Back in September, after I stopped being employed but before my last cat got into the serious business of actively dying, I realized that I had better get those perennials into the ground. Perhaps if you walked or drove by my home at any time in the prior month you know which ones I mean. That's right, those five one-gallon pots of half-dead looking plants which sat beneath that front bird feeder for about a month and a half while I forgot to water them and dreamed idly of where to put them.
These plants fell into my care through no fault of their own. They spent a lot of their lives in these pots, sitting out in front of the Whole Foods where I worked, drying out, blooming, beginning to die back, and not selling very quickly even though they were very beautiful because they were overpriced for the local market, up to $15 apiece, even though none of them was certified to have been cultivated organically. They reached a point when they would never sell for the prices they were marked. Instead of marking them down to cut losses, the decision was made to throw them all away. I imagine the plan was to compost the plants and soil and recycle the pots. Whole Foods has gotten into the practice of industrially composting all organic -- but not necessarily organically grown -- waste produced in the running of each store and then packaging that compost and offering it for sale. Team members are encouraged to recycle or compost everything that can be recycled or composted, but that all gets very complicated, so a lot of people don't bother. Still, I imagine this was the intended fate of these plants.
After my shift one night, I walked by and saw two ladies from the floral department loading up a cart with all these perennials which weren't going to sell. When I asked what would happen to them, and was told they would be thrown away, inside I cried, "NOOOOOOOOOO!" I attempted to remain calm, though, at least in appearance, and asked if I could have some instead.
"Sure."
"How many?"
"As many as you like."
"Cool." (read: "SCORE!") "Let me see..."
It was like going to the pound and knowing that whomever I did not choose would end up euthanized that day for lack of love. It was great, 'cause I got free plants. But it sucked, because I couldn't fit them all in my true love's Forester, not with all the groceries and life jackets and the big fat cooler that were already in there.
I have iffy sun at my house. The only parts of the yard which get enough full sun to grow vegetables are my balcony and one corner of the downstairs neighbors' part of the yard. I had to just not look at all the beautiful, strong echinaceas and rudbeckias, coreopsis and phlox. I wanted to rescue them; I did. But I had to be practical, and selfish. I had to decide that I just didn't have room in the car for anything I was only going to end up killing slowly through bad placement or planting next to the railroad tracks across the street.
So I brought home my five beautiful -- well, scruffy-looking, but secretly beautiful -- perennials, and then what with one thing and another, including the sheer raininess of this summer, I proceeded to neglect them myself.
Fortunately, I had chosen well, and my poor little freebies survived until I could get them in the ground, where they have been thriving ever since. Here's how I did it:
When planting potted plants, you want to
- dig a hole,
- either put some compost at the bottom of the hole to enrich the soil to which you are adding a new dependent or vigorously stir up the soil in and around the hole and mix compost into it,
- soak the hole with water,
- pop the plant out of the plastic pot -- very carefully if the plant is root-bound, as these all were (and when it's this bad, you can tell they are rootbound in part because the roots are poking out out the drain holes in the pot),
- plop the plant into the center of the hole, which should be no deeper than the plug of soil and roots you took out of the pot but about twice as wide if you can manage it,
- fill in the hole around the plant, but do not mound it up against the plant's main stem, and
- water the plant thoroughly.
Though many, many people do it, it is not generally a good practice to add food (fertilizer) to the water. You want to feed the soil, not the plant. The soil will feed the plant. When you put food in the water, you aren't adding anything to the soil, and the plant won't benefit from it longterm. Sometimes different kinds of water-borne fertilizers will even attract more pests to devour the very plant you are trying to feed, and at the same time, you have added this new plant, as I mentioned above, as a new dependent upon the soil into which you have placed it, so you end up torturing the plant and stripping the soil at the same time as the plant tries to grow into its new home and defend itself from attack. This is why you want to put lovely compost at the bottom of the planting hole or mix it into the soil in and around it.
I did not have any lovely compost, and I had just quit my job and had a dying cat, so I also had no money to go buy some lovely compost. So I did the bad thing, and added organic plant food to the water instead. As liquid foods go, this one's not so bad.
Of course, I mean that the Neptune's Harvest Seaweed Fertilizer is not so bad as liquid plant foods go, not the iced coffee. The coffee was to "feed" the gardener. The Neptune's Harvest was a leftover from the days before I took a seminar on organic gardening and learned better practices. I mixed a capful per gallon into the water I used to moisten the planting holes and also to water the plants once they were situated in their new locations. They were not overrun with pests, and if they suffered any kind of transplant shock, they didn't tell me.
Before situating the plants, I had to trim them. Everything they had been through had put quite a lot of dead stuff on them, even though they were still blooming. Then it was time to decide where to put them.
There is an area on the other side of the stockade fence facing the street. It is not intrinsically ugly, exactly, but trash gathers there, and people who don't pick up after their dogs often allow them to use this area as a toilet. I am rather sick of that and would like to discourage it. I also think it might be rendered beautiful, and slowly, a plant here and a plant there, and a hundred mixed daffodils from England all over, I have been working on that. I decided to put in two of the three nepeta and the one salvia I had rescued.
Before:
After:
Look what a difference three scruffy little freebie plants (and an ever so slightly altered camera angle) do to improve that space. Now imagine it next year when, after all the daffodils have spent, these plants come back lush and full and flowery. And it should just get better, year after year, especially as I slowly add in even more stuff until that this nasty little public strip blooms and leafs eight months a year.
