Spring Forward

Spring has sprung and just as the days are getting longer, there seems to be even less time for me to get all my tasks for the day done. I need to not only keep up my typical daily duties like doing laundry, grocery shopping, washing dishes, changing diapers, preparing food for my family, applying for jobs, planning playdates, circuiting local parks, singing lullabies, and the endless list that accompanies entertaining a 19 month old toddler, but I have added a significant amount of other responsibilities thanks be to the season of Spring.

As a gardener, my seasonal task of planting the promise of vegetables and fruits for future harvest became a priority approximately eight weeks ago. Because I didn’t have a location to plant my seeds, preparing my vegetable bed needed to happen first. After a week of weeding, digging and designing, my bed was ready and my seeds finally found their home.

My 'keyhole' vegetable garden

This springtime, my agrarian dream of owning chickens finally came true as well. Eight weeks ago I brought home four day-old chicks to live in my home. Although I was warned by many people, I soon found out for myself how much work keeping chicks really was. After sleeping a total of probably twenty hours in one week, the decision was made to move the chicks from my bedroom to the bathroom. Traveling to Reno for Easter to visit my daughter’s grandparents also became a challenge. We ended up packing up the car with the chicks in tow. Their brooder sat snugly next to my daughter as I drove over the Sierra Nevadas through a snow storm. Although the trip back was less eventful, the task of keeping chickens became a reality check for me. My daily chicken tasks now include cleaning their brooder, giving them water and food, handling them and letting them run around outside.

Clockwise from top left: Blanche, Rose, Sophia and Dorothy

To add to all this change, I also moved the chicken’s recycled reconstructed coop to a more permanent location in my yard and I laid down sod where a garlic garden used to be. Because I had my cousin’s help for an afternoon, I was finally able to level a sloping hillside to accommodate my chicken’s future home. If digging all that dirt wasn’t enough, the following week was spent transplanting garlic and leveling the land to lay down a lawn.

Coop n Lawn

With all of these added activities which accompany the reawakening of Spring, it’s no wonder why I have been obsessed with the notion of time and perpetual change lately. Although it is easy to forget that humans follow the same rules of nature when it comes to time, I have been reminded on a daily basis how both the natural world and mankind walk hand-in-hand when it comes to change.

When I got my four fluffy, furry chicks eight weeks ago, I had no idea how fast these little birds would grow. Although each chick weighed close to nothing when I brought them home, by the second week they had doubled, if not tripled their size and weight. By the third week, my little ‘girls’ had changed from cute and cuddly to awkward and annoying. They’re feathers started to sprout first in their wings, then on their legs and back and last on their head. With every feather that emerged, the fluffy, furry down fell out. This not only caused for four funny looking birds, but a bathroom blanketed in plumage. By the fourth week, I had to warn my guests who came to visit my chicks that ‘they really aren’t that cute anymore’. These past several weeks, my ladies have out grown their brooder and I have moved them to their backyard enclosure. They are now fully feathered and are growing in their combs on their head and neck. To see something so delicate and docile grow into my now maturing matriarchs in such a short time is quite an eye opener as to how fast the ‘natural’ world develops.

My 'Golden Girls' today

Anyone who has raised a child can attest that the first year of a baby’s developmental life is both intermittent and constant. Although an infant is perpetually physically changing, it is easy to get caught up in the fact that the small creature who couldn’t hold up her head one day and was walking the next, still could not interact with you on a more intimate and social level. Around 18 months, this all changes. These past few months, my daughter has become a walking, talking, little girl with a personality all her own. She began talking and saying words that were truly recognizable only a few short months ago. I couldn’t believe my ears the day she pointed at the TV and said ‘Elmo’ as we both got our morning Sesame Street fix. What started with a red furry monster soon became a recital of most everything around her. She can now recognize colors, shapes, and letters and verbalize what they are to you. When I ask her a question she now answers with a short ‘no’ or drawn out ‘ye-aah’ and I think she actually understands what they mean. Because singing and dancing are an essential part of our life, she often stops whatever she is doing if any hint of music trills by and puts on her ‘maniac’ moves. (Imagine the song ‘Maniac’ and the dance that accompanies it in the film ‘Flashdance’.) Not only is this outburst of energy adorable, it is contagious as well. Although she has yet to carry a tune when we sing together, she is quite the pro at doing the hand gestures to the ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, ‘Patty-Cake’, ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’, and we’re now working on ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’. I know I can go on and on describing how this little girl has grown, but I will end by describing her newest facial expression when you do something she doesn’t like or understand. Her little mouth (now filled with 15 pearly whites) opens slightly, as her eyes open wide and her brows furrow in an almost a perfect imitation of her mother. How can one keep a straight face when confronted with such awe?

