Gardening 6 (Last Installment in This Series)

“Lettuce is like a conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.”

“I began digging my potatoes, by the way, about the 4th of July; and I fancy I have discovered the right way to do it. … I do not pull them up, and shake them out, and destroy them; but I dig carefully at the side of the hill, remove the fruit which is grown, leaving the vine undisturbed: and my theory is, that it will go on bearing, and submitting to my exactions, until the frost cuts it down.”

—My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner

Well, I planted too much lettuce, or it grew too vigorously. Next year, one row will more than suffice. This year, I devoted two rows to “fresh,” “crisp,” “sparkling” lettuce. I understand Charles Dudley Warner’s adjectives and find them appropriate, but I might have resorted to “velvety” and “delightful” to describe the texture and the flavor of the lettuce that grew from the seeds I purchased at Divers in Middletown. Is there bitterness in lettuce? Perhaps in some, but mine is sweet and mildly spicy! I apply no laboratory chemicals (fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides) to my garden; consequently, a leaf of lettuce that I have grown is as perfect and unspoiled as it can be. As I trust the decaying vegetation of autumn to produce ample fertilizer for the seasons ahead, I need no commercial fertilizers; besides, I improved the soil with horse manure not that many years ago. As for bugs, I permit the garden to groom itself, and I have had no substantial losses from insects or slugs. I keep the garden weeded with meticulous care. Having done so many things right, I still was wrong in my estimate of how much lettuce to plant. My excuse is that the relatively weak production of lettuce in the previous two years prompted me to thickly sow two rows this year. Too much! Stand back!

My Garden Growing Nicely on June 19, 2016

Then there are my plump potatoes. I have dug them gently from the side, as Warner recommends, and I have found that he is right: the plants continue to produce for a much longer season than I would have guessed! Even though I have managed to extend the potato harvest, the life of my garden is a spring and early summer life. By the end of July, baked earth is no longer patiently watered from buckets pumped by hand from the icy depth of my spring-fed well, and weeds—especially grasses—have defeated my sustained effort to keep the garden focused on the plants that I grew. Nature always wins. In those impossibly hot afternoons, flowers riot in the border, but no more vegetables remain to be collected.

Sunflowers Guarding Replanted Beans on June 19, 2016

I have thought about developing a planting schedule that might keep my garden active through the fall and even into the early winter, but, somehow, I always lose interest around June. Maybe I am too tired from pulling weeds. Perhaps the deer flies discourage me. Whatever the reason, I give up and let the garden go wherever it wants to go without my guidance. Only in the dark winter months does my enthusiasm for gardening become rekindled, so that I begin to anticipate the coming of spring and the opportunity to plant anew.

... but this year may be different. As is said, watch this space!

Garden Looking Lovely on June 29, 2016

Produce Beginning to Roll in on June 29, 2016

Sunflowers Surrounding the Garden on July 6, 2016

Sunflowers Bobbing in the Breeze

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.   

Gardening 1

“ … Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in the garden, which was large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of which he attended himself. To work in this garden was one of his most respectable pleasures … .”

      —Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I can hardly believe that the year has rolled around and I am back in my vegetable garden again. I share Mr. Collins’ respectable pleasure. While my garden is not large, I hope it is well laid out. I planted on April 20th. Steve, who plows my garden, had worked the soil into velvety smoothness. I felt that this year’s garden would be better than those of the past two years. My intuition was justified. Most of the seeds sprouted, and I could see that the garden was indeed better—at least for now!

Garden Ready for Planting on April 20, 2016

Gardening appeals to many senses at once. Occasional breezes lift my straw hat and carry it cartwheeling on its brim while I chase it, brush it off, and push it down on my forehead as tightly as possible. Robins, cardinals, song sparrows, and catbirds sing. Canada geese suddenly honk overhead and fly so low that I hear the whistling of their wings. The heady aroma of honeysuckle and the sweetness of the iris intermingle. The scent of the iris is elusive: sweet at first with an indefinable hint of sourness as the flowers are nearing the end of their bloom cycle. The mowed lawn stretching away from the garden is a golden green, more perfect than I can remember during the dark winter months.

Mission Accomplished: Garden Planted on April 20, 2016

Those who recall my blogs from a year ago know that I plant lettuce, beets, carrots, onions, potatoes, bush beans, squash, and flowers. I avoid corn because it takes up too much room and is such a beacon to raccoons that, when I have grown it, I have had to surround the garden with an electric fence. I prefer no fence.

This year, I have planted flowers on the western, northern, and eastern borders of my garden but not on the southern edge, which I have left open so that plenty of sunlight can reach the vegetable rows that run north and south. In the past two years, my flowers have been so thick along the southern boundary that they have shaded the rows. Also, I have planted fewer squash seeds than ever before. I hope to avoid being overwhelmed with so many squashes that I must hurl the majority of them into the brush on the hill above my creek.

I cultivate my garden with a plow consisting of a wooden frame, a single iron wheel, and five small plow shears in a cluster. Although, at first, the temptation to pull weeds from within the rows was strong, I avoided it for several weeks because lifting out the weeds would undoubtedly disturb too many of the vegetable seedlings.

Few experiences in my life are so hopeful as gardening. Each hour spent working with my plants encourages me to envision dinners to come, and nothing tastes better than vegetables fresh from the garden!