I decided that my garden blog needed a dormant season—a good freeze over the winter to let its author store up energy for the new season. 

I think that I have successfully rejuvenated myself because during Mother Nature’s little strip tease last week, I found myself repeatedly saying aloud; “now THAT is a bloggable moment.”

Along with the snowdrops and crocuses, many of my blog characters from last spring have reemerged. 

There’s evidence that Peter Rabbit and his mistress have returned to our strawberry patch to cast off another round of offspring. 

The sparrows are back and wreaking havoc in our barn.  Unfortunately for them, my husband is less sympathetic of sparrows tearing insulation out of the barn roof and pooping on his lawn mower than he is of bunnies making abundant love in our garden.

The elderly retired farmer who lives next door has stowed his ice fishing gear (a sure sign of spring) and moved on to burning his fence lines.  There’s just something a little unnerving about watching an old man set fire to your property line with little more than a gasoline drip and a rake.  Maybe I’m underestimating his ability to react swiftly in time of danger, but the man does drive with a post-it note stuck to his steering wheel that says “look both ways.”  Maybe I’d feel better if there was a post-it on his torch that said “don’t burn neighbor’s house down.”

And then there’s one of my main characters and most persistent gardening challenge of all—no, not my husband, but that big wolf-like German Shepherd we call our pet.  This time of year she prefers the earthy pillow of emerging tulips and daffodils over her dog bed and with the ground freshly thawed, she’s not wasting anytime getting her digging paws back into shape.  Last week I caught her in the act of burying a box of fish tackle and later, one of my husband’s t-shirts.  There’s really no way of knowing how many miscellaneous objects this four-legged kleptomaniac has buried on our property.  She did not however, bury the 20 oz. New York Strip Steak she stole hot off the grill a few days ago.  She consumed that juicy steak, with not a hint of remorse, right in front of her horror-struck owners.

Since my characters are back and offering good humorous material, I’m sure my gardens aren’t far behind.  Let the fun begin!

I’m having a hard time accepting the end of the growing season, and believe me; I’ve dragged it out as long as I can.

Tilling under the gardens and dumping out the flower pots feels like I’m being forced to end a summer romance just when I fell in love.

Just when the meadows are at their greenest, the fall fruits are pouring off the vines, and my muscle memory has finally mastered the toolshed—everything changes.  The next thing I know, I’m commuting to work in the dark (both ways) and spending more time prisoner to Dancing with the Stars than enjoying my own reality.

You’d think that by the first of December I’d be able to accept this annual routine and move on.  Apparently not.  I’m still infatuated with the color and warmth and light of summer.

Wishing I could color render the outside world

Holding on to every last ray of sunshine and every last degree above freezing, I feel like this Delphinium blooming outside my kitchen window.  The Sedum Autumn Joys and the New England Asters have long surrendered, but this gal isn’t giving up just yet.

I check on this Delphinium first thing every morning, ignoring the fact that our window-filled home loses its privacy this time of year.  The surrounding woods and farm fields are now dotted with camouflaged men, perched in treetops with spotting scopes capable of discovering life on Mars, and who probably don’t (or maybe they do) want to see my paling skin scampering from window to window.  (My conservative flannel pajamas are of course still packed away in the shunned “winter” box.)

In quiet protest to the changing of the seasons, our autumn displays of homegrown pumpkins and gourds are dissolving into piles of rancid mush.  Composting them would signify that it’s time to replace them with evergreen bows and wreaths and other wintry effects.  I’m just not ready.

Despite every glossy magazine cover on my coffee table telling me I should be crafting Christmas ornaments and hankering for the likes of pumpkin cheesecake and caramel macchiatos, I find myself barefoot, sipping mojitos, and flipping through old flower catalogs. 

Late one recent night I slipped on my gardening boots, woke up the dog, and snuck out into the frosty night to gather some still-green spearmint to satisfy my fresh mojito (a.k.a. summer-in-a-glass) craving.  The crickets and swamp frogs were silent.  All I could hear was the subtle rustle of frost-covered blades of grass crumbling beneath my feet and the distant cackling of coyotes. 

