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This turf, overturned,
awaits autumn’s deposits,
seed money for spring.

Recently, the Dow Jones has gone up or down by hundreds of points every day. It seems dramatic. It seems important, if only because important people seem to think that it’s important, because wealthy people worry about it.

As for me, I worry less about what the stock price for Google is than I worry about how I’m going to continue to feed my family given the fragile state of the businesses I work in.

When the paper economy is fragile, we need to turn to something more solid. We need to look to the ground again.

It’s the ground that’s the real foundation of wealth. The stock market is just a far removed symbolic representation of that. It’s from the ground that the food we eat grows, from which we get the most basic energy we need. We can’t drink gasoline. We can’t eat electricity.

It’s the autumn of the year. Leaves are falling down, and all over the country, people are raking up those leaves and putting them on the curb.

I suggest an alternative: Turn the leaves in. If you’ve got a bit of ground, open it up, and dig the leaves into it instead of throwing them away like garbage. Throw some old tomatoes in, or some squash gone bad. They’ve got seeds in them, and they’ll grow next year. Toss in some potatoes that have started to grow roots in your cupboard. It’s just a small source of wealth that most Americans aren’t working at any more, but when 350 million people abandon even a small source of wealth, it adds up to a big loss.

Those leaves that fall from the trees around us contain a real wealth that we could nourish us through hard times next year. Turn them in instead of throwing them out.

Picking up a copy of March’s Martha Stewart Living in a waiting room this morning, I flipped it open to page 27, where Stewart’s From My Home To Yours column talks about how much she just loves working in her big new glass greenhouse, which is the size of most people’s apartments. I’m pretty sure that greenhouse will not be coming to my house from hers any time soon.

Stewart writes, “I love gardening in my new greenhouse - whether I’m sowing seeds, misting seedlings, or watering or feeding plants, every moment there is a joy.”

Every moment is a joy? Anybody who is really doing gardening for themselves would never say such a thing - not even in a posh glass greenhouse. I suppose if you have a staff of assistants hired to follow through on your whimsies of inspiration, doing the tedious tasks for you, then every moment in which you get to pretend to be a gardener by misting a seedling might be “a joy”.

For me, gardening is not about being joyful at every moment. It’s about working hard on something concrete so that I can enjoy the results later. Gardening is about knowing that many things I try won’t work out. Most of all, it’s about doing the work myself.

The only way that every moment in your garden will be a joy is if you’re on drugs - and if that’s true, then you won’t be a successful gardener. Gardening, like life, is realistically enjoyed when it is regarded as a pursuit of fulfillment in spite of setbacks - not a ritual activity of goodness and purity and never-ending vitality.

As the old saying has it, people who live in glass greenhouses should not throw stones. Then again, it’s Martha Stewart who lives in the glass greenhouse. My garden is in the open air, so the next time I dig up a big stone, I feel free to give it a toss.

I don’t mean this as a withering critique, literally or figuratively, but the writers at Horticulture Magazine seem to have a penchant for uninformative titles for their garden blog entries. An example:

Tip of the Week: Transform Your Water Feature into a True Oasis

Is it a common mistake for people to try to make a water garden into a false oasis?

The Horticulture blog does lead me to a more interesting spot, however: Moss Acres, a place that sells live moss for gardeners to grow. I love moss myself, and am happy to see it growing well in the woods in back of my home.

But why, I wonder, does Moss Acres only sell four kinds of moss? As someone who has read Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I know that there are many more interesting species of moss than that.

A tip for lovers of moss: Look at what you’ve already got. Moss has a good way of drifting in on the wind. It may not be at all necessary for you to order any by mail.

Like I said yesterday, times are getting hard and the forecast is for even harder times. It’s time to get smart and start preparing.

With the dollar going down and inflation rising, saving money in a bank account, or in a the stocks of a questionable corporation doesn’t seem to be a reliable preparation for severe economic troubles. Try investing in a more physically grounded investment. I’m not talking about gold. I’m talking taters. It is the year of the potato, after all.

