The Daily: 13 May 2025

I got brave and removed the row covers on the garden beds this week. I have not put them away. They are draped over the waste bins in the garage to dry off a bit before I fold them up, so if frost is threatening, I can cover everything up again. We’ve had May snow in recent years. A hard freeze is not out of the question. But we haven’t had true cold weather for a week or so now, and the garden is taking that as the starting gun.  — Winter’s over! Time to grow! — Mind you, it’s not warm. We dodged a frost warning on Sunday evening, we haven’t seen highs much above 50, and it’s been drizzling rain nearly every day. This is great pea weather. The kales and cabbages like it also. Me, not so much.

I feel physically terrible in this weather, all the worse because it’s not cold enough to run the furnace — so it’s damp and cool inside and out. But more than the discomfort is a constant sense of dread. I am watching the apple buds opening out and worrying that we’re not done with winter. I have broccoli starts in the basement that clearly need more room to grow, but broccoli can’t tolerate frost. So I am reluctant to plant it out. On the other hand, the chiles are puttering along, refusing to grow more than three leaves until there is real sun shining on them. But that can’t happen until the end of the month at the earliest.

I relearn this lesson every year, it seems. I start planting veg indoors when common wisdom says to do so and then remember that, no, here in Vermont, May is not outdoor planting time. I need to push the seeding of indoor starts off until April and plant out in June. But that feels too late. In March I start getting fidgety, worrying that I won’t get veg if I don’t start now. And that is true for many things. Annual plants need a set amount of time in the sun in order to mature, and between the last frost date in June and the first frosts in September there is just not enough time for many of the warm season herbs and veggies. The nightshades and some of the alliums need to be started in March. Basil would be better started in February as it takes a long time to germinate and then pokes along for weeks as a sprout. The cucurbits absolutely need to be planted outdoors in May. If you don’t hit these dates, you don’t get mature food.

For the brassicas and other cool weather veggies and herbs, the timeline is even more constrained. They really ought to be planted in the late summer when the soil is warm enough for germination but when cooling temperatures of autumn won’t force the plant to bolt to seed. New England summer tends to set in abruptly, with humid heat laying like a suffocating blanket on the garden well before the solstice — while May Day sees blanketing snow as often than not. Broccoli does not like heat any more than frost. Maybe less. A light frost makes it grumpy, but it bounces back in the sunlight. Relentless heat just makes it want to set seed and give up on the growing season.

In a moment of gardener desperation late in January (my birthday actually…), I ordered some annual flowers to fluff up my planters and add color to a few bland herby spots in the garden. I don’t often buy annuals. I don’t start them indoors either because I don’t have the space for both flowers and veg — and veg takes precedence. I do grow marigolds and zinnias and sunflowers. These are flowers that can be seeded outdoors though they don’t bloom until late in the summer. But I guess I fell prey to garden catalogs lush with early summer color. Any color on that bleak January day was enough to break my resolve. So I ordered heliotrope and begonias and petunias. And guess what showed up this week… 

I don’t know what to do with this stuff. I don’t trust the weather to stay frost-free, and these are all tender plants. Begonias, especially so. I love begonias, a fancy I inherited from my grandmother. (I even inherited an actual begonia from her though, sadly, it was stolen off my front porch many decades ago.) As I said, I don’t buy many purely fluffy annuals because they require space and time and resources that I’d much rather allocate elsewhere. But I do succumb to begonia temptation now and then. And because you can’t find the lovely ones in common garden centers, I tend to order from places like White Flower Farm or Select Seeds. This is a problem, not merely because I am supporting the transport of plastic waste over long distances, but also because these places never send the plants at the right time. Never.

Out in New Mexico, I would ask for late February delivery so I could put out the well-established potted plants in late March, after frost danger had passed but ahead of the heat and drought of May. But the plants always showed up in late April. They were usually desiccated and dead before the monsoon rains arrived. So, I stopped doing that. But then I moved to a wet climate and decided to try again. Surely, these suppliers could understand the climate they inhabited. But nothing doing. I ask for late May delivery to avoid the frost… And the plants still show up in late April…

I will not be giving into garden fancies next January… But for now, I need to warehouse about a dozen sun-hungry plants in my basement. Some of them are already blooming. I have to cut all that back or there will be no early summer color even if they survive the basement. Of course, this is making me uneasy.

