My 2020 garden

Each spring when I start planting my garden I have an extended bout of mild panic. Nothing will grow because I'm bad at this, is basically my fear. I've wasted a ton of time and effort, and money.

And then, magically, plants start popping out of the ground. Their first little cotyledons, many of which still have the shell of the seed attached in the beginning, burst forth like, "Here I am!" Plants in the allium family send up straight shoots, so spindly and tiny that it's hard to believe it will ever be worth eating whatever it grows into.

This year my first planted crop, peas, was a total failure. Even pre-soaking my seeds to help with germination didn't help in the least. It was disheartening, mostly because I don't know what went wrong. Maybe it was too early? I planted again and the same thing happened, though I was absolutely certain that conditions were right for peas. There were marks in the soil, so perhaps birds and beasts and bugs ate most of the seeds? I have a few very spindly, very bug-eaten plants that grew up from my crop of garden peas and that's it.

Bush peas growing in a pot I
got for free because I saw
landscapers about to throw them away.

Thankfully, that's one of the reasons I plant such a variety of seeds. My main garden peas failed, but the rest are fine. I have a small teepee structure for the sugar snaps over in my herb garden, and those are doing just fine. My snow peas are popping up in the front yard, in one of the garden boxes, and those always produce so much that we honestly have trouble keeping up with eating them. Last, this year I ordered a Tom Thumb variety of shelling pea. It's a bush rather than a vine, and only grows about a foot tall. They look to be all that they were promised, though none has started producing just yet. They don't take up much room and don't need a trellis so they've been easy to fit in among other crops, most particularly my potatoes.

I also proved to myself that row covers are very much a worthwhile investment. Every crop that I planted under a cover is doing far better than the ones that didn't have that benefit. I'm still giving some leeway due to the fact that things are in different parts of the garden--perhaps getting a bit more sun, and thus having slightly warmer soil, was also a factor. But even with that it's plain to see that the plants started under covers are far healthier and more vibrant. They have less insect damage, and more of them germinated. I still have my tomatoes and peppers under row cover, though it's warm enough to do without. I want them to get a big bigger before they have to face the scary world.

I did two different versions of a row cover this year. One was fabric over PVC pipe stuck into the ground on either side of the row, with the fabric clamped to the pipe to keep it in place. It was fussy and difficult, mostly because I didn't have enough clamps so the fabric kept separating from the frame. And it took a fair bit of time and effort to set it up. We had quite a few windy days--part of the reason I wanted a cover in the first place!--and the lack of clamps meant that I'd have to go back out to re-set things most mornings.

Row covers in the hail. You can see the pre-made cover
held up far better than my flimsy homemade one.

The other was a row cover that I purchased on clearance from a local hardware store. I so, so wish that I'd bought a few more of them! For $6, that row cover has already paid for itself. I've so far used it in four sections of the garden but there were a couple of times when I wanted it to use it in two or more places at once. The only thing I don't like about it is that it has a built-in wire frame, so it can only be so big. Several of my rows are too wide for this cover.  It's also much shorter than my PVC cover, so if I wanted to use it for season extension into the fall and winter it would have to be for short crops only. My other cover is far more modifiable, so I could even use it around the corners if I needed to, which would be harder with the pre-made cover. All in all, I'm glad that I have both. I just need to get more clamps for the homemade one.

The last change I made to my garden this year was small, but I think it's increasing my growing space by a rather incredible amount. Last year I left pathways for myself along the entire lawn side of the garden. This year I mounded up soil in what was previously pathway just about a foot deep along the paving stones, planning to plant low growing plants (bush beans, vines) that it would be easy to step over to walk between rows. It felt like such a small change when I planned it but seeing how many more plants there are in my garden this year it turns out to have been a rather major change. The vines are my pumpkins, so instead of growing all over the middle of the garden this year they will grow out into the lawn, where no one cares how much space they take up.

