You Grow Girl™

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“You still grow annuals?”

I was visiting a friend’s garden and I happened to mention that I’d forgotten to thin my annual poppies, so now I was in jeopardy of losing the entire dell, and my friend, he of the upscale collector garden on the nice side of town, looked at me and said, incredulously, “You still grow annuals?”

As if I’d fallen off Mars clutching a bouquet of striped petunias.

I hesitate to report that just for an instant I burned with deep shame. I’d been caught. I hung my head and stammered about the seedlings just being from old, leftover seeds I was trying to use up, when I noticed what a doorknob I was being. I shook my head and reminded myself that I love annuals. That I value annuals. That gardening without annuals would be like a summer without swimming, or a picnic without potato chips, or a living room without chairs. Something quintessential would be missing.

Just because a plant is popular doesn’t make it substandard. How could a plant lose beauty by being grown in many gardens, or gain beauty by being grown in only a few? Why would a common plant be mocked and discarded merely for the crime of not being exotic? If you don’t have to build a cage around it, wrap it in burlap and stuff it full of leaves to get it through the winter, it’s no good? If you don’t have to dig it up and bury it in dry peat moss under the porch it’s inferior? Imagine if people had to meet that criteria! Please. I am myself as common as worms, but some people still think I’m useful.

So are my annuals.

“I wouldn’t mind a bit if suddenly all my perennials shriveled up and died and I was forced to garden exclusively with annuals.”

I wouldn’t mind a bit if suddenly all my perennials shriveled up and died and I was forced to garden exclusively with annuals. There are worse fates. These are the garden plants that give me bang for my buck, plants with pep and vinegar, vim and vigor. No mooning around nine-tenths of the year with nary a bloom to be found, like those lazy perennials. These guys have to get growing, bloom, have their Green Giant equivalent of a romp in the hay and make babies all in a few short months, or be kicked off the evolutionary ladder. If October arrives and there’s no seedpod cracking open and spewing its cargo to the wind, it’s curtains for an annual. They won’t be back. Whereas perennials, the sods, well perennials, what do they care for flower and seed? They’re coming back anyhow year after year

Have you ever wasted your time deadheading a perennial? Deadheading is supposed to panic the plant into thinking it hasn’t bloomed yet so that it’ll push out another flower. But perennials, most of them, don’t much care. They just shrug and yawn and go back to whatever they were already doing, like peering in the windows to catch a glimpse of Canadian Idol. Whereas annuals you can just about hear an indignant little scream when you snap off a spent bloom. The plant hip hops around the bed like a rap artist. If they could talk, the lyrics would be XXX-rated. Man I was done, I was minding my crew, when this fierce _____ came and snapped me in two. But once an annual takes to the amputation, it uses its juice to pop out new blooms like bullets.

So, yeah, I could tell my friend. I still grow annuals. My faves are heliotrope, cleome, scarlet flax, godetia and blue salvia. Wanna make something of it? I have a garden as cool, in its miniature, disorganized way, as Kew.

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.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Fine Gardening commissioned an article on poppies, and they wanted to fly up to Vancouver to photograph mine.”

Joy and I started gardening with one proviso: We could garden our little hearts out, landscaping and tilling every inch of our 120 foot by 33 foot lot into beds and paths and even grottos, but we would never-ever-say yes to being on a garden tour. Sure, we craved the notice. What gardener doesn’t? This is a big green-eyed beast, this ego stuff. Almost as soon as Joy and I had started to dig, we longed to hear that our garden was beautiful, timeless, serene. Why, look at your drifts! Your clumps! Your cascades! We’re rabid for praise. We want to know through others’ eyes that what we wish was true really is true: There’s been no other garden in history as lovely as ours. (Or at least as lovely as ours was last week. If only the visitor had seen it when the roses were in full bloom, when the blue poppies were flowering, just after the grass was cut, before the storm dragged the peonies to the ground.) If we said yes to a tour, we’d be big shots. We’d be the Hobhouses of Hatterly. The Sackville-Wests of Simon Avenue East. The Hinkleys of Huron. It could happen. It could happen to us! Why not? Why not us?

But any notice that came our way, we suspected, would be bound to swell our heads. Which in turn would destroy the purity and pleasure of gardening. Stamping our feet over newly planted bulbs, we agreed we would never-ever-assent to having our garden photographed for a magazine. We began to garden because we love the process-the peace, the beauty, the relaxation, the hard physical workout of it. We wanted the yard to function as respite from the rush and noise of the city around us: a place to rest our weary spirits. Loveliness for the sake of loveliness, not editors.

