Moving, again, again, …, again

Tomorrow I'll finish moving the last of my junk out of my apartment, and I'll hand my keys to the leasing office, thus terminating my lease. This is my eleventh move in as many years since first moving into an apartment my last year in college. By now I'm well experienced with the process, though each move presents its unique surprises. This one is especially heavy, what with the bicycle and shoe racks, the tools I used to build them, and other accumulated clutter. This afternoon I asked Laura after she arrived home from work, Will you help me move the gardening stuff from my patio—

—Right now?—

—sometime this evening?

OK, let me change my clothes.

Cluttering my old apartment's patio were potting trays, two bags of dirt, one bag of vermiculite, and other remnants of Laura's and my attempt at patio gardening last spring. There was also a small trash can filled with the remnants of a not-so-successful experiment with patio composting. The trash can had finished its week-long quarantine exposure to the September Arizona sun to dry out and kill the maggots.

I'm not touching that, Laura said, pointing at the plastic green cylinder that once served as my bathroom trash can. Maggots are yucky creatures, but how much worse are they than what was in the trash can in years past? In any event, the trash can was my responsibility, to be handled later. For now, we moved our gardening implements to the grassy yard on the other side of my patio wall and set about planting our fall garden. We replaced the dirt in the trays with a mix of fresh potting soil and vermiculite, and we planted onions and carrots, each occupying one row in one tray, each about two feet long.

The vermiculite is a new trick. Organic gardeners make a point how soil is more than a medium for holding plants upright and that what goes on below the surface is richer and more diverse than what goes on above. Potted plants are particularly disadvantaged because they exist isolated in a monoculture, and in our case with no input other than tap water. It doesn't help that the old soil in our trays had compacted and compressed by about a fifth in less than half a year, either. Supposedly the vermiculite will help keep the soil looser, though like with the composting, this is all trial-and-error experimentation. From our spring harvest we received nothing but a few unfertilized blooms. Perhaps this time we'll realize a morsel.