Dreaming of a Black Christmas

By Bess Taylor

 

 

 

Dear Santa: Please save the sugarplums for the other good little girls and boys. The visions I have dancing in my head are of the sort only a gardener would love. All I want is dirt, and lots of it. Not just any dirt, either- Please bring me nice, rich black dirt; fertile soil, well-rotted leaf mould, moist peat moss, aged manure, earth-happy compost. I want dirt that looks like devil’s food cake with a healthy sprinkling of kindly earthworms. A couple of sleigh-loads would be perfect. Just dump them in my back yard and I’ll do the rest. Thank you.

 

In the fall my husband and I decided it was time to cut back on the amount of lawn we had to take care of. It was easy to say goodbye to the tatty grass we had right smack in the middle of our back yard between the two long, established, perennial flower beds. Last summer’s drought had left it a patchy, uninteresting expanse hardly worth the mowing.

 

Our replacement plan consisted of four slightly raised beds with four paths between them, meeting in the middle. We tacked down weed barrier, made lined wooden walls for the beds, poured around thirty bags of pea-gravel on the paths (P.S. to Santa: we could use at least again as much of that, too) and edged the sides to keep the gravel from spilling into the grass. It was a lot of work, but it was exciting to be developing another dimension to the garden.

 

At an autumn yard sale we picked up a pretty set of patio chairs and a table. We hadn’t planned on having anything at the crossroads of the new paths, but the area looked like it needed a focal point, so on a whim we put them there and they jazzed the place up considerably. Now you can’t walk straight through the center, but at least you’ll have a place to sit when you get there.

 

So now we have table, chairs, pea-gravel paths and four raised garden beds of …nothing! My next mission is finding enough good soil to fill them with so that they will make a nice home for the annual flowers and vegetables I’d like to plant there in the spring. I have ransacked our compost pile and carried wheelbarrows-full to each bed, but that barely covered the bottoms. My mother let me have a trunk-full of well-rotted leaf mould from her yard, and that made a nice low layer, but is not nearly enough yet. Each of the beds is only four by eight feet and six inches deep, but the dirt just seems to disappear into them as if they were vast, bottomless pits.

 

Some dream of a white Christmas, and I have nothing against snow. I think it’s absolutely lovely and absolutely necessary. But we don’t often have white Christmases here, as the Virginia ground in December is usually not frozen enough to make snow stick even if it does fall. January is more likely to have a measurable amount and February is even more likely to have snow accumulation, just when all the daffodil fronds are coming up.

 

 I like digging snow, but then I am a digging sort of person. Digging is an exercise in instant gratification. When I dig out our front walkway I feel like I’ve accomplished something of value. And if I can do it without pulling my back, all the better. Then I can go in and get a mug of something hot and look out at my work and say “Ha! I did it. ” To hold the handle of a shovel is to have a handle on the world.

 

Digging in the earth is much better than in the snow, especially when you’re preparing to plant something that will live and grow and produce something beautiful or edible or both. To dig is to have hope for abundance to come. Amending the soil with beautiful black compost is like furnishing your child’s bedroom with the most wonderful, enriching things you can find. Like people, plants flourish when they have a healthy start.

 

Winter is upon us, but as the green retreats the foundation for all that a gardener loves is revealed in the bare earth itself. Without dirt there would be no trees, fruits, vegetables or flowers to delight and sustain us. The yuletide may not be white, but it is a good time to think about what we can give back to the earth, knowing full well her habit of returning the favor next growing season.

 

 

©2007 Bess Taylor