This morning I realized we had our first morning glory flower of the season — only I didn’t make time to photograph it until a few minutes ago, when it was folding in upon itself, its brief day in the sun nearly complete.  Still, I was amazed and grateful to witness its appearance in my garden, especially because I did not plant it.

Exactly where I planted my heirloom “Grandpa Ott’s” morning glory seeds last year, a new crop have sprung up this year, healthy and ready to go.  I merely needed to do a little thinning and replace the rotting twine that guided them up to the porch railing.  This recent experience convinces me that my desired style of gardening may be closer to friendly self-seeding annuals in a cottage-garden style setting, lots of pretty things that pretty much take care of themselves given good soil, bright sun, and plenty of fresh rainwater.

Of course, no garden is so idyllic that it takes care of itself.  First of all, such a place would hardly qualify for the name “garden.”  And secondly, I’d be bored.  I need my garden to need me, when you come right down to it.  That is part of the pleasure.

Yet there is such simple grace in a plant throwing down its seeds because it likes the home you’ve provided, and in those seeds springing up of their own accord, raring to go for a new season of beauty and bounty.  I definitely would like my next garden, wherever it will be, to include more of that.

If only technology could participate in some of that simple grace!  Our DSL woes continue, as some of you may have guessed by my sparse participation online.  I haven’t even caught up on responding to comments and messages from the last time we went without a connection, and it’s happening again.  Turns out it’s not the internal wiring in the house — which only verifies my intuition that the problem is outside somewhere.  It kicks up every single time there is a major torrential rain.  This time, the connection went out just after our flash floods on Tuesday night.

It could, of course, be the long wire that is not even buried underground, but runs up the slope out of the hollow only slightly bedded down in the dirt and leaf mold.  If you were to shuffle your toe over it just right, you could conceivably trip over this wire on your way around the side of the house to the Victory Garden.  When F. first located it when picking wild blackberries, we were both astonished and amazed.  A loose wire, just snaking through the forest.

Thus, you can probably imagine the skeptical expression on my face when the last repair technician assured me it was the internal wiring in the house causing the problem.  Maybe because a rodent had chewed a wire in the crawl space, he said.  All I could envision as he spoke was the legion of chipmunks with access to that long green wire stretched out beneath the tree canopy and the bright blue sky.  I wasn’t convinced I knew enough to argue with him, however, so I just let him go ahead and do his thing.  Naturally, I’m ruing that decision now, less than two weeks later.

The main thing I want to say, however, is that if I’ve been absent from your blog, please know that I am still trying to catch up, and hopefully you will see me there soon.  In spite of all that free time to clean the house and weed the garden, I do miss my blog friends, and I hope we have steady, reliable internet service soon.

Cross your fingers for us; won’t you?

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With our temperatures reaching all the way into July territory for the past week (92° F yesterday), plenty of spring rains, and a golden sun bent on reaching its summer zenith in record time, everything in the Victory Garden has been doing well — in some cases maybe too well.  The cabbages have tripled in size seemingly overnight, and the mustards look suddenly moments from harvest.

All of the perennial herbs are back in the full flush of health, except for a single rosemary in a pot, the only loss the garden suffered this winter.  The oregano I’d assumed was dead has proved me wrong, much to my delight, and the chives, parsley and mint are already seeing regular use in the kitchen.  The annual herbs, cilantro and dill and basil, are sprouting as I type this, seemingly anxious to get growing.

I’m tempted to pull up a garlic or two to see what’s under there after all this time.  The stalks of the rocambole type are so fabulously thick and healthy looking, I picture huge, perfect bulbs below the soil line — but this being my first attempt at growing garlic, I’m nervous lest I discover too late that nothing much is happening where I cannot see.  However, the cue to harvest is not gloriously healthy foliage, but brown, dying foliage.  Patience, Meredith.

Of course, the poor lettuces and peas are not enjoying the heat and all of the remaining winter-hardy radishes bolted almost two weeks ago — although their flowers are attracting plenty of bees, so I let them hang out a while since not much else is blooming yet.  This weekend I plan to pull them and prep that bed for teepees of pole lima beans, a couple of Ronde de Nice squash, and a few direct-sown flowers.

But the weeds.  Ah, the weeds!

Lest you think from my recent post about dandelions that I am a sentimental weed-lover, let me set you straight.  No one can truly love them who grows vegetables — or perhaps one can only love them in a very Buddhist, non-attached manner, moments before one yanks them from the moist, crumbly soil that has been carefully prepared for some food plant.  These interlopers take up valuable nutrients that should be ending up in my produce, or in the healthy early foliage and roots of the plants that will fruit more abundantly later on because of their easy access to the good stuff now.  Weeds crowd in easily wherever there’s no shade from tall plants or healthy root competition.

