You Grow Girl™

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“…we had plenty of expensive, susceptible, fragile exotica that needed winter protection.”

It was August. And then it was September. We’d put in a whole lot of tropicals and sub-tropicals and still hadn’t solved our winter storage problem. Which was stupid, since 16 months before we’d bought a lotus, a $90 plant which was now a sad, mucky, mosquito-breeding, deceased mess of soup waiting in its muddy plastic pot to be carted to the compost bins, and that now–again, idjits that we were–we had plenty of expensive, susceptible, fragile exotica that needed winter protection. We hemmed and hawed and fretted about what to do. A greenhouse? But there was no room, unless we built it on our more-or-less unused second story deck and committed to hauling plants up and down the stairs.

So, a second-floor greenhouse. Mind, such a greenhouse wouldn’t just appear. It would necessitate finding a worker to construct it, and we haven’t had a lot of luck with workers. There was Billy with the walrus mustache who started to re-do our drainage tiles by digging a six foot pit along the side of our house –shovelling the dirt up against the rot-susceptible fence–before knocking off for the day. And apparently the week. Then a whole month. To traverse our property, we had to climb up this crumbling mountain and skid down the other side. It took us more than two years to get around to filling his hole back in, and we never did fix the drainage. Then there was Gary who erected the fence posts without concrete supports so that the fence fell over in the first wind. Or Colin who planted our dogwood still tied tightly into its burlap bag so it sat there stunned and sulking. Or Henry of the ponytail who fixed the leaking basement door by pouring cement around the drain, removing the only water reservoir and compounding the problem dramatically. And lest we forget my personal favorite, Neal, who when I complained about him not showing up, said bitterly, “I have all the work I need. I can treat you any damn way I want to.”

“Something like three years elapsed while I churned in my seat waiting for an entire sentence to meander from Rex’s mouth…”

So we decided to ask one of the only guys who had ever worked out, an electrician, for a referral. And we got Rex. Rex joined us for tea. Something like three years elapsed while I churned in my seat waiting for an entire sentence to meander from Rex’s mouth, but when he finally spoke, I liked what he had to say.

He was willing to work to our admittedly peculiar specifications. We wanted a series of tempered glass windows around the circumference topped by–well, we weren’t sure. Did Rex have suggestions?

He scratched his head and chewed on a toothpick and poured some more tea and stood and resat himself. He tapped his pencil on the table. He kicked the table leg. He sent his eyebrows crawling up his forehead like caterpillars. Finally, he puzzled over potential snow loads and whether the current porch posts could support roof weight. Slowly, with his pen dipped in molasses, he sketched the design. He went upstairs to look at the space. He took measurements, his tape snapping back into its casing with a snake’s hiss.

“Gimme a week,” he said. He planned to work up plans and a budget.

We spent the time in the yard huffing on our babies to keep them warm.

Rex came in with a solid plan (we thought) and a reasonable budget, only five days late, but couldn’t start for a month.

On the long-awaited morning, Rex knocked, turned his cap around in his hands on our front porch, wouldn’t come in. “I was thinking,” he said. “You folks’ll be needing–” He couldn’t bring himself to finish his sentence. He scratched his head, looked up at the porch roof. I said, “Insert predicate here.”

Finally: “You folks might need a gutter.”

Puzzled, I waited to see where he was going.

He moved a toothpick around his mouth then pushed it out with his tongue, so shredded I thought it was likely the same one he’d been chewing the month before.

“Plus, way I figure it, you’re gonna have a gap couple a inches wide where the windows don’t meet the roof.”

My blood was battering its way through arteries undesigned for the sudden force–I could actually feel my pressure rising.

“Cause, see, the way I’ve got it designed, the roof won’t meet the walls. So, er–” Enthusiastic messing of hair. “–is that, like, okay? That’s fine, right?”

“Won’t meet the walls,” I said. “Right. Thing is, Rex, we can’t really have a gap there, Rex, since we’re trying to save our tropicals from freezing, Rex. We’re planning to heat the greenhouse, remember, Rex? We’re trying to keep the weather out, Rex, right?”

So Rex looked at me a long time. He said, “Guess I don’t really want to bother, Ma’am.”

And geez, whaddayaknow, the guy walked off.

“In the spring, we placed 97 pots of canna in the kitchen by the only windows in the house that get any type of light.”

It was late October and we didn’t have a greenhouse, even Rex’s knocked-up, slipshod, half-open-to-the-elements greenhouse. And we needed a greenhouse. We had already bought and caulked fourteen unreturnable greenhouse windows. We called the store where we had bought them, frantic. Helpfully, they could also be used as windows in a tiny, pre-fab, lean-to greenhouse, which could be delivered, the store said, by Valentine’s Day.

We would mulch instead.

