The closet jungle

When you start out gardening, everything is worth trying. But over the years, you come to understand that time is your biggest bottleneck and get more selective. You learn to say “no” – loudly, immediately – when your partner asks whether we shouldn’t push the garden back further into that unused corner of the property? You restrain your pen when perusing seed catalogs, recalling that no one but you actually ate those adorable little sour gherkins that climbed the fence so obligingly; those turnips that could’ve kept an entire family nourished all winter, if only anyone would ingest them.

The name of the game at this point in my gardening career is spreading the action out over a longer stretch of the year. How to transfer some of the workload from the thrilling but impossible-to-keep-up-with busy season to the dull and endless winter?

Husband Joe put up a hoophouse last year, which along with some cold frames allows us to keep greens going into early winter; the hardier varieties may even survive to rebound in the spring and provide a bounty of early salads. But a layer of plastic or glass is no match for single-digit nights. When true winter sets in, everything outside still dies or goes into hibernation under a blanket of snow, out of reach until the great thaw.

To go the next step in season extension, I needed to bring stuff inside. I got Joe to clean out a closet that had been storing paint, bought a couple grow lights, plugged in some heat mats and took it over as my... solarium? Generous, perhaps. Noah’s Ark?

Before Jack Frost arrived in earnest, I brought in a handful of my photosynthesizing friends, restricting myself to only those plants that still had plenty of life left in them: a few potted herbs, my lemon tree, houseplants from the unheated sunroom. For once I was selective, because here’s the other thing I’ve learned (after jumping the gun and starting seedlings in February after a stultifying Covid lockdown winter): You really do need a sabbatical in order to be fully juiced for the spring sprint.

I channeled my inner district attorney (whom I picture frowning, arms crossed in front of shelves of leatherbound law books) to make the final cull. If I wanted to keep my winter open for snowboarding, pickleball and watching Suddenly Amish, I had to hold the line.

But once I had the space, it seemed criminal not to max it out. We’re talking heated, lit square footage in the maw of a Northeast winter. My inner D.A. be damned. How could it not be filled?

So I picked up a potted orange tree on a whim, imagining it would be on sale this late in the season and discovering after maneuvering it to the register that it was decidedly not – too late! Still, having the basement smell like orange blossoms has been worth every cent of that $200.

Then while organizing my seed stash, I spilled some beans from a mouse-gnawed packet, and decided to see what would happen if I planted pole beans in pots in December. They grew fast and furious, clambering up onto the orange tree branches. No beans, however – a lesson on the importance of pollinators.

The closet jungle has had mixed results in terms of plant success. No pollinators means not only no beans, but also that the orange tree, whose branches are festooned with blossoms, still only bears the single fruit it came with – though it is growing!

Joe has insinuated that the closet jungle’s days are numbered. He thinks the water is turning the walls in the basement soft or something. It was just a couple times I overwatered, though, and I’ve been careful since he discovered the problem while trying to secure a bookshelf to the drywall and I guess finding it not so dry.

I’m prepared to go to bat for the closet jungle. It may be aesthetically underwhelming – insulation drooping from the ceiling, window screens stashed against a wall – but it lifts my mood when I need it most. I can feel it happening when I plug in the grow light first thing each morning, pulling in a lungful of orange-blossom-scented oxygen with its undertone of warm soil. Every night, before jumping under the covers, I bask for another moment in the LED pseudo-sunlight, draw a last deep breath of perfumed air.

My seven-year-old sometimes beats me into the closet at night, spray bottle in hand, spritzing whatever looks dry. He is proud when I arrive, having taken care of business. We stand side by side, checking whether the Venus fly trap caught anything new: gnat, spider, fly? Examining whether the shiny skin of our singular fruit is any lighter in hue than last time we looked.

Definitely. Winter gives you time to appreciate small miracles, and there’s no question about it: our orange is turning from green to yellow. By the time you read this, our orange tree will be outside, getting mobbed by insects drawn by that intoxicating scent and – hope springs eternal – laden with baby oranges.

ommate!