ANNUALS, PERENNIALS, AND APOCALYPSE GRIFTERS

Hello, my loves! November has arrived! Autumn is coasting inexorably into winter, although we’ve had a few surprisingly warm stretches to soften the blow. We’re kicking through leaf piles on sidewalks! We’re enduring nonsensical mandated clock adjustments! We’re wrapping ourselves in the golden light of unseasonably warm fall afternoons and trying not to think too much about what they mean! We’re celebrating family, biological or chosen, and wondering how to reconcile Thanksgiving’s horrifying origins with the necessity of taking whatever scraps of leisure time late-stage Capitalism still allows us! We’re explaining to grandma why cousin Terry isn’t invited to family holidays anymore!

Seasonal vibe check

Regardless of dodgy holidays with horrific pasts, autumn is for FEASTING. In and out of the garden, babes, this is a season of indulgence and coziness. We haven’t yet had a hard frost — although one is coming soon — and my garden is still doggedly churning out tomatoes and squash and green beans. Milk everything you can out of those veg beds! Don’t throw the towel in until nature does it for you! And it’s not too late to take advantage of this unseasonal warmth to start some winter crops, especially if you have the means to protect them from frosts. (Frost fabric is super cheap and makes a huge difference. And you can 100% DIY a frame with hardware store stuff if you’re clever. Word to the wise, though: buy twice as many metal clips as you think you’ll need to keep the fabric in place.)

I know it’s a Law of Suburban Dads that leaves must be raked and bagged by sullen teens in order to build character, but — color me shocked — dad was wrong about this one. Leave those leaves in the yard! They’ll rot away just fine, and your soil will thank you for all the nutrients they provide. Mulch them, compost them, run the mower over them to break them up, whatever. Plus, fallen leaves provide all kinds of beneficial habitat for insects and other yard friends. Fireflies reproduce under leaf litter, and suburban dads love fireflies. If you can’t bear to leave the leaves everywhere, try picking a few out-of-sight corners to let nature do her thing.

As the sun shifts closer to the winter solstice, a reminder to go around and check on all your houseplants — depending on the orientation of your house, stuff that thrived in that window by your desk might get roasted now that winter is coming, or vice versa!

Finally, it is BULB SEASON. Bulb! Season! Time to plant your daffodils, your tulips, your alliums! Crocuses and snowdrops! Ranunculuses and peonies! It’s one of the nicest little treats you can give yourself now that will pay off big time in spring, especially those early bloomers — just when the winter sads are really getting vicious, there’s nothing like stepping out on a nasty February day and realizing there’s life stirring in the garden.

Ah! The joy of the last late-season rose!

Your quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares

What actually are the differences between growing flowers and produce?

Flowers are such Scorpios, am I right?

Okay, fine. That is not a real answer. But this is simultaneously a very broad, unwieldy question, and kind of an “I feel like the answer is going to be dumb and obvious and boring” question. So here goes!

For the first few years that I was gardening on my own — first on balconies and porches and then, later, in rented back yards — I was almost religiously zealous about only growing stuff I could eat. Money was tight, space was at a premium, and I felt like I couldn’t justify growing anything that didn’t “earn” its keep. And it was fine, I guess, but it was also kind of joyless. I was coming down on myself really hard for “failing” when things went wrong, or when plants weren’t as prolific as I’d hoped, or when they out-and-out died. I had trouble attracting pollinators. I got my shit wrecked by pests. It all started to feel a lot like work, and not in the good way. More in the “middle manager breathing down your neck for failing to meet deadlines” way.

And then I impulse-bought a rosebush at a hardware store. Had I been day-drinking before going to the hardware store? Mayyyyyyyyybe. (Don’t worry, I wasn’t driving.) Did I have anywhere to put a rosebush? Absolutely not. Was it the most exciting thing I’d done so far that summer? 100%. Did I eventually accidentally kill the rosebush? Also 100%.

But! The rose (RIP) brought a little of the joie de vivre back to my gardening. I had a thing that was just pretty, that didn’t serve any real purpose besides looking nice. It did help attract pollinators, which was great. Mostly, though, it took the pressure off. And it reminded me that produce is rad, and growing food is extra rad, but plants are also just … nice. For their own sake. And this is an important thing to remember! You’ll hardly ever swear at your flowers as much as you do at your vegetables. It’s okay to do things for pleasure, not practicality. Especially in the garden.

I can hear you, though, as loudly as if you were shouting at me from behind my vegetable beds: I wanted actionable advice, dammit, not your EMOTIONS. And that’s fair.

To really dig in (suburban dads, that one’s for you) to what separates ornamental from productive gardening, I find it easier to think in terms of annuals, perennials, and sun requirements. Reminder: annuals live and die in a single season; perennials come back every year and may outlive us all and feast on our corpses in the end times.

The majority of your standard, everyday vegetables are annuals. They live fast, die young, and leave behind an edible corpse reproductive organ. Most fruit, and many herbs, are perennials. In the garden, the difference between a bed of zinnias and a bed of tomatoes is fairly negligible, although they have slightly different appetites for acidity and fertilizer. A fruit-producing shrub and an ornamental shrub will have pretty similar footprints.

There’s one very straightforward differentiation between Stuff We Eat and Stuff We Don’t that I’ll knock out quickly: producing fruit & veg takes a lot of energy, and a lot of water. As a result, most food-producing plants require a lot of sun and irrigation to be viable. It’s much easier to find shade- or drought-friendly ornamentals than shade- or drought-friendly edibles. But that isn’t a completely hard-and-fast rule, and it’s also pretty well out of your control. Especially in urban and suburban environments, most of us have sun or we don’t, and few of us are going to make massive changes to our living situations in order to install a vegetable bed.

The most meaningful difference that is in your control, then, is how annual and perennial beds are laid out and maintained. Beds meant to be cycled out season to season have different needs and different design considerations than sections of the garden whose occupants are not only permanent, but grow more slowly.

Annual beds are at their best when they’re:

1) Clearly defined, and confined, with some kind of physical barrier setting them off from grass and weeds. It’s much more difficult to keep weeds at bay when you have a lot of small, fast-growing plants. As plants cycle through the seasons, the soil is repeatedly disturbed and exposed to sunlight; you can mulch as much as you like, but the mulch will, by necessity, be shifted every time you put in new seedlings or clear out old plants. This means annual beds will always, always require more maintenance and weeding than perennial beds. This is why raised beds are ideal for annuals; the height and physical separation make them easier to weed, and help keep creeping weeds from spreading.

2) No wider than a comfortable arm’s length. Weeding is one of those tasks you want to make as frictionless as possible, or — from experience — you’ll put it off until your cucumbers have been physically consumed by crabgrass. And annuals are more sensitive to root damage from soil compression, because they don’t form the vast and hardy root networks that perennials do; there simply isn’t time. You don’t want to be physically climbing into the beds to pull weeds, cut flowers, harvest produce, or prune dead/diseased foliage. A good annual bed should always be narrow enough for you to comfortably reach everything inside of it.

3) Filled with rich, moisture-retaining soil with a high organic content and plenty of available nutrients. This goes back to the “live fast, die young” thing — annuals grow quickly, and they’re hungry. They have a finite amount of time to hit that growth spurt and show up their middle-school bullies, and you need to make sure they’re set up for success. Again, annuals don’t have the time to create the sort of broad, deep, resilient root systems that perennials do; they dry out more quickly, and once they’ve used all the nutrients in the top layers of soil, they can’t access what’s hiding farther down. This is yet another reason why raised beds work so well; even if the soil in your yard sucks, you can build on top of it or use store-bought soil mixes in a finite, easily-contained area.

4) Mostly, or entirely, composed of other annuals. This might seem like a real “duh” thing to mention, but if you’re going to do a bunch of annuals — like, enough to produce a crop, whether it’s flowers for cutting or lettuces for eating — keep them together! You’re going to be disturbing the soil regularly as you rotate your crops, and you don’t want to be tearing up the root system of some perfectly happy plant when you do. Plus, you can maximize your space (and budget) by taking advantage of perennial plants’ relatively chiller needs and keeping that fancy, purpose-built annuals bed for the plants that really need it.

My cherry tomatoes and marigolds have banded together and are plotting to overthrow me.

Perennial beds are best when they’re: 

1) Playing the long game. If your annuals are living fast and dying young, your perennials are Gandalf, smoking a pipe on a sunlit wagon, surveying the wide world with both amusement and foreboding. They are survivors. They have seen some shit. And they are patient. Perennial beds, by extension, are spaces you develop over time. It takes years for a tree or shrub to reach maturity. You have to maintain the balance between leaving enough space for its final, mature form and coping with the big ol’ gaps you have because your fifteen-foot tree is currently three feet tall. It’s a process, not an event. Where an annual bed can be slapped together in a weekend, it can take about three years for a perennial bed to look like much of anything. The good news is that perennial beds require less maintenance as time passes; they’re a bitch to establish, yes, but as the years go by and the plants mature, you’ll need to weed less and feed less as the root systems dig deeper, weeds are outcompeted/have less of a foothold, and your soil becomes a healthy, sustainable biome.

2) Full of variety. Unlike those annual beds, it can be useful to mix annuals and perennials together in perennial beds. Shallow-rooted, single-season plants are a great way to fill in space around maturing shrubs and trees, or to buy time while you figure out whether a particular perennial is worth planting again. This is especially useful if you’re not sure what will thrive in your space! If you want to experiment with lavender, for example, you don’t want to go all-in on half a dozen plants only to discover that they hate your soil. Start with one experimental perennial, surround it with cheap and easy annuals, and if it thrives, great! Go buy more! With annuals, you’re modifying the environment to suit the plant; with perennials, you’re better off modifying the plants to suit the environment. Find out what succeeds and go from there.

Perennial beds also, generally, want different kinds of plants — different heights, colors, textures, and growth habits — both for aesthetic and practical reasons. You want a mixture of trees, shrubs, bulbs, tender perennials, woody perennials, and everything in-between. This encourages the garden to become a healthy, cooperative organism, attracting a variety of beneficial insects and, hopefully, not harboring too many of the same pests or diseases.

3) Dug once, but dug deep. One of the most important steps, if you’re starting from absolute scratch, is to dig the ever-living hell out of your bed. Make your neighbors think you’re burying bodies. (This doubles as a handy way to discourage them from getting all up in your business.) Dig down at least a foot and — look, I know it sucks, but it’s so worth it while you have a big blank space to work with — pick through the soil, by hand, and remove all the rocks, random garbage, undiscovered corpses, and every root you can find. Yes, even the little teensy-tiny roots. Then rake it and pick through it again. Amend the soil, especially if it’s clay, with lots of compost and maybe some screened topsoil, for aeration.

After you’ve dug and planted the bed, try to disturb that soil as little as possible. You’re building a biome here, and the best way to do that is top-down. Mulch heavily, avoid tilling or turning the soil, and let those root networks get established. (REMINDER: HAVE YOUR UTILITIES MARKED BEFORE DIGGING, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.)

In summary: 

I realize this is not quite the question you asked. You can have perennial beds full of edible things — fruit trees, perennial greens, asparagus, berry bushes, herbs — and you can have annual beds full of things you can’t eat. And all plants have their own particular preferences in terms of nutrients, soil acidity, sun, and water. But in terms of planning, building, and maintaining your garden, these are the delineations I think are most helpful — and most likely to set you up for success.