The Kinder Garden

When I was gleefully looking through seed catalogs at the beginning of the year I noticed a trend of seeds for tiny plants, such as those small pea plants. An idea blossomed and I asked my older daughter if she wanted to have a garden of her own this year. She jumped at that chance (mostly, I think, because it will give her an excuse to play with the hose) and we happily picked out a bunch of seeds for her. We found the pea plants, a mini bell pepper variety, and a cherry tomato--all of which only grow to be about a foot tall and are suitable for containers. We also found mini bok choy, which should only grow to be about three inches tall, and Little Finger carrots--so named because they're about the size of an adult's finger when fully mature. My kids love to snack on carrots so those will be a godsend. I can tell them to pick those all they want, whenever they want, and we should be able to get several crops of them over the summer.

Most of the garden is planted and popping up! The bare
patches are waiting for tomatoes and peppers.

The last seed that was chosen? Well. My daughter took the seed catalog to look through all of the pictures and then told me, very seriously, that she wanted one more seed for her garden. A turnip variety. Why did she want it? Maybe her tastes are maturing. Or maybe it's because they've got purple tops. Or maybe it's the fact that the little girl in the photo, about the same age as my daughter, was holding a turnip bigger than her head. That's right, we ordered a turnip variety that can grow to the same size as a pumpkin.

I can't say I blame her for her choice. I ordered an onion variety that commonly grows to about 5 lbs. so....

The Other Kinder Garden

Early this year, anxious to get outside and work on growing things, I offered to be the parent volunteer in charge of the school garden that the Munchkin's elementary. I started coordinating with interested teachers, planning out when we'd clear out plants and what we'd plant. And then this virus began ripping through our community and schools were closed. School grounds were closed.

Now, even worse, there is hunger. Food is being thrown away even as people go hungry because supply and demand are off kilter. Food banks are desperate, people are becoming desperate. The price of food is rising, which will lead to even more hunger.

My kid's school is a Title 1 school. In other words, it's a high poverty school, with much of the population receiving free breakfast and lunch. Many families go home with bags of food on Fridays to help see them through the weekend. At least one student in each class has experienced homelessness. There was need even before the pandemic caused a massive, instant recession and a catastrophic wave of unemployment. I kept looking at the headlines and the articles, then working in my own garden and thinking that there must be something I could do to help.

There is. I emailed the principal of the school and asked if I could please work on the school garden, by myself, to grow food for needy families in the area? I let her know that I'm perfectly willing to donate seeds, time, or whatever else this garden needs. And I received a yes! Even better, she mentioned this plan at a staff meeting and several teachers mentioned that they are willing to help. And best of all, someone connected with the school is on the local food bank's board, so I will have an easy way to distribute whatever food we grow to people who need it. !!!! This is a pretty incredible feeling, so much better than the hopelessness and despair that spawned my idea in the first place.

Bearded iris

The original school garden was going to be something for kids. It would grow food, yes, but that was going to be a secondary consideration after the kids' learning. Now, growing food is the name of the game. I'm able to work on maximizing food production in the garden boxes so that we can get as many pounds of food to the food bank as possible. I'll let you know how that goes when we see what results we get. Right now I can just say that if this garden matches my enthusiasm then we'll be sending many hundreds of pounds of food to help people in the community.

What am I growing this year?

Beans - Six different kinds
Peas - sugar, snap, and garden
Potatoes - Yukon gold and German butterball
Carrots - Four varieties
Turnips - The giant ones and a Japanese variety that looks like it will be my first major harvest (soon)
Zucchini
Pumpkins
Chard
Kale
Spinach
Lettuce
Corn - A different variety this year; it should be purple, and good for grinding into meal
Onions
Leeks
Tomatoes - Five varieties, plus I'm on the lookout for some paste tomatoes since my little girl
                  dumped out my seed packet of them before I got a chance to plant any
Anaheim peppers
Mini bell peppers
Bok choy
Sunflowers

Oh, is that all?

