My Sentient Winter Garden

They’re waiting for me out there!

When the skies go gray and threatening, temperatures plummet, and scary politics all conspire to keep me under my warm blankie all day, my garden never ceases screaming at me to get out there and prepare for winter!

Screams. Those green guys out there are sentient, albeit probably freezing to death, and right now most of them are in a blue funk because –– incapacitated by the election –– I have been ignoring them for a while now.

“Plants are not sentient,” you’re probably thinking. But that’s where you’re wrong, and I hope to prove it to you, or at least give you a reason to consider this possibility the next time you plant something.

Today is November 9th and it’s really cold out there, especially at night, when the temperatures are dropping to freezing. Mind you, we’re in the Pacific Northwest, so “cold” is a relative term, but freezing is freezing, wherever you are, and nasturtiums wilt and crumble in a tangled, dying heap of stems and seeds when it’s this chilly.

So, I’m not talking about annuals here. They don’t scream. They’re content to wither and die when winter comes and I let them compost back down into the earth, giving back everything they needed during the warm season.

But everybody else out there has needs and they make demands. If I don’t give them what they want, they scream in my dreams and I get no sleep whatsoever.

Broccoli. My favorite babies. How I love broccoli! I had never attempted to grow it prior to this year because “everybody” says it’s just too hard, and I believed them for decades. But last spring, in a panic about the potential coronavirus disruption to the supply chain –– especially for food –– I planted everything I could think of to make sure we would have plenty to eat for the year, and maybe enough to share with neighbors and food banks too.

Broccoli is easy. A little dab of Safer insecticidal soap and a sprinkling of food-grade diatomaceous earth every week or so has kept all the worms, slugs, bugs and other thugs away for the entire season. Summer, of course, is not the broccoli’s favorite season, but my little patch produced valiantly and prodigiously. And then, when the weather cooled, it exploded. Only six plants have been keeping us in delicious greens for months now, and still going strong.

Why? Because they love me. They know the only reason they exist in the first place is to fill our dinner plates with organic goodness. And because I love them. Every time I take a cutting, I caress each plant and tell it how beautiful it is and how grateful I am for its generous gifts. If I received attention like that, I’d have flowers sprouting out of every pore!

Raspberries. There is no life without raspberries and they darn well know this. Raspberries are rambunctious and not well-behaved, but with discipline and sweet-talk they produce baskets of sweet, tangy fruits all summer long. In the fall, I sometimes wish I had a flame-thrower to push them back inside their boundaries, and they know this, continuing to offer me surprise gifts for gently thinning out the old canes and adding fresh compost to their bed. Today I stopped to assess my remaining raspberry workload only to discover three perfectly ripe berries as a peace offering. How do they know? I thanked them and promised to finish their winterizing as soon as possible.

Beans. How would it be possible to survive winter without steaming pots of chili, or Tuscan beans, or black beans for enchiladas? All the beans have been harvested now, shelled, and stored. But the vines now need to be unwound from their trellises and composted. They cannot sleep until I put them to bed. Today, to prove this, there was a solitary bean pod, ripe to bursting, waiting for me to collect it and add the contents to the bulging sacks of beans already stashed in the cool garage. They’re tired, though, and it was a struggle for them to make that one last pod, just to please me, and to let me know that even in their old age they were still putting out. I picked that last pod, thanked the vines, told them how heroic they had been all season, and let them sleep now, uprooted and in peace.

I could go on. With more than 40 planting beds out there, I have had a lot of enjoyable companions during our COVID sequestration. They give so many gifts and ask so little in return.

I learned many lessons in my travels to other cultures, especially Bali and Costa Rica, about being grateful. In Bali, for example, every household and every business and every street corner sports a mini-temple for offerings to the gods. All gods. And several times each day every citizen makes an offering––a flower, some rice, a pretty ribbon––for no other reason than to express their gratitude for a bountiful life.

My garden holds all my gods, who love me, feed me, surprise me, and respond so beautifully to the gratitude I shower on them. They blossom and I blossom. It’s a perfect love.

Adelia Ritchie, 2020

Here’s the rest of the story!