(no subject)
Jun. 18th, 2007 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupLooking back now I can see that the makings of my obsession were there through a long winter of looking out the window at the scratchy stretches of weeds and dead tree branches called our yard. I hatched many plans. I plotted many schemes. This year, the yard would be conquered.
It has actually gone fairly well, all told, but the tradeoff has been that I am in the grips of some sort of mania about the yard and all things gardening. It is just about all I am thinking of. Perhaps everything else is not necessarily pleasant to think about. So the yard's tabula rasa quality became very appealing and, in the way these things happen, very expensive.
The thing about gardening and yardwork is its tremendous, deceptive simplicity. I assume that anyone from the middle class regardless of age has had the experience of digging a hole in the ground, putting in some $1.59 tomato from Stop'n'Shop into the hole, and watching it shrivel up. Next time, of course, you think you'll be more careful. Simple enough.
You might think that a little research would help, but you would be wrong. Turns out that the buy-a-hole-and-plop-it-in thing is just to rope in the suckers. The problem is not that you were careless, it's that they put the thing there at $1.59, tempting you--daring you--to fuck it up. But it turns out that one really does need an extensive education to do just about anything significant with growing plants. Just try googling "apple trees" or "pumpkin patch" and you'll see dissertations on this. Compost this and mulch that and pollinator this and spacing that. And the most important thing is timing, since you needed to have done all this months ago to have any chance of success.
So gardening is another one of those pastimes, like three card monte or politics, that was invented by little old ladies purely to fleece the casual spectator. The distance between the tag on the tree, or the text on the back of the seed packet, and what you will need to do to get things to grow, is unfathomable.
Anyway, so the results this year have been mixed. First to be dreamed about was this "middle zone" between the house and the backyard proper where the previous owner kept a woodpile. Last year I carried a cubic ton of rotten wood to my personal garbage woods behind the shed, and tried to replace it with dirt for grass seed, teaching us the lesson that this should never be done by someone without a professional grading tool. (Actually, the lesson of most adult pursuits is Just Go Ahead and Pay the Guy.)
Where the obsession part comes in is that this left a large patch of weeds that had some appeal in their sprawl. I liked the sprawl (anything but grass) but not the weeds, so conceived the idea of making a butterfly garden. After what seems like a thousand dollars later I have many pretty plants but not a lot of butterflies, since presumably those are drawn to flowers, which all had to be planted from seed, and the seed... didn't feel like coming up.
So too will probably be the fate of large garden plots that felt like I literally hewed them from the earth after many years of weedful neglect. My mother in law gave us boxes of this "flower garden in a shaker box" kind of stuff. It's amazing how similar those flowers look to the weed beds they replaced... d'oh...
So one lesson is, do not buy flowers from bloody seed packets unless you are prepared to put them in those tiny hydroponic thingees in March like a complete obsessive. Yeah, and I bought a couple of fruit trees that were probably dead when I bought them because I'm an idiot. I actually did test the soil in one area and figured on blueberry bushes, and indeed those are coming in well. I put in some raspberry and blackberry bushes and now we got a couple of lilacs and daylilies for this big empty planter we ripped out last year.
And so the thing is that you start to get this mentality of addiction where you can't go for a walk without feeling envy at every other garden in the neighborhood, you can't go to the grocery store without looking at plants, you can't go for a drive without stopping at the nursery. We went strawberry picking on Sunday and I could not get out of the place without yet another $30 of crap, because the herb garden won't be done without some lavender, and the butterfly garden could use some butterfly weed, and it just will not stop. Because no matter how much you plant, you will still have bare and weed areas that stare you in the eye every time you think you're done. And there's mulch and bricks and stupid decorative lighted fountains (this last I have resisted because I just can't justify it, but it is hard). It's this black hole of neverending home improvement projects that are small enough individually to make you think you're not spending a fortune on it all.
Which brings me back to that post of a few months ago, about how we may not be in this house forever and I secretly think that when we get it to be actually nice instead of shabby-nice, we will have to leave. My nerdly friend Richie tells me he built a whole frickin' gazebo last year. The gardening obsession is some kind of seasonal metaphor for constant domestic self-improvement efforts. It just seems very male to try to fix your world by building your way to perfection within the constraints life has placed on you. I don't like being so goddam obvious. But what're you gonna do.
