Before the autumn rush begins: a mug of hot tea, a good book, and a shorn sheepdog

Last week I set up a small tea cupboard, with a little shelf and two drawers, in our kitchen. The drawers hold boxes of Irish breakfast, Darjeeling, English breakfast, cinnamon spice, rose hip, and jasmine teas, and the shelf is just right for a china sugar bowl and teacup-shaped spoon holder. As soon as the maple leaves began to fall and I felt the first real chill at twilight, I knew that, along with the coming holidays, tea-drinking season had arrived. The remains of a nasty chest cold gave me a reason to rest in the middle of an afternoon, reading and drinking hot tea from my favorite mug. (I have a cherished collection of English bone china cups and saucers, a legacy from my grandmother, but use stout pottery mugs for everyday tea drinking. The delicate cups come out only for fancy tea parties, when adult women can turn into little girls again.)

I sat in my red chair that day, set down my book for awhile and watched fat snowflakes falling in graceful swirls onto our lawn and gardens. The first snowfall in Moscow always brings a moment of pure joy for me. As a West Side transplant, I remember weeks of rain, gray and soggy days, and the wish – rarely granted – that we would have snow in Seattle for Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or maybe in January. The falling flakes last week were the perfect transition from the glorious colors and flaming sunsets of our Indian summer on the Palouse, to the crisp air and gusty winds that blew us straight into the heart of autumn. The weather's change seemed to happen overnight, and I felt doubly thankful that I'd planted all the spring tulips and daffodil bulbs weeks ago, under a sunny Idaho blue sky.

Before I leaped fully into the year's busiest season, I spent another recent afternoon turning our living room into Miss Sydney's House of Sheepdog Shearing. Rags, our elderly Old English sheepdog, was overdue for a grooming. His long, shaggy hair had grown tangled and matted over the summer, as his health deteriorated. My husband and I were not sure he would live into the autumn, and we didn't want to cause the needless anxiety that any sort of grooming triggers for him. Finally, though, I refilled the veterinarian's prescription for the tranquilizers he needs before a beauty session, and waited until the pills had calmed him. My husband grooms Rags with electric clippers, but I use only hairdresser's scissors, because that tool leaves more fur on the big guy – and winter is coming. Through more than four hours, I followed my large, groggy dog , snipping away, as he lay on his leather couch, then on the living room rug, and finally wedged himself into his favorite meditation spot – under the library table in our entryway. By twisting, contorting, kneeling, stretching and groaning (a lot), I reached every inch of Rags' fur while he lay, conked out, until he roused himself and sleepwalked to his next spot.

Our only problems arose when I accidentally nicked his ear – he yelped once, and I cried – and when he made a request I could not, in good conscience, agree to honor. He wanted me to leave the shaggy hair on top of his head long enough for a man-bun. As tactfully as possible, I convinced him that this unfortunate hair style is a fad (which cannot fade away quickly enough for moi.) His style, I reminded him, is classic (classic goofball, but no need to include the entire description.) Man-buns will soon go the way of the mullet (which I rather liked,)but floppy ears and shaggy hair falling over brown eyes, above a fat black nose, will never go out of style at our house.

Our cats are settling in for the cold months, too. I've laid small fleece rugs in front of the heat registers in the living room, so Benjamin BadKitten and Abigail Grump can keep their tails warm while they share family time with us. (Their rugs haven't gotten too much use, though. Benjamin prefers the soft security of my lap while I pet him, or the privacy of his flowered chair, while he plots his springtime coup d'etat to overthrow my chief garden staffer and return to power.)

 

Tessa the Vague, the current chief staffer, prefers to sleep on a small wool rug that's tucked behind the TV cabinet. Tess remains a loner by nature, although she's become social enough to track my movements indoors and lumber up onto the arm of my red chair at reading and tea-drinking time. A small calico cat, with vacant green eyes and a twitchy nature, who stares, unblinking, is not an ideal companion when I'm trying to enjoy my book and sip hot tea. But I pet her gently, and hope this season of cold and indoor time will help her deal with the transition that may be coming next spring out in the garden. I'm getting the clear message, tweaked by the relentless barrage of snark from my BadKitten, that Tessa the Vague is just flat-out not management material.

Coming to readers from high on a tabletop, it's autumn décor time

Something – a jumbled mass of glittered red, orange, and yellow silk leaves, tiny pilgrims, papier-mache' pumpkins, and a turkey-shaped candle – had exploded on top of the dining room table. And someone, a person who is neurotically afraid of heights, was standing, shrieking with fear, on top of that table, among the debris of autumn décor. She had glitter on her head, thumbtacks clutched in her fist, and the sure sense that she was going to pitch forward, hard, onto the tabletop, directly onto that stupid wax turkey. Only a reflexive reach upward, with her flatted palm on the ceiling to steady herself, saved her from a certain face-plant and possible broken bones.

By the time her husband, having heard her banshee wail, reached the dining room, she had crawled off the tabletop and was standing shakily on the floor. What happened? her husband asked. When she explained, he simply regarded her for a moment before observing, “You know, sweetheart, any story that starts out with, “Well, I was standing on top of the dining room table...' never ends well.”

I never get glitter on my head or mess about with fat, wax turkeys (except Benjamin BadKitten)when I'm in my garden. Last week I decided to decorate our front porch and the inside of our house for autumn. Before I braved the dining room, I set up a fall display on the porch, with odd-shaped and uniquely colored gourds, pumpkins, dried corn, and silk leaves. Inside, our living room mantel looked fallishly festive, with my collection of wooden folk art set among miniature bouquets of silk flowers, all in autumn colors. I can reach the top of the mantel to decorate it. I don't even need a step-stool. But the next stop on the décor train was the dining room and its tall picture window.

Every fall, and again during Christmas, I attach seasonal garlands of leaves and flowers above that window. The garlands are long, stiff and unwieldy, and I am short, small, and not getting any younger. Every year, during the hanging of the garlands, I find my seasonal spirit severely tested. Last week, the dining room table seemed the ideal solution: It was the right height and wide enough to accommodate my balletic, garland-wrangling moves.

I maneuvered myself onto the table, reminded myself not to look down, and secured one end of the first garland to the drapery rod above the window. Just as the second garland settled into place, the first one slipped to the floor. (Imaginative readers may add their own colorful soundtrack to the next three attempts.)Maybe the Garden Goddess sensed my panic and floated inside to the rescue, because I finally managed to anchor both of those ornery sets of leaves, strands and flowers above the window – and then looked down. At least my tabletop panic attack happened after the garlands went up, because, nearly a week later, I'm still not jazzed about another ascent. When I considered the long, wide, L-shaped set of windows in our breakfast nook, I decided they could remain undecorated. I have stood on our kitchen table. Maybe, in late November, I might be willing to scale its heights to hang Christmas garlands above it. Maybe.

To forget the indoor décor drama, I spent a recent afternoon outside in our front yard, at Mini Leaf Mountain and Big Honker Leaf Mountain, the two mounds of oak and maple leaves my husband and I raked for our two young grandsons to jump into. Leaf Mountain Day has been a tradition at our house for three years, ever since our daughter, son-in-law and children moved to Moscow. A huge black maple tree stands in glory at a corner of our yard, and a sugar maple and towering oak tree blaze with color in our side yard.

The little boys, especially the eight-year-old, leaped and somersaulted into Big Honker, giggling, shouting and sending flurries of dry leaves fluttering onto their heads in the October sunshine. Our littler guy, age six, had to retire early from Mini Leaf Mountain and come inside with me for Band-aids, lemonade and cookies, after a sharp chunk of clay soil lodged in his rubber boot and tore a mean scratch in his leg. So both boys ended up decorating my beloved dollhouse for Halloween. They seemed skeptical at first, as if this might not be manly work, until they spied the miniature jack-o-lanterns, with scary, gross, disgusting faces, and they fell to with great enthusiasm.

When their dad had to leave early, we dealt with a dilemma. The little guy's sore leg made it impossible for him to wear his boots to walk home, I couldn't carry him for five blocks, and we have no child safety seats in our car. So I thought fast, and we ended up marching in our own pre-Halloween parade,with the eight-year-old on his scooter, and me pushing the six-year-old in my trusty green gardening wheelbarrow. We met several of my friends along the parade route, and each of them laughed. I could have told them that rolling my grandson home in a wheelbarrow beats the fear of falling from the top of the dining room table any day.

