From the Icy Lake into the Hot Tub

From the Icy Lake into the Hot Tub

Posted by Heather Harris

Warning: This post is only very tangentially related to gardening. Authorial privilege.

This year's pumpkin haul. Not bad for not planting pumpkins...

I almost burned my house down today. Somehow I managed to go out the door with a teapot at full, whistling blast in the kitchen despite the fact that I had to walk through the kitchen to leave. Luckily, when I got to work and reached for my tea, the warning bells finally went off and I remembered the pot was now boiling dry on my power gas burner, full flames blazing. I'm a moron. And I have no excuse because I could not have possibly been distracted by thinking about work. I have the easiest class of students this year that I have ever dreamed of teaching. I hear they are the worst behaved group to menace the halls of this, my new school, in many many years. I have no idea what they are talking about. I have spent the last and only twelve years of my career teaching in Title 1 schools.

 I have seen a misbehaved group of children make a grown man quit mid-day, leaving his colleagues to wonder where he'd gone. I have seen a misbehaved group of children rip a dead bird to pieces. I have seen a misbehaved group of children tear class charts off of walls and dump a pound of glitter in the sink. I have seen many a misbehaved group, and this one doesn't even make the list, much less rank. And yet I look at my teaching partner's face and she looks nearly as distraught as I did the day a severely mistreated student bit me and clawed at my arm, while another one kicked chairs over in the room because math was hard and a third dumped hand-sanitizer over the uni-fix cubes that we were using despite the fact that he had a one-on-one aid with him.

I'm very tempted to say, "Hard?! You haven't seen anything! You should try teaching in a high poverty school and get some perspective!" But that is utterly useless advice. I'm positive that many teachers have worse stories than I do. That does not change the fact that I felt utterly defeated in my own circumstance, and that my teaching partner feels challenged in hers. All it means is that I've jumped from the icy waters of lake poverty into the warm, cozy bubbles of hot tub middle class, and I'm very concerned that jumping back into the lake later will be most unpleasant. Therefore, I must keep myself strong for that inevitable return, but how?

1, I will set things on fire at home so that I have something to worry about at work.
2. I will hike up 500 hundred feet after I drop the kids off at school and run back down the hill despite shin splints.

Rolo, one of the 4 roosters

3. I will push fifty pounds of pumpkins up the hill in the wheelbarrow with the flat tire just for the challenge.
4. I will plan a new addition to the yard that will require shoveling 5,000 tons of gravel and moving large boulders.
5. I will raise four roosters so that my neighbors will hate me and yell at me regularly.
6. I will listen to my husband's stories about his day in a high poverty school and pretend it was my day (not working)
7. I will thank God for this peaceful blessing, go down the river on my paddle board, take in the beauty around me and soak in the glory of the easiest year of teaching in my life (without a wet suit, in January...)

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.