Well. That and remembering that vegetables are, like, total Virgos. Can’t tell them anything.

When my peach tree shed all its leaves, I discovered this lovely little robin’s nest left behind, right at eyeball height!

What I’m pondering in the garden this week

Y’all, I don’t think it’s going to be news to any of you that — while this isn’t the place to get into why — it’s looking like the coming year is going to be kinda rough, economically. Or maybe really rough. I don’t know, I am not a math guy. Or a budgeting guy. Or an economics guy. But I am a guy who pays attention to other, smarter guys, and it looks like stuff’s about to get wibbly.

Why am I, a purveyor of bad jokes and middling garden advice, talking about the economy? Because, if the economy is about to go to shit, we will probably see an increase in two things:

First, the general public will broadly become more interested in gardening. That’s what usually happens when stuff goes sideways; it’s a reasonably cheap hobby, it produces stuff you can eat, and it provides that ever-important illusion of control in the face of uncertainty. See? I’m doing something! I am the master of my own destiny! I created life! LIFE, I TELL YOU!

Second — inevitably, as if they can scent opportunity on the wind — there will be an uptick in survivalist grifters. Specifically, the kind of grifters who are shilling a romanticized, impossible, emphatically white-supremacist vision of “returning to the land” and “self-sufficiency.”

This “back to the land” stuff can be so seductive. It can feel like common sense. Remember when things used to be less complicated? Remember when food was food? Remember grammy and pappy, back on the farm? They knew what life was supposed to be like, right? It doesn’t matter if you, personally, didn’t have a grammy and pappy on a farm; you have the cultural memory of someone’s grammy and pappy, and man, it’s an appealing vision.

The problem is that “self-sufficiency” is a myth. I’ve said it before: even with land, you can’t possibly grow and make everything you need to survive. To even come close requires an enormous investment in capital, and specialized knowledge, and the kind of nuance that comes with years of experience. And even then, it’s impossible to get by without a community. Or, you know, a society. Broken as late-stage capitalism might be, that’s why we have societies. To spread the work of survival.

But, of course, it’s exhausting to be part of a society, sometimes. Part of a culture. Part of a world. Other people are complicated, and frustrating, and sometimes shitty. And in times of tumult, people will come crawling out of the woodwork to tell you that you don’t, in fact, need a society at all. They’ll show you carefully curated images of beautiful landscapes and happy children and hard-working men and tell you how easy it is to step away, to wall yourself off with so many miles of cattle fencing and “no trespassing” signs, to build your own little eden away from the corruption of modern life. And then, once you’re listening, once you’re lulled into the sense that maybe they really do have all of this figured out, well — they’ll have some other ideas they’d love to tell you about, if you’ll only be kind enough to listen. They’re not telling you how to think, of course. They’re just telling you how the world looks to them. And they have some great reading material for you, too, actually — and a couple videos you might want to watch, while you’re at it.

Selling people the myth of self-sufficiency is a great way to steer attention away from the dissolution of the society they need to survive. And it’s an even better way to mask the damage of cutting away the social safety net. You don’t need other people, you just need a happy nuclear family and a horde of blonde children to help you do the farm chores! And in an internet fame economy, all they need to sell you is an idea. The illusion that there’s a better way — a simpler way — if only you’ll give them your clicks, or your loyalty, or if you’ll just subscribe to their Patreon (only five dollars a month!).

And, of course, there are plenty of people who have chosen rural, agricultural lifestyles, and who are sharing those lifestyles online, who aren’t necessarily grifters. I follow a lot of very cool people who are doing cool things and trying to reduce their participation in our very broken systems of consumption! But, as much as I wish it weren’t like this, it’s as important to read between the lines of gardening and agriculture content as it is anything else. Anyone telling you how easy it is to live off the land is lying to you, and if they’re putting in the work to sell that lie, there’s a reason for it.

I am NOT saying “listen only to me,” because I’m one of God’s Perfect Idiots, and I am barely keeping my own life together. But there are lots of people out there who are thrilled to be listened to. They want your attention, and they want to use it to coax you into thinking about the world in a certain way. If anyone is telling you that you don’t need society — that you can step away from your communities and support networks and yes, your struggles too, if you’ll only listen to them — that should always worry you. It worries me.

I did the thing again, I made something possibly too stupid for publication

ou might already know all of this. You might already be well aware of the shittiest corners of the internet, and well-versed in all the endless varieties of dog whistle the people in those corners have perfected. But what about your friends? Your parents? Your weird-but-harmless cousin who actually has a pretty big yard and has vaguely mentioned an interest in gardening?

When things get hard, people cast around for solutions. People take up new hobbies — and yes, they get interested in gardens, and permaculture, because they can save you money, and even if they don’t, they’re hobbies that don’t require leaving the house and can be undertaken with pretty minimal supplies. But thanks to the cesspool of the internet, it can be a weirdly short path from “here’s how to harvest rainwater” to “here are fifty reasons why [minority] is coming for your [basic privilege] and only helping me fund my off-grid paramilitary compound will save you.”

Are you excited for my Inglorious Basterds/Secret Garden post-apocalyptic crossover fic

So, keep a weather eye out. Call it out when you see it. Make sure the people you give your attention and time to pass the sniff test. Are they admitting how difficult their lifestyle can be? Are they telling you to build and invest in your community and your social circles, instead of cutting them off to focus on yourself? Are they engaging with systemic failures in a way that seeks to improve the world around them, rather than waiting — even hoping — for that world to come to an end?

In times of crisis, we need each other. We keep each other safe. By sharing knowledge and swapping seeds. Starting goofy little gardening clubs and asking each other for advice. Volunteering at community gardens. Dropping by our friend’s houses to help out. Reminding each other that squash bugs aren’t a sign of personal failure. We need to remember that the work of survival is shared — and then we need to do the work to share it.

I’m thinking of you, my loves. Thank you for hanging with me every month. Keep each other warm when the winter weather does come, and I’ll be dreaming, with you, of spring.

SPOOKY PLANT SEASON

Hi babies! It’s October! We’re making our yards spooky! We’re wearing sweaters! We’re considering the ways in which landscaping can be weaponized to prevent “undesirable” use of public spaces! We’re planning Halloween costumes! We’re watching horror movies for the catharsis of experiencing fear caused by something other than geopolitics! We’re drinking hot apple cider!

My mother is SIGNIFICANTLY more organized than I am and her fall crops are already: [X] Labeled [X] Covered [X] Thriving.

Seasonal vibe check

We have had a string of perfect fall days, y’all. Chilly nights, just-short-of-chilly days, textbook stuff. It’s time to bring in any tropical plants you moved outside for the summer and start bedding your garden down for colder weather. The Old Farmer’s Almanac — and my completely unfounded superstition — are calling for a particularly cold winter, so now’s the time to prepare!

With that in mind, I’ve prepared an end-of-season checklist, just for you:

1. Acquire an autumnal beverage of your choice, alcoholic or otherwise.

2. Wait until the sun has just started to cut across the sky in that sort of sleepy golden way that reminds you how much earlier the sun is setting. Wrap yourself in the sensation of time passing, and also a sweater, even if it’s a little too warm. The sweater is for ambiance. Sweat a little. It will be cold soon enough.

3. Make a list of any plants you have that are particularly tender or prone to damage from heavy frosts: camellias, for example, whose roots are very close to the surface of the soil; southern standbys like figs, magnolias, gardenias, and hardy hibiscus; perennials that die back to the ground, like dahlias, lilies, hostas, and peonies. If you haven’t, put a stick or plant marker of some kind around those perennials, too, so you can find them after they’ve died back.

4. Note which plants, if any, need to be moved, and how much mulch and compost you’ll need to give them all a thorough top-dressing. Finish your drink. Watch the sun go down. Ponder Halloween decorations. Text an old friend.

5. On the soonest feasible morning, find yourself startled at how perfectly opaque the blue of the sky can be. Move any plants that need moving. Clean up and dispose of any diseased foliage. Spread a thick layer of compost or manure over all your garden beds. Cut back any diseased or dying branches or stems on shrubs. Begin the habit of disconnecting your hose every time you use it so you won’t be caught by surprise if there’s an early freeze. (Letting your hose freeze full of water is a good way to wind up with a ruined hose.)

6. Put up frames and frost fabric for your winter crops, if you decide to go that route. If you’re careful, you may be able to keep some greens going through until spring. Celebrate the autumnal death-related holiday of your choice. Feast in preparation for the dying of the light.

7. After the first frost, mulch your perennials and trees thickly; either mulch or cover empty garden beds.

8. Plan for spring. Order seeds. Daydream liberally. Develop a codependent relationship with your houseplants. Buy a grocery store orchid to remind yourself winter won’t last forever, even if you’ll only wind up killing it in a few months. Tell yourself you’re really going to have the hang of it, next year.

9. Double-check that you really, actually remembered to disconnect that hose. No, seriously. Go check again.

Have a marvelous fall, y’all! Stay warm, enjoy the cozy season, find me on Twitter or email me if you have questions, big or small. What did you learn in the garden this year? What can’t you wait to try differently in the spring?

Persimmon harvests are extremely high-tech.

Your quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares

What happened to my St. John’s Wort??? It seemed happy and then it was … not. 

Full disclosure, babes: this was texted to me by a friend. Advice column nepotism!! But, it let me really dig in and get you the good content, because I had multiple follow-up questions, and now I have a DIGRESSION for you.

After some pointed questioning, it turns out the St. John’s Wort in question was sold to my friend as a … houseplant, somewhat inexplicably. Which is something of a trend that I’ve noticed — companies are selling seeds and baby plants in these cutesy-tootsy planters and kits that heavily imply, if not outright say, that you can just grow them on your windowsill. Except they’re selling plants that are categorically unsuited to living indoors in teeny-tiny pots — plants that are fast-growing annuals that get HUGE (basil, sunflowers, random vegetables) or plants that require very specific growing conditions in order to germinate (poppies, lavender, ROSES), and many, many plants that will never in a million years survive being “grown” in the dumb little pots they’ve provided. It’s a grift, pure and simple. Winter-hardy plants should stay outside! Some of them require or prefer chill hours, or need to go dormant for a period of time; most of them want full sun, which you won’t get indoors without specialized equipment; and those fast-growing annuals are going to keel over and die no matter what you do, so why not just grow them when they’re in season???!!???

It isn’t just that these stupid little kits are, literally, a scam. I worry that they hurt people’s feelings (“I followed all the instructions and it died anyway, I guess I’m just congenitally incapable of keeping plants alive”) and put people off what can otherwise be a lovely and tasty hobby. A lot of them are targeted at kids, and that’s a pretty dispiriting takeaway. And there are edible herbs you can grow indoors! Including basil! You just have to expect that it will die after a while and, y’know, put it in a pot that’s bigger than a goddamn coffee mug.

I have a rule of thumb when people ask me about poisonous plants: if we don’t already eat it, it’ll probably make you sick. Similarly, if you aren’t already vaguely aware of a plant being semi-popular as a houseplant, or haven’t seen it in a nursery’s houseplant section, there’s probably a reason for that. (Grocery stores do not count; they’ll sell you any old damn thing as a “seasonal gift.”) (Plants I have seen shoved into ludicrous decorative pots as “seasonal gifts” in grocery stores: roses, hellebores, lavender, whole-ass fruit trees.)

