Tales of Gardens Past

I was never very outdoors-y when I was kid.  I remember my mother yelling at me one summer to go outside and get some fresh air instead of staying inside reading.  So, I took A Tale of Two Cities with me out the window onto the porch roof.  Then she yelled at me for being on the roof so I had to come back inside.  I never did finish reading the book.  But, for some reason, once I got married and settled into a garage apartment with some land, it made sense to plant a garden.

Our first garden was not particularly impressive.  I had been working at a drug store while my husband was finishing college.  When the seed packets on the small display at the end of the seasonal aisle went on sale for ten cents each, I bought up a bunch of them.  We got a little bit of this and a little bit of that from the garden that year.  I remember picking four, rather pathetic ears of corn and being so excited that they had grown.  Corn is not known for growing well in the rocky soil of the Adirondacks.  Just that we had gotten those few ears to grow was enough to keep me going.

Our first garden on the mountain

The aforementioned corn

We learned really quickly that we had to plant vegetables that fit the nature of the season on the mountain.  Things like peas that could be planted as soon as the ground thawed did well as long as we got varieties that could handle the heat too.  The weather there went from freezing to full summer within a couple of weeks.  Spinach never worked.  It would bolt before it was big enough to harvest.  Swiss chard, however, grew beautifully.  Bright lights chard is still a household favorite.

Our last garden on the mountain

Bright lights rainbow chard

When we got chickens, the garden really perked up. (I’ve got plenty of chicken stories to share later sometime along the way.)  It’s amazing how much their coop cleanings added to the soil.  Chloe, our house bunny, contributed too.  Up north, a compost pile can sit for a whole season without breaking down.  The added manure really helped everything digest.  After just a few years we had such a productive garden that we had to buy a chest freezer for everything harvested.  And that was on top of all the zucchini, tomatoes, and chard we gave away to friends and family.

Our first batch of chickens on their first day in the new coop

Chloe the house bunny

In a way, even then, we were following the Shaker example.  The Shakers kept notes about the weather and growing conditions and what plants grew best.  We did the same thing.  My husband had a weather station and he recorded daily temperature and rainfall.  I’ve got a notebook filled with what varieties of vegetables grew each season and how well.

We had a pretty good thing going up on the mountain but that the economy took a dive and jobs dried up.  One thing led to another and in 2011 we moved to the Southern Tier of New York.  The first house we rented had a nice back yard and we were able to plant a garden.  It also had a well-established family of woodchucks. 

Our Southern Tier garden

Woodchucks hanging out by the shed

The next house we moved into did not have space for a garden but it was close enough to my in-laws’ house that we got to use a couple of their raised beds.  That kept my hands in the soil but it didn’t really feel like gardening.  This summer I planted a few raised beds outside of the museum where I work as part of an exhibit on local agriculture.  It was a fun project but I am really looking forward to having a real garden again.  I remember spending so many peaceful hours working over the same plot of land, weeding, checking for pests, looking for the first signs of vegetables.  I want that again.