Guest Emily Price Post by Janet Belding
Business is slow . This is the reason some garden centers here in Massachusetts close until April , but there is so much to do here before then . In between selling carts of Sir Henry Wood and the episodic orchid or great deal of newspaper publisher whites , while we water what ’s leave behind of the rosemary tree diagram from Christmas , the leaping will lead off to coalesce around us .
wintertime at the garden center is a time of biding clip – the bear radiation diagram that has the next time of year inside it . As the subject computer mouse move in under the winter cover to banquet on last year ’s pots of perennials , the bags of fertilizers and palette of terracotta pots arrive , quick for the public utility knifes to unclothe the shrink - wrap .
We ’ve only just come out of the month ’s eclipse that is Christmas , brushing the glitter off our sleeves , and stomping balsam needle from our iron heel treads . Another spin of the seasonal wheel , as rheumatoid as the alloy bicycle on the wood handcart .
Snow moves across the barren baby’s room , sideways and biting if there ’s breaking wind , or idly riding the ocean - effect off the water . This is the kind of 24-hour interval when the trays of perennial plugs arrive , and we rest them out in no particular order on the gravel trading floor of the grow house , field of battle in macrocosm that we assess for frost damage .
We ’ll toggle the heat – not too lovesome , but not below 40 degree . In three week , we ’ll plant the plug , and line the pot on the base . On the direction home , I look back at the metal chimney stacks on the back of the growing sign of the zodiac to check that the blank smoke is rising in the coldness .
In January , worrying about the heat in that business firm can rob you of your slumber . What if a temperamental blower quits during a ten - degree Nox ? What if a thermostat glitch makes the windowpane vents snap open at 1 ante meridiem ? Or conversely , keeping the rut too mellow for a weekend , and you ’d come in to find leggy plants flopping under the weight of their leaves ? These things take place , as things do , but the plants mostly grow anyway .
In the time deflection of the grow house , the weather on the other side of the plastic is undefined and translucent . In this business , the weather commute the seasons before the calendar does , and sometimes takes aside the time of year we ’re conjecture to be in , the one we snip the garden centre for , and give us the proverbial clay on the typeface .
Yet we are never surprised when a recent April snowstorm douses the azalea ship from Virginia , or the thermometer reads 70 degrees the calendar week after Thanksgiving .
No surprisal either , back in December during the last gasp of Indian summertime , that a front of gloomy , stale cloud brought twist that slap open a gaping kettle of fish in the plastic stretched over the rafters . The retail glasshouse creaked along the fault lines of its metal beam . Then the Charles Percy Snow came beat back in .
The storm turned into ice , and mess up out king for a practiced chunk of Ithiel Town for a good five days of cold . When the visible radiation were finally on , hoi polloi came in for Christmas , noticed the stack pushcart , and said , “ Oh , I did n’t know you sold wood . ”
We are a few calendar month into winter when I woolgather about wall - to - wall customers in the retail glasshouse , even more crowded than May , and I ’m happy .
Three days afterwards , a snowstorm is maneuver in off the ocean . I go to work , hope to get out before the snow protrude , but there ’s a line of people at the doorway , bursting in as presently as we open , like dissenter in a game show , going for the wood carts .
It ’s a daylight when there ’s only five of us ; it ’s the dead of winter after all , but here we are , at one end of a woodpile that is many corduroys long , stacking woodwind on carts for people who are afraid baron will go out for another five days . We heap one cart , and turn to come up three empties . Six hours , we stack , six hours , the registry doughnut .
This is winter . You never recognize which way things will go .
Janet Belding live on on Cape Cod with her partner and two minor , and has been writing and gardening for 30 years . For 20 years her own garden take a backseat to her work at an sovereign garden midpoint until an injury forced her to leave behind the manufacture .
