Of Mulch and Men

And the knowhow of seedy womyn

Spring was thoroughly sproinged over the weekend and I’m still playing catch up to it.

”In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

Thus spaketh Alfred, Lord Tennyson amid his far more weighty poem Locksley Hall. Having no benefit of understanding about the wanton life of that poet, I’ve long presumed he was or should have been Batman’s butler. He definitely would have failed as a biologist, as it’s Autumn when young men and women’s fancies turn heavily to the thoughts and deeds of love, after the annual harvest days arrive. Add nine months and the birth rates come pouring in from July through September.

April, on the other hand, produces the least babies the following January. So well fed people prepping for the long slog of winter are at their randiest, just like bears.

In Spring our fancies are more prone to thoughts of renewal, revival and the sowing of other seed. Once we scrape the mud off.

I do recognize, of course, that goat-footed balloon men are in dwindling supply these days but with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul around, goat-faced buffoon men clearly still abound. I just don’t think e.e. cummings would find any inspiration to wax eloquent about them.

But I come from hardier stock, a long line of dairy farmers in Northeastern mountains, all of whom grew their own hay for the cattle, fruits and veggies for themselves, while some even tapped the maples to adorn their winter pancakes with.

I didn’t get much experience with their arts as I was raised several hundred miles away from the grandparents, aunts and uncles. Mostly we’d visit them when the Fall colors were coming in, so me and the siblings had an entirely different perspective about farms. We enjoyed the rows of cows in their stalls, mooing magnificent while milking and cudchewing and shitscraping were underway. Occasionally we’d climb into the haylofts, jumping down into piles of hay.

I was 23 when I grew my first garden. At the time, I was reading Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Prevention magazines along with the Mother Earth News. My then-girlfriend and I discovered a place up a dirt road in Hatchville, Massachusetts that led to a field that a local had just opened up to create a community garden. A nearby horse farm provided free composted horse doody that we trucked in. We could drive the truck right onto a nearby Cape Cod beach and load up with free seaweed. We’d rinse it well to reduce its saltwater content and mulch heavily with that, after learning the benefits of no-till gardening from Ruth Stout. Coupled with the horsie nitrogen, that provided potash and every trace element a gardener could want, so we only had to purchase bone meal for the phosphorous, plus a ton of labor. But the labor wasn’t a real chore.

New to the craft, I’d spent all winter poring through seed catalogs. I was intent on growing all the things, including exotic-sounding stuff like spaghetti squash and loofah squash, the latter to create bathing sponges with. And we found novel ways to make the work more fun.

Most of the other garden space renters would show up after dinner or on weekends. We were between jobs so we’d usually be out there between 11 and 3 pm, almost always alone and surrounded by pine forest. So occasionally, we’d garden nude.

Till the day an elderly couple came strolling down that dirt road. By the time we heard them chatting it was too late to make a run for the truck to get our clothes back on, so we decided to ignore and keep working. But the old man wasn’t having any of that. Clearly delighted at the sight of my lovely partner, he approached eager to engage in conversation, telling us how great he thought it was that people could enjoy the sun and nature without resorting to modesty. His wife hung back, just behind him, considerably shyer.

I was feeling a bit vulnerable so with arms and garden tools, I covered myself a little in a rather lame effort. Anytime his wife peered around his shoulder, though, it was clear she was looking at the parts of me still exposed between the pitchfork tines.

After maybe 5 minutes, they resumed their walk. Our embarrassment quickly faded and once they were out of eyesight and earshot, we had a bit of a giggle, though we never again gardened nude there, certain that couple was lurking somewhere nigh.

The crop that confused me in that first year was tomatoes. Not only were there dozens and dozens of varieties to choose from but it seemed the gardening book I was reading had made an error. It said something like 6 to 8 plants would provide enough tomatoes for a family of four.

That couldn’t be right. I’d seen tomato plants. Most had no more than 10 or 15 tomatoes on them. The book indicated that 2 plants per person would provide all the fresh and canned tomatoes we’d need.

I decided to grow a cherry tomato, a plum (roma) tomato for canning, a medium and a beefsteak tomato for the rest of the fresh tomato needs. Plus a yellow tomato for the novelty. Five varieties. I planted 10 of each.

Wholly unaware that tomato plants kept flowering and churning out more tomatoes, everything was growing nicely while we were plotting another new direction. Wanting to ‘get back to the land’ where we could supply all our own food and alternate energy, etc, we were trying to figure out a state to move to. Based on climate and soil and other attributes, we narrowed our list to two. Arkansas had the advantage of very cheap land. Oregon was then the leader in environmentalism and had other things that sounded great. No sales tax. They’d decriminalized pot, so it was like getting a traffic ticket. Plus I had a high school friend there who we could stay with for a month on arrival.

In mid-July, just as the cherry tomatoes were close to picking, we boxed up some books in 4 or 5 boxes for shipping later, packed a few clothes in backpacks, sold everything else and hitchhiked to Oregon. It was a mostly fun 5 day trip.

We turned the Hatchville garden over to my family. My parents and two siblings got to harvest our first garden. My Mom described the horror of it all: “we picked and canned, made paste and ketchup. Over and over, endlessly. And still, half the tomatoes rotted on the vine.”

Oops.

It was a couple of decades later, after several smaller successful gardens, that I read something about the Queen of Mulch, Ruth Stout, that further enlightened me. Unbeknownst to us, we were connected magically in another unexpected way.

I recommend the video contained within. Ruth, my girlfriend and I were free spirits, it seems.

Ruth, however, stayed free. I kinda wish I’d known more about her thinking than about her mulching alone. Life can be simpler than we too often think.

Have a wonderful Spring. Might be useful to look out of the right window more often.

You can always come converse a little. What’s your Spring looking like?