Oh No! Snow!

March 25: Snow Day!

Out my window, in my garden, on my special gardening day—a day designated with a leave of absence for gardening—the snow is piling up, bending the daffodils, mounding up over the pots of pansies, piling up on my purple chair. Today, my contractors from the well-named Love and Carrots organic garden consulting company are scheduled to arrive with a pile of stone and several feet of boards to build my new raised beds. Today, I cleared my schedule at work. Today, I've prepared my garden. Everything is at the ready. But huge blobs of spring snow are coming down; and it looks like two and a half inches has already descended.

And the rocks arrive.

And just as my classic guilt sets in, the rocks arrive. And I am freed of that nagging worry that I should be sitting at my desk, fielding inquiry, and adding commas. The Putterer

Saying Goodbye to My Journal

I filled out the last pages of my garden journal last weekend. I felt the end with a sense of mixed pride and panic. This was a free-form flow of the crazy mess that lives inside my head. The journal was heavy stock paper, the pens I used were colorful and bright. The handwriting I chose was wildly out of control or tightly purposeful. And the thoughts that arrived on the page varied from shopping lists to trite poems, or quiet observations of rain fall, bird chatter and the breezes I felt while sitting in my purple chair.

In this book, I've recorded my growth from a wannabe gardener to the genuine thing. In this book, I left remnants of half thoughts that I might flesh out into to posts in my Putter blog. In this book, I compensated for my lack of drawing skills with flowering handwriting flourishes, alternating with pink and green and purple pens. In this book, I wrote down page numbers, like bread crumbs, to find my way back to books or catalogs or journals that I've read. And now it's done.

So I've bought a new journal and this morning, I baptized it with a few entries, but it isn't quite my friend yet. The paper isn't as thick and my heavy ink pens bleed through. It's a moleskin—what the cool kids use—and it's the right size for tucking into my purse or tool bag and it's got a nice band and some page marking ribbons.

And it's got some stickers. Not free form. A little more organized. I don't know. I hope it works. The Putterer

Graysnotes in My Hair, Seeds for Sunny Summer

What harvest will 2013 reap?

Puttering around this morning in my busy brain. My feet are freezing despite both the furnace and the flames in the fireplace. So we are thinking gardens again. But the days coming up this week are finally cold. No hard freeze this year in my garden. There's a white morning frost occasionally, but the day brings warmth and sun. There's a rose bush that still has blossoms on it, and a cone flower that is up with a bud suspended in time, but erect and green with promise.

So I'm picking out seeds and thinking about testing last year's leftovers by wrapping them in a warm, wet paper towel to see if they are "viable." I've renewed my permit for Plot #24 at the Community Garden. And I'm at the ready to place my order for some new raised beds for the backyard. But I'm behind on my fall cleanup. My tennis elbow injury kept me from racking the leaves and composting them into their winter canisters. Before long the early crocuses will be up and I won't see them hidden under heavy leaf cover.

That could be alright. The fence keeps people from seeing. No one can enter until I open the gate. Garden metaphors. They seem a little silly and trivial these days.

I noticed an abundance of gray in my hair this week. I asked Jim what I should do. He said, and you have to love a guy like this, "If you want to fix it, go do it well and expensively." But I'm kind of fascinated by the way they seem to be coating my head, not unlike the morning's white frost in the garden. They aren't really gray, they are white. And light colored. I don't know if I want to fix them. I might like them actually.

I wanted to do a post about my 2012 garden and the lessons it had taught me. But it was just one lesson this year, not worth a full post. The garden taught me that I don't have to do much sometimes to reap the harvest. For some reason when I couldn't get there to Plot #24 to water or weed, the garden did okay. The plants had been planted well in a lovely soil that retained moisture. The weeds that came up around the edges didn't take over and were easily pulled when I could come. The food ripened and was ready for me when I got there. The lesson is clear. Do the careful work and the rewards will come. And that's where I am right now.