St. John’s Wort is a shrubby lil guy that gets to be about three feet tall and wide. It’s a fast grower and self-sows easily. It’s considered invasive in some places, where gardeners are advised not to plant it, lest it go feral; from experience, I will say that after planting it in an herb bed, it took me about three years to get rid of it again. (Whoops.) It’s not suited to living in a lil pot on your desk. Which is what I told my friend — who, hopefully, has already transplanted our friend here into a bigger pot and moved it outside.

Also, uh —

Don’t water your plants every day, you goddamned maniacs.

What I’m pondering in the garden this week

We don’t give plants enough credit for being creepy little monsters.

It’s spooky szn, and so I’ve been throwing myself into my annual orgy of debatably tasteful Halloween decorating and horror movies. This, combined with the tiny gremlin on my shoulder that’s constantly reminding me that I need to create ContentTM, got me thinking about plant-themed horror narratives. Specifically, why aren’t there more of them??

I perused a bunch of different lists, mostly garnered by googling variations on plant-themed horror movies, and tbh, I was really surprised by how many of them aren’t actually about plants. Like, if you go poking around, a lot of them boil down to man was the real monster all along, and/or aliens, and/or the literal devil.

(We do not speak of the offensively boring Wahlberg vehicle The Happening. It does not deserve the breath we expend in discussing it, and so we will not.)

It’s easier to finds plants-as-horror-antagonists in print, which I get: it is difficult to make an immobile organism scary on screen! And yeah, plant horror sort of peaked in and around the Victorian era, where it was used as a handy-dandy metaphor for the looming threats of horny ladies, and the uncivilized world, and the queers, which is, uh, not ideal. But the Victorians were also a lot more aware that life, especially “modern” life, was an inherently tenuous thing, and they understood, better than we do, that it is only a matter of time before we can no longer contain the growing things we claim to have domesticated. Everything you know and love will one day vanish beneath an unstoppable tide of greenery. Herbicide-resistant weeds are going to doom us all, because we were unwilling to find better alternatives to Roundup, and amaranth evolves faster than we can make chemicals to kill it with. I think we need to be afraid of plants again, if only so we give them the respect they’re due!

This zinnia is going as “dead” for Halloween.

With that in mind, here is my first pitch for an appropriately plant-centric horror film. One that I think is thought-provoking, spine-tingling, and relevant to the Youths of Today. Are you listening, Hollywood??? Make me rich!!

Plant Parent
Horror Comedy, 2024

Twenty-eight-year-old Cara is tired of feeling like she can’t get her shit together. She channels her frustration with her shitty job, her shitty landlord, and the ever-increasing cost of living into a mild houseplant addiction — even if she usually kills them within a month or two. She’s desperate to feel like an adult, whatever that means, even if the trappings of “adulthood” are well beyond her budget.

When Cara’s roped into attending a wealthy friend’s bachelorette weekend at an exclusive resort, she’s more conscious than ever of her own inability to keep up with the not-quite-Kardashians of the world. The weekend culminates in a boozy brunch at a high-end “plant bar,” where Cara — after a weekend of feeling like a broke failure and charity case — overindulges in the bottomless mimosas. She wakes up the next morning with a nasty hangover, a series of damn girl you really know how to party texts, and a beautiful, mysterious orchid in a gilded pot. Oh, and a text alert from her bank, warning her that she’s maxed out her credit card.

Determined to make the best of things, and in light of the ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS disclaimer on the plant’s care instructions tag, Cara decides the plant is a sign. She’s going to get herself together. She’s going to stick to a budget. And she’s going to keep this plant alive, damnit.

Back home, Cara juggles work, bridesmaid commitments, and her love life while trying to keep her new, and, it turns out, extremely delicate plant alive. The orchid has an insatiable hunger for blood meal, mineral-rich bottled water — and once, she swears, a mouse, seemingly half digested by the thing’s roots by the time she finds it — but the plant thrives on her attention, even seeming to move toward her when she speaks to it. Her hard work seems to finally be paying off: she’s promoted at work, she manages to smooth things over with the bride, and she finally goes on a couple dates that aren’t totally dismal, a series of successes she attributes, in part, to her “lucky plant.” Sure, it pulsates a little, and she’s noticed that it seems to smell, ever so faintly, of rotting meat. And the neighbor’s cat has gone missing. And Cara’s roommate swears it tried to bite her. But it looks so nice, in the middle of their dim little apartment, and it’s probably the most expensive thing she’s ever owned.

Distracted by her newfound success and a fresh shot at love, though, Cara begins to neglect the plant — only to discover that, when push comes to shove, the plant will take care of itself. (By eating, and then colonizing, her roommate, her landlord, her love interest, the bride, and several hapless bystanders.)

Rated R.
97 minutes. 

Selected reviews:

“A confusing mishmash of anti-capitalist rhetoric, over-the-top gore, and seemingly endless plant trivia that concludes by implying the rich are feeding people to their houseplants. Utter nonsense that will, no doubt, find a willing audience in a generation more preoccupied with resentment than hard work.”

“A love letter to the burnout generation, the anxieties of conspicuous consumption, houseplant people, and the desire to murder that one friend from high school you could never quite seem to cut out of your life. You know the one.” 

“Imagine Bridesmaids, but if it ended in the entire cast being terrorized by a flesh-eating plant that turned half of them into undead, root-bound ‘zombies’ that yearn for blood and fertilizer in equal measure. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but the flowers erupting from the groom’s eyes in front of the wedding party is an image I’ll never forget.”

TREES HOLD THE NEIGHBORHOOD TOGETHER

Hello my best beloveds! It is September! We’re cooling off! We’re drunk on the abundance of harvest season! We’re wondering how summer went by so fast! We’re celebrating the history of America’s labor movements by only giving white-collar people the day off! We’re literally bathing in tubs of pumpkin spice! 

September is second only to June, in my mind, as peak “Oh my GOD I LOVE my GARDEN” season. The nihilism of August is past, the rains of autumn are coming, we’re harvesting the last of our tomatoes and eyeballing our ripening squash and wrapping ourselves in mingled relief and nostalgia for the growing season that’s coming to a close. It’s almost Halloween season! “Feast with friends and/or family until the darkest days of winter are over” season! Don’t forget to take at least a little of your loveliest produce and set it aside for the bleakest days of January and February — whether you’re freezing or canning, a bag of homegrown tomatoes simmered down into sauce or a jar of fig jam goes a long way when you’re in the throes of the wintertime sads. 

These Honorine Jobert Anemones are my FAVORITE fall bloomer. They’ve been super hardy in my partial shade bed and just burst into an absolute froth of blooms every year before politely dying back to the ground. If only ALL my plants could be so CONSIDERATE.

Seasonal vibe check

For some reason, this year, I have been fighting this overwhelming urge to go back-to-school shopping. I am not, it may be noted, a student. But all I can think about is, like, buying a Lisa Frank notebook and the new sweater that is going to Define The Person I Am This School Year. It’s all going to be different from now on! The sweat-soaked angst of summer is behind me! I’m older and wiser than I’ve ever been, and this article of clothing is proof!

So, in deference to the *~academic vibes~* of the season I am going to bring back the actual worst part of school: report cards! Isn’t that fun?!?

Every year, in the garden, I do more experimenting than rule-following. I distribute sage and time-tested advice and then I completely ignore it to see what I can get away with or whether I can fine-tune something for my particular microclimate. I also frequently test the limits of benign neglect, bad scheduling, or shoddy follow-through.

While I am unwilling to subject you, dear reader, to my mistakes and experiments in real time, I am happy to share their results. I know I am not the only person who is overscheduled or under-motivated or simply curious about how to make standard practices work better for a Richmond backyard specifically. 

In short: I fucked around, so you can find out. 

So, without further ado, instead of quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares, I am offering you 

The Great Growing Season Experimentation Report Card of 2022!

The Trials & Tribulations of Teensy Tiny Tomatoes

I started tomato seeds directly in a raised bed under a greenhouse cover, hoping they would mirror the incredible resilience of the volunteers I get every year. The seedlings I carefully nurture like precious infants do fine, I guess, but the trash baby plants that pop up out of LITERAL CRACKS IN THE SIDEWALK are the most infuriatingly healthy plants I’ve ever seen. While many people just wait until they can direct-sow tomatoes after the soil has warmed, I wanted to see if I could get a jump-start. 

The raised-bed greenhouse was pretty good but, word to the wise, I had to zip-tie both the frame AND the cover because it kept trying to take off during storms.

Grade: C+ 

Around the beginning of April, I topped one of my raised beds with a greenhouse cover I got for forty bucks on the internet, sowed my seeds, and waited. Then, after tomato season was well and truly underway, I bought a few established plants from a vendor at the Maymont Plant Sale as a control group, because they have the Good Equipment and I knew their plants would have been set up for maximum success.

Results were mixed. My direct-sown seedlings were slow to get going, because even in the greenhouse it wasn’t warm enough for them to be truly *happy.* Of the three I started: one was murdered in a tragic “lost my balance and smushed something when I put out a hand to catch myself” accident; one failed to thrive, and I ultimately replaced it; but the third was, indeed, incredibly healthy!! It outshone all the other tomato plants in the garden, both in terms of health and yield. What does this mean? I’m not sure! I think it’s definitely an endorsement of direct-sowing — but I probably need to be more patient. I’m going to try again next year, with adjustments. 

Sidestepping Squash Succubi

I didn’t plant my squash or cucumbers until the very end of June, hoping to avoid the annual nightmare infestation of the bugs who must not be named. The idea here is that squ*sh bugs lay their eggs in June — on your cucumbers and zucchini and butternuts and pumpkins, alas — and so if you simply have no squash plants for them to lay on, you disrupt their reproductive cycle, and boom! No infestation. 

You better hurry up, bud.

Grade: B- 

A (qualified) success! Squ*sh bugs are a literal nightmare pest that can really only be controlled through heavy pesticide use or manually picking every single bug off the vine. I don’t have the patience for the latter, and I’m ethically opposed to the former in backyard settings. So anything that gets me pumpkins without a fight is definitely worth trying. I meant to direct-sow all my cucumbers, pumpkins, and butternuts at the end of June, but life being what it is, I actually didn’t get it all in until the first week of July. But — miracle of miracles — it’s now September and I have not seen any marauders in the patch!

HOWEVER, it’s now September, and my plants have only had two months to get their shit together. It’s a race to see how much of a yield I can get before the first frost. For the cucumbers and miniature squash I planted, that’s fine! I am already glorying in my baby butternuts. But there’s no way I would be able to get a carving pumpkin or other large squash to maturity before the first frost. So if you’re going to try this method, definitely go for petite or miniature varieties. 

Just LOOK at these PERFECT and TINY and PRECIOUS BABY BUTTERNUTS!!!11!!!11 (Beer for scale, and also for drinking.)

Snubbing Sprays and Supporting Soil

Over the last few years, I’ve been working my way toward an entirely spray-free garden. This year, except for a one-time, very early season spritz of neem oil on my (not-yet-blooming) tomatoes, my roses, and my fruit trees, I didn’t use anything. No pesticides. No fungicides. Nada. 