I also have this year’s small batch of trees to add to the Jungle. Seems wasted energy to cut down things while I am also busily planting more. But that is exactly what is needed. And I need to do it now before the tick population explodes. (Fun fact: at my poetry reading a week or two ago, there was a tick crawling on the shoulder of the man seated in front of me. All he had done was go for a walk in a mown pasture. He said he’d pulled dozens off his body that afternoon… I have stopped going for my hikes in the woods…) The problem is that what is growing in there now is largely invasive and non-native. Most of the shrubby things and etiolated trees don’t even have the poor excuse of looking pretty.

The west end is colonized by an enormous lilac, which sounds lovely until you get to the reality of lilac. Especially these days. There are two fungal infections endemic to New England and much of the rest of the world. They are both incurable and largely untreatable. Both strike in the summer’s warm heat, blackening leaves and halting all growth, including the setting of next year’s buds. However, these little fiends also do not kill the lilacs entirely. The plants are stunted and twisted with the infection, but the fungi, with devilish cunning, always allow the plant to set enough leaves each year to keep going. Once the fungi invade, there will be no blooms and there will be little green. By Midsummer, the shrub will have only a few blighted leaves rattling in the wind. But the plant does not die, and the fungi live for a new growing season. Winter does not kill these critters. They live in the soil and rootlets, able to freeze hard and still come back for more. Composting also does not kill them no matter how hot the pile. If you get infected plant material in your compost, you are going to spread the fungi everywhere. There are even rumors that the spores can spread in the smoke from burning the blighted bush. There is nothing you can do against these things.

The reality of an enormous lilac in the late modern era is a deformed and hideous thicket of sticks. The City and I both keep cutting it down, so it’s at least not blocking visibility at the traffic intersection. But it keeps sending up a pathos of bent and slender trunks. And while that is ugly and annoying, at least it is relatively harmless and out of my way. The rest of the Jungle is filled with worse evil. There is Virginia creeper that smothers everything, killing even trees under its weighted shade. There are honey-locusts and maples that both drop thousands of seeds to germinate in every veg bed. The honey-locusts also shed limbs every time the wind blows. I honestly don’t know how there are still limbs attached, though locust grows frightfully fast. There is male sumac, again probably just one plant, and alder, maybe many but who knows with alder. Both are indestructible. I have cut it all down to no effect. It just sends suckers and shoots up from still buried root fragments. The sumac can also send runners under the soil for many meters apparently with no photosynthesizing plant parts necessary. It is not only still there, it is also still spreading into new spaces. I think the only way to remove it is to bring in excavators and dig up the whole hillside. 

But the worst is the blackthorn. I used to harbor romantic notions of this bushy cousin in the pit fruit family. Its wood is supposedly prized by crafters. It makes tiny berries, sloes, that are used to flavor everything from roasted meats to gin. There are rumors of its ability to feed wildlife while creating an impermeable border on cultivated fields and pastures.

Impermeable, I will grant it, however, I no longer believe in any of the rest of it. Maybe my property is too cold and shady to allow for berry formation, but it’s not just that I’ve never seen it set fruit, I’ve never even seen evidence of flowers. The flowers are small, and like all trees in the prunus genus, bloom time is brief. So at first, I thought I was just missing it. But there are never hovering pollinators nor any wildlife eating the berries. Maybe this too is an effect of the unsuitability of this plant to my place in the world. None of the local critters can work with these flowers or digest these fruits. Though… I also have barberry, a thorny non-native invasive if there ever was one, and it is covered every year with every kind of flying insect — and the birds who lay in wait for insect treats and then pick all the berries over the winter. In contrast, the entire thicket of blackthorn is devoid of life. Moreover, it is a black thorn. It is covered in spikes up to two inches long, all hard and sharp as steel. I would never put that in a pasture hedge. I can’t imagine ever getting the thorns out of fleece; they’re hard enough to remove from human flesh. Moreover, the barbs often break off under the skin leading to infection and sepsis. Stories of surgical treatment are not unusual.

The Jungle is filled with this mess. And in addition to the physical menace, there is a psychological element. This bush is not native. Like poison ivy in Great Britain, some moron intentionally transported and planted this thing. My mind just keeps screaming that cardinal fact while I am cutting it down each year, swathed in too many layers of clothing for June heat, sweating and swearing and fearing each minor prick. It feels like a personal attack, though I know it was just stupidity. Probably the same sort of deluded romanticism I used to feel about blackthorn staffs and hedge-craft and sloe gin.

