Stick a Fork in It

The calendar says April.

We celebrate Easter whether spring decides to join us or not. Farm machinery of all configurations waits inside field gates, like Thoroughbreds champing at the bit before the call to post at Churchill Downs.

The radar gets checked incessantly: some wishing for rain, some wishing it would go away.

At Hurst Greenery, we worry our phone apps like the puppies work over a shoe; is it warm enough to load the truck? Will the tomatoes, or impatiens, or vinca be huddled and shrunken when they reach their destination? Or...worse yet...might they be frozen carcasses like one misbegotten delivery last year which began at 70 degrees in Westboro before plunging below freezing in a paroxysm of sleet and wind on I-80 in central Nebraska....
Not this year. This past Friday night channel 3 had some kind of sticky gooey frosted dessert on the set; meteorologist Jim Flowers ceremonially sliced and diced that cake, sticking his fork in it and declaring, as he has for lo these many years, that winter in Omaha was a goner.

How done is winter? Let me count the ways.

1) Put a fork in winter is done because Lee picked her first asparagus.

2) Abbie lost a flipflop at church this evening.

3) We turned off the alarm system at Hurst Greenery

4) Jeff Umbarger says he hopes he's made his last Saturday propane delivery (We hope so too, Jeff....come see us when you're ready to plant tomatoes!)

5) Spring is sprung because I changed out the winter garden banner on the pergola..there have been years I didn't accomplish that task until Memorial Day!

6) It might be spring if the Schlueter family takes a family bike ride...except for Grizzy, who runs along....over to Spruce...and no one tells Josh he can't get in the sandbox.

7) Winter is over when Lizzie and Abbie pick a generous handful of jolly daffodils.

8) It is surely spring when Ben sends us a picture of his first scorecard for the young baseball season.

9) On a similar note, Mike Shannon and Cardinal baseball provide the background music for Hurst Greenery office time on Sunday afternoons.

10) Put a fork in winter when it is time for Millie and Blake plant flat after flat of cucumber, melon, zucchini and pumpkin seed.

11) The moms admit defeat and let the kids create mud concoctions and play in the buckets of dog water on Saturday afternoons. (Playing in the water is still off limits for after school...).

12) The Dairy Diner beckons! So does Culver's, Dairy Queen, Sheridan's, Sonic...you get the picture.

Whether your fancy turns to gardening...or baseball....or ice cream...turn over that seasonal leaf and rejoice! Ding, dong, the wicked old winter is dead!

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Name Dropping

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.” 

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

gomphocarpus physocarpus 'Hairy Balls'...

"As its name implies, eating the leaves or buds causes a “buzzing” sensation in your mouth… or in the mouth of the person your children gave it to. Numbness occurs and next comes the drooling. This plant is known as a sialagogue meaning it causes one to start salivating. Big time."

What's in a name? Given all the time, effort, creativity....and money...spent not only in creating new and improved products, but also christening them, lots of people believe that having a catchy or unique or clever name is the verbal equivalent of being the Roadrunner vs. Wiley Coyote. Clearly, the folks that gave "Hairy Balls" its name had a good grip on "attention getting". No one would choose Gomphocarpus physocarpus off a plant list for fear of contracting whatever-that-is simply by reading about it. But attach the variety name "Hairy Balls"to it? Downright irresistible. Even before one of our customers ordered the darn thing, I thought I might have to plant some just to see what it did..Besides make people salivate uncontrollably, that is.

Speaking of spontaneous salivation.... without luscious names, just how many varieties of garden tomatoes do you think there would be? After all, the "just the facts, ma'am" of their attributes are about as enticing as the signs on a test plot.

 Big this, Early that....sigh...Where IS the sense of imagination? Compare, if you will, the listing in my seed catalog for tomatoes with the enticement of names gleaned from an heirloom listing. 

Here be tomatoes differentiated by color: Green Zebra, Persimmon, Pineapple, Plum Lemon, Purple Calabash, Blush Pear.

Pineapple

Green Zebra

And tomatoes differentiated by origin...or someone's romantic notion thereof: Caribe, Cherokee Purple, Chesapeake, Italian Heirloom, Jersey Devil, Nebraska Wedding, Missouri Pink Love Apple.

Jersey Devil

Finally, there are even tomatoes that pretend to be members of the family: Aunt Gertie's Gold, Aunt Ginney's Purple, Aunt Ruby's German Green.

Aunt Gertie's Gold

One gardener claimed she had grown the tomato variety with the longest...and most literal...name of all: Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge tomato. Descriptive, but not poetic, I say.

Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge

Modern seed breeders have their work cut out. Their cohorts on the vegetative side of the aisle have a leg up on them. Take, for example, varieties of coleus. Coleus, of course, is an annual originally discovered in Java which became wildly popular in Victorian gardens inciting a coleus craze something like the tulip madness of centuries before. Back in favor with both gardeners and breeders, coleus varieties are like overly eager first graders waving their hands frantically, vying for attention and popularity with bold colors, textures...and, naturally, over-the-top names. Looking over this list, it appears that some of the original coleus madness is still alive and well in nomenclature! If you're brave enough to take a walk on the wild side, choose your coleus wisely from options like: Apocalypse, Pink Chaos, Alligator Tears, Coco Loco, Hot Lava, Inky Fingers, Pistachio Nightmare and Stormy Weather. Think you can handle it?

