So this is my spring gardening blog.
No my sundial didn’t break: I had really good intentions to sit down and write, but the garden got in the way and time marched on. All our produce is now picked, packed, jarred and bagged.
Except for the Christmas carrots. They are cold-stored in a couple of large plant pots. The garden also gave us cabbages, onions and potatoes for our Christmas dinner and part of the winter, too.
I find it mind-boggling that these veggies were once just a tiny handful of seeds. The other flowers and vegetables were just teeny-weeny seedlings. The potato plants were, well, potatoes.
There must be some life lessons in that garden somewhere. Despite hair-raising events broadcast on the news every day and a pandemic with no visible expiry date, the plants weren’t fazed. They grew. They had their work to do as they had for millennia.
So did my husband and I. While we hoed, raked, weeded, watered, and prayed to the plant gods, I couldn’t help thinking about something an old Upper Canada gardener wrote in 1884. All his hard labour that year, he opined, resulted in “…one case rheumatism, one ditto lumbago, one pair demoralized pantaloons, two pairs second hand shoes .…, half-a-dozen sickly onions, two bunches lettuce, five stalks of rhubarb, and a half-bushel of potatoes.” *
Although we did a little better than that, I’m sure I was channelling that stalwart early pioneer as I picked what I thought were 8,634 weeds out of the carrot patch. Weeding the carrot patch is urgent. Otherwise weed roots become like steel cables, and it’s ‘hasta la vista, carrots”.
Then there was that dry spell in August and we experienced the ‘droops’. That is, I turned my back on the hanging baskets for more than an hour and they wilted; a little longer than that and “crispy” would be a fair description—which was two small steps removed from “dead”.
My husband has always tried to handle the insect residents in the garden in the most ecological way. Take potato beetles. Please take them!
So he tried hand picking, washing them with a soapy mixture (I think I heard them laughing), and then finally he had to resort to higher technology. It involved a dead ringer for R2D2’s older cousin, circa 1973. It had been abandoned along a roadside in the form of one of those loud metal canister vacuum cleaners. My husband diligently vacuumed the garden several times a week for quite some time. Our neighbour kept looking over the fence. I was afraid he might phone someone in authority to assess the situation (and my husband). However, we have been potato beetle-free for at least a decade.
The local deer enjoyed eating the top off our young red maple tree. It stayed unnaturally short for several years. What I took to be a relative of Wiarton Willy liked to upend a wire enclosure that we had around the eggplants to protect them. He ate the eggplant, left the purple rind, and put the enclosure down. At least he was neat, if not polite.
And don’t get me started about the bunnies. It’s amazing how fast a man can run to try to shoo them out of the veggie patch. One year we were helped out by a neighbourhood fox. One fox equalled zero bunnies, for that year.
Now with Christmas approaching, I look back on our gardening adventures and think, “Are we nuts?”
But here we are looking forward to having homegrown fresh vegetables as part of our Christmas meals and have a supply of homegrown food in our freezer to boot.
Since we haven’t done any garden chores for awhile, the pantaloons appear less demoralized. I have already started to see seed catalogues on-line. Everything looks so great in them, so perfect, so bug-free.
Maybe tending a garden is like giving birth: we have short memories when it comes to pain. But what a reward!
Merry Christmas, everyone. Have a great holiday and try to help each other—and keep looking forward to the seed catalogues of the spring.
**the ‘demoralized pantaloons’ quote is from a book called Consuming Passions, Eating and Drinking Traditions in Ontario. It was published by The Ontario Historical Society in May, 1989,
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