Is the Spring Coming? Come to Open House and See!

“Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"...

"It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...”

― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

When I do not think my own words sufficiently artful in pinpointing the feelings or painting the picture I desire, I do not shy away from adopting some from writers of a more poetic bent. I look up quotes...sometimes to reinforce a phrase half remembered, sometimes to express an essence I can’t quite reach.  What is spring?  It is yin and yang, the turmoil of the winds rushing now north with warmth and moisture, now howling south with the sleet and chill from lands where spring has not yet ventured.

“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.”

― John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

In greenhouse world, spring work has been plodding along for months on the more or less predictable schedule we set out when the plant orders came in: sorting a load of plugs, filling flats with potting mix, matching the cuttings to the customer, counting, always counting. To describe this process as ‘joyful enthusiasm’ is indeed to imbue our daily tasks with both more orderliness and nonchalance than is detectable in anyone’s attitude!  We have productive days and frustrating days, but one week before the equivalent of Hurst Greenery’s Opening Day, the greenhouses are splitting at the seams with a patchwork of texture and color.  We humans may be weary, but the burgeoning of spring will not be denied.

There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.”

― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

Even a mild winter in this hard hearted  Continental climate brings weeks of drear and dark and whining winds. The first hint of warming sun melting a heavy frost changes the scent of the land perceptibly.  The first rain releases the soil from bondage and pockmarks the most compacted winter walkway with the castings of awakening earthworms.

“It always amazes me to look at the little, wrinkled brown seeds and think of the rainbows in 'em," said Captain Jim. "When I ponder on them seeds I don't find it nowise hard to believe that we've got souls that'll live in other worlds. You couldn't hardly believe there was life in them tiny things, some no bigger than grains of dust, let alone colour and scent, if you hadn't seen the miracle, could you?”

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

This afternoon Millie and Blake planted cucumber seeds, plucking one at a time from palm to pot, then covering them conscientiously with just enough potting mix to keep them moist, but not enough to make the new sprout labor to reach the sun.  Millie knows all about chicks pecking out of eggs; a seedling is not so different.  I planted the first vegetable seeds around Valentine’s Day; these cole crops are already headed to market.  The vine crops will sprout within a week; a seedling with no more than two true leaves will give the plant a big advantage over cool soil and the multiple threats of fungus, insect, and fowl.

“He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.”

― P. Harding

Watering in early April is still an art.  With one eye on the weather and one eye on the sky, we gauge the risk of wilt against the risk of disease.  A sunny day, no matter how cold, will make the greenhouses’ coordinated systems of heating and cooling kick in, sending a burst of humidity outdoors in front of the fan blades and clearing the plastic roof of dripping dangerous condensation.  The plants are growing exponentially, demanding water, nutrients to fill their sunny hours.  These days, we water everything as necessary.  Soon we will water every other day and  by Mother’s Day, every plant will be mature, transpirating, and, oh so needy.  The chilly waters of March will be but a memory.

“The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing.”

― George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Ah! Now we come to the crux of the matter.  Indeed!  The pleasures of visiting our greenhouse this weekend for the annual Open House are available to everyone and are free, free, free!  Come see what we’ve been planting, watering, and caring for since February!  We have potted up almost 7000 planters, a total we cannot even believe. We are fitting each additional flat in jigsaw piece by piece. The earliest tomatoes are just about ready for those who feel lucky.  By Saturday, the greenhouses will be full to overflowing, not an unusual situation for early April, so, bring your camera, your phone...and kids, too.

Whatever the weather on Saturday, we  promise spring inside….

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

March Madness

What is it about baseball that makes us wax nostalgic? When March comes around, the sun shines brighter, the breeze is balmy and the grass greens...in Florida, in Arizona...and in my mind's eye. As the howling gale stirs the ancient dust and rattles the windows around me, Baseball...like the garden sundial...says, 'I count only the sunny hours...' and draws the blinds against the final gasps of winter. Why is this so? The turnstiles to the ballpark are not the gates to Paradise. In the best of times a batter is safe but a third of his at bats and his team beats all odds with anything more than a 57 percent winning percentage. But we fans acknowledge only the golden hours, the walk off hits, and the chasm of emptiness when September or October ends the season and we face the lonely hours of winter.
It has been that way for me since the 1960s. I was too young to be a fan when the Cards made the miraculous comeback in 1964, but old enough in 1967 to pick the sports section of the Chicago Tribune off the floor after my father had finished reading it and hunt up the box scores. I was old enough to listen to the Cubs' play by play as described by the likes of Jack Brickhouse, Lou Boudreau and Vince Lloyd.

 But instead of growing up a Cubbie, I followed the family allegiance to the Cardinals, learning to tune my mother's old Philco radio to a Peoria radio feed of the Redbird network in the hours before sunset when clear channel KMOX would overcome the static and lesser locals to beam in the gravelly play by play of then Cardinal announcers Harry Caray and Jack Buck.