This early in the season in a relatively empty vegetable garden, that means, well, nearly everywhere.

Truthfully, I’m starting to feel like half of everything I do in the garden is pull weeds… and yet three days later, it’s difficult to tell where I’ve been hard at work.  And keep in mind this is with a heavy layer of mulch piled on in late winter, in some places four inches thick.  It’s enough to make a person who hates the role of plant executioner despair.  (That is, if she didn’t also equally crave any activity that gets her hands dirty after a winter of scrupulously clean nails.)

Because I’ve been doing so much weeding lately, I guess I got a little careless.  This morning was my wake-up call to pay closer attention.  I saw a knot of seedlings coming up in an area where I’d planted things in straight, neat, well-spaced furrows and assumed immediately that they were another interloper trying to cash in on the spring compost bonus.

Wrong!

The whole clump came up easily as I pulled, a sure sign that the plant in question was no weed.  I stared intently at the yellow bits caught in the tightly-woven net of rootlets, as something vague tugged at my memory.  Then I stared at the seedling shape, and it was oh-so-familiar.  I’d ripped up a bunch of cherry tomato seedlings, sprung from a rotted ‘Sungold’ tomato that fell to the ground in late autumn, by which time the taste had diminished considerably with the waning warmth, and in any event we were so sick of cherry tomatoes we weren’t bothering to pick them anymore.

Oh, and if this last part sounds terrible and ungrateful to you because your tomato crop last year was visited by misfortune, as so many in North America were, I do apologize.  I made the mistake of getting overzealous with the tomatoes last year (who am I kidding?  I do it every year) and planted 19 tomato plants for 2 people, forgetting that I was far from home and could not foist extras off on family, and could not even manage to give them away in a rural area where so many grow their own.  As an example, the teenager who mowed our lawn assured me that he would have gladly helped me out and taken our beautiful extras, if only his father had not planted 40 (!) tomato plants in their backyard.

Tomato overkill did teach me some important lessons about eating seasonally, however;  namely that when a plant is in season, you get creative lest your appetite die of boredom.  (And even then, F. broke down and asked to have a tomato-free supper one night.)  But given a break of almost six months from anything remotely tasting of true tomato (that grocery store substitute doesn’t count), I’m now longing with all my heart for a bite of summer tomato.

So I was thrilled to see these wee volunteers.  I found three patches of them in all, and carefully teased apart their tiny roots, selecting only the healthiest and strongest seedlings among the approximately 50 total.  I planted them in a large container, carefully spaced, figuring I’d let them get sized up before finding a spot for them in the ground.  I even watered them in with a bit of fish emulsion to compensate for the stress of moving on a hot day.

And then realized I’d done a useless thing.

‘Sungold’ is a hybrid.  A lovely, highly-productive, part-shade tolerant, tasty hybrid, to be sure, but a hybrid nonetheless.  That means plants grown from its seed will not “come true,” a fairy-tale phrasing on the part of the plant wizards.  Those seedlings I saved may produce something… just probably not the juicy, crack-resistant, ultra-sweet, bright orange, baby tomato darlings that go by the name of ‘Sungold.’  Maybe not even anything remotely resembling the parent plant.  Maybe not even something I’d enjoy eating before I got good and sick of cherry tomatoes in late September.

And I just can’t waste space in this tiny garden of mine on something I might not like to eat.  Even though they were such perky volunteers, and the experiment does interest me.  What wonders might they make, if allowed to live?

We’ll never know, I’m afraid.  They are destined to die, like so many others in the Victory Garden lately.  How can it be that a place which later in the season seems just crammed with life, is now the site of so many little deaths?

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I’ve decided peas are a very strange crop.  For 2010, I’d decided to try growing peas in the kitchen garden as my new-to-me vegetable, and so far I’m not impressed.  Far from being “as easy to grow as beans,” as one seed catalog assured me, the peas are turning out to be some moody little slowpokes.

When I planted them back on February 3rd, I was sure I’d be eating peas in early April, based on the “days to maturity” numbers on the backs of the seed packets.  But those numbers begin to run only after the seeds have germinated.  Which took a long time.

And I mean a looooong time.

As of today, March 19th, 44 days and counting, about 10 of the regular garden peas are up, most of those 10 mere pinpoints of green barely visible in the soil.  We planted about 40, in two neat, innoculant-sprinkled, parallel lines on either side of the homemade pea fence, and the percentages are not encouraging.

What most of the pea seedlings look like.

Because the other area slated for peas had been severely damaged by the flash flooding, I planted the snap pea seed in the two enormous containers that held our purple-podded pole beans last year.   A handful of these are up as well, and looking kind of pitiful, frankly.

