the ice is slowly melting

It’s been a long cold lonely winter, a frozen monotony thawed at whiles by the warmth of a few friends but firmly in the icy clutches of too much school work, and me with no motivation.  

So, I sat in my sun porch yesterday, most of the day, watching a gentle snow cover the sprouts of garlic and shallots and wildflowers that I had been watching intently make their first tentative reaches into sunlight the days before.  It was a different kind of snow, wet and gentle, barely freezing and mostly pleasant; I can’t forgive myself for not going running.  It felt easy, almost happy, after the long bitter winter of discontent.  There being little sun, I started a fire to keep myself toasty; the plants had to fend for themselves under their blanket of snow.  I was working on a comprehensive exam paper for my PhD program, and the view was relaxing.  And on the porch, there’s room to pace.

 Planting and pacing have been about the only diversions from my frenetic attempts to study.  Last Sunday, my friend Elizabeth visited and we planted lettuce and hops.  I followed that with grass seed on Monday, and followed that on Thursday with spinach and radishes and peas, oh my.  My neighbors on both sides look at me as I do this, the one lady making politely derisive comments as she scurries about her yard, busy to no visible end, and the guy across the street occasionally waving and giving me a curt nod before turning away and shaking his head.  I’m not crazy, tho, or if I am, the gardening is the remedy not the symptom. 

 And indeed, though this be madness, there is method in it.  Blessed with a patch of great weather over my spring break from the University, I planted garlic and shallots, now over two weeks ago.  The garlic should have been in the ground back in the fall, but either weather or class work conspired against me, so I wanted it in the ground as soon as could be now.  The hop rhizomes arrived from cold storage and were to go into the ground immediately.  Then, we were due for rain, and I figured that would keep the grass damp – I generally forget to water grass seed and it dries up promptly upon germination.  I knew there was snow coming, but peas are pretty hardy anyway, and I figured they would have just started germinating and wouldn’t freeze two inches underground.  The lettuce won’t have sprouted to be bothered by the snow, either, and the radishes… the package said they liked the cold, and well, if they don’t make it, it’s hard to care.  They’re mostly keeping the ground covered for a month until I plant something I like there.  The chives and wildflowers and oregano are doing their own thing, no help from me. 

 When I tried to explain my the plotting of my planting – an extended version of the above tedious paragraph, a discussion to bore all but the most ardent early planters – to my friend at the computer lab in which I’m stuck all Sunday afternoon, he said, “So, what?  You think you’re outsmarting Mother Nature?”

 Hubris!  My brain went clunk.  Be careful!

 “Ye gads, no!” I insisted.  “We’re working together!  She told me the rules, and I’m just trying to play within them.”

 The method was animated by wanting to use the tiller I bought last fall and barely used.  I almost always would rather that the tool I am using not be a word processor.  It feels good to build, to dig, to hammer.  The tiller feels good to hand, with its smooth vibration and occasional staggering lurch, the ironic whiff of petrochemical exhaust, the dirt and noise.  Each spring finds me checking the ten-day weather forecasts, scheming when to put what in the ground.  This spring doing so is a cross between manic obsession and guilty pleasure; not much of a cross, I know.  It feels good and unproductive.  Tilling was supposed to wear me out and send me back to typing.  The more or less I garden, the more I want to; opposite for study. 

 This spring has been worse than other springs which have been otherwise the same.  I can’t concentrate and am not entirely sure anymore why I ever wanted to.  I feel like compost.  School work has been the same old thing, only more of it done less well.  I feel stagnant like my pond’s water.  Writing this, looking for a metaphor, I remember a fairy tale sort of story: the king offers a reward for someone who can show him something nobody has ever seen before, and the kid brings him an egg as it’s hatching.  Not that I’m the type of person to look for symbols in his vegetables, for new growth in spring.  There is this literary tradition that likes to make a to-do of that sort of thing….  I wonder if the snow mightn’t have been Ma Nature telling me to relax, new growth can be hidden some times, the rules state that eventually the winter of your discontent will be made glorious by the sunlight at the end of the tunnel.  Be patient, like a spring snow, like winter garlic, like people who put up with you; it’s just that the tunnel ends sometime towards the close of June this year, when you hand the fucking exams in.  There is time enough yet for every season and all types of tools, shovels and keyboards in spades.

