Among the Weeds

August is the month of garden abundance. In the case of my garden this year, the abundance is mostly in weeds. While many of the vegetable seeds I planted in the hopeful days of spring have been a flop, however, others have grown into prolific production.  

In the time-honored tradition of vegetable gardeners, I’ve been passing along the overabundance to friends and neighbors when I can – and gladly accepting other gardeners’ excesses. It’s all part of the gardening cycle.

Each spring, I till the soil in my garden, add a bit of compost from the heap at the edge of the garden fence, throw in some manure, and create somewhat straight rows where I drop seeds with the optimism inspired by warm spring days. Then I wait, and weed, and watch for tiny sprouts to pop through the soil and reach for the sun.

My gardening endeavors fall somewhere between necessity and hobby. Yes, I can simply run down to the grocery story to buy whatever doesn’t grow well – although store-bought veggies never taste as good as the ones picked from the backyard – and I don’t tend a garden big enough to keep us fed on pickled beets and frozen beans throughout the long winter.

Still, this labor of love – and sweat and dirty fingernails and hope – occupies enough time and effort that I expect to have a few weeks at least where most of our veggies come from the garden, and longer on either end of that time when we can pick a few greens or some herbs or the odd carrot or two to add to the table.

Every year, the garden yields differently.

This year, the peas – so abundant the last two summers – fizzled in July’s stubborn, scorching heat. My beans, always a success, yielded only one incomplete row of sprouts, which soon dwindled to two producing plants – enough for a handful of beans here and there, but certainly not the bumper crop of past years that filled the freezer.

My carrots have been slow to grow. The beets are scrawny. The jury is still out on the Brussels sprouts.

My cucumber vines, though, have produced copiously. Each day for the last two or three weeks I have found three or four spiky cukes hidden beneath the sprawling leaves. If I miss a day or two of picking, I end up with a dozen cucumbers.

Luckily, this is a vegetable my kids love (although I expect at this rate, they’ll tire of cucumbers soon). I’ve passed along the extras when I can, and I’ve been – happily – on the receiving end of others’ gardening glut.

Our vacationing neighbors invited us to pilfer their tomato plants while they’re away. My mother has kept us in green beans. I sent a bag of cucumbers into the office with my husband and received fresh-picked ears of sweet corn in return. I shared a pile of cukes and a couple of summer squash with a friend whose garden had been devoured by deer, and she handed me a carton of eggs from her chickens.

Beyond the cucumbers – and among the weeds – there are a few other garden successes. Although I missed National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day (August 8), it’s just as well, since the squash hill has yielded just the right number of zucchini – a near impossible feat.

The sungold tomatoes have ripened in perfect handfuls. I’ve had good luck, for the first time ever, growing onions. The eggplants are suddenly bursting with lovely, sleek, deep purple fruit. The basil, which I thought had wilted beyond recovery in July, has bounced back full and green, and we had our first garden pesto of the season last week.

All that fresh-picked color piled onto the kitchen counter makes the gardening effort feel worthwhile. And it ensures I’ll return to the backyard plot to till the soil again next year, to continue the gardening cycle – flops and abundances, weeds and all. 

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 August 23, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

Winter Deer

The garden fence will need fixing come spring. We enclosed our vegetable plot years ago, primarily to keep the dog – and later the toddling children – out of the plants growing there. The wire fencing has been sagging for a while now, between the sturdy wooden posts. But this early winter the fence has been pushed from merely drooping to downright dilapidated by regular visits from a neighborhood deer.

We first spotted her from an upstairs window at the back of the house, the week before Thanksgiving. A shape shifting in the dusk drew my eyes to the rectangle of field enclosed by that slightly sagging fence, where the doe was pacing and sniffing around the garden near the compost heap. The pumpkins that had been our Halloween jack-o-lanterns were at the top of the pile, broken into softening shards, their autumn orange fading but still bright against new snow.

I called the kids – now far beyond their toddling days – and we peered into the growing dark to watch the deer as she examined the fence, repeatedly lowering her head to sniff at its edge, then wagging her ovate tail in apparent frustration, the discarded pumpkin bits just out of her reach.

Two days later she was back, this time as light crept into the day rather than out of it. She repeated the routine of pacing, sniffing and tail wagging. After several minutes of deliberation and scouting her options, the doe gave a final tail wag, twitched her big ears, and with easy grace hopped the leaning garden gate. She stayed within the garden, munching composted pumpkin, until the dog went outside 20 minutes later.

We see deer often in the fields around our house, along with the narrow paths they trod from the field into the cover of the forest. Some seasons we are able to identify the regular cervine visitors to the old apple orchard in the field. Last fall we enjoyed daily visits from a large doe and two smaller ones who came together, always a trio, to pick at the fallen apples or stretch their necks to reach the fruit still clinging to branches. Often they were joined by a young buck who sported only a single spike.

There was an abundance of apples last year, and even after snow had covered the field, the deer came to scrape through the white in search of the frozen morsels below. On the very morning after the last day of the final hunting season, a six-point buck strode regally through the field toward the mountains, not bothering to pause for apples. We’d never seen him before and haven’t since.

This year the apples were not as plentiful, and we haven’t seen deer as often in our field. Our winter deer, the one who raids the compost heap, seems to be our only regular for this season. Often at dusk or before the morning has fully brightened to day, we’ll notice her large ears and twitching tail in the garden out back. She has become quite bold, actually, and we often find her standing just beyond the garden, gazing thoughtfully at us as we come down the driveway after school in the afternoon.

By the time we are out of the car and in the house, the deer is in the garden. She stoops to nose the pile, searching for the best scraps – carrot peels, stalks of wilted lettuce, browned apple cores, perhaps – then raises her head as she chews placidly, dark eyes rimmed in white surveying the landscape, ears turning toward every sound.

When we open the door to let the dog out, the deer is immediately alert, and with one smooth, powerful leap she is over the fence and out of the garden, her white tail waving with each high bound through the field.

She is lovely to watch, and our compost scraps seem easy picking in what must be, for a deer, a very long, hungry winter. But I know we’ll have to break our winter deer’s bad habit. I wonder, as I watch her in my garden out back, if this is the deer who ate the tops off every carrot in the small garden boxes in the side yard, and nibbled every lettuce down to the stalk there as summer faded to fall months ago. There are no fences around those boxes, and we’d never had an issue with wild vegetable thieves before last year. Perhaps it’s time to enclose those veggies, too.

Yes, the garden fence will need fixing come spring, and maybe a jolt of electricity added as well.

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 January 9, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Grow your own

There is something about growing my own food that I love. I relish the taste of a real, garden-grown, red, ripe tomato – whether it’s tossed with my salad, cooked into sauce, or eaten right off the vine, all warmed by the sun. I find great satisfaction in going out to the garden before dinner to see what looks good tonight – the beans or the zucchini or the broccoli. I love digging potatoes in the late summer days, searching for those Yukon golds in the dark dirt of my garden.

I have no illusion that I could live off the land. I grow my own food in the summer, but I’m not much good at canning it – and even if I were, I’ve a long way to go before what I grow would sustain my family for more than a couple of weeks after the garden is put to bed for the long Franconia winter. Nor could I survive, if lost in the woods, by foraging on wild foods, because I have no idea which roots or mushrooms or leaves are safe to eat and which would kill me.

I have no intention of ever raising animals for meat. Chickens for eggs I consider all the time, but I doubt I’ll ever convince my husband that it’s a good idea. But meat, no. My brother and his girlfriend, over the course of two summers and autumns, have raised three pigs. They’ve fed them and scratched their backs and watched their quirky pig antics and given them a comfortable life. And they’ve butchered them with the help of friends when it’s time to fill the smokehouse and the freezer.

My mother tended a large backyard vegetable garden when I was a kid – rows of green beans and yellow, carrots, corn, zucchini and summer squash and butternut, potatoes and beets. I grew up eating fresh vegetables all summer and home-grown frozen ones into the winter. I remember my brothers and me loading a little red wagon with an overabundance of veggies and carting them through the neighborhood, selling squash and cucumbers for pocket change. My brother, as a small boy, grew the biggest and best tomatoes around.

In college I would return, after a school year of dining hall food, to the garden freshness of home. Then I moved to Colorado, and there was no garden in the high mountain town where I lived, and where it is not unusual to see snow in summer. My roommates and I planted pots of flowers, but no food. When the travelling farmers market was in town, I’d happily bike over and buy a few items.

It took me a few years after moving back East to build a garden of vegetables. I consider myself a novice and learn a little bit each growing season. I try to add something different to the garden each spring.

This year we discovered a wide and thriving patch of blueberry bushes in the southeast slope of the field. I could spend hours there picking those small, dark, sweet berries, and we’ve been packing them into muffins and pancakes – and the freezer for later. In the fall we gather apples from our gone-wild trees and the tamer one with the wide branches at my in-laws’ house. These, we eat fresh or press into cider.

In the late winter we tap maple trees and boil the sap into one of New England’s best food products: maple syrup. My husband and his brother and their father made syrup the old-fashioned way when the boys were boys. They collected sap in buckets and fired the evaporator with hardwood, sitting at the sugarhouse for the long hours it took to cook the sap down. A few years ago my father-in-law had a beautiful new sugarhouse built, and modern plastic tubing strung through the sugar orchard to collect the sap. But sometimes we just make a few gallons in our driveway, using the turkey fryer and a big soup pot. It’s all hard work. And in the end, the syrup tastes just as sweet, and – despite the cost of propane used to heat the pot – costs less the $20 per pint at the grocery store.

Sometimes, food just tastes better when you grow it, or make it, yourself.

Obviously my carbon footprint – a catchphrase for those of us who like to think we are gentle to the earth – is smaller when I go to my backyard for vegetables instead of to the grocery store 2 miles or 7 miles away, where the food comes from even further afield – sometimes the farm down the road, often a country across the globe. But that’s not why I plant a garden each spring.

I plant the garden because it feels good, after a long winter, to dig in the muck. Pulling the weeds and tilling the soil by hand and adding compost and forming rows is hard work, but it is good work. Planting seeds and willing them to grow – not knowing if we’ll have a late frost or a wet summer or a local drought or an infestation of those annoying green caterpillars that eat broccoli leaves – is an act of hope and faith.

I plant a garden because my mother did – still does – and I hope that someday, when they are grown, my children will, too.

I plant a garden because vegetables grown there taste more real, like sunshine and earth, than the ones you buy under florescent lighting.

I plant a garden – and harvest wild berries – because months from now, when the days grow colder and darker, there will be something tucked away in the freezer – green beans or blueberries or pesto – that will still taste like summer.

I plant a garden because it brings me joy.

Helicopters

Sunday, as I was walking to the garden to plant the seeds which I hope will bear an abundance of vegetables in the weeks and months to come, I was ambushed by a slew of miniature helicopters. The tiny whirligigs came spinning on a gust of wind from a great sugar maple, which only a couple of months ago was surrounded by a sea of snow, with two sap buckets hanging from its wide trunk. On Sunday, the small disks – the tree’s winged seeds – cut merrily through a summerlike mid-day. I’d never seen such a fleet.

My brothers and I used to take great delight in collecting the seeds – called samara – that fell from the large maple tree, whose thick limbs were perfect for climbing, next to our back deck. We’d toss handfuls of helicopters into the air, or drop them over the railing one at a time, wonderingly watching their twirling descent to the ground. The bombardment of seeds the other day reminded me of those childhood helicopter launches.

Sometimes I feel as if adulthood – dare I admit middle age? – has snuck up on me. Wasn’t I just a kid last week, flitting through the fabulous, carefree days of summer with skinned knees and new freckles? How is it that I have three kids of my own, that my parents are grandparents, that those lazy summer days are now filled with so much busy activity?

Likewise, the full bloom of late spring somehow surprises me each year. The snow seems to take forever to recede after ski season, the green emerges painstakingly slowly – a wisp of grass here, a budding tree there, the miniscule leaf of a lupine poking out from the brown field. And then, all of a sudden, my children are handing me great golden bouquets of dandelions, the lilacs are in full bloom, and the forests bordering the fields have formed a broad canopy of foliage.

And so it was this year, one day hauling buckets of sap from the old sugar maple for our small sugaring operation, the next marveling at the tree’s fruit spinning through the bright air, seeking a place for the next generation to take root and thrive.