We drove to a street with a good selection of maple leaves and homeowners who raked them and when we were sure no one was looking, we heaved sodden, heavy bags into the back of the Nissan and took off like bats. We stood in the yard feeding leaves into a garbage can bit by bit, like flour into a cake mix, and chopped them into fragments with our weed eater. This task was undertaken because perfect gardeners had assured us maple leaves made exceptional mulch and that chopping them into pea-size particles prevented them from forming a suffocating mat.

This task was stunningly time consuming. When we were done, it was dark, dead dark. No chance to pack the nuggets into elaborately constructed cages around pathetic looking bananas and agapanthus, so we tossed them into garbage bags and tucked them out of sight behind our composters. When we went to retrieve them the next weekend, they had vanished.

So we tied burlap around our windmill palms and packed it full of dripping oak leaves from the nearby schoolyard, capping it off with a bonnet of plastic. We carted cannas and brugmansias into the heated basement, except for one pathetic brugmansia with spider mites which we lifted screaming from its pot and tossed, exposed, onto the top of the compost heap, where it lay kicking its bedraggled roots and wrinkling up its stalk. We dumped leaves around our romneya, wound bubble wrap around our outdoor pots, tucked up the tree fern under an overhang.

But rats and starlings made it through the winter better than our plants. In the spring, we placed 97 pots of canna in the kitchen by the only windows in the house that get any type of light. This meant that we couldn’t access the door even to water the tree fern, which groaned and died. We lost the romneya following a hard frost in March. The wrapped palm had fungus rot. And every brugmansia, which we had likewise neglected to water, was pushing up daisies, except, of course, for the one tossed onto the compost heap, which had leapt to its roots singing songs of atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine.

Before we took delivery of our little lean-to greenhouse, the supplier went bust. The store let us buy the demo, but they insisted we take the thing apart ourselves. So off we went to get our drills and screwdrivers before spending an afternoon unscrewing the damned thing. The employees hadn’t done a great job of assembly to begin with–some of the boards were split. Money off? Well, no, said the manager. We’re already doing you a big favour.

Never mind that the thing came apart to a gazillion pieces, some of them no bigger than eyelashes, and without instructions.

Once it’s erected, watch out.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

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Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Black gold? Not in our composters. More like brown zirconium.”

Organize our compost? Itemize all the stuff there is to do in the garden: cleaning up, digging, planting, fertilizing. Rearranging the beds. Dividing. Putting up seeds. Spraying for damping off. Spraying for black spot. Fence fixing. Lawn mowing. And somehow Joy and I have to get through all this on weekends. We’ve already gave up 98.7% of our leisure time to our garden, so what’s next? Give up sleep? Donating our neighbors to the task? Where do other gardeners get all their time anyhow? Joy and I barely manage to keep our heads above the compost bin. That’s us you see back there when you drive down our alley, four arms frantically waving as we sink into the effluvium.

Last summer we ripped a Queen Elizabeth climbing rose out of the sun bed even though its trunk was as wide around as a child’s waist and its thorns were certifiable weapons. We took it out because it’s a ridiculous rose. Even though it was a gift, even though it grew quickly and gave us good screening, it had, during each summer’s pinnacle, only seven blooms. The trunk is still out in the alley pushed behind the unemptied composters (inside which the tottering old neighbour hides his mickeys. Imagine his wife thinking he’s just going out the door for the constitutional the doctor ordered).

We have three black plastic bins we got from the city and a chicken-wire cage we cobbled together ourselves. The perfect plan was to put the raw debris in the cage and move the composting debris over bin by bin, until, by the time it reached the last bin, it had turned itself into black gold. We thumb through the Lee Valley catalogue pining for the cool rotating bin that makes compost in the time it takes us to eat dinner. The Cadillac of composters. But even if we could afford the thing, we have no place save the dining room left to put it. Black gold? Not in our composters. More like brown zirconium.

Imagine us bothering to create layers like making lasagna, noodle, cheese, sauce. First a layer of dirt, then a layer of kitchen waste, then a layer of old leaves. Repeat. Bake at 325 degrees until the worms on top are toasted and brown. (Er, browner.)

Oh yeah, right. Not in our adequate gardener’s garden. In the adequate gardener’s garden there are two adequate gardeners, a couple ordinary, adequate thumbs (blue from the hammer) devoted to doing things with as little fooferah as we can get away with. We count ourselves successful if we even manage to gather the debris from the beds onto the lawn where it mounds until the grass underneath turns yellow. From there, we fill our multiple city recycling blue bins with cuttings and step on them to compact them, hoping against hope that maybe sometime down the way we’ll end up with wine. We get seven or eight of these containers going and when we want the garden to look half-decent on the very rare occasion we busily adequate gardeners actually have time to entertain, we stack them out of sight around the bbq, which works as long as no food needs to be cooked.