This year I also got two new blueberry bushes. The raspberries we planted last year filled in their garden boxes beautifully and are already starting to set fruit. I got more strawberries, though I'm still not expecting a big harvest of them for a few more years, and we got a grape vine, for which my enterprising spouse built a beautiful trellis. It won't produce any grapes until next year at the earliest, but as always with fruit it's more of a long-term investment.

Raspberries. We might get enough for my family's
wants this year. Maybe. Probably not.

For Christmas we ordered my brother-in-law a lion's mane mushroom kit and, while I was at it, I also ordered us a shiitake mushroom kit and spores for red wine cap mushrooms. The latter grow on wood chips and, thanks to last year's leftovers from building the garden, that's something we have in abundance. I still need to spread the spores but we should be harvesting our own mushrooms (which can grow to be 10 inches across!) for at least a few years.

I'm ridiculously proud of this
picture my kid took.

In addition to all of this, I'm continuing to plant more flowers and other interesting plants. I'm particularly interested in planting more natives to help out birds and bugs. I had a large list of plants I wanted to buy but then the pandemic hit and the rest of the world started gardening also. I'm unsure whether I want to try to get as many plants as I can this year, or wait and go for them next year when I've had more time to think about placement, and perhaps there won't be such a shortage of available plants. Perhaps, since I'm also working on the school's garden, I will hold off on many of them. The ones I did get to this year are: a honeysuckle (native variety, good for bugs and hummingbirds), a hydrangea, and a fine tooth penstemon (another native that's good for pollinators and birds). We planted more herbs (marshmallow, borage, horehound) and more wildflowers.

This year was going to be the year that we put in a greenhouse and rain barrels. I'm not sure how much of that is on hold, but I'm still hopeful that it will get done this year. We have a long, long way to go before things start feeling "right", in so many ways. And I know that a garden is always a work in progress, but each year I'm happier with how beautiful and alive my yard is.

During the pandemic

It's very strange how life is terrifying, exciting, and cripplingly boring all at once. I find myself with hours of time in which I do nothing useful, productive, or even good for myself, even while I seem to have no time to myself ever because OH MY GOD KIDS YOU'RE KILLING ME. With almost no social outlets my kids end up demanding my attention for ALL of the roughly 847 hours each day that they're awake. I have to teach the older one during the younger one's nap because there's no school, which means that I get no real breaks. I'm On all day being Mom--the carrier of all burdens, the receiver of anger and despair that come from having their world upended without the understanding that adults have. My younger one has taken to saying, "I need you, Mommy," as she holds out a grasping hand for me. I hear that dozens of times each day: "I need you, Mommy." Then they finally, finally go to sleep and...nothing. I seem to have exhausted every possible thing that I want to do. I'm weary, mentally worn out.

Learning to count by tens from a non-decade number.
This is how I now spend what was formerly my free time.

I know it's not just me. This ennui is afflicting vast swathes of the country, the world, right now. And in fact, it's such an amazing privilege to be so afflicted. No one in my house has lost a job. I'm not worried about being evicted, or where my next meal will come from. I'm not in the hospital, or on tenterhooks because loved ones are ill. No one in my house is an "essential" worker, going out every day risking their life to help others. We're not recently retired and staring at our retirement account with dismay and fear, wondering what lies ahead. I don't even have to try juggling full time work with teaching and monitoring my kids.

So, I know that whining is a privilege. Being bored is a privilege. And yet, everyone is going through pain right now and that shouldn't be dismissed either. The pain of staying at home, of enduring all of this so that we do not create a greater public risk, is something I'm willing to endure. No one on earth can make me say I do it "happily", though. Nor should we be forced to pretend it's okay. It's not. Nothing is. Not for any of us. We are all in pain. We're all feeling uncertain. Please bear that in mind when things start to get divisive, so that you can react with compassion rather than disdain.

