May: Planting Day

3. May 2017
Planted: A Year of Gardening
The series starts here

One of the things I miss the most about the old garden was the beautiful 3-season perennial border, which was particularly spectacular at its July peak, with a drift of yellow coneflowers, pink phlox, blue balloon flowers, and orange turks’ cap lilies. I brought samples of all of these plants with me. In one of the brief warm spells I planted them out in the Botanic, thinking to recreate the spectacle.

That planting was followed by actual unseasonal warmth, and not enough rain. My transplanted perennials and the annuals starts died. The rabbits ate everything else.

It was the death knell for the cool weather crops, too—the seeds never sprouted, the brassicas had not grown a single inch, and the chard, I’m absolutely convinced, had actually shrunk. The lettuce seeds, planted liberally in my pots, had sprouted quickly as lettuce seeds do, and then never developed a second set of leaves. They didn’t die. They just sat there.

I dug out the brassicas and the chard, and repotted them in a good potting mix, putting them back inside with the warming mats and a grow light. While the weather was certainly a factor, I believe poor soil was the main culprit; the soil company however was not interested in talking to me and ignored my complaints completely.

The rule of thumb on watering is that plants need about an inch a week. When I started gardening three decades ago, that is how it rained: on average an inch a week. In August there might be the occasional heavy downpour of 2 inches in an hour, but for the most part you could count on one to two inches of rain in a single rain event about once every seven to ten days. I seldom watered, because you could count on this.

Now, it seems like it rains nonstop from April through June, but with big rain events of 4 or more inches in a single days-long storm, and then nothing for weeks later in the summer.

But you have to plant, especially when you’re relying on your garden for food. So even though the weather was see-sawing from too hot and dry to too cold and wet, at the end of May I threw caution to the winds and planted out the solanums—peppers, tomatoes, eggplants—as well as putting the repotted, and now thriving, brassicas and chard back in the heavily amended soil. I finished planting all the ornamental starts, plus another set of scavenged plants: astilbe, hosta, junca, day lilies.

And crossed my fingers.