Saving Summer

In these early September days, as summer meanders toward autumn, I am savoring the passing season. After a short first week of school, the kids had a long weekend, with perfectly summery weather, and we packed in as much more summer fun as we could: hiking with friends, afternoons on the water, campfires and roasted marshmallows. With the mornings and evenings dropping toward downright chilly, and the colors of fall steadily overtaking the more boisterous hues of summer, spending the days in shorts and t-shirts feels like sweet, borrowed time.

A handful of summer goodness

That’s how I feel about the summer treasures of berries and veggies I am packing into the freezer at this junction of seasons, like I am scoring some bonus bounty that will show up during darker days to feed both belly and soul.

In the basement of my childhood home, tucked around the corner from the washing machine, there was a chest freezer. By the end of each summer, this was filled with gifts from the garden: Ziploc bags of yellow and green beans, broccoli florets, and garden peas. For months after the garden was put to bed, my mother would send one of us down to the cellar to pluck a bit of summer from the freezer to add to dinner.

We don’t have a large freezer dedicated to garden overflow now, and beyond the occasional inspired foray into canning – one year it was dilly beans, another apple pie filling – I am unlikely to stock the pantry shelves with home-grown, painstakingly preserved food. Mine is not a Yankee farmer’s pantry containing enough canned sauces and vegetables to make it through the apocalypse, but rather a small space filled with modern conveniences: store-bought, kid-friendly staples like peanut butter and crackers and granola bars. And without a root cellar, I plant only enough carrots and potatoes to feed us during the growing season.

But I always try to stash a bit of summer’s flavor into our refrigerator freezer, small batches of goodness to be savored some later time.

Each year there seems to be a different overabundance. A few years ago it was green beans, another summer shell peas. One year we had a freezer drawer filled with wild berries and basil pesto. Sometimes the summer bounty stored in the freezer is gone by the time we reach Halloween, but some years I can still find a bag of blueberries hidden in the back corner the following spring, months after we crouched in a hot summer field to gather them.

This year, it is the tomatoes that have flourished to abundance. I don’t know if it was the hot, dry summer we had, or the new compost-manure mixture I added to the garden, or the combination of heirloom tomato seedlings I planted, but even as the lanky stalks have grown wilted and tired-looking, they hang heavy with ripening fruit. Through the summer, the tomato plants have produced small green orbs that swell – sometimes so large they split near the stems – and ripen through the colors of a sunrise: pale yellow to subdued orange to bright, look-at-me red.

While my youngest child will eat cherry tomatoes by the handful, popping them into her mouth sun-warmed and straight from the vine, I am the only one who eats the fresh, full-sized tomatoes. The others prefer theirs in the form of pasta sauce or ketchup. So I have gathered the excess, plopped the whole tomatoes into a quick boiling bath so the skins slide off, sliced them and pushed out the slimy seeds, and frozen them in chunks.

What will they become? Perhaps soup. Possibly pizza topping, Probably sauce. For now, the tomatoes share freezer space with shredded zucchini and plump blackberries. If I’m lucky, I’ll forget they are there, at least for a while. Then on some dark, cold afternoon, when the garden is blanketed in icy white and I’ve forgotten (again) what the landscape looks like when it is filled with lush green, I’ll peer into the freezer, wondering what to make for dinner. And I’ll find a bit of summer there, just waiting to add a flash of color – and perhaps a memory or two – to a winter day. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the September 9, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Lawn and Gardens: Divide and Conquer

There are some things that my husband is simply better suited to do around the house than I am, and vise versa. This is not a man-woman thing. It’s more personal than that; the yin and the yang of keeping house and maintaining the yard makes me glad that we’re in it together.

The vacuum cleaner, a relatively simple machine, baffles my husband. He cannot figure out which button controls the power and which releases the hand-held hose. This confusion is confounded by the vacuum’s quirky electronics, which include its sporadic tendency to turn itself off.

