In Mourning

My garden has a terminal illness. 

Yesterday I came home from a girls weekend at the beach to find debris littering the bean-side of the garden, and the ivy that had been growing unchecked along the back fence hanging precariously over the snap peas and eggplant.  It looked like a tornado had torn through my triangle of life, breaking tomato plants in half and shaking climbing beans from their trellises.

The neighbors had cleared the foot and a half of garage that butted against our fence of its ivy, ripping sticky cleavers from their whitewashed brick and allowing the top-heavy vines to bow sickeningly over our cultivated beds.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only damage.
 
I picked up the broken bits of ivy last night, and hoped a day of sunshine would perk up the flowering beans and help the tomatoes straighten up.  Instead, I came home to a garden even droopier than the night before.  The bean leaves, with their first purple flowers just opening along two or three vines taller than me, were upside down.  The climbers were all taking nose-dives instead of reaching sunward.  The herbs – our six basil plants and out-of-control cilantro – were falling amongst themselves like drunk teenagers, and the lettuce patch splayed out as if a beach ball had repeatedly flounced on top of it.

It turns out it wasn’t just debris, but something much more terrible.  I called my dad, the trusty ex-farmer, and told him my garden’s symptoms.  Is there some sort of fungus that would attack every one of my plants?, I asked.  Some kind of blight that I’ve never heard of?  He asked if we were at the bottom of a hill, if some kind of poisonous runoff could have swept through the yard.  I went to ask my neighbor.

Sure enough, poison was the culprit.  Weeds B Gone to be exact.  She had dumped a bunch on the roof of her garage, “to keep the ivy from coming back.”  And then it had rained.

The ivy looks fine, by the way.  It’s just the vegetables that are dying.

It’ll take a few days, but one by one these plants – almost all of which I started from seed – will yellow, and shrivel, and die.  I don’t think I can bear to see that, so I’ll probably go out there early tomorrow morning and yank the whole lot of them out. 

But before I do that I’ll have some time to think about what we are doing to the earth, and to ourselves.  I know- this Weeds B Gone is just a bit of over-the-counter yard material.  But this is also about the grasses and the flowers and the food that we live on.  Eventually those chemicals will drain into the Wissahickon just down the hill, and from there into the Delaware (not to mention into our taps), then to the bay, then the ocean.  So many people don’t think about how our actions affect the rest of the world, not to mention our local ecosystem or our neighbors.

I’ll start over again, this time by pulling out all that ivy and buying a bunch of pots and fresh soil.  But I won’t forget the lessons this episode has to teach me, and the sight of a beautiful bursting garden simply turning over and dying.

Grateful

I live in the city now, but I have a country life.  I hike along a creek at least once a day.  I weed my garden a few times a week.  I am experimenting with seed swaps and growing raspberry bushes and coming home early on Friday nights.  I have to say, it’s been great.  Add to that my awesome new job, and honestly I feel a little like I’ve struck gold.  It’s exciting to be delving incredibly deep into work that is engaging both intellectually and socially.  The best part is, it’s in my own community, not in some remote rainforest in which I have little connection.  I seem to have lost my travel bug, at least temporarily.

I apologize for writing a recap post after disappearing for so long.  It feels necessary, given the drastic transitions life has offered up in the past few months.  In order to move forward and start writing about the really interesting stuff (snap peas popping out of the ground!  CAFOs in Pennsylvania!  Training Belle to be a good dog!), I need to step back a minute and see what has happened to my life.

Belle, sitting on a seed tray (bad dog!)

Matt and I moved to Mount Airy.  Technically we live in Philadelphia, but to me it’s a retreat every day.  Our two-bedroom walkup with fenced-in yard is home to a few new raised beds ready to burst with strawberries, spinach, and summer squash.  After the damp and musty room we shared in India, with bathroom full of geckos and the occasional errant leech, this is practically a vacation home. 

We adopted a dog.  We started jobs.  We built a compost tumbler.  We struggle to fit all of the things we want to do into seven short days every week.

At work, I get to think about the effect that a millennium-old shale deposit deep under Pennsylvania could have on the forests I love, the water I drink, and the small town communities that make my state what it is.  I get to talk politics and motivate people who think they don’t care about an issue to get off their high horse of pessimism, even if it just means taking thirty seconds to write a letter.  These things are so much easier when you speak the same language as the people you’re working with.

Mid-May strawberries

I am beginning to find the balance I’ve been searching for, between urban stimulation, rejuvenation in nature, and, ultimately, self-sufficiency.  Now that I’m back into a busy schedule, with work and school and various side commitments, I’ve become a bit more realistic about that last goal.  I squeeze in yogurt making on a Saturday morning when I know I’ll be home in the afternoon.  We got a bread machine.  I miss the warmth of fresh dough under my hands, but at least we have fresh homemade bread every week.  These are the compromises you make to find balance amongst all the various things you love.  And when that happens, there’s nothing left to do but feel deeply grateful. 

Garden update

Potato and onion shoots are coming up!  I'm particularly excited about the potatoes.  I've never grown them before, and look forward to cooking them in a campfire sometime soon.

We owe much of our gardening success to these little ladies (and sir).  Chickens do the dirty work of scratching around in the soil, eating up all the grubs, and yes, leaving little pods of nitrogen for the seedlings.