“And it all attracts snails, slugs, spiders and critters from Star Wars that take one look at our outfits and scuttle from sight.”

We mean of course to remember to put holes in the containers so they’ll drain, but invariably we forget and have to face a floating soupy mess of brackish water and worms, which we then slop out, pouring it over our sneakers. Which, come to think of it, is the de rigeur look at our place–baseball caps, mud smears on our foreheads and cheeks, paint-smattered, filthy pants, sneakers with holes, droopy tool belts dangling green plastic garden twine the cats chase, knee pads velcroed into place, stinking like we just poured rotting worms all over ourselves.

This, however, is not as bad as the mix we make up for each new planting hole, a combination of bone meal, peat and compost, and which we never seem to quite finish. We leave the dregs to sit in the rain, too, not intentionally, but because it is already ten p.m. and getting dark and we haven’t even considered dinner yet, plus we have to soak in a hot tub, right, with epsom salts to untangle our muscles? So when days later one of us goes to make more and delightedly finds some already prepared and happily digs in her spade, she finds maggots, lots of maggots happily waving their creepy bobbily heads like some subterranean chorus line.

This is much like the actual composters themselves, where all manners of creatures are attracted to our unlayered kitchen refuse. We’re not all the way to inadequate–we don’t throw in bones or dairy or grains that would attract rodents (we have rodents, but only in the house), but everything else is hucked in there willy nilly. And it all attracts snails, slugs, spiders and critters from Star Wars that take one look at our outfits and scuttle from sight. But rarely does it attract red wrigglers because, of course, red wrigglers are what is needed.

Since leaves are good not only for winter mulch, but for the compost, in the fall we steal them pre-bagged from streets with maple trees. We leave the bags on the flagstone patio. Composting will take place en bag if only we throw in a couple of scoops of dirt, so we do that, only to discover in March that, yippee, they’re almost there. Woe that we can’t fit them. Still, we heave the bags to the back because, alas, we’ve managed to kill all our patio mosses and creeping thyme; we set them out behind the three overflowing composters. What do you think happens? I mean, this is where the adequate gardeners heft spades. Yup, not two days later: Stolen.

We never stir, by the way, even though we have one of those aerating gadgets that slips in with little ado, snaps open in the reeking recesses, then, when we try to lift it out catches on sticks so we have to tug, then heave, so that finally, grunting, we lift the entire composter from its base causing it to come apart at the middle seam and roll half-decayed grapefruits, oranges–and a baseball?–into the alley. Stirring the compost would inevitably lead to more chores–like actual compost, which is on a slippery slope towards the ever-so-time-consuming job of spreading compost. Our composters are filled to the brim and once the plant material subsides, as inevitably, eventually, it does, we refill and refill and refill. (Sometimes we watch from our upper porch as our gardening neighbors tug the bottom doors off and steal the stuff we’ve managed to produce. We’d get irritated, but, frankly, it just saves us work.) We continue on our inefficient way for about a year, and once in a great mountain of summer days we remembering to knock off the composter tops so we can hose down the now exceedingly dry matter inside. Which then, needless to say, gives way to yet another no-no in the perfect gardener’s garden–soggy unaerated compost. Or not soggy unaerated compost, I guess, but just soggy debris which refuses to break down, therefore saving us more time.

Okay, okay, I’m exaggerating. Once a year, give or take, in what we plan to be early spring but which usually ends up being early fall (that all-important season when plants go dormant and need a nutritional boost), we empty the composters, find all the garden tools we lost during the year snuggled in beside a broken plastic doll, a crumpled scooter and an undecayed grade three notebook (gifts, lovely gifts from the wanderers past), and fill them back up with the raw stack that’s now as tall on the mesh bin as the roof of the neighbour’s garage. We sieve (our strainer is still, after five years, waiting to be framed; the wire dangle loose at the edges) and throw it in bucketfuls towards the beds. Nope, we don’t scratch it into the surface. Nope, we don’t watch out that it doesn’t hit the crowns of perennials, even though it’s important to us that they not rot. Mind you, if they rot, it’d just be fewer plants to divide come spring.

After all of our inattention and foolish attention, the stuff that comes out of our composters–and there’s lots of it– is compost, just the same. Crumbly, friable, brownish. And it’s on the beds, more or less where it should be. Now if only we could find a minute to put up our feet and smugly appreciate it.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

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Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“It never crossed my mind that the experts were giving bad advice.”

