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...!

 

I don't have a koi pond

My fish aren’t koi. They’re Carp. Not that I suppose there is anything wrong with koi, per se. I met a couple koi at the garden center this last summer and they were cute and friendly, and really, as creatures of privilege, why wouldn’t they be? Of course, one could say the same about the eventual owners of koi, and anyone else with the means to have a pond in their yard. But not all of them are.

I painted a house this last summer and talked to the woman who lived next door to it. She had koi in her pond. She just moved in and had had her house painted in an off white, off due to the addition of a pink tinge. The trim was bright, flat, purple. She kept promising to anyone who would listen that she would paint a mural on the wall facing where I was working. My employer, a former co-worker where I teach, and I shuddered. Mural woman fancied herself an artist, and the mural and her pond was part of her art as life as art programme. The pond was artistic but not aesthetic, I might want to put it. Nature in a frame. The koi weren’t fish anymore; they were art objects. It might remind me of poodles with the grooming where they’re shaved except for poofy spots on their heads and tail and feet, poor things.

At least it seemed to me that to her the koi weren’t koi anymore. How this seemed to the koi may be different. They probably had an easier time respecting themselves than a lot of poodles out there.

No, it’s not koi, but goldfish what’s in my pond. Twenty-three cent goldfish. At one time there were fifteen, then there were five survivors, now there are some ridiculous number. Not all the fellas were fellas. I need to find someone to give the newbies away to. Freecycle, maybe, when they get a little bigger and I can fish them out. I was afraid that the oxygen supply in the pond wouldn’t be great enough to support them all after it freezes over and they’d suffocate under the ice, but I checked with the pond guy at the garden store. It’s deep enough that they should all be fine.

It’s a bit difficult to describe this reason why I like the fact that my fish are plain carp, not fancy koi carp. Or at least the principle is inconsistent. A friend and I compare the respective worth of our fish, hers indoor in a tank and mine out in the mild wild of the yard. She’s appalled that I keep the fellas there in the winter, freezing with the garlic and shallots. I pretend outrage that she keeps hers locked up in a bowl with cats nearby, and I tell her she should bring her fish out for a swim. I like to think of the fellas as rugged, blue collar, Joe the Piscine sorts of guys. Like me. With a pond garden filled with irises and water lilies.

Mural woman’s pond isn’t deep, maybe eighteen inches. It was more shallow at one point in the summer when I put some water lettuce in it. The fish swam frantically en masse, almost like flopping on the beach, only occasionally finding the deep end. I guess Italy has banned giving away goldfish as prizes at fairs; it seems to be illegally cruel to suffocate them in plastic bags. I suspect mural women’s fish will die this winter, freeze their little fins off.


I wasn’t sure my fellas would live thru their first winter. I did buy them a heater, which melts a small hole in the ice to let toxic gasses out. I bought them a filter for living through the winter. It seemed like they deserved a reward, and I also developed new respect for them as fish. But I’m not trying to say I’m so far above letting fish die. I don’t want to sound too all crunchy, but life and death are all part of nature, after all, the eternal cycle and all that. Fish die all the time and it doesn’t so much bother me(*). I just think that if they’re going to die as part of nature, they should be able to do so as part of nature, not artistic ostentations. What’s the difference between a wolf starving to death because it can’t catch any more food, and a dog starving to death because its owner won’t spring for Alpo? What’s the difference between freezing to death climbing a mountain, and freezing to death in your home?



Unless of course the killing is part of the art.


(*) Unless it’s because of river pollution; that pisses me off. The fish frequently try to jump out of the water, it hurts them so bad. That is an interesting thing to think about: can you imagine not trying to jump into the water – another medium in which we can live – but out of the air, into some mystery element that will kill us? Jumping out of the air and into the fire to find relief?

The Iowa DNR on water monitoring

Iowa DNR on fish kill reporting

Iowa DNR on fish kill investigations

Winter Companions

Garlic and Onions. Yup. And Shallots.

“Oh, no. No. You didn’t eat them did you?” I had a distasteful vision of planting stock sizzling in butter.

She looked at me with a bit of puzzlement. “Well, not yet.”

“Good. Those are for planting.”

“Oh. That’s right. You told me you were going to bring me shallots.”

Then what on earth were you going to eat them for, I thought. I gave her the planting instructions for the organic goodies I had left her: red shallots and yellow shallots and three types of garlic, and hurried on my rounds. I stop and look at the school pond – too shallow for fish, but with a lot of nice irises and rushes. Students walk by and wonder what I’m doing. I smile.

Working at a school, I get many of the opportunities to exchange pleasantries that make Facebook seem like deep conversation. These sorts of thing are, I suspect, meant to reassure each other that we are ready to acknowledge each other’s existence. Most occasions, matching their ‘hello’ with my ‘how ya doin’?’ is sufficient. Other times, from opposite ends of a hall, we see each other coming and I’m sure they can see me thinking about how I’m going to entertain them as they walk by. Typically, their exchanges are focused on weather. And mine are too.

“Looks like winter’s almost here!” I’ll say, taking the initiative, as we close in.
“Yeah,” they take the bait, “don’t you hate it when it gets like this?” they try to agree as we pass.
“Nah… I love it!” I say half turned to disagree before they’re too far gone.

Late fall is not the best time for gardening, especially when the ground freezes. I need to plant kale next year, and leeks – both of which I understand to be very cold hardy. My Swiss Chard remains colorful and healthy after our killing freeze, and even the collards are hanging in there. They’re not long for the world, but the garlic, that’s a different story.

Garlic and shallots plant in the fall. Not unlike flower bulbs, tho not nearly so deep. It’s part of their life cycle, cold then cool, then hot. They start to grow in the fall, hunker down for the winter and greet spring with wiggly finger-like leaves. Ones that I hadn’t harvested over the summer have sprouted again, and may hold me over for the winter. I’m reluctant to till my shallot patch, because ya can’t really afford shallots, and they seem to keep growing back every year. It’s a good thing.

I do like the winter, almost as much as I like garlic. I think of my plants out there in the wind and the snow when a colleague complains. It’s all weather, I think, the weather. No, I don’t want floods or old folks to die in ice storms, but you never hear the shallots complain about a November flurry. I think of their green in the fall and their underground life in the winter and want tot tell people to take heart. Variety is the spice of life, and that counts for the weather as much as for the veggies.

www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM1894.pdf

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.