I stopped and wondered what stiffened grass would feel like barefoot.  Would it tickle like walking barefoot through a fresh cut hayfield?  Clenching the flashlight between my teeth, I prepared to strike the well-balanced yoga pose needed to extricate a foot from my knee-high rubber boots.  I noticed Maddie, my forever enthusiastic canine companion, give me a confused glance as if to say, “Lady, you’re nuts.  What the heck are we doing out here?”

Maddie is happy to reenact her look of skepticism for a photo

I was lucid enough to know that when your dog thinks you’ve lost your marbles, you probably have, so I kept my boots on, snipped off enough frosty mint for a single mojito and ran back inside.

Like any summer romance that comes to an end, I know that I will find happiness again and it will be sooner than I think.  With the end of one good thing, comes the vacancy for another.  I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

I learned to appreciate seasonal renewal after living in Hawaii for eight terribly confusing seasons, where the only delineation of time was a-little-more-rainy versus a-little-less-rainy.  (Note: Relationship analogy deemed inappropriate for newlywed to ponder.)

When I’m ready, I know I’ll be swept off my feet by the scent of balsam fir and mulled spices, hot cocoa spiked with Bailey’s, and listening to old Christmas records while waiting for the cinnamon rolls to rise on a snowy Sunday morning.  I’ll delight in tobogganing and ice skating and snowshoeing up mountains.   I’ll take my first run down the ski slope and I’ll swear that there’s no better feeling in the world—not even dancing barefoot in a warm summer rain.

I’m hereby acknowledging that my feet are bloody freezing on these cold wood floors.  I think I’ll go dig some wool socks out of the “winter” box and make myself a mug of something warm and gooey.

This question was thrown my way by Fine Gardening magazine. 

The challenging task of narrowing my hoards of garden wishes down to just three inspired a long sentimental journey through all of the intoxicating garden aromas, flavors, touches, romances and beauty that I’ve experienced in my life and dreamed of being able to recreate, relive, or prolong.  I’m such a romantic.

My pragmatic husband pondered this same question for about 1.4 seconds and responded, “1. No more weeds.  2.  No more pests.  3. A 36 horsepower Kubota L-Series tractor.” He gave me a smug glance, as if to say, “That was easy.  What’s your problem?”

“Well, when I do find and articulate my wishes,” I replied, “at least I know they’re going to make for a better story than yours.”

You be the judge.  You can now read my garden wishes, along with the wishes of six other garden bloggers, in the December issue of Fine Gardening out on newsstands now.

Here on my blog, I thought that instead of wining about things I want and don’t have, I’d gush about a few of my garden-related wishes that have come true over the past year.  To allow for the detail that they deserve,  I will share one at a time over the coming weeks.

#1 GARDEN WISH GRANTED: A tropical garden wedding.

It should be of no surprise that my biggest garden-related dream come true was my warm, flowery, flavorful wedding adventure in the South Pacific.  Ten months ago, when Indiana was drooping with a thick layer of ice, I absconded with my Knight-in-Shining-Armor to the warm waters and lush tropical forests of Fiji. 

Forgoing a big traditional wedding allowed us the time, money, and sanity to enjoy two weeks of intimate bliss on Taveuni, the “Garden Isle of Fiji”. 

We made our home at Nakia Resort & Dive, a small eco-resort with ten acres of tropical gardens and an organic farm. It’s a place so wonderful that I actually hesitate to share my secret for fear it becomes too well-known.

On Christmas Eve, among the gardens, on a cliff overlooking the blue waters of Fiji, my dream of a simple, intimate, graceful wedding came true.  The intoxicating aroma of plumerias and gardenias presided over the ceremony. 

Our wedding at Nakia wasn’t just a girl’s dream come true, but a gardener’s dream come true.  Everyday the staff brought us big bouquets of fresh tropical flowers and dappled our cottage with hibiscus and plumeria flowers.  

We spent hours and hours roaming the gardens, fascinated by the intricacies of growing fruits and vegetables year-round in a tropical climate.