All the books said buy three or five or better yet seven of every perennial so the plants wouldn’t look like green toothpicks stuck in a frosting of dirt. Well, I couldn’t afford five or seven of anything, so I’d chew my lip and purchase three. Then I’d hang over the nursery table hungering after a Meconopsis grandis which I couldn’t afford because my buggy was filled with three ho-hum pink and three so-so white astilbes. I always assumed my frustration stemmed from not having enough money. It never crossed my mind that the experts were giving bad advice. Or not bad advice, maybe, but advice meant for someone else. Someone in England. Someone with a peerage.

Sure, if I had an acre, two acres, three… Imagine the sweeps and drifts. But I only had a city lot in the usual east-side Vancouver measurement of 120 feet by 33 feet, with a century-old farmhouse galumphing smack through the middle. Did I really need six astilbes? All the books assured me I did. All the newspaper articles said so.

Gives necessary impact, the writers advised.

Never mind that by the very next year I’d figured out that I didn’t really care for astilbes, and that a year after that we dug them out and donated them to our garden club plant sale. (This year, just because I decided to hate them, the astilbes are back with a vengeance. Who needed six when one would have self-seeded just as readily?)

Oh, experts! I so took their advice to heart about buying three plants that I carted home three goutweeds, which proceeded to eat my east sun bed then my cat. Last I looked, they had managed to string one of their roots around our daughter’s ankle and were determinedly tugging her beneath the soil. I also bought three plume poppies. Yup. And planted them at the back of the sun bed. Beside the three gooseneck loosestrife the books said I should have.

” What I need is not three identical plants, but three lives, because that’s how long I’m going to be spending trying to get rid of my triads of invasive plants. “

And one time I hauled home the regulation three Oriental poppies–salmon, said the tag, with purple basal blotches. I happily planted the dears and mooned over their sites until March when the tips of their foliage feathered up through the winter cold slick of wet leaves. I was quivering with anticipation. What fertilizer is to garden plants, poppies are to me: necessary for existence.

Still, still. I have to admit to something the adequate gardener did that the perfect gardener would never have done in a billion springs. She stole out when that first three-pack of mollycoddled Oriental poppies were finally budding–rotund, green and hairy–and, checking both ways to ensure no rogue gardener (there wouldn’t be anything but a rogue in our cement neighbourhood) was looking–peeled a bud open. Which is, incidentally, how I learned that a bud unready to open is, well, actually unready to open. The buds resisted. Resisted, if you can imagine, like they were dead bolts and saw me, the adequate gardener, rollicking towards them with a lockpick.

But I am nothing if not brutal, so eventually I was able to start teasing back a slice of cold bristling green skin, hoping to expose– Oops–Joy caught me. Why did that single moment have to be the single moment she wasn’t utterly distracted by the green snouts of her eighteen thousand cannas? At least by then I didn’t care that she was scolding me because I was exposing not smooth, tight-packed salmon petals but screaming shrieking orange petals. Orange like our bad soil. Orange like an orange. Orange like a seventies countertop. Bright, snapping, popping, look-at-me-to-see-how-I-clash orange.

Our one banned colour.

While we watched in dismay, the flower unfolded like discarded scarlet Kleenex. Bloodless. Anemic. Bent in discouragement like an old tulip. I could tell it was no happier being orange than we were in having it orange. (Either that or it objected to my molestation, and of course that’s unlikely.)

Out they came. That minute, the three of them, spade shoved into ground deep as we could get it.

Guess what we learned? Dig up “buy-three” Oriental orange poppies and their thick-knotted ropes of tap roots break and then, like bindweed, shatter, so that the next year you get–you guessed it–double the already triple banned orange poppies. Which is six.

So much for the experts. All the experts ever got us was three times the problems we would have had left to our own devices. Three orange poppies in year one, six orange poppies in year two, twelve orange poppies in year three and no doubt by the time I die a billion and four orange poppies taking over every unspare inch of my measly “three-bought” city garden. Moving on to push through the neighbours’ cement pads. Moving on, I hope, to the nearest expert’s garden. Moving on to take over the globe.

We made a determination this year not to try digging up that grove of orange poppies. Rather, kingly–why, exactly as if I was actually British–I chopped off their heads and watched them roll, whitely bleeding from their severed necks, into the roadway.

What I need is not three identical plants, but three lives, because that’s how long I’m going to be spending trying to get rid of my triads of invasive plants.

Why buy five or seven of anything when you don’t have the money? When you have a small garden? When you don’t know if the tag is accurate? When you don’t know if you’ll like it?

Nope. Buy one. If it works out the way you hope, then you can get more for impact–if the plant itself hasn’t already seeded or clumped or sent runners for more impact than you planned.

I just read an article in a British magazine by a woman who had decided not to listen to the experts. She wasn’t going to buy just seven of anything. Why waste the time? She’d be ahead, wouldn’t she, if she bought nine to start out with? Or eleven? Or thirteen?

Hmm…thirteen orange poppies doubling in size every year. Wish I’d thought of that.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

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