Gardening In My Pajamas

These days the only way to get any gardening done is to go out at the crack of dawn--well, almost--and work until the heat gets unbearable, around nine.

The early morning air is cool, the plants look fresh and rejuvenated by the night, the birds are chirping, and I'm in my pajamas.

It's a good thing we live where we do, at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway and no neighbors in sight.  If someone should venture up the driveway there is the driveway alarm, which I can hear from the garden, and of course the dogs, which should give me plenty of time to dive back into the house and pretend there's nobody home.

As I planted green beans this morning I pitied gardeners with near neighbors, or city dwellers who have turned the spaces in front of their townhouses into tiny potagers.  What a waste of time and laundry to have to get fully dressed, do the garden chores, then peel off those sweaty garments, take a shower, and put on a whole new set of clothes.

Whereas I have the luxury of walking out in my pajamas, getting as dirty and sweaty as I need to, then taking a shower and getting dressed for the day.

But this is only my summer luxury.  My winter luxury consists of throwing a barn coat over my pajamas and giving the hens their breakfast without having to step on mud, ice, or snow.  Inspired by the clever New England concept of the attached barn, I had the builder attach the chicken shed to the garage, which is in turn attached to the house.

All this privacy is not without its dangers, however.  I have been known, on occasions when I had to leave the house early but wanted to give the dogs their walk first, to take off into the woods wearing my pajamas.  I can see that it is a slippery slope from there to deciding to nip into the supermarket for a can of orange juice, wearing my pajamas.

But I trust I'll never go that far.  Meanwhile, I will continue to garden en deshabille.

What is your preferred gardening attire?

Why I Live In Vermont

Some of you have asked how I ended up in Vermont.  Here is a piece I wrote a while ago about the process that led me here, entitled "Magnetic North":                                                                      

The attraction began in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1959.  I was a freshman in high school, newly arrived in the U.S. and drowning in a river of southern English.  I would grasp at words as they floated past, but could not reconcile the currents that engulfed me with anything in the Primer Curso de Ingles that had been my sole preparation for school in the Deep South.

It was a Catholic high school, so miracles and visitations were not unheard of.  Mine came in the shape of a freckled girl whose family had just moved to town, and the miracle was that the first time she opened her mouth in class I understood everything she said.  Her words were as clear and precise as if she had clicked them out on a typewriter.  She did not stretch her vowels out like taffy, and though she spoke faster than the southern kids, I could tell exactly where each word began, and where it ended.  I could follow her train of thought.  It wasn't that different from mine.

She took me home with her one afternoon and her mother, her father and even her little sister all sounded the same.  No drawn-out diphthongs, no languid cadences.  Here was an entire family whom I could understand.  

My friend and her parents were from Massachusetts, which I learned was in New England.  I thought that someday I would like to live in a place where everybody spoke like that.                                                                                                                              

Graduate school took me out of the Deep South, all the way to North Carolina.  By the time I arrived in  Maryland in the 1970s,  language had ceased to be an issue:  I was not only dreaming, but even counting in English.  

                                                                                                                     

The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing then, and I was determined to achieve self-sufficiency in the acre and a half that surrounded our house.  I had an ambitious vegetable garden with an asparagus bed, and twenty-seven fruit trees.  For protein there were a dozen laying hens, and two Roman-nosed Nubian dairy goats who looked vaguely like Barbra Streisand.

As I had never grown a tomato, pruned an apple tree or milked a goat, I did a lot of research at the local library.  This consisted mostly of reading back issues of Organic Gardening and The Mother Earth News, and I noticed that many of the articles and letters to the editor came from New England.  The writers alluded to sugaring in the spring, and to goats coming into heat as the trees began to turn in the fall.  They advised readers to be vigilant about frozen water buckets in winter, and to keep a stack of old blankets handy for covering tender veggies in case of September frosts.

September frosts!  As I sweltered in the heat of the interminable Chesapeake Bay summer, the fantasy of living in a land where gardens snuggled under blankets, water buckets froze solid, and roadsides were free of that tropical menace, the kudzu vine, became more and more compelling.

The  library also had a shelf dedicated to books about country living.  These were more lyrical than practical, and I read them with the same passion with which as a child I had read about Heidi and her goats.  It was there that I first found Noel Perrin, Louise Dickinson Rich, Scott and Helen Nearing.  In the children's section I discovered the illustrations by Tasha Tudor.  I had read Thoreau years earlier, but the life he described seemed impossible to translate into the twentieth century.  The writers on the country living shelf, however, were very much  alive,  and they had one thing in common:  they all lived in New England.

In the 1980s, as the Maryland countryside succumbed to suburbia, I had to give up my little homestead.  But at the least provocation I would launch into nostalgic stories about the hens I had kept and the goats I had known.  “What do you mean, you kept hens for eggs,” people would say.  “Don't you need a rooster for that?”  The reactions when I mentioned my elegant Nubian does were so predictable and so dispiriting, having to do with tin cans and foul smells, that I soon dropped livestock from my repertoire of party conversations.  Would I ever live where I didn't have to explain or excuse the things I really cared about?

 It took almost four decades—about as long as it took the people of Israel to get to Canaan--but I finally made it to a place where the roadways are free of kudzu (and, because this is Vermont, of billboards as well), and MacMansions are few.  Where a near neighbor makes world-class cheese with her goats' milk.  Where, when I tell people I keep hens, they ask “what kind?”