Garlic Link: Welcome to Filaree Farm.  This guy is serious about his garlic.  I've got some ordered to plant this fall.

Hops Link: The Thyme Garden.  Hops are quick growing, bushy vines... good for privacy... and they smell, like, well, hops....

Planting Calendar:

 

Date:	Plants	Activity By 3-29
Last Year:	Prairie Smoke	All growing; one blooming
	Butterfly Milkweed	Strangely missing.  IDK….
	Side Oats Gramma	Not much yet
	Little Bluestem	A couple green blades starting
	Aromatic Aster	Spreading like CRAZY.  Am going to have to find a way to contain it soon.
	Left-Over Last Year’s Garlic	Clumped up and crazy growing
3-11 –	Garlic and Shallots	25% sprouted; some squirrel damage.  Grrr.
3-21 –	Hops and Lettuce with Elizabeth	Nada so far
3-22 –	Grass seed… not really garden, I know	It’s being patient
3-26 –	Spinach, Radishes, Peas	Soon, I’m sure...!

 

Farm : Garden :: Stadium Supergroup Concert : Local Bar Band

Maybe winter is a time for looking in; it’s taken me until now to put these things together.

I remember in the summer a friend coming over and hanging out. I was showing off my garden, and he said something along the lines of, ‘you’ve made this a real nice part of your yard over here.’

I thought he was wack. We were standing with the mosquitoes between two raised beds. The peas were nice; instead of cooking or weeding, I stand by the garden and eat them off the vine, shelling the older ones. The peas were also messy and over grown. So were the collards. And the beans were looking to be. The onions don’t really get over grown, but they had needed thinning and I hadn’t had time to cook. The place was a mess, not a scenic outdoor destination; it was neither sacred nor profane, just a place. It wasn’t a place I’d go to.

When I was over there, why I went over there in the first place, I would pull a few weeds, look and see what had grown, pull a few more weeds, tie a piece of jute or strip from an old pillowcase around something. In between each of these, I would eat a few peas. A week after that conversation I would eat a few peas and a few young carrots, too. Then not so young carrots. Eventually, I started thinking about it. I did go to this place. Every day I went to this place. I spent a good portion of my time outside there, as the multiple piles of pea shells demonstrated.

So I became enamored of this little space.

It made me revise – I won’t say rethink – my ideas about the sacredness of nature. They became more expansive. A priest, Father Ed of the Iowa City Newman Catholic Student Center, told me once that all things were sacred, having been made by the hand of God. He wasn’t giving me the answer that I wanted.

I wanted him to afford something special to cemeteries and ancient holy spots, and he was having none of it. Cemeteries, a thousand years later, the bones aren’t even dust any more, but the dirt and the flowers and the nature probably still would be. He admitted that some places were sacred to individuals for idiosyncratic reasons, but that everywhere was sacred to God; the bones had nothing to do with it. Of course, I suppose this means that quicksand is sacred, too. But still.

So, I’ve been looking inward. Trying to find the meanings I associate with my idiosyncratic spaces. I like to sit on the other side of the yard. The fish are more fun to watch than the plants. They do more. But I don’t so much like to sit outside. It’s not like I usually work in the garden; I usually fart around, and it’s difficult to fart around on a grand scale .

School Days

“How’s your garden doing?” Asabi asked me.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in three days.”

Asabi works with me at the computer lab in the college of education helping students scan images and convert files and upload assignments so professors can check them. She and I became friends over the summer when we co-taught the class that teaches students how to do these things. Asabi had heard I had a garden, and kept a watchful eye towards any surplus produce.

