Scenes from Septembers
Get in losers we're doing a fall garden tour
Let’s take a tour of the September garden, shall we? The last time I did one of these was in May, and boy oh boy is it a whole different can of beans over here. Plant anarchy is in full swing, by which I mean the seeds I have sown have gone far beyond me and my pretensions of control.
I injured my back pretty badly at the beginning of August - horrible, extremely painful spasms in my lower back that got me real close to fainting in my doctor’s office. I’ve been going to PT twice a week since, and even though I’m mostly back to normal activities my physical therapist advised staying away from weeding due to the strain it puts on the area that was injured. It’s just in the last couple days I’ve started to return to it, and, well - it’s pretty jungly over here.
So I’ve just been letting it go. More accurately, I have been practicing letting it go. The injury coincided with reading a lot of Anne Helen Petersen on de-optimization (and how gardens are a great place to practice it). I’ve been trying to - this is always the fucking work, isn’t it - I’ve been trying to switch the mindset from only seeing what needs to get done - what I’ve been failing at - to feeling gratitude for what’s here already. Because so much is here and it frankly doesn’t need me very much at all. Each plant is the protagonist of its own story, even if the whole feels cacaphonous to me.
The bindweed has grown into plush, green carpet over everything and I make my little game paths through the corners of former garden beds because my former garden paths have been rendered impassable by thriving ground cherries and squash who can’t be told a single thing about where their bed ends and the rest of the garden begins.
I eat handfuls of sungold cherry tomatoes every day and cannot keep up with them. Even though I dutifully and carefully tied my tomato plants as they grew, one row of tomatoes recently broke its top string just from the weight the plants and their fruits leaning over it. Such fruitfulness! Such vigor and will to live!!
I make rose hip syrup and roasted tomato sauce and I put okra in everything. The goldenrod keeps goldening.
We are still technically in drought conditions so I make the weekly-ish rounds to water my fruit and nut shrubs, the nascent food forest. I sit in the still-dewy grass and watch the small, smooth stream of water fall into the same spot as I control its flow from the watering can, transfixed, watching the light catch the water, letting it be like walking a labyrinth, letting it be a meditation.
The asparagus have all leafed out in their fern-y, frond-y way and are all leaning over with their little red round seeds like Christmas ornaments on Charlie Brown’s sad tree. The bindweed reaches up and twists itself around the ends of the asparagus tendrils and tries to climb by pulling it further down - despite the instructions not to weed I make stops to swipe briefly at these diabolical designs, pulling out the offending climbers.
The monarch caterpillars have absolutely decimated the milkweed I planted this spring, with some help from some hungry wascally wabbits who are still up to their old tricks. Every day I check on them and move one or two stripe-y bois to more established milkweed that’s sprouted up in other pollinator patches around the yard. I keep an eye out for the gold seam on the milky blue-jade chrysalis, the gold seam that holds the world together.
The grasshoppers are getting huge and leaping at or near me when I water, startling me every time. The cicadas are starting to slow down - we’ve started to see dead ones, or slowly crawling ones around the yard, their time of emerging from the ground and screaming is coming to the end of its cycle for the year as all things do. There is still so much singing in my yard.
I acquire a five-gallon bucket full of rabbit droppings which as far as I’m concerned are pure gold. Rabbit poop is one of the few animal manures that is considered “cold,” i.e., it does not have to be further composted in order to be safe to put on your garden as a fertilizer. This gift has been bestowed on me by my friend Candice’s rabbit Miles - the only wabbit who is not wascally as far as I’m concerned. Candice calls it “Miles’s offerings” which I love very much.
I have been very lucky to have a stream of friends coming out to visit this summer - no small feat given the distance to major airports - and it swells my little heart to show people who were part of other seasons of my life how I live now. Abby visited this last weekend - I have known them since we were eighteen years old which is now more than half of our lives ago. The lives we live now would be unfathomable to those eighteen year-olds.
We sit in the garden on our butts (to protect our backs, which feel much older than we are), pulling bindweed and talking shit for hours. We throw some fall crops in the ground - tender greens and collards to complement the sprawling squash. Are we in the early Septembers of our lives? Not necessarily in terms of age relative to the average human lifespan, but also the feeling - the mildness, the willingness we are trying to practice of just letting things go, each in our own ways.
What is your garden growing? What are you tending this September? Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear about it.
What I’m Working On
Doing a plant list for my pal on the west coast who just returned after living out of state for a few years. She has a green thumb but a very hectic job so I’m developing a native plant list and some design ideas for the specific issues in her yard: soil that is likely contaminated by a nearby factory that leaked carcinogens for decades, recent fruit tree death (due to some planting issues by the house’s previous owner) that led to the ground being fully exposed in the summer sun, and the extremes of Pacific northwest weather which include near-constant rain and cloudy skies for months that give way to hot hot summer sun for months. So these plants need to be resilient in a few different ways! I’ve been really enjoying working on it - every yard has its own set of challenges and the soil remediation component of this one has been genuinely fascinating.
As always, thanks for being here.
I wish I could post a picture of Miles here!!