None of the ones in the front half of the container had come up, and so yesterday I determined that I would use that space for some lettuce transplants.  Imagine my surprise when the first thing the trowel turned up was three pea seedlings — still underground, yes, but within a centimeter or two of breaching the soil line.

“How long does it take you guys?” I asked these pale shoots.  They had no answer as I carefully covered them and let them get back to their excruciatingly slow work.

That means there are some peas which are planning to take longer than 45 days to germinate.  Does that blow your mind?

When my sister and I planted the seed, we noted that the days to germination were abnormally high, 17 to 20 days.  This lag effectively meant that my pea-planting window would close here before I knew if the seeds had taken, since planting after February 15th meant the poor things would be struggling to produce anything just as our late spring heat and humidity ramps up to normal range.  No resowing  would be possible if they didn’t sprout.

Now I understood why people chit (or presprout) their pea seed ahead of time, and that is probably what I would do if I decide to try growing again.  Granddaddy did not seem to think it necessary — but then, he’d be growing a field of peas, not a couple of rows, and even he admitted this spring has been plagued by weird weather.

We’ve had abnormally cool spring temperatures in this part of South Carolina.   Add in the usual seasonal rains, plus a few of flash-flood-level intensity, a surfeit of cloudy days, and I have reason to suspect the poor peas’ response to the chilled, soggy soil is not what one would expect in a typical year.

So much for eating peas by April….

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Radishes peeking above the soil line. No pictures of carrots sprouting yet.

Carrots are not so easy to grow.  At least, this has been my impression.  Other people seem to disagree, and I look with incredulity upon their huge bunches of perfect, slender, orange roots.

I’ve done a lot of reading about carrots lately, preparing to plant this year’s seed, my optimistic heart running against the grain of experience once again.

“Parmex” is my seed of choice this year, because I have a feeling that F. and I would need to amend the soil for several years in succession to get those classical, long, straight carrots.  The soil we started with here, although rich where it was practically undisturbed beneath the forest canopy, is mostly clay, and carrots tend to come out of heavy clay looking like unfriendly tumors or, worse, some kind of mutant species intent upon world domination.  (I believe the technical term is “misshapen.”)

You can still eat these carrots.  But they are a pain to peel or grate, and frankly the shapes are unappealing to the appetite.

The baby ball-type carrots, such as Parmex, apparently do well in any soil — or at least, that is what the seed sellers say, and I’m hoping it’s no lie.  Still, I’m crossing my fingers.

So when I called up my grandfather yesterday, I was planning to sneak some carrot questions into our conversation.   His farm had heavy clay soil as a base, although it had been well amended over the years by the output from eight chicken houses, several pigs, a couple of cows, the ashes from a wood stove, etc.  The farm also had a huge, dedicated carrot patch — although I might have a distorted memory of its actual size due to my childhood propensity to daydreams, wandering, and distraction which, when combined, could make the chore of being sent to the carrot patch for dinner supplies last a long time.

Still, I remember it being very productive.  Unfortunately, however, the gardening gene hadn’t yet blinked on back then, so I didn’t record many of the how-to details, being more interested in watching that hawk land in the trees beyond the field, or the tiny wildflower that had sprouted in the furrow.  (Hmm… in some ways, not much has changed.)

Here is how our talk went.

ME:  Granddaddy, I remember y’all used to have a big ol’ carrot patch.

GRANDDADDY:  Yeah.  Yeah, we did.

ME:  And it used to make lots and lots of carrots.

GRANDDADDY:  Not so many.  You took some time pickin’ ‘em, though.  (Slight chuckle.)

ME:  (slightly grumpy now)  Do you have any advice to give me on how to grow carrots?  It’s only, I can’t get mine to grow right.

(Long silence.  So long I wonder if the line has gone dead.)

GRANDDADDY:  Well, you get you some carrot seed.

ME:  Check.

GRANDDADDY:  (very slowly, as if disarming a bomb) And then… you put them in the ground.

Ta-da!

When I hung up the phone, I started giggling.  Granddaddy belongs to the figure-it-out-by-doing school of gardening.  Sometimes I suspect he wonders about my intelligence; mostly he thinks I’ve read too much, thus rendering needlessly complicated what is actually basic and simple.  For him growing vegetables is just natural:  that’s what the earth does, if you put the seeds in the ground.

When I was in my mid-20s, I figured out that this is 90% of the secret to what is commonly called a green thumb:  expect miracles.  Expect the stuff to grow and do well.  Expect tasty results.  A lot of this expectation comes from experience, from years of decent results in spite of silly mistakes, from patience when things don’t happen on schedule, from acceptance when it’s not quite right, from that inevitable failure — and from trying again and getting it right.  Over time, one gets the feeling that plants do their thing beautifully without needing so very much from us, on the whole.

