Chlorophyll - definitely not bore-ophyll

Adam Sandler may be a funny guy from the great state of New Hampshire - but I must say that he got it totally wrong in the high school biology class scene in the movie Billy Madison.

Chlorophyll is cool!

I have been neglecting photo-posting lately, an error that I will begin to fix today. Looking through photos taken on July 31, I came to the above realization - call it an "epiphany of botanical revelation."



It's simply amazing. Go away for two weeks in the summer and, provided that your garden doesn't suffer a searing drought, brush fire, plague of locusts or golfball-sized hail, you will return to find a jungle. A lush, green profusion of plant life and all because of a funky little molecule called chlorophyll.

Our raised beds are on either side of the driveway and receive an abundance of sunlight. Our green plants utilize the chlorophyll in their leaves to capture the sun's energy and convert it into sugars to make more plant matter. For several weeks in mid-summer, it's a positive feedback loop - make bigger leaves to catch more sunlight to make bigger leaves. (Note the size of the butternut squash leaves!) However, some of the energy ends up elsewhere, directed to flowering and setting fruit, which makes the wonderful vegetables that make gardening so rewarding. And it's all thanks to chlorophyll.



The butternut squash completely overwhelmed the upper raised bed on the far side of the driveway (in the first photo), but the acorn squash vines were more orderly and stretched out in lovely straight lines across the grass (in the back of the second photo.) The garden looks remarkably different today, but the photos from August will have to wait until another day...

Bonus quiz for the General Botany club - if I had planted corn in my garden, would it photosynthesize more efficiently, less efficiently, or with the same efficiency as the other plants shown in the photos? Leave your answer below.

First, select a sunny spot...

I'm pretty sure that I've checked out every book on gardening from the Lebanon library (except the ones from the 1970s with the garish photos on the cover because I never want a garden that looks like a psychedelic tropical jungle hemmed in by brick work.) You think I would have taken the authors' cumulative advice to heart on how to establish a garden, but I managed to ignore all of it and to pick the worst sites for vegetables last year. Too dark, terrible soil, and I reaped a very poor harvest accordingly. Very sad but of course COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE!

Had I heeded the advice of Chapter One of every gardening book, I would have picked the sunniest spot for my garden, but the only sunny spot is in the front yard and on top of our septic leach field. Roadblock #1. But this spring we had a big frankenpine taken down and amazingly, our yard near the driveway now gets sunlight - yay! Roadblock circumvented.

Adam built several raised garden beds out of Douglas fir planks and these cool metal corner brackets, which he filled with a mixture of aged manure and loam. I'm using a modified version of Mel Bartholomew's square-foot gardening method, what I like to call the "yeah, that's probably about a foot" gardening method. I don't own a 12-inch ruler and didn't want to get dirt in the tape measure, so I just eyeballed it. Which is why some of the tomatoes are a little more tightly bunched at one end of the bed.



So now I've got my vegetables in the right spot so let's see how this season goes! The weather has been surprisingly warm and the plants are loving it.

Gardening Season Begins?

Gardening season does not have a start date. If you are a gardener, whether you live in the tropics or the Arctic, you garden all year long. Gardening season is a state of mind, not two days X'ed out on the kitchen calendar.

True, there may be that first day when you can see the chives poking out of the residual snow and ice, and immediately you crouch down and brushing away the ice and dead leaves. The green spikes and their sharp oniony tang is a wake-up call to that part of you that went dormant during the winter.

But that day is in sometime in the beginning of April - I can't remember exactly - because New Hampshire is still in the throes of mud season. This "fifth" season is aptly named because it is essentially a 6-week-long mud wrestling match between winter and spring. Not pretty to behold, potentially damaging, and really, what's the use of it? The only benefit I can see that mud season provides is that the weather is so inhospitable that it offers plenty of time for a gardener to start seeds and, more importantly, start dreaming in full, bright Technicolor about what the garden will look like in a few months.

Gardening journals tell you to wait to play in your garden until the ground is dry enough to work... to me, that shows the true impatience of gardeners in spring. We just can't wait to put all of our new garden ideas into the ground and see what sprouts. This urge is especially irresistible when the daytime high gets above 50 degrees and there's a beautiful yellow sun in a clear blue sky. The first week that the local garden and farm stand opened, I was there to buy pansies. So what if the temperature was supposed to be below 20 degrees every night for the next week? (Not that the pansy plants would die, but the blooming flowers wouldn't survive heavy frosts.)

I did hold off on planting those pansies for another two weeks, partly because I was so overwhelmed with the urge to buy and plant flowers that I hadn't even decided where I would put these eight tiny specimens of "Sorbet Mix" pansies. The other part was that last fall, I decided that raking up leaves was not worth the effort; this spring, I decided that was a bad decision. For the first 2 weeks in April, I raked leaves. Instead of planting peas and pansies, I raked the front lawn. Instead of digging new vegetable beds, I raked the leaves from the granite steps leading toward the planned vegetable bed site. Never again will I put off all the raking until the spring, because it might be summer by the time I get done with the raking this year.

This past weekend, I did manage to pull myself away from the rake and actually do some planting and digging. I've got big plans for this year, the second summer in our first home. We were fortunate enough to move into a wonderful bungalow with a completely neglected yard - not exactly a tabula rasa, but there's something so satisfying about tearing out the sparse lawn, culling the overgrown daylily population, and harshly pruning trees and shrubs.

Here's a brief summary of how the gardens look in my mind. In front of the house, there are peas growing up strings in between the foundation plantings (little Spiraea and Potentilla shrubs that we planted last spring). Between the house and the driveway, where Adam dug up the lawn for a vegetable garden last year, we'll have a annual/perennial flower garden with some salad greens thrown in there. New vegetable gardens are in the process of being dug up the hill next to the garage; the hillside leading up there will be part rock garden, part herb garden, part "anything-to-stabilize-this-slope." The shade garden on the other side of the house will get some plants other than comfrey and myrtle, and the lilac hedge will be thoroughly groomed. And I'll put in an asparagus bed... and I'll clear out all the wild blackberry canes... and I won't spend all of the free time in the garden. (Did I mention that I'm an optimist when it comes to gardening?)

This vision is the culmination of many months of planning, research, and daydreaming, and this process is at least as important if not more important that the actual planting. The year-round gardening that I do in my mind is not as strenuous as the digging, weeding, and planting I do from April through September, but it's a critical part of the gardening season.

(Sorry! I ran out of daylight before I could take any photos - check back soon for garden photos.)