Garden – Page 2 – the Dig and Flow

Muscle Memory with a Pitchfork and Banjo

We are the music makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams…

Arthur O’Shaughnessy

I keep my nails lopsided—long on the right hand, short on the left—just in case I find the time and gumption to play my banjo again. This house has never heard the bum-ditty of that spunky instrument.

The banjo has waited in its case through our construction dust last winter, hidden in the closet through a busy summer, and has been tugging at me this fall and winter. Finally, one late February day, I unzip the case.

I lift its perfect, round face into the light, imagining the words encircling the head of Pete Seeger’s banjo: This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender. The time seems right for music. I wonder if I can still play it.

FullSizeRender — Photographed from Pete Seeger’s *How to play the 5-String Banjo*

My return to banjo stumbles along, but my fingers surprise me by how much they remember. I play clawhammer style. A left fingernail strikes a string, lifts, then strums, A high pluck of the thumb on the fifth string punctuates each strum. It’s an old-timey, sing-along sound that brings me pure delight as I create it.

Callouses form again on my left fingertips where they press the wire strings. Sometimes my hands even act independently of my brain, as if by instinct. But this is different from the instinct. Instinct drives my chickens to scratch forward, then step back and dart their beaks to the ground. My banjo-playing movements are learned with meticulous repetition. Once taught to my confused, unwilling muscles, this music-making seems to have entered my cells.

Our bodies store memories. The smell of your elementary school. Stubble on an unshaved cheek against your lips. A dog’s ears in your hands. Mint tea from the garden—sweet on your tongue, cold down your throat.

As spring approaches, callouses form again on my palms. I lever a pitchfork into two-feet of hay and petrified sheep turds that linger in a small corner room of our barn. The shove, pry, lift pattern plays old scenes in my mind of other places I’ve used a pitchfork or a shovel. Sweating in stalls as a teenager so horse-crazy I felt honored to handle their feces. Turning compost in our red dirt garden in Alabama. On this farm, I push wheelbarrow loads to the garden, where the well-cured manure will fuel our vegetables.

We are always teaching our bodies something, whether or not it’s what we want to learn. I have learned to ride a bicycle, to drive a car, to tie surgical knots. I have learned to carry my shoulders high and tense and to bite my fingernails (must resist…need them for the banjo).

Movements repeated, like my fingers across this keyboard, become unconscious. We cannot unlearn them, although they can fade with disuse. I wonder what other actions I repeat without realizing that I’m coding them into my body.

Maybe one day I will play the banjo as fluently as I ride a bicycle. It will keep me company and make me laugh. It will invite other voices and their own harmonies. The banjo has no agenda. It offers me no guilt or frustration, only song. It takes my moods and stress and fears and creates something more hopeful. My banjo needs its own slogan—one that rings true for me. Maybe: This Machine Digs Into Shit and Turns It To Fertilizer.

Sending Down Roots

Twilight this evening makes the world glow blue. The snow-covered ground reflects the dense sky. Finally, the winter we anticipated when we closed down the garden this fall has arrived. I slip into the barn to gather eggs—bluish-green and shades of brown—and watch the dog kick up some powder as she tears around on the hill.

Then we go inside to make French onion soup for supper. The smell of onions and garlic roasting with olive oil and thyme will fill the kitchen and spill into the mudroom when Andrew comes home.

I collect an armload of onions from our root cellar, a reliable source of satisfaction. Our root cellar used to be the cistern for water storage in the basement. Two thick stone walls complete a rectangle enclosing a corner under the kitchen.

The previous owner short-sightedly bashed a hole into the foundation to allow him to toss wood from the driveway into the cistern. He hammered another opening in the cistern wall to carry wood to the wood-burning furnace, which he later un-installed.

Andrew and my dad spent many summer days in that cistern, fixing the damages. Stones jigsawed into the foundation hole. A wooden frame closed the space between the stone wall and the kitchen floor joists. Insulation filled all the gaps. They poured a concrete doorway, then built a door, now held by hinges and a latch blacksmithed by my dad.

To get to that door, I walk past shelves they built, now laden with canned tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, dilly beans, pickled beets, plum jam, hot pepper jam, hot peppers, hot cucumber relish, and a bin of butternut squash. I lift the heavy latchpin and swing open the door.

Wooden crates—thanks again to dad—stack five kinds of potatoes against one wall. Many, many potatoes. Carrots and daikon radishes hide in tubs of damp sawdust. Onions fill another crate. I grab five large onions and head upstairs to cry as I slice them thinly.