For all his self-conceit, Benjamin BadKitten knows how to be a loyal friend

I had a chat with Benjamin BadKitten last Sunday, after a friend at church told me an endearing story about her cat, Gabriella. The day before, my friend wore wool slacks and a fleece top to cut back overgrown brush on her property. When she finished, she found an entire brigade of burrs had attached themselves to the wool and fleece. She changed clothes and began the tedious task of removing the burrs by hand. Soon Gabriella jumped onto the burr-surgery table and volunteered to help. My friend worried that her cat would either shred the clothes or eat the burrs, but, instead, the loyal and intelligent Gabriella carefully used the tips of her claws to dislodge the clinging burrs from the fabric. (She might had had a less noble motive, too: One-upping the black puppy that recently joined the household.) I thought this story – minus the puppy motive – might be an inspiration to my own intelligent BadKitten, who seldom uses his powers for good around our house or garden.

“What's your point?” Benjamin flattened his ears and yawned, because I had awakened him from his post-lunch nap. My point, I said patiently, is that some cats actually think about their people's needs and feelings, instead of practically drowning in the pond of their own narcissism. My ten-year-old BadKitten stretched and lifted his chin so I could pet him. “I think about your needs and feelings. I am a very sensitive kitten. Many times a day I think that you need to feed me and freshen the water in my bowl, and you need to put my favorite fleece blanket at the foot of your bed so I can be warm when I meditate there. And I think about how you must be feeling lonely without a small, fluffy Maine coon cat to pet and praise, so I leap gracefully onto your lap.” Benjamin is decidedly fluffy, but he passed “small” several dozen depot stops ago. I have to admit he's right about leaping gracefully, though. He's still athletic, quick, and light on his paws, even if he's carrying much more of a tummy than he used to.

I sighed. Remember Lizzy? I asked. The best adult cat I've ever had was a long-haired “pure-bred, championship silver Persian,” as she preferred to think of herself. Actually, she had more than a bit of white and butterscotch fur mingling with the silver, and, unlike a true Persian cat's squashed-looking face, Lizzy had a classic profile. Smart and vocal, that cat was on my wavelength for all the years that she lived. Even though she had much of the self-centeredness for which cats are stereotyped, she could also be remarkably intuitive. On the day, many years ago, when my mail included not one but two rejection letters from New York publishers, I sat, sobbing, on the floor of my writing room. Lizzy padded up to me, climbed onto my lap, and gently patted my cheek with her paw. She stayed with me while my tears gradually stopped and I told her about all my insecurities as a writer.

You, I reminded Benjamin, never pat my cheek when I cry. You use my jeans as a climbing post – while I'm wearing them – and shinny up my leg so I'll pick you up and pet you. But then I paused and considered him, the Peter Pan of cats, who will always remain a BadKitten. When Lizzy was dying, I held her in my arms, because I couldn't bear to think of her being alone as her life ebbed away. Benjamin and Tessa the Vague kept vigil with Lizzy and me. The two cats sat close together, a few feet from where I knelt on the floor with Lizzy, silently – and, I thought, respectfully – waiting through the long night until only the spirit of my beloved cat remained. (Even Tessa, who normally seems to lack candlepower, behaved with dignity and innate animal wisdom during Lizzy's last hours.)

Now, here in Moscow, Benjamin keeps a different vigil with his best buddy, our Old English sheepdog, Rags, who lives in twilight. Our good dog, elderly, blind and frail, is always the one Benjamin greets first when he enters the living room. My husband and I don't know how many more weeks Rags will be with us. He seems to grow a little more feeble and confused each day. We are certain that Benjamin is a comforting presence to Rags. For Ben's blend of compassion and his “What? He's my buddy” naturalness, I can forgive my cat his many (many, many) transgressions. Lizzy was the queen of adult cats. But Benjamin, who would try to remove a burr only if it attached itself to his ample backside, will always be the best little BadKitten that ever there was.

Taking the path from swirling leaves and mulched gardens to cozy indoor projects

Our autumn, with its glorious colors, swirling leaves and mild weather, has been a gift from the Garden Goddess so far. We can take down our gardens during sunny afternoons, instead of having to bundle up in fleece and gloves to cut down the last of the Canterbury bells or the final heads of broccoli. (Not that I would have any personal experience with broccoli – or any other vegetable plants – producing into October. Mine wimped out in August.) This weekend I'll spread a rich composting mulch over the perennial beds, to give them an extra layer of protection from the chill that could come soon. As I also consider adding an extra blanket to the beds in our house, my thoughts and to-do lists now turn away from the flower and vegetable gardens, toward domestic plans indoors. It's time to decorate our home and front porch for autumn and put a lighted pumpkin in the window for the trick-or-treaters who ring our doorbell on Halloween night.

Next (and soon) I'll finish writing the script for this year's Christmas pageant, featuring the children and teenagers of my church and wider community. Time to schedule rehearsals and feel my smile widen every time the cast gathers, giggling, asking questions, running lines, and adding their own sparkle to the dialogue I've written to reflect each actor's special gifts. On a parallel track, I'll start my holiday lists, beginning with Thanksgiving. Last year, our two adult children took over all the cooking for our family's turkey dinner, because they wanted me to rest after very minor skin cancer surgery. Our son and daughter divided the cooking and created a marvelous meal that combined family favorites with some new recipes. This year our daughter will host again, but I'm also reclaiming my apron, because we Italian mamas have a hard time remaining seated – or staying out of the kitchen – for very long.

Autumn is a quicksilver season. Its maple and oak trees can glow with beauty one day, and a fierce wind can leave them standing, stark and bare, the next. Our menagerie is celebrating the season by bringing mementos inside for my husband and me to enjoy (or vacuum away.) Rags, our Old English sheepdog, habitually carries in clumps of dry leaves that cling to his big paws, and he often sports a small, red or gold maple leaf on his nose or dangling from a shaggy ear. All three cats, Tessa the Vague, Abigail Grump, and the one and only Benjamin BadKitten, track in bits of mulch, leaves, and, unfortunately, an occasional mouse or bird. Abigail's favorite place to observe the autumn world is in a small, compost-filled planter on our patio. She looks like a black and white hen, setting her eggs, with her paws tucked beneath her. It won't be long, I remind myself, that our furry family members will be housebound, braving the cold outdoors only for personal hygiene. And I will smile at them as I sit in my favorite chair, with my book on my lap and a mug of hot tea beside me.

While my memory's fresh, I'll make my do-and-don't lists for 2016 vegetable and flower gardens

I might have exaggerated a wee bit in a recent blog post, when I wrote that I had ordered and received six billion tulip and daffodil bulbs. The actual total was closer to six hundred – nearly all of which I planted during a three-day weekend, in 16 hours of gardening. My husband put in nearly as many hours, rototilling the new bulb gardens, mixing compost into our raised vegetable beds, and planting two shrubs in the backyard. (I know: we are the poster couple for romantic weekend getaways – to the compost pile, garden shed and the Church of Dirt and Flowers.) As I inched along the planting beds on my creaking knees, mentally designing color combinations for grouping the bulbs, my mantra was Think Springtime. I pictured the new tulips and daffodils joining their veteran bulb buddies to create blooming waves of red, purple, orange, yellow, pink, and white petals bordering the perennial beds in our front yard. [Note: I have ordered tulip, daffodil and other spring-flowering bulbs from VanBourgondien (dutchbulbs.com) and Breck's (brecks.com) for years, and appreciate the fat, healthy bulbs I receive at planting time.]

Now most of our flower beds are ready for autumn blankets of compost – except for the sunflower garden outside my office window. As I write, finches and chickadees are hanging upside-down from the tall stalks, harvesting the last of the seeds from flower heads nearly bald from the little birds' unrelenting appetites. I love this unexpected bonus of garden joy so much that, next spring, I'll move the tomato bed elsewhere and plant only sunflowers (for the birds) and hollyhocks (for the bees) below my window.

During my recent bulb-planting-palooza, I had company in the garden. Abigail, our chickadee-sushi-loving cat, and chief staffer Tessa the Vague, our calico – whose already limited battery power grows dimmer every day – each took a turn as my supervisor. Abby complained that the noise from Lee's rototiller in the side yard was giving her a migraine (and scaring off her luncheon plans.) Tessa wandered about, startling at every oak leaf that crunched under her paws, until she finally settled in the middle of the narrow bed I was planting. I didn't disturb her, because her safe touchdown in an actual garden site is a rare event. She napped for awhile, and then rolled around awkwardly in the newly composted patch before beginning her long, complex trek to find the cat door. Meanwhile, Benjamin BadKitten, the deposed chief, did not set even one fat paw in the garden with me all weekend. He was too busy doing research, he explained with a snooty lift of his nose. Halloween is coming, and he was calculating the algorithm required to stuff my chief garden staffer into a pumpkin.