The idea is that, with time, I’ll be able to achieve enough balance and biodiversity in my yard and garden that my plants’ natural defenses and the pests’ natural predators will keep one another in check. Does this mean I’ll never stumble upon the pest-ravaged corpse of a comrade felled before their time on the battlefield? No! But theoretically, it means that the occasional plant murders won’t escalate to full-on Purge-style murder sprees. 

Grade: B+ 

It’s … working? Look, I hesitate to crow success from the rooftops, because as we all know, hubris leads to patricide, and my dad’s a pretty nice dude. But year-on-year, my garden has become healthier, more resilient, and less plagued by pests and diseases, with a few notable exceptions. 

This has required some compromises: I’ve established a non-aggression pact with the less-cute predatory insects and pollinators, up to and including not automatically destroying hornets’ and wasps’ nests (within reason). We are too mean to them! I know they look scary, but try to think of them as bad boys with hidden hearts of gold. Little jabby Edward Cullens. Sure, they’re dangerous, but they’re also vital to the ecosystem dreamy. 

Too stupid to use, and yet

Less controversially, I’ve allowed small sections of my yard to go to meadow, only mowing them twice a year or so; I’ve been using no-dig methods wherever possible and trying to feed the soil as much as I can. It’s going really well, I’m very pleased, and I’m excited to see how things progress as time goes by. 

BUT! 

(There are always butts.) (heh heh heh)

My fruit trees — specifically, my peach and my nectarine — are fucked. And without spraying, they probably always will be. They’re just too delicate, too disease-prone, and too dang sweet to make it through the summer without getting hit by fungus or mildew or some kind of pest infestation. And at least some of my roses will probably always have a little bit of a fungal thing going. I’m coming to terms with the roses; I haven’t decided yet what to do about the peach and the nectarine. Spray them and nothing else? Accept that I just won’t get fruit from those trees but they still look nice? IDK! 

Credit where it’s due: a few of my fruit trees have handled the spray-free regimen just fine. The cherries and pears are muddling along, and the fig is thriving. She don’t give a damn. Just throwing fruit around by the fistful like a king trying to buy the goodwill of the commoners. (It’s me, I’m the commoners.) 

Grace’s Growing Season Fuckery: B

So there we have it! I’m giving myself a solid B. I obviously made an effort, and I am clearly a reasonably intelligent kid, but I lack focus and spend too much time reading novels under my desk when I think the teacher can’t see me. Ah well. We can’t all be “a joy to have in class.” 

I did not realize this broad-leaf chive was a fall bloomer! Or it isn’t, and I just stressed it out real bad by forgetting it in this pot for six months. “I’ll just put this here and then I’ll pop it back into the bed tomorrow” is my favorite lie to tell myself.

What I’m pondering in the garden this week

Fall is tree planting season! As a certified Shade Queen,TM I am all about planting trees. (This is as much a selfish impulse as an environmental one: I literally cannot bear direct sunlight for longer than fifteen minutes at a stretch. I become something … unnatural.)

I have hit max capacity on trees in my own yard, though, so — especially on the heels of summer — I’ve been thinking a lot about where trees are in the city, what kind of trees they are, how well they’re cared for, and what it all means. (Ha HA, suckers, this is another one of those what does it all MEAN columns.)

I live in the not-yet-fashionable but rapidly gentrifying end of Church Hill (North Church Hill, is what people say when they want to be absolutely sure there’s no way you’ll confuse the two). The neighborhood was built as a streetcar suburb in the early 1900s, and when I moved in seven years ago, there were a lot of vacant houses and empty lots, many of which had absolutely enormous trees on them.

As developers have scooped up property and renovated or built homes, they’ve also demolished the trees present on those properties. And look, this isn’t a NIMBY thing! The city of Richmond needs housing, lots of it, and more density. I’m not saying that Nothing May Be Built, For Fear of Losing Trees. 

But my backyard is dominated by an oak that, according to an internet formula I found (so, grain of salt), is between 150 and 185 years old. It predates my house. When my current neighbor moved in, the first thing he asked was if I’d ever thought about having the tree taken down. I explained to him, with only minimal swearing and just one threat to his well-being, that the tree wasn’t just an environmental asset, but — as our houses collectively sit on a slope with no retaining wall — the oak’s root system was holding our yards in place. 

If you go into the other end of Church Hill, or into the Fan District or Jackson Ward, there is shade everywhere. The parks and streets are lined with mature trees. In some of the city’s most “picturesque” neighborhoods, the power lines run through the alleys so the trees don’t have to be mauled every year to avoid accidents. 

This summer, the city (or Dominion, unclear) tore out an ailing maple in front of my house. They didn’t tell me it was happening and they didn’t replace the tree; they just demolished it and left. Four other trees on my street have been removed the same way. I’ve watched developers fell enormous trees from the backyards of houses they’re renovating, or lots they’re building on. An oak went down earlier this summer that left behind the largest stump I’d ever seen in person. What little shade the neighborhood does have is being removed, inch by inch, and no one seems to be replacing it. And yeah, I can go stick a sapling in the easement, but it will take decades to have the same impact. There are no maturing trees to take over from the already established ones we’re losing. 

The arboreal future of the neighborhood — and in many ways, the city — is steered entirely by developers and investors and what they choose to do with the lots and homes they’re scooping up. What developers and investors do not care about, and are not thinking about, is how to build a sustainable, welcoming neighborhood. What they want are frictionless, faux-luxury renovations, or new builds that sell for top dollar and are devoid of potentially undesirable characteristics. Which means the houses have to be as big as possible, the yards need to be empty and featureless, and working around an existing tree isn’t worth the additional time or cost. 

I’m not a crank. The city, and Church Hill especially, also needs: dense, affordable housing, and plenty of it; justice and support for the families recently forced out of the public housing that is now mid-demolition at the end of the neighborhood; more and consistently reliable public transit; and concentrated, community-led investment in our public schools. These are all important and I am begging you to not accuse me of waffle erasure because I said I am worried about the future of pancakes. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still also need some fucking shade. It doesn’t make trees less important.  

We need green spaces and neighborhoods that are welcoming and cool and pleasant to be in, for ourselves and our kids and our neighbors’ kids and the dogs we treat like kids. Heat islands aren’t getting any less severe; torrential rains are not becoming any less likely. Every giant-ass tree in Church Hill is holding the soil beneath it in place, preventing erosion. But none of this is mutually exclusive! I promise you, we can have apartment complexes and trees! In fact, apartment complexes house many people, which means we can have space for more trees!

All of these trees are grass now and I frequently wonder whether the new homeowner has registered yet that there’s nothing holding the hill in place now that they got rid of all those root systems.

I think fences provide an illusion of sovereignty where our yards and balconies and stoops are concerned, but make no mistake, we are making decisions for everyone when we make decisions about our own yards. Our fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides drift on the wind and drain into the river; our invasive plants spill over into the yards and gardens of people with whom we’ll never speak. When we destroy the neighborhood’s established trees, we rob our neighbors of shade, our soil of stability, our yards of biodiversity and wildlife. 

But just as one diseased rose can sicken a block’s worth of rose bushes, so can one saved tree or unmown patch of grass bring life to a block’s worth of homes. The commons have been enclosed, but not erased — not entirely. The hum of natural life, even in dense urban areas, is something we are all entitled to enjoy, something we are all obligated to protect. Trees are the first and largest building block of that system, the structural supports without which nothing else can thrive. A developer working around a shade tree, a homeowner hiring an arborist to keep a tree healthy instead of removing it, an apartment manager planting trees in courtyards and easements — these actions don’t occur in a vacuum. No matter how tall your fences are, the decisions you make for the green spaces you occupy are communal, whether you like it or not. So think carefully about what those decisions are. 

What is wrong with me

TOO HOT TO THINK

Hey babies! It is August! We’re dodging storms! We’re under heat advisories! We’re abandoning our overambitious spring plans! We’re going out of town for a while and coming back to gardens that have gone completely to shit and feeling guilty about it! We’re sweating too much to be sad about the continuing disintegration of society! 

August is when I get a little Saturn Devouring His Son about the garden. Like I don’t know if you know this, y’all, but even as an obsessive garden person, the garden is sometimes… a chore? That I sometimes resent? Who wants to pull weeds when the heat index is 116?? No, I’m literally asking. Tell me. GIVE ME THEIR NAME. I WILL HARVEST THEIR SECRETS. I WILL PULL THEIR HOT-WEATHER MOTIVATION FROM THEM LIKE CARROTS FROM FORBIDDEN SOIL. IT WILL ONLY HURT A LITTLE.

Anyway. You have my blessing to abandon garden maintenance until it’s under 100 degrees outside. It will be our little secret. Let the weeds run riot. Maybe sneak out at night or in the early morning to water it, if you have to. Dance naked in the moonlight and garland yourself in feral morning glory vines. Don’t worry. It will still be there in a month. 

The corn and squash patch is THRIVING and yes maybe I planted A COUPLE MORE SQUASH PLANTS than was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

Seasonal vibe check

If you have somehow maintained your motivation, there’s still time to slam in seeds for your fall crops! Especially anything you’re planning on eating for its leaves (or anything frost-tolerant). If you spent all summer being like “ah shit I really wanted to start a garden this year and I just never got around to it,” this is actually the perfect time to choose a site and stake down a tarp or an old bedsheet to kill off the grass and other weeds before starting new beds in the fall — the heat will accelerate the die-off, and you have time to plan for the more project-friendly weather ahead.

Now is also the perfect time to do yourself, your guests, and your neighbors a HUGE FAVOR and go hunt for (and get rid of) standing water any and everywhere in your yard/porch/garden/alley/block to help keep mosquitos in check. (As we discussed, your adorable “mosquito-repelling plants” might not be the solution they were advertised as.) Do everyone a solid and go on standing water patrol! If you have standing water that you can’t get rid of, consider installing a pump or picking up some mosquito dunks (check the packaging to make sure they’re safe for wildlife). If you’re putting out water dishes for stray cats or neighborhood dogs, change that water frequently! This time of year, pretty much any standing water is FULL of mosquito larvae. Even the thirstiest strays don’t want to drink that. 

I don’t know if everyone saw it, but beloved local nursery the Great Big Greenhouse had a cannabis cultivation seminar at the end of July! I couldn’t go, but if anyone did and wants to let me know how it went, I’d love to know. I’m guessing a lot of us are spending the summer cultivating our own entertainment — indoors, please, let’s not tempt fate — and the GBG knows a growing (heh heh heh) market when it sees one.

Your quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares

My chard! My beautiful, beautiful chard! (Three crying-face emojis)

Full disclosure, y’all, in the interest of Journalistic Ethics™: these picture messages came from my mom, who a) knows a lot more about leafy greens than I do, b) knew darn well that she was lucky to have had chard survive into the dead of summer, and c) didn’t need me to tell her what to do. 

NOPE

But prompted by her Tragically Doomed Chard, let’s talk fungus! And mildew! And mold! And the fact that August is SO HOT and SO WET and your poor plants are basically living inside a line cook’s crotch right now with nary a box of cornstarch in sight. Things are gonna get weird. 

