From Word To Word

I wrote a post about Manitoulin Island a few years ago, mentioning how I had been picking sandcherries and making syrup with them.  Since then I have made several attempts to grow some sandcherries from seed, with almost no success. One batch of seeds, which I cleaned individually as I ate the cherries, were mistakenly left in the zipper pocket of my swimsuit and put through both the washer and the dryer, so I did not even bother stratifying them.  Another batch, also individually cleaned, went through both stratification and planting, but not a single seed germinated.  I tried to find other people who had successfully germinated them, but without success, so I was forced to work by trial and error.

When seeds do not germinate, there are several possible explanations.  First, the seeds may not be viable, which may be caused by the seeds being harvested too soon; by the parent plant not being properly pollinated; by exposure to environmental factors, like growing too near a juglone producing plant; or by some idiot sending them through the laundry.  Second, the seeds may not be stratified properly, which is to say that they may not have been exposed to the proper cycles of cold and heat that are required for the seed to trigger germination.  Third, they may not have undergone the right environmental factors to break down the seed shell, a process that might involve sitting in moisture for a certain time, going through the digestive system of a certain animal, or even, in some cases, being exposed to forest fire.  These environmental factors can often be approximated, by subjecting the seeds to acids or scarification or heat, but determining which techniques to use is not always easy.

Now, I was pretty sure that at least some of the seeds were viable, because I had taken them from a number of plants in a number of locations, all of which showed seedling growth in subsequent years, and because I was collecting seeds at various stages of maturity, all the way from relatively young fruit to the fruit that had ripened fully and fallen to the ground.  I was also pretty certain that I had stratified them correctly, since I have stratified other varieties of cherries very successfully, and it would be strange for such a similar species to require a double-stratification or something of that nature.  I was left with the probability that the seeds needed additional environmental factors to germinate, and I could count out fire fairly safely.  The plants do, however, grow right on the beach, so it was entirely possible that they needed to be soaked for a good period of time, and many kinds of seeds need to pass through an animal’s digestive system, so I determined to watch carefully this past summer, to see how the seeds were being spread naturally.

My first discovery was that a tremendous number of the cherries were being consumed by the gulls.  The gull droppings were full of seeds, and I was mentally preparing myself for the unpleasant task of digging through bird waste for them, when I made a second discovery, that the gulls often voided over the water, leaving the shallows full of partly digested but washed and soaking seeds.  I gathered several hundred of them, stratified them for four months in a soil mixture that was more sandy and moist than I normally use, and yesterday I planted them.  I have high hopes .

As some of you will know already, this year I am planning to plant a garden to supply vegetables for the Agape Drop-in, and I am hereby officially extending an invitation to anyone who would like to assist.

Since this is the first year, we will be planting only root vegetables that we can grow with minimal maintenance and that the drop-in can store with minimal effort, potatoes and carrots mostly. The garden will be located on a little property that we have been calling The Foundry, which can be accessed by a little laneway off of Division Street near Woolwich (I will post a flag), and we will be meeting this coming long weekend to break ground and begin planting.  Anyone and everyone is welcome to join us on Saturday the 21st and Monday the 23rd from 1:00 to 4:00.  We would love to see you there, even if you can stay just long enough to see the place.

If you would like to support the project but are not able to help with the actual gardening, we are still looking for a few things, and we would really appreciate it if you could supply some of them: a second rain barrel, a second wheel barrow, a couple of garden rakes, and some garden hoses that are in decent shape.  Also, if someone has a pick-up truck that we could borrow on the Saturday to take a load of garbage to the dump, that would be very helpful as well.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like any further information.

I have been away for a while, first on Manitoulin with some friends and then at camp, and I have returned home with a whole list of things that I need to write about but will probably not find the time to write about very soon, especially considering the new semester that is lurking only a few days away.  I would like to write something about what it means to go away together, in togetherness, as family and as friends, something about how increased wealth produces increased isolation, something about John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, something on the idea of the call in Heidegger, something on the relationship between ideals of individuality and the experience of depression, and this is still a very partial list.

I was full of these and other things  as I drove into the driveway on Saturday, full of the need to do something about them, but coming home disrupted them with its welcome, disrupted them with the pleasantness of the home and neighbourhood.  There were tomatoes, hundred of tomatoes, ripening on the vines, the first ripe tomatoes I have ever managed to grow from seed.  There were apples, a very few apples, our first ever crop of apples, ready to be picked.  There were sunflowers, the sunflowers that my eldest son had purchased with his own allowance and planted with his own hands and watered relentlessly, and they were blooming.  There were the friends who dropped by for pancakes on Saturday night, and the friends who came by for pasta on Sunday night.  There was, in short, a fullness of those things that make the home and the garden and the neighbourhood what they should be.

