Gardening With My Wife

One of the important rules is that when you screw up enough courage to go for a ride with the bank on a house in the suburbs, you must learn how to garden. It is a covenant in the mortgage agreement, and also one of the 613 mitzvot. This is not one of the commandments that can be wriggled out of like, say, not eating shrimp -- except when no one else is looking. No, it must be done, and it must be done right. Otherwise, you will need counseling. Here is how you do it.

First you call Bruno, who has a truck and lots of experienced advisers from down South America way. They know when, where, why, who, and how  to spread fertilizer (the 4 Ws and an H of gardening). They’re also expert at blowing dead leaves around with engines that, in a former life, did yeoman’s work propelling jumbo jets across the Atlantic, but, in their twilight years, still hasten a bone-curdling deafness to everyone within a 3-mile radius as they cheerfully make their rounds.

Remember to call the right Bruno -- not the junior Bruno whose office is behind the thumb tack factory.  The other Bruno spreads a pretty mean manure in his own right, but he is from the wrong side of the tacks, and not the Bruno to whom I have reference. He deliberately uses the Bruno name, partly because it is his name, but also as part of a sinister scheme to cut into the original Bruno’s market share by using a name (his own) which is likely to cause confusion in the marketplace. We were sure confused when we inadvertently called the wrong Bruno and discovered not only that the  Brunos are cousins, but also that they are feuding and  haven’t spoken to each other in 19 years because of a tiff over some winter cabbage.

As good as the original Bruno is at what he does, do not be misled into the supposition that what he does is “gardening” in the strictest sense of the term. Bruno merely lays the groundwork for the actual tilling, which is what you will be doing later. 

Having a Bruno does not mean, as some have suggested cynically, that you will be: “gardening by numbers” or “gardening with training wheels,” or “hiring a professional gardener and taking credit for the results.” Neither will your later noble foray into the sod be any less  authentically unassisted as a result of the handwritten notes squeezed behind the storm door by Bruno (while you are away at work trying to earn enough salad to pay for the home-grown kind) like so many  supplications stuffed into the crevices of  the Western Wall. Bruno’s prayers are more akin to helpful hints: “Planted vinca along driveway. Water for 13 hours straight after 6 -- or it will die. Also, please stay off  backyard = 3 days.  We massaged grass. Needs time to pulsate.” While the messages are not always a model of clarity, the penmanship is first rate.

 The simple truth is that Bruno’s contributions are really just peripheral. Now it is your turn to get your hands dirty and to make the worms farblonjet.
   
 As you undertake this process, one of the other big rules comes to mind.  It is this: there are no unilateral gardening decisions. This is not a rule to be gleaned from one of Bruno’s cryptic messages. This is, rather, one of those maxims that can be learned only with painstaking trial and error -- mostly error. As it is written: “When you live in a house with someone else whose name is on the mortgage, all gardening decisions are to be made only in consultation with the other mortgagor.  P.S., the other mortgagor is not so bound by this rule, and is, thus, free to make unilateral gardening decisions of her own, no matter how whimsical and insane.”
   
Here is an example of this rule in practice:  “The begonia that you planted in front of the statue of the headless Cupid when I wasn’t looking is pathetic and sickly and has some kind of fungus that will kill everything.”

And so, the begonia must be moved to a less ostentatious location, i.e., the barrel marked with an orange label reading “yard waste.”
   
Though it is, indeed, a drastic move, my wife does have a remarkably curative touch. After one of her frequent surveys of the fraction of an acreage we call home (the bank calls it “collateral“), she transfers to a sunny area of the yard dubbed the “Infirmary”  numerous flora debacles -- born of my hammer and tong approach to landscaping, an approach which incorporates an abject inability (I like to think of it as a “refusal”) to read the instructions for planting and care. I don’t need to read the instructions, I assure her; I can just suss things out -- in a kind of “make the desert bloom” mentality.

 The number of patients in the Infirmary, however, is evidence to the contrary, she reminds me. She is right, of course.
   
 During her regular inspections of the grounds, which I lovingly call “the Dead & Dying Report,”  I am often called upon to explain myself.  Why, for example, are all the  peonies scrunched together and barely peeking up above ground level? Didn’t the tag attached to the container specify that the hole be no more than 6 inches deep and that the flowers be placed at least 3 feet apart?  Or: The hedges look like victims of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, couldn’t you see that you were denuding them? And: “Are you just pretending that the morning glory I spent hours training hasn’t keeled over from utter lack of watering?”
   
