Category Archives: Gardening

My Southern Garden

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“March 9th both beds of peas up! March 23rd sowed 2 rows of celery 9 inches apart, sowed 2 rows of Spanish onions and 2 of lettuce.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1767

It is no surprise that our Founding Gardener got giddy and detailed with the advent of spring, when the inspiration and the reality of the annual vegetable garden is ultimately constrained only by imagination and labor. Each January, mulling over the vast pantheon of vegetable planting possibilities — from artichokes to broccoli, cabbages to corn, all the way down the alphabet until reaching everyone’s favorite vegetable to gift (in quantity), the overproductive zucchini — I know in my heart that something must give. In the final accounting, after all, there are only so many dinners one can eat, so many stolen mornings to attend to the weeding, only so much space to devote.

This tendency toward overshoot, of course, may be evolutionary, that our eyes are truly bigger than our stomach. Fortunate for us, we raise hogs. These fellow gourmands have our back; they are all too ready to take on the challenge of a too-productive garden.

What follows are some thoughts on the vegetable annuals I do plant. This list is governed by one simple rule: plant what you want to eat. Although beauty and orderliness have some merit, if it doesn’t have a place on the dinner plate, why bother? (Which begs the question of why I raised those damned prickly cardoons last year.)

  • Tomatoes: I typically plant at least a half-dozen varieties, ranging from the unproductive but outstandingly delicious Brandywine to the sturdy and prolific workhorse, the Rutgers. With at least six and often more varieties in the ground and 20-30 plants in all, I’m ready for whatever the season throws at the garden. Too much or too little rain, cool or hot, a few if not all will thrive. A summer table without tomatoes is a sign of celestial disfavor. And besides, who would want to eat an egg and bacon sandwich without a slice of tomato?
  • Peppers: While one good pepper plant can satisfy a family, and the pigs will not eat the excess, I still can’t resist putting at least a dozen in the ground. Like okra, they make this gardener look highly skilled. (These are the plants needed to provide ample cover for my other horticultural sins.) I find that a planting of Hatch and jalapeño peppers provide what we crave.
  • Eggplant: I plant about four (usually Black Beauty) and as late as I can still find them. Because covering crops with row covers, dusting with diatomaceous earth, are activities performed only in the most lazy and forgetful fashion by this Scotch-Irish descendant. If the flea beetles are to be outwitted, my plants go in the ground in late June or July and we dine in September on eggplant parmigiana.
  • Southern field peas: That my beloved is not a fan does not limit the space devoted to this most prolific of all that is grown in my garden of Southern varieties. I keep more than a dozen heirlooms: Texas Zipper Creams, Red Rippers, the Unknown field pea, Polecats, Purple Hulls, each lovingly preserved in the freezer for their chance to be chosen to shine bright on a summer evening. A small pot of field peas (also sometimes called crowders) with a bit of smoked tasso, fresh herbs, and other seasonings, all simmered in homemade chicken stock for a couple of hours is as close to perfection as I might hope for in this life. To paraphrase old Ben Franklin, they are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. A bonus is to have a reason to sit quietly and shell peas in the cooling shade of the evening while sipping a cold beer.
  • Green beans: Just a trio of poles, formed into a couple of tepees and planted with the variety called Murphy’s, is sufficient for our green bean needs. They will keep us fed, if harvested regularly, fresh in summertime and canned or frozen for out-of-season dining.
  • Butter beans: A row trellised in mid-summer, packed with pods (most often Snow on the Mountain), mounds of verdant vines, conveying richness and a promise of food security at the table. Serve them cooked in pork products, in a jambalaya, or in chicken stock, buried beneath a slow-cooked, garlic-stuffed leg of lamb.
  • Lettuce: Sharpen your pens in rebuke, but lettuce is a backdrop to the seasonal plate, always present, even needed, but seldom remarked on or loved; a mere conveyance for the main event, yet, it is still essential. I plant a rotating crop of a market mix to provide textural and taste contrasts for whatever use is called for at dinner. Obligatory, attractive, but boring.
  • Garlic: Easy to grow, essential, exciting even, garlic should always be planted in longer rows than one can spare. For to run out of garlic mid-winter is to contemplate the dark thoughts of a trip to Olive Garden. We always plant at least two varieties, Killarney Red being a favorite.
  • Onions: A row of red and a row of white, well-watered, yields a surprisingly large amount for the larder. True, we can buy them, like potatoes, “dirt cheap” at the store. And we never quite grow enough to forestall their purchase. But having your own red onion, freshly cured, is just the thing to make that lettuce look and taste less boring.
  • Winter squash: Typically I will grow three different varieties (although, for some reason I have grown none the past couple of years). Hubbard, Candy Roaster, pumpkins, the list is endless. A winter squash mashed up with butter and Steen’s syrup, with a sprinkling of pecans — now who can think of a better accompaniment to a dinner of pork chops and rice smothered in tomato gravy?
  • Okra: That ultimate cultural identity test, separating the newly arrived New Yorker from the Chosen. I grow the variety Dub Jenkins every year, courtesy of that gardening giant John Coykendall. Okra bulks up a vegetable stew (which will always have beef, my protein- and flavor-deprived vegetarian friends), should never be seen in a bowl of gumbo (unless you hang out with those misguided souls from New Orleans), is perfect in fritters, and is absolutely lovely when pickled (but only made by my friend Susan or Talk of Texas).
  • Yellow squash: I grow it every year and am always grateful for the short season we enjoy it before the squash borers invade. Then it is gone, which is fine, because too much of a good thing and the palate is jaded. Served in a casserole with bacon (from the oft-mentioned Ms. Lundy’s cookbook) or sliced thin with potatoes and zucchini, then sprinkled with herbs and salt, and baked in the oven — these are my two favorite ways to eat crooknecks, please.
  • Cucumbers: That a fruit can be so bland by itself, yet leave you salivating in the kitchen, a halved cuke in one hand and a fistful of kosher salt in the other, is a marvel. Cucumbers never last long enough.
  • Cabbages: I will war with the natural world to keep these whole and fresh all the way to maturity. Cole slaw, home-fermented sauerkraut, or alongside some freshly cured corned beef or pork, the world would be less than whole without the contributions of cabbage.
  • Greens (all of ‘em): I’ll refer you to my Ode to Greens. Let the rest of the garden be washed away or eaten by the undeserving, but please leave me the greens.