You will not blame me for choosing them over writing the poor things that I might have written.

We have been cutting and drying herbs at our place (oregano, lemon balm, tarragon), and though this is a time consuming undertaking, it is one of those mundane tasks that leave plenty of time for thinking and conversation, and I quite enjoy the labour of it, particularly when friends drop by, not quite unexpectedly, as Don Moore and his family did the other day.  While the kids played in the back yard, Don began helping me prepare the herbs for hanging, and we talked, about the book that he is writing on post-9/11 film, about City of God, and about other things. These moments, when others are able to join the rhythm of the home, both practically and intellectually, gratify me very much.  They affirm in practical ways the truths I hold most closely.

The garden marks the space of the cultivated between the spaces of the home and the world, between the spaces of the domestic and the natural.  This cultivated space lies beyond the home, but it is nevertheless a part of the home, an extension of the home into the world.  It is the space that marks the transition from the domestic to the natural.  It signals that the door to the home is near but has not yet been entered, that the threshold of the home is close at hand but has not yet been crossed. It bears the marks of both the domestic and the natural, and so it is less a border between them than it is a borderland, a place of transition, where they are brought into a relation.

It is the space in which the domestic orders the natural so that it might be more aesthetic or more productive, but it is also a space that is always open, by necessity, to some degree or another, to the natural.  This is true even in the most urban situations, even where the natural has been most disrupted and displaced, even where the natural has been reduced only to the weather and to whatever remnant plants and animals have learned to survive in the midst of human development.  Even in these places, so long as the home is bordered by a garden, though it be only a hanging planter or a window box, the cultivated space marks the transition between the home and whatever remains of the natural, and it comes to offer itself as a space where the natural and the domestic both might better live and grow.

The nature of the cultivated space, therefore, marks the nature of the relation between the domestic and the natural in any given place, whether it be the unrelieved concrete of an urban neighbourhood, or the vast and ordered lawns of suburbia, or the fields of the farmhouse.  In each case, the garden reveals how the domestic relates to the natural.  For this reason, the creation of a garden is more than a merely aesthetic or a merely productive act.  It is also a political and a social act, and the choices that are made in its construction are not without their political and social significance.  The choice of whether to make the garden organic or edible or native; the choice of whether to make it hospitable to whatever might enter it, whether it be human or animal or vegetable; the choice of whether to keep only carefully maintained lawns and a few well pruned shrubs or to have a whole range of plants and trees: these all become significant, because they reveal how we cultivate our relation to the natural.

Words are like stones.  You must work with them.  You must heft them, turn them in your hands, feel their weight and their shape, know each one for what it is before you can find its proper place, not its perfect place, for no stone and no word ever fits perfectly, and each word and each stone must be held in place by other stones and words, by earth or by mortar, but each will have its proper place, a place that fits it, a place for which it might have been fitted if it had been fitted, though it has not been fitted for any place at all, and what these words and these stones become is precisely this, a proper place that is the sum of their proper places, where they come to be something that they always could have come to be, one of the many things that they could have come to be, and perhaps, oh, let us rest in this perhaps, they will come to be something beautiful.  This is the work of the mason and the writer, both.  It is what makes words like stones.

I have been building a drystone retaining wall in my backyard.  It will eventually edge the bit of lawn that I am seeding in the backyard for my children to play on, and it will have a single terrace for a garden where I will plant some shrubs to block the view of our neighbour’s driveway.  It is pretty rudimentary stuff as far as stonework is concerned, but it has been taking me some time to complete it.

It is not that I am completely without experience in stonework.  I used to lay flagstone sometimes for my brother Nathan in the summers, and I put in a cobblestone path in the garden of our last house, and I have been setting stones to edge the garden paths of this current house, but stone never seems to get easier for me.  It is always as difficult as when I first began, no matter how much of it I do.

A mason does not build with stone.  A mason works with stone.  This is not a meaningless distinction.  Stonework is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, only none of the pieces are designed to fit together, and so they may need to be shaped a little with a hand sledge and a cold chisel, and they all weigh ten pounds or more.    Yet there is something deeply satisfying about working with stone, about seeing what the stone can become.  Every time a block finds its place, the wall comes closer to being what it will be.

I love Serviceberries (Amelanchier canadensis), or Saskatoon Berries as they are sometimes called.  The fruit tastes wonderful and makes great pies; the flowers are white and delicately fragrant in the spring; and the leaves are a beautiful red in the fall.

