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. 

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.