When I first moved to Maryland almost ten years ago, a neighbor came over to introduce himself, talk about how to eat a blue crab (he was a Joppatowne boy) and to tell us very seriously, that if we didn’t like the weather it was okay – we could simply wait ten minutes and it would change. His wife, observing my frenzied digging in the back yard, then informed us that there was no point in planting a big garden, because the state had been in drought for the last three years and I wouldn’t be allowed to water it. Well, I didn’t listen. I couldn’t. Fresh from the confines of container plantings in the suburbs of London, I went crazy over an American small town lot that promised all the green beans, cucumber and tomatoes we could comfortably munch. And as it was, I lucked out. The summer boasted high amounts of rainfall that bolstered dry reservoirs and encouraged my emerging green beans to undreamed of heights. Looking back on it, I’m ashamed to say that a smirk of superiority hung daintily around the corners of my mouth that season.
And then the next summer came. And granted, it wasn’t ten minutes later, but things had certainly changed. The season was drier, the plants not as robust, and the sun beat through my hat and burned the back of my neck. The timing of plantings was off this time – killing frosts made me reclassify the previous year’s successes as accidental. A freak windstorm blew down all of my pole beans and ripped the rose trellis off the house. The smirk of superiority slowly shrunk with the dwindling reservoir levels; the only thing growing well was a bushel basket of humble with which to make a very large pie.
I’ve gained a great deal of knowledge since that summer. If you ask, you are unlikely to get exact planting dates from me anymore. Instead, I will quote ranges for everything from a green bean to a line of kale, and tell you to have your frost protectors standing by in June. For one thing hasn’t changed over time; or rather it has, continuously – the weather.
A good gardener…a great gardener, can do everything right and reap nothing but a trip to the farmer’s market with empty basket in hand – all because of this mysterious element we call ‘the weather.’ One year you may plant early tomatoes in March and have a bumper crop, perhaps two. The next year you will plant according to the timetables in May, with plenty of leeway for Mother Nature, and end up with shriveled stems in various shades of brown after a particularly cruel and inconsiderate frost.
It happens to the best of us. A week ago my husband was getting ready for bed, and as he set out his clothes for the morning, he casually mentioned that he had scraped frost off the car windscreen the morning before. I utterly panicked. I hadn’t been down to the vegetable beds that day, I hadn’t inspected the basil pots, and smack in the middle of May, my senses weren’t keyed to the possibility of a killing frost. Headlamp on head, slippers on feet, and extremely annoyed, I went down to the garden beds at 10:30 at night to discover that yes, my basil was on the critical list and liable to be finished off by morning, and that once again, I had fatally misjudged the weather.
The next morning my mother called from California to tell me it had snowed the night before and her tomatoes had gone to live with the angels.
So what does a gardener do when he or she has done everything right and everything goes horribly wrong? What to do when you wait till the absolute “best” time to plant your peppers and we suffer through an unseasonably long stretch of summertime cool? When you’ve spent hours wrapping your zucchini stems in tin foil to thwart the dreaded squash borer and that year just happens to be the year of the squash bug? There is self-recrimination of course – but it’s never very helpful. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, is all very good in hindsight, but there are some things you just can’t see coming. Don’t be too hard on yourself.
The weather is changeable, whether we live in Maryland, Oklahoma, California or Nairobi – and sometimes there is nothing to be done but roll one’s eyes as one is rolling with the punches. Forget about frosts – what about floods or high winds? Tornadoes or hailstorms? There’s nothing like losing the first blooms on your peonies to nickel-sized ice bombs coming out of the heavens. And I may be a tad fanatical, but the insanity stops short of standing in the garden sheltering my peonies with a golf umbrella while hailstones ping off my scalp.
In 1876, Mark Twain said of the weather, “[It] is always doing something…always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of twenty-four hours.”
I’m sure I counted one hundred and thirty-seven Mr. Clemens.