Potatoes bring the most kind of real income - food coming into your kitchen. There are no taxes on your tubers when you harvest a tater, because they’re not currency. Potatoes are pure wealth.

My advice is to get some potatoes in the ground now, if you have any land at all in which to plant them - or even just a balcony that gets some sun. Get a potato patch started, and you’ll have something to fall back on in future rough patches.

Growing potatoes is easy to do. Go to the store, and look for potatoes that have started to sprout new roots. Bring them home, and dig up a patch of dirt (or put soil in a big pot if you’re doing the balcony garden). Cut each potato up into two or three pieces, then put them in the ground, covering them up with a few inches of soil. Don’t worry about watering them at first. Let the rain do that later - it’s actually a good thing if the potatoes aren’t in very wet soil when they’re first planted.

Then, just wait for a few months. The potatoes will sprout roots underground, and send shoots up into the sunlight. What you’ll see of the plants will look vaguely like tomatoes, but the leaves will be broader, coarser, and a deeper shade of green. Potatoes and tomatoes come from the same group of plants - a group that also includes deadly nightshade, with its little purple fruits.

Just watch the potato plants grow all season long, and then, when the green part of the plants die back, turning brown in the late summer sun, it’s time to dig up the tubers. The potato plant has been spending its time sending energy from the green leaves underground, forming new potatoes.

Dig from the edge of the clump, so that you won’t cut too many potatoes in two, but don’t worry about it when you do cut apart some potatoes with your shovel. Just throw those back into the ground for next year. Don’t try to get all the potatoes either. A sustainable harvest will leave some potatoes to grow the next year. Potatoes will survive year-to-year left in the ground in most places, even in places that get cold with a lot of snow, although you could always take some of your harvest and set aside to plant the next spring, just in case.

Plants get diseases, just like animals do. So, it may happen that your potato patch gets devastated by a blight at some point. That’s what caused the infamous potato famine a while back in Ireland. However, if you have some diversity in the kinds of potatoes you plant, then you ought to be able to avoid that problem. Check out sources like Ronniger Potato Farm and Heirloom Acres for different varieties, including heirloom breeds.

A potato patch in a good location should be able to grow larger with every passing year, without any additional financial investment. So, start now to make yourself a little starchy parachute - just in case.

A reseeding annual, allowed to reseed, is an act of subversion. Corporate garden seeds are hybrids, crossed and crossed to provide one year’s robust growth, and then an astounding lack of fertility afterwards. They’re like a come on with nowhere to come to.

Last year, I broadcast California poppy seeds in a new garden bed in the front of my house. I got a few plants from those seeds, which then produced a huge number of new plants that are sprouting this spring - more than can actually grow in the space where they are growing.

If I had followed corporate garden advice, I would have “cleaned up” my flower bed in the autumn, and that would have resulted in removing a lot of poppy seeds from the bed, turning over the soil with no roots left in it to hold the earth together, thus allowing seeds and soil alike to be washed away. Would I have had so many California poppies growing this year?

I certainly wouldn’t have had enough seedlings to allow me to thin and redistribute them as I did yesterday, taking poppy seedlings back to this year’s new flower bed, a patch of hardy plants like mint, lily of the valley, Japanese iris, chives and yarrow that is growing where last year there was only lawn.

I will not need to cultivate this new bed. Perennials and self-seeding annuals will establish dominance quickly, and not allow more weeds than can be pulled by hand. Soon, I’ll be able to take more divisions and seedlings from that bed and put it in other areas, pushing the lawn back further.

My garden will expand without me needing to go to any garden center to buy overbred, pumped up annual flowers. As the years progress, those California poppies will become less and less like what’s available in the sealed seed packets. They’ll breed, and mix genes, and evolve locally.

No fertilizers. No pesticides. No mowing. No rototilling.

