Sculpin

This year I ordered tomato plants from Territorial Seed. Uh-oh! They arrive tomorrow. And is that bed ready for them? Will I be home much of tomorrow? Will I have enough time and energy to get that area prepared? Are they going to go in promptly? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gahhhh.

I’ve been gardening like a fiend, though. I’m putting in a path to and around the chicken coop and basically regrading a significant part of the backyard, which involves moving a big hill of dirt that’s full of vile buttercups. (The buttercup is my nemesis. Or maybe I should reserve that title for the morning glory.) Can’t just drop ‘em on the compost heap, because they’re acting like noxious weeds. Can’t just drop ‘em in the yard waste, because the yard waste is close to its weight limit already. It’s a pain. I’m hoping the hot weather lightens the yard-waste load.

Alternate names for Ranunculus repens: devil’s guts, granny threads, ram’s claws, meg-many-feet, setsicker, sitfast, tether-toad. And then there are other buttercup names, some of which R. repens is likely to share: crazy, guilty-cup, blister-flower, blister-weed, hell-weed, pissabed, cursed crowfoot. (Thank you, Albert Brown Lyons!) Apparently I’m not the only person who’s ever disliked this stuff.

Week by week, more and more of the basic garden structure becomes a reality. And there’s actual soil! When I come inside from shovelling, I’m actually filthy! This is great news, because the dirt out there used to be a mixture of fine clay dust and sand with hardly any humus. It couldn’t even really get you dirty, just very dusty. I’ve been dumping organic matter into this place for years. At first you could hardly tell; I’d dump a load of compost and dig it in, and what I’d get is slightly darker, heavier dust. Now things are starting to hum along at last. The soil’s physical structure is finally getting to the point at which I’d consider it worth testing the nutrient balance and monkeying with it.

Sometimes when I garden, it strikes me that I’ve been making something that may well live on after me. Not the rocks or the vegetable beds, but the soil itself. It’s like I’m constructing and feeding an enormous quiet creature. Sometimes I take a moment and try to imagine/sense it as something like a living tissue.

Speaking of the P-Patch, last year we planted two artichokes there; then we dug them up in fall and brought them home in a tub, intending to transplant them. Instead, we forgot about them, and the tub sat on the patio for six months, cold and dry and completely ignored. I was shocked a few days ago to discover that the artichokes were still alive and putting up leaves. So I transplanted one today. What do you want to bet I kill it now? [ETA: Yeah, that thing’s looking like death warmed over, if not worse. Weird.]

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