I can’t remember the first time I heard the expression, “putting in the garden,” but it was a very long time ago. “I’m going to put in the garden this weekend.” “It’s almost time to put in the garden.” Once I got some experience as a gardener, that expression seemed weird. Yeah, I would, “put in a garden,” but that usually consisted of building another bed, cultivating a new area, or some similar activity that would significantly increase how much watering and weeding I had to do (Note to self: what seems like a great idea in March is usually a pain in the posterior by August).
What people usually meant by, “putting in the garden,” was, “planting the vegetable garden.” The entire thing. Usually in a weekend. Once I moved from Portland to Southern California, I stopped hearing this expression, since gardening is truly a year-round activity in SoCal (except when the outdoor temperature is approximately 1582 degrees, and you will spontaneously combust if you open your front door--but even then one gardens in the evening, once the porch cools off enough to not melt one’s flip-flops to the soles of one’s feet). But now that I live on Hoth in Flagstaff, I once again hear people talk about, “putting in the garden.” And now I understand why. I planted a bunch of stuff in March (first warm spell = delusional gardener), only to watch it freeze/rot/get buried in snow. I planted some more stuff a couple of weeks ago. Some of it froze. My poor potatoes--planted during the aforementioned March warm spell--have frozen twice. Yet they are sprouting once again, brave little tubers that they are. And believe it or not, we haven’t quite reached our average last frost date, which is June 15. I really need a giant hoop house to cover my entire yard.
Based on what everyone tells me, Memorial Day weekend is the official time in Flagstaff to, “put in the garden,” so that’s what I’ve been doing. Last year we started building a potager (note to self: what seems like a good idea in October will probably seem absurd the following summer, when the grasshoppers are eating everything and I’m watering 219 times a day). It’s not finished yet (obvious from the pic at the beginning of this post), and it doesn’t look like much, because it’s mostly filled with newly-planted seeds and newly-transplanted seedlings.
Photo 1: The bed on the left is seeded with winter squash, bush beans, sunflowers, and nasturtiums. The bed on the right contains peas (they’re the tiny green things at the base of the metal yard art covering the ugly satellite dish pole in the corner) and fennel transplants plus sunflowers, zucchini, and marigolds. The half-built bed along the chain-link fence has two hills of winter squash. Why wait for a bed to be finished to plant in it?
Photo 2: The bed on the left has purple cabbage, cilantro, and a lone fennel plant that wintered over, plus seeds for radishes, beets, more cilantro, and basil. The righthand bed contains my poor frost-nipped potatoes, seeds for bush beans and zinnias, and a lone calendula seedling, the only one of my winter-sown calendulas to survive the first grasshopper invasion of the year. The bed by the fence contains lettuce, chard, a currant bush, onions, blackberries, a boysenberry, and seeds for zinnias, cucumbers, milkweed, and basil. Oh, and I think I threw in some garlic too.
The delusion image in my mind is much prettier than the reality shown above. Imagine those beds overflowing with grasshoppers beans, squash, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, parsley, dill, basil, marigolds, sunflowers, chard, lettuce, parsnips, onions, garlic, blackberries, zinnias, and calendula. Hopefully some of that will actually happen, and I can post pictures here so there is evidence that it’s actually possible to grow stuff in this bizarre land of late frosts, grasshoppers, howling wind, grasshoppers, lousy soil, and grasshoppers. In the meantime, I will bask in the warm glow of sunburn accomplishment and enjoy my fantasies.
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