of the beauty and bounty that we are lucky enough to experience year after year.

Zucchini

We didn’t grow any zucchini this year. I’m not sure if I’ve talked about it yet on the blog, but I have a love/hate relationship with zucchini. On the one hand, it grows really beautifully. It’s not hard to get started, it doesn’t mind being transplanted, and once it’s settled, it pretty much just needs sun and water. On the other hand, it grows too beautifully. Everyone knows that gardeners always have too much zucchini. I’ve probably given away more zucchini than I’ve eaten, and because I have a garden, I’ve eaten a lot of zucchini.

I don’t generally like growing vegetables that I wouldn’t already be eating. So, the mountains of zucchini bread and zucchini muffins, and ratatouille and baba ganoush and veggie lasagna don’t appeal to me. Those are not foods that I’d put on my shopping list. So why grow the zucchini if I’m going to have to force myself to eat it? I’m much more likely to use basil or carrots or even onions.

Zucchini is just so…extra. It isn’t coy; it isn’t sensitive; it knows who it is and why it’s here: to take over everything. It makes no excuses.

There are a lot of plants that are like that and many of them are considered nuisances. Tomatoes, mint, wildflowers of all kinds. (I once saw a review for mugwort that basically said, “Only buy this if you hate yourself, your neighbors, and everyone living within a one mile radius, because that radius will be covered in mugwort.”) I have a love/hate relationship with all of these. I feel such pressure. They need to be managed, the produce needs to be harvested, and most of all, they need to be pulled up and controlled or else they will take over everything.

And that’s pretty much how I feel about a lot of things in my life. My own dreams and desires, my kids’ wants and complaints, the general state of the world with all its competing factions. It all needs to be controlled or it will take over. And that sense isn’t wrong. One year, we had a pumpkin plant that was killing everything around it with its broad leaves and sprawling vines. I finally got fed up and in a fit of anger, grabbed a gardening knife and, in full view of the busy road outside my house, hacked the thing to pieces. It was destroying the entire garden!

But now, we grow our pumpkins in an out of the way bed where they can spread to their hearts’ content, without any limits whatsoever. And for what it’s worth, half of my pumpkins end back up on the compost pile every year, because there’s only so much pumpkin I want to eat. And that’s ok.

Why do I feel like growing the zucchini somehow locks me into a relationship where I’m not allowed to not use it? Just there, I wanted to write the phrase “not allowed to waste it” and maybe that says everything I need to say. I owe nothing to the zucchini and yes, there are probably starving children somewhere in the world who would love it, but they aren’t mine, because my children have eaten more zucchini than they would probably like to have in their entire lives.

Does it really harm the world for me to put the extra zucchini back on the compost pile to be broken down into fertilizer for some future year? Because what I’m doing right now is not growing zucchini because I don’t want to waste it. Is that better than growing a lot, using and giving away what I can, and recycling the rest?

 I don’t know what to do with the overabundance of my kids’ desires for the latest toys and fashions. I definitely don’t know what to do with the deep seated dream inside of me for a life with a little more space and time and a little less arguing over chores. But like the zucchini, isn’t it better to have those dreams and desires and then take what we can from them without feeling like it’s all or nothing?

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with zucchini, and apparently lots of other things. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Nicotiana

Nicotiana is a flower that has a bad reputation, at least around here. It’s pretty uncommon to see outside of the southeastern US and I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, but it’s been a huge hit around here. Well, for Forrest and I, it has. It grows to be 2-3 feet tall, and has pink/purple/white flowers, which, at night, release the most beautiful smell.

It’s also very poisonous.

My kids, especially my eldest, hate it. It’s a hate borne of fear, which she will freely admit. The plant is a member of the tobacco family and so, if eaten, it will kill you. Unfortunately for her, the plant is beautiful, low maintenance, and has adapted well to our laissez-faire approach to flower planting. When the choice is between caring for the delicious cucumbers or weeding the beautiful but deadly nicotiana, it’s not hard to decide. The nicotiana has spread throughout our flower beds and I love it. Unlike the morning glories, which would gladly choke out everything else, it’s a well-behaved flower.