“Collard greens!” she had exclaimed, “You all have collard greens?”

Yes. I had. And plenty to share, altho she and I never managed to get the sharing done.

I’m not a very energetic gardener. I prefer to let things take their own course for the most part. This inhibits certain kinds of garden success. In the summer I spent a lot of time in the garden, standing in the heat and imitating the plants, soaking up the sun. Sometimes I would make a mental list: should ought put that fence back up, might could weed the carrots, need some sort of trellis for the peas. The list was mental only, without any physical manifestation. Like I said, my gardening isn’t very energetic.

Now that school is in session, from Sunday night until Thursday night, I’m not home in the daylight.

Weeds have been a problem this year. We’ve had a lot of rain and the weeds keep… shooting up like weeds. The Saturday before Asabi had asked me this, I had plunged into the weedy mess with resolve. The day before I had simply stood and stared, wondering where my vegetables were. It was a mess, enough of a mess to put off dealing for as long as I could.

And then, that was it. Cut down a bunch of weeds and run off to study. Leave the garden to its own devices. It feels somehow that without me standing there to watch it, it must be going to have problems growing. Or something. It needs me.

I soak up fluorescent light from the school and the flat screen monitor glow from the lab and grow pasty and pale. And the plants. The plants and the weeds soak up the rain and remains of the southening sun and dispute my claims of relevance to the whole operation.

Gardening 301

Milton and Malachai are looking up at me, and I share with them my frown.

Mike and I had not so recently been carpool talking about the lottery. What would the school I made be like when I won the 300 million dollar lotto? What would his school be like? Some of the talk was the predictable rehashing of our changing footings on whether media production should be a separate class or part of language arts; science and social science would both require critical thinking; good gym classes were a good thing.

More interesting was the surprise, “I think in my school we’ll have classes about gardening.”

“Yeah, me too. Have the kids grow stuff.”

“There’s something about growing your own food. It’s amazing – you put something in the ground, give it a few months, and it turns into food. Or flowers.”

“Hands-on. Playing in the dirt.”

“Yeah. Have the kids grow stuff.”

Milton wiggles his tail to swim to the next plant and chews on it. Malachai wiggles more enthusiastically, darting back and forth and looking at me expectantly. I drink some beer and wish they would both eat more algae. Murdoc’s white nose and orangeshiny body eases through the gap in the water lettuce and I drink more beer, Iowa Pale Ale from the Millstream brewery just down the road. I am resting off a long day, and wonder if they can tell their days apart.

This is a forcedly myopic peace for me. To my left and to my rear my yard is a shambles, the turf ripped out along with the fence Nik and I put up fourteen months before, which stood barely eleven before giving way to the advance of progress. I’ve been too dispirited to weed the flower garden that runs out to the mud that the workmen promise they will turn back into a sidewalk. Continuing my frown, I return to thoughts of Malachai. Is he tainted by the hand of man? He prefers me to feed him, but lack of foraging in the seaweed hasn’t seemed to skinny him down any. Another swallow of beer. I spy a dead bird on the rocks alongside the water. I look at the plants, blossoms drying out and leaves turning brown. I created this space without knowing what would grow in it. The waters aren’t still. From the five fish that survived the first week last summer, fifty more swim amidst the flowers and wilting leaves in miniature mimicry of their parents. I’ve got to get a bunch of them out of there before it freezes or I worry they all will asphyxiate under the ice.

Getting up, I cross the yard then the driveway, and stop in front of the prairie plants. Caterpillar creatures have finished eating the butterfly milkweed, and the little bluestem screening my windows is turning red, like I think it’s supposed to. Past that, where it all started, the garden plants struggle to be seen over the weeds. The beans have overcome the fence and threaten the irises. A city rabbit hides in my oregano, the neighbor’s bees buzz by. It’s a tangled mess.

Yeah. Have the kids grow stuff. I grin childlike and toss my bottle in the bin. I got stuff growing, alright.