Root Chatter

It has been a year since I began my subscription with Pot-Gang, a grow your own vegetables in pots project. Each month I receive a box filled with pots, seeds, a block of compost to be reconstituted and instructions. I am aware that I could do it far cheaper through the garden centre, but I like the smallness of a pot and its simplicity. I have a garden that I could plant things in, but the size of a garden as compared to a pot – pots are doable.

After a year, am I drowning in home grown vegetables? That would be a ‘No’. Part of my lack of harvest has been the snails and the slugs getting to my crops before I do. I said goodbye to a carrot pot this morning and one of my squashes has been eaten. Maybe I will bring the other inside and put it on a windowsill. The beans have long gone as have the marigolds.

So what have I harvested? The potatoes. On Saturday my husband and I tipped up the potato pot into a bowl and rifled through the soil. Such joy! To be honest I wasn’t convinced that we would find anything, but one potato, two potato, three potato, four – the nursery rhyme came to life. They weren’t big and there was just enough for two servings but they tasted wonderful. We had grown them. They had not come out of a Tesco bag but out of the soil in a pot.

We have also had spinach by the handful, coriander and basil and a single spring onion. I was ill a week or two back and had not been out to evict the snails. To see the damage they had done was heartbreaking. I thought about dismantling my PVC green house, emptying all the pots and just chalking it up to a good run. But, no, I was not going to give in to the snails. They had won a victory or two but they were not going to win the war!

A thought occurred to me this morning as I mourned the carrot pot. Now, I am not about the give human feelings to vegetables – well, actually I am. I thought my veggie pots might be sad. Yes, they were mostly undefended against the snails and slugs – they couldn’t walk away – but I thought they were, perhaps, sad. They could look at each other from the shelves in the green house, or the pots on the patio. The rocket could wave at the tomatoes. The radish shoots could smile at the spinach and maybe touch green leaves, but they were stuck in separate pots. There was no root chatter going on. Had they been garden planted there would have been root mingling, sharing worm movements and exchanging bacteria, but in a pot there was nothing about that.

Next week I am zoom-meeting with friends. We are celebrating friendship with pictures and poems and stories. I have been asked to read a few paragraphs about a picture by Gustav Klint. He lived in Vienna in the 1900s and travelled around various gardens with friends and family. He painted what he saw – colourful borders of a mixed varieties of flowers. Not formal gardens always but just riots of colour beside a lawn.

Us in our friendships is like that border of mixed flowers. We all come in different shapes, sizes and colours, some bold, some not, some scented, some not. People are kind of like that – some people are colourful, some more toned down; some are very extrovert, others shy. All of them contribute to the whole, Together, they present a glorious display.

And then I thought about my pots. There is a lot above ground in a flower border. There are splashes of one colour next to another and petals everywhere. It is all seen and visible but so much is going on under the ground. There is communication happening that we cannot eavesdrop on. The roots of one plant talk to another. A tree tells another tree about a storm on the horizon through its roots. A dying plant passes on its nutrients to a new plant growing. Fell a tree and plant a new one and all that knowledge the old tree had, the new tree cannot access it. So much talking beneath the soil. It is a complex network that human beings are not a part of with our technological bias.

The plants in my pots in my greenhouse grow. They wave at each other perhaps, but there is no root chatter going on. They grow silently.

Friendship, if it is to flourish needs root chatter going on. The externals, the visible, the seen is nice – but it is the unseen, the beneath the ground sharing that determines the quality of a friend. You passing on your wisdom to me. Me warning you about the storm on the horizon.

Perhaps I should try planting a carrot seed, a spinach seed and a radish seed in the same pot and see what happens.