Gardening through a Pandemic
Never before have the healing powers of gardening been so apparent. I'm out there every day, whether I have time to get anything done or not. Just to look, to smell, to touch the plants and talk to the bees. The week that things really started to get weird in our fair country, the figs were just coming into season.
I love figs, a love made that much more passionate by their scarcity. Fresh figs don't keep well, and their season is short. The only way to get a reliable supply is to have your own fig tree. I felt so lucky when I realised we had one here at the new house.
The first ripe fruit off this tree was picked by me on a beautiful sunny Spring day. I had a friend and her aunt over and I was showing them around the garden. I shared my early find with them. It was deliscious and the birds hadn't discovered them yet. It felt like an absolute luxury. How could I know that, weeks later, simply being able to share that moment with a friend would feel like a luxury.
In the early days of the lockdown (all of one and a half weeks ago but it feels longer), I would climb the fig tree daily, searching for ripe figs. It's one of the only climbable trees on the property, and tree climbing is a joy in and of itself. Here is my view, lying back on a sturdy tree branch, looking up at blue sky through fig leaves:
Lucky me, I am the only one in my household who likes figs, so most of them are eaten by me, right on the spot. Here's the one I picked yesterday. I took a bite out of it before it even occured to me to take a picture:
And yes, I have been working away on my Fall vegetable garden. Luckily I had already done my Fall seed and seedling shopping before the lockdown arrived. Almost everything is closed in lockdown, and that includes garden centeres. At first, food security was on my mind, and any setback in my gardening felt like it carried extra weight. Like the epic saga of my broccoli seedlings. First I foolishly left them where the bunnies who I share the back garden with could get to them. They ate most of the leaves, but left three seedlings unharmed. Just a few days later, I foolishly left the seedlings outside on a rainy night, and they snails got to them. The snails didn't spare any of them. But they left some of the tiniest leaves intact on about half of them. They left growing nodes on most of the rest. Only 3 were munched down to stubs. This left 9 out of 12 broccoli seedlings still with some chance of recovery.
I repotted the seedlings each into a bigger pot, and started looking after them more carefully. Plants are adaptable and as long as there are growing nodes left, there is hope. It has been fascinating to watch these seedlings slowly recover and start to thrive. At this point one is definitely ready to plant out; two others will be ready soon. Given the smallest opening, life finds a way.
The survivors:
And then there was the battle with the snails over the fate of the bok choi. I actually have less free time right now because of the lockdown. In our family bubble of three, we are missing the childcare help that is a usually a regular part of my life. So it was a couple of days between me noticing the first nibbles and finding the time to do something about it.
First I tried the diatomacious earth because it only takes a few minutes to sprinkle it on and around my plants and that's all the time I had. It immediately rained enough to wash it all away. Next I empolyed a low budget trick of converting little plastic plant pots into a little wall to place around seedlings. You simply cut the bottom out of those little pots your plants come in from the garden centre, and cut a slit down one side (this makes them easy to remove later without disturbing the plant). This is a very basic physical barrier, and of course a snail can climb right over it, but it confuses them for at least a few days, and that buys you time. My intent was to put a strip of copper tape around the tops of the little walls - a more reliable deterrant - but I couldn't find my tape and I can't exactly buy more right now.
My third effort was more time consuming but very satisfying. It's what I call my Snail Relocation Programme. It involves going out to the garden with a torch after dark and catching the little suckers in the act. I don't have the heart to kill them; I just stick them all in a bucket and set the bucket down on the side of the garden farthest from my veggies. Two or three days in a row of this and you will have caught all the main perpetrators. You can go a head and picture me with a small torch in my mouth, leaving two hand free to pick up snails caught in the act of climbing up the sides of my raised bed.
At first these ordinary little setbacks felt weighted. My garden felt so much more neccesary. But then I remembered that, let's face it, my little garden isn't exactly our main food supply. It's the source of our veggies maybe twice a week on a good week. Which is nothing to sneeze out, but it's not exactly self sufficiency. I had to remind myself once again of the main purpose of my veggie garden. It is for my health, my happiness, for the sheer joy of it. And right now, that DOES make it extra important. There are a lot of places I can't go right now, but my garden is always there for me. There are a lot of things I can't control right now, but I can always spend just twenty minutes in my garden and make a real and immediate improvement. A lot of things might be changing right now, and so much is unpredictable, but that doesn't matter one bit to my garden. Seeds still sprout and seedlings still climb toward the sun. And I can still garden, the same way I always have.
My Winter garden, so far:
That same tenacious calendula in the front left, rocket (a.k.a arugala) in the foreground, bok choi with their battlements in the back, and a few tiny beetroot seedlings hardly visible behind them.
I repotted the seedlings each into a bigger pot, and started looking after them more carefully. Plants are adaptable and as long as there are growing nodes left, there is hope. It has been fascinating to watch these seedlings slowly recover and start to thrive. At this point one is definitely ready to plant out; two others will be ready soon. Given the smallest opening, life finds a way.
The survivors:
And then there was the battle with the snails over the fate of the bok choi. I actually have less free time right now because of the lockdown. In our family bubble of three, we are missing the childcare help that is a usually a regular part of my life. So it was a couple of days between me noticing the first nibbles and finding the time to do something about it.
First I tried the diatomacious earth because it only takes a few minutes to sprinkle it on and around my plants and that's all the time I had. It immediately rained enough to wash it all away. Next I empolyed a low budget trick of converting little plastic plant pots into a little wall to place around seedlings. You simply cut the bottom out of those little pots your plants come in from the garden centre, and cut a slit down one side (this makes them easy to remove later without disturbing the plant). This is a very basic physical barrier, and of course a snail can climb right over it, but it confuses them for at least a few days, and that buys you time. My intent was to put a strip of copper tape around the tops of the little walls - a more reliable deterrant - but I couldn't find my tape and I can't exactly buy more right now.
My third effort was more time consuming but very satisfying. It's what I call my Snail Relocation Programme. It involves going out to the garden with a torch after dark and catching the little suckers in the act. I don't have the heart to kill them; I just stick them all in a bucket and set the bucket down on the side of the garden farthest from my veggies. Two or three days in a row of this and you will have caught all the main perpetrators. You can go a head and picture me with a small torch in my mouth, leaving two hand free to pick up snails caught in the act of climbing up the sides of my raised bed.
At first these ordinary little setbacks felt weighted. My garden felt so much more neccesary. But then I remembered that, let's face it, my little garden isn't exactly our main food supply. It's the source of our veggies maybe twice a week on a good week. Which is nothing to sneeze out, but it's not exactly self sufficiency. I had to remind myself once again of the main purpose of my veggie garden. It is for my health, my happiness, for the sheer joy of it. And right now, that DOES make it extra important. There are a lot of places I can't go right now, but my garden is always there for me. There are a lot of things I can't control right now, but I can always spend just twenty minutes in my garden and make a real and immediate improvement. A lot of things might be changing right now, and so much is unpredictable, but that doesn't matter one bit to my garden. Seeds still sprout and seedlings still climb toward the sun. And I can still garden, the same way I always have.
My Winter garden, so far:
That same tenacious calendula in the front left, rocket (a.k.a arugala) in the foreground, bok choi with their battlements in the back, and a few tiny beetroot seedlings hardly visible behind them.
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