Hard Virtue

Most sales jobs seem to involve, at least to some degree, the overstatement of a product’s attributes in order to stimulate prospective buyers’ desires. TV commercials and advertising of all stripes routinely rely on hyperbole to promote the belief that the touted goods or services can deliver satisfaction of a nearly spiritual nature.

By contrast, we on Prairie Moon’s sales and consulting team spend much of our time carefully and deliberately dampening the expectations of prospective and first-time customers. No matter how many times we chant into our phones our mantra that establishing a native plant community from seed can take at least three to five years, we know that our best buzz-kill efforts will only slightly diminish the number of follow-up callers ready to proclaim a failure two months into a planting’s first season.

Because we are so diligent about trying to inject doses of realism into planting plans, it was fascinating, while out in the field this spring, to find myself falling prey to some of the same impatience and unrealistic expectations that I daily, glibly, strive to exorcise. I grow a small number of species for bare-root plant sales through our nursery.  After experimenting early with a few more finicky varieties, I settled on six species that seem popular and relatively easy to propagate and tend in my spare time.

Monarda fistulosa, Wild Bergamot, is ubiquitous in plantings and native remnants all around us, yet that species has proved the most challenging for me to grow reliably and predictably. In our cultural guide we describe the species as easy to grow and assign it germination code A, needing no pre-treatment.

When I first planted it, I was advised also to follow the code D instructions because of Monarda seeds’ tiny size. So I dutifully surface-sowed the seeds in lines in my production beds and covered them with strips of burlap to press them to the soil surface and retain moisture. The trickiest part of this procedure is to remove the burlap after the seeds germinate but before the seedlings get caught in the burlap and uprooted with its removal.

Nervous about that timing, I kept peeking under the strips, puzzling over whether the green sprouts that I saw were weeds or my crop. When the hardiest seedlings started to penetrate the burlap, I decided I’d better take the strips out of the bed and try to cultivate as the season progressed. Weeks went by, gradually eroding my confidence in my ability to identify any Monarda among the tiny green emergents. I resorted to pulling everything that I knew for sure was weedy, resignedly concluding that my planting somehow had failed.

When frost cycles ushered in plant-digging season, I was surprised to discover that indeed I did have a few sale-worthy plants in my poorly managed patch. I noticed that many plants were available from Prairie Moon’s own beds, so I asked the nursery’s garden manager to share his technique. Arnel told me that a fall planting seemed to yield better germination in the spring, even though Monarda is not considered to require over-wintering.

I adopted that approach, abandoning the burlap strips, with greater success in subsequent seasons. This year, though, I was reminded that, regardless of how experienced I think I’m becoming or how confident I feel in expected outcomes, it’s still awfully easy for me to fall prey to common pitfalls and hasty, false assumptions.

I sold all of the Monarda fistulosa plants in my bed last fall, so I decided to try a frost seeding for this year’s crop. When the snow drifts had settled to a few inches’ depth in early February, I brushed off the garden bed and lined out my rows of Bergamot seed, dusting a blanket of snow back on them to tuck them in until spring.

When I seeded other species in my production beds in early May, I tried to take Monarda inventory and was discouraged to be able to identify only a few, scattered sprouts. They were about the size of a dime or smaller and far scarcer than the more vigorous weeds popping up all around them. Complicating matters was that the adjacent species in the bed is Heliopsis helianthoides, Early Sunflower. Some of them had gone to seed, greatly increasing my uncertainty about whether each sprout that I saw was a Bergamot or an encroaching Sunflower or a weed.

I began to worry that I would not have enough M. fistulosa plants to fill the orders that already had been assigned to me, not to mention the full inventory figure that I had projected for the fall harvest. I decided that I had better try a spring sowing to increase the plant numbers. I lined out more of the tiny seeds, lightly pressing them into the soil surface.

Several months of hot, wet weather ensued and by July, crowded, thick rows of Monarda waved at me, evoking mixed emotions of relief and sheepishness.

As I thinned the rows, spacing plants to provide more room for all to develop, I reflected on how my superimposed agenda had prompted me to lose faith in what I knew to be a protracted natural process. Soon I ran out of room for all of the seedlings and had to choose the hardier specimens, culling the rest. I vowed to improve my skills at plant and weed identification, to be more trusting of predictable progressions and certainly to be more compassionate when counseling anxious customers to be patient with their plantings.

Here are two views of my Monarda fistulosa bed in mid-August. The taller plants were seeded onto frozen soil in February. Seeds for the shorter plants were surface-sown in early May, when the wintered-over seedlings were about the size of the dime pictured below.