Gardens I Have Left Behind

Like the rest of the population of Vermont, yesterday I was out working in the garden, taking advantage of the warmish weather, which was scheduled to turn rainy and raw and stay that way until, oh, probably October.

But I won't be planting a garden this year, since we'll be leaving this house in a month, and while my fellow Vermonters were putting in their cool-season crops--lettuce, kale, turnips, broccoli, cabbage and chard--I was draping my garden in black landscape cloth, keeping it asleep until the new owners come to claim it.

My spouse and I spread the black stuff over the nine 4'x4' raised vegetable beds.  He stapled while I held the cloth taut, and we worked silently, with a sort of balletic harmony made possible by almost five decades of conjugal living.  When it was done the beds looked neat and clean, unlikely to offend the most persnickety house buyer. 

But I couldn't bear to cover all the beds.  Last fall, having raised my first-ever garlic crop, and while the difficulties of continuing to live on this hill were only a shadow in the back of my mind, I picked out the best heads and planted the cloves in two of the beds (you--or rather, I--can never have too much garlic).  Now, despite the apocalyptic winter, guess what's four inches high and bursting with joie de vivre? 

I couldn't even think of smothering those bright green shoots in their infancy--it would have felt like drowning kittens.  On the other hand, now that my time and energy must go to packing up the house rather than weeding, leaving the two beds open to the sun will mean a crop of dandelions, ground ivy, wild geraniums and clover along with the garlic.

The earliest harvest date, if we get no more snow storms, is mid-July.  Assuming the house hasn't sold by then, this will mean a four-hour round-trip from our new life to reap the last fruits of our old one.  If this crop is like the preceding one, I'll be scattering garlic largesse all over northern Vermont, and a cloud of Mediterranean aroma will settle over our new community on Lake Champlain.

This will be the seventh garden I've left behind, but it won't be my last.  I've already written here about the plan to transport the orchard of potted fig and citrus trees to our new cottage, sort of like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.  There is a tiny area around the cottage where we can grow whatever we like.  I'll see what I can do with it.

My main concern about the upcoming move--way bigger than my worries about whether we will be lonely or bored or drive each other crazy in our tight new quarters--is that the cottage yard has no southern exposure, and everybody knows that the essential ingredient for a good garden is sun, sun, and more sun.

The Harvester's Complaint

Today I pulled up the tomato vines and removed their wire cages.  There were still green tomatoes on the vines, but I needed to get rid of the plants so we could install another of the raised beds that my husband made early in the summer.   

Now five of the nine beds are in, but only three have been filled.  It takes a huge amount of dirt and compost to fill a 4'x4'x2' box.  We are using the dirt that was removed during the making of the patio and fish pond, and left in piles at the edge of the woods.  We cannot transport it in the garden cart because we would have to lift the loaded cart over the 2' walls of the beds.  Instead, we use a large plastic tub with a handle on each side, my husband holding one and I the other.  Those tubs of dirt are terribly heavy--far worse than boxes of books--and, keeping our backs in mind, I only let us do a few tubfuls at a time.  Which means that it is taking forever to fill those beds.


Meanwhile, the garden is still going great guns.  Guarded by squadrons of daddy long legs, the beans are maturing so fast that by the time I get to them, many are as thick as fingers.  Fortunately Wolfie and Bisou find them almost as tasty as chicken legs, so I am saved from the great sin of letting a single bean go to waste.


After the bean picking, I realized that the banana peppers think that we are still in August.  I relieved the plants of all but the smallest fruit, and went into the kitchen.  I filled the blanching pot with water and set it on the stove.  While the water heated (which, as those of you know who have an electric stove, takes eons), I seeded and sliced the peppers and put them in the dehydrator.  By the time I was done with that, the water was boiling, and I put the beans in it to blanch.  Then I cooled them in ice water, put them in bags, and took them down to the freezer.

I stuffed the beans into the freezer, and then had trouble closing the door.  If this Indian summer doesn't go away soon, we'll have to buy another freezer.  Did I mention that the pepper plants are full of blooms, that the chard and kale are flourishing, that the bean plants are loaded with baby beans?  In fact, I should probably be out there picking those little beans right now, before they get so big they're only good for the dogs.

Hard Labor

You may recall that several weeks ago my husband made nine 4'x4'x2'high raised-bed frames for the vegetable garden. We set up the first one after the spinach bolted, and when I say "we," I mean my husband and the guys who at the time were installing the slate patio. Conveniently, the patio builders had a front-end loader which they used to transfer some of the soil which they had (also conveniently) dug out to make the patio and pond into the raised bed.

All I had to do was to dump in a cartload of compost, mix it into the soil, and plant my beans, which sprouted beautifully and seem to be prospering in their penthouse.

When last week's heat delivered a coup de grace to the peas, I pulled up the plants and threw them into the chicken house, where the hens--God's own composting machines--will peck at them and poop on them and make them ready for next year's garden. That left space in the garden for the next raised bed.

But the builders are gone now, with their front-end loader, so it's been up to the two of us to do the job. It's heavy work, and filling a bed that size takes a whole lot of dirt. In the interest of our backs I've been dictating terms: small cartloads, and short stints.

Yesterday and today we went out right after breakfast with the garden cart, a couple of shovels, and a can of homemade bug repellent. The patio builders left us two separate piles--one of dark brown, rich, crumbly topsoil, and one of grayish, clayish "underdirt." My plan is to fill the beds with 50% underdirt, 25% topsoil, and 25% compost.

Doused with bug repellent, we shoveled dirt into the cart, wheeled it over the dew-wet grass to the garden and--this was the killer part--lifted the cart over the two-foot wall of the raised bed and dumped in the dirt. While my husband started filling the next cartload, I distributed the dirt somewhat evenly in the bed, then returned to the dirt piles to help fill the cart.

When I called "time!" we leaned our shovels against the wall, tipped the cart over in case of rain, and went inside to close down the house against the coming heat. I lay on the bed under the fan and hugged my knees to my chest in an attempt to avert a back catastrophe.

So far, so good. The bed is three-quarters full of dirt and both of us are still ambulatory. Tomorrow we'll dump in the compost, and then I'll plant more beans. It's dicey planting beans this late around here, but if frost threatens before the harvest, I can save the crop by covering the bed with plastic.

Two beds down, seven more to go. Those last seven will have to wait until the warm-season vegetables are finished.

It's going to be a suspense-filled autumn, I can tell. I always let the chard and kale stay in the ground and keep producing until an Attila-the-Hun-type frost does them in. But if I wait that long to install the remaining beds I may find that the mountains of dirt have frozen solid. We'll have to work quickly.... If it takes us three days to fill one bed, however, it will take the better part of a month (allowing for weather) to fill the rest, by which time the snow will be so deep we won't be able to even find the garden.

And I thought that raised beds were going to make my life easier.