Rain, dammit!

“And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.”

- Edward Thomas, Sowing

The rain is coming. Not yet, but soon. The bird feeders are dry and filled to their brims yesterday, already half full. Before the rain, I have to give everybody a drink of water (there’s no such thing as a gentle “soak”) so the ground softens enough to open and drink when the rains finally arrive. If I don’t gently hand-water a bit first, the first rain just makes the surface of the dry dust damp. The first water to fall from the sky rolls off my dry yard like a duck’s back, right down the storm drains.

So I go outside to water before it rains. The birds resentfully quit the bird feeders at my approach. Some of them are too fat to stand on the dainty feeders and, like the plump morning doves (aka, hobo chicken) who are content to forage on the ground below the feeders. The wren pictured here is actually too obese to feed from the hanging feeders . The morning doves also waddle around, sorting through the sunflower hulls for any dropped seeds.

In early spring rains, the seeds who have escaped the birds begin to sprout. I’ve sometimes managed to transplant the fragile sprouts into a sunnier spots where they survive and prosper. I’ve never had much luck buying sunflower seeds and attempting to cultivate real live sunflowers. Which is a shame, because I love sunflowers. Big, gaudy, and vulgar like their humble beginnings as subsistence food for poor farmers. Now the darlings of the Farmers’ Markets, the icon of the Art Nouveau which was beginning to fade and be eclipsed by Art Deco about 100 years ago. I insist that I liked sunflowers when I was poor, before they became trendy and sustainable and green and junk.

Some day, I will stumble my way into the perfect combination of sun, soil and rare rain to cultivate wildly successful sunflowers. My timing is also probably off, a sad metaphor for my gardening skills in general. I am the Almost Gardener, who may insist on not remembering all the right botanical names, but I garden for love and for physical and mental therapy, and probably enjoy it all the more because it relives me of my obsessive need to name what I see.

But someday, I will grow sunflowers deliberately. Meanwhile, my yard is overrun and run amok with mint: the perfect barometer of my measure of care in the yard. I practice gardening like a clinical drug trial doing the LD50 phase. This means the dose at which 50% of the patients die. I probably am doing better than 50-50 these days, but it was not always so.

One day, I will all arrive at the exact right time and deliver the exact right dose of all the ingredients needed to grow monster sunflowers. But first, let’s have some rain, dammit!

Strange Days Indeed

There's always something cooking and nothing in the pot.
They're starving back in China so finish what you got.
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama.
- John Lennon, Nobody Told Me

After Johan Wolfgang Goethe finished a book about his theory of the metamorphosis of plants, he said, "The happiest moments of my life were experienced during my study of the metamorphoses of plants, as the sequence of their growth gradually became clear to me.” Turns out, his unproven theory was crap, and contemporary botanists ignore it.

Which just shows to go that happiness and ignorance are not incompatible, and which further supports my own unproven theory that even if your understanding of nature is misguided and wrong, you can still derive satisfaction from messing around in a garden. I had some success with sunflowers this year, but I’ve got no theory to explain why so few germinate. Most peculiar, Mama.

Then, there’s the theory about the starving children in China that Lennon used to support his theory that we’re living in strange days.

Some years ago, I worked in a research institution where I met a Chinese postdoctoral fellow who was my age. We had obtained a 2-year visa for her to work in our institution, but she had to leave her husband and 2-year-old daughter behind as hostages to guarantee her return. As we became acquainted, we learned to our mutual surprise, that her parents had told her to clean her dinner plate because it was wrong to waste food when there were children starving in America.

Another theory bites the dust – unless you interpret her experience to support my suspicion that parents the world over employ fear and hyperbole shamelessly to keep their kids in line.

My potato vines are dying – just as they’re supposed to do when the potatoes are ready to harvest. I am reluctant to dig them up because I have a volunteer pumpkin that sprouted from the compost used to grow the potatoes. The pumpkin is white, and I’ll steam it, scoop out the meat, mix it with brie and breadcrumbs, some eggs and cream and bake it in the pumpkin shell into a yummy soufflé. There will be no need for threats to assure we’ll finish it.

So, today’s rather disjointed lesson is that I can enjoy my garden even though my composting skills are rough, and my knowledge of potato cultivation is rougher. And, as strange as it seems, Mama, when parents threaten their children to make them clean their plates, they’re just trying to warn kids that there will, indeed, be days like these.