Getting Dirty

About four years ago I decided to devote two unused garden beds to growing plants for consignment sale through Prairie Moon Nursery. My wife and I had been the primary growers of a couple of species in the nursery’s early days but we had been sticking to vegetable gardening in the intervening couple of decades.

As usual, my new endeavor began teaching me lessons right from the start. I tried to choose "easy" species since I have a busy schedule and I was working with only two raised beds, measuring roughly 2 1/2′ x 9′. After the first season, I eliminated a few species that proved more difficult for me. I learned that Monarda fistulosa (Wild Bergamot), which had been spreading so rapidly through the prairie planting above my driveway, seemed loath to germinate in my production bed. I was surprised to discover that Rudbeckia triloba (Brown-Eyed Susan), which seems to appear so early in diverse plantings, doesn’t bloom until its second year.

                         Rudbeckia triloba plants in foreground with Bouteloua curtipendula behind
 

All of the species in my beds looked good through this growing season, despite long dry stretches and cooler than normal summer temperatures. We started to dig plants for shipment the last week of September. Since we’d only had a few light frosts in the valley and a sunny, warm snap had set in after a few rainy days, I felt oddly out-of-synch with the season, lifting roots from warm, fairly dry soil in the evening sun.

My most vivid associations with plant-shipping season include cold, numb fingers, aromatic muddy beds, soggy shoes and a little freezing rain thrown in for good measure. These sensations always flash me directly back to my earlier brief career as a mercenary, nomadic treeplanter.

For four or five seasons in the early 80s, lured by the illusory promise of big bucks through piece work, I toiled with scruffy crews contracted to hand-plant trees for paper companies and state and federal forestry departments. We traveled all winter throughout the Deep South, replanting Loblolly pines on disgracefully clear-cut tracts ("settin’ out pine," the locals called it). We worked our way north, finishing by planting mixed hardwoods amid mosquitoes and black flies on public lands in the Upper Midwest.

Conditions were incredibly harsh. We lived in the dirt, camping on remote sites, worked all day in cold, wet weather, stooping constantly, shouldering packs crammed with as many seedlings as we could carry. We got strong and learned all sorts of valuable lessons from living in such intense, intimate contact with the earth and the elements. We showered weekly and discovered the existence of a mega-box retail chain, metastasizing out from Arkansas. We gathered at nightly campfires, told stories and developed the kind of allegiance, sense of shared mission and cockiness of which military veterans speak so reverently.

Back in Wiscoy Valley this fall, the elements complied, dishing out some rain and cold shortly after the temperate start of plant-digging. My hands full of soil and roots, I marveled at the wisdom I’ve gained by getting my hands dirty. I wonder how much more good could be accomplished if more young men and women would seek the warrior’s camaraderie and discipline under duress through serving the mission of ecological restoration rather than military adventurism.