Holy crap. January is almost over. The first month of the year that just got started is almost over.
Just a few weeks ago we made our first 2009 visit to the plots, only to discover that #2 had been mysteriously taken over. After a bit of back-and-forth, it was discovered that the garden manager had accidentally given away our plot to a newcomer! They were understanding enough to move their plantings over to some empty plots and give us back our baby. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t have been so picky but once we started grappling with this once-abandoned plot last year, we got…attached.
Which may be a little odd, because you never know what you’re going to hit when you sink your shovel into this sucker. It’s lined with concrete, you see. Concrete that’s grown jagged and worn over the years, breaking off into the soil and every now and then jutting out in huge plates not more than a foot down. You can be methodically working along the edge, turning the soil and turning the soil and turning the—CLUNK. My shoulder has cursed plot #2 more than once. And yet, that’s one of the reasons I was so reluctant to just give it up. We’d put just enough labor into it that it really became a labor of love. We’d respected its stone-cold orneriness, and it had respected ours—by giving us more beans than two human adults could possibly consume.
So it was with utter disappointment that we discovered plot #2 yanked from our clutches that unseasonably warm (70+ degrees!) second Saturday in January. And it was with utter gratitude that we turned up this Saturday to a freshly emptied plot—the newcomer had laboriously transplanted all of her misplanted starters into the plots she was originally intended to have. And thus the weekend began.
Our first move was to address the ailing first plot. Number one had been left unattended over the holidays while we headed back East, but it still had a bushy (though now dreary) sage plant, Italian parsely and some slow-growing rosemary. More importantly than those few survivors, though, was the shock of seeing a good two square feet of lush, green, fast-growing potato plants.
When we first laid eyes on them, our jaws dropped: we’d planted potatoes last spring, and they had shown real promise. But within weeks of unfolding leaf after leaf, they caught blight (does a plant catch blight? Does it contract it? Come down with it?), and had to be pulled. We dug up quite a few ultra-tiny tubers that would never get the chance to grow to maturity and I felt a twinge, thinking maybe this is what my Irish forbears felt so long ago…until I remembered that they were starving to death, and I had frigging Whole Foods down the street. Out came the potatoes, off shook the twinge.
But now, now here are plants larger and lusher than those failed starts. Springing forth from untended soil, unintended and very nearly abandoned. Who woulda thunk? And all it took was leaving the damn things alone for a while. Figures.
So on Saturday, we dropped a few starters into plot #1 (saving some for plot #2):
- Half a dozen spinach plants
- Half a dozen lettuce plants
- Four beet plants
- Three broccoli plants
I also moved the ailing sage plant, unsure if this thing was even supposed to still be around (was sage a perennial or an annual? Turns out, it’s a perennial). And today, Sunday, we spent several hours ammending the soil in plot #2, and sowing what we hope to be a ridiculously successful crop. Details on that to come…