There are literally thousands of fungi species that cause plant disease, ranging from microbes that live in the soil to spores that are carried on the wind. What complicates the whole arrangement is that there are also tons of beneficial fungi — lil garden buddies who can help your plants take in nutrients, fight the bad fungi, all kinds of stuff. Diseases caused by fungi are common enough that you’ve probably heard of some of them even if you’re not an avid gardener: downy mildew, powdery mildew, blight, black spot, rust. Fungal disease can strike just about any plant, from oak trees to houseplants. And they are, I’m sorry to say, an absolute bitch to deal with. 

For years, I’ve heard (and repeated!) that baking soda, milk, or even neem-based sprays are effective preventatives for a broad assortment of fungal diseases. If you google “diy fungicide,” you are going to get approximately a million recipes for one of those three things. But for you, babes, I realized I wanted to go the extra mile and, y’know, research my oldey-timey home remedies. And guess what? (I think you already know.) When you look into the actual research that’s been done, there’s very little evidence that these approaches work in a lab or greenhouse setting, and almost no evidence that they’re broadly effective out in these mean streets gardens. 

“What!?” I can hear you gasping. “The Pinterest infographic/random google result/my own granny (sorry, granny) steered me wrong?!?” I know!! I am scandalized! Al Gore’s Internet, spreading misinformation??? I need a fainting couch! And a stiff drink!

So, y’know, this puts me in a bit of a pickle. Because while there are lots of sprays and things you can buy to prevent or kill fungal disease in the garden, they range from “viciously toxic” to “reasonably safe for you, not so much for [fish, insects, birds, pets]” to “pretty much fine, but also going to kill all the good fungi.” I don’t really want to tell you to just go buy a bottle of whatever, hope for the best, and get to sprayin’. For one, I promised not to spend all my time telling you to buy stuff. And for home gardeners, especially, I think what’s most important — the absolute first priority — is to always, always err on the side of harm reduction. 

So I’m going to tell you that — bummertown — the best approach you can take to fungal disease is a two-pronged strategy of prevention and cold-blooded plant murder. 

Corn: check. Children of: [guttural screaming]

Boringly, prevention is your best bet. I’ve gone so far as to make you an acronym! You ready? For fairly reliable fungus prevention, use SCAT. Which in this context means Soil, Crop rotation, Air, and Tools. (I crack myself up.)

Soil and Crop rotation are going to be most important here. Good fungi can go a long way to both fighting off bad fungi and ensuring that your plants are robust enough to fight off disease. Healthy soil is vital. Dust the root balls of plants with mycorrhizal fungi when you plant; top-dress beds with compost twice a year (the best compost you can make or find!); feed your plants and soil with seaweed fertilizer or compost tea; ensure that beds drain well; and avoid overwatering, so the soil isn’t soggy. This is also another good reason to mulch: a thick layer of mulch will prevent spores in the soil from splashing up onto the stems and leaves of your plants. 

In vegetable beds, try to do a three-year rotation between plant families (brassicas, nightshades, squash, etc.) if you can. If your garden is very small, even one year will be a big help! You can even take a year off from a plant family entirely. If all your tomatoes get blight this year, maybe next year will be the Year of the Green Bean. (Sure, no tomato sandwiches, but have you ever had a cold pickled dilly bean on the beach in the dead of summer? A true delight.)

In the interest of rude acronyms, I’m using Air a little broadly here: first, and most instinctively, ensure that there’s good air circulation around plants that are likely to get their shit wrecked by fungal diseases. Tomatoes, cucumbers, roses, and potatoes are all common victims. Prune so air can circulate within the plant, and try not to plant too close to fences/your house/things that will block the prevailing breezes. Second, you want to ensure the leaves are staying dry by watering just the roots when you water your garden. I know it’s a pain in the ass, but sprinklers are your enemy. Water with a wand or a watering can or even a hose — as long as you get up under the foliage so the water is just going into the soil. 

Finally: Tools! Always, always clean your tools. When you’re moving between beds, or even between different plants, give clippers/trowels a quick sterilizing to avoid spreading spores or mites or anything else (I use isopropyl alcohol). At the end of the season, thoroughly clean up any and all leftover foliage or dropped fruit & veg. If you’re handling/disposing of/raking up after plants you know are diseased, it won’t hurt to go ahead and sterilize everything you’ve used. (Also, if you want your tools to last, give them a nice oiling before putting them away!)

There is some evidence that spraying with neem oil, milk, jojoba oil, or baking soda can help prevent fungal infections, if you know from experience that they’re likely. I have personally had reasonably good luck with preventative neem spritzes in the past, on roses and fruit trees, when I remember to keep up with them. If you go this route, don’t go bugnuts: baking soda is still a salt, and you can stunt or damage your plants; don’t use neem or jojoba sprays on plants that are currently in bloom; and wash any produce thoroughly before eating. (Milk sprays are essentially harmless, although I’ve heard they can smell … less than ideal, in a southern summer.)

Alright, so you’ve SCATted like a champ, but you still got a fungal disease, because Richmond Line Cook Crotch August. Alas, alack, but them’s the breaks. 

Feel free to try a baking soda or milk spray, if you like! It won’t hurt, really, it just might not do anything. Your best bet — I’m so sorry — is to become Death, Destroyer of Plants. If you catch it early, remove and destroy affected leaves. Be preemptive and remove any foliage or fruit those leaves were touching, too. If it’s already spread, though, your best bet is just to demolish the plant. If it’s a perennial plant, or a tree, you might not need to go so scorched-earth; especially if the problem is leaf-based, you can remove the affected foliage, practice good prevention with surrounding plants, and hope that winter will kill it off. 

My mom tore out her chard in the end, by the way, after trying a milk spray for good measure. RIP, chard. You were good while you lasted. 

No thoughts, just petals.

What I’m pondering in the garden this month — just kidding, it’s too hot for pondering, I am only sweat and resentment now, check back in September.

IDK about you, but August is right around when springtime’s ambition turns into late summer’s list of failed experiments. And fungal problems. And my post-vacation “oh shit I forgot how much feral morning glory and Virginia creeper can grow in a week.” I sat on my porch the other day, with the sweat pooling under my boobs and in my ass and behind my knees, and let myself fantasize for a good twenty minutes about flattening all of my flower beds. Just tearing ‘em out. I yearn for a hard freeze. I yearn for a blissful void. I yearn for a big dumb blank chemical horrorshow of a lawn. I want to crawl beneath the rosemary bush and let the trumpet vines consume us both in cool, creeping silence. 

But I am going to step back and take a cold shower and pull on my Big Girl Bootyshorts and carry on. I know that this is a temporary impulse. I know I would actually be sad if I didn’t have a garden, and this is how I feel every year in August, at least for a bit. 

Because hey! It’s also “eating a tomato sandwich over the sink” season. “Cucumber salad for dinner” season. “Baby watermelon on the vine that I’m hovering over like a midwife” season. It is time to make pickles and jams and give your friends bags of summer squash because you planted too many and you’ve run out of exciting ways to eat them and now you’re seriously debating trying to use them as weapons or sex toys or a rudimentary form of currency. 

Everyone else might be miserable, but the mandevilla is laughing at us all.

Summer is great; summer is terrible; summer is almost over as soon as it begins and I will resent it and embrace it and miss it when it is gone. 

The next time we meet in this space, I’m going to have something more substantial to say. Until then, what are you pondering in the garden this month? Come tell me on Twitter or email me or tag me on Instagram. I wanna know! 

Until then, I’m going to go pull some weeds. I’ll see y’all down at the Pipeline. Somebody save me a cold beer.

MOSQUITO-REPELLING PLANTS, SAFE HERBAL ABORTIONS, AND OTHER MYTHS

It’s real summer now, y’all! We’re sweaty! We’re dodging increasingly dramatic storms! We’re studiously pretending that flash flooding and heat islands aren’t a problem because local government thinks urban trees and water-smart infrastructure are less of a priority than a casino! 

If you have a yard, this is a great time to make note of any places where you’re like dang, it would be really nice if I had some shade here — you can be the shade you wish to see in the world! By which I mean, in October/November, you can consider filling that spot with a tree. And there are so many options to choose from: productive fruit trees, statement-making ornamentals, shade trees, dwarf varieties, and towering, fast-growing behemoths are all out there. The world can be your arbor! (Just make sure you call 311 and get your utilities marked before you accidentally slam a root ball on top of your sewage line. You don’t want the shit literally hitting the fan.) 

If you don’t have (or own) a yard, but you’re still itching for that good natural shade on your porch or balcony, consider putting a tree in a big pot. You can put it anywhere! You can move it with you from apartment to apartment like a maniac! Your friends may never help you move again, but hey, you have a tree to be your friend now! Not that I’m speaking from experience! 

I am trying a new tactic for squash bugs where you start everything later than usual to avoid squash bug mating season or whatever–I put all this newspaper down in the rain because hey, I’d have to get it wet anyhow (it’s to keep the weeds down!).

Seasonal vibe check

July is a great time to go ahead and finish up any chores you’ve been putting off, because while it’s heating up now, August is only going to be hotter, and the novelty of buttcrack sweat will have worn off by then. If it can’t wait for the cooler days of fall, do it now! 

This is a time of year when I like to wander around, look at what’s thriving and what’s begging for the sweet release of death, and make plans for next year or the end of the season. Do you need to move any of your perennials come fall? Or put those annuals somewhere else next spring? Take notes now! Like, literally take notes. You will not remember, no matter how much you think you will. Dedicate a gardening notebook. Email yourself. Send your friend a letter with another self-addressed letter inside for them to send back to you. Whatever it takes. Get that shit in writing. Thank me in January, when you will have forgotten what being hot was even like and you can’t remember where you planted any of your bulbs. 

Houseplant friends, I’ve neglected you the past couple months in my feverish excitement for spring. How y’all doing? 

If you’re the kind of person who cycles your tropicals outdoors for the warm weather, keep an eye out for any friends or foes that might take up residence while they’re on your porch or patio. My banana plant is currently hosting an itsy bitsy spider, which is chill with me, although I probably won’t bring him back inside with us come fall.

Now is also a great time to repot your houseplant babies if they need it — they’re in active growth, ready to be fed with fresh soil and extra breathing room, and you won’t have to startle them too badly if you need to do the actual potting outdoors. 

Also, a word to the wise! Depending on where your house is situated, the sun exposure of your windows might be completely different in the dead of summer than the dead of winter, so make sure your houseplants aren’t being roasted/dying alone in the dark. I have a bunch of plants I have to move to the opposite side of my house twice a year, like little retirees going to Florida, to either take advantage of, or avoid, direct sun. 

Finally, for our vegetable gardeners, it’s time to start planning your fall crops! I find the turnover to be tricky here — our frosts are so late that you can be harvesting tomatoes well into the fall, and so where gardeners further north can just tear out their summer crops, knowing there’s only so much time left, I wind up doing a bit more of a dance for space. In July, especially toward the end of the month, you can go ahead and throw in seeds for peas, beets, carrots, greens, and broccoli. Lots of fall crops will grow well in containers, so if your garden bed is at capacity with tomatoes, peppers, or cucumbers because you got carried away (still definitely not speaking from experience idk what you’re talking about), you can always put a few pots or buckets or barrels at the end of your veg beds for those autumn harvests. 