It’s hard for me, as a parent, to do something that my kids have specifically objected to. I don’t mean objections to house rules or eating their vegetables or something normal like that. I mean when they say specifically, I don’t like that decision you’re making and it affects me. As my kids age and have more of thier own opinions, it comes up more often. To be fair, there are a lot of hills I’m willing to die on now that they’re older. When they were toddlers, I wasn’t going to fight my corner over choosing what to watch on TV. For one thing, all those toddler shows are the same mind-numbing dreck. For another, if you push a toddler too far, they’re liable to bite you.

But these days, I’m starting to stand my ground on the little things. I tell myself that it’s good for them to learn how to accommodate others and I don’t want any prissy kids who always have to have their own way, but let’s be honest: there are five people and four animals living in this 1300 square foot house. My kids are used to compromise. I’m not doing this for their own good.

It’s hard to admit that maybe I stand my ground on the nicotiana because I just like it. Maybe that’s what I’m modelling: that it’s ok to like things and want to have them around for no other reason than they bring you joy. There’s no actual harm to any members of my family. They know not to eat the flowers or leaves and our yard has plenty of other inedible and poisonous plants.

I think that if there is one thing I’m modelling, it’s that when something brings you joy, you hold on to it. It’s easy to eliminate everything that gives us anxiety or fear. It’s a surefire route to the most comfortable life. But comfort and joy aren’t the same. And sometimes, many times, joy is complex. It takes effort and thought and even overcoming fears.

And that’s what I love the most about nicotiana. It blooms in the dark, smells intoxicating, and will definitely kill you if you eat it. The beauty lies in the complexity.

Edamame

Every year, we pick out a few new plants to try, something to keep things interesting. Usually, they don’t work. Sweet potatoes were a bust, cabbages got eaten by slugs, and the kiwis are growing beautifully without producing a single piece of fruit. I don’t mind. It’s nice to experiment.

This year, one of our new starts was edamame. For those of you who don’t know, edamame is a type of soybean that is cooked and eaten sort of like peas. Some people eat the pods, others don’t, but they’re delicious when steamed and salted. We like it because it’s an easy protein to throw into a salad or stir fry. Plus my kids would eat straight salt if I let them and this lets me at least have the illusion that it’s healthy.

The variety I ordered grew much like green beans. I was so happy to see that it had worked! Unfortunately, the pods ripened just as the rest of my life was at its most hectic. So, I kept putting off harvesting. And putting it off. And putting it off. Finally, I looked over and the beautiful green pods were brown and dried out. I didn’t even have time to regret it. Just another thing I don’t have time for in September.

But I went away for a girls’ night away with some friends (we didn’t even have time for a weekend - it was maybe 24 hours), and Forrest has an aversion to letting food go to waste, even seemingly dried out edamame. So when I got home the next day and reached for some leftovers to lunch, I found a stir-fry with shelled edamame in it. I looked at him and he smiled. He’d gotten the girls to help him shell them, pulled out the ones that really were too dried to eat, and steamed the rest. They were a little tough, but still delicious.

I am so thankful that he’s willing to go the extra mile to find the good in situations I give up on. If I have one flaw (I know, just one?) it’s that I’m very quick to throw up my hands. If it doesn’t work on the first try, it doesn’t work. Maybe we’ll try again next year, but if it’s not right, there’s nothing to salvage. Forrest, on the other hand, goes the complete opposite direction. Right now he is happily making a woodshed out of some pallets he found by the side of the road and an old dresser that was falling apart.

As you can imagine, sometimes that can lead to disagreements. I look at a burned cake and want to throw it out. He pulls out a knife to cut off the bad parts. I want to trash a leaky hose, and he’s out there with plumber’s tape. I both love and hate it. And I think he enjoys that there are moments where I put my foot down and refuse, allowing him the indulgence of - gasp!- buying something new and pristine.

We’re definitely growing edamame next year, and with luck, our growing season will be more normal so I can harvest it in August when I’ve got more time on my hands. Besides, I’ve got no choice. Yesterday, I was sorting through our surplus seed packets and I found a little container. I recognized it as one that had originally held ketchup from our favorite take out place, carefully washed for reuse by Forrest. Inside, a couple dozen dry edamame seeds filled the container. And on top? It had been labeled, very carefully, in my daughter’s handwriting.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And I could not be happier about it.

