The Fall and What to Make of a Diminished Thing?

Well, it has been about two months since I last wrote a post, and we have had two good months of eating from the garden with plenty of tomatoes, arugula, collards, chard, kale, rattlesnake beans, beets, and almost too many zucchinis and cucumbers. Until a few days ago, the Ravens kept me company, but they too seem, like the children and grandchildren, to have left Hull. The school year is in full force with many magical classes and a couple of classes that keep me working to get better as an art teacher. The wheel of the year rolls on.

It makes me think of the Pete Seeger song, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” where he quotes Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. There is a time when the garden and food are the center and another time when the classroom and the school are the center. “A time to reap and a time to sow.” Here is an excellent version of the song Pete Seeger sang that was released by Folkways Smithsonian in 1998.

As the year rolls on and we begin Fall, there is a lessening of light and a lessening of food from the garden. We still have amazing cherry tomatoes, both Sungold and Black Cherries. They taste nearly as good as ever, but we have had no Black Krim for a month, and the Brandywines are no longer perfection. I have had to pick the Brandywines just as they turn because for the last six weeks animals have been eating them well before they were ripe. They are good but no longer the transportative food that I was blessed to share with my father in August. He was born in 1928, and he is still a model of how to savor and show appreciation. It was fun watching him eat a truly excellent tomato sandwich. He liked it so much he wanted to have them again and again and was not satisfied with waiting for next year when I could bring him more. He wanted to get them from a local farmer in Maine. He has had a lot, and he wants more. I am just like that too.

A cucumber plant while most of the cucumbers have died back this part near the roots is trying its best to make more.

Despite the positive image of the cucumber in the photo above, we might have had the last of the cucumbers. They and the Black Krim and other tomatoes are still putting out blooms and still have the drive to make more, but they may not have the sun or the heat to do it. Back at South Shore Charter School, there was a recess game we played called “We got a lot, but we want more.” In that game, we would link arms and walk back and forth, singing and chanting, trying to get more students to link arms and join our game. I remember one recess more than ten years ago when we got nearly all the students to link up. There were more than ninety of us linked together, singing and cheering ourselves. That was the most we had, but we had a lot when it was only two of us; we wanted more, and sometimes we got more, but we also knew two was enough. In the Hull Garden, we have had a lot, and I do all that I can to get more. I believe the most important thing is to show gratitude for the food that the garden has already made and to know we have enough, but still work hard to grow more. Just like my dad and the tomato, we got a lot but we want more.

Appreciating the fall garden is a lesson in learning how to appreciate a diminished or diminishing thing. This lesson makes me think of the Robert Frost Poem, “The Oven-Bird.” In the poem, Frost hears the sound of a “mid-wood bird.” The bird sings a beautiful song, but it is not the song of the glory of spring. It is what it is and what it is enough. In striving and working hard for more, more for yourself and more for others, it is so important to celebrate what is and to say it is enough. Below is the Frost Poem:

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

A garden, like a life is a cycle. There are times for the spring radish, and the mass of arugula, and other times for tomatoes, and cucumbers, and a time for collards, parsley, and hope for fall radishes. The two photographs above all feature plants that could make more but might not, depending on what the weather is like in the next six weeks. It is not their time, but the drive to make seeds is inherent in plants, and even if the calendar is against them, they will try.

I had a decision to make this weekend: do I pull the Rattlesnake Beans or do I wait two weeks? I decided to wait two weeks. That was probably not the right choice, as I could have put in some seeds and put down a cold frame, and those two weeks would have been the two weeks with the most light until the beginning of March. But I love Rattlesnake beans, so I decided to give them a little more time.

As Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger teach us, there is a time for everything under heaven, and this is the time for parsley and greens. I am hopeful about fall lettuce, arugula, and maybe a cucumber, and the already full-size tomatoes will ripen, but as these pictures show, now is the time for greens. They like carrots get better with the cold.

As we get deeper into fall, we get closer to Carrot Day. Over the weekend, I learned about a Massachusetts farm that is about to celebrate its 12th Annual Old-Fashioned Carrot Pull. The farm is Siena Farms in Sudbury, MA. I loved reading about their farm and am so excited to go to the Carrot Pull on Sunday, November 8th. Here is the link to sign up. We are unlikely to have had a frost in Hull that soon, but perhaps in Sudbury there will have been frost, and I can eat a frost-kissed carrot a little bit early. It would be great fun to see you there. If you decide to go, please let me know and let’s try to connect.

And what would a Carrot Day Post in October be without a carrot picture?

Picked on 10/12/26 and very good but, they will get better

The Children and Grandchildren Have Gone Home and the Ravens and the Bees are Still Here

They came, all three of our children and their partners and families. They came and visited and ate from the garden. Eleven folks and one dog stayed with us, with six the most at any one time. They made our house rich and wonderful with meals, dishes, celebrations, conversations, toys, barriers to keep the little ones safe, and energy we no longer have. Katy and I shake our heads and remember that once we did all that too.

