For 36 years I lived in a house with no yard. In Chicago I gardened in pots on top of my 10x18 garage roof. Over the years we built plant tiers to take advantage of the most sun. Plastic and fabric pots were the lightest weight.
I grew mostly annuals and vegetables that would produce quickly in limited sun, an average of 6 hours of sun, in Chicago’s short growing season. That meant marigolds and geraniums and petunias in hanging pots. It also meant chard and parsley and basil and pole beans.
I tried zucchini once. It grew like gangbusters for about a month, produced three squash, then got some kind of rot and keeled over and died.
I tried potatoes in a bag, but I got not more out than I put in in seed potatoes.
I also tried carrots in bags. They looked nothing like what you buy in the store. They grew two legs and looked like gnarled and twisted growths you’d find in the forest.
Then I retired and moved to Portland. …
My husband and I opted for a newer home, on one level, with a yard for this new phase of our lives. Not just any yard. A mature yard. A yard that had been lovingly tended for years. We bought the house in February so we weren’t sure what would come up. In addition to the two Pacific redwood tress, an amazing array of flowering perennials pushed up through the clay earth. They bloomed in studied succession. Fuchsia and light pink peonies. Two varieties of red roses. Bright red rhododendron. Pink azalea. In the backyard, a succession of lilies of different heights and colors kept surprising us from May through mid July. And did I tell you about the purple clematis? Huge and prolific. It continues to give up a few blossoms, even through this past super hot August.
The climate here has taken some getting used to. It’s not quite as cold as Chicago and doesn’t have temps below freezing for weeks on end. But. It’s either raining or misting, sleeting or hailing, and sometimes snowing, from the time we got here until early July. The damp penetrates the skin and the darkness tends to close down possibility. Still, we noticed that every day there is a short window of sunshine somewhere. Because we’re not on a regular work schedule that one hour or so became our sign to get out and exercise. Or mow the lawn. Or grab a bite to eat at the nearby St. Johns Beer Porch food truck court.
During the rainy season, as the temperatures climb into the 50s and 60s during the day, we unpacked the veg trug — a 3’ x 6’ wooden planter on legs that we brought from Chicago in pieces. It was pretty deteriorated after six growing seasons, but we were able to reconstruct it with some new ribs replacing those that fell apart in our hands. We bought a burlap liner and filled it with raised bed soil. Then I went to City Farm, right down the street in St. Johns (which sadly is no more), and bought just a few plants. Six broccoli, six lettuce, one tiny tomato and one pepper plant, three basil plants, some garlic chives and a package of kale seeds. Having no experience, I planted them and let the cool, wet weather tend them. They looked soooo green and hardy.
Then all of a sudden in July the rain stopped and everything changed! It got warm. And dry. And my plants took off. That small tomato became the monster that ate up all the space in the veg trug. It shaded the pepper plant and the lettuce, which was good. We have copious lettuce for salads for about three weeks until the heat caused all the varieties to bolt. The pepper plant set one small pepper before it disappeared under the jungle of tomato branches. The broccoli is making a valiant effort to flower in the tangle. Basil we had to hide from the wind and weather. It was either too cold and rainy or too hot for the basil until we found just the right spot in the backyard, by the fence, between the arbor vitae. The kale has been prolific in its own little raised bed in the backyard. So finally, we it has taken over where the lettuce left off in our salad bowl.
All this growth costs something. Water in Portland is very expensive when the rains stop. As a result we followed the example of our neighbors and let out grass turn brown. We just water the food crops and the flowering things. Especially the roses.
I never knew much about roses. But I'm grateful for what I’ve learned. I didn’t know they’d bloom more than once, but apparently they do. All you have to do is cut them back after the blooms begin to fade. They will muster their strength and send out new shoots that form buds and then we have a whole new display of bright red blooms. Roses are incredibly hardy. They survive the chilly and wet weather as well as the hot, dry spell (with a little help from us).
I want to be like the roses. I want to grow, even more productive after serious pruning, and continue to bloom, adding a little beauty, in this new place we’ve planted ourselves. That's what I think about when I begin to question whether I did the right thing by giving away so much stuff, by letting go of my position as pastor in a church.