Yesterday, in yoga class, the woman who usually sits on my right was late because one of her sheep had gotten loose.  After final meditation, while we were rolling up our mats, the woman who sits on my left gave her a short lecture on the best kinds of livestock fencing.  As I was walking out, the instructor confided  that she is  thinking about keeping bees--her gesture towards saving the planet.

From where I sit at the computer, I can see my hens pecking and scratching at  the newly-green grass.  In the garden, the spinach is up but growing slowly because of the cold spring.  The apple trees are in bloom, but I have a stack of blankets ready, since a hard frost is predicted for tonight.

The farmer who hays our field dropped by on a chilly, sunny day last week to discuss plans for the coming summer.   He complained about the rising costs of diesel fuel, and told me his philosophy on breeding cows—he prefers to wait until they are two years old, when their pelvises are fully developed, because it makes for easier births. 

“You know,” he said, finally getting around to the real topic, “this field of yours really needs manuring.  I hope you don't mind.  It'll stink badly for a couple of days, but that won't last.”

  

His speech was as crisp and clear as the Vermont air, and I could understand every word he said.

Gentle Rain From Heaven

After a string of bright, chilly, windy days, the rain has come to stay for a while, and we gardeners are celebrating.

Not for the obvious reason, however. Sure, we're glad for the perennials just coming into bloom, and for the broccoli and tomato transplants whose baby roots need all the help they can get, and for the water table on which our wells—and everything else—depend.

But the real reason that we gardeners are rejoicing is that it's too wet to work outside. So we're tossing our dirt-encrusted jeans in the laundry, scrubbing the dirt from under our nails, and reacquainting ourselves with the inside of our houses. Reacquainting ourselves with friends as well.

Having applied 30 bags of mulch (weighing about 40 pounds each) to the flower beds in front of the house yesterday, I spent this morning returning e-mails, talking with one friend on the phone, going to lunch with another. We are all as grateful for this spate of rainy days in gardening season as we are for a thaw in January.

Which leads me to conclude, once more, that frequent changes in routine are a very good thing. For me, the lengthening, then shortening days; the peepers giving way to crickets; the planting and the harvesting followed by the shutting down of the outdoors, followed by the season of the wood stove—these are the things that keep the tedium of life at bay.

A place where it's always sunny; where you can go swimming in February and plant tomatoes in March; where the same birds sing and the same flowers bloom year round; the kind of place, in short, where most people would like to live, would do me in.

Give me, instead, a place where I have to look out the window and listen to a ten-minute dissertation by the VPR weatherman before I can figure out what clothes to wear, what kind of boots to put on my feet, and what shape my life will take (frenzied physical activity outdoors? Indoor reflection and philosophizing?) for the next twelve hours.

The natives around here like to say, "if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes.” Me, I almost always like the weather, and I'm almost always glad that it keeps changing.

Lugging Stones

To soften the severe facade of our New England house, I made a couple of wavy-bordered flower beds. One of them is next to the driveway, and last winter the snow plow scraped off quite a bit of the precious mulch that I had put down.

To keep this from happening again, and to give the bed more definition, I decided to border it with stones. I wasn't thinking about a stone wall, mind you--just a row of stones laid side by side that would clearly say “flower bed” on side, and “driveway” on the other.

This being New England, I reasoned, nothing would be easier than to find just the right kind of stones for my project. After all, it was this region's rocky soil that made farmers throw up their hands and flee West, leaving behind miles of stone walls made from the rocks they had dug out of their fields.

Two such stone walls, well past their prime, border our property. In spots the rocks are so scattered that only the rusted remains of barbed wire proclaim that here is a boundary. Still, I revere these walls, and will not touch them. They are the closest thing this country has to the dolmens and menhirs that so casually adorn the woods and vineyards of my native Catalonia. To remove even a single stone would make me feel like a grave robber, a desecrator of ancient things, a creep.

With all this reverence in mind, I stood up from where I'd been working on the flower bed and looked around for stones. I wanted medium-size ones—not so big I couldn't carry them, and not so small that the snow plow would run over them.

I took a little walk, Wolfie panting beside me. There were all kinds of pebbles on the driveway, and the field was exploding with dandelions, but there wasn't a decent-size stone in sight. From some places in the driveway, I could glimpse the crumbling stone wall through the trees. But I turned my face away. I would not touch it.

It occurred to me that if the farmer who originally worked this land had to clear the fields, the place where the small field abuts the woods might hold some promise. I tore through a maze of sticker bushes and, sure enough, there were the stones. They were gorgeous, big and mossy and bursting with presence, the kind of “focal point” that my landscaper in Maryland used to charge hundreds of dollars to bring into my yard.

But these boulders were way too big for me to even think of carrying them to the flower bed. Still, where there are big stones there might be small ones, and I grabbed a stick and dug around under the old leaves and, sure enough, there was a crop of smaller rocks huddling by the big ones, like chicks under a hen.

These user-friendly stones may have looked small, but they were heavy--I'd say about 30 pounds on average. That's a lot of pounds to carry out of the woods, across the lawn and the driveway, to the flower bed, over and over and over again.

Still, I dug and carried, Wolfie following along and dragging small dead trees out of the woods in a show of empathy. And as I lugged my stones to the flower bed, I thought about the farmer and his horses, sweating and panting, urgently dragging boulders out of the fields, so the grass would grow and the sheep would graze and the family would have meat to eat, and the wife would have wool to card and spin, before they gave it all up and went West.