One of the things they never tell you in all the pretty gardening handbooks, as you are dragged deeper and deeper into this gardening lark, is that you may no longer go on vacation. Not for you summer trips to Yellowstone for two weeks or a cross-country tour to find the world’s largest ball of string. Don’t even think about visiting Paris in the springtime, much less in the fall. Nope, as a gardener, your watch begins at the end of February and doesn’t conclude until the last tomato is harvested in October. Of course, you can throw caution to the wind and go if you want to, but you’ll pay. Oh how you’ll pay.
Far away from my garden…
Almost all of our extended family lives in Northern California, though I’m happy to report that they don’t have bleached teeth or wear roller blades to work, and as far as I know, all parts of their bodies are original. This geographical distance poses an enormous problem for me as a gardener. I love my family. I want to visit them. I want to foster bonds of great tenderness between grandparents and grandchildren. I also want to grow a decent head of broccoli. Sadly, the two desires are mutually exclusive. Sacrifices must be made, and unless I’d like my father to take out a copy of the will and a good eraser, I’d better rethink my first instinct.
If it is a year that we have decided to visit our family (and this one is) the question is always “when”? Seedlings are started in February, the Cold Frame Shuffle is scheduled for March, and the rest of the spring/summer months from April onwards? Fugeddaboudit. The fall is about the harvest, and I’m hardly likely to cosset and cajole three hundred pounds of vegetables only to leave them hanging come October. November and December are peak holiday flying times (read: expensive) and our family does not live in Bermuda, so I am not too excited about visiting in January. Snow is snow, whether it has a tan or not. Do you see my quandary?
Even a late summer’s week at the beach is a concern to those of us who till the soil and squish lawn grubs with gusto. Our Mid-Atlantic climate acts like a magical elixir to weeds, grass, vines and all things green Leave for a week, and an Amazonian jungle greets you upon your return. You may have paid the neighbor boy to feed the dog and water the potted plants, but did you also pay him to nip and tuck the cleome, dead head the daisies, shear back the chrysanthemums and reattach the heavily laden rose trellis to the house after a bout of gale force winds? Of course you didn’t, no one has that much money.
Broccoli or Bambi?
So you come back, exhausted from your vacation to find what? The dog and the terracotta blooms have survived, but where are the eighteen cabbages you planted in July? They are stalks only, eaten down to their spindly foundations. Beans have ripened too long on the plants and sent them into a downward spiral, and the dratted lemon balm has flowered and scattered seed all over your lawn. This would be just fine if you hadn’t spent previous weeks covering the little cabbages with love and tenderness…if you hadn’t gone out faithfully every morning picking beans to keep the plants producing…if you hadn’t taken valuable time to shear the lemon balm each week to prevent the merest suspicion of a flower from setting seed.
But perhaps you think you’ve got this one solved. This year you plan to ask a trusted friend to swap gardening chores with you when you each go away. Well, make sure you take a good hard look at the actual exchange of labor and have a lawyer review the contract before you sign anything. My friends now know to run a mile or change the subject when it looks like I am itching to tread upon foreign soil. One week tending my garden is worth fourteen weeks tending their pots – I can’t imagine the amount of under-breath cursing that my plants have been exposed to over past years – poor darlings. The plants I mean – my friends should have read the fine print.
So what is the poor gardener to do? Send your family off on a holiday without you, but with promises to come back with lots of pictures? Hire a full-time under gardener with full board, so he comes to regard your garden as his own and isn’t offended when you take off to see the Great Salt Lake in May? Or simply come to the realization that there’s going to be a certain amount of…er…collateral damage, should one spontaneously visit Disney World in September? Life is a series of trade-offs, as I have come to realize after an undisclosed amount of years on this planet. This year it will be a crop of early brassicas that will most probably suffer as I fulfill grandparent dreams and familial obligations at the end of this month.
I guess you truly can’t have your squash and eat it too.
