Growth

I was coming back from walking the dog when the truck pulled into the alley along my fence. The rig was much bigger than I’d anticipated. 

“Do I really have to take all of it?” 

The driver shrugged. “Sorry, yeah, we don’t split it up.” 

“Whew okay. Well. Pull as close to the fence as you can, please? I’m going to take the dog inside. Thank you, I guess?”

He shrugged again and climbed back into the cab of the truck. I went into the house and hoped I had not made a huge mistake. When I heard the truck drive away, I went out and looked at the enormous pile of chip mulch in the alley. It was what, 25 yards? 30? More? It ran the full length of my fence and blocked half the alley. My neighbors came out and stared. 

The service is called Chip Drop. You sign up for a load of chip mulch and the service matches you with landscapers or tree services or whoever grinds up huge tree limbs and garden scraps into the stuff I got. Instead of paying to unload it at the dump, the tree services unload it on you, the not entirely unsuspecting gardener. It’s free but the terms are clear. You don’t get to know when it’s coming and you don’t know how big the truck will be. Oh, and you gotta take it all. 

“I’m going to have to move all this by Tuesday, that’s garbage day,” I said to the mulch. “The truck won’t be able to get through the alley.” 

“That’s a lot of mulch,” said one of my neighbors. 

It was Friday. The neighbors looked at me and the giant pile of mulch and back at me and shook their heads. One of them laughed, the kind of laugh you give someone when they clearly don’t know what they’ve got themselves into. They dispersed. I stood there for a long time. Then I came to my senses, picked up the phone, and hired a couple of day laborers. It took them about five hours to completely cover my entire front yard in four to six inches of chip mulch. I gave them both a nice lunch— which they did not touch until they were done—and tipped them generously. I’m not sure when I’ve been so grateful to be in a place where I could just hire someone to help to fix a problem. 

You are supposed to put cardboard down before you cover your yard with mulch like this, but I had not prepared. In some places, it’s called the lasagne method, this business of laying down cardboard and covering it with mulch. The cardboard smothers the growth underneath, the mulch holds the cardboard down and, over time, everything—including the cardboard—decays into rich dark soil. I had so much mulch, I figured even without the cardboard, I’d kill off nearly everything underneath. I was mostly right. 

The mulch sat on my front yard all through the winter rains and into spring. In April, I picked up a bunch of plants from the local conservation district plant sale. I walked out front with a shovel and held my breath while I punched the point of the shovel into the ground. There was the tiniest bit of resistance and then, the formerly rock-hard soil just gave way. I turned out a spade full of rich dark soil, full of earthworms. The lawn was gone. 

The garden at my house had been such a point of contention with my now ex-husband. He objected on what felt like almost religious grounds to this particular technique. It wasn’t just the lasagne method that offended him, though, most of my attempts to garden were… let’s say they were not supported. One winter while he was away for many months, I spent a few minutes every day digging out the dandelions from the back lawn and replacing them with crocuses. He returned in spring, saw the little yellow and orange blooms, and said they would interfere with mowing the lawn. 

“I did it purely to annoy you,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. It was not nice to be snarky, but I was angry that he saw my flowers as an inconvenience. 

The back lawn is now a third smaller than it was when I moved here. I have been expanding my vegetable garden east and lasagne-ing around raised beds. There are lilies and a heavenly bamboo, but the remaining part of what was lawn is now either wood chips or raised beds. I have mowed this smaller back lawn only twice this spring, once in late April, and once the first week in May. The crocuses were finished and the lawn was easily 12 inches deep in places. I love the grass when it’s tall like that. I like watching my small dog navigate it like he’s on an adventure, I like seeing the little deer tracks he leaves as he walks his rounds. It’s a pain to mow when it’s that tall, but I let it go for as long as possible because it pleases me to see it blowing in the breeze, like a tiny backyard prairie. 

I tried this lasagne business out front the season before the chip mulch. I covered a narrow strip along the front walk in cardboard and compost. When spring came, I planted lavender, four different kinds. The plants have been happily expanding ever since. Over the winter, I buried daffodils between the lavender, they bloomed like so many bright yellow suns in early spring. I had so many of them, I would cut them and put them in a vase on my kitchen table, enjoying their buttery scent until they started to turn brown. Much of the front yard had been colonized by poppies, blown in on the wind. They died off over winter, but they returned very early, just in time to replace the yellow of the daffodils with bright orange flowers. To fill in the empty spaces, I scattered two bags of wildflower mix, one for bees, one for birds, and when I was tucking compost around one of the rhododendron starts, I found a tiny nasturtium. 

I gave the seedling its own blanket of compost and wandered around to see what else had decided it was going to live where my lawn once was. When I bought tomato plants, late this year because it has been a cold, wet spring, I also bought zucchini starts. It occurred to me I could just put them in an empty spot out front where they would get plenty of daylight and their broad leaves would steal the sun from the nearest dandelions. I put in fennel and sage, and I think I will plant some eggplant too because why can’t my former front lawn be the extension of my vegetable garden?

I had for so long thought that I did not have the skill or knowledge to garden. I had been hamstrung by the false impression that having a garden required planning and order rather than experimentation and time. Certainly, planning and order will yield one kind of garden, but it is not the only option. If there is good soil and water and the plants are the kind of plants who want to be here so badly they just show up, well, who am I to tell the poppies and the columbine they can not stay? They ask so little of me. 

The yard is chaotic, there is no denying it. In some places, the grass has come back, leggy and tenacious. The returning dandelions have long deep roots and when I try to pull them, they often break like a lizard releasing its tail so it can keep its life. I have an invasion of these adorable brown bunnies; they rudely decimated my currant plants last spring. This year I replanted and put bunny-proof baskets around them—and around the fennel when I discovered that apparently, bunnies like fennel. I war with the bunnies and the dandelions and the tall grass that I try to pull out without disrupting the things I want to keep. I put things in the ground and I pull things out and I see what takes. 

It is a beautiful mess. I walk through it often. This afternoon, I lost count of the honey bees in the lavender, and then I followed a fat bumblebee as he stuck his head in and out of the poppies. He squeezed his round fuzzy body into the tightly curled petals of the newer blooms, diving inside to collect the pollen he’d bring back to the hive.