The squash (and corn) a few days later and after a thorough mulching! I’ll let y’all know if this gambit works or if I wind up with NOTHING at the end of the season.

Your quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares:

Do “mosquito repelling” plants actually work?

No. 

Wait, aren’t you going to explain yourself?

But that means I have to go do research so I can justify my instincts and applied knowledge as a means of earning your TRUST or whatever and it’s hot out and I have a cold beer in the fridge — ugh, FINE. OKAY. Let’s talk about SCIENCE. 

I see these plants every year — at nurseries, in listicles, on your aunt’s neighbor’s Facebook posts — with bright, eye-catching labels. Repels Mosquitos! Keeps Pests Away! But those are lies. Lies, I say! They might repel mosquitos from themselves, but they will not repel them from you. Capitalism’s ceaseless need to commodify and brand every single thing within an inch of its life strikes again! 

This is not to say that there are not lots of plant-based ways to keep from turning into a walking pile of welts; only that advertisers have capitalized on a fundamental misunderstanding of application. 

This flowering tobacco will not keep mosquitos away from you, but it does smell really lovely and also has sticky leaves that catch gnats and stuff, which is a fun feature.

Mosquitos, the vampiric little bastards, are a true marvel of evolutionary design. Female mosquitos (the ones that want to eat you; male mosquitos are harmless, horny little vegetarians, which tbh sounds familiar) have special nerve cells with receptors for detecting carbon dioxide (which we exhale) and what are very creepily termed “skin odorants” that are produced when we sweat and whatnot. 

The way that mosquito repellents work, generally, is by covering or neutralizing your human stink with a smell that theoretically fills mosquitos with tiny, airborne loathing, so they’ll stream away from you, spewing tiny mosquito swear words, and attack your less-prepared friends instead. Ha, suckers.

You might already be noticing the problem with live-plants-as-mosquito-repellent: they might work quite well, if you were planning to physically lie inside of them all day. But you probably aren’t (hey, no judgment though), which means that the catmint or citronella or “mosquito plant” geranium you stuck in a pot on your porch isn’t going to do a single damn thing to help you. The oils in those plants need to be activated (read: smooshed out of the leaves, or extracted, or set on fire) and then either applied to your physical person or suspended in the air in an invisible but odorous bubble around you. Otherwise, they accomplish nothing. There are lots of products out there that operate on this principle — essential oil–based repellents made of neem, or the ubiquitous citronella candle — and work quite well. If you’re feeling cheap, you can technically smoosh some of those plants and then just smear ’em all over yourself, but I don’t recommend it: some can give you a rash, and also, you’re going to look pretty weird with smooshed leaf bits all over your arms when you could just as easily use a spray or something. 

A lot of those “mosquito repelling” plants, though, are wonderful additions to the garden, and I highly recommend planting them on their own merits! Lavender, catmint, citronella grass, rosemary, bee balm, cedar-scented geranium — they’re all lovely plants. Just don’t expect them to keep you from getting itchy. 

<3

What I’m pondering in the garden this week

Your garden will not save you. 

Look, I had a whole other thing that was meant to go here. I was going to joke about the NYT canceling the Fiddle-leaf fig, and it was going to be fun and lighthearted, and now this is going to be a goddamn mood pivot because we were all just joking about mosquitos, and I’m sorry. I didn’t want to make this yet another space where Politics Happen. I know everyone wants a fucking break. But our useless government has triggered a conversation that is Very Much in My Wheelhouse and I feel like I have to step in and say a thing, so HERE WE ARE. I hope everyone is HAPPY. 

As we have been failed, over the last centuries decades few years, by government on pretty much every level, from city council to the Supreme Court, I often see people advocating for personal, “natural,” or “DIY” solutions to systemic problems. Inflation skyrocketing, food systems breaking down, over-reliance on herbicides leaving the future of large-scale farming devastatingly uncertain? Grow your own! Baby formula impossible to find? Make your own! Fundamental healthcare, including abortions, no longer nationally legal? Do your own abortion, with plants! At this rate I feel like I’m going to see someone be like, Is your state attacking trans folks in ever-more alarming ways? Have you tried herbal gender-affirming healthcare????  

Fuck, shit, piss, and hell.

Anyway.

People are throwing up these lil infographics on Twitter and Instagram, being like well now we can’t have safe abortions, here’s what you need to know to do them yourself, like oldey-timey lords and ladies. How fancy! I mean, they wrote about it in Chaucer! And first off, if you’re like, Chaucer who, correct, he’s famous for writing one of the first major literary works in English and not being the contemporary of folks who could offer you a safe abortion without a side of organ damage. Or death. 

So yeah let’s talk herbal abortifacients. They’ve been around forever — in every culture, all over the world. And yes, a lot of them worked. There are hundreds of plants that will cause the pregnant body to become un-pregnant, with side effects ranging from manageable to deadly. The information being passed around online usually features herbs and plants from western medical traditions — you’ll see a lot of pennyroyal, rue, cotton root, mugwort — mostly because it’s easiest to read historical texts in English if you’re an English speaker. And I’m not going to go as far as to say herbal abortifacients 100% do not work and are not worth it but y’all, herbal abortifacients work sometimes and are often not worth it. The tipping point between not-pregnant and liver failure can rely on something as complicated as how the herbs were grown, never mind how they were processed and prepared and dosed. And while those complexities don’t make for a cute infographic, people’s lives can depend on them. 

I have four or five books with recipes along the lines of take one handful of goat’s breeches and one handful of bard’s breath and distil in a Fine Wine until aromatic and give to the Afflicted Woman thrice under a full moon. Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t. The same books recommend stuff like keeping goat’s testicles around your neck as a means of contraception. They recommend making “clear waters” out of wildly poisonous plants to treat an upset stomach. You can do a lot of damage without dropping dead on the spot; we used to use lead as makeup, remember? The Trotula didn’t necessarily understand things like long-term organ damage or how different medications (even herbal treatments) might interact with one another. 

The issue is this: herbs used as healthcare are healthcare. And what old books and social media posts lack is the nuance and applied, individualistic knowledge that make healthcare safe. How much pennyroyal tea do you need for a pregnant person who weighs 130 pounds? How about 230? What if they have preexisting medical complications that render their kidneys less able to handle the onslaught of the very compounds that make it effective? There are people out there with that knowledge, with the years of practice and education to guide someone through the process, but there aren’t many of them. And, as with all “non-traditional” medicine, it’s difficult to tell if the person giving you advice has decades of experience or spent an hour and a half on Wikipedia before deciding they were ready to go pro. 

If nothing else, fall back on Occam’s razor: if there were a straightforward herbal remedy that was safe and effective, that didn’t require extensive background knowledge to correctly prepare and dose, would that knowledge have just whoopsy-daisied its way out of our common understanding? Wouldn’t it still be in active use, for any number of reasons, instead of relegated to history the minute something actually safe and effective came onto the scene? When was the last time you sat around chewing willow bark instead of taking an aspirin? 

I think there’s this weird idea that herbal remedies are inherently safe. I’ve read medical accounts of women who were hospitalized after taking herbal abortifacients when a safe abortion was readily available because they thought it was more “natural” and less risky. Because they’re just plants, right? How badly can a cup of tea really fuck you up? But there are plants in my garden I could assassinate people with. No cooking, processing, or extracting required. Anything strong enough to be efficacious is going to be dangerous. Pregnant people die all over the world, every day, as a result of misused herbs. 

I worry that these books and tweets and listicles will cause harm, yes. But I’m also worried there are people out there whose sense of urgency is blunted by the idea that there are “safe” options out there still. People who care a little, who conceptually understand that this is a problem but either aren’t directly affected or are sure that they will be able to care for themselves, even if theoretical faceless others won’t. We are a society of individualists, for better or worse; our ability to project ourselves into the struggles of others is rusty, stiff from lack of use. We know intellectually that shit is going sideways, but we don’t always feel it. And so we share infographics on Twitter and donate ten bucks to Planned Parenthood and promise each other that we’ll definitely vote in November. That’ll fix it!

I am tired of the garden being asked to make up for the shortfalls of what should be a modern society. A square of dirt will not save you from skyrocketing food and fuel prices, any more than a fistful of pennyroyal or rue will reliably end your unwanted pregnancy. Stop falling back on gardeners and witches when you want legislation and solidarity and an end to gerrymandering. Stop offering individual solutions to systemic failings. Plants and gardens are wonderful. They are important. They connect us to the natural world; they feed us and nurture us existentially and physically; they provide a sense of reflection and beauty that we all very much need in our lives. Especially when things are hard. But even the most efficient urban homestead cannot replace a functioning society. You are asking too much of it. Medical abortion and mifepristone and misoprostol are fucking miracles. Any person with an unwanted pregnancy in any prior era would have given anything to have access to something so safe and effective. 

I’m sorry that this is the world we’re living in. I’m so, so sorry. I do not judge people who will risk anything to terminate a pregnancy. I understand that devastating side effects are chances, possibilities, whereas forced birth is a certainty if nothing is done. I know that these are complicated calculations undertaken in a moment of crisis. But the very real danger is that it won’t work. That it won’t work and still have devastating health consequences. And I refuse to lose sight of the fact that these calculations shouldn’t be happening at all. 

Do not let the idea of herbal abortions comfort you. Do not for one moment think it is a viable or acceptable alternative. Do not for one moment allow yourself to think at least — when you should be thinking: what can I do, right now, in this moment, to fight for the safe, effective, and inalienable resources we already have? 

BAKING IN THE CITY AGAIN

Hello, babies! We are feeling EXISTENTIAL for June! We’re celebrating Pride! We’re telling our friends how much we love them! We’re weeding the garden because it will keep us from doom-scrolling for a fifth straight hour! We’re lying in the wet earth after a thunderstorm, trying to feel close to something larger than ourselves! 

Don’t forget to set something on fire (a list of intentions, some herbs, a nice little pile of wood, a cop car) to celebrate the solstice on the 21st. Gather your friends! Spit whiskey into the roaring flames, reaffirm the worthiness of your personal battles, and ask the universe for a good harvest — whether in literal produce or something beyond the confines of the garden. 

Maude is SHOCKED by the heat.

Seasonal vibe check

As predicted, May dead-ended into HOT HOT HEAT. I am watching the sweet peas in my front garden begin to hiss and crackle like little fragrant vampires in the sun, while the Icelandic poppies gasp for mercy and the lettuces foment mutiny (okay fine, they’re just bolting, but you take my point). Cool-weather flower and veg season is OVER, Y’ALL, and it’s NOT COMING BACK. (Well. Until fall. But October is several years away, isn’t it?)

Keep an eye out for incoming hot-weather pests and problems, especially in the veg garden: squash bugs, earwigs, fungus, and blight are all going to rear their heads soon. 

I have already seen some of you watering (!) your flowers (!!) IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON WHEN IT IS NINETY DEGREES OUTSIDE (!!!!!!!!!!)! Babes! You might as well pour the water straight into the air; it is all going to turn around and evaporate. And unless you’re really good at harvesting rainwater, that’s bought water. You’re overpaying the city for that stuff!