Loading the dishwasher is also my job. My husband has learned that even if he tries, I’ll just reload it the way I want it done. Sick, I know. And laundry – that’s me, too. He puts too many clothes into the washer and too much soap, and he can’t figure out which shirts and socks belong to which kid.

Mowing the lawn, however, is clearly his department. In his brief absence recently, I attempted to take over the mowing. The lawn has been his responsibility since we moved in together nearly a decade ago. (Vacuuming was not always mine, not until we got the new vacuum about six years ago. Incidentally, that’s about the same time we started having children, and I started constantly worrying about what was on the floor that they might ingest.) Beyond the sneezing fits freshly cut grass triggers for me, I am not adverse to lawn work. Not really.

As a kid I happily rode the old red mini-tractor that was the family lawn mower around the 2-acre plot of the back yard. My brothers will say they spent far more time than I did using that mower, and they are probably right. But I mowed sometimes. For two of the summers I spent in Colorado, one of my jobs was mowing and weed-whacking the square, green yards of the second homes of absentee owners from Texas and Oklahoma. Our crew was myself and another 20-something woman, and we did good work.

These days I’d rather be in the garden, especially the vegetable garden. I like the satisfaction of growing a bit of my dinner, if only for a short couple of months. Even the perennial garden is OK. At least it provides beautiful flowers to brighten up the yard – along with the copious weeds that need nearly constant rooting up. But mowing the lawn – I can take it or leave it.

We’re all probably better off if I leave it. I had to ask my 6-year-old son how to start the mower and steer it. When I finally got it going, I couldn’t believe how zippy that thing is! Definitely different than the old red tractor of my girlhood and the push mowers I used in Colorado. I took a few easy passes on the large rectangle of lawn out front before attempting anything tricky.

Apparently the straight lines made me overconfident, because as soon as I tried to swerve with the contours of the perennial garden, I jammed the old granite garden post firmly between the back wheel and the mower deck. I figure that takes a real talent, but I’m not the one who had to get it unstuck. I left that to my husband, who returned home the next day and took over mowing again.

For our wedding, some friends gave us a large garden cart and stenciled on its tailgate “McPhaul Lawn & Gardens” and the date of our marriage. It was a practical gift and has been well used in the years we’ve had it. Mr. McPhaul can have the lawn. The missus prefers the gardens.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life.

Growing rocks

The past week or so has felt more like mid-summer than spring, and so over the weekend I made a good start at putting the vegetable garden in. The peas are planted and four rows of carrots, some greens, broccoli, and a few green beans. There’s still work to be done, of course. Always is with gardening.

Not quite potatoes...

No matter if I’m tilling the soil, planting seeds, or dragging weeds out by their roots, I often get a little ditty stuck in my head while in the garden. It’s something my kids learned at preschool from local musician and environmental educator Barb Desroches, and the refrain goes like this, “Rocks, rocks, rocks. There are rocks all over the earth. There are rocks on the mountain and rocks in the sea, so many rocks to see.” Barb doesn’t mention the rocks in the garden anywhere in her song, but they’re there, nonetheless.

It doesn’t matter how many rocks – from thumb-sized to boulder – I’ve dug and picked and sifted out of the garden the year before, every spring I find a new crop. And that crop seems to grow uninhibitedly through the spring and summer and into the fall. A few years ago while digging for Yukon Golds, I found some Granite State Boulders instead. It took half the afternoon to dig those suckers out, and they were too heavy to pick up, so I rolled them out the garden gate and left them for the tractor.

It’s no wonder, with all these rocks, that New England is crisscrossed by stone walls. The first farmers needed a place to pile all that glacial till – and, I suppose, a way to keep the animals in the pasture. It seems a little crazy that early settlers continued their attempts to farm this rocky soil. It’s tough enough to grow a family garden!

Of course, the early folks didn’t have the luxury of a quick drive to the store, regardless of the season, to pick up veggies grown in California or some other faraway place for dinner. What they grew was what they ate. And eating what you’ve grown by your own toil is still satisfying, even if the grocery store is just down the road. There’s just something pleasing, beyond that sun-warmed, fresh taste and superior nutrition, about growing and eating your own vegetables.

