Gardening 4

“One end was taken up by a french window which gave on a long, high-walled garden. I could see unkempt lawns, a rockery and many fruit trees. A great bank of peonies blazed in the hot sunshine and at the far end, rooks cawed in the branches of a group of tall elms. Above and beyond were the green hills with their climbing walls.”

—All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

On the 29th of May, I carried water to my garden, and there was no sign of a new bean poking above ground to take a look around. On Memorial Day, the 31st of May, I again carried sprinkler buckets overflowing with water hand-pumped from the well before my barn, and found—to my surprise—beans standing two inches tall. In just forty-eight hours, the bush beans had grown at least those two inches and maybe more! Such breakneck speed for such tender plants! Even though the longest day of the year was still three weeks away, I thought—as the beans must have “thought” in the deepest levels of their DNA—of winter with its icy blasts and snowy drifts. My beans were in a determined hurry to grow fast so as to reproduce before the arrival of the short days, the long nights, and the bitter cold.

Replanted Beans Make Their Appearance by Memorial Day

After sprinkling water on all the rows, I looked beyond my garden to the fruit trees and past them to my Buckeye version of James Herriot’s “green hills” of Yorkshire. My garden was really a tiny patch in the midst of the expanse that my eyes scanned while I stood watching nothing in particular and viewing everything in general, yet my garden would yield so much lettuce that I would have plenty to share with half a dozen neighbors, enough beets to keep me busy helping a friend who likes to can them, so many carrots that bags of them would have to be frozen, more potatoes than I could consume before they would become wrinkled and useless to me, bunches of onions to hang from nails around my solarium, such an abundance of squash that I would be sure to be flinging many over the hill in what I call my “mulch patch” (from which I never actually haul any mulch), and such a bounty of beans that I would grow weary of cooking batches of them to accompany my steaks and pork chops. Planting, cultivating, and watering a minuscule rectangle plowed from Planet Earth’s surface would bring such a rich array of delights in only a short time!

Salad with Lettuce from My Garden

I noticed that my rock piles had become nearly concealed by grasses within a week’s time. My neighbor, who had owned my gentleman’s farm and sold it to me, had raised Aberdeen Angus years ago. Where my garden lies he had fed the cattle, and he had brought loads of rock to combat the ill effects of mud. I have collected the larger rocks, about the size of softballs, in two small mounds, and, to mark the beginning and the end of a row, I place rocks from the piles. When I push my plow between the rows, I guide on the rocks until my seeds have sprouted. The mounds have more rocks than I can employ as markers. In the spring, the piles are plainly visible. Here it was only May, and the fringe of grass that my riding lawnmower could not cut immediately adjacent to the rocks had already reached its full height. While the scene surrounding my garden appeared tranquil enough, it was truly the location of a headlong rush toward vegetable reproduction: “unkempt” (to use Herriot’s word), except for my orderly rows of quietly riotous beets, beans, and more.