I still had one more nepeta and a dwarf hydrangea that promises to bloom beautiful gradiently pink pointed blossoms next year, if properly situated. The nepeta went up against a fence with another blooming plant, some kind of loosestrife (but not the purple peril) and a Solomon's seal visible on the other side, and with fading dicentra plants next to it. It's my hope that all these things will overlap so that there is always something blooming and leafing and dying back and springing forth interestingly to be seen from either side of this fence, whether one is leaving the yard or entering it. The hydrangea I planted at the base of a bird feeder to mirror some pink dianthus which bloom all summer across the path and some species tulips which might still be going, along with several dicentra, at the start of the hydrangea's bloom time. This is what it looked like when I got done.
It's a lovely mess I'm making, isn't it? Plant by plant, hole by hole? To add to the betanglement of it all, there are sunflower hulls spread all over the place, and I'm letting violets and ground ivy have their way, plus not completely discouraging some volunteer maples and a vigourous Virginia creeper enjoying the fence next to a planting of aquilegia. It's calculated confusion. It makes me happy. It should grow in beautifully next year.
But what, you may be wondering, does all this have to do with leg cramps? The title of this post did promise leg cramps, and a solution.
Well, as I have mentioned before, I am no stranger to leg cramps. I usually get them from eating poorly, exhaustion, or from performing some unaccustomed exercise. Behold my engagement in the latter:
That's right! Sitting around thinking about digging in the dirt and planting things for a couple of months is not the same thing as actually getting off one's arse and doing it. Notice that in the above picture, besides jumping up and down on the shovel to get it into the ground I am also using my left leg, from the thigh, to add force to the blade. I am using my left adductor muscle rather a lot. I am not used to using my adductor muscle, because I have spent much of the summer dreaming of getting outside and planting things, not actually planting things, and because I don't have my beautiful blue tricycle yet. For this I shall pay.
And yes, later that night I suddenly found myself in screaming agony every time I tried to change the position of my left leg. This was because my adductor muscle was unhappy with me. I did not warm up before digging. I did no preparatory or wind-down stretches. I just got to it, and then stopped cold and went about the rest of my day.
This used to happen to me all the time when I would dance ballet in my teens and 20s, strangely enough. I don't know why, because I generally ate fairly well back then, in my 20s anyway, and I definitely did the warming up and the cooling down, and I did these exercises several times a week, if not quite every day. I would cramp in the calf I no longer have. I would cramp when I pointed my toes. In my sleep, I would dream of dancing, would point my toes while sleeping, and would wake up screaming as my calf cramped in real life. Shortly after that calf was amputated, I had some phantom cramping of that muscle, which was really the way my brain interpreted cramping in the newly snipped and relocated right adductor. Long ago, once I learned not to panic, I developed a technique to successfully fight cramps in all these instances by consciously relaxing the affected muscle and stretching ever so gently into the cramp.
On the day I planted all my freebie perennials and so very badly annoyed my left adductor, this did not work at all. Nor did massage, another technique I have often employed with good result. You know what worked, and damn quick? Cramp bark.
Cramp bark (Viburnum opulus) is a common herbal cure for menstrual cramps. It is an antispasmodic. If you take some before you experience cramps when you are expecting your period, and just keep taking it through the end of your period, you will not experience cramps. If you take it when you have cramps, they will stop. Fast. If you take it in the middle of your cycle, you will not experience mittelschmerz ("middle pain" or painful ovulation). It's stunning and miraculous, and I only just learned about it this summer.
It's also a real, live antispasmodic. So the kind of cramps it solves are not just menstrual. I popped two to combat the screaming adductor cramps, and they stopped in five minutes. I am not making this up.
Men would probably not think to buy this stuff, because it is kept and marketed with women's remedies. However, if you are a man and muscle cramps are a problem for you, I suggest you swallow your gender identity issues (if any), get yourself over to the nearest place you can buy herbal remedies, and give it a try. I have tried a couple of different brands for menstrual issues, Oöna and Dr. Tori Hudson's Vitanica brand Cramp Bark Extra, and particularly recommend the Cramp Bark Extra for those particular problems because of some other stuff compounded in which not only alleviates pain but addresses nutrition and mood difficulties associated with menstruation. I would also recommend it over any other for just simple muscle cramping, though, because there is so much more cramp bark per capsule than other brands I've seen that it will work more quickly. The other stuff in each capsule will not hurt you or make you grow breasts or anything. We're talking things like (but not limited to) antioxidant Vitamins C and E, some B vitamins for your nerves, ginger to soothe nausea, and valerian, another favorite herb of mine that will give you regular bowel movements, a good night's sleep with visionary dreams and a calm demeanor if it does anything at all.
What can it hurt? Give it a try. And if you also are a woman who suffers menstrual nastiness, or if you live with someone who does, it's worth having this stuff around for that, too. It really works, even for people I've talked to who get these symptoms so badly they incapacitate them. And actually, I was one of those myself before I tried it. The only thing to remember is not to take it if you're pregnant or lactating.
If you do try this, please let me know how it works out for you. I have yet to meet anyone who has tried it that it hasn't helped.
See? There was a connection between planting perennials and curing muscle cramps. And to think you doubted me.
thank you thank you thank you for that advice about cramp bark.
I experience adductor cramps after too much gardening, too. Until now I have used Ambien or a muscle relaxant but my prescriptions for them have expired.
I am so glad there is an alternative I can buy OTC.
Posted by: NJCher | October 04, 2008 at 12:29 AM
I really hope it works for you, NJ! Please feel free to let me know.
Posted by: Sara | October 04, 2008 at 01:35 PM