Summer Plants in Winter

Before I moved here, too excited to think, I bought a number of tropical vines I thought would look good draped over the outside balcony.  Unfortunately the construction dragged on and by the time the vines were ready to do their spreading, they were forced to stay indoors in their dry pots and enjoy the outside world through the sterile distance of window glass. 

Not to state the obvious, but there’s something unnatural about green plants in the winter.  Firstly, they never look like they’re comfortable with the situation.  They always look a little dry and dusty, a little burned and browned around the edges.  They sit in salt stained pots, in dirty dishes that catch water.  For all the reasons we seem to want our greenery to last the winter through with us, they give us none of them. 

Maybe in our efforts to keep those plants alive, we are in a way wishing someone would take care of us.   Not necessarily allowing us to thrive, but survive the coming cold and live again to see warmer, embracing air.

In addition to my desiccated vines, I’m forcing some bulbs that are on track to be blooming by the 1^st of the year. There’s another inexact science.  I have 10 or so in a ceramic window box and another ten in an antique chamber pot.   There’s gravel in the bottom, a good deal actually, and a healthy dose of compost.  I even gathered some fresh moss to put around the top so I could make each pot ‘floral grade’.  Still, they have erupted unevenly and I wonder…is it something I’ve done?

The other day a woman drove up selling fall bulbs for her daughter’s gymnastics class.  She had the girl in tow, a malnourished, bespectacled child with tape on her glasses.  The conversation was hard as I could see that the woman was trying her best to snoop.  I bought a bag of 10 crocuses and called it a day.  I planned on putting them in between the stones of the patio, but the weather took a cold turn and there was no way to get all the bulbs in on time, so I decided to force them.

Fall bulbs like crocuses have chilling requirements, so you just can’t pot them up and expect them to sprout, they have to be exposed to a certain amount of cold first.  The pot I had was ceramic, so there was no chance I could just leave them outside.  The first freeze would expand the moist soil and crack the pot, but I didn’t want to live with a pot in my refrigerator for the next 6 weeks either, so this is what I did.

I potted them up, then put them in a box insulated with Styrofoam (it was an old vaccine shipment box I had lying around).  I then stuffed straw around the pot, closed the lid and buried it in the fresh manure pile I have next to the barn.  The manure is ‘working’ so once I dug down deep enough, I could feel the heat of the living microbes.  I placed the box in the warm hole and covered it.  This morning when I checked, the outside of the pile was frozen, but I know that inside, that pile is still working and the bulbs are probably snug in a 40 to 50 degree environment.  I’ll unearth them in early February and bring them indoors.  They’ll be perfect on a windowsill of hot, spring, white light. 

Those flowers won’t be unnatural against a white back drop of flying snow, but the first marching steps towards warmth and the summer they insist will come.