I admit it. I panicked.
It was exactly one week before Memorial Day and the flats of vegetable and herb plants on my deck still had no place to go.
I had lumber for garden frames in the basement, a stack of old newspaper in the garage and a pile of finished compost ready to go, but I hadn't taken the time to actually make my raised beds.
It was evening, and I was staring at a curry plant thinking of something else when I had a eureka moment. The curry plant was so interesting looking, I thought, with its dusty foliage and flowers about to bloom, that I really should plant it among my flower gardens out front rather than hide it in the herb garden.
And that's when I saw a way out of my predicament.
Why not plant everything with the flowers?
I could tuck the herbs in neatly among the daylilies. I could put tomatoes and peppers in the flower garden where I usually plant cosmos and other annuals. And the zucchini? Well, I'm not sure where the zucchini would go, but I would think of something.
Apropos of nothing, I blurted out my plan to my husband. Fortunately, he didn't take me seriously. He saw it for what it was: panic.
But I don't have soil yet, I whined, and there's no place for the plants to go and I'm not sure I want to spend the money and it's so much work and I don't know how am I going to get the soil here.
For a man who had already spent a sunny afternoon in the dark basement sawing and screwing together one of my two raised bed frames, he reacted with remarkable patience.
He told me I should just get the soil. Take the pickup truck, he said, or just have it delivered onto a tarp in the lawn. Heck, have it delivered to the driveway, he said. He'd park in the street.
I took a deep breath.
Of course I should just get the soil. When had I lost my nerve for ridiculously large, tight-deadline yard projects? Wasn't I the person who had a 5-cubic-yard mountain of compost dropped on the lawn a few years ago and who spread it on my lawn in a day?
This worried me, in part because it's not the only situation in which I've gone soft this year. Out of nowhere I find myself unable to pinch off and kill the extra seedlings in the flat of plants I started from seed.
I always plant two seeds in each well and then if both grow, I pinch off the weaker one. No big deal. But this year I didn't want to do it. I avoided killing them when they were small and now the plants have grown their adult leaves and look like real plants. How can I kill them now? I have 36 tomato seedlings. I may just have to plant them all.
At least if I follow through on my garden beds project I'll have some extra space.
My husband's pep talk got me back in the game. I went to the garden store the next day to inquire about soil.
If all goes well I will be spending this weekend madly shoveling dirt out of the back of my husband's truck so he can drive it to work Tuesday, throwing together a garden under pressure and loving every minute of it.
nnn
Julie Kirkwood is a freelance writer for The Eagle-Tribune. Her column, Yard Dirt, appears most weeks in At Home, Sunday North.
