The Death Bed

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Well, it looks like crap, if you must know.

Despite my vast library of books and my grand plans for a winter garden, (why shouldn't I?! It's Southern California!) I was defeated by The Death Bed.

Inspired by seasonal eating books that seduced me with magical promises of the unequaled sweetness of winter cauliflower and broccoli, fall blooming lettuce, and butternut squashes, I planted as soon as the days got short and the temperatures dropped. I dug out and filled new raised beds in the front yard so I'd have enough room and dropped in heirloom seed packets of broccoli de cicci, Toscano baby kale, butter lettuce, cauliflower, butternut squash and, for fun, loofah gourd seeds. I spent hours carefully measuring the distance between seed holes that I carefully dipped into the soil with my fingertip and lovingly covered with soil made from a mixture of kelp meal and homemade compost and chicken manure.

The Death Bed ate them all.

When nothing came up the first time I surmised that hungry autumn birds might have been at whatever seedlings were coming up, so I carefully replanted and netted the beds, supporting the nets with bamboo stakes I'd whittled grooves into by hand to make a perfect plant nursery. I watered my new set of seeds in with rain water I'd collected from the summer storms.

The Death Bed ate them all.

Not a single cauliflower sprouted or a butter lettuce or even a single leaf of kale. We're the birds eating them through the raised netting? It seemed impossible! I tried new seeds. Maybe my seed packets were too old to be viable. The Death Bed ate these too. Oddly, I started finding vining seedlings outside of the raised beds; demoralized by my failure  to obtain the mythical sweet winter cauliflower and broccoli I let them grow as they would, unwilling to root them up but also determined not to water them. If everything I had so lovingly planted would refuse to grow, I wasn't going to waste effort on these bastard vines.

Except the bastard vines grew and multiplied and holy crap they took over literally everything. Within a month the vines had covered the barren Death Bed and spread to the entire lawn. They grew up the side of the house, clinging impossibly to the stucco at crazy angles and blooming fantastic brilliant yellow flowers the size of hibiscus. Despite the shortage of bees the flowers fruited and started transforming into humongous watermelon sized cucumbers that pulled the vines down from the stucco. Undaunted by their thwarted journey to the sky, the vines settled and split and flowered again and fruited. Everywhere.

Yay. These were my loofah gourds. Because of course the only thing I'd be able to grow in my food garden was infinite quantities of inedible gourds. And I hadn't even planted them. The birds found them so inedible they'd spat or shat them out right next to my beds and even still they thrived better than anything I HAD planted, utterly without any help from me. Once they were dried and cut I had all the exfoliation I could handle. No food. But my skin was soft as hell, dammit.

Except...

Sometime in the middle of winter I noted that under the web of loofah gourd vines something was growing. Weeds? Crab grass? I was determined to just leave it there in the Death Bed, as betrayed as I was by the failure of all my educated efforts. Just take over if you want to, then. I don't care.

They did take over. Four months after I planted the seeds that should have sprouted in a week, impossibly, butter lettuce sprouted in the Death Bed. Higgledy piggledy, in nothing resembling the carefully spaced rows I'd planted, they sprouted all over each other, heads growing up over the other heads, leaves the most beautiful, bright brilliant green winter had ever seen. Darker, jagged edge leaves popped up between them and formed towers rising above the butter lettuce heads, shading their cousins, and soon sprouting familiar deep green clusters of broccoli. We ate butter lettuce all winter and when the spring came, too soon, bright and overly sunny, the lettuce and the broccoli faded and flowered and set seed.

This morning I went out to take a look: my lettuce heads have grown into purple tinted obelisks, ready to bloom and turn flowers into white cottony chaff that will fly a million seeds into the summer breeze. They are, objectively, ugly. The leaves are too bitter to eat, natures way of keeping the plant alive until it can reproduce. The broccoli grew three feet tall and faded as it set its yellow flowers, turning into ungainly stalks with tan leaves and flopped over into the soil. It is a mess. And yes. It looks like crap.

But to my surprise, this morning when I looked I found butter lettuce growing in the lawn. Seedlings are all over the Death Bed, churning the heat from the decomposing compost into bright green leaves two inches across, but they are in my lawn too, where a year ago, perfect bright Kentucky bluegrass grew in a straight flawless carpet of weedless  glory. A year ago there was not a clover to be seen, clover that fixed the nutrients in the soil and covers the bare ground to keep the more invasive weeds away, but now the clover is sheltering tiny lettuce seedlings in my lawn. A year ago we'd have sprayed them away or mowed them over, and maybe my neighbors will find little lettuce seedlings in their lawn and mistake them for the ugly spade shaped weeds we fight in suburbia and root them out. Maybe. Maybe life will find a way.




I bend over the bed, where nature has arranged the obelisks of the parent lettuce in a perfect way that shades and protects the baby seedlings from the birds and the sun. There are new broccoli seedlings, a few inches high already, crowded by the wealth of lettuce clamoring to live and thrive in this shrinking space. I slide my hand into the soft soil, warmed by the sun, loose and rich and crumbly from the kelp meal and the compost, and guess at how far the roots have descended. I'm right, and find the perfect scoop of soil that contains the new life and its nursery all in the palm of my hand. I dig out a new home in the other bed where it can set roots and spread out. I find a few others and add them to the broccoli bed--they do better together I think.






Nearby my chickens are greedily devouring the clover patch I moved them to this morning and I realize with a start of recognition those are lettuces they have found under the clover and are gobbling down to their roots. It doesn't matter. We have more than enough.