An Abundance of Vegetation
This is the time of year that many colleges, universities, and non-profit corporations hold plant sales. Diligent students and volunteers have been propagating plant starts for months, and now they are showcasing the results of their work.
I’m a sucker for spring plant sales, and so is my oldest daughter. We have made a tradition of attending the Mother’s Day Plant Sale at our local community college and my grandaughter always tags along. This year, however, instead of following us around asking when we would be finished, 5-year-old Bean was an active participant in the process. She specifically requested certain plants over others, asked questions about the hydroponics display, and negotiated for a large basket of petunias that I suspect her mother didn’t think they needed.
Sunday afternoon this is what my car looked like as we prepared to go home and spend the rest of the day in our gardens. Once home, (after stopping for Jamba Juice), I carried the plants from the car, sighed when I saw how many I had bought (again!), changed my clothes, put on more sunblock and a broad brimmed hat, and went to work.
By late afternoon I had two wooden boxes prepared and ready for the vegetable starts, but before I could put in the ornamentals I realized I would need to take out a cluster of iris and prune back several shrubs that had grown to record sizes during our wonderful rainy winter.
Removing iris plants involves loosening the soil with a spading fork, removing the top layer of soil with a hand spade, then setting the tools aside, grasping a rhizome below the soil and pulling it out. This process always reminds me of the little boy in the children’s book, The Carrot Seed.
Pulling Carrots
The little boy in that story plants a carrot seed in spite of his parents’ pessimism, continues to care for it in spite of his family and friends’ pessimism, and eventually emerges with a carrot so large that it needed to be carried in a wheelbarrow. Some of those iris rhizomes were as long as my forearm, and to pull them out I had to kneel on the moist soil and bury my hands in it up to my wrists. As each plant began to come loose I would pull harder and harder until suddenly the soil released the roots and I fell backwards in a swoosh. When I was finished with all the irises and surveyed the large open space I’d created, I expected to feel exhausted. Instead I felt energized and happy.
Spring Cleaning in the Garden
Clearing a garden bed and planting new annuals is a special kind of spring cleaning — cathartic, physical and satisfying. From the time that the seed catalogs arrive in late fall, fueling my imagination through the winter months, until Mother’s Day weekend, I daydream about my garden at least once a week. I imagine several different configurations of vegetable boxes, a new selection of vegetables and flowers, and the taste of the delicious meals we will cook when we harvest in the summer and fall.
Pruning the established plants and removing the spent ones was a necessary precursor to the creative work of building this year’s pantheon of annuals and perennials, vegetables, fruit, and ornamentals. It’s similar to coming home from an outlet shopping spree and realizing you need to remove the old and worn out, grown-out-of, and out-of-fashion clothes from the closet in order to make room for the new and stylish ones.
To carry the analogy further, some people get the same pleasure from purchasing fabric as others do from purchasing clothes. Cutting out the pattern and sewing a garment is a creative process that often leads to the necessity of cleaning out a fabric cabinet as well as a closet.
Similarly, some people enjoy raising plants from seed and planting out the seedlings once the beds are prepared. Bean and I have been doing that since she was two. This year she took charge of the selection of seeds as well as the actual planting in jiffy pots. When she comes to see me tomorrow we’ll carry those fibrous jiffy pots out to one of the vegetable boxes I prepared on Mother’s Day, and we’ll plant them into their new homes.
Gardening becomes something very special when you have children beside you, and even more so when those children are your grandchildren. We’re no longer just clearing soil and planting plants. Now we’re teaching about the four seasons, the nitrogen cycle, the importance of caring for growing things, and the value of traditions. I’m not going to get all sappy here (that happens in maple forests in February and March), but I do think planting and harvesting rituals are good for children, and good for grownups too. They tie us to the earth and remind us what is really important.
Sunflower and corn seedlings.
It’s very simple to begin gardening with children. Buy some sunflower or pumpkin seeds and show your grandchildren how to plant them in paper cups and care for them until they are ready to plant — the rewards next August will be memorable.
What’s happening in your garden this spring?
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