We impetuous gardeners cannot count on memory alone to remember our plans for next year's plantings. In my decades of gardening, I wonder how many fabulously brilliant ideas I lost between the blue and gold of October's skies and the pink and green of May's gardens. No matter how certain I was that I would remember exactly the changes I'd make, some of those bright thought-bubbles floated away before I'd even filled the Christmas stockings. Many of my family members and friends rely on their smart phones for keeping schedules and lists. I, the geezer who still has an aol.com email address (it's so ancient, it's now retro-hip,) use a paper-and-pen weekly planner. Every week during take-down-the-garden month, usually October, I note which varieties of seeds tanked and which triumphed. (Guess which column has the most entries.) I always buy next year's planner early, so I have it in autumn, and I can make my to-do lists on the calendar pages for next April, May and June.

On my 2016 list, I'll write these three items in big letters at the top:

• Don't cave to cheap thrills and set more than one zucchini plant in the raised bed. Remember you're the only one who will eat the Zs, and that you don't eat much sweet stuff like zucchini bread. Remember the nightly dinners of baked, roasted and sauteed zukes, egged, floured and herbed, in hopes of revving up their blandness? Remember that the blandness never really disappeared?
• Plant the tomatoes in big, individual pots and set them on the sunny, south-facing patio. A few years ago, they grew well in their patio pots and tasted sweet and juicy. (We would have enjoyed many more tomatoes that summer, but our late, beloved golden retriever, Kaylee, stole them off the vines, even after we wrapped the plants in plastic netting. That dog loved her 'matoes.)
• Do not plant any more bulbs. At all. Anywhere. Do not gaze out onto the backyard shrubbery beds and imagine how well the taller shrubs would set off flowering clusters of tulips, daffodils and grape hyacinths along the length of the fence. Imagine, instead, how much hard labor those beds would need to become bulb-ready. There's bad dirt out there, and it would need digging, amending, fertilizing, rototilling, and more digging before you could sink to your aching knees (which will be a full year older and creakier) and start planting six billion more bulbs. But...can't you just see those gorgeous parrot tulips,pink and yellow angeliques, deep red couleur cardinals, the giant trumpet daffodils…?Stop that right now. Smack yourself on the forehead. Do not plant any more bulbs. Anywhere. At all.

What will be on your own “do or don't” lists for next year's garden?

I knew I was living up to my impetuous reputation the day the tulip bulbs arrived

I've been breaking in a new pair of walking shoes this week – red suede. I'd thought about buying blue suede shoes, but then I should be walkin' in Memphis, instead of in Moscow. I came home one morning from a brisk turn around our neighborhood in time to see the letter carrier delivering a box to our front porch. If I needed a reminder that The Impetuous Gardener is an accurate name for my column, that box was all the evidence required. I felt the first twinge of alarm at the size of the carton and its many air holes. But, I assured myself, tulip and daffodil bulbs take up space, and there's probably a lot of packing material inside to protect them from damage during shipping. I stooped to pick up the box, couldn't lift it even an inch off the ground, and felt the little twinge morph fast into full-blown panic.

 

I bet that carton weighed more than Rags, my Old English sheepdog, and the pudgy Benjamin BadKitten combined. How many tulips and daffodils had I ordered? Did my husband and I commandeer --and plow – part of the neighbors' yard, to compete with the West Side tulip fields in northern Washington state? My immediate worry was how to lug that monster bulb box from the front porch all the way to the patio at the back of the house. (Pride and embarrassment stopped me from waiting until my husband came home to act as tulip transporter.)

I am a small person but possess a great deal of determination. After propping open the front and patio doors, I gulped extra air, flexed nonexistent muscles, and hefted that box as far as my hip. After huffing out a couple of brief, colorful phrases, I staggered through the living and dining rooms to the patio door. The Garden Goddess must have protected me from taking a header down the two steps from the dining room to the patio, because I certainly couldn't see around the carton to check my footing. I plunked the box onto the patio table and then opened it, to find every square inch stuffed with mesh bags of bulbs. I had ordered approximately six billion tulips in jewel and pastel colors, a “super sack” of naturalizing daffodils, and blue, purple and yellow crocuses to celebrate the arrival of spring.

Our gardens already include bulb beds, which I started digging when we moved to Moscow five years ago. This summer I added a flower bed in our front yard and imagined its winding paths framed with tulips and daffodils next April and May. I love creating beauty, in our home and in our yard. If seeing bright-petaled flowers brings passersby as much joy as the sight brings me, my own happiness multiplies. During the gardening months, I include a budget item for buying plants and bulbs – and got a great deal on the tulips and daffs I ordered. Now I have to imagine where the heck to plant the 12 billion bulbs in that box. I see many hours of spading soil in my immediate future, and my husband has offered to spend much of this weekend with our rototiller.

 

While I'm digging, I'm not sure I can count on my garden staffer to keep me company. Unfortunately, Tessa the Vague needs a bit more orientation: If she wants to go out to the patio, she waits for me to open the dining room door. (She also knows how to use the cat door, a major milestone, but that leads to the front yard.) Recently, when Tessa and I were in the laundry room, I opened its door, which also leads to the patio, and waited for Tessa to go outside. She paused at the threshold, studied the patio, and looked up at me with total confusion in her wide, vacant green eyes. From the door, she could see all the familiar landmarks on the patio, but the perspective was different. My chief garden executive believed I was trying to send her to Mars, and skittered away.

My three cats are trying to scare me with their low-budget scary movie – and it's not even Halloween

 I'm not going to write about autumn garden chores today, because here is an even more pressing issue to deal with: The cat-tailed members of our household seem to be trying to send me straight into Cloud Cuckooland. The three conspirators include my current chief garden staffer, Tessa the Vague, a 14-year-old calico; Abigail, a black and white longhair, and – this will come as a shock – Benjamin BadKitten, my former garden chief. Abigail is as old as Tessa but still has all her own mental marbles, plus most of the aggies, glassies and swirlies that Tessa has lacked from birth. Benjamin is a black and brown Maine coon cat with a cunning mind and a penchant for trouble, who had been shunning Tessa since I demoted him.

With Tessa's rise to glory, Abigail, never a social cat, abandoned her favorite napping spot in the front yard, under the phlox, and avoided Tessa in the house, too. So I was delighted – at first –when I saw all three cats huddled together near the bird bath in the flower garden on a recent sunny day. With their paws tucked under them, they looked like three furry loaves of bread, pumpernickel, sourdough, and ham on rye (guess who's who.) I assumed that Benjamin and Abigail were trying to bring Tessa up to speed on basic garden orientation. (Up to speed for Tess means, “See that tall green thing with the petals on top? That's a clue. If you see some of those things around, you've probably found the flower garden, unless you took a wrong turn and ended up on Main Street, in front of a flower shop.”

After the bonding session in the garden, I expected peace among the cat tails. The next morning, I was working at my computer when I heard an unnerving crunching sound coming from under the bed. My stomach tightened as I crouched and found Abigail finishing a truly macabre brunch of feathered chickadee sushi. Abigail has never been a bird catcher. The last time she showed a hunter's instinct was a year ago, when she and her partner in crime, the BadKitten, ushered a live mouse into our home, via the cat door, and then lost the little critter. The mouse, who was faster and smarter than those two feline doofuses, roamed free overnight, until I found him the next morning in my closet, experiencing rigor mortis.

Now, after the chickadee sushi scene, Tessa has begun a new ritual of perching on the arm of my chair while I read or watch TV. She stares at me with unblinking, jade green eyes as blank as the marbles she does not possess. When I pet her, she purrs quietly and then makes an awkward trip from the chair arm onto my lap – where she sits, staring at me. She does not relax or purr again. She just stares. Maybe the pressure of her new responsibilities – finding the garden and keeping me company while I work – has pushed her to a Tessa version of catatonia, but she's not saying. She just sits on my lap and stares. I am feeling stalked.

After Abby and Tess creeped me out, each in her own special way, I actually told Benjamin that he had become The Good One, at least temporarily. My large BadKitten leaped athletically from the floor onto my lap, seeming to mock Tessa with his agility, and settled in, purring loudly and smugly. Benjamin didn't stare at me; he just arranged his considerable avoir dupois and shut his eyes. He was still sporting his halo late that evening, when I was reading alone in the living room and suddenly heard an odd clanking sound coming from the kitchen. When the sound repeated, I went to check – just in time to find Benjamin carrying a mouse trap,from which dangled a skinny gray tail, with the rest of the murdered little rodent attached. I shrieked for my husband, who has danced the mousetrap polka with Benjamin before He quickly disposed of that beastly cat's unfortunate trophy.