And then there was the food.  Wow.  At every meal we indulged in some of the finest and freshest cuisine we’ve ever had.  Most of the ingredients were grown organically just steps from the kitchen. 

When your garden looks like this:

How could you not sing Hallelujah when you’re sitting on a porch being served an organic and locally grown breakfast that looks like this:

Visiting Taveuni was a dream come true for both the lovebird and the gardener within me.

My nightmare in the tomato patch.

After eight months of marriage, my typically flawless husband has finally found my “I-can’t-believe-you-did-that!” button.

The reason behind my recent fury is going to be very difficult for the average person to understand.  But if there’s any outlet for me to rant and possibly get a little sympathy from someone other than my mom, it’s going to be here on my garden blog.

He wasn’t out drinking all night.  He didn’t wager his paycheck playing online poker.  I didn’t find a beef taco under the couch cushion. 

It was so much worse. 

He gave away… gulp… all our ripe tomatoes!!!

Big, beautiful, heirloom brandywine tomatoes in the hands of danger

The story began on Thursday night when I called home from the office to tell my husband that I would be, for the second night in a row, working around the clock in an attempt to meet a completely insane deadline.  (Note to self: send blog link to bosses. Italicize completely insane.)

I immediately perked up from my compu-coma when my hubby mentioned that he was going to pick some vegetables to bring to his close friends at work (i.e. all staff and faculty in his school corporation) the next day.   

Unenthusiastic, but trying not to appear selfish, I said, “Okay, but please don’t give away our tomatoes because I want to make sauce this weekend and I need all the ripe ones that we have.”  I was looking forward to spending my Sunday barefoot in the kitchen, turning our homegrown tomato harvest into homemade awesomeness.

He replied, more or less, “Blah, blah, blah.  There’re plenty.  Blah blah blah.  But Baby, I’m a giver.  You need to be more of a giver. Blah.”

I said, “I’m serious.  I don’t think you realize how many tomatoes it takes to make just one jar of tomato sauce.”

Friday evening I stumbled home from my 60 hour work day and immediately noticed that our kitchen, which typically has fresh produce protruding from every nook and cranny, was uncharacteristically barren. 

“You didn’t give away all our tomatoes did you?”

“No.  Not ALL of them,” he replied matter-of-factly as he handed me TWO of my heirloom tomatoes, undoubtedly saved from his free produce stand only because they were really big and really ugly.

Too tired to argue, I laid my head down on the kitchen table next to one of my thankfully ugly Marvel Stripe heirloom tomatoes, pouted for a minute, and fell asleep.

But when Sunday rolled around, I had regained enough strength to wage my battle. 

While the tomato thief and I rummaged around the patch looking for the “plenty more ripe ones” he had promised, I wore a grimacing frown that every husband should fear.

I prodded for an apology. 

Finally he said, “Okay, I’m sorry, but Baby, they’re just tomatoes.”

“JUST tomatoes?”  I gasped.  “These aren’t JUST tomatoes! These are the heirloom tomatoes that we started from seed on our window sill back in March, built a cold frame for in April, planted in our garden in May and tirelessly tended to through the frosts, storms, droughts and bug infestations of June, July, and August.  These are the tomatoes that were to be the main ingredient, and a rather important one at that, in the homemade tomato sauce that I was to spend my day therapeutically smelling and stirring for hours and hours.  This was to be the sauce that would forever dispel my pressurecookerphobia. ”

Never again shall these babies be mistaken as "just tomatoes"

When I saw I wasn’t reaching him with sentimentality, I tried to reach him with numbers.

“Do you understand the investment I’ve made in this tomato sauce already?  I’ve spent $10 on seeds and supplies, $30 for a canning class, $40 on a blanching pot, $70 on a pressure canner and now I have two tomatoes to work with?  That’s about $150 for a scant ½ jar of sauce!  And you thought Bill Alexander’s $64 dollar tomato was ridiculous?”

We picked a meager 6.5 pounds of ripe-ish tomatoes that morning.  I needed 30. 

He said, “I’ll get you more tomatoes.”

