Nelson County Rocks

I guess most non-gardeners would think I spent a ridiculous amount of time this period of each year poring over seed catalogs.  But what gorgeous displays many of them have become, and with the growth of interest in heirloom plants, they are goldmines of historical as well as horticultural information.  Who can resist names like Cherokee Trail of Tears Bean, Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck Squash, Paul Robeson Tomato, Bloody Butcher Corn, or Fife Creek Cowhorn Okra?  When combined with all the luscious catalog photos, it’s easy to understand Barbara Kingsolver’s husband’s reported quip in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that it might be more efficient for her to circle the items that didn’t tempt her, rather the ones that did!

The four catalogs pictured above: Seed Savers Exchange, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange are my current favorites for varying reasons–vision, diversity, horticultural information, and regional focus, among others.  I’ve ordered seeds from all of them and the arrival of their catalogs around the new year feels like a visit from old friends.  Recently I’ve also discovered three online catalogs that have nice special features: Cherry Gal not only offers an impressive variety of heirloom seeds but also packets with half the usual number of seeds (generally more than enough for most gardeners) at half the price.  Renee’s Garden Seeds, while somewhat more limited in its offering, combines color-coded seeds of different varieties of a given vegetable in the same packet, allowing one to get what one wants in one packet instead of several (I also like the detailed growing information right on the seed packet, rather than having to refer back to the catalog).  And Amishland Heirloom Seeds provides unusually-detailed information on many hard-to-find heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables and flowers.

Beyond seed catalogs, retirement has produced a fairly eclectic range of reading, but increasingly I’ve recognized a pattern involving the material bases of culture and history, with a parallel effort to broaden my woefully-limited scientific background.  This started with Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, a book that had been sitting on my bookshelf for twenty years, while it influenced others like Jared Diamond, who popularized many of its ideas.  Other good reads in this vein were Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, and Henry Hobhouse’s Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Changed the World. (A re-reading of Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire also provided food for thought.) Recently my son Tim came by with The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, which I appropriated for the duration of his stay and found to be a fascinating account of British scientist and radical theologian Joseph Priestley, his long-term intellectual relations with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and his eventual flight as a political refugee to the backwoods of Pennsylvania.  While I’d known about his role in the discovery of oxygen, I was unaware of his being the first to grasp the fact that plants gave off oxygen through what we now understand as photosynthesis.  He was in a sense, then, the founder of ecological studies.  Currently I’m reading and enjoying Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I’d listened to while driving to and from Virginia, but am getting much more out of by actually reading it.  How Bryson manages to serve up such a broad smorgasbord of basic science while being consistently funny and entertaining constantly amazes me.  But I’m learning a lot!

Among other books read: Monika came across Virginia Bell Dabnay’s Once There Was a Farm: A Country Childhood Remembered in our local library, and her enthusiasm led me to read it too.  What a great read!  Without nostalgia or sentimentality, Virginia Bell Dabnay (1919-1997) provides a beautiful elegy for a life few would want to live today but which nonetheless hauntingly reminds us of what we have lost in our mostly paved-over industrial consumerist society.  Dabney describes her growing up on a farm in central Virginia with her strong-willed mother and two sisters (her strange bird of a father lived in Chicago during most of her upbringing, until he moved uncomfortably to the farm when he retired).  Coincidentally, in later life, she bought a place not far from our new home  in Roseland, which she abandoned in disgust when the Wintergreen development came in the 1970s, moving later on to  the Allehgeny Mountains in western Virginia.   With its intimate portrait of the hardships and rewards of rural life in the 1920’s and 1930’s, filled with amazingly-vivid stories and with unobtrusive but powerful insights into family, race relations, friendship, and community, it’s a deeply moving, and for me, unforgettable,  book.

We had much to be thankful for at our first Thanksgiving in Virginia: our transition into retirement and a new sort of life has gone amazingly smoothly and we are loving every minute.  And of course we were thankful that Eleanor and Justin came down by train from New York City, and that Nic and Alison came out from Charlottesville.

