The summer that I turned eight, we moved full-time to a piece of land in rural New Hampshire. Before that, we'd travel to the land from the city on weekends and holidays to clear a spot for a cabin and gardens. I spent many, many hours hauling brush and trees. Many of the felled trees became fence-railings and posts. We pulled thousands of rocks and hundreds of stumps out with my dad's truck and come-along, and hauled in innumerable loads of horse manure from the local horse farm and sawdust from the local saw mill. We got a horse, goats, and chickens, and their manure was added to our household waste, and became compost that we eventually used to enrich the soil in the garden.
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| Me and my pet chicken (Chirp), my Grandma, and my mom. Plus lots of trees cut from our N.H. land to clear the garden. |
I remembering helping to dig the rows every year, and I especially remembering the picking: green beans that seemed never-ending during the summer, carrots, beets, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers, etc. In the late fall, I remember trying to dig carrots out of the partially frozen ground, and in the winter, I remember cutting brussels sprouts off the stalk. Both of those tasks I strongly disliked; our water during the warm weather came from a pressure-fed natural spring up the hill from our house; in the water, we lugged it from the spring to the house in five-gallon buckets, so getting my hands clean and warm after digging carrots and cutting brussels sprouts was pretty much impossible.
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| My mom and my younger brother in the N.H. garden, in the spring. |
During the late summer, my mom and I would can tomatoes, green beans, and pickles. I have fond and not-so-fond memories of that time: it was always the hottest time of the year so having the kitchen stove burning for hours at time to scald the tomatoes, cook the tomato sauce, or seal the canning jars in the pressure cooker or water bath made the kitchen stiflingly hot. Of course, since we were off-grid, we didn't have air-conditioning. Preserving tomatoes was the most difficult part. To loosen their skins, the tomatoes were first dipped in boiling water and then cold water. We then could just pull the skins off with our fingers. The acid in the tomatoes got into every tiny break in the skin on my hands and burned like hell. My fingers would wrinkle and turn white from being wet for so long. On the other hand, I loved to salt and eat the scalded, warm tomatoes.
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My mom, proudly displaying the results of our canning in the pantry.
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And the payoff from canning was wonderful: every day after school I'd come home and eat dill pickles, sometimes with a piece of bread wrapped around them. And in the long, cold days of winter, my mom would make spaghetti and meatballs using the sauce we'd made back in the seemingly forever-ago summer.
I bitched and moaned at the time about being forced to help out. In retrospect, while it was certainly reasonable to expect me to help out around the house and yard, they did ask a bit too much of me as a kid: it wasn't my dream to move back to the land and develop a homestead, and I didn't choose the back-breaking labor necessary to live that kind of life. I spent many hours after school, on weekends, and during my breaks doing hard physical labor: lugging rocks, hauling brush, raking, loading and stacking firewood, scraping the paint off of old salvaged windows, pulling nails out of salvaged boards, pulling weeds, picking and canning vegetables, hauling water for the household in a plastic sled, and cleaning out manure, in addition to other standard chores shared by other kids my age such as washing dishes, folding laundry, taking out the garbage, sweeping the house, and making my bed.
Of course, in the process, I did pick up some very important skills and I developed values and beliefs about what kind of life I think is worth living.
The summer after sixth grade, I got a job on the farm where my mother worked. She was in charge of the farm's greenhouse operations. I worked mostly in the fields, picking and hauling vegetables in the field for the farm's vegetable stand, stocking the stands, and weeding. I also worked inside and outside the greenhouses caring for the yard and houseplants, such as mums. Working in the fields was hard physical work; I'd start in the morning around 7:30 at the end of one row and I'd work my way along the row for hours as the sun got higher in the sky. We'd break for lunch; I'd be so hungry from the work I'd sometimes eat a whole pizza by myself. After lunch, it was back to the fields, under a scorching sun, until 5 p.m. I'd end up filthy and exhausted, yet exhilarated and drunk from the sun and fatigue. We did have brief interludes where the two male teen supervisors allowed (and initiated) rotten tomato fights. I cherished those times when I'd get to take a break to go stock the fruit and vegetable stand, because it meant I needed to get supplies out of the walk-in cooler, where I'd linger and eat grapes.
Some days, I worked with the mums. Thousands of mums of various varieties were spread out on black plastic sheets and the goal was to get them to be as bushy and bloom-covered as possible. Some days I spend the entire day pinching them back, to encourage branching and profuse flowering. Other days, I'd begin watering and fertilizing first thing in the morning and wouldn't finish until the afternoon. It was damn hot, standing out there with the mums on the black plastic. Oddly, I don't remember ever wearing sunscreen.