Dirt

This past weekend Forrest and I helped out with a giant gardening project over at the school, which has been an ongoing effort of his, but I was just called in as grunt labor when they needed to shovel 7 cubic yards of topsoil into the new raised beds. My lower back has finally stopped punishing me, almost a week later, but the reward of seeing the now-filled gardens was more than worth it.

Is it just me or does the sight of clean dirt bring a smile to your face? On first look, the phrase “clean dirt” is oxymoronic, but there’s something about the possibilities in a garden bed that feel fresh and new. There’s no weeds to be pulled or rocks to be sifted, simply the potential of spring flowers and summer harvests.

Having made my own soil mixtures from time to time, I always find it intriguing how much more complicated our topsoil is than we know. Vermiculite for drainage, compost for nutrients, additives to encourage germination or discourage disease. And every company and gardening blog has their own preferred recipe. Me? I leave that kind of thinking to others.

The science of gardening is something that I dabble in occasionally, but it doesn’t hold my attention. I wish it did; I’d be a better gardener. But, to be honest, I like the mystery and magic of it all. Until my plants are sick or pest-ridden — then I’m more than happy to lean on my more educated brethren.

I struggle sometimes with not being fully knowledgeable about all things at all times. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s my little perfectionism in a life that is stubbornly imperfect in every other way. So, in releasing any real understanding of why my dirt contains all of its myriad parts, I’m allowing myself to put some trust out there into the world. The plant scientists spend their lives figuring out how and why all this stuff works; why not rely on them?

Perhaps it’s also my little protest against my own hubris. In our society we are expected to have opinions on everything, whether or not we really know anything about them. That’s why everyone is an epidemiologist last year, then a vaccine expert, then an inflation policy guru, and now a professor of Russian foreign policy. It’s exhausting. And everything is as complicated as it seems. So maybe you’ll forgive me when I look at a new garden full of clean dirt and don’t ask any questions before I just dig in.

Garlic

It’s October, which is garlic planting time in our hardiness zone. I wish I could say that I already knew when garlic planting time is, that there was some sort of calendar or organizational system that I rely on, or even better, that I was so in tune with my garden that I could feel when it was time to plant. In reality, some garlic appeared in the mail yesterday along with a guide on how and when to plant it. I don’t remember ordering it last spring but the seed company, knowing better than me, didn’t send it until it was actually ready to be planted.

It’s winter garlic, so it gets buried now and then, like many bulbs, puts its shoots up in early spring. Each year I garden, I’ve enjoyed doing bulbs more and more. Spring feels so intense around here - the weather is still fairly miserable, kids’ sports and school is way too intense, and there are so many other gardening tasks to do. So, it’s nice to look over at a pre-planted raised bed and think, “Thank you, Fall Serenity. Nothing left to do there.”

The other nice thing about garlic is that a little goes a long way. I planted about 30-40 cloves yesterday. It took maybe 15 minutes. I’m sure some won’t germinate and some will get nibbled or dug up before they get very big. But even if we get 25 heads, that’s our garlic needs sorted for most of the year. And unlike zucchini, basil or tomatoes, garlic needs very little processing. Dig it up, dust it off, tie it in a bunch, and voila! You’re basically a homesteader already.

I often get caught up in tasks that seem really easy but aren’t. I’m usually halfway through before I realize how deceptive my initial impressions were. How often have I thought something like, “How hard can it be to put together this IKEA chair?” only to get mired in a 27-step process using 50 different screws and a single allen wrench? But sometimes, more times than I deserve, things are simple. Like planting garlic. And crockpot soups. And the occasional blog post where I pour out a beautiful, cohesively written essay before my tea even cools.

This is not that blog post. I started it about two hours ago, and about ten minutes in, I was interrupted. And then I got distracted and decided to make some lunch, chat with Forrest, do some light housecleaning, and welp, here we are. I’m learning not to make judgements about things like simplicity, or distractions, or even needlessly complicated bureaucratic processes. Tasks take the time they take. Any frustration or expectations I add onto that simply make my experience worse. Most days I fail to go with the flow, but I’m trying to be zen about it all anyway.