This is the fourth time my BadKitten has come home bearing identical gifts: a mousetrap plus a dead mouse. Each time he had the nerve to think we'd believe – what? That he bought a trap, baited it, and then lured a mouse into it? (Note to neighbors: Your mouse traps work well, but our cat steals them – and the mice they attract --from your yard. I am more sorry about this than you can imagine.)

So one cat's dormant hunter instincts have suddenly awakened, and another cat's dormant mind will never wake up, but she has developed a stalking fetish. The third cat appears periodically with dead, pre-trapped mice. And, as a denouement, after each act of bone crunching, lap stalking, or mousetrap retrieval, each cat gets sick. The BadKitten, I suspect, has directed every scene of this low-budget scary movie to drive me bananas enough to return him to power. Maybe I should just get a gerbil.

On autumn's first day, my red-haired grandson and an orange pansy remind me to celebrate all of nature's colors

September 2012

A few impetuous garden musings on this first day of autumn:

Last weekend, my husband, Lee, and I decided to take a walk around our neighborhood after dinner. When we reached our house again, Lee pointed to a patch of pansies someone had recently planted in our front garden, near the sidewalk. The pansy flowers were orange. For too many years, I refused to plant orange flowers in my gardens. Passersby could see red, blue, purple and yellow blooms in my beds, but, until recently, I enforced a heavy ban on orange petals. I joked about this prejudice, and even wrote about it in this column several times.

My intolerance became painfully apparent to me when my five-year-old grandson, a redhead, asked why I didn’t grow any flowers that were the same color as his hair. The uncertainty in his sweet face hurt my heart. Finally I saw the message I might be sending: that some flowers – or, much worse, some people – are less worthy than others, because of their color. The next time Joshy visited, I showed him the huge orange poppies growing in our backyard. (Before I mentally smacked myself upside the head, I had actually thought about digging them up and composting them.) I also told him about the orange tulips I had planted last fall, and how bright and sunny they looked in our front garden this spring. He beamed, as only children can.

Buying a red-flowering rosebush or a blue delphinium is nearly automatic for me, after decades of filling my gardens with shades of these colors. I still have to remind myself to add orange and bronze and russet flowers to my beds, but the choice is much easier now. Each time I pass my newly planted, tiered garden bed, ablaze with autumn shades of flowers, I’m thankful for the entire color palette.

When we saw that orange pansy in our garden, I knew that neither Lee nor I had planted it. Orange is not a typical color for pansies; they tend to have purple, yellow, blue or rose petals. So whoever my mystery guest gardener was, he or she knew about my dubious history with orange flowers and decided to tweak me, with humor and kindness. Seeing that perky little pansy, center stage in the garden bed, made me smile and then laugh with delight. I’m taking good care of it, keeping it watered and telling it daily that it’s looking fine. Actually, it’s beautiful. The color of its petals reminds me of my grandson’s hair and my own clearer vision.

Benjamin BadKitten, my garden staff member, humiliated himself last week. He caught a mouse…trap. I went out to the patio one morning and saw, near the back door, a white plastic contraption, with small, furry gray feet and a tail hanging out. Benjamin was parading around, weaving his tail through my legs and trying to look like the intrepid hunter that he is not. “Really?” I asked him. “You’re actually proud of catching an already-dead mouse that’s still in its trap?” My cat flattened his ears and stalked off, obviously disgusted with my utter inability to recognize his killer instinct.

Our grandsons, Joshy and three-year-old Henry, and their mom and dad (our daughter and son-in-law) are living with us for awhile. (The day they moved in seemed like an early Thanksgiving to us.) Joshy has started kindergarten here in Moscow, and a recent assignment was to draw a picture of a plant in his yard. He, Henry and I took a slow, careful tour around the vegetable and flower beds in our side yard, so that Joshy could make his artistic choice.

The two little boys stopped to study the bees perched on a purple aster in the tiered bed. They also considered the orange and dark red chrysanthemums in the same bed, but decided to move on to the artichoke plants. A bright purple flower grew from the center of each of the artichokes, because I had let them go to seed. Joshy and Henry climbed onto the edge of the wooden bed so they could peer into a plant whose purple flower was just emerging. They checked it out, fascinated to see the tiny petals – and the bees hovering on a bigger flower nearby. I was sure my favorite kindergartener had found his still life – but then the boys spotted the pumpkin patch. I am growing “Cinderella” pumpkins for each of them, and they spent some time debating which pumpkin was whose. They called dibs on the two biggest pumpkins – “biggest” being relative, of course. My pumpkins aren’t exactly county fair quality.

Then they chose a small, round pumpkin for their baby sister, who will be born in mid-December. Halloween will be over by then, but holidays are big at our house. So maybe we’ll display her pumpkin near a Christmas wreath on the front porch after she’s born. Joshy decided to draw his pumpkin, with its grooved ridges, orange body, green vine and leaves. His picture is a masterpiece, of course.

September is time to look back on gardening season

September 2012

These September mornings have a wee nip in the air now. I check the weather forecast for projected low temperatures, in case my tomatoes are in danger of frost. For the first time since June, I have needed a light jacket for my daily walks. Soon, in our shortest, most glorious season, the maples and oaks will blaze in autumn colors before their leaves fall in great drifts over our lawns. The wide Idaho sky will turn a deep blue that seems to appear only in the fall. Smoke will start curling from neighborhood chimneys, and I will be baking bread and simmering Italian stews and soups again.

 

In January, when seed catalogs teeter in stacks on my reading table, I weave my fantasies for the coming spring. But September is the time when I look back on another season in the garden. Soon I will be outside, finishing my annual ritual of what I have always called taking down the garden. I will do a final dead-heading of the still-blooming roses, cut the remaining perennial stalks to the ground, and plant spring-flowering bulbs in new spots. Then I’ll tuck everybody in for the winter months under a blanket of WSU compost, the finest mulching compost I’ve found in many years of gardening.

My flower gardens were the stars of my gardening efforts this year. Delphiniums, roses, phlox, verbascum, pansies, hollyhocks, sweet peas, coreopsis, monarda, catmint – we understand each other. I find sunny spots where they can show off their colors, and they know what to do. In late summer, when the early bloomers finally faded, I did another planting of perennials for one last dance before the big chill arrives. 

This summer was my first attempt at vegetable gardening here in northern Idaho. Last spring, my husband built eight wooden raised beds for our side yard, and I have felt great pressure to perform. Let me just admit that I am glad I bought the book, “Vegetable Gardening for Dummies.” I followed the instructions for growing asparagus, including letting this, my first crop, all go to fern-like seed, and will have high hopes for many sweet green stalks next spring. My carrot patch is yielding enough beta carotene to share with the neighborhood’s wild rabbit. I have been pulling a few carrots nearly every night for salad or as part of a main dish, and leaving the rest in the ground until needed. The bunny seems to know that he doesn’t have to raid the entire patch at once. So far, we are coexisting peacefully, carrot-wise.

The corn crop has been disappointing, with many of the ears infested with weevils – and lady bugs. Why can’t those cute little red critters hang out on rose leaves where they belong, eating aphids? (Speaking of aphids, my greatest humiliation of the season was draping banana peels on the rose bushes in the misguided belief that the peels would kill aphids. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.) Another hazard in the corn patch has been Benjamin BadKitten, my garden staff member. In mid-summer, when the stalks were high and the sun blazed, he decided that the perfect napping spot – pardon me: the perfect supervisory spot – was in the middle of the corn plants. Benjamin is a sound sleeper, and he apparently rolled his ample backside onto the stalks while taking a catnap. The result was a soundless cry of “Timber!” and a toppling of corn plants onto the cat. (I know this because I saw him emerge from the corn patch, wearing strands of corn silk over his ear.) We’re eating the few remaining undamaged ears of corn, and have found the kernels sweet but more chewy than crisp. I’m still optimistic about being a corn farmer, though, and will plant again next spring, using a different variety of seed.

After last year’s meager yield, the tomatoes are thriving this time. This is partly due to the absence of our golden retriever, who died in June. Kaylee had the skills and chutzpah of a born thief. There was no garden fence or wire netting she couldn’t crack, if it had fresh tomatoes or peas on the other side. If she had lived, she would have easily decimated my tomato garden – and I would gladly give up all the fat, red tomatoes out there now to have her back, healthy and smiling again, with tomato juice dropping off her face.

