The Seedy Time of Winter

This was the week in which we collect the eight seed catalogs from which we commonly order. there are others that are backups, when something is out of stock or there’s a crop failure and the original order of that particular vegetable or flower cannot be fulfilled. We divided them into two piles and each do the order form one of our four for each veggie. We start with beans and end with tomatoes. The few flowers we mail order are my responsibility – several types of marigolds, calendula, cosmos. If we need more, we’ll buy plants. Then yesterday in the morning, Woody did the annual shed inventories. We have three sheds, the old shed, the shed by the main garden and the new shed. Woody’s method for storing things [unfortunately also applicable to the walk-in closet] is to open the door and threw whatever he is disposing of and then shut the door quickly and hard. So the reckoning comes and the sheds must be straightened, as by this point, no one can even walk into any of them. When they’re like that, I refuse even to open the door. But the time has come to check a list I compile and give him listing the garden supplies we need from row covers to sphagnum moss. Then I finish the eight original seed orders with whatever items they may carry that Woody tells me we’re low on. Then the orders have to emerge as reasonable lists. Off they go. The longest order is always, always from Fedco, an organic cooperative in Maine, which has the cheapest prices, not on glossy paper and no photographs, but honest appraisal of each item. I’m fond of them and one year, they printed a bunch of my garden poems in that catalogue. It’s about a month since we did any garden work and we are subject to delusions of grandeur for next spring and summer’s gardens. We imagine ourselves accomplishing far more than we possibly can. I always order too much. Except for Fedco, most catalogues are gardeners’ pornography. They make impossible promises of fecundity, great production and no problems with insects, diseases or weather, while the pictures feature perfect come hither specimens. I always get suckered into something silly. Last spring I succumbed to three artichoke plants. Artichokes on Cape Cod? How about palm trees? But two of them I managed to keep alive and they are actually rather pretty foliage plants. They’re growing in the bay window. I have realized there will never be fruit, but the foliage is attractive. Willow likes to sit in the pot with one of them – the bigger pot. I haven’t written but one poem this week, a haibun I sent out today. The seed orders were more seductive than my computer. But tomorrow I will get back to work. We had our first snow this week although it went away by the next day. Only a shallow coating in deep shade. The last two days were sunny and mild. Woody and I walked by the harbor, around the pier and it was gorgeous, clear to the horizon with many ducks gliding in flotillas all through the harbor. Almost all the boats are out of the water except a few hard working fishing boats. But there is a small grey shingled house sitting on a barge on the pier – we speculated about it. Somebody making a houseboat out of a regular house? Somebody floating a house to town when the rising sea rendered it in danger? More than a century and a half ago, many of what are now the oldest houses in town center were floated across Wellfleet Bay from Billingsgate when it began to go under water. A house sitting on a barge on the pier has aroused my curiosity.