Garden Wars

Love Lies Bleeding and squash; Charley Freiberg photo 2016

The seed orders have arrived, the over-wintered parsnips pulled and relished, Bear has come to snack on the dregs of winter birdseed, tree frogs and peepers are chirping away, and I’ve scheduled the last two weeks in May to plant my garden - so expect those two weeks to be continuous pummeling rain with nor’-easter-worthy winds, broken up by rare milky-sunshine moments filled with clouds of blackflies. You may count on it, so plan accordingly.

You might think that if I need two weeks to plant my garden, it must be gigantic. It’s not, but it’s just a little too big for someone who works long hours to take care of well. No, I need two weeks because the weather gods think it’s funny to make the time I chisel out of a busy schedule insufficient unto the task, so they always make certain that the best I can do is plant a couple of soggy rows of peas and get the onion sets into the ground; the rest always has to wait for odd free moments, later.

Given the gods and the unending struggle to keep things weeded, watered, de-bugged and picked, it’s fair to wonder why I put myself through this annual exercise in stress. One summer some truly monstrous grass took over the entire garden - growing merrily through newspaper-and-straw mulch that was more than a foot deep. That fall, I covered everything with a deep layer of newspaper, and next spring, the invading grass was twice as thick. I gave up. I fed most the garden seeds to the birds, threw a few into the compost, turned my back, and made do for 10 years with a couple of tomato plants and some basil in big pots on the back wart. Most years the chipmunks ate the heart out of the tomatoes before I could pick them, and the basil didn’t get watered enough and dried out long before its time.

But my New Englander’s heart couldn’t stand it, and eventually the three pots grew to 15, plus a couple of potato bags, and before I knew it, two raised beds over deep bases of cardboard and newspaper were erected near the south wall of the house. Those two beds morphed into the slow resurrection of most the beds in the original garden. Even another 10 years later, the evil grass and I wage continual war for dominance, and the huge pile of old newspapers and accumulated flattened cardboard boxes that grows dining-table high over the winter is the first thing to hit the ground as soon as the snow melts – if I’m speedy, before the grass has a chance to get a new root-hold.

I plant a garden because my parents had a garden, because Gramp and Nan had a garden, because great-grandpa and grandma had a garden, because great-great grandpa had a garden…and from the time we were old enough to pull weeds, Brother and I were expected to help out in Dad’s and Gramp’s gardens. After supper, when the gardens were located in a neighbor’s field, we’d pile into the back of Gramp’s pickup truck (back in the day this was common, seatbelts hadn’t been invented, and Mom would hang out the window shouting at us to sit down and hold on, darn it!) for the short ride up the hill. Weeding stint over, we’d watch the neighbor’s tamed chipmunk scramble all over him collecting the peanuts he’d hidden in his pants and shirt pockets, then pick wild strawberries and blueberries in the field until the parent-generation had finished the more delicate gardening tasks. Most people had gardens back in the dark ages and you couldn’t grow up without learning to plant and harvest, then preserve the results.

One summer I got home from college to discover my father’s spring-time spine operation had left him unable to plant the garden, which by then had migrated to our side yard. That May, Dad sat on the screened-in porch drinking lemonade and singing Spirituals while I labored below in the clouds of blackflies, planting beans. He discovered I’d learned some words at college he was surprised to hear I knew how to apply.

I can’t help gardening, it’s in the blood, and as soon as I lived in my first post-college apartment with a little back-yard space, I grubbed out a small garden to plant stuff – edible stuff mostly, but always some poppies and calendula and nasturtiums and cosmos and herbs that reseed. In recent years, I’ve added giant sunflowers and gladiolas and Love-Lies-Bleeding for the exotic savor. That decade of not gardening was sweet; but eventually my blood won out.

Gladiolas and very tall sunflowers; Charley Freiberg photo, 2016

When the Husband and I built the house we’ve lived in for so long now, we put it in the middle of an old cow pasture. Immediately I thought, wow, flat space that doesn’t need clearing – I’ll have a great garden! Turns out that when cows spend decades stomping around a field, they turn the topsoil into hard-pan, which neither rototiller nor tractor could cut through. We built raised beds, we hauled in topsoil and manure, we made compost as fast as we could, and between the rows, I mulched heavily so the earthworms would slowly build good garden soil. Which they did – even after the wicked grass took over. 

In today’s garden, I have decades-old chive plants, a rhubarb plant that Dad dug up from next to an old abandoned farmhouse he found in the woods, planted in his garden, then 30 years later split to plant half of in my garden – that plant is likely close to 100 years old. I also plant edibles my lineage never dreamed of: fava and scarlet runner beans, parsley root, purple-podded peas, giant sunflowers, a peach tree…

I also still have that evil grass. And you know who’s gonna win that battle, doncha?

Originally published in the Concord Monitor as “Garden battle lines and the seeds of change,” May 13, 2017.