Pink Chaos

Coco Loco

Pistachio Nightmare

Probably. After all, we consumers are used to dealing with the persuasive powers of advertising whether the product is Made For TV (BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!) or a particularly seductive sports car streaking out of a computer generated backdrop. You could plant an entire estate to posies for what that Lexus with a bow will set you back. Do some name dropping of your own....forks will wonder what you've been up to!

Just keep your Gomphrocarpus physocarpus in your own garden.....

March-ing, March-ing

If this is Wednesday..

...then it must be VanDewetering and Ball Tagawa. And all this before noon.

This is Matt's workload. For one week. This week. Three thousand flats in seven days. One hundred and eight thousand little plants to pick up, put down, tag, water in. It is not quite as big as the national debt, but unlike our fiscal situation, it must be dealt with. This week. It's March.

Just last week, there was room to roam. Just last week, Josh could put up the Little Tykes play house and watch movies inside on his dad's Kindle. Just last week we could leave extra hanging baskets to sit on the ground and grow and put off deciding where we would hang them. Today I thread 75 feet of three quarter inch hose between the lines, but from here on out, we won't rely on my agility; it will be up to the irrigator to keep the seedlings moist.

In greenhouse after greenhouse, the flats ooze toward the door as inexorably as the tide coming in. The great green stream flows from trays of plugs or cuttings plush as carpet, to be counted by 15s, by 18s, by 36s, as the ranks of tags line up across the floor. 

One of the mysteries hidden deep within the psyche of a seed is what makes it "know"when the calendar page turns to March.  Critical growth energy is achieved; tomato seeds that languished for at least a week in the seed room in February sudden shake off their languor and leap from the soil in 5 days or less in the exact same environment.  In February it is three weeks to transplant size; by April, it will be two.  Tomatoes seeded April 1 will be headed to Midwestern gardens before Mother's Day.  The essence of spring condenses, compresses, then uncontrollably erupts in the greenhouse in March after the equinox.

 Tiny, but tough, the little vegetables pack a fragrant punch as we move them from plug tray to pot.  A lucky few are patted in gently by Abbie one day after school.

 The back of the number 10 house presents a prospect of geraniums as far as the eye can see.

 Even though we are anxious for color and applaud their enthusiastic growth,

it is time to fill the pots with good roots.  Blooms now use valuable energy that should be directed to foliage and roots.  There is ample time to grow a good show for April sales. My hands are sticky and orange and smell of the faintly rosy aroma of geraniums as I gather my bouquet of early bloomers.

Not every day is rosy.  Our mechanical aides de camp break down. A broken chain on the bale breaker under the laws of nature occurs when the machine is full of soil mix. Parts are in Tennessee, so Ryan jury rigs a new link while Lee and I scoop pots to the aroma of welded metal and hot peat moss.  It is a warm day with low low humidity; ladies that would ordinarily be transplanting grab a hose and lemonade is made of lemons.

And here it is....the first fruits of the harvest, the first flower sales of Spring 2014.  A Monday afternoon with calm air and mellow weather allows us to load three cartloads of pansies in the trailer for delivery.  

It doesn't happen that often in March.  But like the geese flying overhead these chilly mornings, it is a harbinger....

of all the multitudes to come.

Is it spring yet?

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A Date with February

So now, its February.  In my kitchen, February looks like this:

Warm, molten even, with an inner glow.

And this is the kind of calendar that rules my life.  Brutally concise, Puritanical, rigid, unyielding.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;


For this is February and the inexorable timetable necessarily rules.  Without order in February, abandon hope, all ye who enter March.

It is February when the potting mix stacked like so many Cubist icebergs outside must thaw.  It takes days.....and a time to every purpose....for these

to be transformed into these....

.....then packed into crates and unloaded four by four into a greenhouse to warm.

We stir in slow release fertilizer because this light fluffy mix has great drainage and water holding capacity, is weed and disease free, but it isn't soil, it just acts like it.

We water the baskets down to moisten the mix through the whole pot and break the dry crust on top.  This time we plant four little begonia plugs, urging them out of the plug trays gently to preserve as many roots as we can, nestling them in the soil carefully so they won't drown when we water them in....

with an old stiff hose that probably looks something like this.  The well water is as cold as ...well, name your poison. Until the ground floor of the greenhouses absorbs enough sunshine, the water will be frigid, the hoses will be recalcitrant and the subject of mild cussing.

After the baskets are well watered and before we hang them, we check the leaders on the basket lines to make sure they aren't plugged by algae, dead insects or spider webs..

From this point, the hanging baskets will be watered 50 at a time...

It's February....a time to plant....some spicy Garden Salsa peppers...

or some early cauliflower.

.Some sweet Big Berthas with the seeder or some Romas and Supersweet 100s destined to be the earliest tomatoes on the block....

To every thing there is a season.....it is February.  Still winter in this country.  The groundhog mails his prediction in without opening his eyes.  We shed our hats, scarves, gloves, coats and sodden boots 'neath the radiator in the kitchen, hoping they will be not just warm, but please, please, dry when we pull them on in the morning.  

But....turn, turn, turn, one fine day the sun begins to turn the drive to mud, the drifts to puddles, the white to brown.  We shed some layers.  The car thermometer confirms hard fact to our hopeful senses.

And we are not the only living things to come to life, to unfold...

...to bloom..

and recognize, realize, rejoice and begin to count down the waning days of February.