Cush, working hard to thin out the phlox bed.

Kristian

Jean, Cush, and Betty on our last day of the season.

A sunny day in the courtyard.

Impressive grape vine.

An Inviting Pergola.

Tha Garden House

The ends of these large shrub walls were damaged in the ice storm of '08. This is before we put the replacement shrubs in.

...and after. They have some catching up to do!

A happy garden.

Kristian's patio at the old farmstead.

The trusty wheelbarrow.

I learned how to be a gardener this season, but I also, more importantly, learned how to envision a simpler life. A life where I grew what I needed. A life that valued the power of good soil over the shine of a dime. A life that supported local farmer’s markets and not supermarkets. A life that sustained itself on vegetables and grains and not industrialized meat products. I could finally see that it could be done, that I could do it, and that it was about time.

I immediately had an overwhelming urge to relocate somewhere that allowed me to have my own garden. So I did. Here I am, three months later, living with my boyfriend in a little one-room cabin in the woods of Gilsum, NH with a plot of land for me to plant whatever I wish. We sold or gave away almost everything we owned from the old second-story apartment in downtown Keene (with the exception of our books, which we just couldn’t work up the guts to part with) and don’t miss any of it a bit. We needed to simplify, and then simplify some more.

The cabin on a foggy late November day.

As a gardener, I was given an opportunity to connect with my community and with my regional environment in a way that I never before had. The realization of it all, the abrupt collision of my current way of life with the one my eyes were opening up to, was momentous. I realized with an almost panic that I had to do things differently. I could see how unimaginative I had previously been, how much I had to learn and unlearn in order to live a better existence. My idealistic morals of the past had no reason to stay idealistic when I had the capacity to make them happen. I have since made steady strides towards a more imagined life, but still have a ways to go. There is so much I’m excited to learn and experience, there is so much room for my roots to grow into this bountiful soil. I am truly grateful for this past season for helping me gain this new enthusiasm for life and I look forward to all the gardening to come.

The school semester started back up again I remained working in the gardens, but with classes going I could only spend three days working in them rather than my regular five. I decided to inquire about the greenhouse on campus to see if there was anything I could help with on my campus days, and sure enough they were looking for someone to give it a little routine care. I started working in the greenhouse the first week of the semester and found it to be an absolutely wonderful offset to being away from the gardens. It was a totally new experience too, with all the tropical plants and trees that I’d never work with in any New England garden, but that thrived in the warm and humid atmosphere of the greenhouse.

There is a plaque on the window by the entrance that says:

GREENHOUSE

Supported by Bruce and Jane Keough

In Honor of Leicester Faust.

It’s interesting because Cush mentioned that when she attended Keene State, she worked with Mr. Faust when he was the head of grounds keeping for the college. The greenhouse has a great collection of plants, including a huge variety of orchids, passionflowers, a coco tree, a lemon tree, banana trees, eucalyptus plant, cacti of all kinds, tropical ferns and many more green little gems. I loved getting out of class and going up to that steamy little paradise for the rest of the day to water the plants, clean up any dead leaves, re-pot things, and tromp around with my flip flops on and my pant-legs rolled up while it was 40 degrees outside. I was also responsible for caring for the plants along the hallways in the science center. It was always funny when someone walked by as I stood there draining a 3 gallon bottle of water into the giant pots and said something like “I always wondered how those things stayed alive.” It’s a tricky bit of work hauling around a push cart with water enough for all of those plants and trees, but I enjoyed it.

The greenhouse is primarily cared for by Katie Fetherston of the Biology Department, who does an amazing job keeping everything green and shiny and happy.
The Keene State web page for the greenhouse is http://academics.keene.edu/bio/Greenhouse.htm.

AND!
The greenhouse also has a very special amorphophallus konjac! For great photos see: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8561740@N08/3731475522/in/set-72157621527809321)

It’s true that if you aren’t blissfully happy in the garden, you are usually (as Jamaica Kincaid so nicely puts it) “terribly vexed”. There always seems to be something that’s just not working quite to your liking. Or, some flower or plant that’s just decided to give up and fall dead without any known or reasonable explanation. It’s funny how distraught you can get over something so out of your control. I read somewhere that humans cultivate gardens in order to gain some semblance of control over nature, to exert our force onto the great unknown. I suppose this may be true, because we get all worked up when a piece of our “controlled nature” behaves other than we’d like (i.e., naturally out-of-control) and we dare to be upset with the plant for not conforming to our personal wishes. I dare to wonder if gardening is really a beneficial act. Maybe we should just let everything be and learn to appreciate the wild beauty of it all, learn to love the weeds as much as the flowers? Maybe we should go back to seeking and gathering rather than cultivating our food? Perhaps then we would learn to be comfortable with the natural order or chaos of things. Perhaps…

Naturally, I learned a lot about garden pests this season. Every day we encountered some sort of aphid or mealy bug or beetle eating away and sucking the nutrients out of our precious flowers. And the deer and slugs munching away at the hosta leaves until only little stubs were left. It’s hard to stay calm and remember that all those buggers need to eat and don’t know that they are wrecking your diligently kept garden as they fill their bellies. However, I am a firm believer that harmful pesticides won’t ever solve a problem without creating an even bigger, more serious one. So, it is useful to learn some practical, safe ways to deter garden pests.