It was the first summer in years when I did not also work at least part of the time. I have a new job — full time art teacher and I have the summers off now. I love it!

We had almost a full six weeks of big energy and big living. In those six weeks I got to focus on gardening, swimming, cooking, cleaning and being. The youngest visitor was almost sixteen months old, so not a baby anymore but still a great teacher in how to be present and how to understand all the things we have all accomplished in being able to tie our shoes and make our beds. It is so exciting to see all four of the grandchildren becoming their own individual selves. On leaving Maud, Ben’s spouse said, “Every year, I look forward to coming and eating the food from your garden. It is the best food of the year.” There are many reasons all of our children have been coming to visit in the summer every year, after all Hull has one of the best beaches I know, but certainly one of the reasons is to eat from the garden.

It is quiet now and that is good too and I am again sharing food with the neighbors.

The picture above is the harvest from August 13th. A week after the last visitors left. From left to right are: beets, mustard, rattlesnake beans, collards, kale, cucumber, tomatoes, Swiss chard, arugula, and zucchini. While we ate each of these crops during the busy time, we never had so much food from the garden in any one day.

There is no way for Katy and I to eat all this food so it is the time of serious freezing and visiting neighbors with vegetables and always bringing vegetables to pot lucks. Below are pictures of the processing of the greens. To freeze greens you merely blanch them in boiling salted water and then chop and put in freezer zip lock bags. The blanching time for collards, chard and beet stems is three minutes, while it is two minutes for kale, chard and beet greens.

The photo above shows the greens in front of their stems and in the case of the beets their roots. From left to right are collards, kale, chard, and beets. I compost the collard stems, I use kale stems as a replacement for celery in sofrito. I chop the swiss chard and beet stems before I blanch them. Chard and beets are closely related and have seeds that are clusters of seeds. Collards and kale are brassicas. Two plant families and lots of good food for the winter.

The carrot bed, a new bed that slightly expanded the garden into the flower border is doing well. There were a couple of days when an animal got ahead of me and burrowed under the wooden perimeter and ate a few carrot tops but I quickly patched the openings with some shingles. No animal has gotten in since and those munched on plants have recovered. The carrots in the middle photo were pulled as I had not thinned them well enough. I expect every few weeks I will decide that the carrots need to be thinned more. Perhaps they do or perhaps I just want to use a few. In this case I used the carrots and carrot stems along with an onion as a sofrito for a really great crab soup made from the crabs that Reggie and Ben caught. That is Reggie in the photo on the right at Pemberton Pier with the line to the crab trap. That day they got one big crab that Ben and I ate steamed and lots of other smaller crabs that I made into soup. The carrot tops rivaled the crab for the starring role in the soup.

August is when it all comes together, the cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, kale, collards, chard, while the arugula maintaines. I like to measure things and here is the report: rattlesnake beans 8.5 feet, apsaragrass 7.5 feet, tallest tomato plant 6.5 feet, cucumber vine 6 feet off the ground, zucchini five feet out from the stem, chard leaf over two feet. These measurements and the color of the plant leaves are a product of healthy soil. The healthy soil is a produce of crop rotation, care, minimal digging and continually adding organic matter. That is only possible with the privilege of stability and land. A few weeks ago Katy and I celebrated our 40th anniversary. For 30 of those years we have been eating from this garden. Summer in Hull is good and it feels amazing to have children who return in the summer to bring their partners and children to be here.

A storm was coming through and Reggie and Lou are holding beets they had just picked and some carrot thinings I had picked.

For me a big event this summer was on Friday July 31st. That day I went on a long swim starting at the southern most point of Nantasket Beach, landing briefly on Little Brewster Island and then swimming on to M Street Beach in South Boston. A swim of about 12 and a half miles. The conditions for the swim were magical. At the start the water was glassy smooth with gentle two/three foot swells moving in the direction I was swimming. Even better than the weather were the support boat and crew: Timmy Burke the pilot, Jess Garber the official observer, and Elaine Howley my feeder and support swimmer. Solo distance swimming is a team sport and I still feel the glow of that team. It is the feeling of security that comes out of dependence. While the swimmer may swim the strokes no one can do a swim like this alone and the need to let go of control and follow the pilot and the crew is a goodlesson to learn, a lesson that goes beyond swimming. Elaine swam in the last hundred yards with me and waiting for me on the beach was Katy and my training partner Anuj Sampat. That night we had the fifth annual cake party with our neighbors. It has been a tradition for Maud to make a cake to show appreciation for the love and care our neighbors Tracy and Sue and their children give to our grandchildren. Maud’s cakes are always the best cakes of the year. That Friday cake party was a double party as we celebrated the swim as well our friendship.

Elaine, Jess, Timmy and me bofore the swim.

It is quiet now and until next summer our children and their families have left Hull. We are confident that with the water, our neighboors and the garden that they will be back. These photos below are a few memory of the six weeks of company.

In late June just as Josh and Cleo and family came to Hull ravens came to Hull too. Ravens had briefly visited last summer. I suspect that it is the same ravens who are back this year as they too appreciate Hull in the summer. I have been interested in ravens since I was a child and then only saw them when visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains as they never came down to Charlottesville VA, where I grew up.

