My fingernails are still faintly blue. Tie-dye week ended on Friday, and the dye that crept under my gloves has outlasted a lot of scrubbing, a garlic harvest and an afternoon of weeding.
For the first time in years, I worked part of my summer. A nonprofit arts center nearby asked me to teach a two-week summer art camp, July 6 to 17, weekdays from nine to three. The stipend was $1,850, which more than covers the lake cabin we've booked for August. I said yes back in March, when July still felt like a theory.
Tie-dye week, and the week before it
Week one was drawing and printmaking: leaf rubbings, foam stamps, and a lot of kids discovering that a brayer will roll ink onto anything, including a brayer. Week two was fiber and color, which everyone called tie-dye week. Every camper brought a white shirt from home, and by Wednesday a line of wet shirts was drying along the fence behind the building, each one bleeding a little into its neighbor, magenta into lemon into a blue the color of a swimming pool. A first grader told me hers looked like a sunset that fell in a puddle, and I've been thinking about that sentence ever since.
We also spent one morning on plant dyes, which was the garden sneaking into camp. I brought a grocery bag of yellow onion skins I'd saved since spring and a jar of marigold heads I'd deadheaded from the porch pots, and we simmered them into pale gold and rusty orange baths for small cotton squares. The kids found them a bit quiet next to the bottled dye. The parents at pickup liked them best.
Camp is a different kind of teaching. No grades, no fire drills, and kids who chose to be there. It's also six hours on your feet in July. I got home every day around 3:40 with a sunburned part in my hair and nothing left for anything involving a hose.
What the garden did without me
I had planned for this. The drip line we put in at the end of April runs through both raised beds on a timer, so the six tomatoes in the west bed and the onions in the east bed got water every morning whether I was there or not. Mateo, who had his own day camp, watered the porch pots each evening for his allowance. On paper, everything was covered. The only gardening I did in those two weeks was the garlic harvest on the middle Saturday.
Yesterday, the first day with nowhere to be, I walked out with coffee and my notebook and made a list. Nothing had died. A lot had gone wild.
- The tomatoes had grown past their stakes, and the suckers I meant to pinch had become whole new stems. The Cherokee Purple was leaning into the San Marzanos like a tired commuter.
- The cucumbers on the chain-link fence had hidden two fruits the size of my forearm under their leaves.
- Every basil plant on the bench had flowered.
- Purslane and crabgrass had filled the path between the beds.
- Japanese beetles had found the zinnias in the cut-flower strip, and several blooms were down to lace.
Catching up
It took about five hours. I cut back the suckers, retied everything and added two tall stakes to the west bed. I pinched the basil hard and filled a colander with the tops, and the porch smelled like pesto for an hour. The beetles went into a jar of soapy water, which will be my morning routine until they thin out in August. The path got weeded on my knees, with the soil knife and the radio. The two giant cucumbers went to the compost, seedy and bitter.
Under all that growth was the good news. The first Sungolds are blushing, green fading to a pale apricot at the bottom of each cluster, and I'd guess we'll eat the first ones this week. The garlic is curing at the shady end of the porch and smells like a pizzeria every time the breeze turns.
What I learned is boring and useful. The drip timer handled water, which is the thing that actually kills a garden in July. It doesn't pinch suckers, pick cucumbers or catch beetles. Ten minutes every evening would have saved most of yesterday, and I skipped them because I was tired and the yard looked fine from the porch steps.
Next year: if I teach camp again, a ten-minute walk through the beds goes on the calendar like a class period, and the tomatoes get pinched the weekend before it starts.