Now, you may wonder at the obvious ones missing, potatoes and corn. And I do typically grow some for the table. But here, and just between us, I blush to confess, the economy and scale of the grocery store to provide quality at a reasonable price makes my efforts superfluous. Besides, I am a rice man by inheritance and culinary inclination. And, as for the noble corn, it is always at its best stone ground and made into cornbread.

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Reading this weekend two books (again and again) by very different Southerners, both of whom knew that the meaning of a good garden is hospitality. Butter Beans to Blackberries, Recipes from the Southern Garden (R. Lundy). What prose, what style, what wisdom and joy is found in these pages (such as the instructions on page 164, for okra and corn fritters with sorghum and pepper relish). And Thomas Jefferson, the Garden and Farm Books (T. Jefferson). A fascinating glimpse into his world and life.

Ross Road on a Spring Day

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It is the kind of drive that restores some of my dwindling supply of faith. On this late spring day, two kids in inner tubes are bobbing in the faster current of the creek that sweeps under the bridge over Possum Trot. It is an unremarkable stream that runs alongside our road, and it never builds up much speed unless in flood. I honk my horn in hello as I pass. Across the way a neighbor is using a skid steer to smooth out a new driveway. He looks up and waves.

Young gilts

The skies are May blue, with deeper shades and depths in the distance where storms linger without threat. I make the left turn onto Ross Road. In a small pasture on the right that stretches back to a low wooded ridge, a large family works together to set out a garden. The man tills while his teenage sons pull sod from the patch. Back a distance from the road, a cluster of women chat in the shade. Perched in lawn chairs next to another stream, they keep a close eye on a passel of youngsters who run shrieking in and out of the water in a game of chase. I honk again and wave.

