More recently, however, I have discovered another kind of gardening. There's not much Ta-Dah-ing, or crowing, involved-- more like a variety of oaths from mild to scathing, occasional gnashing of teeth, and some tearing of hair--one could probably safely call it Tilting at Windmills Gardening. Why? Because it involves the quixotic, often fruitless, masochistic, deluded idea of starting the plants from seeds. Why, again, you ask--and it's a damned good question, considering that in March and April you can hardly get inside my front door for all the seedlings packed into the sunny south-facing foyer. And I'll tell you how it got started. Sweet Peas.
Even the best nurseries and farmer's markets have a relatively narrow selection of plants, while the larger nurseries have the advantage of space they nevertheless have to limit themselves to what they can expect to sell. But I started to run across seed companies that had hard-to-find heirloom varieties of things i was lusting after and couldn't find in nurseries, and eventually a few years ago I started with hollyhocks and sweet peas. Sweet peas became a yearly tradition, every south-facing sill in the house crowded with little peat pots holding tiny bamboo tripods. One year I found a treasure trove of sweet pea seeds: heirlooms, antiques,bouquet sweet peas, container sweet peas, and prizewinning new hybrids and even perennial varieties. I began to fill trays of peat pots by the front door. Then a few heirloom columbines, wild strawberries, heliotrope, herbs, cucumbers, baby lettuce and curly endive, and of course wonderful, luscious heirloom tomatoes. I harvest seeds from my best plants: jars of the tiny lobelia seeds, tiny waxed-paper envelopes of tomato seeds (cherokee purple, striped german), jam jars full of nasturtium seeds, marigolds, sweet peas, cosmos, nigella, hollyhock, hyacinth bean vine, moonflower. Curled up by the fire, I leaf through seed catalogs and place orders for new things to try.
In the dead of winter, often while there are still drifts of tinsel on the living room carpet and thank-you notes unwritten, I start soaking seeds and making little greenhouses from takeout food containers. (The kind with the clear plastic tops are perfect little terraria, the clear dome is ideal for humidity retention and the size is perfect for fitting three peat pellets across and four over and then tucking nicely into the windowsill. ) When there are still arctic winds and snowdrifts, and the cold ground seems so sterile and forbidding, I watch the little seedlings sprout and lift their tiny heads to the sun and it reminds me that, outdoors , there are stirrings below the ground and that spring is not so very far away.
When the snows finally melt and the days begin to feel more temperate, outside the daffodils leap out and remind me that I can start hardening off the seedlings outside, which is a tricky process because the nights are still frosty enough to kill off any young plants I may carelessly forget to bring indoors at sunset. There are many other hazards at this stage, too: damping off, which is usually a result of overwatering and will cause the young sprout to wilt and die, and of course the opposite--the peat pellets dry out; a mere half-day of dryness and a seedling will give up the ghost entirely, suddenly shriveling up altogether. Sometimes the seeds don't sprout at all, for various reasons. Or unknown reasons. Or no reason. There are seeds so tiny they are nearly invisible, and will just dissipate unless they are mixed with sand. I put my terraria on the radiator covers for a couple of days to start the germination process, then relegate them to their place in the sun so I can watch and marvel as they sprout their tiny green hopeful shoots.
There are always two little baby leaves on a sprout, ovoid and featureless, leaves that like a child's baby teeth eventually fall off when the adult leaves are out in full force. When the seedling has four of its adult leaves, it can, in theory, go outdoors. That theory doesn't always hold, because there are other danger factors like soil temperature, air temperature, neighborhood teenagers, peeing dogs, curious squirrels/raccoons, drought, flood, vandalism, well-intentioned weeding assistants, big feet, and absent-mindedness when it comes to watering.
A lot of things can go wrong, what can I say. And, when you've nurtured the seedling from its infancy, you really take it personally when the birds eat it or the squirrel digs it up or the neighbor's dog pees on it. My language has gotten pretty scandalous, I am thinking of starting up a cursing jar, dropping in a dollar every time I turn the air blue, and donating the contents to a charity. I save the foulest epithets for my own stupidity when I accidentally step on one of my own babies, or under/overwater it, or hack off a root when I am transplanting.
But eventually they do get transplanted, and they are out there now in the beds and containers, but my seed-started plants are way behind. The rows of green are healthy and happy, but haven't bloomed yet: lobelia in rows, its dark curly foliage happily trailing over the sides of the beds, is still entirely green. The zinnias are happily shooting up, but only a couple of tiny buds have appeared yet, and though a few of the cosmos have started showing some flowers, the nigella is a haze of green fern-like foliage, lovely but still without a single flower. Sweet peas, trailing up their trellises, just starting to form a few little clusters of buds at last, and the cypress vine with its delicate spirals is a quiet deeper green.
Then I look at the strawberry plants, not the big patch of everbearing strawberries but the tiny delicate ones that in France are called "Fraises du Bois', or woodland berries. There are similar wild strawberries in New England, but these berries are sweeter, tiny but plump, and the flavor is insanely, disorientingly, divine-- almost narcotic in its hypnotic intensity, a pagan ode to summer, a dionysian revel, a trip down the rabbit hole. I started some from seeds two years ago, beginning one January afternoon with microscopic seeds and soggy peat, and watching as tiny leaves the size of pinheads eventually emerged, dismayed and thinking I would never live to see these bear fruit, they were so tiny and the odds seemed so long. I nursed the tiny fragile plants and tucked them into the pockets of a couple of strawberry pots, then planted the rest of the seedlings in shady corners under the grape arbor in the back.
I started some more this spring, too, partly because I have friends who clamor for some of the plants. This morning I was looking at their tiny leaves in in a strawberry pot and thinking about the advantages of Ta-Dah gardening, grousing about how tardy all my seedlings are. Later in the afternoon I was weeding in the very back, though, and lo and behold on last year's plants were a huge crop of fat little berries, and as I greedily ate them and inhaled their intoxicating aroma, I felt as though I'd done a particularly successful magic trick, turning microscopic little seeds into pretty little plants that flower and fruit. And therein lies the lure of tilting at windmills, because success against all odds feels so damned good, and that success has been earned.
I guess some things are worth a wait.
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