Poppy drawing her many 'happy' faces

One of the many lessons I have learned studying the land is that humankind often tries to separate themselves from the ‘natural’ world or the land itself. I am reminded that this is notion is futile every time I look at my growing chickadees, both bird and human. Although my chickens and daughter are maturing at a different pace, they are both tied to a world in constant flux. This evolving world binds us to nature and nature is always a part of us.

As this season passes all too fast, I look forward to the summer sun (and fog) and to the ever-changing world around me. I will grow with nature as my garden begins to bear fruit, as my chickens begin laying eggs, and as my daughter speaks her first sentence. I would like to encourage similar thoughts as you escape into ‘nature’ this summer as well. Whether you are hiking a trail above timberline in the Rocky Mountains or biking through busy downtown San Francisco, remember that you are nature and so is everything else around you.

The Power of Patience

This past week was rough. It started out fine enough with a wonderful Valentine dinner with my man and delightful day with my daughter, but the next day, all the hearts and warm fuzzies were clouded over with the dark dread of debt depression. My car got towed.

If you drive in San Francisco and you haven’t had your car towed, consider yourself lucky. There really is nothing worse than getting ready to leave the house for an anticipated destination, then walking to where you parked the car two days before, only to find that your car is no longer there. Add a fussy baby to this equation and you can very easily imagine what hell must be like. Of course, my day of purgatory did not end there.

To try and save you from too many horrid details, I will offer you a brief summary. First, I had to break the bad news to the bread winner of the house knowing that we were already low on financial funds. He did not take it well. Feeling beyond guilty, I offered to go and find the car. I tried to not seem too distraught on account that my daughter would be joining me for the bus ride to the tow lot in the Tenderloin. I told her with tears in my eyes that we were going on a ‘fun adventure’. The bus ride was an adventure, all right. Fun, no. The bus we were on ended up getting in an accident and although my daughter and I were fine physically, I was mentally aghast when I was told to leave the bus and wait twenty minutes for the next one to arrive. Twenty minutes with an irritable toddler in the Tenderloin is something I don’t even want you to imagine. After getting on the expectant second bus, I’m embarrassed to admit that I missed the stop I was supposed to get off at. Although I was only three blocks away from my final destination, toting a toddler that distance without a stroller is a true test of tenacity. We finally got to the towing facility and I faced the fact that my fate of the day was not going to get any easier. I’m not sure how long I waited for my exuberant transaction to transpire, but I will tell you that I was glad I spent the extensive time in a sequestered cell of a room because my little one couldn’t escape easily. Although our car was finally freed from the facility and both my daughter and I made it home before bedtime, the rest of the week has been dampened by this dreadful predicament of debt.

The reason I am letting you in on the details of my dramatic day/week is not because I want your sympathy, but because I find it funny that I was planning on writing about patience for a while now and it has been patience that has kept me sane during the past week. It’s quite curious how coincidental the world works, isn’t it? Because my patience has paid off and I ended my week on a positive note by planting the perennial vegetables I purchased before my week of woe, I guess I can let you know that the original title for this post was going to be: The Patience of Planting Perennial Vegetables.

Although I have been gardening, quite honestly, for as long as I can remember, I have never planted a perennial vegetable before. What makes a vegetable perennial is that unlike its more common brother, the annual vegetable, the perennial vegetable does not die after harvesting the fruit. The perennial vegetable, you could say, is a year-round responsibility. Although this permanent garden fixture sounds great at first, there is one big downside to the perennial vegetable: It usually takes two to three years before you can harvest any fruit! So, like my terrible towing experience, patience is the key when it comes to growing this slow-to-mature plant.  

For years now, I have been dreaming of planting one particular perennial vegetable: asparagus. But every time I thought of the timely investment I had to put into this plant, I quickly changed my mind about starting my own bed of these springtime shoots. I guess it didn’t seem possible to wait two or three years before I enjoyed my first harvest. To put it simply, I just didn’t have the patience.

Obviously, something changed this past year because I was finally ready to put my time in for my aspiring asparagus. I can’t really put my finger on why I now have more tolerance for time, but I’m sure it has much to do with becoming a parent. As this last week can attest, being a mom requires an infinite amount of patience.

