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Payne’s North Hours
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Rand Lee
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Rand Lee
Payne's Nurseries
and Greenhouses
Errors of the Spring
By the time you read this, I’ll have moved into new digs in a little village 30 minutes from Santa Fe. It’s very, very quiet out here. The converted trailer where my husky, cat and I are now ensconced is surrounded by old piñon trees, through which the mountain breezes sigh fragrantly. And the red hill clay, which is what passes for soil around here, is a superhighway of animal tracks: coyotes, rabbits, local dogs, mountain jays, and human trespassers.
Gardening here is going to be a bit of a challenge. (Isn’t gardening a “bit of a challenge” everywhere? That, some say, is what makes it fun.) The clay, being clay, is nutrient-rich — it’s especially rich in iron, which is what makes it red — but pretty low in organic matter, except in the piñon grove, where it is covered with a duvet of old rotted pine needles. I’ll need to dig lots of compost and dried poop into my beds before I do anything else.
And of course, all the edibles and ornamentals that I plant will act as flashing neon signs shouting “EATS! EATS! EATS!” to every Ninja bunny lurking in the underbrush. (That’s why the Good Lord made chicken wire fencing.)
The one thing I shouldn’t have any problem with here, if I’m careful, is water. What with our wet winter, and the delightful little river that bisects our town, the water table is pretty high. We’re on a deep well, too. My gentle, softspoken landlord said, “I used to have a big garden here. Corn didn’t do so well, or fruit trees, but I had lots of peas and radishes.”
I hope I won’t make the same mistakes I made twenty years ago, when I first moved to Santa Fe. I had experienced gardening in the tropics, in the moist acidic Northeast, and in Ireland, but never in the arid Southwest mountains. So I had no idea what I was doing when I hacked holes in the rockhard clay of my rented yard, shoved in some gallon lavenders, threw in some mushroom compost, mixed it with the coarse clay chippings, watered once or thrice, and forgot about the poor ‘Munsteads’.
Of course, what I should have done, was prepare the soil bed to the depth of 2 feet, removing the clay and mixing it on the side with up to 1/3 sand or pea gravel (lavender prefers well-drained soil) and 1/3 compost (not mushroom compost, which is mostly peat moss — a nonrenewable resource that adds zero nutrients to the soil — but manure compost, i.e., animal poop plus rotted veggies, which is Yum City for the soil microorganisms that all plants need to digest the nutrients in clay soils). Then, after returning the soil mixture to the bed, I should have dug holes for each lavender bush 3 times the width of their root-balls and 6 inches or so deeper, made a little mound of soil at the center of each hole, gently spread their roots over the mound, and backfilled with the soil mixture I excavated from their hole. And then I should have watered each bush, gently, letting the water settle the earth in each hole, not tamping it down with my foot (and thereby
driving the air out of the dirt and endangering the roots with suffocation). That’s what I should have done.
But I didn’t. And there they were, still thriving 17 years later, looking 300 years old, each sporting about a billion fragrant purple flower spikes last summer. Beginner’s luck; I’ll miss them. But maybe the folks who get the house after the landlord rehabs and sells it will appreciate them.
Or maybe not. Maybe the new owners will dig them up and plant rhododendrons in their place. Which will die, swiftly. That’s okay, though. Everything dies sooner or later. And everything lives sooner or later, somewhere in the garden, if you keep at it long enough, and with enough love, and read enough books, and pester your nurseryfolk with enough questions. Because gardening, though it is said to be an art, and said to be a science, is neither and both. At root, it is an act of love, and like all acts of love is often clumsy, messy, impetuous, ill-informed, ill-considered, and sometimes, in the end, futile. But who can live without at least attempting to love? And who can live without at least attempting to garden? Not I.
Copyright 2007 Rand B. Lee.