Not to say that Granddaddy hasn’t had his share of disappointments, whether it be at the hand of Nature or of Man.  But he continues to expect good from whatever he plants.

(Apologies to those of you who were expecting an actual how-to article.  They’re not really my style.  But here is a link to a pretty good one from our nearby university, with lots of detail, just in case that’s what you were needing when you came by.  If you live in a different area of the world, I suggest you check with your local university or extension service for growing instructions appropriate to the conditions of your bioregion.)

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I’ve been spending a lot of time with seeds the last few days, and they never cease to amaze and move me.  Brand new beings will spring from them, without any more effort on my part than burying them properly, in a spot with access to fresh air, and water, and light.

Last night, as I planted out yet more seeds for the flats that will sit on the corner of the kitchen table (the lettuces having finally all been moved outdoors), I became engrossed in their differing textures, sizes, colors, and shapes.  It’s easy to become as enraptured and fascinated as any child if you meditate on seeds for just a few minutes, really.

Of course, you could plant them and never ponder the miracle at all.  If you were in a hurry, you might never think twice.  If your community were facing starvation, your anxiety for a nourishing result could crush any chance for awareness of a mystical connection.  If you were greedy, you might see the seeds as merely a means to a profitable end — and complain about the steep increase in price since the last season’s purchase.

Clockwise from the biggest seed at the bottom of the circle, the seeds of:  lima bean, lovage, lettuce, cardinal climber, spinach, mustard, Swiss chard, marigold, globe amaranth, dill, four o’clock, eggplant, snap pea, spider flower, nasturtium, and tomato.  At the center is my living family heirloom, a half-runner bean seed.

Personally, I think my culture could use a lot more of us meditating on seeds.  Maybe then we would make more sane choices collectively for the long term, thinking not so much about the next tax period, or election, or when we get to retire, if ever, but instead about our grandchildren, or what happens a hundred years from now, or in a hundred generations.

Seeds, although many of their cycles are quite short, may help us take the long view, perceive the actual circle of life — and not a romanticized or culturally-programmed version of it.  Often, there is quite a difference between the two.

My own culture typically views seeds as a “resource” to be used and manipulated at will, and many times reduces the seeds and their fruits to products, things, or worse, numbers on a balance sheet.  It is easy to see how we got ourselves into the mess we are in now, facing a shortage of crucial energy resources, with severely depleted topsoil, contaminated water and air, beaches awash with plastic and oceans pockmarked with enormous dead zones.  This culture, which is unfortunately globally dominant now, could not manage to treat even the most obvious foundations of life with respect.

Under the influence of this kind of reductionist thinking, we cannot perceive ourselves as part of the circle, nor our proper place within it.  Such a worldview allows the human being to assume an elevated status (the mighty, entitled Exploiter), while simultaneously degrading most human beings to mere units of monetary value (widget producer or widget consumer).  It is convenient, though, if you’d like to forget any moral or ethical duty to your fellows on the way to your end goal.

From within an egoic frame of reference, it’s nearly impossible to recognize that without the work of the seeds, insignificant if one considers their size alone, we would not survive; that because we lack the ability to transform sunlight into a food source we can assimilate, we are, by any scientific definition, a kind of parasite, and unfortunately one that is currently engaged in killing its host.

Life and death, beauty and disfigurement, compassion and cruelty, wisdom and ignorance, the sublime heights and the depths of darkest despair.  It’s all there if you look deeply enough.

Maybe I see too much in a seed.

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“I think carnations are making a comeback.”

– Carrie Bradshaw (a character on Sex and the City)

Carnations are winners in my book.  Not only are they pretty and ruffly, but they last forever in the vase, and their scent is lovely, with a hint of spice at the heart that makes me lean in to sniff several times a day.

I’m afraid I did not properly follow up on my half-anniversary giveaway, and I do apologize to you for that.  With the move over to the other site ongoing, I guess I just forgot.  It’s getting a little difficult to keep up with both sites and all of the details, so if you haven’t visited The Enchanted Earth, please come on over and don’t forget to change your bookmarks, subscriptions, and links.  Soon the transition will be complete, and Victory Garden Redux will be a happy memory.

Thank you to everyone for your kind congratulations on my half-year anniversary of blogging.  Some of those comments were so nice they made me blush.  I hope to continue to meet your expectations for another half year and beyond.

Without further ado, the winners of the selection of seeds are:  Annie’s Granny, Jackie, and Carol.   I know Granny prefers lettuce (not just for herself, but I think for her adorable rabbit Cookie, too), and Jackie wants a selection of radishes to amuse her husband’s taste buds.

Carol, you’ll have to let me know your seed preference:  is it to be radishes, lettuce, or cucumbers?

I’ll be in touch with all three of you soon about addresses and details.

As for the rest of you who commented and who read this blog, you know you’re all winners to me!

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