Around the curve I brake suddenly for a flock of chickens crossing. They belong to a neighbor whose poultry roam at will during daylight hours, as they should on all winding country lanes. That I never see a dead chicken in the road shows that either the poultry are street savvy or at least that area drivers keep a sharp watch. Off to the side of the neighbors’ is a small homemade hoop house. Behind it, in a quarter-acre lot, a distinctive pod of hogs lies beached under the cool shade of overhanging trees.

I glance to the left, where Big Sandy cuts off on an asphalt tributary. A man feeds his horses and another stacks firewood. Ross Road follows a soft curve, framed by a never-run-dry spring to the left and a bulk feed bin to the right. Cresting the hill, I see off behind a well-maintained rancher that the wife of a fellow who has dug several ponds on our farm is taking her rest from mowing the yard. We both wave.

Ross takes a long upward bend to the east just after passing Lynn Road, to the south. I come upon the Burnett family, who periodically buy our feeder pigs. They have recently leveled an old barn (which with the next good gust of wind would probably have fallen on its own), and today some of them are busy preparing the foundation for a replacement. Others are hoeing in an adjacent and embarrassingly tidy garden. Knowing the state of my own garden plot, I am tempted not to honk, but they flip me a quick wave and I reply in kind.

The road narrows as it passes through a wood just before the Brights’ dairy. Upon emerging from the trees, the lane aligns at certain times of the year with both the rising sun and the eastward route of the morning school bus — making for a dangerous game that involves squinting and a desperate hope that your own vehicle and that of the bus driver are both in separate lanes, keeping all on the above-ground side of life.

The path widens, slightly, and I turn down a hill between two dairy pastures, where I see Mrs. Bright tending the modest (and again tidy) garden across from her home. Another curve, past the dairy’s calving paddock, alongside the milking parlor, and I’m on the final stretch to Stockton Valley.

At the stop sign I turn left. A large garden just behind a small red barn that sports an extensive collection of metal farm equipment signs, a just-baled hayfield, another rancher whose lawn is erupting with spring flowers — I’ve arrived at the demarcation of my boundary. I pick up speed on the long, quiet straightaway that leads out of our community.

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Reading this weekend: How to Be a Farmer (MD Usher), a collection of Greek and Roman authors on farming. No Country for Old Men (C. McCarthy).

Pride Goeth (or, My GDF Sheep!)

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The hoophouse in happier days

Now that the skies have been blue for a week, it is official: I am enjoying the farm again. The old excitement of the coming spring takes on steam as the grass rapidly greens, the maples begin to bud in the deep woods, the plums leaf out in the orchard. When friends we hadn’t seen in a year visited yesterday, for the first time in months I was not embarrassed by the winter face of the farm.

Last weekend I planted a small new vineyard of wine grapes (Chambourcin and Cynthiana) on the back side of the old orchard. High hopes that in 3-4 years’ time I can produce a decent enough red wine to see me through any apocalypse. Meanwhile, out in the hoop house, after a weekend of prepping last month, I planted 80 feet of cole crops — lots of collards, early maturing cabbages, and Brussels sprouts. The 160 feet of onions and garlics planted in the fall in the north garden were up 4-8 inches. Life is good.

On Tuesday, I took an overnight trip for my off-the-farm job. When I returned Wednesday afternoon, Cindy and I sat down for late afternoon coffee and a chance to catch up. This time of the year, as spring gathers momentum, it is more important than ever for couples who farm together to spend time discussing what needs to be done, what has been done, what has happened while one was away.

As Cindy started recounting the previous 24 hours, I sat back in my reading chair and took a sip of coffee … then spit out my coffee, choking, before stuttering and spewing, “The Goddamn F-ing Sheep Did What???!!!”

Apparently, the aforementioned GDFS! had broken through a fence and spent the previous night in the garden and hoop house. Where, in mere minutes, they denuded both of every tender shoot in the ground. They then proceeded to party all night, overturning planting tables, kicking apart drip hoses, ripping through the double-layered polyethylene walls. In short, having a grand old time before dawn arrived and Cindy restored order.