But boy hardy, never say never. Fine Gardening commissioned an article on poppies, and they wanted to fly up to Vancouver to photograph mine. I admit that I didn’t even contemplate declining. Writing is what I do for a living, and if a garden shoot is part of the gig, well, who am I to say no? Values? Out the window. The editor and I settled on the last week of June, the likeliest time for the biggest variety of annual poppies to be blooming.

“Joy and I began to chant, like some funereal dirge: Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming.”

This was in March, when Joy and I were smack in the middle of a frenzy of renovation. Idiots that we are, we had decided to install a hottub, but the porch needed to be demolished, and a cement pad poured, and a door cut into the side of the house, and a change room built, and a deck laid, and trellis erected, and then, because our electrical wasn’t upgraded, we had to replace our stove with one fueled by gas, only when it arrived, it bumped up against the closet, so we had to knock it out, but the closet had a sunken floor and a raised ceiling, necessitating great swacks of drywalling. Meantime, due to overhead wires, the hottub was craned into the backyard from the street-over the neighbour’s house. Everything got delayed and delayed again. Tempers flared.

Joy and I began to chant, like some funereal dirge: Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming. Threatening the workmen. Threatening each other. Any upkeep or improvement that might have been fun given a leisurely schedule was now accordioned into two short months, and included such unlikely tasks as oiling and sharpening garden tools lest the FG editor catch a glimpse of them. Have you ever painted trellis? I did, around the hottub, triangle by repetitious two-sided triangle until I wanted to twist the stem of every poppy that had led me down this vain garden path. Everything had to be perfect. Do you hear me, Joy? Perfect! Perfect, I say!

Most foolish of all, I grew annual poppies in seed flats instead of sewing them where they belonged, scattered among the beds where they’d rise in naturalistic waves. I was paranoid that FG would need to know the exact variety of every poppy they saw (like Papaver rhoeas ‘Angel’s Choir’), for labeling purposes, and what if I didn’t know, exactly? What if I hadn’t quite memorized every last one? Ever the zealot, I had snatched up nearly 30 unique seed packs from a wide assortment of nurseries. There’s a problem transplanting poppies because of long tap roots which hate disturbance, so feeling congratulatory and brilliant, I sprinkled my oh-so-plentiful seeds on top of luxuriously deep toilet paper tubes I could, ostensibly, just transfer to the ground come April. But the seeds only reluctantly germinated, no matter how I stood over them huffing and puffing. More worrying still, there seemed to be hardly any back-up poppies coming up in the garden beds.

“Grow, I pled each morning. Grow, I whispered each evening, and grow they did, by leaps and bounds, in nitrogen-rich handfuls of greenery.”

Oops! It didn’t quite take until April for the toilet paper tubes to biodegrade. Within days the constantly damp cardboard disintegrated into a moldy mess, taking with them down the drain much of my damped-off crop. I murmured sweet nothings to the rest, and they at least flourished. Eventually, when I could spare a minute from the ferocious demands of renovation, I tweezed tangled tap roots from the undifferentiated mess of potting soil and black moldy toilet paper tubes, and lowered them like rescuers on ropes into pre-dug holes. Grow, I pled each morning. Grow, I whispered each evening, and grow they did, by leaps and bounds, in nitrogen-rich handfuls of greenery. Oops again. In March, just as soon as I accepted the assignment, Joy and I had dumped the finest top soil we could find, half a foot of it, all over the beds in a foolhardy attempt to impress the editor with the lushness of our garden.

It was lush, really lush, but with hardly any flowers. There was nary a poppy bud to be seen.

Late June arrived, and with it the editor. Our garden was beside itself with beauty, putting on a show to rival New York’s Broadway, except there was-

Well, you can see it coming, in this slapstick idiocy I call my life, and you’re right. Yup — not a single annual poppy in bloom. No somniferums, no rhoeas, no nudicaule, no californicas. The article had to be entirely illustrated with poppies from other people’s gardens.

Hubris, that’s what the whole thing was. Mine. All around town annual poppies bent in gentle breezes, letting the editor from Fine Gardening know the failure wasn’t Vancouver’s oddly cold spring, but rather me, the inadequate gardener, so desperate to impress that I’d blown the whole experience.

And my poppies? They bloomed as if sniggering at me, hundreds upon hundreds, exactly two weeks late, splendidly.

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.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Doesn’t anyone just take it easy anywhere at any time anymore? Pass me a beer. I never studied Latin. I just want to grow plants.”

