L.A.W. Fraser's fragrant memory of two gardens takes us to a world of seeds and loam...and a surprise sprouting from the compost bin.
Favorite Gardens
by L.A.W. Fraser
Two gardens stand out in my mind. First is the one my dad created when I was a child; it was down the slope from our house on Fox Island. He plowed it with a gentle, old white Clydesdale by the name of Nellie. Above the garden, was an artisan well. After the ground was all plowed and tilled, Dad had me walk behind him to help press the seeds he was sowing down into the sandy loam. The garden area was surrounded by evergreens and madrone trees and I remember the smell of pine and warm soil with a hint of chicken manure mixed with salty seaweed from the bay. We grew beans, peas, carrots, corn, radishes, onions, pumpkins (which is what dad called squash or any pumpkin-like plant), and strawberries. The garden may have held other vegetables but I don’t remember what they might have been. Dad also helped me create my own garden, a smaller version next to his. I planted radishes, peas and nasturtiums.
When the radishes and green onions were thumb sized, dad would pull them and eat them with lunch putting out two tablespoons, one with vinegar and one with salt. He would dip his radish or onion into the vinegar then dip it into the salt. He savored every sour bite.
The second garden was the one my own family prepared at the back of our house in Virginia Beach. It wasn’t a large space, about 10’x10’ but Virginia had a long growing season that began in March and ended at the beginning of December. I could plant and harvest two times a year. We lived in a suburban area that had been bulldozed level, leaving the ground without any topsoil. We rented a rototiller and dug up the area, then heavily amended the soil with compost. We began our own compost bin and put grass clippings, weeds and other plant matter in it for mulch later. We planted green seedless grapes along one side while the compost bin was at the other end.
We tried different crops until we found what grew best and in what order. The first crop would consist of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, green peppers, beans, radishes, onions and lettuce. Just as the beans were ready to harvest, bean beetles would be eating the foliage like crazy. I would gather the beans, blanch them then freeze them. We would pull up the bean plants and pile grass clippings on top of them in our compost bin to create heat in order to kill the beetles. The tomatoes would bear fruit all summer and I would can a lot of them. We would go out at night to pick cut worms off the plants. After the soil rested from the bean harvest, we would plant peas. We would also reseed more lettuce, carrots and onions as needed. We always had an abundance of zucchini squash and of course, tomatoes. We tried corn but it took up too much space in comparison to its yield but found okra did well. The okra plants had glorious white flowers although the fruit is rather slimy when cooked so the only one who ever ate it was my husband.
One year we didn’t have time to attend to the weeding and care for our plot. I was out looking for any still edible vegetables to harvest at the end of the season when I tripped over a huge watermelon. The melon vine was coming out of the compost bin and the watermelon was laying under all sorts of old pea vines and weeds. It was the sweetest, best watermelon I had ever eaten. I had tried to grow melons before but failed to get any fruit at all. It took nature, on her own, to grow the juiciest and largest one and our family took two days to eat all of it.
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