7. When You Ass.u.me
Life Lessons of a Backyard Gardener
I believe it was seventh grade, but don’t quote me. Sister IForgetHerName was feeling playful. And when the nun is feeling playful, you just go with it. Everyone feels a little weird and uneasy, but it is a pleasant redirection from the daily dose of fear and loathing. One day, on such an occasion, someone tried to explain that he didn’t do this or that thing because he assumed that someone else did it. Sister smiled, and wryly noted that “when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.” We were stunned. The churning waves of shock that reverberated through the room instantly engulfed and nullified the clever smirk embedded on her thin lips. Because Sister said “ass”. This just isn’t done. Our entire world was shaken. What other core principles lay on foundations of sand?
Gardens and personal ecosystems are diverse places, with many variations on common themes, as well as many different themes. Gardeners, on the other hand, tend to be creatures of habit. We come up with methods that work for us, we rinse, and we repeat. Seasons, years and decades pass, and those well-trodden procedures fossilize into our synapses. Your system for watering in July, your approach to vine borers, how you treat a rootbound transplant, your philosophy of deadheading (or not deadheading) roses – these and hundreds of other personal procedures become fixtures of your gardening life. You don’t consider other methods. Why would you? You simply assume this is the way it’s done.
When sowing seeds indoors, at least seeds of a certain size, I dampen the soil and poke holes with the tip of an old pencil, typically chosen from an exclusive clique within my pencil inventory – the venerable, timeworn veterans with woefully eroded erasers and tooth marks, whose heydays as sexy, full-service pencils expired years ago (perhaps having once been chosen for the ultimate #2 pencil experience – the SAT – which I imagine is the Super Bowl for most pencils buried in otherwise mundane jobs in home offices). I reserve such esteemed pencils for higher callings, which include my garage workshop (i.e., marking stuff to cut) or, more significantly, the garden. Using anything other than an old pencil to sow seeds would feel weird and unnatural. I have sowed seeds this way for decades. It works. When I explain seed sowing to new gardeners, I will tell them to poke holes in the soil with a pencil. Of course, I really mean “poke holes with whatever pointy object of choice that you have handy.” I never consider that some people will take me literally, scouring their junk drawers for old pencils that might not exist, assuming some unstated but necessary magic. But I just happen to collect rustic pencils and salute their service, and I assume that others can relate.
For the first forty years of my gardening life, I grew tomatoes the way my grandfather did, that is, tied to long poles or stakes. He didn’t teach me to do that. As a kid, I marveled at his manly tomato plants and surmised that he must be doing something right. I assumed. Oh, sure, I tried a few other ideas along the way... woefully undersized tomato cages… fatally restrictive cylinders of welded wire… multiple poles wed into Rube Goldberg enclosures via twelve gauge insulated wire… But none stuck. My default most years was to drive a stake into the ground and assume that it was the tried and true solution for real gardeners. After all, the spring to-do list is long. Simple, direct solutions to immediate challenges necessarily win the day most of the time, even ones with near-fatal flaws. And what is easier than driving a stake into the ground?
Fortunately, unexamined assumptions can occasionally and spontaneously combust into ash. I don’t pretend to understand the gnostic foundations of fiery inspiration – it is pure mystery. Sometimes creaky assumptions simply crash into reality head-on, as the exigencies of a particular moment reveal a crumbling house of cards that has stood only through dumb luck. We experience an “aha” moment, a moment of clarity when we finally understand the bones and infrastructure of what we have been doing for years, as if we suddenly developed x-ray vision. And we discover that the assumptions were mostly delusions, the bones hollow. We’ve been making an ass out of you and me. Well played, Sister. Well played.
Whatever the spark, one April my brain decided that there has to be a better way to support a tomato plant. I decided to escape the intellectual box, lined as it was with musty assumptions and sealed with the adhesive of mere adequacy. Thus liberated, I could begin to reconsider the challenge. How does a tomato plant want to grow, and how can I leverage that rather than battle it? I discovered the answers not in the garden section of the local big box store, but in the plumbing and building material sections – the comfort zones of my father’s ancestors. The solution did not lay in woefully inadequate and overpriced plant stakes, but in about 50 feet of PVC pipe, a collection of PVC fittings, and a couple sheets of concrete remesh – the burly wire sheets that concrete installers use to keep new driveways from cracking into pieces. After a frenzy of design and construction activity, a PVC frame structure emerged with horizontal mesh planes every eighteen inches or so -- a gangly monstrosity that only tinker toy enthusiasts could appreciate. But this is no toy. The plant grows and expands through the mesh planes, free of straggling, drooping branches, with neither ties nor other human intervention required. The plants grow much larger, so fewer are needed. Harvesting is much easier. The unit disassembles easily, as desired, for winter storage. And it will last for decades. When all of my assumptions about stakes and cages vanished, the limitations and shackles vanished with them. A new era of tomato growing had emerged.
The tomatoes were not alone. Most of what I do as a gardener has hardened into a set of specific habits. Each habit deflects a universe of alternate possibility that I implicitly reject, in many cases not for any noble cause or deep reason, but simply because my way worked at some point in the deep past -- or worse yet, someone just told me to do things a certain way, sans any rationale. And I believed them. Habits can be useful; I will sow seeds with old pencils as long as I am able to sow seeds. I have considered the possibilities and failed to discover a better alternative. But unexamined habits – habits teeming with lazy assumptions and robotic action – those are often paths to regret.
From the inconsequence of sowing seeds with hoary old pencils, to decades of substandard tomato supports, my garden life is filled with assumptions of all shapes and sizes. Assumptions inadvertently lead to habits, and our habits tend to enslave us. We need to choose our masters more deliberately, more wisely. Fortunately, habits of the garden rarely bear any true consequence of note. After all, who really cares if I prefer to sow my Swiss chard indoors? But some habits in life do matter: habits of the heart. These too develop partly through assumption, but the stakes are infinitely higher. These habits define who we are, what we do and how we interact with individuals and community. History suggests that we accept such habits, and the assumptions that undergird them, too freely and without examination. The assumptions that we make about other individuals and other groups often indict us more than the people we seek to stigmatize without evidence or cause. Those assumptions truly make asses out of you and me. Sister’s lesson from fifty years ago taught far more and lasted far longer than she imagined.
Examine your habits and the assumptions that nurture them.