I am so focused on the ravens that Katy calls them, “your friends.” That is what they are. The ravens and the bees are my friends and with the visitors gone they are even more important to me. I usually hear the ravens before I see them. Ravens have among the most complex vocalization patterns of any bird. I hear them and then I go out to look for them. When I find them, I look at how they hang and glide on the wind. What I see now is not too different from what I remember seeing as a child. I remember watching them as they seemed to be enjoying the updrafts off Humpback Rock in the Blue Ridge. Ravens are new again for me but in the past few years I have really been appreciating the bees. I love watching the bees in the garden and I often stop passersby to show them the bees on the mint. Every afternoon when the bees are at their most dense I try, as a practice, to spend a few minutes admiring the bees on the mint. Seeing all the different kinds of bees and watching them go from flower to flower.

The garden with and without children is good. I hope you too can spend time in your gardens or appreciating other’s gardens and you too can make friends with the wild creatures that live where you live.

This is the 60th Carrot Day Post and the Carrots Have Germinated!

It is officially summer. The last few years, I have planted the fall carrots on Juneteenth, but I was going to be away from Hull this year, so I planted the carrot seeds the weekend before.

This bed started its growing season under a cold frame back in March. Already pulled from this bed have been amazing radishes and butter lettuce; only beets and collards remain. I snuck in some basil plants recently as well.

The block of photographs above shows the Garden at 41 Western Ave on Sunday, June 28th.

Space is always an issue in the front yard garden at 41 Western Ave, and I could not figure out where to put the carrots, so I built a new bed and planted it with carrots. This new bed slightly increases the area of the garden. That, to me, is a good thing. There was no need to put up a fence right away, as the bunnies don’t eat dirt. The carrots germinated well, and it is so much easier to thin them without bending over a fence that I thinned them early and then put up the fence. It is wise to wait to thin plants until the secondary leaves have formed, but I thinned them early with only their cotyledons or seed leaves developed. Time will tell if that was a mistake.

As you can see from the photo, the carrots needed to be thinned. A carrot plant needs room to grow. The more room, the healthier they will be. In the photo, the plants with long, thin cotyledons are carrots. If you look closely, you can see some purslane cotyledons as well. They are the little round leaves. Because cotyledons are so immature, they are vulnerable. I hope I made the right decision to save labor and thin them early.

In previous posts, I have written at length about the precautions I now take that we no longer have cats to protect our gardens from bunnies. In the end, the boxes and fences have worked out well. In part it has worked because there are so many plants bunnies don’t care for: cucumber, tomatoes, zucchini, arugula, sorrel and mint. Those plants I leave unprotected, but there is one new threat this year — a doe. The young deer moved into our neighborhood on Hull Hill a few weeks ago. It has found other gardens, but so far it has not found our garden. My theory is that the deer is put off by the tansy and mint that form a barrier around the garden. It is not a physical barrier, as there is a big opening in the middle where the walkway leads from the porch stairs to the road. My guess is that it is more of a smell barrier, as the astringency of the tansy and the potency of the mint have kept the deer away. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

In other garden news, I have started to harvest mint for tea. I have made a new batch of compost tea and have started to use it when the color of a plant’s leaves is not dark enough green; a good example of plants with a weak green are the two of the cucumber plants in the photo below. Speaking of green and healthy, now is the time of the year when the purslane starts to thrive. As I get used to the plenty and the flavors of the butter lettuce and the arugula, the purslane starts to emerge. I have never once planted it, but I sure do harvest it as it emerges from the space around tomatoes and under beans, and it sure has a great crunch and wonderful flavor.

But the big news is that for the past five days the two Baltimore Grandsons have been in residence and the harvest is piling in. I leave you with this picture of a day’s harvest. I put in a toy to show scale but thought the picture was better with Izzy and RJ in it. Izzy helped me harvest the mint!

Happy gardening and please send word of how your garden and your family is doing.

What Happened This Week in the Hull Garden and Last Chance to Get Your Free Carrot Seeds

In case you don’t read this post to the end, here is a sentence from the last paragraph: “Please order your free carrot seeds using this form.“

Well, in Hull this past week, it has been a little bit colder than average, but despite that, the plants sure have thrived.

I took photos on May 3rd and then again a week later on May 9th. The difference is amazing. What I, as a gardener, hope would happen has happened. The labor of April is paying off with the joys of May. The saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers.” The photos below show what has happened in our side yard in the last week. The Wild Ginger, Money Plants, and False Solomon Seal have had subtle changes, but the Yellow Fairy Plants and the Lilies of the Valley have truly popped.

Wild Ginger, Money Plant, Lilies of the Valley, Yellow Fairy Plant, and False Solomon Seal
May 3,2026

I might amend the saying “April showers bring May flowers” to “The garden work of April brings the glory of May harvests.” Of course, that is true not only for April to May but for every month; what we do now and what happens now impacts what we do later and what happens later.