Cush in the garden.

Here are a few suggestions:

For aphids: Mix up a spray bottle of soapy water and give the plant a good bath
Find some lady bugs and place them on the plant (they eat the aphids right up!)

For slugs: Slug-magic (non-harmful to children or animals)

For mealy bugs: Spray leaves with cedar oil
Place banana peels near the plant so they will be enticed by the sweet snack
Pour your old coffee grinds around the base of the plant

For deer: Spray predator urine around the garden (cougar or fox scents)
Place a sculpture or cutout of a fox inside the garden
Tie pieces of soap to varying spots on your plants

For gophers: Sprinkle cayenne pepper around the base of your plants
Put some pinwheels around to scare them away

For beetles: When you see them, pull them off and place them in a jar of water

* And use Have-A-Heart traps if nothing else is working! If you don’t want to buy one, put an add up on Craigslist requesting to borrow someones for a while until you catch your culprit!

Cush scoping out the situation.

The borers eat their way right through the center of the branches.

A borer beetle in the rhododendron!

You have to cut into the branch, following the hole made by the borer, until you find it nestled in the wood.

But my efforts were misguided and blind to the wonders of the early spring garden. I was reckless, careless, and impatient. First of all, you have to really take the time to work those roots out of the soil, you can’t just rip off the little green tops and think you’ve actually done anything (they have a great little tool to help with this, called a “weeder,” imagine!). Secondly, not everything that’s little and green is a weed. Cush asked me to come over to the end of the garden that she was working on to point out a particular little seedling that I must take care to look out for, because it would soon turn into a tall, bright-orange oriental poppy. I stared befuddled at the little two-leafed, half-inch-tall sprout and wondered how the hell she could tell that that one, among all the rest of the identical green things, was going to end up a poppy and not a weed. She carefully pointed out the leaf structure to me– the way the edges were a little more jagged than the others and the subtle feeling of fuzziness to the touch. I was amazed. A whole new world of details opened up to me. I decided right then that I didn’t want to use my gloves unless working with thorns. I wanted to feel everything, see everything, smell everything. I had so much to learn.

Now, I can identify poppy seedlings pretty quickly and it seems silly to think that I once could not. But on that spring day I probably yanked about 20 of them out of their precious places in the soil.
After then, I got better at noticing poppies and other flower seedlings, and I got better at weeding. A lot better, because we did a lot of it.

Boy oh boy, I never had any idea how much you could weed and weed and then still need to weed some more. My god, those things are persistent. You’d spend an eight hour day clearing out a giant patch of tangled green so that you could finally see the mulchy brown underneath and then come back two weeks later to the very same tangled mess that you seemingly already took care of. As a gardener, it’s a never ending process. There’s always some sneaky little thing twisting up around the stalk of a flower or peaking through the leaves of a bush or running along the ground to form a carpet of perfect, tactful, unrelenting domination over your garden. I have nightmares about vetch and Bishop’s weed. Terrible things. If you even leave a trace of one of their little white roots in the ground when yanking them out of the soil, they will come back full force with a great “ HAH!” just to spite you.

But then there is the other side to the whole ordeal. Sometimes those weeds are awful, but sometimes I find reason to think they aren’t so bad, times when they are actually pleasing to the eye. Especially things like clover, or violets (that pop up everywhere and will take over if you don’t control them) are just so pretty that I always bite my lip when pulling one up for the sake of gardening. Even, I dare say, vetch gets a nice delicate purple flower when in bloom and variegated bishop’s weed looks pretty nice in a big bunch (don’t tell anyone I said so, though). Sometimes, over the course of the season, I would come across a really cool plant with neat little flowers and question Cush as to what it was, to which she would examine it, pronounce it a weed, and say “pull it” with a nonchalant wave of condemnation. I brought a few home and potted them,feeling guilty that some book someplace had deemed such a pretty little thing a weed and thus it was so hastily pulled out and discarded. It’s funny how pretty things become ugly when they show up in places we didn’t ask them to, or how their amazing means of survival becomes a specific point of annoyance to us since we’d rather they survived elsewhere if not at all.
I think I became a plant scavenger. Sometimes I would take the pretty weeds, but always the plants or flowers that customers didn’t want anymore. It gives me a chance to practice growing all kinds of things, to see what I can do to cheer them up and make them flourish, to experiment with potting up different soil mixtures and adding fertilizers. It’s fun and it’s free when you take the rejects! I’ve even had some do so well that I’ve given them away to friends as small gifts and they were happily received.