During the school year, in middle school and throughout high school, I worked in the greenhouses owned by a classmate's dad. He grew the kinds of seasonal holiday plants that you find in places like the grocery store or K-Mart: Easter Lilies, geraniums, petunias, and yes, mums. There, I'd water and fertilize for hours on end, too. The main job, though, was to transplant seedlings from the small cells they were initially planted in, into the larger pots they'd sell in. On a typical day, I'd transplant tens of thousands of seedlings of the same kind of plant. It was repetitive and relaxing, though I did have to pay attention to keeping up my speed, and I enjoyed working inside the greenhouses surrounded by plants. I'd lose all track of time until my boss would come in and tease me for "lolly-lagging" no matter how fast I was working. I did come to hate the smell of geraniums, though, and I'm only now coming to appreciate them again. I also developed the ability to be relaxed about caring for plants; many people think that plants are really fussy and must be constantly watched over and pampered. I realized that, given the right conditions, plants
will grow. And fussing and lots of handling and fiddling with the conditions to make them just right aren't good for them. Strangely, plants are like horses and children; they seem to appreciate and flourish with relaxed and competent handling, and satisfaction of their basic needs.
The time I spent around growing things was seriously reduced when I left for college. When I was an undergraduate in Maryland, three of the places I lived were second-floor apartments with no access to any ground whatsoever. In the first two places, I didn't really notice or mind; my attention was caught up in other things. But after living in the third place, I swore that I would never again live in a place where I couldn't step out my front door and have access to the soil. I did, however, have houseplants throughout my college years. After college, I moved home to New Hampshire for a few months and painted houses with my dad. That was wonderful because I got to spend time in the garden again, though I wasn't responsible for it. I then moved in with what were to eventually become my in-laws in California, in the suburbs. They had a beautiful yard as did all their neighbors, but no one had gardens.
After my son was born, and my husband and I were in graduate school, he, my then-husband and I moved into a row-house in the family-student housing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. That was a beautiful place; the family-student housing looked out over the Monterey Bay in one direction, and over lush fields and redwoods in the other directions. We had a small grassy fenced backyard that was adjacent to a larger grassy common area. I was excited to once again have garden space, this time space of my own, and I cleared an area in our yard the first summer and planted poppies, zinnias, petunias, and tomatoes. The tomato plants grew huge and luscious-and were covered with green tomatoes. And then one night the deer came and ate all the tomatoes and the plants down to nubs.
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| Toddler Oliver in front of our garden space in Santa Cruz, CA |
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| Garden space in Santa Cruz, CA |
We didn't live there through the next summer. We graduated and moved to Bloomington, Indiana to enter doctoral programs. There, we rented a house with a fenced yard, right next to an enormous city park. When we moved in, the house had a plain front and back yard, covered with grass. We rototilled garden space and planted all kinds of vegetables. We also planted maple and fruit trees, roses, and all kinds of wildflowers. Eventually, the yard grew lush and crazy.
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| Newly established garden in Bloomington, IN |
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| Growing yard, in Bloomington, with rainbow |
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| Bloomington yard |
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| Oliver in the Bloomington yard |
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| Oliver, with our enormous crop of dandelions |
Things would get kind of crazy time-wise in the spring, with final exams and grading. We didn't always keep our yard mowed and nicely groomed, in keeping with the neighborhood standards.
I remember that I canned on my own for the first time while we lived there. I also remember that a mother rabbit built her den right into the side of our carrot bed; unfortunately the cats discovered it and hauled out the babies, one by one. Though none of the babies appeared damaged, we weren't able to save any of them.
After graduate school, we moved to a rental house in Virginia, right outside of D.C. Though the house had a yard, my life was so stressful that gardening didn't even cross my mind. I was working full time at a non-profit and finishing the writing of my dissertation in the hours before dawn and on weekends. Though I did finish my dissertation and get my doctoral degree within a year of moving, that was in many ways the beginning of a dark time in my life. Amongst other things, that was when I first began to get really sick. Although I loved D.C., I hated that I was no longer in an academic environment of people committed to learning, no longer with the community of friends and colleagues from Bloomington, the university, and Oliver's school, and no longer surrounded by the trees, green hills, and animal and insect life that had been present in the mid-west.
Sick, deeply in debt, and unhappy, I quit my job and free-lanced for a bit. I started teaching part time at Georgetown University, we consolidated our debt, bought a house in Maryland, and I transitioned to full time at the University. Things seemed to be looking up, though I was still sick. The house in Maryland, though it had been built in the 1950s, had virtually nothing growing in its yard except for tons of grass, a dogwood tree, one red tulip, and an overgrown and diseased rhododendron.