I’m that frustrated, really. I’m climbing a braid of tangled clematis like it’s Rapunzel’s hair. This one’s a Clematis montana (what’s the story with all this C montana this and P orientale that and all those unnameable names and this part gets italicized and this part doesn’t and this part needs a capital and this doesn’t? Doesn’t anyone just take it easy anywhere at any time anymore? Pass me a beer. I never studied Latin. I just want to grow plants.) A C. montana growing all the way to the attic window, and I’m scaling it to escape the clematis police. Look at them down there, ten prissy UK gardeners with permed hair, pursed lips and clipboards. The first time I went to make a pruning cut, their whistles shrilled and they forced me to hand over my secateurs, and then the bunch of them did a football huddle around them making clucking noises. Rust, I heard, and dull cutting blade, and Doesn’t she ever oil her implements? and Probably carrying bacteria. I heard a righteous sniff. They’re just cheap clippers anyhow. They’re hardly Felcos. All this down their substantial noses. Well, darn the clematis police to heck anyway. I leaned over one woman’s shoulder chip and snatched my clippers back. They may not be the best maintained clippers in the world, but on the other hand, I find time to watch ER. So sue me.

“…I was so bloody busy working and cooking and vaccuming and yelling at the kids and finding time for Sex and the City that it was all I could do just to shove the damn thing in the ground…”

I got the idea the clematis police, at least, would like to sue me. I was standing back from the first clematis I saw whose colour I just couldn’t remember — uh, purple, maybe? Many of them are purple of some shade with even the whites a bit purple-tinged, so it was a safe guess, probably, and if I hadn’t been so busy going to work and raising kids and making dinner and drinking martinis under the garden heater and laughing with my friends last summer I might have bothered to actually notice, and I might have written it down, a notation, and while I was at it I might even have written down what group (A, B or C) the wretched plant was in to begin with, but of course that should have happened when I planted it, only when I planted it (and the 30 or so others) I was so bloody busy working and cooking and vaccuming and yelling at the kids and finding time for Sex and the City that it was all I could do just to shove the damn thing in the ground in a more or less prepared hole (a dug hole, that is) and I probably didn’t even plant it at the right depth which is six inches of stem in the ground because, go figure, the stem will grow roots, and then naturally I left the tag on it but the tag was just plastic the width of a dime and very crackable, and of course it cracked, and the part that didn’t break off bleached in the sun (though how is that possible since the roots of the clematis are supposed to be in the shade, so how could a tag be sunbleached, huh, huh, if it was a properly planted clematis? Huh? Huh? With a tag near the bottom of the stem where no sun is supposed to shine sort of like certain areas of one’s bathing suit? And anyway, if roots are underground aren’t they by definition shaded? I mean, no one ever said my ancestors were pushing up daisies six feet under basking in sunshine, did they?) And anyway, the tag did crack and the tag did bleach and with it went all the info I had on the clematis so why couldn’t I just hack at it? Huh? “Would that be all right with you guys?“

“Humph, they said as one. You are speaking, we believe, of the genus CLEMatis. Kindly refer to said plant as CLEMatis in all future speech.”

The UK gardeners weren’t looking. They were busily conferring and scratching on their clipboards. Was that a paddy wagon siren I heard coming to take me to jail for breaking clematis laws?

I had no idea what they’d do to me if I guessed wrong, so I shouted, “Would it be all right with you guys if I just cut this clematis any which place on its stem?”

The clematis police turned as one monolithic creature and laid half-lidded eyes upon me. Their pens poised above their clipboards. ì“xcuse us. Did we just hear you just say—”

And here they couldn’t bring themselves to actually repeat it. They stalled, this one-voiced creature, speechless. But then they went on. “Did we just hear you just say — clemAtis?”

Darn, darn, darn. I did. I said it just like that. I suppose I should have been gnashing my teeth and renting my raiments.

“Humph,” they said as one. “You are speaking, we believe, of the genus CLEMatis. Kindly refer to said plant as CLEMatis in all future speech.”

“Nuts to you,” I said.

And they just stood there, open-mouthed. Many of them had amalgam fillings which I hoped were leaking mercury.

“You know the secret with clemAtis?” I shouted. “You know what it is? If you don’t prune ëem right, they still grow. If you don’t prune ëem at all, they still grow. Nothing bad happens. World War III doesn’t break out. They just bloom up higher, is all.”

“They might wilt,” said the officious poops.

“Dudes,” I said, “pruning doesn’t stop wilt. Clematis get a fungus. If I see drooping leaves, and I happen to have time, I cut the stem a couple inches down past it and hope the thing survives. Or if I’m busy, I let it go and hope that next year it doesn’t wilt again. But sometimes it does.”

Their Stepford mouths open in unison. “Prune your CLEMatis in its proper groups. Don’t prune group A. Prune group B lightly for shape. Prune group C a foot from the ground.” And then suddenly they’re chanting. “Prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis.”

That’s when I hightailed it up the C. montana towards the attic, an overstuffed chair, my TV clicker and a beer.

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.

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.

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.