My one lockdown relief has been to go and see my mother when I can. This is, by necessity, not a frequent occurrence. There have been weeks at a time when I haven't been able to see her at all. Video calls are confusing to her, and while she seems to enjoy my voice over the phone she doesn't verbally respond and it's awkward knowing that a caregiver is sitting there holding the phone, trying to keep her attention on the fact that I've called her, isn't that lovely! Oh don't worry, she's smiling! She's smiling to hear your voice!

Now I'm able to view her through glass like a zoo animal, to call so that I can talk to her with a wall between us. And even that is a privilege, because she's there at all. Due to many factors hers is one of the few care facilities in the Seattle are that hasn't had a single case of COVID-19. I was worried in the beginning, and I still am, that it would get to them somehow. So far, thankfully, no. As this pandemic plays out, especially as places open up and cases grow again, I doubt they will be able to keep it out forever but I'm grateful for this time we have. I was worried what the isolation would do to my mom but my semi-regular visits (with my kids playing around the small courtyard behind me) perk her up and seem to keep her grounded. It could have been so much worse. I know that, and I'm thankful every day that she's still there, that the isolation or the virus haven't gotten to her.

And so I find myself on the couch, surfing through what thing I can make next out of sourdough because I too am out of yeast and can't find more. (Admittedly, it's been over 2 weeks since we went to the store, so they might have been able to re-stock by now?) We've cleaned out and reorganized what we're going to clean and organize for now. I've gone through our supplies of food many times to figure out how many iterations of meals I can make out of it before we have to go to the store next, and how to keep my kids from rebelling because it's not food they want. To dole out the treats in an appropriate fashion to keep morale up without running out of those treats before we can get or make more. I've become bored by reading, with an attention span that of a gnat so the pile of books I've got that I was so excited to read sits there almost untouched. I can't. I just can't right now. It's either too happy or too depressing. Too real or not real enough.

I keep exercising, yes. It helps a bit. Not as much as one would hope, but a bit. Getting out for walks, runs, and bike rides. Lifting weights. Doing yoga. It gives me a small boost and helps keep me sane, keeps me from getting truly Depressed. But it can't quite calm the anxiety that's always there. I don't think I'm alone in that. It's manifesting in so many ways for so many people: eating too much, doing too much, doing nothing at all. Drinking too much is becoming a major problem, which is thankfully one path I haven't taken. I don't drink more than a few times a year socially, but a few times I've thought to myself that maybe today would be a good day to open a bottle of wine. I haven't, though, because it feels too much like drinking out of despair, when I know it won't actually make anything better. So I don't.

I've started making a rag rug out of an old flannel sheet that the dog ripped up. My grandmother would be so proud. I remember her making them in the evenings when she was watching TV. No time like extreme boredom to pull out those old fashioned skills and learn something new, right? Don't mind me channeling my anxiety over here by doing something seemingly useful that is also mindless and unnecessary. We don't need a rug. But it's something to do, something that feels valuable. Maybe that's part of why these rugs were so popular during the Depression? It gives your hands something to do without needing to really think hard about it, and adds a bit of comfort to your life when it's desperately needed. Will this rug be a work of art? Absolutely not. But will it keep my husband a bit more comfortable on winter mornings so he won't have to put bed-warmed feet onto a cold wood floor first thing every morning? Yes. Will that keep the rug safely hidden out of sight in the bedroom, so friends and family won't be forced into falsely admiring it? Also yes.

Anxiety rug in its infancy.

When my brother-in-law first heard about this project he assumed that I was just going to throw the sheet on the floor and call it a rug. Then he found out there was a method to my madness and laughingly confessed that he gave me far too little credit. "What is this, Soviet Russia? Is rug now!" I took the scraps I had at the end of braiding and handed them over in a bundle. "And here's a rug for you." I'll never let this joke die, and it's weird to think of how we'll laugh about it many years from now as one of our pandemic stories. Will we remember this time at all fondly? All the family togetherness? There have certainly been fun moments and enjoyable evenings. We've had family movie nights and family walks. We've gotten to know all the prettiest gardens in our neighborhood, to discuss the names of plants, trees, and birds so that even the two-year-old can accurately point out tulips and crows. The adults in our household are playing a turn-based computer game together, increasing the difficulty as we go. My siblings, a cousin, and I have set up a regular weekly board game over text. There have been funny movies and yes, I did even watch Tiger Kings just to see what all the fuss was about.