WordPress sends me monthly updates of how many visitors come to the posts, how many times those folks visit, and what they look at on those visits. This past month, the second most visited post was Spring: Youth, Experience, and Joy. This post was published on May 9th, 2022, almost exactly four years ago. This post asks questions about the idea that the work we do now has benefits for what happens later. The May 2022 post is about being a teacher and trying to understand the conditions that are needed so that students can, in the present, complete the necessary work, so they have the strength to do the work they need to do later. I took the wisdom of the Carrot Day Massachusetts readers to re-read that post myself, and it was good and rang true to me. These posts, like the garden, are cyclical. As Pete Seeger quotes Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for every purpose.” As it is the same time of year, this post says more or less the same thing the post of May 9, 2022, said, which is to plant, weed, tend, and nurture the soil now so we can eat later.

In this post, most of the story is told in pairs of photos. That story is labor now brings food or beauty later.

One of the most rewarding changes to me in the last week is the deepening of the green and the increase in leaf size of the arugula. Both changes are signs of prospering plants, and are both a product of how the arugula and the soil are tended. That tending is labor.

The Arugula Patch, planted in October and covered by a cold frame all winter and spring.
Masy 3, 2026

About seven years ago, in early summer, my son-in-law Josh and I were standing on our porch looking down on the garden. That day, he asked me what I was most proud of in the garden, and I told him it was the arugula bed. He is a scientist, and he did not stop at the first question, but as a good scientist, he also asked why it was my favorite. There are many reasons why I am proud of the arugula bed, then and now. First of all, some of my joy about the arugula bed comes from the fact that I developed an original method of planting and tending arugula. It is my tradition that in October, I select a spot for the bed, and I lay down arugula stalks on top of the soil. Those stalks have huge numbers of arugula seeds, and I simply place on a cold frame over the stalks. This past year, I also planted rows of radish seeds in that same bed. As winter ends and spring comes, I spend hours taking the thousands of baby arugula plants, and over time, harvest arugula by thinning plants. We eat the thinnings, but at first it is certainly not a rational endevor. I spend hours gathering a tiny amount of food. Gradually, as the individual plants gain more space and as the roots go deep, the harvesting gets easier and easier. Once the bed has arugula in six-inch spacing, and what were thousands of arugula plants are now only about 100, I no longer pull the plants but harvest with scissors. By then, it takes only a minute to harvest a family salad. For me, there is joy all along this cycle, with the vivid green of the tiny sprouts in March, the delicate salads of April, and the plenty of May, and overwhelming quantities of June, then the diminishing harvests of the rest of the summer. I am proud of this bed and the story it tells. It is a version of “April showers bring May flowers.”

These asparagus are in their second year and need at least two more years before we start to harvest them. Another example of the value of patience. Not taking a few stalks now will bring us plenty of asparagus later.

When I eat a perfect radish or a perfect arugula leaf, I am struck by the texture. The burst of water and the crunch that comes out as the spice and flavor explode. It sure is good to eat. One thing that cooks say is that flavor is a marker of nutrition. One spectrum of taste tends to dominate our desires in eating, sweetness but there is nothing like the roundness of bitterness and hint of bite that make arugula and radishes in the early spring a place to feel at home.

Enough to Share,
The Harvest of May 9, 2026,

But it is not only bitter and spice the garden can produce. Please order your free carrot seeds using this form. I will be sending them out ready for an early June planting and post-frost harvest. Then you can taste that same burst I had this week, along with the glow of frost-kissed sweetness. To everything there is a season, and I sure hope you join me in the season of a really good carrot sometime deep in the fall.

Spring 2026, Tiny Gardens Everywhere and Free Carrot Seeds!

It was a cold and snowy winter and it sure seemed windy too. I am glad to say there are only a few days left before spring!

I took the photo above on Sunday March 15th, our son Ben’s Birthday. It is of the cold frame I planted in the last few days of October with the hope of Christmas Radishes and February Arugula. Well that did not happen. It got cold fast and then we got snow. Now I am hoping for radishes and arugula by the end of the month.

I did better with seaweed this winter. I gathered and piled seaweed on the garden’s surface on three different days and put about 300 gallons of seaweed on the garden. Today was the third time I gathered seaweed and dumped it on the garden and I am confident I have enough on it now. It would have been better if all of it had been put down in early winter but I am pleased I did better than last winter.

The principle is simple: when you take you should give. It is always in the gardener’s interest to give more to the soil than we take with the harvest. When we harvest food from the garden we are taking out organic material. That only works year after year if we give back to the soil year after year. Living here in Hull, seaweed is a good way to gather the organic material the soil needs. I just have to wait for a storm and then go gather it. Then all I need to do is lay it down and the natural process will take care of making sure the soil is replenished and enriched. As a kid my dad told me this about mulch. I wanted to dig it in. He told me to leave it on the top. I did an experiment and he was right. Then 30 years later and 25 years ago I was walking through the woods at Holly Hill Farm with Frank White and he said to me that the woods are our teacher, as the leaves fall and lay down on the forest floor we should do the same in the garden. The lesson is to let the amazing network of organisms bring the organic material into the soil. The soil is a living network and the more hands off we are and the less we dig the more it builds itself. All we need to do is to feed it. As in many areas of life, in the garden we need to learn the same lesson over and over again and in different contexts.

