Zen and the art of NOT poisoning your bushes

Spring is finally … sort of … here and there’s no better way to start off your gardening than bleaching your lilac bushes. After a very cold, very long, very snowy, and frankly very brutal winter, we’ll call it a clean start.

My wife loves to garden, and her favorite part is growing flowers from seed, a task that starts now. This year, she’s growing about 700 flowers of about a dozen varieties. And while the big boys are still braving outdoor weather, our seedlings are breaking through into the warm confines of our sunroom. Never mind that our house looks like a budding jungle for three months. Growing seedlings is fun times.

Like anything new that grows, seedlings require a sterile environment. Sterile dirt, sterile trays, sterile grow cells. You can buy sterile dirt (of all things) but the rest is up to you. My wife sterilizes her trays and cells with a water-bleach solution in a 60-gal. bin outside by the water spigot. The bin is taller than the spigot, so you either need to fill the bin with a hose or by bucket. I didn’t want to drag out the hose just yet, so I went for a 3-gal. bucket.

Filling up a 60-gal. bin three gallons at a time is kind of like trying to put a bonfire out with a Dixie cup, but I chose the lesser of two gardening evils.

I quickly developed a rhythm to pass the time: fill bucket, mix bleach, dump in bin. Fill, mix, dump. Fill, mix, dump. By my calculations, with the gardening materials taking up room in the bin, I should have had to dump the bucket about 15 times into the bin. My mind wondered somewhere around bucket-full eight. Ironically, I was thinking about what to write for this edition’s “Happy Trails,” zoned out, completely unaware that inspiration was pooling all around me.

About 10 minutes in to the process (yes, 10 minutes), the bin was barely half-full. I broke out of whatever fugue state repetitive tasks put the mind in to find myself and the bin standing in a small, swampy pond of water, mud, and floating woodchips.

Closer inspection revealed what was, of course, obvious: the bin had a crack in the corner. I felt like I was in a comic strip, a life lesson floating somewhere on the fringe of consciousness. Maybe, you can pour water in a strainer all day long, but it’s never going to fill. Or, if the glass is half-empty, check for holes.

There was no time for budding wisdom, however, and I immediately went into emergency mode. It reminded me of when I was kid and woke my dad up from a nap (after many calm, unsuccessful attempts) on the couch by shouting, “FIRE!”

I bolted into action because the bin was positioned between three lilac bushes, expertly placed to block the unsightly view of our water spigot, gas meter, and in-ground irrigation system piping. Barebones, the lilacs aren’t doing much for aesthetics, but they’re thirsty. The last time I checked, bleach is pretty much a kill-all (except when you’re using it to treat certain shrub-related diseases). These lilacs are mature, healthy, and ready to drink whatever you pour on them.

Nature (and human error) doesn’t come equipped with child-safety mechanisms, so I dashed into the house (muddy shoes and all) and alerted my wife.
“Honey, the lilac bushes got into the bleach!”

My wife’s first response was “Call, Kathi.” She meant Sun Day “Gardeners Forum” columnist Kathleen Carr of The Growing Scene. Since moving into our house, Kathleen has become our “go-to” for all gardening questions or catastrophes, and we were in need of poison control bad, imagining three wilted and shriveled lilac bushes come summer. However, my wife and I keep the oddest hours on the planet. We’d fit right into China’s schedule. It was approaching 9 p.m. on a Sunday night (to start gardening!), and I didn’t want to ring Kathleen away from her family because I accidentally poisoned our bushes.

An idea struck. The kind of idea that only comes during times of alarm, which means it’s going to be genius or, to use today’s slang, an epic fail. Dirt transplant.

I ran to the garage. I grabbed a shovel and my aged and rusted Radio Flyer wagon from my childhood. We’re intending on turning the wagon into a decorative planter box this summer, but I pulled it into active duty early. Squeaky wheels and all, I dragged it around the side of the house, where I found my wife (all 95 pounds of her) trying to move the bin. Even at a quarter full, moving it was like trying to grab a granite countertop and run, but we managed to get the bin to the street and empty it on the road.

Back at the lilacs, the pond had settled into a mud pit, and I began to dig up the bleach-soaked muck and slap shovel-fulls into the wagon. Have you ever dug mud? No? Well there are two obstacles working against you: suction and weight. Getting the shovel in is no problem. Getting it back out and lifting it, well, that’s another story for my chiropractor. Mud is stubborn. Whoever came up with the term “fling mud” obviously never tried. Again, I’m sure there’s a life lesson in here somewhere.

Forty-five minutes later and three slow-going trips to the other side of the house where I dumped the bleached mud as if it were nuclear fallout, I was looking at a square-yard pit about a foot-and-a-half deep in one of my flower beds. The wagon was almost literally on its last wheel. And my back creaked. But the soil was amended.

It was only later that I found out a dirt transplant was probably unnecessary, which brought to mind another possible life lesson: don’t shovel mud unless you have to.

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