I know that I’m using the word incorrectly, but, like so many things having to do with reproduction, it feels good to do it even if it’s not done perfectly.
Last summer I grew some flowers in the garden, but my efforts were somewhat frustrated by the long period of time between covering the seeds with dirt and the appearance of flowers (or anything otherwise interesting). Add to this the annoyance of having some of the tiny sprouts, once they started to appear, mowed into oblivion by the guy who cuts the lawn, eaten by insects, crushed by the errant feet of small children, dried out in a drought, or just die for no particular reason, plus the lack of yield for some of the efforts (such as an enormous moonflower vine that produced only two blooms all year) and you can imagine that this year I decided that things would be different.
Of course, whenever I decide that things are going to be different, my doom is to discover that things can be different in many ways.
Last year I planted late, and therefore things were just starting to get going in July and we didn’t really start to see serious flowering until August. The fault was shared; first, I put the seeds in the ground later than necessary, and second, the seeds took their sweet time germinating and getting their first leaves out into the sun. So this year I decided I would jump-start the process by using seed starters to start growing the plants indoors before the last frost, and then transplant the young plants outside when the weather was good. I carefully consulted the seed packages, which list the expected germination time and the elapsed time until emergence, and then consulted the long-range weather forecast, and then added a little pessimism based on my experiences from last year, and decided that last weekend was the right time to plant the first batch of morning glories and nasturtiums.
If you’re a fan of suspense, go read a book for an hour or so and then check back. Otherwise, I see no need to prolong the narrative by including a full chronicle of the ensuing events.
One week later–and still more than a week earlier than I was lead to believe I could reasonably expect to see young shoots tentatively emerging from the soil, I have a tray full of morning glory vines, some as many as 9 inches in length, threatening to choke each other already, and I have nowhere to transplant them, because the forecast calls for a hard frost several nights this week.
I might as well confess that one of the other reasons that I don’t have anywhere to put them is because I did not fully comprehend the difference between gardening and potting soil until this week. I thought garden soil would be adequate for containers, but I was wrong. Potting soil has radically different draining and absorption properties than garden soil. This makes sense if you think about it at all, which I neglected to do. But I digress.
It’s a bit frightening that a relatively small seed can increase in size so many-fold in a single week. At this rate, in another week the vines will be large enough to threaten our living room. By the end of the next week, the vines will occupy a space the size of Middlesex County. By the end of the following week, most of the continent will be overrun. Some time during the following week, the growth rate at the ends of the vines will exceed the speed of sound. In the next month, the vines will rival the national deficit in size, and in three months the solar system will be in peril. In less than a year, the vines will be long enough to circle Dick Cheney’s arrogance.
OK, that last one is a little silly, and perhaps an exaggeration. I don’t think the vines will grow that large.
What to do?
If I can’t come up with a plan soon, I’m going to pitch the whole thing in the trash, and start over from scratch in mid-April. Of course, next time I do this, the morning glories will take four weeks to sprout… Nothing ever happens the same way twice, especially if that’s your hope.