Dad died on January 1 at 5:05 in the morning. (That's when the gray started coming in.) I think about him almost every day now. I feel like he is better and well, and he's not angry or frustrated anymore. I'm sadder for the time he was alive and unhappy than I am for the time now where he is gone from us. I hope in a rebirth, or a heaven, or an ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust kind of way, he finds lessons in this life's journey for his next path. I hope he visits me here on Earth and finds comfort in my contentedness.

I don't have my garden ready, but I am ready for 2013.

All the Things You Wish You Could Say

Ray Py and me

My father Ray Py is in a hospice bed likely taking his last breaths on this earth. He isn't able to talk anymore. I spoke to him on the phone yesterday. He said something unintelligible and all I could muster in return was an incomplete 'I Love You, Dad." That's all. Then I read through the emails of people saying their farewells. My sister's last note. "He's comfortable. . . Unresponsive."

And I tried to sleep, but my chest heaved. I think words don't convey any meaning to what was in my chest, where my heart lives. The epicenter. The force pumping life's blood, where emotion resides—where fear and anxiety and anger and frustration and hope and joy pound out the beat of our lives.

Sleep was calling me, but I couldn't release myself to it. It didn't seem right to sleep last night. Instead, I thought about Jesse Jackson's eulogy for Jackie Robinson—we all have a birth date and then a dash. And then we all eventually have a death date. "But on that dash is where we live," he said. "And for everyone there is a dash of possibility, to chose the high road, or the low road; to make things better or to make things worse." And as I tried to think about the dash of my father's life, that ache in my chest grew more demanding. On my father's dash, there are so many stains and blots and discordant dots. So many transgressions and mistakes. So many fits and contretemps. Something worse than sadness and grief pulled at my chest cavity.

I'm glad to know that I loved him. I sometimes worried that I didn't. I sometimes thought about his death and imagined that it would pass without too much sadness. But I couldn't have been more wrong. The complexity of my relationship with my dad makes his passing so much more wrenching than I could have ever imagined.

When my mother died, there was a deep well of sadness. So much sadness, real, genuine, honest, heartfelt, a tragic loss. Real grief. I went through the classic stages and finally arrived at a place where I imagined that she rested with me in my heart, living life alongside me, whispering helpful hints to me as I made my way through each day. She was there with me for the ride. She was me. That is the completeness of a healthy grieving process. Perhaps it was her grief then last night, too, that filled my chest to the point of bursting. I think she must be there pounding out her sadness, inside the wall of my ventricle cavities.

The space my dad occupied in this world, I now realize, was massive. He was my childhood hero. He was a child himself, mischievously devising games to play, adventures to run off to, discoveries to make. He joined us in secrets behind my mother's back, breaking the rules in a way that endeared him to us forever. We built forts in the living room. We drank coke for breakfast. And stole sugar cubes. We had picnics in front of the TV. We got in the car and drove off to find adventure. My favorite was to go to Dulles and ride back and forth on the buses out to see the airplanes. "Let's go exploring," he would say. And the jokes and one-liners. The quips. The giggles and the belly laughs.

Forever in childhood is a very long time. But it doesn't last forever, and when we tried to grow up, we lost our hold on all that fun. He must have looked at our teenage bodies, and saw the eventual separation that would tear us from him. Divisions grew. When I made him mad, it was a cruel anger that was so bitter, so heartbreaking. And that bitterness is in my heart, making my heart ache so much today.

There is much on my Dad's dash that I don't understand and now, I won't know. I think he would say he had a lot of joy in his life. I think he did find happiness. I know how proud he was of us. I know he wanted to be more to us. And maybe he just couldn't figure how to do that. I know many people who will tell me how much they loved him. And I am very happy to know that.

But nothing hurts more than a cruel comment from your father. A word. A phrase. A shout. They well up in your heart and there is no way to cope. So you steal yourself. You block yourself. You build up walls. And you can't tear them down. Then when you have just one last moment to say goodbye. And you try to think of all the things you wish you could say, nothing comes out, and you can't say anything, except, I love you.

I guess that is all there is. Really. Thankfully.  The Putterer

The Plot is Doing Its Own Thing

From my plot, The Wonderful, Happy #24

Now here's a little secret about gardening that nobody knows. It's not that much work!

Everybody thinks that there is a lot of labor involved in having a garden. Well, guess what! Not so much.

Plot # 24 at the Fenton Street Community garden is doing all the work. I show up occasionally in the morning when temperatures are expected to climb and I give it some water. That's it all it ever asks of me.

Well, okay. One day, after the June 29 derecho storm, I had to help the tomato plants find the vertical path again. They were tilting dangerously over and shading my neighbor's plot. So I pounded extra stakes into the ground and jerry-rigged them with twine until the plants were approximately back in place. And I thinned out the yellow leaves at the bottom of the plants, but my Better Boy, my Mortgage Lifters and my Romas were all standing tall again. The okra, meanwhile, were so strong, that not even a 60 mile per hour wind gust could budge those babies. They are producing so quickly that sometimes I think they grow a fruit while I'm standing there.

The soil in the plot is rich and well-dug. Last fall, I grew clover for a few weeks and then double dug trenches from the front of the plot to the back. I layered compost over it and then this spring I turned still more compost into the soil. So now when I accidentally step on the soil, my foot sinks an inch. Last summer,  after I first got the plot, putting a stake in the soil was nearly impossible, the ground was so compacted. This year, it yields to just a few simple strokes of my hammer.

And the rain we've had! Almost every three days, either a gentle downpour, like the one we had this morning, or a monsoon, like we had the other night. So that the ground is always moist around the roots of my plants. We've had rainfall all through June and now into July consistently. At the expense, of course, of the Midwest, which is disastrously dry this summer.  We'll take it here, though.

Now on to planning my fall garden. It's time to put in more seeds. What's next? The Putterer

Garden Blooms for June 10, 2012

Kathy Jentz, Publishing Gardener, Plot 16

Kathy Jentz, Plot 16, Fenton Street Garden. Kathy’s work is featured in numerous area publications including the Washington Examiner newspaper, Pathways Magazine, and Washington Women magazine. In addition, she appears on regular gardening guest spots on Channel 9, Channel
4, and WAMU radio.

I've known Kathy for quite awhile. She is my gardening guru, living the enviable life of producing both a magazine and several gardens. Kathy is editor and publisher of Washington Gardener magazine and a life-long gardener. She says that growing plants should be stress-free and enjoyable. Her philosophy is "inspiration over perspiration."

When we were assigned plots in the garden, I was delighted to learn that Kathy would be gardening just down the row from me in her Plot 16. She's always got a good tip handy; knows most everything there is to know and if she doesn't, she'll figure it out for you. Having Kathy around the Community Garden has also proved useful because she's a natural-born leader. When there's a project at hand, she's got the chops for it. With a quick command, we're all happily lined up and executing the orders. And as a result, we've got two gorgeous communal herb and wild flower patches growing in what once a messy mix of angry, ugly weeds. Without further ado, here's Kathy: 

Kathy lays in the brick path for our herb and wildflower corne

As a gardener, what do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Mid-December thru February - HATE HATE HATE the Mid-Atlantic Winter!

Other than the state of Maryland, where would you most like to live?

New Orleans

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Time enough to read everything in my stacks, cool drink in hand, surrounded by my cats and bunches of cut flowers

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Procrastinating


Who are your favorite environmental or botanical heroes?

Ben Franklin, he is not thought that way, but if you really read his stuff, he was a great protector of the Earth


Who are your favorite gardeners in history?

The originals: Adam and Eve


Who are your favorite heroes or heroines of fiction?

Indiana Jones

Your favorite painter?

Dali

Your favorite musician?

Prince

Your favorite tool?

Cobrahead


The quality you most admire in a gardener?

Patience

Your favorite virtue?

Calm

Your favorite occupation?

I'm not sure if this means job or way to spend my time?


Who would you have liked to be?

is this a historic or fictional or not specific person but a job category?

Your most marked characteristic?

Bossiness

What do you most value in your garden?

Anything that takes care of itself and thrives


What is your principle gardening defect?

Hate the thought of weeding - but once I get going, it is not too bad

What is your dream of happiness?

See: What is your idea of earthly happiness?