to garden

Fall is the best time to garden. The ground is soft, the mesquitoes are gone, the plants will go dormant shortly, building their root systems throughout the winter so they will be prepared for spring and then for the stress of summer.

This is important to remember.

Fall is the best time to do garden work. Good garden work starts with the soil. Think of mixing in flour with other ingredients. American soils are often heavy, dense clay (or at least as I experience it from my gardening in Central Texas, Washington, D.C., and Central Indiana -- the universe is what I experience, a failing I know). Heavy clay soils need compost. Best case, you provide the ingredients by either creating a good compost pile or by burying kitchen organic (stress uncooked) matter in the garden bed. Quickest and easiest way: you go to the big box hardware store and pay $1 to $2 for a bag of composted cow manure. How much compost should be used? First time bed, or bed that badly needs help? I recommend one bag (40 cu) per two square feet.

If you are rich, and didn't Jesus say that is was almost impossible to love to garden in a true and honorable way and still be loaded up with dough? No, oh, ok. But if you are rich, call up your local mulch dealer and ask for mushroom compost, which is probably composted chicken manure and stuff. Chicken manure, used hot, will burn out a plant. I mean burn it dead. An aside -- Anne Raver, the NY Times garden writer, once wrote a Sunday column about the heat of chicken poop, along with a few living chickens, keeping a moderate sized greenhouse heated in a wintery climate. There is actually a formula of how many chickens it takes to keep a greenhouse heated without a heater. Back to chicken manure. Once aged and composted, that chicken poop will give your plants a wallop. Your first year planted perennials will shout hallelujah in the next year's spring. Hot, hot chicken and horse manure will quickly break down organic stuff in the compost pile, too. Hot is good for raw materials, bad for living plants. Aged poop, in that case, is better. And aged compost containing aged poop, is excellent for living plants. Except for those plants who don't like rich soil (lavendar, rosemary, diantha, e.g.).

Dirt. Two different friends from different parts of the country have given me those little green machine embroderied pillows with the saying, Gardeners Have the Best Dirt. The oldest cat, Glendajean, likes to sleep between them. Franklin the dog chewed on the corner of one of them when he was a puppy. He doesn't do that anymore.

For those of you who live in sandy or loamy places, with arid climates, I envy you and feel sorry for you. You can grow roses without resorting to fungicides. But this is wrong. Gardening in North America, in the places where I've dipped my hands into the dirt, is a moral calling. Heat, cold and humidity, all work against the foolish human desire to edit creation and make one's own Garden Paradise. To be god-like in a way that humans think they would be like if they were in charge -- a terrible human failing. In my garden practice, I worry about using fungicide, hand pick the black spotted leaves off of the plant, carefully taking them to the trash can, try to keep all blighted leaves off the ground, and keep mulch between the plant and the soil (while being careful of not choking the plant stem with it). Of course, I find this is a losing battle and I buy Safer fungicide (supposedly less toxic) and in all this hesitation, I still get moments of raging black spot, although not as bad as when I do the totally organic hand-picking the blighted leaves technique). The defining moment was one spring visiting the rose garden at the New York Botanical Garden. The rosarians were spraying away. I meekly asked them about my organic attempts and they set me straight on the futility of keeping roses in a hot humid climate free this way of black spot.

Gardening is joy. It is bragging. It is learning humility. It is brashness. St. Augustine supposedly once uttered that if one chooses to sin, then sin boldly. This is an important commandment for the gardener. You only learn by making mistakes, by getting lucky, by doing dumb things. By getting advice from another gardener and trying it out. Once a lesson is learned, you tend not to repeat major mistakes. Gardening is hope. It is not about being afraid to work with living things.

Gardening is about dealing with the dirt. By mixing in organic matter, the soil becomes something else. Lighter and fluffier initially. But even as it settles down, it is still less dense. Roots can more easily move through it. Water drains better. Worms find things to chew on, making poop and giving the soil important nutrients for the plant.

Gardeners can be obsessive. We stop cocktail party cold with heated discussions about the value of chicken or horse manure over cow manure. (Ruminants, animals with two stomachs, bleach out a lot of important bacteria. )

It is not dewy-eyed, la-la sentimentality, like those clotted paintings of gardens and cottages one sees in the mall. People really buy that stuff?

Being a gardener leads to snobbery. That isn't a word, is it? Snobbishness? Snobbery sounds better. I don't do house plants. I don't do annuals. For years, I don't do annuals. I mellow about these things. I have red geraniums in the stone flower box along my porch. How cliched is that? I don't see the cliche when I look at them. My partner likes red flowers. I rarely plant red flowers, but for years, I try to do so around the front door area. He will see those and appreciate them.

To garden is to have an opinion, is to get beyond timidity ... my God, it requires the desire to stick your finger into the dirt on your way into a church right before a wedding to test the quality of the dirt, to smell its sweetness, to touch and feel a basic element, dirt. Gardening is dirt.

You learn to control this when you are about to go into the church right before a wedding and you realize that dirty finger nails in this God forsaken age we live in (this refers, dear reader, to our loss of connection with the cycles of the season and the daily order of sunrise and sunset, and for the innumerable ways we have to communicate, all smothering out our ability to think, to reflect, and perhaps to understand better how little we know)...where was I...yes, in this awful age, to have dirt under the finger nail is not a sign of one who has struggled with the devils, who has fought the good fight, who has lived honorably. No, dirt under the finger nails is so low down and low class, that folk will smirk. They don't understand the gift of dirt.