From The Innkeepers

On Laying the Groundwork

You would think summer at a small group retreat center would be the busy season. Surprisingly, we had our last retreat of spring in mid-May, and due to a cancellation combined with the fact that most of our customers spend their summer vacation time with their families, we don’t have anything on the books until mid-July. 

At first, this greatly worried me. We are trying to increase business this year, and two months without business in sunny May and June seemed more unsettling than the break we had mid-November to mid-January. But once I accepted that no one would be booking in late May or June, I decided to embrace what was and do what I had been trained to do for 25 years of teaching: look forward to summer vacation!

Alas, we quickly realized that we would not be twiddling our thumbs. Late May and early June is go time for gardening. (Grow time!) In the March blog, I shared that I had some big garden dreams. Once I realized we were nearing the last frost date, I started my to-do list. I soon realized that we don’t have time for customers right now! My plan was to create a 400 square foot cut flower garden complete with a deer fence. I had about 30 milk jugs full of winter sown seedlings, 14 packs of seeds, and a flat of store-bought seedlings to plant. That wasn’t going to happen between brunch and dinner service.

Our first step was ordering a compost delivery. The minimum you could order for delivery was five cubic yards. Ryan, our chief vegetable gardener, had plans for an expansion of the veggie garden, plus we had a ton of pots to fill with herbs and flowers, and we knew we could add the rest to the gardens around the house to improve the soil, so we decided to order ten cubic yards instead. Once it was dumped in the parking lot, the enormity of the task ahead lay before us in the shape of a 5 foot tall, 6 foot wide, and 10 foot long pyramid of dirt. 

The next day, we peeled off the tarp that had been smothering the grass in a patch of meadow behind the silo since early March. We had saved all of the cardboard from our move last summer and decided to lay it down as an extra layer of weed protection before topping the plot with compost. I decided the universe approved of our decision when it turned out we had exactly enough for the size of our plot.  We wet the cardboard down and put the tarp back on for one more night to let it get nice and soggy before putting the compost on. The next day, Aaron and I pulled the tarp off again and filled, dumped, and spread about 1 million wheelbarrows of compost on the plot until we had a good 3-4 inch layer over the cardboard.  

As far as physical labor goes, it’s safe to say that day was in the top ten for us. As I looked at the compost pile at the end of the day (which was only half gone!), I thought of the ending lines of Oh the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss. “Kid, you will move mountains!…Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So get on your way!” As a teacher, many more thoughtful and organized parents than me would send in a copy for each of their child’s teachers to sign from kindergarten on, so they could gift it to their child upon graduation, which means I usually saw a copy or two at the end of every school year. My mountain was waiting, alright. The timeline I had envisioned for getting this pile knocked down melted from a week into a month.

We took a two-day pause from farming to attend a friend’s celebration of life gathering in Dexter. Lili was a friend beloved by all of us. When we were young, Ryan lived with her future husband Brendan in Ann Arbor in a house whose breezeway our then 6-year-old daughter dubbed “The Pizza Box Museum.” Ryan, Brendan, and Lili all worked together at the restaurant Mani when it first opened. After Lili and Brendan started dating and eventually got married, she moved to doing hair full time and became my all-time favorite hair stylist. In chatting with her every 6-8 weeks for a few years, it became clear to me that Lili embraced the joys of life more than anyone I know. She filled her life with family and friends, traveling, good food, books, music, and getting people together. Her beautiful children are brilliant, creative, curious, and kind, taking after their mom and dad. Lili had a positive impact on everyone who knew her. 

Lili’s legacy of love of gatherings, food, and nature lives on through our work at the Inn, first and foremost in one of our favorite dishes to serve: a pomegranate cauliflower tabouleh recipe she hand wrote and shared with Ryan. Guests love this dish, and we think of her every time we explain its origins. It also lives on in the garden. We didn’t just share a love of flowers; we literally shared them. When Lili volunteered to grow dahlias for her friend Charleen’s wedding, she didn’t quite get as many as she’d hoped in time, so Aaron and I donated a few buckets of cut dahlias from our garden to the cause. And when we were preparing to sell our house last spring, we didn’t want to go through the trouble of planting the dahlias that we wouldn’t be able to dig back up, so we donated them to Lili to add to her garden.  At her celebration of life, Brendan pointed out to me the large section of their backyard garden that was yet unplanted and told me that it was all going to be dahlias. It makes me so happy to know that some of those tubers from our old house will be a part of this new plot planted in her honor. We created a dahlia section of similar size in our new garden, and the idea of having a “sister garden” with Lili’s makes my heart happy. 

We came home ready to plant. But first, we needed to build a fence. On Memorial Day, we gathered our supplies: 8 foot metal T-posts, a post driver, deer netting and zip-ties. Thanks to Aaron “The Pile Driver” Wynn, with me on net pulling and zip tie support, we soon had a fenced in plot ready for planting, complete with a door on hinges that Aaron built himself. 

Over the next three days, we planted. I started with sunflower and zinnia seeds. Then I began breaking apart and planting the winter sown seedlings I had grown in milk jugs (tall snapdragons, stocks, statice, centaurea, calendula). I quickly realized 400 square feet wasn’t big enough for all we had to plant. I set aside a few jugs of seedlings to find other spots for and finished with a few starts I bought to replace my winter sowing fails: gomphrena, celosia, and eucalyptus. Aaron is our dahlia expert and had grown 12 dahlia starts from seed indoors, so I got those planted too, and the next day he dug 48 holes and planted the new tubers we bought this year.

I had to find a spot for the remaining seeds and seedlings, so I asked Ryan if I could have the top of the expanded vegetable plot. That area needed a full day of prep, but by the end of another grueling day, I had planted my remaining seedlings from jugs (chamomile, feverfew, butterfly weed, and flax) as well as three packs of cosmos seeds. I’m calling this spot “the sidecar.” 

Even though we are busy during our not-busy season, it is a wonderful kind of busy. We all have gardening fever right now. Ryan got the rest of the veggie starts and seeds planted and the new section tilled, raked, and covered with compost. Over these same weeks, Aaron even hatched a mango sprout from a seed he saved from a grocery store mango. He knows it will never bear fruit, but he is excited that it sprouted just the same. (“It would be so neat if I could just get a little mango plant out of that.”)

Before gardening season, I was falling into social media loops that stole hours from my day. When cleaning rooms or pressing sheets, I was always cluttering up my brain with extra noise: music, audiobooks, and breaks for Instagram. Now I wake up excited to go check on and water my babies. On gardening days, I can dig in the dirt for hours in silence and be shocked at how fast time flies, and I end every night by watering the cut flower garden to the music of birds and frogs.

Watering my seedlings the first evening after getting everything planted, a wave of gratitude washed over me. I had realized the crazy dream I envisioned way back in January. Yes, there was still a small mountain of compost to spread, but it was satisfying work. The title of Dr. Seuss’ book came back to me and I thought of my own version: Oh the Places You’ll Grow! From the start of my houseplant obsession in college, to a little planting box on the side porch of my first apartment, to the gardens and porch pots at the house we lived in for almost 25 years (where I got my true education on gardening, summer by summer) to here and now: this little rectangle of land between the beautiful red barn and the shimmering lake at sunset.