I replanted this weekend, repaired, and cleaned up their party. Because? Such is my inexhaustible faith and optimism in life when the skies are blue and the temps are mellow. So, once again, I am at peace with the world. At least until the sun comes up.

On the Farm in December: Mud, Veggies, and Dining on Squirrel

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Water: The rains still fall with the same regularity in December as in most other months. Yet the combination of retreating hours of daylight — just seven days before the solstice — and the diminished grass cover on the ground to hold the water signal the advent of mud season on the farm. My boots are heavier with clay and manure from even the briefest of excursions to the barn or fields.

As the weather turns colder, filling a water trough easily depends on whether I had the foresight to stretch out hoses after the last use so they drained completely. Failing to do so on these below-freezing mornings means finding the hoses frozen solid and the livestock thirsty. Lugging five-gallon buckets of water, one at a time, gives me plenty of time for introspection and kicking my inattentive self.

The garden: Covered with manure and tarps, the south and north gardens await the great reveal in late February, when they’ll be prepped for the coming seasons. Behind the house are a few raised beds with a handful of hardy Italian dandelion greens still holding their own on 22-degree mornings. But the taste at this stage is more bitter than life itself. Between those raised beds and a concrete sidewalk is a marvelous micro-climate where volunteer cilantro still thrives. That most sensitive of herbs has apparently evolved with tough love, in this spot, to grow 10 months out of the year.

Meanwhile, the hoop-house is still brimming with turnip greens, collards, Swiss chard, and Napa cabbages. The snails and slugs are finding the latter delicious. Which, by the act of typing these words, reminds me to slather the Napa with a scoop from the barrel labeled “D.E.” Sounds ominous, I know, but D.E. is simply diatomaceous earth, a go-to organic method for controlling a variety of unwanted diners that feast on my edibles.

Paella and squirrel hunting: Apparently the traditional paella is made with chicken and rabbit. The dish I fixed on Friday night was prepared with chicken and link sausage (and field peas, green beans, and tomatoes). We seldom have rabbit to eat, usually only finding them in the headlights coming up the drive late at night, or while bush-hogging in the fields, or with my hands full in the garden and a shotgun a hundred-yard sprint away.

But squirrel? We have plenty. A friend and I will walk the woods this morning seeking to harvest some for future dinners. I am sure they will make a fine substitute for the rabbit in the next paella dish. And, for the semi-annual sauce piquante d’ecureuil (squirrel sauce piquante), I will need two to three. So, let us call it half a dozen. We just need some cooperative little nut jobs to line up for the feast. Pick your side, my dear readers, and wish one of us luck.

Readings in a Pandemic

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The world can best be seen at 5 or 6 in the morning, with a cup of coffee at hand and a book just closed in my lap. Staring ahead without focus, as words and ideas float about the waters, bumping against the vessel of the coming day. It is a private time for me, before the work on the farm begins, not to be found at any other.

With Old Man 2020 now limping off the stage, it is hard to go back to that moment in January when the year ahead seemed fixed in a mold much like any other, with the steady march of months and a ritual rhythm of farm and career. I voyaged with Adam Nicolson those first few days, around the wild coasts of the British Isles, in Seamanship. Then Wendell Berry kept me company with Andy Catlett: Early Travels, A World Lost, and a perennial rereading of The Farm. I joined Sacha Carnegie as he discovered the pleasures of learning to keep pigs in post-war Scotland, in Pigs I Have Known, and Shaun Bythell was my guide to being a rude, obnoxious, and downright funny Wigtown, Scotland, bookstore owner in Confessions of a Bookseller.

As the year picked up steam and “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” became part of the daily lexicon, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hines, in Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, provided a flicker of light — “[T]ogether, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us” — even if it had to be got by striking flint to steel. More Berry followed, as did the fun fare of John Sandford and the embarrassingly addictive S. M. Stirling.