Yesterday afternoon it rained, right after I transplanted the California poppies. It was free water distilled at no charge from a puddle far away using solar energy. That may be bad for the garden supply corporations, and for Pepsi’s bottled water business, but it’s good for me.

A long while ago, I noted the avoidance in popular garden writing of the subject of plant death. Although the death of plants in a garden is as common as a blossom or fruit, we almost always hear about the living plant, and not the process of its death. Dead plants are a common natural occurence, but in the garden they are regarded as a sign of failure, or just “messy”.

Well, I’ve got a mess on my hands, then. I have written this year about my sage project - an attempt to replace large parts of my lawn by planting seeds of common sage, which eventually would be transplanted into areas where I have removed high maintenance sod.

The entire sage project was based upon my previous observations that sage grows well as a perennial in the area where I live in Upstate New York. Over the last week, I’ve made another observation. The general success of common sage in my area doesn’t guarantee success in my particular yard.

The mature sage plants I already had growing near the stone terrace next to the back of my house are dead. They are no new growth, and their branches are brittle, not supple, to to the touch.

Nearby lavender plants, and a chrysanthemum, also appear to be dead. My guess is that they suffered from some of the cold weather we had without insulating snow this winter, but I can’t really be sure. It could be disease, but the multi-species death leads me to think not.

What am I now to do with the garden sage seedlings that I planted this spring, with the idea of placing them near the sage I already had? Should I plant them in the soil, and then baby them, or just take my chances that whatever killed the sage I had was just a freak occurrence?

Let me suggest that sage and lavender as lawn replacements may not work in cooler climates such as the northeastern United States after all. Herbs that die back to the ground every year, including as bee balm, oregano, mint, chives and thyme, have survived in the same general garden area.

Yesterday, I noted the oddity of Garden Gate magazine praising siberian iris as a “pest-free” plant, but telling readers that its leaves need to be cut back to the ground in autumn to ensure that pests don’t winter over in the old foliage.

Undeterred, I continued flipping through the latest issue of Garden Gate this morning, only to come across the danger of elderberries.

Garden Gate has placed elderberries, Sambucus canadensis, on a list of “9 pests you need to identify and get rid of now!” The magazine advises,

Why you want to get rid of it now! 10 ft. tall, spreading shrub grows into a dense, messy thicket, birds eat the juicy berries in summer and spread seed, can also spread by stems that root wherever they touch the ground.”

I’m baffled by the choice of elderberries as a “pest” that gardeners need to “get rid of now”. First of all, I’ve never seen anything messy about the growth habit of elderberries. I think they’re rather elegant, especially with their broad feathery collections of white flowers, kind of like a giant queen anne’s lace.

Birds will eat elderberries right off an elderberry bush, and that’s a reason to keep them in a garden. As migrating birds suffer from ecological disequilibrium resulting from climate change, it’s important to integrate sources of food for birds flying through into our gardens. Besides, most gardeners also appreciate the beauty of birds, and want to attract them, not drive them away.

People can eat the berries too, and with the seeds strained out, they make an excellent jelly. Why would a gardener regard a good food source such as elderberries as a pest?

Finally, elderberries are a native North American species. Many gardeners are very interested in integrating native plants into their gardens, as a way of keeping some aspects of local ecology intact. Pulling out elderberries and replacing them with a hybridized nursery plant that does not bear fruit or have flowers with enough scent to attract pollinators is an unwise environmental choice.

It’s a lucky thing that birds often bring elderberries into people’s gardens all on their own. However, many plant nurseries actually sell elderberry plants, because they’re so popular with gardeners, many of whom don’t want to wait for nature to bring the plants into their gardens.

If you’re one of the few gardeners who would agree with Garden Gate, and call elderberries a nasty pest plant, then get wise. Don’t just destroy the plants. If you must remove elderberries from your garden, trade them with another gardener who is wise enough to see the advantages of growing elderberries. You’ll get a start for some other kind of plant that you want, without having to put out any money, and the elderberries will grow somewhere else where they’ll be appreciated.

