Summer 2008
My Vermont: A Multitude of Seasons, Straight from the Garden
By Andrew Nemethy
Among my list of hobbies (definition: activities that inadvertently take over my life) I tell folks that I do aerobic gardening. This often draws a puzzled expression, except from fellow gardeners, who know exactly what I mean.
My experience over three-plus decades is that growing a garden is equal parts passion, up-tempo workout and sitcom. To put it another way, the garden can be a demanding mistress. At times, she can be sweet and delicate, at others earthy and luscious. But a mere couple of days of neglect, and the relationship can end disastrously.
Take a couple of years ago, when with great anticipation I moseyed up to the garden to pick my first red tomato of the summer. Instead I confronted tomatic devastation. The deer, who insist my garden is the local salad bar, had barged through a weak spot in the fence and eaten or chomped on anything vaguely redish. King Lear himself couldn't have done better than my howling imprecations in the tomato patch.
Still, those of us who start seeds in March and till and toil all summer into fall know the taste of a good thing when we sow it. Like many gardeners and generations of Vermonters before me, I have learned to count seasons not just by their foursquare appearance and temperature shifts. Instead, I eagerly tally a multitude of seasons, marked by fleeting appearances on the plate, in the bowl, pie or stew.
It starts in May with asparagus shoots from a prolific bed at least 40 years old, offering a delicacy whose subtle flavor doesn't even reside on the same planet as the stuff sold in stores. Then come the first tender spring greens, June sweet peas, late June rhubarb and strawberries, July's tender beans, raspberries and blueberries, then a wealth of goodies all at once, none of which surpass the harmonic seasonal convergence of fresh basil and parsley with ripe tomatoes and cukes, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette.
This is not to slight my favorite late summer, straight-from-the-garden meal of corn on the cob, fresh steamed haricot vert green beans, boiled potatoes and beets: summer distilled, then slathered with butter.
As a gardener, I join a long tradition of "putting food by, to use the old Vermont parlance. The practice was born of thrift, necessity and good taste on thousands of small farms where the wives made cheese and butter and cream, the meat came from the barn and coop, and mason jars filled with pickles, dilly beans, tomatoes and beets lined the cellar shelves.
Today, in almost dizzying fashion, the rest of the world has caught up to these sensible rural ways, and Vermont's long-cultivated attachment to homegrown goodness is suddenly oh-so au courant. Localvores are hot, and Vermont tallies at least 50 farm markets, 200 restaurants and food makers in the Vermont Fresh Network and more than 60 farms that are part of community supported agriculture, which links consumers to locally grown food.
We've got more cheesemakers per capita than Washington has lobbyists, and our state whose lambs, turkeys, wheat, butter and pork fed Boston Brahmins in the 1800s now feeds food Brahmins who want to eat well, organic, and know where their beef came from. Grandma's kitchen is back in vogue, albeit updated with Cavendish quail, Misty Knoll naturally raised chickens, Pete's Greens, Gaylord Farm pork and myriad other down-on-the-farm products from Vermont.
And so I stand in my garden, sweat-drenched and madly hoeing up purslane and pig weed and delivering manure tea to thirsty plants (and checking and re-checking the fence), amazed to find I'm not just a gardener who likes homegrown veggies, but part of a new paradigm — an organic/artisanal steward of the soil.
Exhausting work with a healthy moral purpose. It makes my aching back feel so much better.
Andrew Nemethy is a longtime contributor to Vermont Life who lives, plays and raises mutant zucchinis in Calais.
