Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
-- Henry D. Thoreau. Faith in a
Seed.
I
am a gardener. As such, this is typically a hard time of year for me; I get in
a funk. I’m impatient to get back outside, churn up soil, count earthworms, and
plant things that will, in time, become both beautiful and delicious. It’s late
winter; months have passed since the last leaf fell, revealing the tree
skeletons stark in their nakedness. Naked trees have always disturbed me, their
branches like so many grasping fingers, the dry rattling noise they make when
wind shakes the limbs. It’s so unlike the soothing woooshshshsh that wind makes
with the leaves; in the Blue Ridge Mountains, wind in the leaves reminds me of
the ocean where I grew up. It’s like music.
I miss the colors, too. I miss the distant blue-green haze of
high summer in these mountains, so named for the hue
that the leaves give to them. I miss the vibrant shades of emerald,
chartreuse, pine, colors more distinguishable when standing under the eaves,
the golden green quality as you look up through the canopy. I need these things
like I need food and air. Everything is a shade of brownish-gray now, even the
sky most days.
This late winter season has hit me harder than usual. Normally
by now I have seedlings started in the dining room window: sweet basil, Roma tomatoes,
Thai chilies. This year, I find myself apathetic. In my heart and in my head, I
want to plant seeds. I just haven’t managed it yet, and it’s not that I have
been lazy...I’ve accomplished other things (I’m writing a lot more)…but not the
planting of seeds.
I’m not really looking forward to my birthday this year either,
even though the first day of spring will follow immediately after. Birthdays
don’t usually bother me. I always thought that as long as I got wiser, too, I
wouldn’t mind so much getting older. But it’s bugging me this year, and I
cannot put my finger on all the reasons why. (I am completely clear on some
reasons, but I will keep those to myself.) I don’t feel old, but certain
undeniable signs suggest I should enjoy that feeling while it lasts. As a
younger woman, the sense of – the hope
of second chances was easier to conjure. Now, more and more, it’s a sense of
urgency to not waste time, not a precious moment of it. All the while, time
moves faster and faster. Is it really almost my birthday again? It was just
Christmas yesterday, wasn’t it?
I won’t lie. It’s been a rough winter. I am still reeling
from the loss of my Aunt Nancy at the end of October. To have her drop dead
only ten days into the first round of chemo for what, by all reports, was
highly treatable stage 2A breast cancer — it has left me truly shaken. It has
caused me to rethink EVERYTHING I think I know about living and dying and
breast cancer, and cancer treatment. My take-aways so far are not that
comforting: 1) Feel free to live as healthy a life as you can – you can still
get breast cancer; 2) Catch the cancer as early as you can – the chemo could
still kill you anyway.
A few of these maudlin thoughts were taking root in my brain
yesterday after lunch (water and carrots) as I walked past the pepper plants
that are hibernating in my two-car garage. And I saw them, the green buds just
beginning to push away from the stem, proof that where all is naked and stark,
leaves will return.
Last spring I planted Tabasco pepper seeds. My husband found
the seeds on the Internet at the Tabasco
sauce web site, and we love to grow hot peppers, so he bought a kit. We
followed all the directions (a redundancy…I have green thumb). The seeds took FOREVER to germinate -- like
six weeks – waaaay longer than “normal” pepper seeds should take. The seedlings
that finally emerged were thin, spindly. I was sure they’d sold us bum seeds.
(Why wouldn’t they? There’s no profit for them in my ability to make my own
Tabasco sauce.)
I nurtured, I fertilized, I gave encouraging pep talks. The
seedlings became small plants. The term “failure to thrive” came to mind. I
fertilized more, gave more pep talks.
By mid-August, I had four under-sized but healthy pepper
plants finally going to flower...that necessary first step that leads to fruit.
I put the youngsters in pots large enough to hold the mature plant. By
mid-September, the plants had grown much taller, were covered in flowers, and
had begun to form perfect little peppers, pale and white, no larger than a pea.
By mid-October, the peppers were the length of lima beans, still pale, and I
knew we were in trouble. The first freeze was weeks and maybe only days away. I
had lots of little Tabasco peppers and no hope that they would ripen before
frost killed the plants.
When the first frost warning finally arrived, I returned the
plants to the dining room window where they first germinated. I hoped to
nurture them long enough to let a few of the peppers fully mature. Three of the
four plants did really well, but one plant began losing leaves fast. The
absence of dead leaves on the floor around the plant should have been a signal,
but it just didn’t register with me. The clods of what looked like potting soil
that kept showing up outside the flower pot should also have been a signal, but
I blamed it on the cat. Smitty kitty loves to climb in my plants, so I just
assumed he had been playing in them and kicked out some dirt.
One afternoon I noticed that the plant, which had been losing
leaves, was suddenly completely denuded – nothing but stark, skeletal
nakedness, bare limbs of grasping fingers. No baby peppers either. Weirdly,
only one very large leaf remained on the plant, and it was bright green.
Then the leaf moved. I bent down to look more closely, and I
screamed. What looked like this...
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| Photo from http://www.socaldailyphoto.com/tag/tomato-hornworm/ |
was actually this...
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| Photo from http://www.hughsmith.org/caterpillars.htm |
...a tomato hornworm...in my house. It explained a thing or
two, why I never found any dead leaves around the denuded plant for one. And
that “potting soil” I kept sweeping off the floor and blaming on the cat? Well,
that’s what the digestive track of a tomato hornworm does to a pepper plant
leaf after it’s done extracting the nutrients. In other words, worm shit.
I hauled all four plants outside and cleaned the worm shit
off the floor. My husband (greatly relieved to learn that the cause for my blood-curdling
scream was an insect and not a murderer) dispatched the large worm on the
denuded plant using a method I found on the Internet after I finished cleaning
the floor (cut the worm in half with scissors then put in a plastic zipper
bag...just to be sure). Our closer inspection of the three remaining plants revealed
three smaller tomato hornmonsters that we dispatched in like fashion. I put the
three surviving plants in the garage on top of an old wooden bookshelf that
sits under the window where I expected them to die in the relatively low light.
I gave the plants a little water, not too much, knowing as I do that in the
relatively low light and cool temps, the plants’ transpiration will diminish,
the roots will not take up water from the soil as quickly and that soggy soil
would cause the roots to rot. To my surprise, instead of dying and dropping off
the stem, one by one, the little peppers turned from pale white to orange, and
then, Tabasco sauce red.
(In case you wondered, Tabasco peppers fresh off the plant
taste EXACTLY like Tabasco sauce, only MUCH HOTTER.)
Yesterday, when I saw the dozens of tiny leaves pushing out
in pairs from the main stem, my funk lifted. Spring is coming
(and yes, so is my birthday, but I’ll take growing older to the alternative). Yes,
it’s been a rough winter but we’ve survived (in spite of hornworms and other
monsters) I and these pepper plants that once failed to thrive. Perhaps the
approaching equinox has allowed a little more sunshine into the garage,
stimulating the plants to grow. Perhaps all my encouraging pep talks finally got
through to the plants, and they are now ready to step up and reach their full
potential. I’m delighted by the idea that they appear to be on a fast track
to producing more peppers sooner this year. They’re going back outside as soon
as it warms up a bit more. I see no need to germinate more Tabasco pepper seeds
this year, hope they sprout, beg them to grow. These plants are mature,
healthy, and ready to produce. They owe me. They could have been worm shit.
But there are others – sweet basil, Roma tomatoes … spring
is coming, I should go plant some seeds.
