The Garden

I had just about zero energy, but as I said, I was falling in love with my condo. It has a bit of land that I can use for myself. It's not huge, but it's still something. Somewhere along the way, I got a membership in a gardening book club, and began studying organic gardening. I learned about compost, mulch, soil additives and what to plant where. I was like many a young Lesbian, thinking it would be great to grow my own food. I started with herbs like lavender and thyme. My basil didn't go very well at all, as I'm on the north side of the condo complex. But I kept at it. As I'd run low on money, I started with seeds. The seed catalogs were mesmerizing. I ordered a bunch that looked promising. I'd hover over the seed trays, spritz them with water, move them around in the empty room upstairs to catch the sun. I thought I could grow begonias from seed. Hah. Tiny little things that bore no resemblance to the lush illustrations in the seed catalogs. Ah well. Live and learn.

I learned that seaweed is a great soil additive, with natural growth hormones, great water retention properties (very important in my little Cape Cod patch of sand) and an all-around good mulch. The lilies I planted loved it. Like the Herring Cove pebbles, seaweed from the East End Flats is free, so I'd don my sturdiest boots and scramble over the rip rap with a plastic garbage bag and load it carefully into my new car to bring home. My neighbors got used to the sight of me lurking in the garden at all hours with the hose trained on my new babies. Babies? Hmm.

One investment I made was in a kwanzan cherry tree, maybe five or six feet tall and slender, with a few branches. I love their fluffy, pink blossoms in the spring. I planted it myself. It's one of the great successes in my garden, now three stories tall, glorious in May. One year, I heard a strange chattering sound out my window, so I went upstairs to look. I opened the blinds and was shocked to find a female raccoon swaying in the breeze at the top of the cherry tree, pursued by not one but four males. She looked concerned. I didn't now what to do about it, so I closed the blinds and left them to it.