Young Lobster Claw and Toy Crab Sand Mold

In the seaweed that washes up after a storm there are typically lobster, clam, mussel, and crab shells — all good for the garden. There are also often toys along with the plastic bottles, fishing gear, and other debris tangled in the organic matter — not so helpful in the garden. Today I was amused to see that nestled together in the seaweed was a toy plastic crab and an immature lobster claw. I have been gathering seaweed for three decades and I have never seen that before. In the photograph on the left there was no manipulation on my part. I did not move a thing and there was no photoshop. It just gives evidence that if you look often enough and long enough you will find amazing things.

That is the beauty of gardening. It makes you look. It makes you experience. It takes you outside. One of the truths gardening revelas is that spring does come every year. It is a time of renewal and rebirth and we are just about to move into spring.

But just as the soil needs new inputs to keep developing and producing, so does the gardner need new influences. I am reading right now an amazing book called Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City. The book, written by Kate Brown, an Environmental Historian who teaches and swims at MIT, is about gardening. She describes the ways in which regular people have time after time created substance and community through gardening. It is wonderful to have a skilled researcher not only detailing the benefits of working the soil and growing food but going back in time and in many different contexts to describe what could be. It is an optimistic book because gardening is optimistic and gardening has proven time and again to be good for health and community.

The book is also sad as it tells the same story of how powerful interests have stood in the way of folks being able to grow their own food over and over again across centuries. It tells the story of those who aim to impose order and cleanliness often destroy not only interrelated networks of plants and animals and microbes but also human communities. I can’t recommend it enough. Kate also had a free Substack and she wrote me to say, “If your readers don’t want to buy a book, here is my free substack with many of the same messages.”

I know Kate because we swim in the same Masters Swimming Team and met in the fall of 2024. At the end of a set or the end of a workout we would talk about our gardens. I thought she would like to read this blog so I sent it to her and this was her reply: “Ahhh, I should have know you are a plant person! One reason why I liked you immediately. I’m just finishing up a new book about the power of working class urban gardeners over the last hundred years to make alliances with plants, fungi, microbes and each other to build powerful worlds (while no one was looking). And these days the chard, collards and arugula (plus the kale and bok choi I just seeded that have already sprouted!) are teaching me about adaptation to our new climate and now to our new political world.

Let’s go get a coffee some day after swimming, if you have time. I’ll be back in the pool next Tuesday.”

That is what we can be — plant people. Learning from plants and each other. As Kate shows in her book the same lessons are learned again and again and undone again and again but it is through the layering of experience that our understanding is deepened. Plants and community build in multiple contexts and ways. Perhaps in time the goal of order and control can be unlearned and we can allow folks to be and more of us will grow our own food. Kate has a dream that the roads and parking lots can become our gardens. Katy, my wife, says that in Massachusetts “right of ways” take up more space than all but “residential” and “open space.” Imagine if a large portion of the “rights of way” were gardens. It would be a better world.

So we begin again. It is spring. I have ordered my seeds from Fedco and I hope you will grow carrots with us.

Please get your free seeds by filling out this form.

Carrot Day 2025

On Sunday, December 7th, we had our Carrot Day Celebration at 41 Western Ave here in Hull. We had 24 folks from around the neighborhood who came to join us at 12:30. We picked the time and day in conjunction with youth sports schedules and, of course, the weather and the frost.

In November in Hull, there was only one night where the temperature fell below 32° Fahrenheit — the 23rd at 31°. Below is a chart of the cold temperatures in Hull for the two weeks from November 30th to December 13th.

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
30 32°	1 28°	2 28°	3 18°	4 12°	5 28°	6 31°
7 31°	8 17°	9 14°	10 32°	11 25°	12 22°	13 27°

I came home early on Wednesday, December 3rd, and went straight to the garden. I harvested some of the parsley, sorrel, and dill, a little bit of the mint, and all of the lettuce, chard, and beets. I expected that the kale would be okay, so I left it alone. I was wrong, and two weeks later, the cold has gotten the kale, and I should have harvested that too.

I had harvested arugula and tomatoes the weekend before, and that would be their final gathering of 2025. That harvest and the pickings of December 3rd gave us the ingredients for amazing December salads. We ate those salads composed of home-grown butter lettuce and the wild arugula, with tomatoes, and depending on the day, carrots or beets. The garden gives gifts here in Hull deep into December.

December 3rd Harvest of Swiss Chard, Sorrel, Dill, and Butter Lettuce with Tomatoes in the background, the Arugula is in the refrigerator. Notice the shine on the lettuce and chard. It is not only carrots, whose flavor is deepened by cold.