So as a patient mother, I took the time to prepare my asparagus bed by first weeding, then turning the soil, and lastly amending the soil with some compost. I carefully set my crowns of asparagus in a well tended trench and covered my crop with what was left of my compost. I will continue to cultivate my crop until the time comes for me to cut each long awaited sweet chartreuse shoot which emerges from the earth.

It is with this patience that I plant my other permanent perennials as well. In two years time, I will not only be parenting a preschool age child, but preparing to harvest my flavorful flowers of artichoke, my tangy twigs of rhubarb, and of course, my long awaited asparagus. And I must remember this bounty I will bear the next time my day dips downward because with patience, something positive will always prevail.

My asparagus trench, artichoke transplant (bottom) and my Poppy 'seedling' (my daughter).

Pruning

A week ago, I took a pruning class at a local community demonstration garden. This educational class not only gave me more confidence in pruning, but it also inspired me to get back into gardening after my winter days of waiting. Because of this class, I now have a beautifully trimmed Camellia tree in my backyard and a new insight on how pruning can metaphorically influence me as a landscape designer.

Although the dictionary defines the act of pruning as cutting or lopping ‘superfluous or undesired twigs, branches, or roots from’ a plant, I would advise that there is much more to pruning than just this. As my instructor taught me, pruning is not only the act of trimming unnecessary branches and twigs, but of aesthetically and spiritually ‘shaping’ the plant as well. Although I can go on for days about how all these pruning concepts can be transferable to the landscape, I will try to limit this rant to the basics.

When pruning, a ‘good start’ is to look at the ‘3D’s’ of the tree or shrub you are to trim. These branches include the 1) dead, the 2) damaged and 3) dysfunctional. Because the first two characteristics are pretty self explanatory, I’ll divulge on the latter. What makes a branch dysfunctional is that it is not promoting to the function of the plant. If a branch is crossing over another, it may be deemed dysfunctional because it is taking light, water and space for growth from the other branch. Hence, that branch should be pruned. This sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. When two or more branches are crossing, the pruner has to decide which branch is better fit to serve the function of the plant. Wow. I now understand why I was intimidated for so many years when the topic of pruning came up in the garden. How do you know which branch will serve the plant best? What if you pick the wrong branch? What if you make a mistake? Well, as I quickly learned while pruning my Camellia, mistakes happen and inevitably you will choose the wrong branch to cut. I will not go into how devastated I was when I cut the wrong branch on my Camellia, but I will tell you this: I learned that the flaw I created not only extenuated the adaptability of the shrub, but my own flexibility as well. The Camellia quickly showed me that the hole I created with my trigger happy pruners could be filled by another branch and all I had to do was encourage that branch to fill it.

An 'after' photo of my Camellia (I forgot to take a 'before', but try to imagine a big ball of a bush.)

I hope I haven’t lost you in all this talk of cutting, crossing and Camellias, because I would now like to explain how the concepts of the ‘3Ds’ are transferable to the landscape. Unlike an artist approaching a blank canvas, the landscape architect; designer; gardener never gets to start anew. No matter how empty or unused a landscape may seem, it is part of an evolving, living world that is anything but blank. With this in mind, the architect or designer must look at the landscape and see what may be 1) dead, 2) damaged and 3) dysfunctional.

As with pruning, finding the dead and damaged material of the land is not a difficult task. But how does one decide what is dysfunctional? If you have ‘weeds’, are they serving a purpose, a function in the landscape? Are they taking light, water and space from another ‘branch’ or plant in your garden? If your answer is yes, then maybe the weeds need to go. This is a simple example, like an easy to see branch that needs to be pruned, but like the shrub, not all dysfunctional ‘branches’ in the landscape are so easy to fix.

In my yard, there are many dysfunctional characteristics, but one, not so simple to solve is the overabundance of shrubs and trees crowding the yard. Because there are so many woody plants, the very large yard, seems to be dwarfed by their numbers. So, what am I to do? Should I immediately plan to remove plants that are not promoting to the function of the yard? And how do I deem which plants those are? This is where I think I will take the advice of my pruning instructor and ‘start small’. Instead of going in and looping down random trees, I think I will start by pruning each tree and shrub. By doing this, maybe I can start to see if each plant serves a function in the yard.

Like I learned while pruning my Camellia, I know that as I move forward as a gardener and landscape designer, I will inevitably make mistakes. Although the land is just as adaptable as my pruned shrub, I must remember to look and see what the landscape has to offer before deeming too much unnecessary. Whether this is in my own backyard or a large public park, I must also try to be just as flexible as the land I encounter.