Seasons

Nobody photographs this part. Autumn on a small lot is dragging dead vines to the compost pile, coiling hoses, and doing the boring work that decides whether next spring starts at zero or starts underwater.

I left for a week in July and came home to a yard that had given up. Summer here is not the abundant part of the year that gardening books promise. It is a water problem, a heat problem, and a lesson in what I can realistically keep alive.

The hardest stretches in this yard are not deep summer or deep winter. They are the seams between seasons, when one thing has not finished and the next thing will not wait. Here is how I stopped losing plants in the gap.

Spring on a small lot does not arrive as a season. It arrives as a narrow opening you either walk through or watch close. Here is the year I watched it close, and what I changed so it happens less.

I used to think the quiet stretch of the year was wasted time. Then I noticed that every good season I have had traced back to a decision I made at the kitchen table in the cold, and every bad one traced back to skipping that.

A split hose bib on a January morning taught me what winter on a small suburban lot is actually for. Not growing. Maintenance, repair, and paying attention to the things I ignored all summer.