Spring Unfurled

The peas have pushed through the dirt of the garden box in the side yard – the first vegetable sprouts of the season. For a couple of days, I wondered if the planted seeds had drowned in last week’s thunderous deluge of mid-summer-like rain. But Monday morning, there they were: tiny and green and full of promise.

Last week’s heat also inspired leaves, which had been tucked tight against May’s lingering wet and chill, to unfurl into the sunshine that followed the rain. Suddenly, lilac bushes and maple trees and ferns and innumerable other growing things were full and lush.

In a matter of two days, the blossoms of our unruly apple trees popped into an array of pink and white. On cue, the lilacs have followed, infusing subtly-varied hues of purple into the landscape and permeating the air with their sweet, heady scent. The perennials in the front garden seem an inch or two higher every day, as do the lupine stalks in the fields.

I love this phase of spring, when winter’s chill is faded to memory, the light is long and brightening, and the warmth and color hold the happy promise of impending summer.

It is also a time when I feel, finally, that I am progressing in my gardening endeavors. The soil – at least some of it – has been turned. Weeds – a few, anyway – have been pulled. The vegetable garden – slowly, yes, but surely – is starting to take shape as I decide which favorites will be planted where this year.

I am a distracted gardener, so I often start with one task and get pulled toward another before I’m finished with the first. No matter, there is always plenty to do in the garden.

I tend to start with the perennial bed, where the weeds are consistently plentiful. It dries out before the vegetable garden, and it seems a good place to start as the days begin to warm. Often I start with the intention of spending a few minutes there and stay much longer, both inspired by the progress being made and distressed at how much more there is to do. Sometimes the kids join in the weed eradication efforts, gleefully seeking the long roots of dandelions and other persistent invaders against whom I have no grudge other than where they’ve decided to grow.

But before I get through weeding around the astilbe and lady’s mantle, before I have separated the moonbeam coreopsis from where it has overreached its boundaries and tangled with the Stella D’oro lilies, before I have tried to contain all the patches of black-eyed Susans and split (with an ax, because a shovel simply won’t do it) the spreading masses of flag iris – the vegetable plot has dried out, and I leave the high-maintenance flowers for the useful seeds of carrots and cucumbers, leafy greens and bush beans, potato eyes and squash mounds.

Bit by bit, I’ve been preparing the big garden out back, repairing the fence to keep the overgrown puppy out of the compost (she loves broccoli stumps, no matter how far decayed they are), pulling out the long-rooted grass that creeps in around the edges, picking rocks from the soil, tilling it all by hand – one row at a time.

No matter how many seeds I plant, it always seems like magic to me – that a tiny seed can sprout and push through dirt to grow, flower, and become food – or simply a thing of beauty. No matter how many times I watch spring emerge from winter and evolve toward summer, that process, too, holds wonder.

Everywhere now – in the vegetable gardens and flower beds, in the fields and along the roadsides, on treetops and up mountain trails – new sprouts emerge each day, small promises unfurled to spring sunshine, ready to grow.

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 May , 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

A Killing Frost

There are a few carrots left in the garden, their still-green tops rising from the soil like a final beacon of the growing season. The frost last weekend left the rest of the vegetable garden a ruin of tired brown stalks, drooping vines, and wilted leaves.

Our September was lovely and warm, sometimes downright hot. It was easy to believe, despite the shortening days, that we were still in the happy midst of summer. Even the trees seemed reluctant to begin their annual display of showy color. But the killing frost and the date on the calendar have forced me to accept the changed season, and this weekend I began the process of cleaning out the garden for its long winter’s rest.

Tucked away somewhere I have a photo of my older children helping me with the fall harvest. Only toddlers then, they already knew the joy of pulling carrots and digging potatoes, that thrilling suspense of each turn of the soil, waiting to find treasures revealed by the spade, reaching into dirt and hauling out food we could eat. The children loaded the garden bounty into their Tonka dump trucks and happily rolled it up to the house.

The kids still love digging potatoes and pulling carrots, plucking green beans and popping peas straight from the pods into their mouths, peeking through the garden foliage to find cukes and zukes and to check on the pumpkins’ growth. Weeding they don’t love so much, and who can blame them?

I feel a bit the same way about fall cleanup as I do about weeding: it’s a necessary process, but not my favorite.

The clearing-out of the garden happens in stages. Since early summer, we’ve gone through several plantings of lettuce, pulling out each row as it started to bolt and moving on to smaller, newer greens. We long ago consumed the first yield of shell peas and tugged the withered vines from the ground and from the fence they’d twined around and through and up during their green life. We dug the potatoes a row at a time, taking only the spuds we needed and leaving the others until two weeks ago, when we gathered all the remaining ones and carried them to the house – now in a 5-gallon bucket rather than yellow Tonka trucks.

Still, there were some veggies left before the frost – a row of beans, two sprawling zucchini plants, a few straggling cucumber vines – along with scattered old weeds that needed pulling before the soil could be tilled by hand and left to rest through colder days.

