The Garden

Mistakes and mean weather – my year in review

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise
of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.
My sweetness is to wake in the night
after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

The late, great Wendell Berry from his poem, “Water”.

It is September and I am garden tired

We had blessed rain last weekend and the one before and the one before that and the garden has NOW become all smug and perky. I take this personally.

A garden has long been my happy place.  I was thirteen when my parents and sibs went on a summer vacation and I stayed back to tend the old Whonnock farm garden.  This is one of my fondest memories.  I had buck teeth then and braces to correct them.  I wore brackets that fit around my head like a horse’s bridle. The orthodontist told me that the more I wore them the sooner they could come off. I was an odd geek just starting high school and did not want to compound certain misery by showcasing my front teeth messed up from years of thumb sucking.  Anna Bucktooth, they called me in in grade 7. 

I already knew I was going to suffer because I didn’t own a pair of jeans and my mother would insist on my wearing the orange, brown and yellow crocheted vest my Oma made me. We had only recently moved to the country and no kid I met or saw there wore anything but T-shirts and jeans.  I was in 4H country now.

So that summer I wore my headgear 24/7 while I worked in the soil and sun listening to the sounds of birds and the wispy quaver of wind in trees.  This was my heaven. This was peace.

BTW, I did not escape scorn that September.  There was no disguising the headgear tan lines.

This was my pilot year growing a real garden here in Spallumcheen.  I started late. First we had to tear down the “fencing” that bordered what used to be the old garden plot.  The deer mocked it. 

I tilled it tardy for a proper spring planting because it rained so hard. Once I did move out my seedlings and started direct seeding, I had to battle snails and earwigs. Their populations had surged during the mild winter. And they were relentless snackers.

I got help with the earwigs eventually. A covey of about fifty to sixty quail, six adults and the rest sweet little chicks, scratched and pecked through soil and straw and devoured the asshole bugs like they were eating Christmas candy.

The snails I dispatched early every morning, several hours after they had already mangled many of my young plants. I ought to have gone out at night and patrolled with a flashlight but I treasure sleep like a best friend.

When my kids were toddlers, we lived in a Greater Vancouver suburb. A quiet street lined with common ranchers with large backyards. We’d lived there for a year when a young couple moved in next door.  Beth and Perry. We got on splendidly.  Beth got to work on her flower borders and immediately found herself at war with the snails that made short work of them. She came over one morning looking all sorrowful and beaten. She had started to dispatch the snails by lining them up in a long row on her concrete path and crushing them sequentially with a brick.  But by gastropod number ten, the heat of battle tempered, she thought ruefully of the terrorized snails at the end of the queue who witnessed the annihilation of their siblings and cousins at the front it with no means of escaping the same fate.  Beth abandoned the execution and had tea and pie with me instead.

Yeah, not me.  With zero f*%^%s I collected the snails in buckets and tossed them onto the railroad tracks.

Like many gardeners in the North Okanagan this year, I had other issues, too.

The pocket gophers pulled my lettuces one by one into their tunnels like in a looney tunes cartoon.

Majestically grotesque hornworms found my tomatoes.

And no combination of companion planting saved my brassicas from cabbage butterfly worms.

By the way, companion planting is a joke.  It sounds nice and looks pretty but the odds are mostly not in your favour. 

My dad was a big proponent of organic, companion planting.  Just after my third baby we moved into the neighbour’s three bedroom rural house for a year while they explored Europe. The yard was large and I had permission to double dig and garden a big hunk of it.

My father mapped out a garden plan.  I think it is the nicest thing he ever did for me.  I followed it faithfully and yet found that I shared at least a third of that garden with the hungry critters of 267^th street.

The broccoli that grew in this garden looked amazing but, despite being planted next to marigolds, nasturtiums and alliums, little black aphids and worms floated to the top of the soup I made with it.  Skimmed them out and fed it to my kids anyway but next time soaked the broccoli and cauliflower real good in salt water to reduce the unintended protein content. The bugs float then so and its easy to scoop them out before cooking.

This year we had no rain and unrelenting heat for two months.  The ground cracked and became concrete. We had serious water restrictions in the North Okanagan.

The leaves of the nasturtiums curled from heat and thirst.

The dried out roots of a top heavy volunteer sunflower caused it to topple onto the cucumber trellises smashing them. 

I read a novel once where captives were tortured until the brink of death and revived with the best of care for the sole purpose of being tortured again.

I felt that is what I did to my plants all summer. Hand watering deeply with songs. Mulching with pep talks.  They weakly and briefly lifted their weary stems off the ground faking an attempt to live but I knew in my heart that these annuals just wanted to offload their seeds and die.

And then, like I said it rained.

All that effort and something I have no control over brings my garden to life.

Think of spending months planning a big party.  Carefully curating the guest list, the decor, the conversational corners.  Stressing over the seating arrangements, the music, the menu, the paired wine.  The big event arrives, and there are some no shows but most of the guests arrive and they make polite, unanimated small talk. And then your big, loud, boisterous cousin arrives from out-of-town busting open the front door rolling in a keg with his right foot, a 26er of Vodka in each hand.  Well only THEN the party starts to rock and the wall flowers get all sweaty and hootchy-kootchy and drunk texting their friends to come over. Good bash in the end but I can be grateful to my cousin and resentful at the same time.

Rain. FFS. You are always welcome but could you RSVP?

I learned a lot this year.  Gardening four thousand square feet is a lot.  Ten zucchini plants are a lot.  That was a mistake.  I didn’t wear my glasses when I seeded what I thought were cucumbers and now I have enough megantic zucchinis to make a large fleet of canoes.

Hand watering during drought restrictions is a lot.  We were saved at the end of the season recommissioning an old shallow well on the property. 

Everything I have learned I will steer into next year’s garden design and purpose and I am glad for a bit of rest.

I just finished reading Good Husbandry by Kristen Kimball.  She writes in Chapter 9, “How tightly our egos were tied to the fields.  When the farm was thriving, it was easy to be proud of what we did.  When it wasn’t, we felt bad not just for the crops or sick animals, predation or weeds, but about ourselves.”

Yep.

I am not a true farmer….yet.  But I have the heart and constitution of one.  I cannot control the sky’s spigot but the garden’s failure to thrive felt like my failure to nurture and sustain.  By the end of the summer with rain and well water we moved into the right side of even with the flowers and vegetables making up for lost time. I am grateful and relieved. But it still feels personal.