Wednesday evening I prepared a “local” meal where the key ingredient of each dish came from our garden (fresh or via the freezer): yellow squash pancakes, pesto with spaghetti, three varieties of sunroom-ripened tomatoes, zucchini bread, and a vegetable medley of garden onions, tomatoes, string beans, lima beans, peppers, yellow and green squash, and herbs (click on left picture for a larger view).

On Thanksgiving Day we took “The Plunge” trail to the overlook in the middle picture, as well as driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway and stopping on the way back for a short hike to Crabtree Falls.  At Thanksgiving dinner, all agreed that the Polyface Farm turkey was the tastiest we’d ever had (also less fatty, since it got to run around in its life).

More pictures may be seen by clicking here.

It now seems amazing to me that that at the time of my last posting about our vegetable garden in mid-July, we were just getting a handful of Early Girl tomatoes.  For weeks now tomatoes of many hues and varieties have poured forth from our garden, averaging 30-50 per day.  (This on top of everything else mentioned earlier, with recent additions of carrots, eggplants, leeks, and melons).

Keeping up with this outpouring of tomatoes has been a challenge.  We’ve been eating lots of gazpacho (there’s a nice simple recipe at Farmgirl Fare that not only dispenses with peeling and seeding, but with tomato juice as well),  tomato sauce (click here for one favorite recipe, but follow the option for using fresh tomatoes) and salsa, salads (here’s a great recipe for black bean and tomato quinoa, although you can dispense with the complicated instructions for cooking quinoa and just cook it like rice, fluffing it up at the end), and of course tons of sliced tomatoes.  But that’s made only a small dent, so we’ve been freezing tomatoes in various forms (but mainly just cored, bagged, and popped into the freezer) for uses in soups and stews in the winter.  The fresh flavor holds amazingly well, even if the texture is mostly lost.

For my own memory and for fellow tomato growers (such as Donna, who posted a comment earlier on some of the varieties she is growing), I’m going to summarize and illustrate our experience over the past two years, when we began mainly to grow heirloom varieties rather than hybrids.  (The distinction between these is variable, but in my view the key thing is that heirloom varieties are open pollinated while hybrids are not, with the further observation that the point of most hybridization has focused on appearance, ease of mass transport, and supermarket shelf life, rather than flavor.)

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This past Tuesday I did a pretty complete harvest in the garden and took a good-sized basket to Monika, who has been tending the house in Cherry Hill.  I returned yesterday and what you see above is what became harvest-ready in the four days I was away.  It comes to 34 pounds overall and includes Early Girl tomatoes; six varieties of summer squash (Costata Romano, Dark Green, Ambassador, Golden Zucchini, Scallop, Lemon); pole beans (Kentucky Wonder and Emerite); bush beans (Royal Burgundy); four varieties of cucumber (White Wonder, Marketmore 76, Poinset 76 and American slicing); two varieties of snap peas (Cascadia and Super Sugar), and plenty of basil for a batch of pesto.

Now of course the work begins to store much of this away for fall and winter…

June 29th produced our first harvest basket–not too bad considering that we weren’t able to plant most things until mid-May.  Mostly heirloom varieties: 2 varieties of cucumber, 4 varieties of summer squash, snap peas, (Early Girl hybrid) tomatoes, pepper, lettuce, swiss chard, parsley, basil.  (Missed the pole beans hiding at the base of their poles.)  It’s not hard to see that the quantity is about to increase exponentially (we’ve ordered a freezer, due to arrive later this week).

Given our experience with a community garden in New Jersey last year, what is perhaps most striking is the almost total absence of pests so far.  Insects have nibbled at the leaves of some of the lettuce, arugula, vegetable amaranth, and eggplants, but so far none of the usual suspects that caused so much trouble last year!  The string beans on the string trellis were searching two feet upward with their tendrils, so I’ve installed 10 foot bamboo poles to accommodate them.  There’s no secret to any gardener where Jack and the beanstalk comes from!

Getting a vegetable garden planted as quickly as possible was important to us.  Nic and I started sod removal on April 24, followed by broadforking and rototilling the soil, amending it with compost from a paper mill that we had delivered, creating raised beds and planting seeds and seedlings, and finally constructing a fence to keep out deer.  By May 18th the garden was pretty much complete. Click on any picture above to see a larger gallery.