We have sent down roots in this place, and I think about home. I juggle deep gratitude for our marriage, kids, farm, and jobs with the ache of living away from family and decades-old friendships. We each have strong roots in other places—Pennsylvania and Indiana—where family, extended family, and close friends coincide. We find ourselves living in neither of those places, but digging into life here. I find myself full and missing.

At my kids’ ages, I lived on the farm where my dad grew up. I had the sense of belonging that comes through generations of living there. After high school, I left home quickly, eager for new places, unconscious of what I was leaving behind.

Home always has layers and complications. How do I feel rooted in a place where all of our roots are only one year deep? What will our kids understand of themselves in this place? How can we connect them to our village, when it spans multiple states?

Now, home is where our potatoes parallel this stone foundation. Home is the dog among the chickens, the dog and the chickens in our kids’ arms. Our village is the kindness of strangers becoming friends, coworkers adopting us like family. We are lucky. On this blue evening, our home is warm. Our roots are roasting in the oven.

2015-10-11 22.31.51 — Digging potatoes in October

RootCellar.2.2016 — Potatoes and onions in February

Autumn Layers

2015-10-02 20.36.52 — Layers in early October

2015-10-29 01.08.23 — Layers at the end of October

I find myself wielding a machete behind the barn in my pajamas. Maybe this is not the perfect tool for this job, but it feels right. I am a ninja, swinging my heavy blade. I am an Amazon woman. I am a Jedi knight. Regret this tomorrow, I will.

It is a grey-sky, damp-air day, warm for November. A breeze touches the tall grass and dead goldenrod as I whack them. Without leaves on the trees, the underneath layers of the farm seem more complex, more beautiful. The wetland stands out, green-bronze below, topped with silver branches. The ground I am clearing undulates, perhaps deeply rutted from past heavy equipment, so it has escaped the bush hog. It is surrounded by half-naked trees and rusty-tufted sumac and leaning, disconnected fenceposts. I am hacking a path for the electronet fence.

Our laying hens’ dissatisfaction with their current accommodations has inspired my madness. A week ago, I exerted Hurculean effort to push their A-frame tractor uphill to fresh pasture, thinking they had exhausted the fun and nutrition from their enclosure on our defunct tomato patch. I thought they’d be grateful. I underestimated them.

First, they were loathe to leave the garden area, where we’ve rotated their house all summer. After prolonged, humiliating coaxing, most of the chickens crossed the road. Seven refused, deciding the gravel of our driveway was the devil. Six of these allowed me to scoop them under my arms and carry them across the Driveway Styx. Beardo did not.

Beardo, an Americauna with the dark whiskers of a lumberjack, required a slide tackle. In the process, Stella nicknamed her Roadrunner. I would’ve thrown up my hands and wished her luck finding the flock on her own, but a red-tailed hawk cruised nearby, and we needed leave to pick up Sam from school. With both of us muddy when she was finally under my arm, Beardo and I had words.

Since the big move, the hens have been flapping out of their electronet fencing several times daily. They prefer the garden, with long-dead sunflower stalks and bare dirt, to the pasture, with more exposure and no vertical structures. In the new location, Stella observes, the wind blows their butts wide open.

2015-11-11 22.04.09 — Rewards for my troubles

These birds now have no qualms about breaching the driveway to run all over the place. I don’t begrudge them their freedom, but it separates them from their food, water, and nest boxes, making them more vulnerable to predators.

This morning, I look out the kitchen window and see half the chickens down in the garden, with several hens scratching towards the road. Fine, ladies. Fine. I stuff my feet into muck boots and head outside to lure them back to safety—except Beardo, who I refuse to chase this time—and to move their house and yard under the trees.

Careful to keep my attentive dog behind me, I grip the machete, swinging from my shoulder. Knees bent, feet apart, I lean into the moment. I feel a little stiff. There are other things I should be doing. My coffee is definitely getting cold on the kitchen table, but I’m having too much fun to go back inside.

2015-11-11 17.19.48 — Today: the rogue Beardo. Skip wonders what the heck is wrong with this unherdable bird.

A Prescription for End-of-Summer Blues

Note: This prescription is preventive, and must be initiated several months prior to the end of summer.

Rx: Tomato plants, any highly productive variety.

Quantity: 72 plants (or any larger number of plants).

Refill: Once annually, as needed.