I picked more rocks than I care to count from the dirt today, as I placed in the garden the seeds that will grow into this year’s harvest. My feet and fingernails are dirty, my shoulders tinged brown from sun and soil, and it’s a joy to look at my little garden in the back yard and see the neat rows of dirt packed over the tiny seeds.

Sure, there is more rock picking to come this season, and too many weeds to pull and bugs to battle. But each morning, my first gaze will be out the bedroom window at that fenced-in rectangle, where I’ll watch the seeds sprout green from the dark soil, growing higher and fuller, flowering, bearing good food to eat. Unearthing a steady stream of rocks seems a small price to pay for that reward.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life.

Hidden Gardens

There is a mid-summer bloom of cheerful orange at the edge of our side yard, where the forest meets the lawn. In that otherwise dull corner, a group of bright day lilies grows tall as the days grow hot, bursting into a flame of color each July to reveal somebody else’s patch of flower garden.

Walk through the woods about anywhere in northern New England, and you’re likely to stumble upon a centuries-old cellar hole, or notice a bulging line of mossy earth below which lies a forgotten stone wall, or find yourself in an old apple orchard gone wild with time. Those are the obvious indicators that someone once dwelled where you roam, digging that cellar by hand and storing root vegetables there for the long winter, painstakingly prying rocks from the ground to create a pasture or garden plot, tending apple trees to grow fruit for eating – or for fermenting into hard cider.

Open your eyes a bit wider, and you’ll also find the flowers of gardens past tucked into the woods and along the edges of uncultivated fields. They suggest a memory of the finer things in life: afternoons puttering in the garden, new blooms picked for a table set for the company of friends, fresh herbs plucked for seasoning dinner. The stone walls and helter-skelter apple orchards, lilacs and lilies, are pieces to a puzzle whose answers are buried in time. Who lived here? When? For how long? Why did they leave, abandoning a house, a pasture, a garden of perennials?

I’ve noticed lady’s mantel and wide swaths of forget-me-nots bordering the back roads where I run, small patches of bright purple irises growing through scrubby weeds along old stone walls, even daffodils popping happy yellow heads through forest undergrowth as the snow recedes slowly in springtime.

At our house, the gnarled lilac bushes along the driveway faithfully produce purple blooms each May, around the same time snowy white apple blossoms fill the back field. The apple trees, we were told by the former owner of this house, were planted during Prohibition to produce hard cider. Perhaps once they formed neat rows, but now they grow in an unruly jumble. In summers when the field has not been mowed for a couple of years, thick brambles of blackberries grow beneath the apple trees, creating a feast for the bears who ramble through each late summer and fall, bulking up for winter.

Bishop’s weed grows with abandon (as Bishop’s weed will) down the slope from the driveway. Vast patches of yarrow frolic through the fields. A thick stand of tansy, used in Colonial times to season food in place of sage, claims the narrow hill above our vegetable garden.

I know little of the human history of this piece of the earth. It seems probable that it was once pastureland, and there is plenty of evidence of old stone walls, buried now in tall ferns and prickly berry bushes. The house was built in 1929, and we are the fourth set of inhabitants to live in it. The woman from whom we bought the house and land created a large perennial garden in the front yard, taking full advantage of the southern exposure there. We’ve altered that garden, pulling out the ajuga, which continues to grow freely in the lawn, and the ornamental grasses, some of which have transplanted themselves into a tall, oblong patch in the field.

There are plenty of Stella d’Oro daylilies in that garden now – amid the astilbe and hosta, the rudbeckia and evening primrose and sprawling baptisia – but none of the big orange lilies that thrive beyond the edge of our lawn. I’ll probably never know who planted those lilies, or what once grew alongside them. Were they part of a garden, or did they travel there on their own? Were they planted the same time as the heirloom lilac bushes and apple trees? And what, I wonder, will future inhabitants of this place uncover from the plants I tend today?