Gardening: Happy Hobby or Prairie Penance?

-->

The Great Garden Makeover of 2013

Gardening is NOT for sissies. In my usual winter-is-finally-over delirium, I forgot that, so I’m enjoying a painful reminder today.

We’re always late getting our veggie garden in. The semester doesn’t really end until the middle of May, and before that, I can forget any semblance of a life beyond grading rubrics, panicky students, deadlines and shrapnel cleanup. Then I need about a week to sit drooling in a chair, watching reruns of Alaska: The Last Frontier, and recovering. And that was BEFORE the stroke, so multiply by infinity…

This year, my usual post-semester [s]lackadaisicalness was also compounded by freaky weather. We had a mild but very late winter, with snows into late April. This was followed by near-constant rain. It’s tough to put a garden in when the ground is mush and water is pouring on your head. And today it's a balmy 88 degrees. I drove past a woman gardening in her bikini, and believe me, it was not a pretty sight. The Row is starting to look like a wild tropical rainforest. I swear I hear monkeys in the shelterbelt at night.

But we’re prairie folk, by gum. We never give up on our Better Girl tomatoes or our Bush Pickling cucumbers. Ray has gradually been dismantling old horse/cow fences around the Row and hauling huge iron fencing panels to the garden. He made an amazing perimeter fence sturdy enough for vining cukes & squash. We “skirted” the fence with chicken wire to keep bunnies out (the peacocks will eat whatever they can reach through the garden fence—they LOVE gooseberries—but they haven’t figured out that they could just fly over the fence). Finally, Ray laid ground cloth, and the garden was ready to plant.

The Row's Original Homestead House

Zorro's ImPEArsonation of a Lawn Ornament

So yesterday, Ray took a “vacation” day and, because I was feeling all Mother Earthish and clearly forgot I’d had a stroke, and because SoDakians have to “make hay while the sun shines,” we did the marathon. It was 10 hours of finishing fences, rigging a gate out of old parts we found in the homestead house, moving the herb garden, reigning in The Mint that Took Over the World, and finally, putting in tomatoes, cucumbers, hot and sweet peppers, squash, greens, basil, parsley, and dill. I had a short midday nap, one minor frustration meltdown, and I had to leave Ray to wrap things up for the last hour or so. But we got it done.

Whoodoggies! Crawling around on the ground and contorting to reach trowel, flats of tomatoes, gloves, water bottle, etc., is a whole new experience with this clunky post-stroke body. I was an idiot to let garden guilt and fear of more rain drive me like a madwoman yesterday—today, I could barely move enough to shower and go to PT. But thanks to Tiger Balm and Advil I can move my fingers, so here’s a little poem I wrote that explores the typical SoDakian philosophy of gardening:

GARDEN HYMN

This is no English tea garden, pal.

No fragile limp fuscia

edged in periwinkle ruffles,

no meandering crocus border,

wisteria draped over a pale trellis,

no painted wrought-iron bench

resting in the thick, damp shade.

No thin ivy dipping its compact buds

in a moss-blue wading pool,

dotted with alabaster cherubs and

creamy-white water lilies.

No sir, this is serious prairie stock.

Drought-resistant bush beans,

sixty quarts worth,

squared off in rotten railroad ties.

Screaming red Big Girl tomatoes

strung to chicken wire

with old support hose.

Hot jalapeño peppers splitting

in a sudden mud-splattering downpour—

a brief storm that somewhere washes out

a delicate, orderly flower bed.