So, all that must go, but I don’t want a bare hillside. For one thing, a bare hillside will not long remain bare or a hillside. Either more invasives will colonize it (probably that other darling of romantics, artemisia, a genus of plants that you can never eradicate and that drive my allergies crazy) or water will carry the whole thing down to the river, by way of destroying the swath of Main Street in its way. So while I am removing the mess, I am also planting trees and hedge plants that will hold the soil and create a woodland space rather than a jungle. This year I have a balsam fir, a cottonwood, several viburnums and serviceberries, a river birch and a dwarfing variety of rowan that brilliant Russians bred for the best jelly imaginable. Not all these are natives. The rowan is more of an orchard plant than a naturalizer. But all are well behaved, and all provide for many needs — from cooling shade to wildlife food to greens for decorating the Yuletide mantle.

But I haven’t made much progress on this year’s planting or removal. My weather journal shows that we’ve had exactly five weekend days without precipitation of some form since the beginning of the year. Sunday was one of those days, but it was also 40°F and very windy. It was also still very boggy from the couple inches of rain we had over Friday and Saturday. The trees would not have appreciated the mud or the wind and might have just blown over with only loose wet soil to hold the roots.

In any case, I was tired and feeling cruddy, not equal to wrangling trees into holes in the ground with 20mph winds pushing against all my efforts. Furthermore, I’m having a hard time finding time. Along with the usual housework and cooking, I keep finding things that need attention. For example, I discovered that one of my jugs of emergency toilet-flushing water had been leaking slowly. No idea how. There were no holes in the plastic. But it was enough that some sheets had gotten damp and then started growing mold. I had to toss one sheet, but the others were not bad enough to compost. This meant extra laundry with a lot of scrubbing to get out the mildew stains. (The emergency water is now stored in the basement.) Then, there is the hole that opened up in the front porch floorboards. I have not made much progress on that aside from reading up on how to fix it and falling down a couple rabbit holes of extravagant plans to redo the whole porch, evicting all the critters living underneath it in the process. And then there are the spiders. I am vacuuming the basement every week, and there are still new cobwebs and desiccated pill-bug carcasses every time I go down there… It’s lots of little, not especially enjoyable things like that taking me away from the garden.

There are also more pleasant tasks demanding my attention. Part of maintaining a ritual calendar is changing my space to reflect the seasons. I use color and scent and small symbolic decorations to evoke a mood, to change the atmosphere of my home. These are subtle things, like putting out seasonal kitchen towels, replacing the candles, or changing the quilt on my bed. A couple weeks ago, I declared myself done with pale colors and eggs and dug out florals for the Flower Moon.

I also have altars scattered around the house. These aren’t elaborate, nor are they what most people imagine upon hearing the word “altar” No sacrifices or offerings, no grimoires or devotionals. You might look at them and just see some interesting things collected on a dresser or shelf. But the things are chosen deliberately to prompt contemplation. I have a small ledge in the kitchen for thinking about ancestors of all kinds. My bedroom dresser has representations of the Mothers, what I consider to be the essential divisions of human time. I use my dining room mantle for celebrating the season. Right now, it has a garland of felted moonflowers, blue and gold candles, and a pair of vases filled with freeze-dried maidenhair ferns.

None of this is necessary, but it gives me daily reminders that there are reasons to be joyful, reasons to celebrate every day, and reasons to be thankful. Also it makes for a very pleasant home, and that is my main goal in life. Time was that people like me were pejoratively labeled “fluffy bunnies” for focusing efforts on hearth magic and home-making. Many of us decided to embrace the name and own it. I am fluffy and am quite content to be so. Fluffy means comfort and I can’t imagine a better way to live.

So I was being fluffy on Mother’s Day and did not plant trees or pull weeds or assemble the new compost bin or any of the myriad other things that are clamoring for attention out there. I baked bread and made hummus (no-frills traditional chickpeas, lemon, olive oil and tahini). Vacuumed spiders and washed the bed linen. Spent a good deal of time on the phone with family. And in the evening, Son#1 and I watched Emilia Perez, which is just about the most perfect movie I’ve ever seen. (Did anyone else know Zoë Saldaña can sing?)

Maybe next weekend will be more productive. But then, it’s supposed to rain again…

Sigh…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025