Seeds have taken root

 

I cannot stop gardening.

We are in the dogs’ days of summer and the early spring cold crops – radishes and beets and lettuces – are coming to an end. Not a necessary end; only that I’m tired of eating and harvesting and cleaning and re-seeding them. Still, today I re-seeded a bed a fast-growing green vegetable for September. I can’t stop.

Their maturity in the early fall will take my focus, from the bright, young, early hunting season, from the immediate concern of firewood and winter weathering. I can foresee it. I can just tell. I’ll be composting and bulbing and pruning.

It’s high summer and the tomatoes are just blossoming, their yellow blossoms crying small and wide. I tend to them. I tend them with pollinating by hand, guiding the stems and branches as they grow so fast and heavy; by pruning, fertilizing, side-dressing, mulching, staking and stabilizing.

The beans are struggling, but they will come. And when they come, they come fast. Blueberries seem sensitive to too much water. The raspberry stalks are burdened by great ripening fruits at their high end. The peas and brussels sprouts, rutabagas and turnips have lushed, and sown too close, have grown to a point of lesser returns. I am subject to the law of diminishing returns: the longer one lives, the less one grows. But I cannot thin them now. I cannot thin them: tall, aged, developed-up, though they are misshapen and diseased and undeveloped downward, for lack of love or too much.

I cannot stop husbanding trees, fruit trees and blossoming trees.

Sometimes it takes willpower to not check on their progress for a few days, even though progress is slow. Sometimes I wish I could go away for a year or three and come back to them new – them older and taller and thicker and more beautiful in the spring and productive in summer, and hardy and dignified in fall and winter. But I cannot go away. It takes will to stay away for just a day.

I count compulsively. I count how many inches the seedling spruce and pine have grown, the volume of the bushy baby cedars. I count the first fruit from a young apple or pear or cherry.

I add up in consecutive years. This year I count nothing on two young pears that fruited first the last year or two. I count fewer on a Whitney crab than last year.

I number the lower branches to be pruned later during hibernation. Hibernation is a blackness for the trees. Their hibernation is not a great respite for me.

I cannot stop growing flowers and creating flowerbeds. Annuals and perennials, wild or bred, gentle pollinators and ornamentals. More seeds, I say to myself, must be the answer. In a game of percentages more seeds must be sown.

More sun so the roses – the meadow roses and varietals – will come greener and pinker and oranger and redder and more salmon. More sun for the daylilies so they may flower and divide.

More water for the irises and transplanted peonies. More temperance though for the lilacs. More time on the pansies because they respond to care. More support for the coneflowers and daisies as their blooms bend their stems.

People ask these days, these years, about fishing and deer hunting, about fly-tying and painting, about paddling and backpacking. I answer ambivalently: I’m not passionate about them.

“It’s not about passion,” my brother replied mysteriously.

No. It’s about possession: being unwantedly possessed to an extent that I dream of land where gardening is impossible. A country bone-dry and sterile. A yard made of stone or metal. To be forced to stop doing something I cannot stop doing to myself.