I picked up a copy of Garden Gate Magazine at a friends house, and started flipping through it to see if I could gather any gardening inspiration amidst the pages of ticky tacky designs and excessive use of variegation. Alas, the only inspiration I found was inspired amusement at the pages full of bad advice.

Consider, for instance the admonishment from the magazine’s writers about the importance of cleaning up after siberian irises in the fall (Garden Gate’s editors seem to believe that any plant that does not fade away into immediate nothingness after it has put on its peak show is “messy”. The magazine advises, “Siberian irises aren’t bothered by iris borer or bacterial soft rot like bearded irises are. Instead, they’re almost disease- and pest-free. You can keep them that way by cleaning up the foliage where pests can overwinter after the plants die back in late fall.”

Wait a minute. If siberian iris don’t suffer much from “pests”, then why would there be any need to protect them from pests by “cleaning up” foliage in the autumn?

The answer is easy. There isn’t any need to do so. Siberian iris do just fine without having their old leaves cut back to the ground in the autumn, as Garden Gate urges readers to do.

So, why do the writers of Garden Gate tell people to take care of siberian irises by cutting away old leaves in the fall? Well, for one thing, the Garden Gate article wouldn’t feel complete if it didn’t give year-round advice for taking care of a plant. The Garden Gate style of gardening doesn’t regard plants as things that can mostly take care of themselves. For horticultural magazines like Garden Gate, garden plants are like pets that need to be tended and groomed.

For another thing, Garden Gate magazine seems to have an aesthetic revulsion against gardens that aren’t as neat and tidy as a furniture showroom. The magazine’s garden writers look at a natural scene and regard it as a sign of sloppiness. They can’t imagine leaves on the ground left to rot, or plants that produce considerable fruit, or plants that reproduce with the aid of a nurseryman, without shuddering.

I just so happen to have some siberian iris in my yard, and I have received at least this much inspiration from Garden Gate: I’m going to go outside now, and admire the pattern of the long, reed-like fallen leaves of last year’s growth on the plants. Then, I’ll walk away, happy in the knowledge that I won’t have to spend my time cutting back the organic material that will help to keep my garden soil rich.

The common sage seedlings had an exciting weekend, going in and out the front door in order to get some sun and be exposed to a little bit of wind. They’re growing, but they’re looking a little tossed and twisted, what with their attempts to move toward a shifting sun and their vulnerability to a gentle breeze, having been birthed in a still interior.

Before they went out for the first time, the seedlings were uniform in their stance, all about the same height, leaning in the same direction. Now they’re helter skelter individuals, bending, mixing it up.

If they had consciousness, they might be horrified to know that just a few feet from the steps where they have been sunbathing, there was a violent attack last night - against the crocus.

Just yesterday afternoon, I was admiring their light purple flowers as a sign of spring. This morning, taking my son out to meet the school bus, the flowers were all gone, the flower stalks neatly snipped down to the ground, one by one.

Deer tend to get the blame for eating plants like this, but I’m more inclined to blame the rabbits, woodchucks, or the squirrels - something with an eye close to the ground, and a brain that can’t remember that it’s the autumn crocus that has flavorful saffron for a pollen.

Next year, the bloom will be all the stronger for the brutal pruning. The crocus leaves are intact, gathering energy and now putting that energy into bulb division, rather than seed production.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the beginning of my sage project - a group of seeds of the common sage herb I’ve planted in the hopes of replacing areas of my lawn with them.

I am happy to report that almost all the sage seeds have germinated and as of this morning, are putting out their first pair of secondary leaves. The plants are already over an inch tall, and showing the thick leaves characteristic of sage.

