A Tale of Two Gardens

A Tale of Two Gardens

Posted by Heather Harris

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

I'm pretty sure when Dickens started to write the first lines of a Tale of Two Cities it was late August because never have his words rung truer to me than right now. I just spent the last week at "New Teacher Orientation". After 10 years of teaching I'm starting all over again. Yay? This meant that for three days straight, I was engaged in a never ending loop of the exact same one minute conversation each time the "Facilitator" cheerily said, "Find someone at a different table to share your thoughts with!" Each conversation went something like this:

Me:"Hi, I'm Heather."
 Teacher:"Hi, I'm _______ from_____ "(some exotic state like New Jersey)
 Me:"Awesome."
Teacher:" Is this your first teaching job?" (code for "Do I need to worry about you being better than me or are you a loser first year teacher?)
Me: I taught two years in Hawaii and eight years in Hillsboro (take that!)
Teacher: "Oh, Hawaii must have been awesome!"
Me: "Well it was challenging but rewarding" (code for, " I don't have enough hours in the day to explain that place to you, you silly person.)
Teacher: "What do you teach?"
Me: "Kindergarten"
Teacher: "Ohhhhhh." (Simpering sweet cooing sounds)
Me: Pray to God we're moving on to the next activity.

This was repeated at least 380 times during the three days and every single person Ooohed or Aaahhed  patronizingly when I mentioned I teach kindergarten. Now I never took the position for any sort of social or vocational standing. I know its a challenging, great job, with little societal merit, but do I need the cutesy sigh? I contend that I do not. The kids are cute, the job is not. Now don't get me wrong, the rest of the training was awesome, and I feel like it's the greatest district I've ever worked for already. But who likes meeting new people, especially colleagues, for three straight days?


The end of August is when I am reminded that I'm no longer a full time gardener, blissfully planning my day around mowing, weeding, hedging and harvesting. I am now a teacher, attempting to wrap my head around the needs of my students, family and garden all at the same time. The garden however, decides that this is exactly the time of year to pump out enough vegetables to feed the whole block. All of my hard work has come to literal fruition, but I'm too dang busy to enjoy it. Instead I frantically pluck beans, slice off zucchinis, and wrench tomatoes from the vines, tossing them into the fridge or onto the counter, hoping that somewhere between my cookie social, the kids' open houses and Greg's registration night I'll find time to preserve a hundred pounds of tomatoes.  Is it really possible that one week ago I was camping along the Clackamas with nary a care in the world? August...It's the best of times, and its the worst of times...

Rumspringa

Rumspringa

Posted by Heather Harris

I have returned from a week of camping in the high desert of Oregon, just long enough to let my garden shake of the minimal control I exert upon it and enjoy a rumspringa of sorts, under the lax care of a middle schooler.  She was given instructions to water every other day, and leave the rest to me when I got home. Before leaving, I carefully picked any zucchini that were bigger than a matchstick, harvested all the beans, chopped down the kale (again), plucked any tomato that looked close to red, and nestled everything on the top of my 120 quart cooler for a brutal week of being pummeled with ice, crushed by hunks of bloody meat, and exposed to 100 degree blasts of dry desert air. Not exactly the storing method recommended in any gardening book. As I left, the tomato vines were securely lashed to their cages, weeds had been exterminated, and all the greens were razed.

Turns out it was a hot week at home, and my middle school hire was very effective with a water hose. Not only was everything still alive ( even my hanging basket with lobelia!) and twenty times its original size, but there were things growing that I did not plant. Well, didn't really plant. I realize that I have always given the impression that I am a carefully detailed and exacting gardener (ha), but you will be surprised to note that I do a lot of my gardening on accident. Despite the fact that I read all kinds of advice on growing vegetables, I rarely intentionally follow any of it. If it seems too elaborate of a technique (for me anyway), I check nature. For example, " Tomatoes prefer to be watered from the ground. Their leaves do not like to get wet." Really? Since when does the rain burble gently up from the ground, considerately avoiding the delicate leaves of a tomato? Most of the time I just forget the multiple steps suggested to me in the literature, and do only the parts I can recall. After all, I'm not trying to make a living or survive the winter. (Thank God.)

The success I do have is generally accidental. This year, most of my real planning was centered around aesthetics. I put nasturtiums on four sides of my center boxes so that they would spill out and surround the little bistro table. I planted scarlet runner beans so that I would have red flowers climbing the birch trellises that I made this winter. I planted pink zinnias and sunflowers to break up the green. As luck would have it, these lovely flowers were placed in the same plots as my zucchini, which require pollinators to take the male pollen to the female flowers. Hummingbirds and bees are joyfully skipping from flower to squash blossom.







I also like to bury things in the winter and see what pops up when it gets warm. I often forget that I've done this. Apparently I chucked a few pumpkins in the large bed after Halloween because I now have huge pumpkin vines wending their way through the cherry tomatoes, that I also did not plant, supported by the sunflowers that I selected for their deep magenta color. In fact, I inadvertently planted potatoes, dug them up, planted lettuce in the bare spot, and then grew giant pumpkin leaves to protect them from the hot August sun. Now if someone in a book said, "Plant a rotting pumpkin in November and bury a few moldy cherry tomatoes, then plant Yukon gold potatoes in February, plant a sunflower seed in the middle of the plot in June, dig up the potatoes in July and plant some lettuce," I never in a million years would have tried it out. But it turns out I have this crazy little ecosystem pumping out vegetables all by accident.

So, if I can grow all of this stuff by only paying attention to beauty and experimentally burying rotting stuff, you too can pick what you like to do in the garden and politely nod your head to all of the advice with three hundred steps to success, and then merrily go your own screw ball way. You will surely grow something.