This is why I decided to try and grow some Serviceberries from seed last fall, collecting seeds from two very nice specimens in my neighbourhood, and working from Henry Kock’s Growing Trees from Seed, a book I have posted about before.  This is also why I went through the painstaking process of teasing the prematurely germinated seedlings apart and planting them in my seedtable this spring.  I was able to plant a whole tray of thirty-two seedlings, and I was eagerly anticiapting my own Serviceberry grove in ten years or so.

Unfortunately, the seedtable was initially placed in my basement, and the temperature was apparently not warm enough, because every one of those thirty-two seedling withered and died in a matter of week.  I moved the seedtable upstairs immediately, but the damage had been done, and I had no recourse but to console myself with the knowledge that I could collect more seeds in the fall.

A few weeks ago, however, I noticed some strange seedlings mixed in among the yarrow that I had planted very shortly after the Serviceberries.  They were quite definately not yarrow, but they were also quite definitely not the little weeds that creep into potting soil when it is reused over time.  I decided to let them be, and it quickly became clear that they were in fact Serviceberry seedlings.  I had taken the soil in which the Serviceberry seeds had been stratifying all winter and mixed it back into my potting soil, and this discarded soil must have contained at least a few seeds that had not germinated but still could.

So now, against all hope, I have five Serviceberry seedlings.

I wrote last week about making a seed table, and I must admit that the post did deem to imply that I was starting tomatoes in my seed table as of this past weekend, which horrified several of my gardening friends.  Now, I am new to the gardening game, but even I know that it is still early for tomatoes, and I plan to plant red peppers in two weeks or so and then tomatoes one or two weeks after that.  Though it was the tomatoes that made the table necessary, the seeds that I put in the dirt this past weekend were of a very different sort.  They were the tree seeds that I had been stratifying in the refrigerator this winter, and they were technically no longer even seeds.

This was the reason, actually, for my hurry in making the table in the first place.  I had not expected to need the tables for a week or two yet, but I went last week to check the moisture levels of my stratifying seeds and discovered that they had all germinated, every one of them.  I no longer had little bags of dirt and hibernating seeds.  I had little bags of dirt and tangled masses of germinated seedlings, all pale and straggly and searching for light.  So, my first task was to build the table a little ahead of schedule, and my second task, accomplished this past Saturday, was to detangle and plant in seed trays the still very delicate seedlings.

The plum and cherry plants were fairly simple.  There were fewer of them, and they were stronger, and only a few of them had germinated in the first place.  The roses were a little more difficult, but there were still only a couple of dozen of them, so I planted them out without too  much trouble.  The Saskatoon seedlings, however, were a nightmare.  There were something like a hundred of them, all very delicate, and all woven together like a mat.  I was forced to pick through them one by one and to use a toothpick to help place them in the soil without breaking their roots.  This is definitely not how the manuals recommend that you plant seeds, and after several hours of tedium I would also second their judgment, but the results seem good.  I had relatively few of the seedlings die off from shock or breakage, and the cherries and plums are responding very quickly to the light.  It was good just to see the rows of little plants, and I was motivated to plant several trays of perennial herbs that can stay in the table until spring.

As our first real snowstorm of the year rolled in yesterday, it was good to have a little bit of spring growing in my basement.

There are three principal reasons that I have not been writing over the last few days.

Two of these reasons are of the sort that I am a little ashamed to confess: first, I have been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess with  my eldest son, since he is old enough to be interested in the game but is still too young to work his way through it by himself; second, my wife and I have been watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica in the evenings.  I do not often indulge in these kinds of things, and I have been getting much less done because of them, but I remain entirely unrepentant.

The third reason is at least a productive one: I have been making a seed table to start my seedlings for the garden this spring.  Last year’s experiment with putting the seed trays in the window sills was mostly a disaster.  There was too little heat and too little light in the front windoew, and there are really no better places in the house.  A seed table was necessary, and so a seed table has been made.  The photos are perhaps not entirely clear, but the table has two levels, each of which is divided into six sections that are the same dimensions as a standard seed try, so I will be able to start twelve trays of seeds at a time, which should meet all of my foreseeable needs.  I still have to add the plastic cover and buy the grow bulbs, but it is otherwise ready to go.  Best of all, the thing cost me only the price of the light fixtures.  The frame was constructed from some wood that I salvaged from my brother-in-law’s futon, and the cover will be cut from some poly that was left over from insulating the attic of our previous home.

I hope to have seeds in dirt by saturday.