When the lockdown began to imprison the land, I retreated into reading A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana, a nostalgic treat. (His Between Meals essays of dining in France in the 1930s also fueled some mighty and heroic meals for our table.) I read, loved, and suggested to all who could hear me shout from the front porch String Too Short to Be Saved by Donald Hall. Add it to your own must-read list and seek out a copy, if you haven’t already.

The summer months opened with false optimism that the curve had flattened and the worst was behind. The COVID Victory Garden provided for our table, and then provided some more, and the farm phone rang with pleas to be put on the schedule for meat. Meanwhile, my 5 a.m. readings turned toward the classics. I worked my way through Robert Fagles’s translations of both “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” epic poems that inspire humility, forgiveness, love, and, most important, a renewed belief in kicking ass where needed.

When the summer neared its end, I nursed a sneaking suspicion that we had been snookered in a game for which the rules had yet to be written: mask or no mask; transmission by surface, sneeze, or stare, for seconds, minutes, or weeks; devoted follower of the Ministry of Silly Bombast or of the Judge Advocate for Fearful Cowering.

As the world beyond the farm devolved into juvenile bickering, I retreated a century into the past and gained fundamental lessons in neighborliness by reading The Country of the Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett), before then plunging Into the Heart of Borneo jungles (Redmond O’Hanlon) and learning how to remove leeches from uncomfortable, most-private places.

October and November, truly the months of greatest change and of dying on the farm, were perfect for another go-round with The Lessons of History (Will and Ariel Durant) and a meditative reading of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Thankfully, before slicing open a vein after hearing yet one more tweet inspired by Q-Anon or seeing one more monument toppled by iPhone-toting Talibanistas, I discovered Jason Peters’s The Culinary Plagiarist. It’s the kind of book that had me writing a fan letter and taking the much-needed opportunity to shout “Comrade!” into the chill fall air.

Which brings this reading year almost full circle, to early December, where once again we are in retreat, each of us standing masked, silent, isolated from family and friends when we need them most, and where what and whom we’ve lost is still being tallied.

Time to close any news browser remaining open and pick up another book. For me, I think it will be the Library of America’s collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce, with one more chance to stand on the bridge overlooking Owl Creek, hoping for a different outcome. Which, some say, is the definition of insanity and which I proclaim is just the opposite.

The Complete List of 2020 Readings

  • Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles (Nicolson)
  • Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Berry)
  • A World Lost (Berry)
  • The Farm (Berry)
  • Pigs I Have Known (Carnegie)
  • The Third Plate (Barber)
  • How to Burn a Goat (Moore)
  • Confessions of a Bookseller (Bythell)
  • A Place on Earth (Berry)
  • Farmer’s Glory (Street)
  • Killing for the Republic (Brand)
  • Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (Kingsnorth and Hine)
  • Masked Prey (Sandford)
  • The Sky-Blue Wolves (Stirling)
  • The Drowned World (Ballard)
  • Think Little (Berry)
  • The Earl of Louisiana (Liebling)
  • Between Meals (Liebling)
  • Living in the Long Emergency (Kunstler)
  • String Too Short to Be Saved (Hall)
  • Giving Up the Gun (Perrin)
  • Lycurgus & Pompilius (Plutarch)
  • Seasons at Eagle Pond (Hall)
  • “The Iliad” (Homer)
  • “The Odyssey” (Homer)
  • Into the Heart of Borneo (O’Hanlon)
  • The Shooting at Chateau Rock (Walker)
  • The Lessons of History (Durant)
  • The Country of the Pointed Firs (Jewett)
  • Corduroy (Bell)
  • Silver Ley (Bell)
  • Breaking Bread with the Dead (Jacobs)
  • English Pastoral: An Inheritance (Rebanks)
  • The Culinary Plagiarist (Peters)
  • What’s Wrong With the World (Chesterton)
  • The Moviegoer (Percy)
  • The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd (Rebanks)
  • The Night Fire (Connelly)
  • J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth (Grotta)
  • The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Kotkin)
  • Eastern Approaches (Maclean)
  • Stop Reading the News (Dobelli)
  • The Long Tomorrow (Brackett)