Over the next few days, I announced to neighbors that we would have Carrot Day on Sunday, the 7th. I wrote some emails, I knocked on doors, and while one neighborhood family was away that weekend and could not come, 12:30 was chosen as the time we would gather. Katy had warned me that the neighborhood kids were getting older and I should try to find some families with younger children, or soon the 41 Western gathering would dwindle. Fortunately, one of my neighbors is a real connector, and she invited a family with children of seven, five, and three. Rather than dwindle, we had the largest gathering at 41 Western Ave for Carrot Day ever.

It is a simple concept. Wait for frost, gather folks, and celebrate by eating carrots. The carrots really are good, and the party is fun. In our neighborhood, it has become a seasonal tradition. The only thing involved now is picking carrots, washing them, eating them, and being and talking with friends. This was the second year without the tire swing, and it seems forgotten by the kids.

We really had a wonderful hour. The sun was out. There was no wind. Folks lingered. Middle schoolers ate carrots and talked for more than half an hour. The younger children asked for and got more carrots. The adult neighbors talked and ate carrots, and everyone said the carrots were really good. I agree, they really were exceptionally good. After about an hour, the carrots were eaten, and folks went home. As the family with the three young children left for home, the five-year-old told her mom, “They were better than cake.”

That is the idea for Carrot Day. Get people, especially children, to realize just how good a vegetable can be. This five-year-old was more open than most about vegetables — both her parents and her grandparents have gardens. At five, she already knows how good a vegetable can be. But it sure made me feel good to hear about her judgment and to see everybody having a good time and eating carrots. For me, seeing a range of folks from 3 to 70 happily eating sweet just-picked “frost-kissed-carrots” and talking about how good they are, and then just hanging out together in the yard and on the street for almost an hour, — WOW.

Carrot Day Massachusets is a small thing, but it is enough.

Eight years ago, when I started this blog, I thought that there would be more and more schools every year that would follow the tradition that began at South Shore Charter Public School almost 30 years ago. The tradition of planting carrot seeds in the spring garden with students and then harvesting and celebrating with them in the late fall. School Children at School Gardens across states would be celebrating Carrot Day in late fall. I thought there would be hundreds of schools where, after the frost, students would be eating “frost-kissed-carrots.” This year there may have been some schools celebrating growing and eating carrots, but I don’t know of a single school that celebrated Carrot Day. Eight years ago, I also thought the chefs and growers would take this on, and the added value of the “frost-kiseed-carrot” would be known far and wide. The benefit of cold on fall vegetables and carrots in particular is not something new. The esteemed farmer Elliot Colman grows and advertises “Candy Carrots,” which are harvested starting in December and going through the winter in Maine. But even farmers who trained at Elliot Coleman’s Four Season Farm and sell out of the local farmer’s market in Hingham and grow winter carrots don’t market them as special.

There are lots of reasons Carrot Day has not caught on as I thought it would, and of course, it still may, but I am at peace with these blog posts and our small carrot celebrations. Schools are complicated organizations that run on a set calendar and when Carrot Day happens is determined by the weather. At a school, space, time, and schedule drive events. Even at the school where I teach, we have not had a Carrot Day for the last two years. The school made a decision to remove garden beds to give more room for kids to play sports. We had three or four fun years of Carrot Day at CCSC, but not this year. June Fontaine, who carried on the Carrot Day tradition at South Shore after I left that school, retired. It may come back at South Shore, but not this year. Jonny Belber of Holly Hill Farm tells me he does not know of any Carrot Day Celebrations in local schools. He wrote to me that he will spend some of his winter time,
“Trying to plan and get a bunch of schools and other places planted for, “frost-kissed-carrots,’ statewide.”

Another tricky thing about Carrot Day is the weather. Each year, the cold comes on in different ways. Some years it comes on slow, but this year it came fast. In Hull we had a couple of 31/32° nights in November and then suddenly in Early December, the temperatures dropped to 12° and froze the top of the soil. Frost is good for a carrot’s flavor, but being in frozen soil is not. The freezing alters the carrots’ texture and then they do not store well. Not a simple thing for a farmer to plan on and for a chef to organize a menu around a perfectly “frost-kissed-carrot.” Maybe one of the reasons a “frost-kissed-carrots” are so good is that they are rare.

Carrots on the left from Concord, NH, harvested on December 2nd. Molly grew these from last year’s seeds. I missed the other colors this year. The other three are grown by Jenny in Windsor, VT, on November 6th, and brought to Baltimore for Thanksgiving.

Top left and middle, Kendra’s dad havested these in Harwich MA, November 20th, Jonny’s fork digging carrots in Cohasset MA early December, Bottom left Lam’s or Ning’s hand in Weymouth, MA, December 3rd, and the Hull carrot bed before its harvest on December 7th

Here are the reports from friends who grew carrots. Some only grew a few, while the Potters out in Minnesota grew 1,100 pounds of carrots. But all declared that the carrots were good and that they had fun.