So it's not all bad. I brought out an old friend and started playing my violin again. I haven't had or made the time in far too long, except on a few occasions to play for my mom. Now I'm playing just for myself and it's glorious. I also have the garden, which is starting to pop up. Perennials that I planted last year are bigger and more beautiful. With fewer planes flying it's easier to stand on my back porch and listen to all the birds, who seem especially active this year. (Maybe that's just wishful thinking.)

But it's always, always got a veil of sadness over it. I miss my friends. As much as I love seeing my siblings over video chats, I miss them too. I want to give ALL the hugs, especially to my mom. It's hard to know that we don't have much time left with her and this is stealing some of that in a very real way. She doesn't always understand my words but she always, always knows who I am when I hug her.

And maybe that is the worst part, the reason for the collective funk. We won't be able to get this time with friends and family back--the missed visits, the birthdays, the laughter and hugs we would have shared. We had planned to go to a wedding in Fairbanks this summer and see friends, some of whom we haven't seen in person since we moved away what feels like forever ago. We were going to make stops to see family, spend time with cousins and great-grandparents. Will we even get to anymore? We still need to wait and see how this is going to shape up, if more lockdowns will happen as cases spike again. How many times will we be forced to miss out on important moments with friends and family? How many of our friends and family will still be there on the other side of this? There's so much uncertainty, and we can't even be there for each other except virtually. Which feels like no real way at all, when it comes down to it. That's not how humans were meant to communicate. We're missing those moments of humanity that bring us together. Life is precious. What do we do when we need to subvert our humanity to preserve lives? We have to kill part of ourselves for the greater good. It hurts. It hurts so much, but the alternatives are worse.

The twin to my sadness is anger. I'm so pissed that so many people are proving to be incredibly selfish. This selfishness has become our national identity. I'm so fed up with it. I'm so tired of trying to push back against it. I'm just so tired of it. I can't even work up a good rage because it's too exhausting. I have too much else draining my energy right now, as do most of us. But I'm still angry, and I can't seem to forgive or explain away the selfishness of my countrymen. Just as I can't say I'm happily sheltering in place, I can't say that I sympathize with the people who just want to open things up without understanding even the first thing about this illness, about the impact their selfishness is having on others. I know much of it comes from a place of (particularly economic) uncertainty. But there is a time when that is not a good enough excuse and this is it, when so many people are dying and when so many others are making heroic sacrifices to save who they can. To be selfish in the midst of a pandemic is to be the ultimate fool. My country is run by fools. We're driven by fools, who have become the loudest (if far from the largest) demographic.

I know that this is just the start. We will likely look back at our life from early lockdown and think of how lucky we were, how we didn't know just how immensely privileged we were. I hope I'm wrong about that, but the news and history are telling me that I'm not. The coming year, or more, will not be easy by any means. We're all going to need to dig deep and find reserves we never knew we had, to endure things we never contemplated. There will be a Before and After. We will be different people. But even then, I can't wait to meet you, my friends and family, all over again. To give you the hugs we've missed out on and celebrate the magnificence that is each of you. Life is precious. You are precious to me. In the meantime, we're here in our quarantine still celebrating the things that matter most. The new babies we haven't gotten to meet yet, the birthdays of people we love, wedding anniversaries and sobriety anniversaries and other happy news of various kinds. We will celebrate in a big way when we can.

Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay well. We miss you.



Edit: I wrote this piece and then, before getting a chance to publish it, received an email that one of the staff at my mom's facility tested positive for COVID-19. So I sit here with an issue Schroedinger would love: we have to assume that everyone there is afflicted and contagious until proven otherwise. My mom both is and is not in imminent peril. I don't know what more to say about this except that my waiting has become just a little bit harder.