Constantly Growing

The life cycles of our garden plants have been astonishing to behold. Gardening offers many gifts: communion with nature, exercise, relaxation, humility, and food! We have learned a lot from our garden this summer and enjoyed the freshness and fuzzy feeling of satisfaction that comes from growing our own food rather than buying it. John Jeavons, in his book Ecology Action writes, “Gardening offers the chance to become partners with nature. The reward is not just a salad from your backyard…Gardening is the process of digging the soil, starting small seeds, watching an apple tree grow. Gardening is an education in observation, harmony, honesty, and humility–in knowing and understanding our place in the world.” Indeed the process of gardening has rooted us in the soil, and settled us into our new home.

Summer in the garden flies by. As we turn towards September, fall is just around the corner. The plants seem happy to reward our months of sweat and toil with wholesome and delicious fresh food, even with the growing season winding down. Plants grow extraordinarily fast and produce a lot of food in their relatively short life spans. Below are some pictures of the early garden at the beginning of the season juxtaposed with current pictures of the same plots and plants. My, how we have all grown up together!

Our first trays of seedlings before we transplanted them into their beds. Leeks, kale, tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, herbs, and swiss chard. Thanks again to Warren and Nancy, Bob and Doris from Sweet Dog Farm, Debra and Paul from Clayfield Farm, Harry, and Ron and Jan Hitchock for donating seed and seedlings to the Forest Farm garden.

We were fortunate to have been donated various tomato, pepper, and lettuce seedlings, which helped us jumpstart our growing season back in May. Many plant varieties had been started from seed, in trays in the greenhouse, or directly sown in soil in the greenhouse. I wrote back in early June that “Tomatoes, basil, lettuce, and peppers are scheming right now to injunglify (verb: to make into a jungle) the greenhouse. They sit tidy, stretching out, eager to absorb sunlight and nutrients with which to grow and explore their new microenvironment.”

Then: Tomatoes and lettuce settling into their new home

Now: The greenhouse has successfully injunglified (verb: to make into a jungle). Photo by Claire Briguglio

Tomatoes=summer. Photo by Claire Briguglio

The greenhouse extends the growing season, allowing us to plant earlier in the spring and later in the fall. Outside the greenhouse, in June, the garden was just getting going. We slowly turned our buckwheat cover crop in as we transplanted lettuce and started radishes and spinach from seed.

A blank canvass ready to be filled with growth. We put lettuce in at this point, but had yet to turn in the buckwheat cover crop shown in the rear beds. Photo by Claire Briguglio

Garden in June…Photo by Claire Briguglio

Garden in late August. Photo by Claire Briguglio

Let’s check in on our potatoes and scarlet runner beans, which were each highlighted in “Featured Food” posts. We have harvested many delicious potatoes, but they are still growing bigger hidden beneath the soil. Patience pays off. We grew our potatoes exactly how Helen and Scott grew them. We made the beds using first a layer of seaweed, then straw, then compost, then sprouted potatoes, then straw on top as mulch. They are super happy in their home and and we are thrilled with their growth. We have eaten a fair amount, but we are waiting a bit longer for them to reach maturity, since they went in late. Below is a photo of the potatoes emerging from their mulch of straw in early June, followed by an image of the delicious result taken last week.

Potatoes sprouting soon after they went in in early June. Photo by Claire Briguglio

Fresh picked last week and ready for breakfast. Photo by Claire Briguglio

The luscious red flowers of the scarlet runner beans have been attracting hummingbirds (and humans) to them for weeks now. Just like Jack and the proverbial beanstalk, these things can grow! Give them a pole and they will snake all the way to the top, reaching towards the sun, tangibly connecting the soil to the stratosphere. They are not quite mature yet but they are tall and loaded with beans.

Lil itty bitty baby scarlet runner beans starting to grow in early June. Photo by Claire Briguglio

Scarlet runner beans topping out the pole they climbed and reaching towards the sky. Photo by Claire Briguglio

Like all good things, the summer growing season is fleeting, and before we know it, gone. It has been an honor and privilege to care for the Nearing’s homestead and gardens. The plants we have grown have sustained us and nourished not just our bodies, but our souls. We are truly inspired and awestruck at what Helen and Scott accomplished, and most emphatically, how much food they squeezed out of such a relatively small garden. We have never tended a garden of this size, so it was a learning experience for us to be responsible for even this plot, which felt huge to us at first. We now know that we can grow plenty of food to support ourselves on minimal land. The most rewarding aspect of gardening besides the nourishment involves tuning our bodies and lives into the bodies and lives of the plants. We align onto the same schedule and rhythm and attempt to see the world from the plant perspective, which allows the plants and ourselves to thrive.

With the growing season winding down, we are putting up cucumbers, tomatoes, dilly beans, and the like to preserve the harvest. On those cold winter nights we will open up a can of tomatoes from the garden and the warmth and aroma of summer at Forest Farm will flood back into our lives, sustaining us until the spring. Never gone, summer awaits for its time again.