These words correspond to the pictures from the top left: Molly and I corresponded about when to pick the carrots, and she asked when to harvest, and this was my advice: “Yes, wait on your carrots, but you can thin them now and have a few to eat now. I have been doing that, and they are good. But the bulk of them should wait, and they grow really well in the fall.” Then she reported on October 10th, “Hi Ted, we got a frost last night! Should I pick all the carrots or can they stay in the ground while I pick them gradually?” I advised gradually as multiple cold nights improve the flavor of the carrots. On December 3rd she wrote from Concord NH, “I got spooked with all the snow yesterday and picked them all, what a wonderful harvest!” Jenny wrote, “They taste like a dream carrot! I was going to share the first one with Walker, but then it disappeared before I could stop myself.” Then she brought some Vermont “frost-kissed-carrots” to Thanksgiving in Baltimore, and she reported that her mom says, “Delicious! These carrots are so sweet.” Kendra wrote, “My kids ate them but didn’t get to harvest this year. They are both in high school, and life is insanely busy, as I am sure you remember.” Jonny wrote, “Frost-kissed-carrots” coming out of the Farm Food Pantry garden at Holly Hill Farm for donation to local food pantries. December sweetness cheer.” Lam wrote, “Thanks for the carrot seeds. We put down the seeds late this year, beginning of July, and we still have some little nice carrots.”

Nancy Potter wrote me: “We hope everyone has as wonderful a carrot harvest as we did. It was a perfect day!” Please watch the bounty of their labor in this 3-minute video, where through time-lapse film, you can see all the carrots come out of the ground and move toward cold storage. So impressive to see all that work and all that food grown the way food should be grown.

The four pictures below are from the Hull Garden on the day before the Winter Solstice, December 20th, 2025. When I wrote you in late October, I explained that I was pulling the rattlesnake beans in hopes of Christmas radishes and February arugula. The two pictures on the right show the cold frame, the baby arugula, and the radishes. The radish will not be ready by Christmas, but the arugula is looking set for a late winter harvest; see the tiny flecks of green evenly spaced below the radishes, those are all arugula sprouts!

A four generation carrot course before we sat down for Thanksgiving at Cleo’s home in Baltimore

May you all eat well and keep your hopes up in 2026! If you can garden!

Mid Fall and the Garden Is Good and Why I love Rattlesnake Beans

Six and a half weeks ago, I wrote to you about turning 65 and compared that stage of life to the Mid-September Garden. The Hull Garden in the weeks since has continued to grow good food: lots of tomatoes, lots of kale and chard, some arugula and lettuce, a few cucumbers and zucchini, and lots of Rattlesnake Pole Beans. I have been indulging in an occasional carrot. Perhaps I am selectively thinning the carrots to give those remaining more room to grow, or I could just be a bit impatient and eager to eat a good carrot. Anyway, for just the two of us, the garden continues to produce almost all of our vegetables. If you say a garden’s life span is 52 weeks and a person’s life span is 95 years (both well above average), then these weeks are the equivalent to about twelve years of a life. I certainly hope my next twelve years are as productive as the garden’s last six and a half weeks have been.

That said, each day, conditions for growth here in the Hull Garden lessen, but there are about five more weeks where plants will continue to grow. I just decided this morning to pull the Rattlesnake Beans, even though there are a few buds and some very tender young beans, but it is a matter of diminishing returns. I figure if I pull them today and put down a cold frame and plant some radish, arugula, and parsley seeds, we could be rewarded with Christmas radishes and February arugula and April parsley.

The Rattlesnake Beans have been my favorite crop this year. Not only have they been the visual anchor of the garden, growing to almost eight feet high and producing a steady crop of beans from the first week of August until this week, but they have been giving us amazing food and amazing experiences. Among those experiences were the times with our grandsons here in Hull. One week this summer, I was the lead daytime caregiver for the one-year-old Robinson. In that week, Robinson and I spent a lot of time moving together as he fearlessly improved his proto-walking skills and his stair climbing and stair descent work. We spent hours on the porch and going up and down the front porch stairs to the garden. When we got to the bottom, we often nestled in the shade of the pole beans and ate beans. Not only that, but his older brother Izzy also liked to eat beans, and when he got back to Baltimore Izzy relished telling his dad his beans were not as good as mine. There was also the party on the porch in September when Ruth said that the blanched Rattlesnake Beans were the best beans she had ever eaten, and she has lived her life eating excellent home-grown vegetables. The bean dish we had last night with Rattlesnake Beans at five stages of maturity, from dried to tender (see photo in gallery below), will have to be enough. The textures of the five stages in a rice and bean dish were amazing. It was not a dish for a parent of young children or a grandparent with company, but as someone who loves their beans all that extra time sorting, pulling strings, and making stock (from the dried and drying shells), was time happily spent.

Rattlesnake Beans are an old variety. They originate in the American Southwest, where the Hopi People grew the bean, and they are also revered by the Cherokee, who have the seed stored in their seed bank. It is hard for me to give up the handful of beans that will not come in the next few days, but the thought of Christmas radishes and late winter arugula and early spring parsley overrides that emotion, and as soon as I finish this draft, I will pull them.