“It’s not the same,” I sulked.  And sulked.  And sulked.

The incident has left me to wonder if I am over-reacting or if any gardener would feel the same hurt and fury if the harvest she has mothered for months is taken away?  I realize that in the grand scheme of things, these were in fact just tomatoes.  But in my world, they were far more than that. 

A few final words to my tomato thief:

I’m sorry for breaking our agreement that you get to edit blogs written about your character, but hey, I also thought we had an agreement that you wouldn’t give away all the tomatoes.  Truce? 

Although I will forever contend that our homegrown tomatoes are not just tomatoes, I do thank you for the 30 pounds of substitutes that you brought home from your brother’s garden Sunday afternoon.  I just hope he asked his wife first.

Harvesting our garden produce and admiring its growth spurt after returning from our summer vacation

This may-like motivation is the result of returning home from my July vacation and being thrilled with all the new blooms and the plethora of harvestable goods.  It’s easy to overlook the small daily changes in your garden, but after a longer absence, it’s awe-striking how quickly plant life changes. 

Of course abandoning my homestead in the peak of growing season isn’t easy.

Two summer vacations ago, I had just moved my army of veggie and flower containers from my apartment patio to my new country home.  Doug (my boyfriend) and I set up an automatic sprinkler system to care for them in our absence.  We returned to find that our irrigation had malfunctioned (on day 1) and my beloved companions were limp and barely clinging to life. 

Still recovering from my losses, last summer I left Doug (my fiancé) at home to tend to the gardens while I vacationed solo.

This summer I thought I’d better reprioritize the people and plants in my life.  After all, it would be a little awkward to leave Doug (my husband) at home to water the tomatoes while I attended the wedding party thrown in our honor.  So I settled for plan C… hired help. 

We left our container gardens, our 100 potted mums and our dog in the care of one brave friend.  (In hindsight, I also wish we’d left our weeds in his care.)  On our drive home from the airport I made the prediction that we were more at risk to find our plants drowning than wilting.  I think that caretakers are so afraid of under-doing that they over-do.  I was kinda right.  Our plants looked happy and lush, but our Maddie waddled up to us looking uncharacteristically plump. 

Plucking basil leaves for pesto with one very happy canine

Now it’s catch up time.  For the past few days, we’ve been scrambling to dig the rest of the potatoes and onions, freeze sweet corn (before the birds eat it all), broccoli (before the worms eat it all), basil pesto (before the Japanese beetles eat it all), and blueberries (before I eat them all). 

It’s good to be home.

Now,  about those weeds…

While I have zero interest in teaching derivatives and integrals to smug high school students, I have a huge amount of interest in my husband’s summer vacation.  As a wannabe full-time gardener who barely has enough time to de-wilt the flowers each evening after work, I am burdened with irrepressible envy for my husband’s project-filled summers.

Last Friday I arrived home after work thinking that Doug would want to celebrate his last day of school by going out for a nice dinner and then enjoying a quiet and relaxing evening.

I should’ve known.  Instead, I found him in the front yard with a big piece of machinery and an even bigger grin on his face.  Of course.  Doug chose to celebrate his first weekend of the summer by renting a mini-excavator.  

Doug initiating our patio project with a Dingo, four-wheeler, and trailer

One of the things I love the most about my husband is his creative energy.  I know that I will never be a wife who complains that her husband is a couch potato and never does anything around the house.  Doug is a doer.

However, one of the things that exasperates me the most as the wife of said husband is when he uses this creative energy to do something I don’t want done, or more commonly, don’t want so overdone.  He has a track record of turning a small trim job along the lane into an all-day chainsaw massacre.  There is nothing calculated or restricted about his “controlled burns.”  And now, digging out sod for a small patio has turned into Doug’s very own “Big Dig”.  Although admirable, his eagerness to pursue home projects is worrisome for the wife who’s at work all day wondering what her husband is up to in her (as she likes to think) gardens.