Now comes the tricky part, however. Even on the cusp of April, it’s not safe to put these sage seedlings outside to get the strengthening springtime sun. Though sage are perennials that can withstand long winters with lots of snow and ice, I’m not confident in the ability of these youngsters to survive those conditions yet. We’re still having nighttime freezes, and the air is often taking until the middle of the afternoon to get above 32 degrees. A few excursions in the late afternoon sun may be possible now and then, on days when the wind is not strong, for what they call “hardening off”, but by and large these sage seedlings will be indoor plants until the end of May.

While the sage sprouts are comfy inside, in terms of temperature, there isn’t as much light as they’d like, even near the south-facing window where I’ve put them. For that reason, they’re growing spindly and floppy.

It’s an awkward stage in a young sage’s life. Will they survive? I have high hopes that they will, although it may take a while for them to grow out of their gawky habits.

The qualities of common garden sage are reflected in the fact that the plant is named after wisdom itself. It’s aromatic, culinary, medicinal and ornamental, growing in short perennial shrubs that bring in bees, butterflies and hummingbirds with its white or pink blossoms.

A lawn, with its grassroots, is tough. It lets us walk all over it in a way that sage would not. However, we don’t really need to walk all over every inch of the yards we cover in lawn. We don’t need to mow it all.

With that in mind, I’ve been working for the last couple of years on reducing the size of my lawn. I’ve put in a stretch of tall ornamental grass that never gets mowed, but is burned to the ground every spring. I’ve planted a group of spirea bushes. I’ve started an herb garden, based around a stone path and a line of lavender. Last autumn, I dug the beginnings of what will be a large bed of lily of the valley and mint, with a butterfly bush in the middle.

This spring, to add on to these earlier projects, I begin the sage project. Yesterday afternoon, for less than 3 dollars, I bought a pack of sage seeds - Salvia officinalis, heirloom. The envelope was from Seeds of Change, a company that promotes genetic diversity in horticulture.

By growing sage from seed, instead of from cuttings, I’m doing a little bit to see that the genetic diversity of the common sage is preserved. If I had gotten sage plants from a nursery, I’d most likely be getting clones - cuttings propagated from a single plant that had the features someone thought would make it nice for the garden. Often, the cuttings from just one plant can account for the majority of the sales of a species of plant in nurseries all across the country. At other times, seeds are the result of the carefully controlled interbreeding of hybrid strains, done in order to provoke vigor, but leaving gardeners with sterile plants themselves.

The sage from Seeds of Change are created through organic open pollination, meaning that the company has fields of sage that are never sprayed with pesticides or herbicides, so that bees, butterflies and hummingbirds can come along and feed from the nectar in the plants’ flowers, and pollinate the flowers in the process. Thus, every seed in that package of sage is genetically unique. Most of the seeds will probably grow nicely for me, but each one will be a little bit different.

I’ve planted 40 seeds inside, in small pots on a warm window sill, and have probably another 40 left for a second planting. I think I can reasonably expect to have 20 of those seeds grow successfully to a size where they can be transplanted. The trick will be keeping fungus from killing the seedlings while keeping them wet. Sunlight, with the tray of seedlings outside to be hardened off on warm afternoons, will be the best fungal disinfectant.

Those 20 sage plants will grow to just a few inches tall this year, but next year they’ll grow to be a good foot tall, with a spread of at least as much as that. In years to come, I can expect the plants to grow to perhaps a foot and a half in height, covering 3 or 4 square feet each very well. So, in a few years, I’ll have replaced between 50 and 75 square feet of grass with the sage that I have planted this morning, creating a nice sweep of good-smelling, good-looking plants that will require just a touch of weeding now and then, but never any gasoline-powered mowing. My plan is to keep the plants mulched with straw. That’s worked well in the portions of the herb bed that I already have established. Eventually, the shade produced by the sage plants themselves, combined with the natural mulch of their own fallen leaves combined with leaves fallen from nearby trees, ought to be sufficient.

Of course, there are often unexpected events in gardening, but I figure it’s worth a shot. I’ve only had to spend a few dollars on the sage project, and the time I would have spent mowing just a portion of lawn - if the weather were warm enough for the grass to grow yet.