It has actually gone fairly well, all told, but the tradeoff has been that I am in the grips of some sort of mania about the yard and all things gardening. It is just about all I am thinking of. Perhaps everything else is not necessarily pleasant to think about. So the yard's tabula rasa quality became very appealing and, in the way these things happen, very expensive.
The thing about gardening and yardwork is its tremendous, deceptive simplicity. I assume that anyone from the middle class regardless of age has had the experience of digging a hole in the ground, putting in some $1.59 tomato from Stop'n'Shop into the hole, and watching it shrivel up. Next time, of course, you think you'll be more careful. Simple enough.
You might think that a little research would help, but you would be wrong. Turns out that the buy-a-hole-and-plop-it-in thing is just to rope in the suckers. The problem is not that you were careless, it's that they put the thing there at $1.59, tempting you--daring you--to fuck it up. But it turns out that one really does need an extensive education to do just about anything significant with growing plants. Just try googling "apple trees" or "pumpkin patch" and you'll see dissertations on this. Compost this and mulch that and pollinator this and spacing that. And the most important thing is timing, since you needed to have done all this months ago to have any chance of success.
So gardening is another one of those pastimes, like three card monte or politics, that was invented by little old ladies purely to fleece the casual spectator. The distance between the tag on the tree, or the text on the back of the seed packet, and what you will need to do to get things to grow, is unfathomable.
Anyway, so the results this year have been mixed. First to be dreamed about was this "middle zone" between the house and the backyard proper where the previous owner kept a woodpile. Last year I carried a cubic ton of rotten wood to my personal garbage woods behind the shed, and tried to replace it with dirt for grass seed, teaching us the lesson that this should never be done by someone without a professional grading tool. (Actually, the lesson of most adult pursuits is Just Go Ahead and Pay the Guy.)
Where the obsession part comes in is that this left a large patch of weeds that had some appeal in their sprawl. I liked the sprawl (anything but grass) but not the weeds, so conceived the idea of making a butterfly garden. After what seems like a thousand dollars later I have many pretty plants but not a lot of butterflies, since presumably those are drawn to flowers, which all had to be planted from seed, and the seed... didn't feel like coming up.
So too will probably be the fate of large garden plots that felt like I literally hewed them from the earth after many years of weedful neglect. My mother in law gave us boxes of this "flower garden in a shaker box" kind of stuff. It's amazing how similar those flowers look to the weed beds they replaced... d'oh...
So one lesson is, do not buy flowers from bloody seed packets unless you are prepared to put them in those tiny hydroponic thingees in March like a complete obsessive. Yeah, and I bought a couple of fruit trees that were probably dead when I bought them because I'm an idiot. I actually did test the soil in one area and figured on blueberry bushes, and indeed those are coming in well. I put in some raspberry and blackberry bushes and now we got a couple of lilacs and daylilies for this big empty planter we ripped out last year.
And so the thing is that you start to get this mentality of addiction where you can't go for a walk without feeling envy at every other garden in the neighborhood, you can't go to the grocery store without looking at plants, you can't go for a drive without stopping at the nursery. We went strawberry picking on Sunday and I could not get out of the place without yet another $30 of crap, because the herb garden won't be done without some lavender, and the butterfly garden could use some butterfly weed, and it just will not stop. Because no matter how much you plant, you will still have bare and weed areas that stare you in the eye every time you think you're done. And there's mulch and bricks and stupid decorative lighted fountains (this last I have resisted because I just can't justify it, but it is hard). It's this black hole of neverending home improvement projects that are small enough individually to make you think you're not spending a fortune on it all.
Which brings me back to that post of a few months ago, about how we may not be in this house forever and I secretly think that when we get it to be actually nice instead of shabby-nice, we will have to leave. My nerdly friend Richie tells me he built a whole frickin' gazebo last year. The gardening obsession is some kind of seasonal metaphor for constant domestic self-improvement efforts. It just seems very male to try to fix your world by building your way to perfection within the constraints life has placed on you. I don't like being so goddam obvious. But what're you gonna do.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 06:00 am (UTC)110 degrees today.