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!

My Summer in a Garden: Weeding 3.0

Abundant rain kept me out of my garden. After the wet spell, I strolled out to take a proud view of my neat rows. I saw a carpet of thick, tall weeds carpeting the ground. “I must have been mistaken,” I thought. “I must have imagined that I weeded and hoed this garden a week ago. It could not have been this garden that I so carefully tended. Maybe I accidentally weeded and hoed someone else’s garden.”

Garden Coming Along on June 21st

I took my trusty hoe and began. The weeds were worse than they were before. Fortunately, the rain had made the ground easy to work. It was no trouble to pull the largest weeds, root and all. There were just so many of them! Also, the hoe cut through the upper surface of the ground just enough to clip the stems from the roots of the weeds too small to pull. The summer solstice had come and gone, and the heat was much higher than it had been even a week earlier. I follow the practice of my father and the old-time farmers: I wear jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat. I prefer not to be sunburned, and the long sleeves keep me less hot than I would be otherwise. Even with my protective clothing, I soon felt perspiration, which soaked through my shirt. Before long, even my jeans were damp!

Garden After Third Massive Weeding

I struck the hoe over and over against tough roots. I bent low over rows to pull huge pigweeds from amid the potatoes. I could not believe that, for the third time this year, I was involved in a monstrous weeding, as if the previous two weedings had been for nothing.

Next year, before I order seeds, I will read my blogs. Maybe I will become a regular customer at the farmer’s market and will skip gardening. What joy is there in repeating exactly the same hard work of a week ago?

The fact that many of my seeds had not sprouted in the first place was haunting me now. Large gaps were not shaded by the leaves of vegetables and had to be hoed smooth. Not far from where I live is a perfect garden of about the same size as mine. It stands so near the road that I am forced to look upon it. The rows are as straight as a ruler, the plants are spaced exactly alike down the rows, the stakes have the same height throughout and do not lean, and the weeds—well, there are none. What gardener has the patience and the good luck to have a garden like that? I would ask the owner if I could take a picture to post online, but I fear that the obsessive compulsive individual might rightly ask to see my garden. So everyone will have to imagine how faultless and immaculate that other garden is.

The First Flowers in My Garden

My garden is what a garden is meant to be: haphazard, uneven, inexact, and overgrown in spots. Of course, the previous sentence is only a literary stunt intended to sound true but a cheap alibi nonetheless. I wish my rows were as satisfactory as those of my neighbor, but, before I covet my neighbor’s cucumber, I will content myself by saying that, after I hoed my last weed, I harvested three fat zucchini that will send me into an ecstatic state of mind at my dinner table. As I carried them to the house, I almost forgot my aching back.

Why I Plant Onions

The trick to growing onions is preserving them as long as possible after harvesting them. First, as the stalks of the onions begin turning yellow, you can leave the bulbs in the ground to be fattened for another week or, at most, two weeks. After that length of time, the onions may start to decay. Mine always pull out easily.

My Onions Dried and Hanging from a Nail in My Solarium

I stack them, stalks and all, on wire racks on a porch that gets plenty of sunshine in the morning and ample breezes throughout the day. I try not to let them touch each other on the racks. Depending on weather conditions, the onions need several weeks to dry. When the stalks are completely dry, I bunch the onions in clusters of five up to eight and tie clothesline cord or twine around the stalks. Next, I hang them in bunches over nails in my solarium. Whenever I want an onion for a recipe, I snip off a fresh onion from a bunch. By hanging them, I can keep the onions almost indefinitely. I have to be watchful because, occasionally, one will begin to rot—particularly if the drying period has been unusually humid.

The onions look homey hanging from nails all around my solarium. They remind me of my Quaker ancestors who, in the pioneer days long ago, put in good stores of vegetables and fruit to last throughout the long winter months. Although I am not necessarily a student of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, I admire his poem entitled “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174758. If you have not read it, you are in for a treat! Composed and published just after the end of the American Civil War, the poem commemorated life on a New England farm prior to the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution. The poem has been described as nostalgic, and I can see why; but I think that “Snow-Bound” was written in an era when, for many readers, the experience of an uncluttered home life around a blazing hearth in winter was ongoing or, at least, still fresh. For me, the poem is more nearly a clear snapshot than a rosy memory distorted by the passing of time. Each day that I notice my clusters of golden onions, I think happy thoughts of my upbringing on a farm. The onions evoke the joys of gathering in my mother’s warm kitchen on a December morning.

My First Edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Book Entitled

The Panorama, and Other Poems, Published by the Famous

Boston Firm of Ticknor and Fields in 1856 and a Look Inside

 

Onions provided a strange chapter in my life as a writer. My first published creative writing was a prose poem entitled “The Book of the Dead,” which appeared in Artful Dodge when the journal was brand-spanking new and originated from the creative mind of its founder, Daniel Bourne, in Bloomington, Indiana (before its move to Wooster, Ohio): http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/. Just before I left Indiana University with a newly minted PhD in hand, I submitted a second prose poem to Daniel. It was entitled “Onion Liturgy.” For reasons that now escape both Daniel and me, it was never published, but both of us remembered that it was. Odd! Several months ago, I asked Daniel for a copy of the issue that had carried it, and Daniel found that the poem had escaped being printed. No wonder I could not find the issue in my library! I could have sworn that it was published, but it never was! I have lost the poem, which is probably just as well because it likely suffered from being a spin-off of “The Book of the Dead,” which, for its numerous faults, had a certain idiosyncratic charm. As I recall, my concept for “Onion Liturgy” was that philosophy is like an onion that can be peeled, layer by identical layer, until there is nothing left except the memory of replication. Profound? Hardly, but I was young.

My First Published Creative Writing in Artful Dodge in 1980

That Was Supposed to Be Followed by a Sequel Entitled “Onion Liturgy”

So when I notice my onions hanging from nails, I feel—with satisfaction and relief—that I have come a long way as a writer since the days when I was first trying my tentative hand at composing poems.