Please, I beg you, water early in the morning or at the end of the day. There’s debate over which is better — I’m a morning waterer, but I am not here to judge my nocturnal gardening brethren — but either is better than IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DANG DAY. 

Your quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares

Uhhh

What the hell is happening to this rose

oh no oh no oh nO OH NO OH NO OH NO

ROSES OF THE LIVING DEAD

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

RUN AWAYYYYYYYYYYYY.

*ahem*

Pour yourself a drink, friend, then get out your beaked mask and your grim sense of irony: you’ve got yourself a case of rose plague. Your poor shrub is both doomed and contagious, and, like the third act of a zombie movie, you should probably put it out of its misery before it infects anything else.

Rose rosette disease (cool kids call it RRD) is a virus (did you know plants can also get viruses) carried by mites. The mites travel from plant to plant on the wind. Which means your rose, in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-two, caught a fatal “airborne” virus.

So. 

That’s fun. 

There’s not much that can be done once your rose bush is already infected. You can try completely removing the infected section of the plant by cutting back to the base or graft if necessary (if it’s sentimental or expensive, it can be worth a try), but if you don’t succeed, it won’t be immediately apparent, and the plant will be “contagious” the whole time. The safest thing to do is to tear it out entirely — root ball and all — and then dispose of the corpse in the trash, not in your compost.

For the sake of all our gardens, I’m going to take a moment to climb on my soapbox and ask y’all to go check your roses!!! I see bushes all over town that are infected, and I swear to the moon I’m going to start leaving people obnoxious little cards that say HEY PLZ KILL YOUR PLAGUE ROSES THX. Roses, especially cheap and hardy Knock Out roses (rumored to be particularly susceptible, but I’m not sure that’s really true), are a favorite of developers, landlords, and realtors, so lots of people just sort of . . . have them, whether they want them or not, which doesn’t help. 

If you’re reading this and wondering whether you can put a giant N95 on your beloved roses, sadly, preventing RRD isn’t a sure thing; horticultural oil, neem oil, and insecticidal soap are all good preventatives, but they’re not a guarantee. If you go that route, be sure to follow label instructions and try to be sparing. (It’s too late in the year now to apply horticultural oil anyway, it’s hot as balls out there.) Other than that, the best defense is to nip infection in the bud by tearing out infected plants, pruning thoroughly at the end of the season (sterilize your clippers between plants!!), and hoping for the best <3. 

If you need to replace your plague roses, or are trying to encourage a friend or neighbor to replace their plague roses, I asked the fine folks at Moulton Hot Natives for some environmentally friendly recommendations that will fill the Knock Out rose-shaped hole in your life. They recommend Ceanothus americanus, New Jersey Tea; Itea virginica, Virginia Sweetspire; and Rhododendron periclymenoides, Wild Azalea, among others. Check ’em out! They have lots of nifty stuff! 

Soon-to-be-roasted sweet peas.

What I’m pondering in the garden this month:

Spitting in the face of god. 

Or at least, spitting in the face of climate and common sense. As I sit on my porch, in the ninety-plus-degree heat, I am eye level with the sweet peas I planted this spring. The sweet peas I plant every spring, even though they are categorically unsuited to life here in the swamp-hill-river-valley that is Richmond, Virginia. 

Sweet peas love long, cool springs, where nights are decently above freezing but the days stay temperate. They want to be planted at the very end of winter or early spring, and once temperatures climb up into the eighties, they start to wither away, like ailing Victorian ladies coughing discreetly into their hankies, and before long they give up the ghost entirely. 

You might notice that exactly none of that describes the climate here. And yet. 

Every year I plant as soon as I can, I shower the soil with compost like I’m made of the stuff, I shade the roots and give the crowns light and mulch the bejeezus out of them. And every year I get an anemic scattering of blooms before they’re roasted in the frying pan of late May and early June. I sigh and kvetch and then I plant them all over again. No joke: this year I ordered all my sweet pea seeds in December, went to put them with the rest of my seeds, and found six packets of sweet peas from last year. 

What is wrong with me? Why am I like this!?!?

But I feel like a lot of us have our “spitting in the face of god” plants. Quixotic obsessions that we can’t seem to set aside, despite ourselves. Greenhouse-less gardeners who can’t help planting peppers in Maine. Squash bug-ridden cucumber obsessives. Probably somewhere is an English person bemoaning their inability to grow okra, thinking longingly of Richmond’s sauna-like summers. (Probably not.) My mother is obsessed with lavender; every year she buys one, puts it in a different spot, tweaks its growing conditions, convinces herself she’s honed in on the formula this time. It always fails to survive the winter. 

I take notes and I do research and every year I sniff my four sweet pea flowers with reverence, and then I watch them die, still covered in buds that will never bloom. And — like a lot of things — not only is it bittersweet, but it kicks off a certain level of imposter syndrome. Out there somewhere is someone who will say I grow thickets, fields, literal cornucopias of sweet peas every year. No, really, I trellised them into a giant cornucopia. No sweat. My garden is blanketed with scent every spring. I am a god of sweet peas and you just need to do X or Y, you dummy. Surely this is not an unsolvable problem. Surely, at the very least, I should just stop trying. There are so many things that thrive in my garden, that look amazing every year even without being anxiously babysat for three solid months. 

But this spring, for me, has been marked by a lot of loss. And a lot of pain. And I know I’m not the only one. I could shy away from my sweet pea obsession, which would be easier, certainly. At the very least, it wouldn’t tap into my insecurities quite so badly. But also, I dunno — if I can’t tilt at my floral windmills, if I can’t keep trying on the off chance that this is the year it works, what’s the point? 

I think, sometimes, I need to spit in the face of sense and throw caution to the wind. There’s a kind of ache in exercising my ability to fail that feels necessary, like stretching a muscle. Like it’s good for me to keep going. Keep planting. Keep failing. Because maybe, with enough time and sweat and failure, I’ll figure out how to succeed. And even if I don’t, I’ll know that at least I made an effort. I didn’t just say it can’t be done. 

I dunno, y’all. But that’s what I’m carrying with me through the end of spring. 

The DAHLIAS never give me anxiety, why can’t everyone be more like a dahlia. Stripey. Reliable. Fun at parties.

WEIRD VIBES FOR MAY

“Attack of the Killer Thumbs” aims to provide answers to your garden quandaries and your houseplant conundrums. We think plants make our lives and homes and balconies a better place to be. But we also know that you aren’t made of money. Here you will not find “recommendations” for our “favorite” ninety-dollar gadgets or “quick and easy” tutorials that will cost thousands of dollars to accomplish. We will focus, wherever we can, on solutions that are cheap, easy, and kind to the environment.  

Hello and welcome to Attack of the Killer Thumbs!

Spring is HERE, it’s QUEER, it’s unsurprised but unfailingly disappointed in the ways in which the world is going to shit… it’s me. I’m spring. Hello, my sweet plant-loving babies! How are we all? Are we feeling real weird? I know I am! And so is the weather! 

Seasonal vibe check

It’s been a weird May! Spring is taking its sweet time — nights in the forties, just when I thought it was safe to put out my tomatoes! Madness! Even so, those nearly 90-degree days are already popping up. Soon it’s going to be hot, starkly illustrating the divide between our warring tribes of indoor and outdoor gardeners. 

Whether you’re out hoeing in the sun (lol) or prefer to stay inside with a mister and the AC on, I love you all equally. Remember to love one another. Gardeners, share your tomatoes with the indoor kids! Houseplanters, harvest that aloe when the gardeners turn up lobster-pink and swear that they were definitely wearing sunscreen! Symbiosis! 

The tomato plants might have been mad about our long cool spring, but my peas are digging it.

My Dear Old English Granny™ has cast an eye at the horizon and thinks we’re in for a dry summer. This means that May is the perfect time to make sure you can spend the coming months maximizing your water usage as much as possible. Plus, it’s always good to use water thoughtfully! 

• If you haven’t yet installed your flower or vegetable beds, make sure that they are designed to retain water. Raised beds should be wide and open-bottomed, as they will dry out more slowly than closed containers. This might be a year to steer clear of lots of little potted plants, unless they get a decent amount of afternoon shade. 

• Whether you’re filling raised beds and containers, or planting directly in regular beds, go ahead and be heavy-handed with the compost. You can buy a gorgeous leaf compost at Lowe’s that won’t break the bank and that has been very kind to all my babies. (If you have your own compost, even better!) For established plants, use the compost to top-dress: just spread a solid inch all around. 

• Mulch, mulch, mulch! Mulch your beds, mulch your raised beds, mulch your potted plants! Nature abhors a vacuum, and that’s exactly what bare soil is. When you’re buying mulch, be attentive to the fact that certain products (pine, cedar) can affect the pH of the soil they’re spread on. And don’t feel like you can *only* use bagged shredded wood! You can mulch with compost, old leaves, straw, gravel (better for small pots) or even moss.

• If you don’t have a rain barrel (or don’t own your house and can’t be arsed to get your useless landlord to install one for you because he still hasn’t fixed that leak under the kitchen sink you told him about six months ago), don’t forget that you can at least harvest some rainwater when it does arrive. Get in the habit of keeping your watering can outdoors. If we’re getting a good downpour, you can always put out a bucket. Especially for you houseplant types! There are lots of sensitive houseplants who prefer rainwater if they can get it. 

• Finally, resist the urge to overwater your plants. You do not need to water your garden every single day. A thorough watering every third day is usually plenty. Overwatering encourages plants to establish wide, shallow root systems, which makes them more susceptible to drought. Letting them go without encourages those roots to dive deeper, seeking water further down in the soil. 

Responsibly mulched lettuce, all cozy and tucked in during that chilly rain we got last weekend.

The time has finally come: all your hot-weather children are ready to go outside and/or can be started now. Tomato and pepper seedlings can be transitioned into the garden; in the next few weeks, you’ll be able to start cucumbers, squash, beans, and okra directly in the ground. Just wait until the first few inches of soil are warm to the touch — remember, good gardeners finger their dirt. It’s science. 

For those of us in the flower garden, the early spring blooms are beginning to fade, and the high summer flowers are still a few weeks away. A good time to throw around a little seaweed fertilizer (according to package instructions) and show your appreciation for what is still blooming.

Don’t forget to dead-head your roses! <3 

Your quandaries, conundrums, queries, and cares

What type of groundcover won’t completely eat my yard and be a nuisance forever?

Ahh, the groundcover games. 

As I mentioned above, in reference to mulch: nature abhors a vacuum. Bare soil dries out, it fills with weeds, it turns to a strange and surprisingly powdery dust that your dog rolls in and then rubs all over your sheets… so, yeah, a lot of us have spots or spaces in our yards, containers, and raised beds that we’d like to fill in with a spreading, low-growing plant. The problem is that many of those plants are enthusiastic and fast-spreading, and can eat everything in sight if you don’t keep up with them. 

In the garden, there are lots of low-growing plants that can fill in spaces around their taller siblings. 

• Sedum is a reliable groundcover, and I’ve never had trouble with it. Just hardy enough to stay put where you want it, not so hardy that you can’t get rid of it if you want to. Just be sure to check your plant tags! There are varieties of sedum that get quite tall — not so much a groundcover as a feature plant. 

• Thyme works beautifully, puts up with drought, and you can eat it, which is a bonus!