I will not plant artichokes again. When people here on the Palouse assured me that artichokes can be grown as annuals, I had to try. My five plants matured well and produced several artichokes each. But instead of the large, meaty leaves I have always found at a grocery store, these home-grown artichokes had tiny, delicate leaves – and far too much of the furry, inedible “choke” at the center. I deliberately let a few of the mature artichokes go to seed in their garden bed, to see the deep purple flower emerge from the center of each plant. I have found a lesson in those dramatic purple flowers: If an impetuous gardener has patience, beauty and joy can come even after a disappointment.

Impetuous gardeners: Get yourself organized before the cold weather arrives

September 17, 2011

The first of the fall plants and flower bulbs that I ordered from garden catalogs arrived this week, which makes my Autumn To-Do List more urgent. Impetuous gardeners love ordering and buying new treasures, but we also need to do some planning to keep our new plants and bulbs alive and happy over the winter. It’s not only possible to be both impetuous and organized – it’s crucial. I learned the value of the organized half of the equation one freezing January day years ago, when we lived in the Seattle area. I still remember kneeling on the frosted dirt in our garden, hand-digging a new tulip bed for the bulbs that had arrived months earlier. My hands were stiff and bluish-red; the ground was unyielding, and the bulbs seemed to multiply with each new hole I managed to hack out. Those frigid hours were the worst gardening day I have ever had – until I imagined a sub-zero January afternoon. putting my tulip and daffodil bulbs to bed here in northern Idaho.

So now, while the days hover in that perfect harmony between summer and fall, make time to deal with the garden projects that won’t wait until Thanksgiving. Take a walk around your yard and garden, carrying a small notebook, and write down what needs to be done soon. (May the Garden Goddess walk with you, and may your list be shorter than mine.) Before I can plant the newly arriving tulip and daffodil bulbs, I have to dig new garden beds. I will finish that project by next week. The other must-do on the list is to finish weeding the final small patch of tall grass and weeds in our side yard. I have big plans for that yard, but, until it is fully weeded, there will be no orchard or spring vegetable garden. I’ll get that done this weekend.

On days when I don’t have time for a four-hour gardening workout, I’ve been doing more manageable – and more fun – projects from my list. Recently I planted pansies and Lenten roses (hellebores) in our front-porch planter, and more pansies in the patio planters. Looking outside when the November chill creeps in, and seeing blooming flowers, will remind me of the continuity of the seasons and the beauty that’s always in our lives.

Another small project on my list is harvesting seeds from my bloomed-out perennials. I have separate envelopes for sweet pea, delphinium, columbine, and poppy seeds. Our across-the-fence neighbor has offered hollyhock seeds, which originally scattered onto her side of another neighbor’s fence. I love the idea of drawing our neighborhood closer through a pattern of shared flowers. Collecting seeds from my own flowers and, in turn, offering them to our many neighbors will be a small way of thanking them for the welcome they have given Lee and me in our first year in Moscow.

Also on my list is transplanting the flower starts I have grown from seed over the summer. Columbine, sweet william, snapdragons and verbascum (mullein) will have special places in my garden beds. I’m so proud of all those little guys for actually growing and have even bigger plans for seed-starting next spring. For impetuous gardeners, a truly successful to-do list needs the option of delegating certain items, preferably to someone stronger, taller, more patient, and less afraid of heights. (Somebody has to get on a ladder to refill the bird feeders high in our hawthorn tree.) At our house, those requirements automatically disqualify my three garden staff members. Rags, our Old English sheepdog, is shorter and less patient than I – Why not just rip out the rosebushes and eat the petals? Kaylee, our golden retriever, is less agile from arthritis than I am, stubborn as a Moscow mule, and even more afraid of heights. And Benjamin BadKitten, although fierce, powerful, regal, and fearless in his own mind, has not yet mastered the use of a spade or gardening gloves.

My husband, however, is stronger, taller, and far more patient than I, and he is not afraid of heights. (Did I mention that he’s patient?) So he and I have talked about delegating some of the items on my list to him: He will rent a big honker of a rototiller to plow up the newly weeded west garden; he’ll transplant the bigger trees and shrubs, and he is the official refiller of the bird feeders.

A reminder from the Garden Goddess helps me find joy among all my gardening fiascoes

Although autumn doesn't begin until Wednesday, I've already started my end-of-season ritual, which I call taking down the gardens. I cut down all the bloomed-out perennials, do some weeding as I move on my knees through the beds, and note the spots where there's room for more plants. Normally I enjoy the tradition that marks the changing seasons. But this September, even as I glory in the newly red, yellow and bronze leaves on our maple tree, I'm feeling tinged with blue. None of my gardens – the flower beds or, especially, the vegetable patches – reached their typical standards this summer. Faithful readers might be wincing in sympathy, because they know my vegetable growing skills are pathetic at best. Acknowledging a drop-off this season takes us into negative numbers. For an impetuous gardener like me, whose heaviest yield of beans, for example, was barely two cups in 2014, it's time for a therapy session with the Garden-Goddess.

During this spring and summer of drought and smoke, I picked enough toothpick-skinny stalks to make one side dish. Total. The rest of the stalks seemed to go seed nearly as fast as they emerged. Asparagus roots are shallow and shouldn't be disturbed by annual fall rototilling, so my husband covered them with a generous blanket of compost last fall. But we had no asparagus soup, fettuccine tossed with steamed stalks, or roasted asparagus with sun-dried tomatoes. We also composted and rototilled a raised bed before I planted sugar snap peas – usually my old reliables, happily climbing their netting and yielding fat pods of sweet, raw peas. This year the quail helped thin the seed rows, and the plants that survived apparently feared for their lives every day. Few of them showed the moxie to thrive.

The bean plants bagged out early, although, compared to the rest of the veggie slackers, they're this year's champs. By combining this summer's harvests of the dried cannellini and red-speckled Italian beans, I'll be able to make one pot of minestrone soup, an autumn treat with homemade bread. The broccoli bed, for which I had high hopes when I planted the little seedlings in June, never recovered from an early onslaught by the neighborhood bunny. Those plants faced a further handicap, as did the tomatoes, when I allowed volunteer sunflowers to grow to full height in their beds. The tomatoes tough enough to grow and ripen also developed skins tough enough to use for belt-making. Of course, the three indefatigable zucchini plants cranked out their squash all summer long, no matter how little care I gave them. Many thanks to readers who took pity on me and sent recipes starring the fabulous Zs, encouraged me to donate my surplus to local food banks (which I did,) and made me laugh with their own tales of green overload.

Our perennial flower beds blazed with color and texture from early spring until mid-July, when the drought and intense heat wilted most of them. Although we used drip systems in the raised beds and the backyard gardens, and I hand-watered the perennials, our water bills for June and July were stunning. Finally, the optimistic gardener within me wilted, too, and I stopped all but the most life-sustaining watering.

Lately I have heard a soft message from the Garden Goddess: Find joy in what is. Look forward to what can be. So I've been feeling thankful for the flocks of finches that perch on this summer's unexpected gift of seed-bearing sunflowers outside my window. The little birds, yellow, gray and white, dangle upside down from the flower heads, selecting their seeds, cheeping happily and calling out to their pals to join them for lunch. I find joy and gratitude every time I stop to watch Rags, our frail Old English sheepdog, slowly make his way down the patio steps and raise his head toward the sun and the breeze. And I'm happy – bemused, but happy – that my chief garden staffer, Tessa the Vague, has found my lap after 14 years and uses it as a safe place for being petted and praised. One day soon, I'm sure, she will remember where the garden is and join me in welcoming a new season. (Benjamin BadKitten, her deposed predecessor, offered to draw her a neighborhood map. The map used his own muddy paw prints to bypass the garden entirely and point the most direct way to the nearby house where two big dogs live. My BadKitten still seems to have a few issues with the staff changeover.)

I'm stepping out of the garden today to a doggone tale at a Texas truck stop

This is a story about goodness, not gardens. I wish I had asked the couple's names, but the story's telling happened on the fly at Moscow Building Supply this week. I was at the front of the store when a small, cream-colored dog with curly fur trotted up to me and seemed to smile as it sniffed my ankles. A man hurried up to me, thanked me for catching the escapee (who had bounded out of the car without a leash,) and scooped the little guy into his arms. I gave the dog a final pat, smiled at the man and his wife and went out to the parking lot.

I hadn't reached my car when the couple and their curly cutie approached me again. “Found him at a truck stop in Texas,” the man said. “There was nobody and nothing around except the truck stop owner, who said the dog had been hanging around for four days and nobody had claimed him. A storm was blowing up and it was getting cold. I tried to catch him, but he wouldn't come to me, so I flagged down a car that pulled in and asked if they'd help me catch my dog.” His dog. I could see where this was going, and already felt the tears slipping out.

