Garden by Committee

It’s so ironic  in this spring and summer of 2017, when I didn’t take a step on my newly put together left ankle from April 7^th to June 5^th , have walked only clumsily since with the help of a knee rolling scooter and crutches, and am still not cleared to bear full weight on my ankle; that my garden looks great.  Better than years in which I got around fairly well on two legs.  How could that happen?

I’ve always prided myself on taking care of my own garden, thank you, but this year that would clearly be impossible.  My wife urged me to skip a year. 

“It’s just one year.  Give it a rest.  You can put your energy into other things.”

I considered it.  But I was haunted by the prospect of BLT’s with someone else’s tomatoes, an entire year with no 2017 edition of my Mom’s Chilla sauce, no homemade jerk marinade, no eclectic and custom built Irish Asian chili paste.  I would have said I walked around sadly for days pondering the possibility, but I couldn’t walk.  Instead I rolled on my scooter forlornly, laid in my recliner with my leg on three pillows, above my heart as ordered, and anticipated the loss.  I couldn’t give up my garden.  But neither could I do the work it takes to have one. 

It’s always been hard for me to ask for help, but I had little choice.  My wife was doing plenty more for me already, bringing me meals on a tray, driving me from here to there, untold extra mercies.  Besides that, we have a well defined division of labor when it comes to spring and summer work.  She grows the flowers, I grow the vegetables.  She picks up the sticks, I mow the yard.  It’s the kind of thing you fall into when you’ve lived together forty years, thirty of them in the same house surrounded by the same yard.  I wasn’t going to mess that up by asking her to do more.  Not that she would have done it anyway.

I’d have to expand recruitment beyond the house.  There’s my kids, who both live in Chicago and are busy young urban professionals.  Not a lot of man hours possible there.  No, it would most likely  be locals, friends not family.  It meant imposing on others who have no obligation whatsoever.  Daunting.  I began to formulate a vague plan as countless Cub games were played in cold weather on TV.  I usually don’t plant tomatoes till Mother’s day at least, even Memorial Day would be OK.

It’s easy to underestimate the kindness of others.  My friend who owns a roto tiller, and generously brings his machine up to my house each year so I can till my garden, and don’t have to buy one, called before I could ask him.  He’d heard about my plight.

“I can till your garden for you.  Be glad to.  Just tell me when you want it done.”

I thought of my long skinny plot out there beside the garage.  Each fall we till the garden, after all the trash is pulled and burned, and sow it with winter rye, which makes a great cover crop, keeps out the weeds and feeds the soil.  It was a great winter and spring for rye growing.  It was over a foot tall.  In spring we till again.  Afterwards I provide lunch and drinks. 

“All you’ll have to do is mow that rye.  Clogs up the tiller.  Just let me know when you’re ready.”

The rye was too tall to mow.  I didn’t tell him that.  Just another step in the process.  But I had a lot of time to come up with a plan.

My wife was struggling with her own problems.  I was the one who always cut down the prairie grass, which was reaching a critical point.  When the new green growth creeps up two or three inches it is time to trim the brown stalks down to meet it.  I always used the hedge trimmers, but I was in no shape to do that.  My wife doesn’t do power tools, yet she needed it done.  It was a task I’d been doing since the prairie grass was planted.  God knows how long.

Here’s the great thing.  When you’re compromised physically people offer their help blindly, not expecting to be called on to deliver it.

One friend, retired and living close by, checked in on me and said, as many before him had

“If there’s anything I can do to help let me know.”

Rarely comes the request that cashes in on that often made offer.  However, I immediately made one in reply.

“Actually, there is a way you can help.  I have this prairie grass that needs to be cut down, as well as the rye in my garden.  Think you find an afternoon to do that?  We can have some drinks after.”

I offered no assistance whatsoever, seeing as I couldn’t walk.  It’s a tall order, saying yes to such an open assignment.  Truly generous people decide to help quickly.  His reply?

“Sure.”

My wife showed this next day volunteer where the prairie grass was and got the tools and power cords out for him. I added that there was a tarp he could put the rye straw on.  Later I would use it for mulch.  He had it all done in a couple of hours.  We retired to the shack for couple of glasses of rum.

“So who’s going to till the garden?”

I told him.

“I know him.  I worked with his wife.  Will he need help?”

“He might need some help getting the tiller out of his pickup.  That’s always a little touch and go.  Better two people doing it than one.”

“Let me know when he’s coming, I’d be glad to help.”

With the rye cleared the two of them turned over the dirt with the roto tiller in less than an hour, start to finish.  I was ready for planting in less than a week.  Mind you, all I did in this whole operation was pour drinks.  We added whiskey to the mix after tilling.

My son Dean came down unexpectedly on a Saturday, just for the day.  Soon after he arrived he offered to take me to the Seatonville Greenhouse to buy plants.  I’m still not convinced his Mom wasn’t somewhere behind his sudden desire to be helpful but she claims not.  He took me over in the Buick, we discovered to our surprise the greenhouse was handicapped accessible, so I cruised the paths between the tables of plants on my knee scooter picking out what I needed.  Dean trailed putting them all in flats.  We got it all, herbs, pepper plants, tomatoes, lemon grass.  It’s a one stop shop, that Seatonville Greenhouse.

When we got home we slammed the tomatoes, a dozen, in the ground before dark when Dean headed back to the city.  We couldn’t plant the peppers though, because those require fencing to keep out the rabbits.  Dean didn’t have time.  The peppers would have to wait.

They didn’t wait long.  My daughter and her boyfriend were at the house the next weekend for Memorial Day.  They host a bash.  A beer brew, crayfish boil, canoe trip down the fox, tents in the yard, the whole deal.  Thirty five people this year, slightly down from previous years.  After it was all over and we were returning to normal on Monday afternoon they planted the peppers, with me directing from a lawn chair, pointing here and there with my crutches, directing the placement of serranos, poblanos, habaneros, jalapenos, cayennes, those mild round sweets, and a few new ones for the sheer hell of it.  Then they surrounded the peppers with the fence.  It’s just chicken wire and skinny steel fence posts.  Not fancy but it works.    Moe planted the herbs in pots by the back door steps.  Next they put up the trellises for the tomatoes and mulched everything with the rye straw, including the garlic which was planted last Halloween.  Done.  I sat there in amazement.  I hadn’t done a damn thing.

I take that back.  I fertilized.  I started out thinking I would buy an organic fish poop product on Amazon.  But the more I read about it the more dubious I became.  I cast about on Face Book for ideas.  Consensus among the gardeners was the fish poop stuff was powerfully smelly and bad to handle.  And then the Breslins responded by inviting me to come out and just take some of their stuff.  Colleen drove me out of town to the Breslin organic farm where I scored a bucketful of Chick Magic, not to be confused with Chick Magnet.  As luck would have it they had just taken delivery on fifty tons of Chick Magic, pelletized shit from organically fed chickens.  And thus is born organic chicken shit.  When you’re dealing with fifty tons of shit what’s a bucketful here or there?  It smelled fairly bad, so I shuddered to think how the fish poop stuff must reek.

That was truly my only contribution.  I hopped around the garden on crutches sprinkling Chick Magic by the plants.  And since then, as I become more mobile, I crawl and crutch around pulling weeds. Oh, and I sit on my butt in a lawn chair by the garden and spray water on it.  But the heavy lifting on the McClure Fields Hill 2017 garden was done totally by friends and family.  And it’s the best looking garden I’ve had since I’ve been here.  There’s a lesson to be learned here, best summed up by a single word.  Collaboration.