Putting the garden to bed, really and truly – yanking out the dead remains, pulling the last weeds, tucking the newly-cleaned dirt back into neat rows – is like starting the garden in reverse. The actions of pulling out rather than putting in are opposite, of course. But I am also in an opposite state of mind: in spring, relishing the promise held by freshly planted things and the strengthening warmth of the sun after months of cold; in fall, savoring the last of the home-grown goodness, soaking up the sun’s rays as they start to fade, and lamenting the loss of picking a bit of dinner from the garden.

There is joy and hope in the hard work of putting a garden in. The pulling it out is more of a melancholy chore. With frost threatening each evening of this week, we cut the few plump, green pumpkins from their withered vines and brought them to ripen (we hope) in the sheltered light of the front porch. I ripped out the drooping tomato stalks (along with their stakes), pulled up the cold-blackened basil, uprooted the newly dead squash plants.

The garden is mostly tucked in now, back to fairly tidy rows of bare dirt. In springtime those rows, surrounded by the burgeoning green of the fields beyond the garden, hold promises. Now, the garden furrows betray memories – of hot days in the sun and the taste of home grown goodness.  

Only the carrots are left, and it is a sad day indeed when the last one is pulled from the dirt, brushed off, and eaten fresh: the growing season’s grand finale. For now, their fringed, green tops are a lingering sign of good things still to come amid a garden mostly put to bed, waiting for the promises we’ll plant next spring.

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 October 9, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Garden to Bed

It is a task I do reluctantly in the bittersweet transition from summer to autumn: cleaning out the gardens. Putting them to bed, some call it. It’s not that I don’t like the work. I do – being outside amid the changing colors of fall and the sounds of animals scampering about as they prepare for winter, digging in the dirt that has provided the bounty of summer, soaking up the fresh air and – if I’m lucky – a bit more sunshine.

Truckload of spuds

It’s just that the gardens stay abed for so long; emptying them of summer growth and goodness seems such a long goodbye.

After months of coaxing seeds, then shoots, then swelling plants to grow and bear fruit (or vegetables), after tilling and weeding and plucking off tomato suckers and thinning rows of baby carrots, it is a bit of an affront to pull it all out and throw the remains into the compost heap. Yet, there is something pleasing to restoring some semblance of order to the garden plots that have grown unruly since we sowed the first neat rows in springtime.

Last week’s frost killed anything that wasn’t covered, and a few things that were. The cold was a clear indication that it was time to set to work. The sprawling leaves of the zucchini plants, which had for weeks loyally provided a squash or three each day, turned black. The eggplants, which produced a multitude of pale purple flowers through the summer, but only one tiny fruit, withered to brown. The tomato vines drooped. The basil leaves, which had been a vibrant and warmly fragrant green only the week before, hung shrunken and brittle on brown stems.

I started with the small garden boxes in the side yard, which are easier to tidy than the large garden down back. Out came the wooden stakes that had bolstered the cherry tomatoes, and with them the frost-browned plants, whose vines and leaves and roots had grown intertwined with their neighbors through hot months in the sun. Even in their wasted state the plants were prolific, with tiny green tomatoes still clinging hopefully to narrow stems.

Out, too, came the pea trellis. The early peas have long since been happily consumed or packed into the freezer, but a few withered shoots still clung to the wire fencing. These I removed before rolling the trellis upon itself to store in the back corner of the garage through the long months of dark and cold.

Working around the row of small lettuces that may still grow big enough to eat, I tilled the little garden, breaking up clumps of earth compacted during the growing season, pulling out weeds that had flourished as they hid beneath the vegetables, dragging the long, white skeletal roots of tomato and pea plants from the dry, cool earth.

Occasionally one of my children would join me in the garden-cleaning effort. The youngest picked fallen cherry tomatoes in various hues from the dirt and chucked them into the field as she kept me entertained with a 5-year-old’s chatter and giggles. My son came down with his three-pronged weeder to help rake the chopped dirt smooth.

When I headed to the big garden with potato rake and spade in hand, all three kids trotted down to help with one of their favorite garden tasks: digging potatoes. Of all the magic a vegetable garden can provide for kids (and grown-ups), digging potatoes is probably the most fun: like searching for buried treasure.

As I pushed my spade into the soil, the kids stood by eagerly, focused on the turning dirt, seeking the pale yellow and red of spuds and racing each other to scoop them up. In keeping with our family’s potato-digging tradition, the kids placed the tubers into their yellow Tonka dump trucks, meant for the sandbox, but just as useful in the garden. So, while our potato crop this year was meager (and we had already eaten many of them), we still managed to haul two truckloads up to the house.

There are still lots of weeds in the potato patch. These I’ll yank out this weekend when the sun is supposed to regain some of its summer strength. I’ve left some green beans and cucumbers in place, but have become lazy in covering them against the nighttime chill, so they’ve nearly stopped producing and look more dead than alive. My late planting of shell peas has put out shoots and pods aplenty, but the peas within are slow to ripen in the shortening days. I have hope for the second and third crops of carrots, whose frilly green tops stand tall in the garden box with only a row of lettuce left for company.

Perhaps, then, we’ll pull a bit more goodness from the earth before the gardens are completely tucked in for the season, before we say our last goodbye to this year’s bounty and wait for the gardens’ awakening next spring.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the September 26, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.