It’s really, really nice, then, when the garlic gets planted and there’s still time to read an extra chapter before duty calls once again.

Carrots

Carrots are one of the kid favorites from the garden. Most years, we can barely get the kids to hold off harvesting until they’ve had a chance to grow, and unlike tomatoes or apples, they’re just as good when they’re small (and quite a bit better than when they’re too big).

One problem though. They’re completely unreliable. I’m told carrots should be sown directly into the soil, no inside starting necessary, but some years I broadcast the sesame-like seeds and we have a bed full of carrots. Other years, nothing grows. I’ve asked around to lots of very experienced gardeners and their response boils down to, “Yeah. Carrots are like that.”

It’s infuriating. It’s even more infuriating because the climate we live in is not always the most friendly to baby plants. Well, it’s really, really friendly to ferns and moss and blackberries. But anything that needs sun and warmth either has to wait until June or give up.

So last spring, in a fit of pique, I prepared a tray of carrots in our usual indoor seed starter. And man did they grow! It turns out that if you give carrot seeds perfectly nourished soil, direct light for 12 hours a day, and twice daily watering, they are quite happy to grow. Hundreds and hundreds of plants.

Of course, it’s rather foolish, because each of those hundreds of plants needed to be transplanted into the garden bed, a task that I was conveniently too busy to do. Forrest bit the bullet and took care of it. (He’s gentler with the transplants than I am anyway, so really, it’s for the best.) And those carrots thrived.

I try not to think about the ridiculous hours of work we put in, just for a hundred or so carrots. A carrot at the store comes to about a quarter, and that’s if it’s full sized. Meanwhile, my kids are yanking little baby carrots out of the ground with no awareness of the care that went into it. Nor should they. There’s a reason you don’t start carrots inside.

When we start pumpkins inside, we start about 5 plants, maybe 10 if we’ve got time. And we end up with about 20-30 pumpkins. It’s the same for tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini. A lot of bang for the buck.

So why did we do it? And why will we definitely do it again next year?

Because, most days, when the twins get home from school, they dump their backpacks on the sidewalk and drop their coats and run into the garden. They yank out a few dirt-covered carrots and wipe them on their pants or sleeves or, if they’re smart enough, the grass. And then they joyfully crunch their way through the hours of effort that Forrest and I put in.

Isn’t that parenting in a nutshell? You put in a thousand hours of thought and time and hard work and then your kids come along and munch it up, not realizing for a second what it cost. Sometimes I want them to, and we have lots of conversations about appreciation and pitching in and not leaving sneakers all over the kitchen floor where someone will trip on them.

But sometimes I want them to have no idea at all what their joy cost. I want it to feel free, abundant, a small miracle there for the taking. There is a place for gratitude but there is also a place for wonder. And those little carrots are sometimes the most wonderful things of all.

Grapes

Six years ago, we had a trellis put on our deck. It was, at the time, a symbol of a future I wished to exist, not one that I actually lived. I had visions of cozy chairs shaded by some sort of well-maintained creeping vine, afternoons spent reading books and chatting, evenings with twinkle lights and deep conversations. I think, when it was built, I had two four year olds and a six year old, and life did not accommodate books, chatting, or deep conversations. That said, we could manage twinkle lights.

The vines, however, were even trickier. As first, I thought wisteria. So pretty, so fragrant! Until a gardener friend of mine indicated gently that our laissez faire style probably wasn’t up to the intense pruning we might need. So we planted hops. It seemed hip, interesting. And easy, right?

Apparently wrong. They died pretty much immediately and I still have no idea why.

So we decided to try grapes. They tend to do ok in our dry summers (even when I forget to water them) and I figured third time’s the charm, right?

We ordered and carefully planted the vines, and worked really, really hard to keep them alive. That first year, anyway. But they didn’t sprout leaves, and didn’t grow and after two years of trying, we gave up. Forrest built a raised bed around them and tried not to jostle them too much but we planted kale and lettuce and some flowers and gave up on the idea of a leafy canopy. It just wasn’t to be.