One of the biggest challenges of gardening together is that we both want to be head of the estate, when in reality, we are equal partners.  In other areas of our home, there is an unspoken division of power.   I don’t tell Doug how to organize the garage and he doesn’t tell me how to decorate the kitchen, even though I still tinker and Doug still cooks.  But when it comes to our lawn and garden we have almost no mutually agreeable gender roles.  When our ideas, desires and ethics differ, as they often do, we must compromise—an art that doesn’t come easy to us Newlyweds.

I still think I’m 15 with my own unlimited garden space and unlimited plant material allowed by my easy-going single dad and his greenhouse business.  I am not accustomed to negotiating neither my garden plans nor my meticulous manual management strategies.  Doug grew up working on his family’s 100-acre farm, growing vegetables on a commercial scale.  Today, he manages our 3 acres as if they were 100, avoiding any activity ending with the feared words “by-hand.”   I shovel (by-hand); he rents an excavator.  I use a wheelbarrow (by-hand); he uses a four-wheeler.  I weed with a weed fork (by-hand); he mixes round-up in a boom sprayer.

Annie working on the patio project with a shovel and wheelbarrow

With his rented Dingo, Doug spent much of the weekend removing sod and excavating dirt for my big landscaping project in the front yard.  I very much appreciated his tedious efforts, but also realized that I needed to pull on his reigns if I wanted to maintain control of my project.  I gave a well-received lecture about how much time and thought I’d put into planning this project and how much I was looking forward to doing the construction.  I emphasized, “I’m the project manager—The Brain and you’re the laborer—The Muscle.  The Muscle can’t work properly without The Brain.” Being the wonderful man that he is, he agreed to let the patio project rest on weekdays.

Maddie might love summer vacation (and trailer loads of topsoil) even more than The Muscle

But since The Muscle isn’t allowed to lay flagstone while I’m at work, he has to find something else to do.

Monday, the first day of his summer vacation, I received the following email at 1:53 PM:

Subject:  You whoooo…

“Uh ohhhhh… the muscle has been at it again….”

And so begins the summer adventures of The Muscle and The Brain.  Every weekday for the next 10 agonizing weeks, The Brain will be sitting at her office desk wondering if The Muscle is up to an “Oh no!” or an “Oh yeah!” 

Stay tuned…

Okay.  I’ll admit it.  I have a love-hate relationship with frosts.  Though I cringe at the thought of any of my fragile young plants withering away on a chilly night, there’s something oddly pleasurable about scurrying around the farm on a crisp, clear evening, creatively outfitting the garden with an extra layer of warmth.  It feels similar to the exhilaration of preparing for a big storm.

As a newlywed couple, my husband and I are disadvantaged when it comes to preparing our gardens for a hard frost.  We haven’t aged enough to have correspondingly aged sheets and blankets to sacrifice as frost covers.  We’ve been forced to expedite the tattering of our pristine linens for the sake of our tender plants. 

Our strawberries got the royal treatment last night, tucked in under nearly new 800 thread count sheets.  Our zinnias cozied up to some soft L.L. Bean flannel.  Thankfully, the posh new sheets my Mom gave us for our wedding were on our bed, because that’s the first thing she asked when I mentioned our frost challenge on the phone to her last night.  “Oh, Annie, you didn’t put the Garnet Hill sheets out in the garden, did you?”  Whew, that was close.

Our strawberry plants got five-star frost treatment with this matching set of 800 thread count sheets

When the wedding gifts ran out, we moved on to a couple of blue tarps, and then upside-down plastic pots.  Our garden soon resembled a bright patchwork quilt. 

The morning after a frost is not quite so peaceful.  The sun doesn’t hit our gardens until about 7:15 AM, which lucky for my husband, is after he leaves for work.  This leaves me about 15 minutes to reverse an hour’s worth of work before I too need to leave. 

Whenever possible, I extend “Casual Fridays” to “Casual Frostdays”, but this morning I had an important business meeting and needed to look like I didn’t just crawl out of the garden.  Over the dress pants, blouse, and neatly pulled back hair, I layered on an oversized pair of sweatpants, my husband’s fleece-lined denim work jacket and rubber boots.  As soon as the sun cast its warmth on our hillside, I bolted out the back door, running (literally) in a race against the clock to strip down our gardens and move all the potted plants from inside the barn back to daylight. 