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| The Silver Spring, MD house which is very bare, even after we made some preliminary efforts to plant some things in the beds. |
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| The Silver Spring, MD house after our preliminary plantings. |
I put a lot of work, money, and love into the Silver Spring yard during the seven or so years we lived there. It wasn't a huge yard, and half of it was covered with the shade of enormous oak trees, so gardening conditions weren't optimal. Still, over the years I planted tomato plants, and many different kinds of herbs. Right before we decided to move, I had been reading about urban gardening, and I had hatched a plan to get some reclaimed planks and convert my flower and herb beds to vegetable beds.
Through the years there, we built stone walkways and walls, hauled in manure and top soil, and I enriched the soil with humus and leaf litter I carted in from the nearby woods. We constructed three compost bins with packing crates, and composted our yard and food waste. While at first I got all kinds of perennials from the nearby greenhouse and created beds around the perimeter of the yard, I learned about the benefits of native plants and started to search for plants in the wild areas of the neighborhood. I dug some of them up, hauled them home along with some of the native soil, and scattered them in a naturalized way throughout the yard. I identified native plants that would flourish in the shady areas, and after several years of failing to get anything to grow in that part of the yard, I planted these there instead of greenhouse-purchased plants, and they settled in happily.
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| The house, after a few years |
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| Flower beds with birdbath |
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| Purple Coneflower |
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| Dandelions and Bachelors Buttons, along with an unidentified wildflower |
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| Bleeding Hearts |
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| Columbine |
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| The Silver Spring house after a few years of planting and growth |
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| Woodland Poppies |
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| Solomon's Seal |
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| Ferns from the woods |
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| Harriet, my gargoyle, surrounded by Euphorbia and Money Plant |
After I met Mike, we talked about homesteading in Virginia, on land that his boss was going to give him. I started all kinds of seedlings in anticipation of planting a big garden.
We went back and forth between a couple of prospective house/garden sites. The first was on a hill, and was covered with teasel that we chopped down with a hand scythe.
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| Mike digging in Virginia |
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| Prospective garden space in Virginia |
However, after we got a better sense of where exactly the property lines were, we decided to move to a flatter area down the hill, and we got started mowing and breaking the turf. We even had manure delivered and hauled trash barrels filled with compost in from my house in Maryland.
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| Manure in VA |
But after some additional reflection and in a relatively short period of time, we decided to go in another direction entirely: to move to the Santa Fe/Taos, area of New Mexico, and to rent for awhile with the prospect of saving money to buy our own homestead.
We found a beautiful rental house up on the canyon walls of the Rio Grande River, that was off-grid and it had garden space. The prior tenants had even planted two tomato plants before they left.
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| The mostly empty Embudo, NM garden in the summer of 2012 |
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| Two kind of sad, resident tomato plants in Embudo, NM. Can you find them? |
After we decided to rent the house, Mike and our landlady spent a few hours sowing some random seeds in the garden, and turned the drip irrigation system back on. We went back to Maryland and Virginia to continue our packing up, and by the time we returned to New Mexico a month or so later (at the end of July), some things had sprouted, mostly Zinnias, sunflowers, morning glories, and arugula, and the tomatoes were looking a little healthier.
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| The beginnings of the Embudo garden, summer 2012, when we moved in |
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| The beginnings of the Embudo garden, summer 2012, when we moved in |
I pulled weeds, watered, and planted a few additional things, like summer squash, green, and pole beans. But by the time we were settled in and I put the seeds in the ground, it was early to mid August, which was very late in the growing season. Nevertheless, we did get some squash, and tons of beautiful flowers.
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| Embudo garden, summer 2012 |
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| Embudo garden, summer 2012 |
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| Embudo garden, summer 2012 |
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| Embudo garden, summer 2012 |
This spring, I started seedlings and they are now all in the ground.
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| Spring 2013 seedlings |
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| Spring 2013 seedlings |
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| Spring 2013 seedlings |
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| Spring 2013 garden bed |
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| Spring 2013 seedlings |
Everyday I'm out in the garden, looking to see if there have been any changes. Things are definitely progressing: there are now flowers on the tomatillos, cucumbers, squashes, and tomatoes. The green and yellow beans are off to a good start, and I just planted a fresh batch of salad mix that has begun to sprout. The sunflowers and morning glories are scattered throughout the garden, and I'm eagerly anticipating blossoms.
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| View of the garden, now |
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| Squashes, now |
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| Green beans, now |
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