The next year, we just ignored them. A series of thin brown sticks poking up, surrounded by all the other plants that at least had the decency to either grow or die already. And we put a greenhouse on the area of the deck covered by the trellis. A “she-shed” full of comfy chairs and cozy blankets. Of course, it leaked and got cold and kind of sucked and I just gave up on the deck. Nothing was working.

But then, two years ago, the vines started growing leaves. And, well, vining a little bit. Working their way up the deck supports and railings, completely fruitless, but alive, at least. I’d been burned before. We watered and planted the beds as usual. And last year, we got our first grapes. Not many, and not large, but delicious and tangy and bearing the unusual flavor that homegrown produce always does. (Is it the compost? The water? The fact that my dogs definitely pee on the ground around them?)

This year, for our 15th anniversary, Forrest and I moved the greenhouse out into the yard to be a real greenhouse. (A joint project which conveniently tested all of our hard-earned communication skills from these last 15 years). And we bought a cozy outdoor couch for under the trellis. The vines haven’t reached the top yet, but a beige sun shade is doing its work and I have high hopes for next year.

We’ve reached the stage of life with reading books and chatting and conversations and kids who decided to name that little nook “The Grotto” while we sit out there and I hear every little grievance they have about each other. Tomorrow, we’ve got to harvest those grapes. Lots of them! Still small, and still so delicious.

I’d given up on my dream of grapes, allowing those plants the barest of care and space, and in the end, they surprised me. More than surprised, they’ve delighted me. We’ll harvest this weekend and close up our outdoor spaces and look forward to next year, when maybe, maybe, that leafy canopy will finally be here.

Pumpkins

This year’s garden has been a bit of a bust. Ok, worse than that. All the things I planted died because it didn’t get above 50 at night until well into June, and by the time it did, I was too busy with end of school/vacations/birthday festivities to replant. So we finally got around to putting some seeds in the ground in mid-July, which means we have some beautiful beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes that are only two months behind. I’m super bummed.

The nice thing, though, is that a fair amount of what I plant gives me a lot of wiggle room. For all my failures, our potatoes, onions, edamame, swiss chard, and carrots are doing beautifully. Kale and mint are the cockroaches of the gardening world, so I can’t kill them even if I tried (and I have tried…a lot.) Most of all, though our pumpkins put me to shame. Oh, those pumpkins. We don’t let them grow in the main garden because they have a habit of spreading all over everything and making weeding and harvesting nearly impossible. So they’re tucked away in the backyard, in a nice little bed that used to be a compost pile before the dogs came along. I say they’re tucked away, but what I mean is that we plant them all in that little bed and then they take over about half of the girls’ garden. That’s ok. By the end of the summer, the girls are bored of planting anyway so there’s room to spare.

But pumpkins are sneaky. They seem to take forever, doing not very much, and then, during the dog days of summer, when it’s too hot to do anything, let alone garden, they unfurl by leaps and bounds until you notice them one day and wonder if maybe they’re going to take over the house next. My daughter always chooses to water them because one of the nicer chores on offer, so I really don’t notice them until they’ve gone full Cinderella.

Even then, my pumpkins look like a giant carpet of broad, flat leaves. Not until I’m right up on them do I see the green squashes beneath. And then I realize, every year like clockwork, “Crap. We have like 20 pumpkins.” Even if you like cooking with pumpkin (which I do) that’s a lot of pumpkin to process. Even if you give away half to the kids to decorate with or leave out for neighbors, that’s a lot of pumpkin.

And usually, because we’re so conscientious and the weather isn’t a terrible rain-soaked monstrosity, the pumpkins start to come ripe in August. So, unless I’m unusually good at storing them (I’m not) they rot by the time we actually need pumpkins in October, so we end up buying more.

But this year, the year when everything failed and we just kept replanting and then we just gave up on some things, one by one, those pumpkins are still green in September. They’re just starting to think about turning. Right on track for a perfect October harvest, with pumpkin bread and pumpkin soup and jack o lanterns and, best of all, pumpkin seeds by the handful.

