I just looked at the forecast for the next week. I don’t recommend you follow suit.
It’s supposed to be 17 degrees today! But with rain. Tomorrow? Rain. Saturday? Isolated showers. Sunday? Light rain. Monday and Tuesday? Cloudy…with showers. For goodness sake, how many ways can you say “rain”? Someone over at the Weather Network sure took it upon him or herself to get creative.
But then Wednesday will come! And with it? A day of blessed “variable cloudiness,” which is far superior to rain and even comes with a little bit of bright yellow sun in the accompanying graphic. So we’ll wait six days for the pure luxury of partial cloud cover.
But I’m going to be okay with this. I managed to get out on Sunday (before it rained) to my former community garden plot and pick up my tomato and pea cages and mini trellises. I got another call out of the blue from the city with a message congratulating me on receiving a community garden plot in the space that’s actually next door to my apartment. I loved my plot last year but the daily jog/bike ride/walk was difficult enough on the way there and even more difficult biking home with giant, gnarled Indian drumstick plants, delicate tomatoes, and heaps of swiss chard. Now I’ll walk 30 seconds. Life is good.
And I do have grand plans for this new plot. I had to tear up a lot of old, unidentifiable plants (I’m pretty sure they weren’t perennials) and even transplanted my sorrel and strawberry plants. The water isn’t on in the garden yet so I couldn’t water them after transplanting, but then, inevitably, the rain came. Now they’re more likely to drown than to die from dehydration.
I put my gardening sheet over top to retain more heat and speed up the spring thaw. And I made a design of what I want to plant. The whole length of the backside will be peas, beans, okra, bitter melon and zucchini, so I’m hoping to build a trellis to give these somewhere to hang. While okra and peas don’t need to hang, I’ve seen a lot of the Bangladeshi women in my former garden hanging bitter melon and okra, so you have to peek in and under and around to find them as they grow, a little like a Where’s Waldo of gardening. But much more delicious…and with a lot more Waldos.
The rest of the plot will be different kinds of eggplant, tomatoes, lettuces, spinach (I have about 5 kinds of spinach somehow), mustard greens and choys (there are tons—not just bok and pak), marjoram, cilantro, sorrel, and hot peppers. I’m a little nervous, though, since I saw a squirrel in the garden the other day. Squirrels are my nemesis. In my former garden they weren’t a problem because they couldn’t get over the fence. Now, thanks to overhanging trees, I’m already dreaming up squirrel-repellent tactics. A big broom and my usual amount of swearing isn’t going to cut it. I didn’t get a single tomato from my balcony self-watering container last summer thanks to a dastardly rodent. Yes, squirrels are rodents. I just checked.
So maybe I won’t have daffodils or cherry blossoms come May, but I’ll hopefully have an entire summer of pesticide-free vegetables I grew myself. If I have anything to say about that squirrel, that is…
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