 But whereas she tends to see the glass as half empty, I like to maintain an air of childlike optimism and to redirect her attention to something more pleasant. Look!  There’s a chickadee taking the waters in the fountain with a few of his closest friends!

 Don’t try to change the subject, she instructs, as she transports the wounded to the Infirmary where they will be nursed lovingly back to the pink of health. For good measure, she adds: “Do not, under any circumstance, attempt to plant these without supervision,” an admonition I thought, upon hearing for the first dozen times, was just silly talk, but now, with its incessant repetition, am beginning to realize may actually be a serious directive.    

I try to convince her that in all things horticultural, wondrous results can be obtained through the application of positive imagery. Instead of noticing all the vegetation on the verge of giving the thought of ever growing again the old heave-ho, I beseech her to view the garden in a whole new light. I tell her: “Impress all your negative thoughts and emotions about my agricultural abilities with a pen upon a piece of paper. Roll up the piece of paper into a ball. Bang it against the floor and then stomp on it.  Slap it around like a two-bit hood and yell: “If you ever pop into my mind again while I’m discussing my husband’s farming methods, I’ll kill you! Do you hear me!?”

She isn’t paying attention to my lecture on positive affirmations, though.  Instead, she has gone inside the house to take a telephone call  from Bruno.  Some of the men, it turns out, will be around later in the day to remove the protective covering from the roses that had been laid down to protect the new buds from the mid-Spring killing frost that we had earlier in the week, he tells her. That would be the protective covering that I thought was garbage blown over from the neighbor’s yard and had thrown away three days ago without (as is my custom) consulting with my wife before she ever knew it had been installed. At this moment, I hear my name intoned from the kitchen at an operatic decibel.

“What have  you done with the protective covering for the newly-planted roses!?  Did you throw it away, allowing them to freeze to death!?”

“Why, look!” I respond hopefully.  “There’s a cloud in the sky in the shape of a carrot.  Surely this is an omen that presages Edenic bliss for us and the seeds we have sewn.”
   
Speaking of Eden, she considers briefly the possibility of banishment, but settles on some redirecting of her own.
   
This is not to say that all of her unilateral designs sit well with me. I can’t abide asparagus and don’t see why we have to have so much of it in the garden, not to mention the tending, harvesting, and eating of it. Ditto spinach. The aesthetic value of these plants is lost on me. Yet, given the morbidity rate of my crops, I must bite my tongue. It hurts, of course, so I try not to bite it too hard. I don’t really bite my tongue.  That’s just a figure of speech.  What I really do is mutter loudly under my breath, so that she can hear my every word and get my meaning without the slightest trace of ambiguity.

It is incredible to me that with all the rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks that eat everything I try to grow, not a one of them is partial to spinach or asparagus.  It is depressing to have to eat something that even a squirrel thinks isn't worth the effort.

To reciprocate, I take my wife on my own Dead & Dying Tour.  “I think the spinach and asparagus plants are all dead,” I say, crushing them with my foot when she turns away momentarily.  “Maybe we should rip them out and replace them with something more successful like watermelon and cherries,” I suggest.

“You’re crazy,” she answers. “They’re the healthiest thing growing here.” Then she implores me to please stop stepping on her plants. Nothing escapes her gaze.

My wife is obsessed with things she considers to be invasive species (they look like friendly vines to me, but I am not exactly wont to consult a field guide, or any other authority for that matter).  She can be found most mornings hacking away at the roots with an axe and flinging the pieces onto the grass while I drink my coffee unobtrusively and look the other way, praying that I will not be summoned to assist in the surgery. As she works, I try to pick up a few tips from her streaming monologue. Not only have I misidentified the vine, apparently, but also an impressive collection of weeds for which I have cared with beatific ignorance. I would have continued to do so, it seems, until disabused of the notion that they were ever welcome in our lives.

Ultimately, As a result of my rate of  recidivism, certain furloughs have been revoked and my outdoor responsibilities have come to consist chiefly of hosing down the sidewalk to discourage the dandelions. Until my wife explained it to me, I never would have realized the importance of this task to the magical process of photosynthesis. But deferring to her vastly superior trove of  cultivation knowledge, I hear and I do. Who am I to argue?

Besides, Bruno approves.