Gardening When Wet

I was writing in my head on Friday, while I was in my garden, and doing pretty well, so I thought I’d better start getting it down before all those words disappeared.  

As anyone who lived in the Pacific Northwest knows, we have had a wet and cold Spring, what feels like an extension of winter.  The Jet Stream chose to give us a mild winter, no snow to speak of, temperatures mostly in the forties, but the Jet Stream seems also to have chosen to continue it’s influences on our Spring, which has seen more rainy days in a row than I can ever remember at this time of year and temperatures in the 50s during the day and often down to the 30s at night.  In my memory, which admittedly is viewed through rose-colored glasses, May was a month that could often be described as summery.  My son was born in May of 1977 and I distinctly remember his tiny little body in only a diaper and a t-shirt because it was so warm.

But this year, our warm Spring days could probably be counted on one hand.  I have found myself on so many days standing at the window, staring out at the wet patio, the dripping apple trees, the wet soil in my new raised beds.  At the beginning of April I planted lettuce and beet seeds.  They germinated pretty quickly and I was excited by the 1/4 inch tall seedlings.  But then the weather changed back to seriously cold at night, in the 30s, and my little seedlings stopped growing.  A few weeks later, I planted more lettuce and beet seeds.  Only a few of them sprouted.  Two weeks ago I did a third planting.  No little seedling has dared to show it’s face yet--those tiny seeds are obviously shivering below the surface of the soil, afraid to pop their heads out for fear of freezing or being drowned by giant drops of rain--glub, glub. The first seedlings have now shriveled, totally giving up and who can blame them?  

Friday I had had it with the rain.  I had considered drowning (you see how much I am thinking of copious amounts of liquid?) my sorrows in margaritas but I thought I’d try a more positive approach and try rain drowning first.  So I put on my blue and black raincoat, the hooded one everyone in the Northwest owns that we all bought at the big warehouse store, and I put on what I think of as my clonker shoes, big, ugly navy blue ones that I bought through the catalog from the store with the letters and the legume name and I got my nitrile gardening gloves and my 5-gallon white bucket and I went out the door into the rain, shaking my fist at the sky:  “You won’t win”, I yelled at the black clouds.  “I will  not be stopped!”

While I was staring out my windows one of the plants in my garden that had caught my ambitious attention was a large white rhododendron that had flowered profusely at the beginning of the month.  The blossoms had been huge, luminescent, attracting bees, proving why we gardeners plant rhody’s here in the Northwest.  But after days of rain the blooms were dragging on the ground, had become brown and slimy, the weight of the rain on the spent blooms threatening to break the skinny limbs.  This would be the target of my rebellion against the constant rain.

Dead-heading a rhododendron is not my favorite garden chore.  The old flowers stamens are sticky, they are hard to grasp with gloved fingers and even harder to be precise with the removal of the entire flower clump.  I usually use surgical gloves because this kind of work requires care, but Friday the rain was cold and I wanted my hands to stay warm while I rebelled against the unseasonable wet. 

I grasped and broke off the dead heads, throwing them in my bucket, while my increasingly wet hood slid down over my face, blocking my view of the bush.  I pushed into the shrub to get at those old flowers that had hidden inside it, in the process drenching my jacket and my pants with the rain the leaves had been collecting.  My clonkers were getting soaked, my nose was cold, my hair, that I had carefully blown dry earlier, never expecting that I would be leaving the house for any reason, had turned limp, my back was aching, not used to this level of gardening yet.  But I looked up at the sky and cursed again, and kept at it, dead head after dead head.  

I heard no dogs barking, no neighbors calling to each other, not a car or UPS truck, no birds singing--it was deadly quiet except for the sound of the rain on the cobblestones and the rhododendrons.  Just as I was deciding that not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, except for crazed me, I heard the distinctive calls of the raven couple who nest near our yard and every day take a cruise over their “territory”.  A big raven, maybe male, flew overhead followed noisily by either a female or a juvenile learning to fly, grocking and complaining.  Another small raven brought  up the rear, equally loudly.  I wasn’t alone after all, in my desire to be doing something productive despite the weather.  I felt a little better to know that I had company.

I forged on, almost done, then finding one more spent bloom, slimy with wet, under a dripping leaf, then one more and one more, until finally I was done, my bucket 3/4 full.  I was able to stand back and be happy about what I had accomplished.  I stood dripping from head to toe, not nearly as glorious looking as the rhododendron bush, which, as soaking wet as me, was now clean and lovely, her dark green gown glistening with pearls of rain. Standing next to her was another rhody just now beginning to bloom, which in a week or two would begin shedding its flowers and making a mess, probably a soggy one if the trend continued.  But for now, all was well, all was serene, the rain was not my enemy anymore, but a benevolent entity bathing my garden, nourishing and gentle. Me and the rain, the only ones besides the ravens, both triumphant.....and wet.