A Re-enchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature
James William Gibson

Dessert Solitaire
Edward Abbey

The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals
Ed. Odell Shepard

Turtle Island
Gary Snider

The Garden Earth
Bruce Allsopp

The Unsettling of America
Wendell Berry

My Garden Book
Jamaica Kincaid

Silent Spring
Rachel Carson

Second Nature
Michael Pollan

A Place of My Own
Michael Pollan

Thoreau’s Garden: Native Plants for the American landscape
Peter Loewer

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer

Uncle John’s Certified Organic Bathroom Reader: An Entertaining Look at the Green Movement
The Bathroom Reader Institute

It was really fun in May and June when we would go to Sarah’s Windsock gardens every morning and fill up the back of Cush’s truck and my Subaru with flats and six packs of beautiful, colorful annuals that we’d be putting in the ground that day.

Sarah is a very nice woman with an exceptional green thumb. She grows her flowers from seeds, which she carefully picks out during the winter months and begins the sprouting process in her greenhouses across from the airport in Swanzey. She has wonderfully unique varieties and they are all healthy as can be, with strong little roots that grow up into amazing gardens. Every color of the rainbow. I loved walking through her greenhouses in the mornings with a cup of tea as her and Cush went through the lists of things they needed to gather for the day. With the morning sun washing over the sides of the greenhouse and setting all the colors aglow as steam from the early-morning watering started to evaporate into the promise of another summer day. I couldn’t help but be excited about all the different little plants around me, touching them all to look right into the flower heads and revel in their simultaneously simple yet intricate beauty. It was especially cool when Kristian would come in and swoop through the place like a wizard picking up ‘this’ and ‘that’ and ‘a few of those’ and somehow arranging an awesome grouping of style and color that looked as if it took weeks to plan, throwing it in the back of his truck and driving off with a smile and a tip of his big white cowboy hat.

Sarah’s is open to the public and I recommend you go take a look if you’d like some special annuals in your garden that you just won’t find in a regular nursery. Even just walking through to enjoy the vibrant colors is an experience worthwhile.

I learned a lot about the character of rain this summer. How absolutely refreshing it is when you don’t fight it. At first I tried to stay dry. I mean I really tried. I was obsessed. I’d have a baseball cap on, and then the plastic rain hood cinched up tight around that. The sleeves of my raincoat Velcroed like air-tight seals around my yellow plastic gloves. But it never worked, I’d end up cursing under my breath as water somehow snuck into the finger nooks of my gloves, pruning up my skin like an evil little leech. My hood would slowly shift off of my head and soon enough I’d feel droplets sliding down the back of my neck. If I turned too quickly the water, so innocently collected on the brim of my hat, would splash menacingly right into my ear. Ugh! Then, there was the incessant pattering of glopping-wet rain drops on that darn plastic hood when it was all up and around my head, blaring out anything else I might have otherwise noticed… especially voices. Cush and I would often attempt to hold a conversation on those rainy days, but they eventually would dwindle out because the majority of our words always ended up being “what?”. Even if I was doing a decent job of staying somewhat dry, I would always, without fail, forget that I had my muddy, wet, grimy gloves on my hands as I went up to wipe a trickle of wet off my my brow, smearing everything from the garden onto my face in an instant. Truly, a total catastrophe.

I finally decided it wasn’t worth it. I was getting wet and I was annoyed the whole time. So, I just gave in. I peeled my hood back, took my hat off and let the rain wash over my head and right down my face in a fresh, invigorating cascade. I tore off those yellow gloves in a suction-frenzy of skin and wet plastic and dove my bare hands into the cool, glorious soil. It was wonderful. I felt an instant release of so much built up frustration, a new spark of appreciation for the element, an utter child-like enjoyment. I remembered all of those times I would willingly run outside to dance in the rain and splash in the puddles. Suddenly I was having fun again. It was a brilliant realization.

From then on, I just got wet. I allowed myself to accept and appreciate the rain on my head. And I generally enjoyed myself a whole lot more. Unless, of course, it was cold and raining, which is just not a combination that appeals to the senses much, but I won’t get into that. I’ve re-learned to not just love the sound of rain, and the look of rain, but the feel of rain,and the total immersion into the weather of the day.