“The woman in the car said she'd help. She was little, like you,” he told me, “She got out of the car and knelt down and just put out her hand, and that dog went right to her. He was dirty and sick – and I didn't look too good myself. I'd been driving a lot of hours, hadn't shaved, my white shirt was dirty...” The long-hauler gently picked up the little dog and took him all the way home to his wife. They found good veterinary care to treat the dog's diagnosed prostate infection. “He was just peeing all the time, and I think maybe that's why somebody dropped him off at the truck stop. They just couldn't take care of him,” the dog's rescuer said.

“I sure didn't want a damn poodle,” he said. His plan was to get the dog bathed and healthy, and then find him a home within a week. I couldn't help grinning. And how long ago was that? I asked. He and his wife both laughed. “About ten years,” he said, “and nobody could take him away from me now.” I said they were wonderful people, and their dog was a very lucky guy. We waved to each other as we went to our cars, but I didn't turn on the engine right away. I had to keep wiping my eyes for awhile. In my mind, I kept seeing a small, abandoned dog, hungry, sick, and shivering, dumped like trash at a truck stop in Texas. His fur must have been badly matted and his hope nearly gone. Maybe his former owner was a man who scared him – or worse – because the little guy prefers women, the rescuer's wife told me, smiling. Ten years down, it's more than clear there's one man that well fed, fluffy and confident little dog trusts and adores.

Many of the faithful readers of this column love animals as much as I do. I hope this happy ending warmed your heart as much as it did mine. So let's just rock on with another animal update, involving a milestone birthday for a beloved member of the Rozen menagerie. Benjamin BadKitten turned ten years old on Labor Day, the least appropriate holiday imaginable for my chief-garden-staffer-in-exile. He was fired for doing no labor in my garden (except for using it as his personal privy.) He has no chores for which he is responsible in our home, but excels at creating more work for me. (Vacuuming cat hair off his chair, cleaning up when his sensitive tummy cannot digest a mouse, sweeping up the leaves he brings in from outdoors.)

For all his flaws, Benjamin's value to our family shines when he's with our frail and elderly Old English sheepdog, Rags. This week, my husband and I were reading in the living room when I whispered, “Look at those two.” Rags lay on the rug, with his shaggy chin resting on top of Benjamin's head. BBK was sprawled across Rags' front paws, offering friendship and comfort, and willing to lie patiently while the big guy used him as a pillow. This is one of the reasons I tell the beloved birthday cat that he is the best little BadKitten that ever there was.

Not even fall yet, but let's just put my garden to bed right now. (And what has the BadKitten taught my chief garden staffer?)

Author's note: Today, September 7, 2015, is a major holiday at our house. Benjamin BadKitten is ten years old and celebrating his Labor Day birthday by committing no labor whatsoever.

I eagerly ripped off the August calendar page this week. It's time to move forward from heat and smoke into the red, gold and bronze of September. On Tuesday morning I smiled at the back-to-school photos of children on Facebook, carrying new backpacks and wearing still-spotless sneakers. With a mix of joy and melancholy, I thought of our son and daughter decades ago, as they paused at their classroom doors and looked back at me with wobbly smiles before they took the next steps to becoming big kids.

The beginning of the school year is more of a red-letter marker for me than New Year's day – filled with plans, important dates and deadlines, long to-do lists, and a shift from afternoons in my garden to longer writing sessions at my computer. And there is a cozy attic room in my mind that I've already peeked into. I store holiday memories in there: the golden fragrance of a fat turkey roasting, an autumn centerpiece on our holiday table, set with my grandmother's china, and the laughter of three generations of family waiting for pumpkin pie with extra whipped pie. Then, quickly, the door opens farther to the bright glow of the holiday lights my husband hangs from the eaves and weaves through our shrubbery, the green scent of the Christmas tree that touches our ceiling, bright wrapping paper and ribbons on the table, and the joyous rush of rehearsals for our church's Christmas pageant, which I write and direct. Ideas for that pageant script already have floated down from the attic room and taken center stage in my mind, because a cast of kids, from preschoolers to high school, will expect roles that reflect their personalities, show their humor and goodness, and include their requests for a slightly creative gathering in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve.

This year I'm more willing than usual to start shutting down my gardens for a long dormancy. The summer drought and wildfire smoke not only affected my vegetable and flower beds, but my own confidence, too. I made some big mistakes this summer, the result of impetuous gardening, and am feeling quite discouraged. By allowing volunteer sunflower seeds to sprout and grow in the tomato and broccoli beds, I ruined the possibility of successful crops. (With my history of vegetable gardening, the “possibility” of success is as definite as I can hope for.) Our neighbors' gardens seem to have thrived through the heat and smoke. This week my husband attended a meeting with a friend of ours, who asked him to bring me one of her home-grown tomatoes. It was a Brandywine, I think, and so plump, juicy and gorgeous that I wanted to keep it as horticultural art. But we ate it as the star of a dinner salad, and I savored every tangy-sweet bite. It wasn't easy, because I kept comparing that perfect tomato to the thick-skinned, pallid little orange golf balls I'd harvested from my own plants.

It's me, of course. I am apparently not equipped with the combination of self-discipline, preparation and follow-through that healthy veggie crops require. I've used red plastic, wrap-around trays to aid watering and warmth for the tomatoes, and found no difference between the red-trayed wonders and the ones I allowed to go commando. I've let big, skulking sunflowers invade the beds, because I love feeding birds and find joy in the cheerful flower heads. (Being able to grow a big-honker-anything, even a sunflower that could grow in gravel, is a cheap ego booster.) I let the neighborhood bunny use our veggie beds as an all-you-can-eat buffet, because I can't imagine not feeding a hungry little animal. (Just ask the squirrel that hangs out in our apple tree, for whom I regularly buy big bags of unsalted raw peanuts.)

My personal staff has not helped to raise the garden odds in my favor, either. I employ a frail and elderly Old English sheepdog (retired now, but still able to pee on the grass and in the flower beds;) a chief of staff aptly named Tessa the Vague, who still has trouble finding the garden, and a chief-staffer-in-exile, Benjamin BadKitten, who poops in the blueberry bed. When I demoted Benjamin and sent Tessa up the Rozen corporate ladder, I expected a sweet companion, peaceably settled near me in the garden as I worked (but not too close, because she is not sure she is acquainted with me.) Now, after a few weeks of observing the effects of the changeover, I'm worried. On the few recent days when the fire smoke has cleared, I did some work in several gardens. Tessa knew how to find each of those locations, but I did not see her at all, even though she had followed me (in her vague, meandering way) outside. She could have set out for the side yard and ended up in Kooskia, so I slowly circled our yard, checking shrubbery, flowers, raised beds, and the compost pile (not, unfortunately, an inconceivable possibility.) I finally found her, asleep, under a chair on the patio. When she heard me approach, she blinked. “I am taking my afternoon break,” she seemed to murmur. “My new best friend Benjamin said that now that I am chief garden staffer, I am entitled to four 15-minute breaks every hour. He said you can do the math.”

When the smoke clears, I'll deal with my garden's clay soil – and my BadKitten's act of rebellion

A dirty haze from still-burning wildfires hangs over much of north Idaho as I write, and I'm making my peace with the early end of this season's garden. The double smack-down of drought and smoke has hit my flowers and vegetables hard. Most of the nearby fires reportedly started from dry lightning strikes, instead of human carelessness. But instead of muttering unpleasantries at the Garden Goddess, I've decided to use these acts of nature as excuses for this year's failures in the vegetable beds – except for the zucchini overload. The Big Zs just smirk at the smoke.

My flower gardens have hung in much longer than the veggies, but they, too, have suffered an attack of the vapors. The pansies started fainting in July, and most of the petals on the phlox, monarda, Canterbury bells, rosa campion, and verbascum have dried in the relentless heat. When the smoke clears out, I'll get an early start on digging shallow trenches along the flower beds for planting bulbs this fall. I'll also re-dig a couple of beds that tanked last spring. Instead of the bright mix of tulips and daffodils I expected, glowing red, purple, yellow and pink in the April sunshine, only a few spindly daffs and a couple of grumpy tulips pushed up through the soil. I'm learning never to underestimate the amount of clay clumping up my gardens. We impetuous gardeners believe that a one-time pass with a rototiller will produce crumbly black gold forever. This has not happened, so I'll also amend the soil this fall with bags of anything promising “clay buster.”