It's easy to forget how much of being a baseball fan was experienced through our ears, over the radio: how much of our sports memory is a specific voice with a slang, a vernacular, a catch phrase of its very own. Maybe we watched one game a week on television...a Saturday afternoon game narrated by Kirk Gowdy and Tony Kubek. The game on TV was small, blurred, and black and white; the game on the radio was big and bright, with the immediacy of the crowd, the beer men and peanut vendors, and the ump behind home within virtual spitting distance of the radio speaker.

Sure, I remember watching poor ol' Bill Buckner dribble the ball between his legs; I whooped and hollered when Kirk Gibson limped home on a wing and a prayer for the Dodgers.  Blake and I were speechless with tension watching Chris Carpenter crush the Phillies in October 2011 with the sheer force of his will.

But I don't know if I ever actually saw Bob Gibson flying off the mound with the violence of his pitch; I just heard about it.

  And though Bob Forsch is gone now,  I still remember listening to him pitch his final no hitter late in the disappointing season of 1983 as we drove through a harvest night in Iowa.

 Through the miracles of technology we can watch all the baseball we want anymore; we can even  DVR the coastal games if we have discipline to ignore the urge to check the score.  But when March rolls around, I don't need to watch the games.  Whether I'm on the highway or working some gray afternoon in the greenhouse,  I can see those fields of dreams just fine .....on the radio.

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Warm and Fuzzy

Later on, my feet will hurt and my shoulders will ache. Later on, there will be weeds and bugs and sweat and worry and deadlines. But on this January day, the sun is shining, the wind is light, and the season is new. It is just like the first day of spring training when hope springs unbidden in the heart of fans everywhere. This....this will be the year.....that all the pots will arrive on time...that no trucker will follow his GPS and get stuck in the mud of 150th west of Highway 59.....that it won't freeze or snow on May 3rd...

Winter is the time to build (two new bays on the gutter connect house); to repair (fan belts, stovepipe, electrical this and that); and to re-cover (still working on that...three more greenhouses to go). Winter is the time to call on old customers and try to find new ones, to order seed and cuttings and plan, plan, plan. But winter ceased on Sunday when the first heaters were lit and Monday when the first pots were filled. Tuesday Kevin, our trusty FedEx driver, made the first of countless drops of boxes in the office.

It may be January, but at Hurst Greenery, it is officially spring 2015.

We unboxed 400 ferns yesterday. It takes a long time to fill out a fern basket when you grow as far north as we live. Ferns may be happy in the shade during our hot summers, but they tend to sit and wait and do nothing during the cold dark days of winter. For several years we got the ferns in December to give them an extra month to grow, but it was a waste of time and propane. The plants sulked; nothing grew in the pots but moss. We try to fool the ferns with supplemental lighting, but there is no substitute for the longer days after winter solstice.

Geraniums also benefit from additional light. We root our own geranium cuttings for several reasons: 1)to save money on shipping for the large quantity of cuttings we order and 2) to have that nice big rootball established when the geraniums are transplanted into bigger pots and hanging baskets. Geraniums may not be the earliest bloomers in the greenhouse, but they are poster children for flower power. It takes lots of space, lots of fertilizer, and lots of grooming to grow the beauty queens we send off in April.

I have always enjoyed rooting cuttings and still get lots of pleasure when the first  white roots poke through the bottom of the cell pack. A week or two after sticking the cuttings it is difficult not to "peek" and pull the cuttings up to look for new roots. To speed the process, we run a fog machine like you see on the sidelines of a football game to increase the humidity when the cuttings are first planted; a bright day even in January will make the rootless leaves and stems wilt down alarmingly.

And this is what 3000 red geranium cuttings look like just planted. These cuttings were shipped to us from Mexico. Tomorrow Lee and I will plant 4000 more cuttings purchased from another supplier and harvested in Guatemala. The cuttings are bagged by variety and packed to keep cool....not warm! We rarely receive frozen plants even in the depths of winter, but we worry about shipping and are thankful for weeks of moderate weather like we have enjoyed recently.

We've had company in the greenhouse this week. The puppies reduce our productivity, but they sure are cute!

Gabe and Popeye

Abbie and Gibbs

From geranium cuttings to puppies, this year's greenhouse season is starting out warm and fuzzy!

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Let There Be Water Under the Bridge: April

This is what happens in April.

 Saturday evening.  I am watering wilted fuchsia baskets in the big house when Blake calls. He has checked the reservoir for possibly the 50th time this week and likely the tenth time this warm day with wind gusts up to forty mph from the south. "How're you doing?" he asks. This is a shorthand I understand.