One of the things I love best about gardening is that no matter how many times I’ve screwed it up, the garden is always forgiving. Yeah, there’s no tomatoes this year. But usually, I’m scrambling to use those. And the few cucumbers we’ve gotten were from the girls, who got a couple plants from some teachers at school, so those appeared as if by magic to me. But even in a bad year, there’s never nothing. Often, the things that thrive most in the harder years are the plants that I never would have expected. They were just waiting for the right conditions all along.

Bees

We’re in the middle of the coldest, wettest spring in as long as I can remember. Every day we wake up and it’s the same 50 degrees that it has been for the past four months. And all of our late spring vegetables have sprouted…sputtered…and died. We’ll spend June replanting if Seattle can ever shake off the cloud cover that definitely should be gone by now. (Don’t tell anyone, but generally, from June to October, our skies are clear, blue, and beautiful.)

One springtime tradition that hasn’t been interrupted is the return of the bees. Our yard is, how do you say, unkempt, so there are a lot of wildflowers and flowering bushes that we leave a bit wild so there’s plenty of food for the pollinators. Which means, if it’s not raining, they’re out there. When our rhododendron blooms, you can hear the buzzing long before you see a single fuzzy bug. It’s a bummer for my kids, because there’s this amazing space under the branches, a perfect hideout, but when it’s at its most beautiful, the threat of being stung is a little too close for comfort.

There’s a patch of big, friendly daisies in our front yard that Forrest refuses to mow over. I’m not sure how it came to be there, but each year, that amorphous patch grows bigger and bigger and he just walks around it. Appearances be damned, there are flowers here.

I think those daisies are a little bit magic too. Each morning when I yank my cranky kids out the door to school, we stop in front of them to get recombobulated: put the water bottle in the right pocket, where’s my folder?, did you remember your library books? — all the thousand last trips inside to make sure they have what they need.

And in the middle of the cloudy, misty mornings, I stand there, counting to 100 to calm down as they fight and fret and ask me for things that I told them to pack themselves. Right in front of those daisies. And for the last week, I’ve realized, as I try to regain my zen, that each night, a half dozen bees have made their beds there. As we’re leaving, one or two might be just waking up. But mostly, their fluffy bodies remain all curled up, waiting and wishing for summer to come, just like me.

I don’t know how they possibly stay safe right out there in the open, but I looked it up - bees really do sleep in flowers occasionally. And what it is about those daisies that attracts them, I don’t know. Maybe it’s that they know, those flowers are kept sacred until their blooming time is over. And even then, we won’t till that ground for as long as they grow. Maybe it’s that the bees know they belong here. There will be a steady supply of new wildflowers popping up all over our yard. Half of that is carelessness on my part. A few wildflower mixes strewn over the years and now I can’t get rid of the damn things.

But the other half of that is the utter delight I feel when I see and hear the buzzing. Those bees take what would normally be considered weeds, the product of my failure to keep a proper garden and turn it into nourishment. I want to be that kind of busy bee. The one who takes what exists naturally in the world, the ordinary, boring, even irksome things, and thrives on it.

So no, those daisies won’t be getting mown down any time soon.

Appearances be damned, there’s magic here.

Cucumbers

It’s still snowing on and off here in what can only be described as a cruel joke from a climate that gave us 112 degree heat last June but decided to postpone the last frost until (hopefully) April this year. Luckily, we’ve been burned (well, actually frozen) before so we wait until May to put anything out that isn’t hardy enough to handle cold, hail, or torrential downpours.

But with an already short growing season, we decided to start cucumbers inside a few years ago. It’s not super recommended, as cucumbers don’t always like being transplanted, but here, the alternative is to plant them in late May and hope they grow enough to bear fruit before having the harvest cut short by an October frost. So I spent this morning planting cucumbers, pumpkins, and peppers in our seed starter trays.

I asked Forrest how many plants he wanted me to start, and he said 150, I think jokingly. But that pretty accurately represents how everyone in our family feels about garden cucumbers. When I began dating Forrest, one of the first things he told me about his family’s farm was how good the cucumbers tasted. On and on and on, he would talk about how much better they were than store cucumbers. I was skeptical at first, but he was right. There is something qualitatively different about a garden cucumber. I read somewhere once that the interior of a growing cucumber is significantly colder than the exterior., making the phrase “cool as a cucumber” literally true. Something about how they grow makes them more refreshing than they have any right to be.