In this summer of drought and smoke, I've been especially grateful for the flocks of finches that perch at our bird feeder and then head to the nearby birdbath for a drink and a splash. I watch these beautiful little creatures of feathers and song from my kitchen window, noting the way they share the perches, and I make sure to freshen their water regularly. The recent day when I walked into our living room and found a scattering of finch feathers on the rug was a painful reminder that I live with a passive-aggressive BadKitten. Except for a couple of small acts of rebellion, my former chief garden staffer had handled his demotion pretty well, I thought. But my black and brown Maine coon cat is a wily beast. He foxed me while I struggled to bring his replacement, Tessa the Vague up to speed on her new duties.

“Speed” is not a word I typically use with Tessa. Her thought process– a vacant stare, followed by a long (really long) pause, until, finally, tentative comprehension dawns is not speedy. Neither is her gait, a stumbling, sideways clunk. So I streamlined her duties: When I'm working in the garden, I told her, come outside and find me, no matter how long the search takes. Then keep me company for awhile, before you wander away on your mission to find the kitchen steps again. Now I'm afraid the week-long disruption of her training, because of the smoky air, might have taken us back to point zero. (And with Tess, point zero goes back a good stretch.)

While my attention was diverted, the BadKitten plotted. He had not caught a bird since Mother's Day, and I hadn't seen him anywhere near the bird feeder in weeks. I've gotten used to his presence indoors – a large, furry mound, asleep on the flowered armchair near his buddy, Rags, our Old English sheepdog. But I should never doubt my BadKitten's IQ. Unlike his adopted aunt Tessa's blank gaze, Benjamin's green eyes gleam with intelligence. Apparently, he felt unappreciated (without bothering to consider for what, exactly, he deserved appreciation,) and decided to remind me that a demoted BadKitten is a dangerous BadKitten. When I discovered the feathers, I also saw my Maine coon cat lying on the rug nearby, front paws crossed, halo slightly askew. “Too bad your slacker of a chief garden staffer wasn't guarding the bird feeder,” he seemed to purr as he regarded the feathers. “Such a mess. The vacuum cleaner's in the hall closet.”

My flowers are grateful dead-heads and I find quiet joy in caring for them

Late August, 2011

It can be easy for impetuous gardeners to get discouraged in late summer, when we realize that our flowers have faded and our once-blooming beds are showing only dried stems and bare spots. In late August, I felt a pang of sadness when I looked out over my suddenly scruffy garden. The fragrant phlox blossoms had dried out in the relentless heat. Only a few petals still clung to the once-dramatic dark blue delphiniums. The roses were drooping, and even the spunky pansy plants had grown leggy and pale.

I knew it was time to give all my perennial flowers a thorough dead-heading. Over a weekend, I snipped off dead flowers to encourage more blooms, cut down some exhausted plants and thanked them for their months of color, pulled weeds, and removed dried leaves and spindly growth from the forget-me-nots and violas that border the flower beds.

I also spent time snipping 12 million dead blooms off the pansies I had planted in patio containers in May. I moved the containers next to the chair where I sit on the patio while Rags, our Old English sheepdog, eats breakfast and dinner. He will not eat unless I sit beside him, encouraging and praising him. Last week, while he nibbled away at his kibble, I dead-headed tiny pansy blossoms – and both of us were happy.

The front yard gardens look perkier now, just as many of us look more presentable after a long-delayed haircut. But after all the cutting-back and dead-heading, the beds’ new bare spots made me sad. I love looking out the kitchen window and seeing the flower gardens filled with blooms – a blowsy, exuberant splash of color.

I have grown flowers for many years. Because we lived on the West Side near Seattle, I was accustomed to buying plants throughout the summer. The mild temperatures all season made it easy to plant waves of perennials. Here in north Idaho, though, I locked myself down during the high heat of mid-July until nearly the end of August, and spent no money on plants. Putting in new flowers in 90-degree days, and expecting them to enjoy baking in the sun, seems mean-spirited.

Now that the calendar will turn to September, I want my flower garden to reflect the colors of autumn: russet, gold, pumpkin, and deep purple. (I have included deep purple in the fall color palette because our Idaho sky often turns to indigo after sunset.) So, after uncharacteristic self-restraint in July and August, I have bought some perennials for my September gardens. I’ve added more monarda, and phlox to fill the bare spots where I dead-headed all the spent blooms and cut down the perennials whose flowering season is over for the year.

I also bought plants to christen the wonderful five-tiered garden box my husband built in our side yard. Purple penstemon and stokesia, orange and gold rudbeckia, and trailing lavender bellflowers will mix with autumn chrysanthemums and pansies there. If I can find an autumn shade of miniature rosebush, I will plant one for drama in the box’s top tier.

Dead-heading the flowers, planting the new bed, hand-watering the garden, refilling the bird bath and the feeders – all bring me a quiet joy. Taking care of living things can be a sacred trust. As I work on my knees, using delicate kitchen scissors on the plants, I remember the fragility of nature, as well as its astonishing power to heal, to inspire, and to offer beauty. Those hours in acts of caretaking remind me why I not only love gardening, but why I need it in my life.

I should have been more bullish on the fertilizer

Writer's note: I wrote this in late August, 2011, when my garden rocked and the Northwest had not been hit by a double smack-down of drought and wildfire smoke.

The limits of my vegetable gardening ability are visible now, in late August. I’m thinking there might be a lesson here for those of us who have impetuous tendencies.

In June I transplanted six pumpkin plants, all of which I grew from seed, into an outdoor raised bed. Four small Cinderella (rouge de printemps variety) pumpkins are turning golden orange out there. None of these gourds shows any promise of growing plump enough to become a coach for a fairy-tale princess. I’m not sure even our neighborhood’s wild rabbit is small enough to be chauffeured from garden to garden in one of my pumpkins. Maybe our little grandsons will enjoy painting these mini-pumpkins for Halloween.

My corn patch is “representative,” a term former Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella used regularly as a euphemism for “these guys won’t be heading to the Series any time soon.” The stalks and leaves grew tall and remained dark green for the first month after their transplants from my dining-room table greenhouse. Gradually, though, they have turned a paler shade of green, far too close to chartreuse. Each stalk has produced several ears of corn, with tassels that are slowly turning brown. But the ears aren’t as plump as I’d expected, considering the plants’ spectacular start. Instead of many late-summer corn feasts for our small family, we might be down to only two rounds of hot buttered ears.

I have been faithful about watering the pumpkin and corn beds throughout our hot, dry July and August. The pumpkins, especially, are excellent nags about their need for hydration. I check my gardens every day, and, as soon as I see the pumpkin leaves drooping, I brandish my water wand and perk them up again. So it’s not a lack of watering that has caused this late-season slump. Instead, I think the curse of the impetuous gardener has struck again: a failure to follow through. Specifically, I think I should have relied less on the excellent compost I worked into each bed’s topsoil in June, and added actual fertilizer as the plants matured. (Having written the previous sentence, I am only too aware of the possibilities for some people who read this comment regularly to respond with variations of: “Man, she slings it every week in print. You’d think she could spread a little in her garden, too.”) Fire away, my friends.

Two vegetable beds have been a total success. I’ve been adding thin slices of fresh fennel and Italian basil, grown from seed, to salads this summer, and will soon have home-grown celery. In the same bed are three zucchini plants, which have been pumping out gourds as fast as I can give them away. (Note to self: Next year, plant one zucchini seed. If it doesn’t germinate, say a fervent thank-you to the Garden Goddess.)

The other rockin’ bed is planted with carrots and a small, late-season crop of sugar snap peas. The carrots are not yet ready for picking, but their fern-like tops wave to me every day when I walk by and encourage them. (Recently, I have been getting Facebook messages, asking about the carrots’ estimated maturity date. The sender’s screen name is Petercot N. Tail. I have no plans to “friend” him.)

My lettuce patch is less productive than I’d planned, thanks in part to a cute, long-eared bandit who hops away after sampling the greens. But there is still time to do a second planting. After I sowed the first lettuce seeds in June, my original schedule called for successive plantings in July and August. Instead, I spent most of that time getting our downstairs apartment ready for the arrival of our daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons – and then playing with the little boys, ages five and three, when they moved in.

Although I’m occasionally buying lettuce at the farmer’s market or grocery store, instead of picking my own every night, I would not trade one minute of grandma time for the finest garden in Idaho. It’s an excellent trade-off, one I’m sure impetuous gardeners (and loving grandparents) would approve. This is another lesson, I think. If we reach the point where we start placing our gardens, or any other avocation, before the relationships in our lives, maybe it’s time to step away from the bag of fertilizer and go read a story to, have tea with, or send a card to someone we care about.

My garden staff takes a vague turn– Does trouble lie ahead?