At the end of May, apply 72 (or more) plants at once to fertile soil every three feet. Replace any plants singed by a late frost. Stake and tie plants for maximum tomato yield. Grow plants with a commitment to eating all tomatoes produced, immediately and year round.

2015-08-29 05.24.15 Harvest tomatoes constantly. Preserve tomatoes with a complete set of canning
equipment, quart jars, and, ideally, a food dehydrator. Stare repeatedly at the full mason jars, hoping they have been properly sealed.

If fulfilled and administered as directed, this prescription will heighten relief at summer’s end, delay autumn melancholy, and curb feelings of dread that winter is pending.

Possible prescription interactions increasing these effects may include:

Having a day job (Or a night and weekend job. Any other job, really).
Raising livestock.
Parenting (See previous).
Growing ridiculous quantities of other vegetables.
Fulfilling weekly shares for a Community Supported Agriculture enterprise.
Parenting.

A willingness to allow tomatoes to rot, however, will weaken the effects of this prescription.

Side effects may include:

Sweating profusely in the garden.
Dark tomato plant staining of fingers, resembling heavy tobacco use.
Heartburn from overdose on fresh tomatoes.
Sweating profusely in the kitchen.
Abnormal gait while sliding in tomato juice all over the kitchen floor.
Insomnia due to finishing the last canner load at midnight.
Hypersalivation from olfactory stimulation.
Deep sense of satisfaction.

Caution: While using this prescription, Do Not perform the simple arithmetic of dividing the grocery store price of canned tomatoes by the number of hours spent planting, weeding, picking, and preserving your tomatoes. Such calculations might impair your perceptions of value and could result in injury to your gratification.

Consult your physician, therapist, spouse, neighbors, employer, and local garden guru before beginning any rigorous garden program. If you have a past history of excessive gardening or aversion to eating ripe tomatoes right off the vine, or if you lack a support network to receive boxfuls of ripe tomatoes in early September, this prescription may not be right for you.

Vegetables, Like Meteors

Melancholy surges in my chest as I walk the row of sugar snap peas. They are senescing, finally, yellowed from the ground upward until only the tops remain crisply green. These peas, often confined to June, have astounded me all summer. Now, some straggling peas decorate these green borders, less sweet than they had been, but still trying. I munch them like the last taste of summer.

I shake my head at myself, feeling maudlin amidst the roaring vegetation. Behind me, the tomato plants weigh heavily with fruit, despite having lost their lower leaves to blight during our wet early summer. If they decide to ripen more than two at a time, we’ll can them. For now, Sam brings me one, and we take turns biting into its warm flavorful flesh, juice on our chins.

Our corn stands tasseled and proud, loaded with ears that bow my head at suppertime. Their tender sweetness echoes my Lancaster, Pennsylvania childhood, when my parents invited a yard full of friends and relatives to help freeze one hundred dozen ears. We’d perch on the blue pickup truck, piled high with corn—the husking and talking, all covered with cornsilk. Water steamed in canners to cook the corn; the hose ran all day to cool it. Women in Mennonite dresses or shorts, all sat on lawn chairs with knees slightly spread to hold pans as they sliced sharp knives upwards past the flesh of their thumbs. Corn fell from the cobs in long train-track pieces, snatched from the pans by those of us too young for knives, but attuned to the taste of everyone working together.

How can I feel anything but delight, here in this garden, with the sunflowers waving against this sky? Pollinators attend these wide yellow and orange-brown faces. Bees have thighs thunderous with pollen. They draw me away—I’ll blame them for my tendency to gape at the flowers—from picking cucumbers.

The cucumbers! Our newly built shelves in the basement hold pints and quarts of pickled cucumbers—dills, spicy dills, garlicky dills, spicy bread and butters, sweet gherkins, spicy pickle relish. The gherkins are actually semi-sweet, since I miscalculated and added half the required sugar, leaving them with a satisfying tang.

We’ve pickled in the evenings, mostly after 10 pm. We finished in the wee hours on August 13, at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Feeling saturated in salt and vinegar, we walked out into the cool darkness and watched the Northeast. A couple of green frogs played their rubber bands in the ditch across the road. Meteors wisped and seared across the sky above the snoozing sunflowers, tomato stakes, and cornstalks.

The vegetables, like meteors, seem to pass in one gasp of awe. This year, I know how short summer in the Northeast can feel. I welcome the sweating as I wade through the weeds, sinking my teeth and eyes and fingers into the garden. The yellowing peas put a lump in my throat as I savor this brief, extraordinary vibrance.