Instead of the requested 150 plants, I seeded 20 plants our main garden and then another 50 for Forrest to do whatever he likes with. I figured if he gets tired of randomly planting cucumbers in every nook and cranny of our yard, we can throw the rest in pots and give them away. It’s time for the rest of the neighborhood to realize the uniquely halcyon joy that we’ve been selfishly keeping to ourselves.

Potatoes

It’s been hard to find time this spring to fit in a solid weekend of gardening, so when swim class was unexpectedly cancelled last night, I took advantage of the sunbreak and the free hour and decided to put in our potatoes. I know I’m supposed to wait a few days after cutting the seed potatoes up, but, like I said, I’m squeezing every moment out of my days right now, so I sat down at the kitchen table to prep.

My usual go to is just to plant the whole potato, but Forrest prefers to cut them into sets, where each potato is cut into three or four pieces, each piece featuring an eye from which the plant will grow. That way, you maximize the number of plants per seed potato. (Like most things gardening related, there’s some (okay, a lot) of debate about how to prep seed potatoes. And like most things Serenity-related, I do what I feel like doing at the time and it usually works out.)

One of my girls sat down to talk to me about her Roblox game while I was working, which is actually a perfect amount of multi-tasking, because having something to draw some attention away from the mind-numbing details of Roblox is conducive to a better listening experience for everyone. After five or so minutes, she emerged from her bubble of video game trivia and noticed what I was doing.

“Ugh,” she said, “Why are you cooking those gross old potatoes?”

‘I’m not, I’m planting them. They’re old because we want them to be ready to grow new plants.”

“Eww, what are those weird things growing out of them?” she pointed to the sprouts.

Here’s where I paused. This child has been surrounded by gardens and growing things her whole life. When she was three, we dug up the front yard. This summer, we’re rototilling half the backyard so she and her sisters will stop planting random plants in my garden. How does she not know how potatoes are grown?

Then I realized that her interaction with the garden never - and I mean never - starts until it gets warm and dry outside. So, she’s very used to setting out starts, weeding, and definitely harvesting. But all of my kids have carefully avoided the early spring planting, since it’s full of mud and rain and damp, cold hours.

Not that I can blame them. The only one in the house who will go anywhere near the compost is Forrest. To me, it’s a magical substance that somehow makes its way into my garden beds each fall. And if you ask him to spend more than a few minutes weeding, he’ll find some large project that definitely needs doing immediately. I guess we each do what we feel like doing at the time and between all of us, it usually works out.

Kale

I hate kale. I don’t particularly mind it as a food, although I will always choose chard as a tastier option, but I hate growing it. Mostly because I don’t have to grow it. It just grows.

Twelve years ago, I planted a mesclun mix that included a variety of kale. At the time, I had a baby, so I failed t pick it before it went to seed. (I don’t have any babies any more and I still fail at this - more on the defiled tomato beds later.) And from that one year, that one mistake, kale has invaded my entire property.

The original garden bed is now purely made up of volunteer kale. It’s a field of greens that grows year round. We made the mistake for supplementing some of our potting soil with that dirt and now two of our garden beds and most of our herbs in pots have to fight against it. And it grows so happily that the stalks will be an inch thick. It is the plant that will not die.

Worst of all, however, is how surrounded I am by betrayers. The kids happily eat the kale out of the beds, using it as both a snack and an ingredient in various soups, potions, and decorations for mud pies. The dogs love it, happily chewing on the thick stalks and enjoying nibbling at it on hot summer days. And Forrest will go out in the summer, disappear with a bowlful and return with annoyingly delicious kale chips. No one will help me in my war against kale.

Except for the cats. They understand, like me, that plants are all well and good when they’re wanted, but when they start taking over, they become weeds, no matter how nutritious and wholesome they are.

I have no witty ending, so larger life lesson here, except this. When gardening, and perhaps in life, be careful which seeds you plant. You many end up with a whole yard full of…kale.