• Robin’s Plantain is a sweet, fuzzy, native plant that spreads quickly enough to be useful but not so quickly that it’s alarming. Although the leaves stay low to the ground, it puts off surprisingly tall flowers every spring that look like tiny, almost-lavender-in-the-right-light daisies. 

These are just a few I’ve had good luck with! You can always go to a nursery and poke around in the groundcover section. Look out for terms like “self-sows readily,” “fast-growing,” or “naturalizing,” all of which can mean “becomes borderline uncontrollable once you get it in the ground.” 

It’s chive bloom season! DID YOU KNOW: the flowers are edible, and they make a great addition to bread, if you were one of those pandemic sourdough people.

Which brings me to Groundcover Part Two: The Groundening. Maybe you want to cover or fill in a bare spot in your yard. Maybe a shady spot under a tree, or that weird corner where the grass won’t grow because your dog alternates between peeing on it and running over it at top speed. 

To many of us, grass is the original groundcover, and we tend to conceive of replacements that match the aesthetic. Different grass. Better grass. Plants that grow like grass but aren’t grass. English Ivy. (Yikes.) But maintaining grass in Richmond’s climate is kind of a nightmare: the below-freezing winters, the ass-sweat-inducing summers, the torrential rains and occasional droughts are not ideal! That being the case, I think the easiest, and most satisfying, answer is to veer away from it entirely. 

In my backyard, I’ve allowed the seasonal weeds to take over. They aren’t the prettiest, but they mow just fine, and I’m rarely left with bare soil. Plus, letting chunks of your lawn go feral is good for pollinators! In areas where even the weeds won’t grow, it might be best to surrender entirely and put down mulch. If you just Want A Green Thing Dammit, you can try putting in a hardy groundcover grass (clumping liriope works well — clumping, mind you, never spreading. Check. The. Tag).

If you let your lawn go feral, you’ll also get super cool lil volunteers like this not-quite-native Ornithogalum umbellatum — which is, hilariously, also called nap-at-noon.

What I’m pondering in the garden this week:

The value of a perpetual work in progress. 

I think many of us feel an immense amount of pressure toward “completion.” A day where we finally have all our boxes checked, our projects concluded, our socks matched and our fridges organized, our pets well behaved and photogenic. On that day, we will flood Instagram with evidence of our triumphs and invite all our mothers over for tea, confident that our flaws are well hidden and the inevitable messes of progress have been swept under a (well-vacuumed) rug. 

May can feel like a race toward an imagined finish line years after the concept of a “summer vacation” has faded into the rearview. Summer is right around the corner, and it’s going to be the best ever, right? Right!?!? There is a sense that it is time, it is past time, time is running through and over us with the inevitability of mosquito bites and underboob sweat and everything has to be done now, now, NOW— 

Gardens, though, defy the very concept of completion. There is always something to be moved, divided, pruned, or pulled; always a sense of what could be done differently next year; always a grapple with this season being a little different from the last, just when you thought you had it all in hand. 

My garden is a reflection of myself: chaotic, unpredictable, messy at the edges. A sprawling rosemary dominates an otherwise delicate bed like a fat and happy bear. Mint has invaded the rose beds. Trumpet vine — well, all I’ll say is, don’t plant trumpet vine. Nothing is picture-perfect. It’s hardly photographable at all; it defies attempts to coalesce into a pleasing frame from any distance. It wasn’t built that way, because that’s not how I experience it. Streaks of color interrupt lines of foliage. An untidy fence line always seems to make itself visible. It’s meant to be lived in, day by day, change the only constant. The only finished garden is a dead one, robbed forever of the chance to make itself anew, in the way of all growing things. 

I take a great joy in that. When completion — perfection — is unattainable, all that is left is process. There is no such thing as too late, because there is no “late” in the garden, only an early start on the next cycle, the next season, the next spring. To garden is to look forward, in perpetuity. And I can think of nothing better. 

HELLO FROM THE GARDEN

“Attack of the Killer Thumbs” aims to provide answers to your garden quandaries and your houseplant conundrums. We think plants make our lives and homes and balconies a better place to be. But we also know that you aren’t made of money. Here you will not find recommendations for our “favorite” sixty-dollar gadgets or “quick and easy” tutorials that will cost thousands of dollars to accomplish. We will focus, wherever we can, on solutions that are cheap, easy, and kind to the environment.  

Hello and welcome to Attack of the Killer Thumbs!

Spring has sprung, babes. The (second) long pandemic winter is over, and (still allowing for social distancing!) it is time to get outside and marinate our bodies in pure sunshine. For some of us, that means canned beverages at Pipeline. Maybe moving our Instagram scrolling from the couch to the front stoop. For others, the smell of freshly mown grass and the arrival of those daffodils you forgot you planted can mean only one thing: GARDEN TIME, BAY-BEE.

I am affectionately referring to these as the “Blood-Spatter Tulips.”

Seasonal Vibe Check

It is April. As the cutesy rhyme indicates, the month is traditionally supposed to provide “showers” which, in turn, bring about “flowers.” This year, though, has been on the dry side. If you have a garden, or potted plants outdoors, check and see if your spring bloomers are getting enough water — letting them dry out too much could keep them from flowering to their full potential. 

4/20 is an excuse to indulge in one kind of weed and to do everything you can to combat another. Roll a joint, wander out into the garden, and pull up any clover, violets, dead nettles or other spring weeds that are trying to colonize your flower or vegetable beds. (Pro tip: chickens LOVE clover, dead nettle and chickweed. Violet flowers can be harvested and used to make syrups or jellies. Just make sure your dog hasn’t peed on them first.) 

A word to the wise, as April bleeds into May: certain Big Box Hardware Stores have been trying to sell you tomato and pepper seedlings since, like, March. Do not buy them! Spring in Virginia is fickle enough to be meme-worthy, and hot weather crops need warm days and nights *above* fifty degrees. Stay strong. My rule? Tomatoes and peppers don’t go in the ground until Mother’s Day. 

If you absolutely must buy that tomato seedling, keep it sheltered overnight for a few more weeks. You can always transfer it into a larger pot (“potting up”) and bring it inside overnight until the proper warm weather comes. 

Your Quandaries, Conundrums, Queries and Cares:

Can fresh seedlings handle sunlight? I’m afraid they’ll get burned.

That is a valid fear! It can be scary, transitioning seedlings outdoors. You’ve been nurturing them for weeks, watching them sprout, taking excessive pictures of their first true leaves, scrapbooking about their growth rate… no? That’s just me? 

Moving baby plants into the garden is a big environmental shift: temperature, sunlight, and strong winds can be a real shock to them. They can be burned by sudden exposure to full sunlight, and they can suffer from sudden exposure to heat or cold. But there is a solution. The process is called “hardening off,” and is accomplished in stages, so your chlorophyllic children can adjust to Life on the Outside. 

First, find a spot that gets morning sunlight and afternoon shade. Place your seedlings in a tray or on a sheet pan, for easy transportation, and put them out as soon as you wake up on a warm day. Make sure they’ve been recently watered so they don’t wilt. 

Second, if the overnight temperatures are still colder than the interior of your house has been, bring the tray inside at dusk and place it back outside in the morning. Alternately, you can buy or rig up a miniature greenhouse to protect them. My tomato seedlings have been happily coasting in my tiny greenhouse ($40, available online) since early April with no signs of stress. 

My v. cheap porch greenhouse, keeping it toasty.

Finally, increase their exposure to sunlight by a few hours a day over the course of a few days. You can do this by putting the strays in increasingly sunny areas and then putting them back in a sheltered area at night. 

Once they’ve been outdoors for ten to fourteen days, they’ll be ready to go in the garden. Remember to transplant on an overcast day or just before dusk, so they’ll have a period of darkness to adjust before being exposed to a full day of sunlight. And water them thoroughly when they go in! 

*Note: Plants that you purchase from a nursery should be hardened off already. That being said, make a point of noting the conditions the plant was kept in when you bought it. Was it in partial shade? Full sun? If it was being kept covered, or indoors, you might want to give it an accelerated version of the process — over just a few days — before putting it in the ground.  

How do I eradicate ivy (English, poison) from my yard forever?

Gasoline. 

Just kidding. 

Kind of. 

Okay, no, seriously, don’t pour gasoline in your yard. It’s terrible for the environment and hell on the water table, and living in a city where everything rolls downhill into the river, I try to discourage people from even using herbicides. 

And herbicides are the answer you’re looking for, if you want a one-and-done solution that will remove ivy from your life forever. These plants spread by the root. If you try pulling them up by the stem, any piece of root left behind will turn into a new plant and pop out of the soil when you’re least expecting it, like a leafy chest-burster. 

If you’re willing to put in some extra effort to avoid using chemicals, the answer is to dig deep. Grab a shovel and dig up the entire area where the ivy is. English ivy roots only go about six inches deep in the soil: poison ivy roots can go as deep as twelve inches. Working in a grid pattern, loosen the soil of the whole area, and then (wearing gloves!!!) go through and pull out any piece of root you can find. Rake the soil when you’re finished to see if you’ve missed anything. Keep an eye on it for the following year and pull up any starts you see re-emerging. 

In a general sense, when dealing with invasives like this, it’s good to look at your yard and think of ways that you can rearrange or revise your layout to make maintenance easier. Maybe having a bunch of patio furniture right up against your fence line seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it’s getting eaten by weeds. Instead of trying to kill the weeds with chemicals, you can try to work in a “weed-whacking allowance” between the fence line and the furniture. Whack them down hard when you mow your lawn, so they don’t get a chance to come up. Or put down some pavers to squash them before they can sprout. 

It’s important to try and work with nature, instead of against it. Defying nature never works. Jack London wrote a ton of books on the subject, and a lot of them ended with people getting eaten by wolves. 

What I’m pondering in the garden this week:

This spring, I installed a single Aconitum in my garden — commonly known as Monkshood, or sometimes Wolf’s bane. This is either the coolest or most idiotic plant purchase I’ve ever made, because if you have heard of this plant, it was probably in the context of its most famous use: poisoning the shit out of people.

Aconitum carmichaelii — my varietal is called ‘Arendsii’ — is a gorgeous plant. It puts off these elegant, spidery blue-white-purple flowers in late spring and has glossy, spiky, dark-green foliage. That you cannot touch the plant without wearing gloves just keeps things spicy, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a little experiment, every time I go in the garden. Am I enough of an adult to subdue the dumb toddler in my brain who wants to touch the thing as soon as she is told not to touch the thing? So far the answer, surprisingly, is yes!

I didn’t buy the Monkshood because I’m a weirdo who fantasizes about poisoning her enemies. Well. I didn’t just buy the Monkshood because I’m a weirdo who fantasizes about poisoning her enemies. I bought it because it reminds me how much — and how little — humans have changed over the centuries.

We can’t resist beautiful things, even when they are dangerous. Think of the Victorians and their arsenic-riddled wallpaper. The number of times you forgave that particularly hot ex. The allure of precious gems and rare flowers we know we can’t afford and can’t take care of. We have kept Monkshood in cultivation for a thousand years because it charms the eye and can be used to get rid of unwanted dinner guests, even though having it at all is inherently risky. And I think that’s delightful, because at the end of the day, humans are very strange animals.