I'm ready to flap a half-wave at our long summer of heat, drought and savage fires, and welcome autumn, but we still have another month to go. The shriveled state of my own vegetable and flower gardens is not important when people's beloved homes, possessions and land lie scorched and blackened, and smoke hangs over north Idaho like a dirty shroud, turning the setting sun an eerie red. Maybe the Garden Goddess will show some mercy and send us milder days, cooler nights and – should I even risk the jinx? – rain. We don't need just a few minutes of rainfall from a burst thundercloud, but some good, long soakings.

I've cut way back on watering this month, knowing my perennial flowers will have the winter to rest and rebloom next spring. I've surrendered my hopes for the broccoli, asparagus and sugar snap peas, and donated the final (I hope) picking of zucchini to a local food bank. Only the beans and the spindly but spunky tomato plants are still getting regular water. This week I've found one ripening cherry tomato and more than six green ones hanging on in the shadow of their bed mates, the water-hogging sunflower plants. Lately my garden time has focused on dead-heading flower stalks and offering orientation sessions to my new chief garden staffer.

Tessa the Vague, a 14-year-old peach, white and gray calico cat who makes Winnie the Pooh, a “bear of little brain,” look like a Rhodes scholar, earned the job by showing astonishing initiative. This sweet-natured feline needed three years to understand and process the complex workings of the cat door, but once she figured it out, Tessa's world expanded. Now it includes our backyard, the side yard with its raised vegetable beds, and the front yard flower gardens. She, who used to cower under the bed for days, now is often the last of our three cats to come inside after dark. She turns up her nose at the indoor cat box and pees in the outdoor dirt, because she is rugged cat of action, with an important job and many responsibilities. The fact that she has no idea what a “job” is– and would tremble if she understood the implication of “responsibilities” – is fine with me, her immediate supervisor and personnel manager.

I listened to readers who emailed me or posted comments on my Impetuous Gardener blog and hired Tessa the Vague (even though, technically, she didn't actually apply to be my new chief garden staffer.) I chose her because she showed real moxie (without, of course, having a clue what she was doing) and, most important, because she is not Benjamin BadKitten. While her predecessor, who is still-pouting, entered daily napping/meditating/snoring triathlons over the summer, Tess often wandered out to the garden where I was working. She kept her distance from me – unlike BBK, who tended to set up camp on my lap – and observed me with a steady, unblinking stare, which could be interpreted as “I will learn deep green truths from you, mistress of the garden.” The more accurate message is “Have we met? Do you happen to know where I was going? Or why I was going there? Is there a map?”

I'm not sure I would even have considered Tessa as garden staff material until my friend Bill Payne of Moscow, a longtime reader and major fan of Him Who Must not Be Named, suggested it. He thought my BadKitten might benefit from being relieved of his duties, at least temporarily, while I gave Tessa a shot at the big time. When I broached this idea in a column, many of you agreed . And now, here we are, me with a new chief staffer whose elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor,as my grandma used to say.

And what about Benjamin? He is, as he promised, spending more time with his best buddy, Rags, our frail Old English sheepdog. In fact, Ben is showing so much patience and compassion that he modestly suggested I describe him as the Mother Teresa of neutered male Maine coon cats. Already, though, I'm seeing ominous signs of passive-aggressive response after I followed through on my threat to demote him, as a reader predicted: “I would suggest that Benjamin BadKitten be retained here on a provisional status (rather like probation) this year,” Cathy Willmes wrote. “He should be informed that qualified applicants are standing by to fill his shoes (or paws,) should he slack off on his duties. This way, he can preserve his important dignity – and, if demoted, who knows what really bad behavior could ensue?”

Already, in the first week of Tessa's new tenure, Benjamin has taken over her favorite sleeping spot in the living room. Twice he pooped in the blueberry bed, squeezing his abdominal girth through the decorative wires of the small fence I set up to keep varmints out. I've been taking special care of those blueberry bushes all summer, and my favorite varmint knows it. When I suggested to my new chief staffer that she patrol the blueberry bed for BBK sightings, Tessa blinked at me. “Who is this BadKitten of which you speak? Is there a photo?” They have lived together for ten years. I feel a headache coming on.

Readers' blog comments and emails helped decide choice for my chief garden staffer

No wonder business people say personnel issues rank among their greatest challenges.

Advertising for the job, sorting the resumes, interviewing the most qualified applicants, and making the final hiring decision can all be stressful – and they're dealing with human beings. Imagine how stress levels would rocket into the red zone if the only employment choices were a couple of cats. This – the cat factor – is the muddle I faced as I considered a shakeup in my garden staff.

My current chief staffer, Benjamin BadKitten, a black and brown Maine coon cat, has four years' experience on the job, but this summer he has mostly been a no-show, in daylight hours, at least. He has developed a paunch but no new level of maturity. He still poops in the garden beds, clambers onto my lap while I'm planting or weeding, and demands unlimited attention. Lately, he has been spending more and more time sprawled near his best buddy, our elderly Old English sheepdog, Rags. Those two bonded from the moment we brought Ben home as a tiny kitten. Our normally rambunctious young sheepdog laid a gentle paw on Benjamin's tail, licked his little kitten face, and seemed to smile. The baby BadKitten returned the affection, and this odd couple is still devoted to each other nearly ten years later.

The other applicant is our 14-year-old calico, Tessa the Vague, who stumbled – literally – into consideration when she finally learned to use the cat door. She tripped going down the steps and ended up in the flower garden. She blinked her lovely, jade green eyes, as luminous and empty as marbles, and cautiously tiptoed through the phlox. Unfortunately I was watering the phlox at the time, and by the time Tessa mentally connected the dots between the garden hose and the water lapping about, her paws were soaked and her cognitive capacity had maxed out.

See why I asked you faithful readers to help me decide between those two? And you really did help. Below are some of your thoughts, sent in emails or comments on my Impetuous Gardener blog:

A former personnel manager, who reads my blog from her home in Iowa, wrote: “Tessa sounds like a good companion...but Benjamin may need to up his game to keep his spot as chief staffer. I might need to know the qualifications of your staff positions to make a more effective choice. Is there any need of guarding the garden? Or...knowing where it is? These are important considerations."

 

With Tessa in the competition, knowing where the garden is becomes a crucial requirement. As for guarding the garden, early this summer Benjamin cowered in the pea patch while a pair of quail checked out the newly planted beans and sampled the seeds. (Of course, I'm not at all sure Tessa is even aware of the winged, flying species.)

Patricia Raamot of Pullman succinctly captured my dilemma: “I think Benjamin is out. Why is he lying around so much? The heat? Has he seen a vet? Tessa sounds hopeless. Regarding the zucchini, [Writer's note: I often complain about my zucchini,] I suggested the food bank two years ago. I am 79, and paying $1 for two skinny ones in the store is silly. If I lived in Moscow, I would be over. (In Pullman, no transportation.)” She also included a tasty-sounding recipe for zucchini, which I think even my husband will like.

Anne Shearer, president of the Moscow Garden Club and her kitty, Minnie, both voted for Benjamin. “Tessa sounds like she is too vague, and we feel she isn't really up to the demands of the position. “

Ginny McConnell of Troy wrote, “One more in the plus column for at least a temporary position for Tessa the Vague as Chief Garden Staffer. The BadKitten is needed as a support for his buddy Rags, who now needs him more than ever. He doesn't have time to supervise a garden, as well. Possibly that is the reason he has neglected it. ( I'm putting a positive spin on his laziness!). You know I'm a BIG fan of the BadKitten, but I think it would be a great lesson to him if he were replaced, even if temporarily, by the slow-learning but extremely accommodating Tessa. It should inspire him to try to gain back his old position. When a baseball closer is blowing saves, he is replaced until the manager thinks he has gotten his form back. Benjamin has taken his role for granted and abused it. He needs to be taught this valuable lesson. (And it will add another character to your narrative – how fun! We will get to know Tessa, who has a completely different personality from Ben's. I can only imagine the conniving BadKitten pulling stunts to sabotage Tessa's reign.)"

 

Truer words have seldom been written, BadKitten-wise.

Benjamin trailed early, but his fans poured it on this week to make the final vote very close. The following dictated statement announces the outcome:

 

 “I, Benjamin BadKitten, have begun a voluntary sabbatical leave from the high-stress duties of my permanent position as Chief Staffer of the Rozen Gardens. Although I have been maligned in print, my sabbatical will center on spending more time with my family (all traitors, except my sheepdog.) I wish that dodo-brained interloper, Tessa the Vague, all kinds of luck (she'll need it.) I will, of course, do everything I can to subvert – I mean support – her as she bumbles around in the garden where I have popped and peed for four years. It's mine, and I will return!”