Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: A World in a Drop of Water

Sunday, September 06, 2015

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalWorcester Gardening Expert

My friend Peter waters his neighbors’ sidewalk patch of summer flowers while they vacation. Our city is full of side walk gardens, those narrow stripes between granite curbstones and generations of brick, concrete, and stone sidewalks. Our town has legacy in its street names, Forest St, Oak and Maple of course, Larch, Laurel, Woodbine, and countless variations of Elm, notably absent. Peter, like other residents, cherishes our idiosyncratic sidewalk plots. Many trees shade our neighborhoods and gardeners adapt to sun and shade. Peter enjoys hosing the thirsty patch and hopefully, you too have someone to keep containers and plots moist. Most container plants are at full maturity and need every drop. Sidewalk gardens are in full fig, cosmos, sunflowers, brown eyed Susan, portulaca, and for fun, specimen plants such as an Oregon Grape off Hope on John amuse and please everyone. The long narrow sidewalk gardens knit neighbors together.

Watering the garden is a thoughtful gentleman’s game. Most of us rely upon compost and permanently renewed mulches for moisture and surrender to fate. The thrifty Yankee in me reluctantly unrolls the hose. Our long dry late summer hastens annuals and perennials towards final blooms. Zinnias are at their prime and offer a gentle reminder, save seeds from favorite colors and forms for next year. You’ll never buy a slender packet of Thumbelina again. Cosmos, coneflower, brown eyed Susan, Four O’clock, and amaranth cut on a dry afternoon and stored in large inter office envelopes, reach their final address “Zinnias, apricot color, cactus type”. I hang the seeds in the back corner of the closet next to short sleeved shirts. Document clips bind the seed envelopes to ordinary hangers next to spring clothes. Change into short sleeves? Time to plant the lusty annuals. I water the zinnias barefoot and in shorts although I suspect Peter may very well be wearing his tie and lain a jacket nearby. He’s an Englishman after all, without an umbrella I suspect he’s dangerously close to going native. Watering? There is a world in a drop of water, it is life’s essence.

We are 70% water. Sounds from heartbeat to siren can be measured within our watery cells, water is far from inert. Water’s astounding capacity as a solvent imbues memory. A drop of water contains traces of its antecedents, from mountain to eventually the ocean. Each raindrop is a messenger collecting nutritious aerosol particles from distant places such as Saharan dust blown across the Atlantic to trickle onto our lands. North America receives approximately 1.6 pounds of salts per acre each year within rainfall. Savvy gardeners have long known trace elements have big impact.

The tablespoon of Epsom salts I put in cheerfully painted 2 gallon watering cans instantly dissolves. If not used right away, I wash my hands in the full cans, the Epsom salts heals brushes with raspberries and roses. Clean hands after full tilt gardening is a bonus. Experience and opportunity removed fig bushes from the main garden into huge pots. Their extensive root systems are implacable once established in a cultivated garden. Ripe figs? Irresistible. My legacy figs came from an Italian family who claim the figs arrived in America in a steamer trunk long before WWI. An heirloom by any other name, they told of digging up the fig and burying it each year for the winter, a chore far beyond me. Or a great grandson advised, if in the ground, don’t feed it, all foliage and few fruit. Mine grew 7 feet tall for a few years running and found compost just the right soil conditioner. Each December, stark trunks would wither and finally be cut down to mulch level to return larger, more extensive but relatively fruitless. Laboriously dug out and potted in very large pots they barely noticed the transition. Much better captives in pots than pioneers in the garden. Roses thrive in the same sunny location and are much tamer.

