Wrong turns, learning curves and a Mid-west Spring.

 Last year, well if we’re being precise, sometime in the middle of the year before that, I started this blog as a way to document my adventures in gardening. A journal of my successes and my failures, which would hopefully focus more on the successful part of that equation rather than the portion dealing with failure. 

Wishful thinking and a tendency towards massively overly estimating my level of creative energy being a weakness of mine, I wrote one additional blog post and then no more. Primarily, if I’m honest because there was, in reality, precious few successes to be had. It's fair to say that last year was a season of gardening defined far more by what was not achieved as by what was.

As I mentioned, I am the sort of person who can get easily carried away with my creative imagination one day only to find that the practical reality of the physical universe can bring me crashing back to earth the next, so gardening has been an exercise in learning functional perseverance.

If you read enough texts on gardening, particularly those written by British gardening writers as I do, you will often read that gardening is a journey and a process that is never truly completed. This is a wonderful observation to make, but it can often seem like a truism, something to encourage oneself with when things don’t go the way we think that they should.

 There will be just as many wrong turns and pitfalls, empty harvests and forgotten flowers as there are moments of pure horticultural joy and delight, bountiful produce and overflowing bouquets of exquisite blooms along the way. We all claim to know this but secretly we’re all hoping that there are no wrong turns and pitfalls and that everything that we plant will immediately take root or germinate into deliriously wonderful levels of flower and bloom.

It's like all of life, of course, most humans know that we’re supposed to learn just as many things about ourselves in life’s low points as we do in the high ones. Indeed, some would say we will gain so much more knowledge about ourselves in the fallow times as we do in the days when everything seems hunky dory. 

We just don’t want this to be true, we’re not really in this life for any amount of suffering, heck, never mind suffering we’re not in this life for minor inconvenience. This is a world where a hundred years ago many of our ancestors were dealing with genuine hunger and poverty and we lose our composure over a ten-minute interruption of our homes' WI-FI signal.

We children of the digital age, we love to be in control of everything around us, to be able to run our entire lives from the simple double click of a computer mouse or the electro-magnetic response of our smart-phone’s touchscreen. Gardening, it appears, doesn’t care about our delusions of control, of being masters of our own destiny. Gardening will give you the kick in the backside to remind you that most of that feeling of control is just an illusion.

Gardening removes the years of separation between my level of technology and my late grandfather’s so that I have to understand the truth that he and his generation knew, and that I’m only just learning that no outcome is guaranteed and you just have to do the best you can. It either succeeds or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and resolve to find a better way next time.

The journey of gardening is the point, it seems, not really the destination, the process not the produce, the growing not the harvesting. At least mostly, it is true that no one is every going to try and grow something if they know for certain that it won’t succeed. I do want a bountiful harvest out of my vegetable plot, I long for abundant blooms from my flower beds. I just have to learn to accept the speed bumps along the way.

In failing I’ve learned, hopefully, how not to fail this year. I know now, for instance, that no matter how heat resistant a variety of pea is claimed to be, I still have to get it into the soil as soon as the soil is warm enough for reliable germination. Giving it in the best start it can and trying to improve my natural inadequacy in the whole area of time management.

I was excited to try potatoes, last year, ordering a variety called Baltic Rose from the Burpee seed catalogue and I did get a harvest (unlike my peas, which never gained much height and withered and died around the same time they produced pods.). It was a relatively tiny one though.

 I’d “chitted” my potatoes (leaving them in a sunny space for their sprouts to grow before planting them.) by leaving them in our sunroom, but while the seed tubers liked the sunlight and started to grow sprouts, they didn’t like the variable temperature so some dried up and became useless before I could even plant them. Too compound my issues I then planted them out too late to develop well enough for a really good harvest.

Planting things out too late is an easy mistake to make here in the American Mid-West due to the extreme and slightly bi-polar nature of the climate. In the summer the weather can feel as hot and humid as a Louisiana bayou and in winter it can take on the characteristics of a windswept plain in sub-zero Siberia. Spring, that time of year relied on by temperature gardeners the world over as the delicate season of new beginnings and gradual awakenings to the prospect of the fresh horticultural calendar becomes in the Mid-West, more of a short transitional zone between winter and summer.

 A climatic afterthought, a blink of the eye. Here, trees that take a couple of months to come into full leaf back home in good old Blighty, do the whole process in a couple of weeks covering every vehicle in masses of tree pollen and exponentially increasing the need for a good antihistamine in your back pocket.

This was my first year starting vegetable seeds outdoors and I’ve discovered it can be remarkably easy to miss the relatively short window for good germination and growth to occur. I may have had the parameters for my vegetable plot worked out in December but my relative inexperience in wire fencing and fence posts meant that it was the middle of April before my father-in-law and I fenced off the plot. It was still later when my wife, who is definitely the woodworker in my family, helped to complete my masterplan by making some raised beds for the same area. 

So, that meant that my carrots, my peas, my potatoes, my radishes and pretty much every other seed planted outside was planted out a month too late. This is not a mistake I will be making again, not least because I have the plot already fenced off and the raised beds are already completed. Green beans were my saving grace, producing an ample harvest which I picked in the evenings while the main summer citizens of the Mid-West, mosquitoes, added their unique encouragement to my efforts. 

The truth is though, when it came to things that didn’t involve an obvious harvest like the construction of new garden paths, fences and flowerbeds, we were quite successful last year. We constructed two new flowerbeds either side of the wattle fence by our patio. We edged them with logs that came from our own garden and then constructed a couple of bark covered pathways to prevent us slipping about in the mud after a thunderstorm. 

Perennials from previous years also did surprisingly well, now I come to think of it. Coneflowers flourished while perennial Geraniums provided increasing ground cover around our patio flowerbeds. I added some new Salvias into one of my front flower beds which seemed to do okay and my Rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susan) romped away in a riot of green and yellow as it always does. Delphiniums returned and did better than they ever have for me including one that I thought had truly died and gone for good. 

The Dogwood that I planted three years ago finally seems to have established itself and now stands guards over our snow covered hollow, its bare scarlet stems contrasting against the bright white of the surrounding landscape. A promise in these frigid months or new growth to come and a reminder that I probably didn’t do as badly as I thought I did in my gardening year. This has just been the latest step on the journey, the latest climb on the learning curve and as my grandfather and all the generations of cottage gardeners that make up the history of the island that I hail from knew, this year is always a brand-new year to try again.

My grandpa grew onions, at that least I seem to remember him bringing my mother some at times, so maybe this year, I will grow onions and maybe this is the year my zinnias finally grow but that’s for another time. So, until I write one of these again. I will bid you goodbye and adieu.