Maddie, our German Shepherd, got instantly riled up in all the commotion, going into uber-goofy mode, charging around the garden in broad circles and nose-diving into the soft flannel sheets.  Very helpful.  Then she pooped right in my path between the barn and the plant benches so I had to run, carry a heavy armload of plants, dodge fresh poop, and gag from the shockingly repulsive odor (must have been the deer leg she was gnawing on last night) — all at the same time.  Perhaps this is some higher power’s way of preparing me for the possibility of future motherhood.  I’ve never been so happy to get into my car and drive to work. 

I waltzed into the office only three minutes late, with a caffeine-free rush of adrenaline to get me through the morning, and amazingly, not a hint of garden (or dog) on me.  There’s something invigorating about leading the secretive double life of a working hobby gardener.

En lieu of pre-marital counseling, my husband and I opted for the much more grueling and revealing task of pre-marital homesteading.  During our experiments in the dirt together, Doug and I came to realize one big difference between us.  I am a planner.  He is a doer.  I research every project meticulously and formulate a plan for its precise execution.  He dives right into projects, making do with whatever knowledge and materials he has and then learns from his successes and failures. 

Neither of our strategies is necessarily bad in moderation, but we’re both extremists at what we do – or in my case, plan.  Our biggest challenge in the garden together is finding some kind of compromise between my neurotic planning and his haphazard doing.

One evening shortly after moving in together, we expressed a mutual interest in starting a blueberry patch.  Unbeknownst to me, within a couple of hours an assortment of blueberry plants was on a UPS truck en route to our farm.  Meanwhile, I spent the next week researching all the possible varieties that might grow well in zone 5, in silt clay loam soils, on our north facing slope.  I researched soil amendments and fertilizers and mulching techniques.  At the end of the week, I proudly skipped up to my blue-eyed boyfriend with a short list of varieties to discuss, just as the delivery man pulled into the driveway with an odd assortment of blueberry plants—umm, not on my list. 

Nearly all the blueberry plants are now dead.  

However, that doesn’t mean my neurotic planning strategy would have produced more successful results.  Honestly, it probably would have taken me another four weeks to actually place an order, at which point it would’ve been too late in the season, so I’d decide to hold off until the following spring, but then there would be new varieties and new information to research… and you get the point.

Here’s my problem and why I need a whip:  A modest amount of planning and researching is fine, but obsessive planning and compulsive researching is not.  Trying to be a perfectionist in the garden is a setup for continual disappointment.  The most wonderful and perfect thing about nature is its unpredictability.  I need to learn to be a little more like my husband, consider our gardens a source of ongoing adventure, take risks, and then learn from my mistakes.  For the past 94 weekends, I’ve been telling my boyfriend – then fiancé – then husband that I will draw up a landscape plan for our front yard so that he can see what I’m visualizing.  Apparently I have an easier time committing to marriage than I do to committing an idea, in pencil, to paper.

Here’s my husband’s problem and why he needs a leash:  Let me tell you another story.  (I have lots.) This past Saturday afternoon I agreed that we should conduct a controlled burn on the weedy hillside behind our barn.  End of conversation.  In my head, I’m thinking that I’ll check the weather report for next weekend, assess the predicted wind direction, devise a burn plan, and borrow a drip torch, some fire-resistant nomex clothing, two water backpacks, and a couple of flappers from work.  Later that evening while distracted by the dinner dishes, I notice that my husband has mysteriously disappeared from his safe station on the couch.  I look out the living room window to see the entire hillside ablaze and my husband frantically stomping out flames in his tennis shoes.  Needless to say, sometimes I wish my husband was a little more like his analytical wife, particularly when the situation involves things like fire, flammable liquids, tall ladders, and chainsaws.

This season we’ve vowed to try and lessen our individual extremisms and learn from the other’s strengths.  Our figurative whip and leash may be our most valuable garden tools.

(But hey, if not, it sure will make for an entertaining blog!)