I wheel the figs under shelter for the winter, water once or twice, prune back and put out again in the beginning of April. Although both always have a thick layer of seaweed stuffed into the pots, this year I water with freshwater only, and the other with my Epsom salts solution. Like a drop of water, there is a world of difference. One has offered two pickings of divine figs, the other, healthy but more sparse. Bright green leaves on utterly disease and insect free stalks are delightful. My box of Epsom salts in the toolshed and the other under the bathroom sink never goes bad and seems to last for years for pennies. Container plants of all kinds enjoy this abundant, non-toxic soluble mineral. Always under estimate supplemental doses. It is much better to water sparingly but more frequently. The English discovered Epsom Salt’s virtues in the 18th century. The grass is much greener around Epsom’s natural springs and the grazing animals healthier and quick to recover from wounds. A eureka moment concluded it must be the sour tasting water. The Epsom salts that seep from my potted figs along with other dissolved nutrients that drain into the garden are messengers caught up in the fascinating ecosystems within our soils. Bound up in leafy complex carbon molecules, the foliage is composted each fall with the robust leaf harvest on the horizon. Fertility re-enters our largely glacially bleached soils inspiring ever more robust crops of every kind.

Water is highly reactive to electricity, lightening is a natural discharge between ionized air borne water particles. Neural science can describe Peter’s happiness while he waters the sidewalk garden in electrical terms. We radiate electrical impulses. The water gushing from Peter’s hose maybe from a distant reservoir. In his hands it reacts and remembers, water is the universal memory. Not only does water flow away and carry our thoughtfulness, it also sends back messages, we wash away cares and love returns to lighten the heart. We’re not alone. Bees approach the moistened plants. Birds flock towards us. During dry spells I set out an old fashioned arc spray type water sprinkler. As it transits to and fro, cardinals roost upon tomato and bean trellises and fluff their feathers as the veil of water passes over beyond and returns. Our insect friends buzz, peace is the theme at the watering hole. The wholesale affection we feel for our gardens reaches into the living fibers as elemental as gravity.

Our dry late summer will soon end. Tropical depressions will swirl northward to soak our lands again. Start to clear out the mature garden growth. Deadhead the roses, cut back delphiniums, pull off those dry sunflower leaves, give a quick crumble and let fall onto the mulch. Harvest, harvest, check the pears for ripeness and recall they ripen inside out: ripe to eat off the tree? Pick right away! Tomatoes are at their prime. Trim back errant tomato vines almost back to the main stems. If your garden is anything like mine, cutting back exuberant summer growth is a revelation. Where once a tangle of tomato vines and volunteer blue Peruvian potatoes have presented a solid green mass is much fertile soil. The thick summer mulch of seaweed and 50 bales of hay have sunk into the humus beneath. Somehow, crabgrass is here and there, Lady’s Bedstraw, Day flower, and Virginia creeper have found a foothold. Pull these plants up and tuck under the mulch unless they have formed seed heads. Snip off the seed heads and dispose away from the garden. Remove Day Flower entirely to deep distant places.

Rummage through the seed box. Pull back remaining mulch and sow kale, beets, carrots, leeks, and your favorite salad greens. I customarily allow arugula or rocket to go to seed and tolerate its dispersal throughout the garden to become my most common “weed”. Others like arugula are nasturtiums, now forming immense seeds. I enjoy the serendipity volunteers offer the gardener and currently have a lone but large lunaria full of encapsulated seeds. I’ve snipped off branches to tuck into the garden’s margin. A biennial, lunaria or money plant will establish itself and contribute lovely purplish flowers before another, more robust harvest of the lovely dried seed pods. A crop of left over peas sown in the fall will fix nitrogen in the soil and provide lots of “green” manure in otherwise abandoned spaces. Use up leftover spring season seeds now for abundant harvests far into the fall. Dispose of seeds kept from the past. I throw surplus seeds unwanted or needed by friends into the compost pile. Many times, like the oysters I once buried into a growing compost heap, the seeds will endure throughout the winter and surprise you next spring.

Peter patiently waters the neighbors’ sidewalk garden during summer vacation. We are linked, home or abroad by common threads of kindness and mutual assistance. There is a world in a drop of water. Peace its first shores, the water’s message is one of universal solutions, a drop at a time, eventually oceans.

Leonard Moorehead is a life- long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence, RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees