Editor’s note: This opinion piece is by Walt Amses, an educator and writer who lives in North Calais.
I almost had a garden last year and I enjoyed it so much I’m almost having a garden this year as well. I used to have actual gardens but bushels of tomatoes the size of walnuts, the texture of golf balls at a cost – when all was said and done – of $17 each, coupled with the pervading sense of working on a collective farm during the cultural revolution, caused me to come to my senses.
When I look out at the space my last actual garden took up, I experience a slight rush of blood to the head before taking comfort in the fact that weeds are swaying in the summer breeze where I once unwittingly grew 700 radishes, which I learned (not fast enough) were just as idiot proof as zucchini and tasted almost as bad.
Each vegetable seemed to have its own individual perversity….. spinach for instance…..one afternoon in a dreamy August, far, far away, I’m titillated at having enough spinach to feed every rabbit in the Northeast Kingdom with enough left over to juice Popeye’s forearms and keep Olive Oyl swooning. While I walk back to the house for a basket, it all goes to seed.
Corn, too, was an interesting experience because it introduced me to raccoons, relatively cute, furry things I had previously associated with highway carnage; cartoon robbers and rabies warnings. I had never actually seen one alive until I planted corn and didn’t see many of the little beasts then either, probably because they only come out at night and that’s when I sleep.
We had a dilemma – I did anyway. They seemed to prosper quite nicely, stuffed to the tips of their fuzzy little whiskers with every single ear of corn that I grew. When I finally saw one stumbling across the lawn toward the cat’s bowl, it was almost too fat to walk, a masked precursor to America’s love affair with corn syrup and subsequent obesity epidemic.
Arriving in Vermont from New Jersey 30 years ago, I wanted to blend in with the natives, all of whom I learned later were also from somewhere else, having preceded me in seeking solace from the relentless urban battering of traffic, heat, humidity and people like us.
I was invited to house parties where I was served exotic foods that all tasted vaguely of dirt. “Vegetables” I was told. They come out of the ground in the back of the house. I was stunned. My previous vegetable experience had mainly been extracted from a can, boiled for half an hour and easily could have been eaten through a straw.
“You can grow ‘em too”….sure, why not? Several reasons actually, as it turned out.
While striding majestically toward serious commitment to flora over fauna, not every creature got the vegan message. One of my first miscalculations concerned insects. As I moved away from eating meat I initially forgot that I was still meat – comprised mainly of flesh and blood, for which squadrons of black flies, mosquitoes and what I presumed were “no-see-ums”, were monumentally grateful. The ones that didn’t eat me ate the vegetables to the point where it looked as though I fertilized with Agent Orange.
Another thing I hadn’t realized was the Vermont growing season was sequestered somewhere between the last hard frost of the spring – usually after Memorial Day but before Fourth of July; and the first frost of autumn – right around Labor Day. Such time constraints offer the novice gardener the same opportunity to grow a respectable garden as they might have of visiting Alpha Centauri.
The final indignity was a twofold curse stemming from having a relatively successful summer and utterly no idea of what to do with all the produce that was suddenly rotting in heaps on the kitchen counter, table top and back porch. Eating them all was out of the question since we’d already consumed more salad that year than a herd of Holsteins. So we bought a book on canning, which we quickly learned had nothing whatever to do with cans and defeated the whole purpose of gardening.
Canning is a process by which you put all your vegetables in jars and place the jars into a humongous pot of boiling water until the lids “pop,” primarily so your harvest doesn’t develop botulism and kill you. The alternative was to parboil or partially cook the stuff, jam it into plastic bags and consign it to the deep freeze until you were ready to eat it. Neither sounded very good so we mysteriously decided to do a little of both.
The end result was indeed vegetables in January. Unfortunately, they were the same texture, taste and (probably) nutritional value as whatever was in all those DelMonte cans on supermarket shelves in 1958. Eventually it all became soup or sauce since it didn’t require any chewing and felt funny in your mouth.
The frozen stuff fared little better, due primarily to a tropical storm and subsequent five-day power failure in the late 90s that melted our broccoli like a dropped creamee while we bathed in icy ponds and made so many cauldrons of soup on the woodstove that it felt like a scene out of Macbeth.
These days, my gardening failures are more tolerable in retrospect and my summer vegetable Jones is sated by an influx of young hippies running a number of small organic farms. They’ve been providing local farmer’s markets with mountains of healthy, gloriously photogenic produce that tastes as good as it looks.
Although a tad pricey, I get to swim more, dig in the dirt less and still eat some fabulous food…….and I figure paying anything less than $17 for a tomato keeps me way ahead of the game.