 "Are we done? I'm watering sad fuchsias" 

 "Will they die? If you water them now, it will be all salt water.." 

We have a deep well, but it is so high in sodium, we have to mix it with our sweet well.

  I lift a couple of baskets to check...."No, they'll make it til tomorrow."

I shut off the hydrants and walk up the hill to the office.  Lee and Ryan, who have also been at the business end of a garden hose, are ahead of me.  We've done what can be accomplished with the resources we have.  The rest will just have to wait, just as we look to the skies, our phones, and the ten o'clock meteorologist to gauge our chances for relief. When there's no more you can do, you just go home.

At least it is Saturday night.  I've promised to grill some burgers for my husband.  This simple meal will include a head of cauliflower chopped and the seasoned burgers sprinkled with some tomato basil feta that appealed to me at the HyVee and hearty chunks of last summer's lime pickles. Blake will not complain.

Chopping the head of cauliflower reminds me of our trip to California's Salinas Valley last summer.  The Salinas Valley is a potpourri of food production, a crazy quilt of edibles in all stages from transplant to harvest, leafy greens to artichokes, all possible through the judicious and calibrated use of irrigation.  After two years of shortened field crops and the constant worry and expense of providing water to our greenhouse plants, I know what it is to deal with scarcity. We don't have a spigot to turn on when we need it.

But there is no agency turning that spigot off either. We scoop up some dip with our crunchy cauliflower only as long as there is water for those farms in California, only as long as those farms and that produce have sufficient value to society.  If, perchance, some California critter is declared scarce, the vast and productive farms return to the dust from whence they emerged.

The greenhouses are home to creatures above ground and below.  We fight the ages old battles with the rodents human history has pronounced a scourge; we stumble to avoid squishing harmless toads; we clean sparrow nests and wasp nests from our machinery and chimneys.  But there are marvels too.  The first butterflies of the season, the red admirals,  find a flowering oasis; hummingbirds in transit buzz through for a week or so.

  The locals make their best nests cheek by jowl with the working parts of the business. I enjoy the robins of spring, the swallows of summer that scoop snacks off the greenhouse plastic like it was a glassy ocean, the killdeer that ply their wiles in the fall as I pace the watering route in the mum patch. The line between habitat and human is large and blurred and is home to life abundant and sometimes unexpected.

There are two ways to solve the water shortage at Hurst Greenery.  One is to put the flowers on the trucks and send them to someone else to plant and care for; to change this:

into this:

And the other is Nature's way:

Welcome April Downpour

April should be for showers in our part of the world and if we spend some chilly days in raincoats with wet feet, we deal with it stoically, knowing all too well what pristine spring day after pristine spring day yields in the long term of July.  Rainy days in April go into the soil bank, literally, to be withdrawn by crops in the field and mums in the pots and flowers in the garden.  I'm donning my raincoat and three layers of shirts today on my way to work, hoping to squeeze another quarter inch out of the uncomfortable drizzle.

This is one part of April....

....and this is another...

Mud makes the grass grow....

Nothing Contrary Here!

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockleshells

And pretty maids all in a row.

That was then....graceful but finicky cottage blossoms, ephemeral but lovely to celebrate in rhyme.... never mind the dark historical back story....

But this is NOW...

Mary, Mary, don't be contrary

Choose a flower that will give us a show!

Whether Bada Boom or Nightlife, 

Cocktail or Harmony,

We know these begonias will grow!

The 21st century gardener's version of pretty maids all in a row.. upon row.. upon row.  

When all else fails...including imagination...we wind up with a greenhouse of marching bronze leaved begonias. 

On the Front Lines of the Season

Today's project requires a drive from home to Jefferson City, accompanied by 550 plus of our most fragrant and tender friends in the back of the Explorer, thirty or so flats of Matrix Mix and Matrix Ocean pansies. Their blooms are three inches across and, if you'll forgive my fancy, their "faces" seem to be frank and open and unswerving as the break of day. They spent the night exhaling in the car, greeting us with a warm breath of fragrance and humidity in the morning.

We drove in driving rain for three hours. It drained away before our destination, but my spirits drooped when I saw geese swimming on the pooled waters on the Missouri River bottom outside Jeff.

On the surface, the flower beds looked pretty good!

But reality set in as soon as my spade bit into the ground. Every hole for a plant became a...

..... pansy pond.....
Now I'm a long ways from my college soils classes, but even a wee bit of gardening experience, much less the decades I've accumulated, tells me these are not ideal planting conditions. Saturation, compaction, collapse of soil structure? Let me count the ways.....

And...oh yeah, I planted them all anyway. Every passerby told me what a nasty day it was to plant,but I didn't choose the day; it chose me.

Like they always say, you fight with the army you have. May my pansy volunteers overcome the odds against them, flutter their brave spring flowers against the elements, and cheer all that pass through...

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