Category: Garden

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Summertime Magic

With the first year of school comes the first official summer break.  And that means that I get to watch a little girl’s first experiences with the wonders that the magic of summer break have to offer…with some minor guidance of course.  Captured below are two of these such moments.

She asked me to get her a drink.  I was busy, so I suggested the novel idea of drinking directly from the hose.  She stared at me blankly, considering that proposal.  It had never occurred to her before that she could do that.  Eventually, she decided that sounded fun, and off she ran.  I found her in the front yard with the hose.  Her eyes were bright with glee as she held the hose to her face, cute little nose crinkled as the inefficiency of hose-drinking drenched everything in the area.

Every kid enjoys being a know-it-all, especially to authority figures.  At one point, someone had taught her that she could eat clover flowers, which has become a regular activity to taunt her teachers–guardians who are necessarily concerned with their charges eating wild plants.  Now, with the herb garden installed, a banquet of edible plants sits in the yard, begging for a child’s destructive attention.  So after she freed the remaining fishing worms into the herb garden, decided to sample the cuisine.  Admittedly, it was fun to teach her about the different plants and let her build culinary associations.  I’d have her taste a leaf first, then ask if she could identify it.  She was pretty accurate with the more obvious ones, correctly identifying chives, mint, and basil.  She’s not a mint fan, but loved the chives.  Forestry merit badge earned.

–Simon

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Micro-Bouquet

While I would never admit this to Liz, I too enjoy the aesthetics of arranged flowers.  Where we differ, however, is that I generally don’t feel the price point of these arrangements to be worth their cost, nor do I consider purchasing them to be a full experience.  But, it is possible to make one’s own floral decorations, and since this represents a project—I like projects–I dabble in this art form.

Back in the Lubbock years, mom would take us down the road to a vacant lot.  This being upon the Great Plains, the lot had gradually morphed into reclaimed prairie.  The inevitable spring storms would then turn this into an urban landscape of wildflowers.  We would each pick a bouquet, then walk home and place them in vases.  It was an afternoon activity of cheap entertainment, until the city eventually paved the lot.

At the time, I found it a little out of character for a boy to be immersed in flowers, but I had only sisters, so the options were generally to play alone or join in with more effeminate activities (although I still instigated the occasional Nerf fight).  And play alone a lot I did, but there’s only so much a kid can do alone before needing company.  So while Texas schooling tried their best to beat me into a tough, football-loving macho asshole, I was forced to embrace aspects of my feminine side.  This was also at the end of the super-angry 80s feminist period–the period that gave us a decade of sitcoms featuring incompetent family-men, and represented a brief period in which I was taught that as a boy it was okay to show emotion.  I say brief because once I tried dating, girls were decidedly not interested in a boy who talked about and showed his feelings.  Can you say double-standard?

Just search through Pinterest

But a consequence of this confused upbringing is that I can easily embrace a cultural shift in masculine ideals.  Gardening?  Bah!  Sissy nonsense.  Cooking?  Tailoring?  Domestic woman’s work.  Not so much anymore.  Even the most obstinate of minds still has to accept the pendulum is swinging back.  And such is the case with something as simple as flowers.

I note of growing popularity are the Asian floral arts.  They will spend hours deciding where to place a single flower.  And like all things Asian/European, Americans are quick to assimilate the culture as chic.  Hence, floral arrangements are no longer effeminate.

With that over-analysis, I can move on with my anecdote.  In the townhouse, there wasn’t a lot of room to grow flowers, and any garden space I did have was reserved for tomatoes.  Therefore, I started making what I call “micro-bouquets”, or simply “whatever I could fit into a shot glass”.  Simplicity became the governing principle, and the small size necessitated creativity over substance.

Today, I still like to apply this philosophy to floral arrangements.  I find a small bouquet to be less gouache and more elegant, less taxing on my garden’s resources, and more difficult to pull off:

Intellectual reflection aside.  My daughter really likes them.  And if making my daughter happy isn’t manly, then I fail to understand anything about our current society.

–Simon

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Tilling the Land

Whenever I complained about any form of manual labor, dad was quick to remind me of his own youth, namely the pre-dawn cow-milking.  Recently I had him iterate a favorite anecdote to Liz, regarding the drafty farm house and a glass of water on his nightstand freezing overnight.

During the Lubbock years, a brilliant idea was conceived.  My parents, environmentalists and chronically short of funds in those days, decided that when the lawn was mowed, the grass would be bagged and spread under the rabbit hutches.  Then, over the course of the following week, this drying grass would soak up the all the delightfully nitrogenous excrement that the rabbits produced.  The resultant urine-soaked yard waste would then be shoveled into a wheelbarrow and carted to the alley–dumped upon the compost pile–in time for the next mowing and batch of grass.  This pile would lengthen, requiring that it be watered and turned, until the now saturated mass would breed the necessary microorganisms, expediting the pile’s decomposition.  The conclusion, and omnipresent lesson in decomposition models and the nitrogen cycle, courtesy of dad, was an incredibly nutrient-rich and organic soil for use in the gardens.

And amazing gardens my mom did have.  Yet somehow, I failed to appreciate these lessons at the time.  Through some combination of being a kid and doing hard manual labor in the west Texas heat, the miracles of biology fell flat.  And while I remember my sisters helping with the mowing/shoveling/turning, I don’t recall their involvement nearly as much as my own–something I attribute to being the only son, and the point at which the cow-milking anecdotes would emerge were I to point out these injustices.

But, I did enjoy gardening, so mom indulged me with a section of the garden for my very own.  And while there was many a discussion on what I couldn’t plant in it, the joy of having one’s own child willingly involve themselves in a parent’s hobby likely superseded the irritations of teaching me basic gardening.

So it was that I indulged my daughter when she asked me recently for her own garden.  The proud parent within immediately agreed and started working on her very own partition.  I selected a full-sun and rather barren section of the yard, near my own vegetable garden.  After some digging and hauling of recycled bricks (retrieved elsewhere from the yard), I bestowed upon her a section of earth, prime for cultivation.  Unlike my own parents, however, I forked over a few bucks and filled it with a commercial potting soil, since we lack rabbits.

The whippet approves

Then it was off to Lowe’s.  I don’t know who Lowe was, but I’m guessing the patron saint of suburbia.  Hail, St. Lowe!  Feeling my mother’s pain, I tried my best to remain silent as we accumulated a cartfull of mismatched plants.  Ultimately though, this is a lesson in gardening, which will require some failure.  Still, it turned out well, and complete with lawn decoration, represents a utopian model of suburban flora.

I’m in the process of planting clover in that unkempt section

I do still have her pick up the dog poo, and even though it doesn’t go into compost, it sort of counts.

–Simon

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Cheating

Since the vegetable garden got decimated by frost, I was forced to do something I’ve never done before: buy tomato plants.  I’ve purchased seed of course, and the first year we were in our last townhouse my mother-in-law gave us two tomato plants, but never before have I purchased them at a store.  And once I grow a plant, I save seed–partly out of a sense of self-sufficiency and the desire to maintain my own seed stores, partly to discover new hybrids, and partly because the germination rate on saved seed is significantly better than store-bought (not to mention free).

But with over half my tomato plants dead, and since I didn’t get the chance to put in a vegetable garden at the new house last year, this year I was going to have tomatoes dammit!  So when the local Lowe’s started putting them on sale, I relented.

Normally I don’t get tomatoes until July, but here I am with a single tomato, growing from the heirloom yellow lemon variety:

I see you!

I suppose since I’ve recently depleted my canned tomato stores, that I can forgive myself just this once.

–Simon