As I said, the past six and a half weeks have been good in the garden. We have had plenty of rain and plenty of sun. But some of the success has to do with the compost tea. In June, I gathered rotted seaweed from the beach and halfway filled a 32-gallon trash can with that rotting seaweed, and then topped off the barrel with water from a hose. For the last 19 weeks, I have been taking compost tea from that barrel. I carefully put the tea on the specific plants in the garden, and then later I add the water left over from washing vegetables or the grandkids’ bathing pool back into the barrel to restock the tea. It has never been empty these last four months. I think this tea has made a world of difference, especially for the beans and the greens. Early on, the tea was at times too strong, but its potency has lessened over time, and now I freely add the tea without fear of burning the plants with too much nitrogen. I plan to use compost tea next year, even though I will not neglect the garden as I did after the November 2024 Election.

The pictures below, taken in the garden today, show the plants that love or tolerate this season. Clockwise from top left: Italian Parsley, Red Russian Kale, Rainbow Swiss Chard with Buttercrunch Lettuce, Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes, Red Torch Tomatoes still hanging on, and the yellow watering can with compost tea. That tea is still a nice brown color and still has a rich smell, even with the 19 weeks of dilution.

Those vegetables persist, but the sorrel and the mint are thriving as we approach November, and along with the arugula (there is a bee on the arugula flower in the photo below), are still going strong for the pollinators.

Please send me your carrot updates. I have heard that there has been frost in New Hampshire and in Minnesota. This is what Nancy Potter said about the Minnesota carrots captured in the photograph of her and Steve on October 23rd as they harvested a few of their carrots, “Our carrots have definitely been frosted–it was 27 degrees this morning. The root cellar is a long way from being cold enough, so digging all the carrots is still in the future.” In about six more weeks, I hope to be posting the year-end edition of the 2025 Carrot Day Massachusetts Blog, and I would love to include your carrot adventures in that post, so stay in touch.

Nancy and Steve Potter pulling a few of their many carrots.

The Fall Garden and Turning 65

In early August, Katy and I celebrated our 39th Anniversary. That night I said to her we would not have another 39 years together, and she laughed and agreed. This past week, I turned 65.

On Saturday morning I was working/being/hanging in the garden strategizing how to get the most out of the garden this year. Vegetable gardening is largely a question of what to do when, and there are lots of small decisions like when a crop should be removed for the next to take its place. To garden is to make many moves, some as small as harvesting kale leaves so lettuce plants nearby get more light, or deciding that it is time to pull the beets and put in the radishes, or pull the radishes to put in the beets.

One thing I decided on Saturday was to use some more of the compost tea on the cucumbers and beans. I was hoping that the compost tea would encourage the Rattlesnake Pole Beans and the Shintokiwa Long-Fruited Cucumbers to keep going. While they, like me, are past their peak, they, like me, are still productive. If I were to make the decision that their season is over, it is very unlikely that whatever I planted to take their place now in mid-September will produce much. Both beans and cukes have had amazing seasons. We have had beans for the past five weeks and cucumbers for the past six, and I hope they keep going strong. Not only for us to eat but to share. You see, I have a short term goal to eat beans and cucumbers this weekend because Ruth, the daughter of old friend and Carrot Day Massachusetts blog guest writer Nancy Potter, is coming to lunch and to see the garden. I want to be sure she gets some beans and cucumbers.

The fact that there are still new flowers on both the cucumbers and beans, and that there are young beans and cucumbers are promising signs we will have something more to eat this weekend. The brown leaves and waning vigor of the plants are real too, and they will not last forever.

Decisions in the garden are not only about when but “where.” This year more than any I remember “where” has made a huge difference. This year I had dramatically different results from the same type of plants in different places. The Shintokiwa Long-Fruited Cucumber trellis in one spot has produced about 80 beautiful cucumbers, while the other trellis has produced two not so beautiful cucumbers. The trellises are near each other, only ten feet or so apart. But these photographs below tell the story. I know of course it is the soil; look at the different shades of green.

Not only were the cucumbers more numerous from one trellis than the other, they were longer and better. I had hoped that the less productive trellis might have a later season but it is not to be as the productive one still has more small fruit. Same is true for the tomatoes as the plants on one side of that path are out producing (my guess is by ten fold) what is happening on the other side of the path. I had thought the slow starters might have a better late season but that is not coming to pass as they are ending sooner too.

This past Saturday, while I was harvesting and thinking about the near-term harvests for the next few weeks, I was also looking forward to the fall garden. It is not all that different from thinking about being 65. Katy and my children have been born and grown up and are living their full lives on their own. I am still working in a school and teaching, and while much of what I will ever learn has been learned, there is more to learn and do. This season’s garden is at the stage I am in life right now. Like the garden I have done much of my season’s or life’s work but not all and perhaps not the most important part.

As I was doing that thinking and gardening and planning I thought about what I was good at in the garden. My first answer was harvesting. I spend more time harvesting food, than planting, weeding, watering, or tending. I think of myself as being good at harvesting but I decided on Saturday morning that what I might be even better at than harvesting is just being in the garden. Making those small decisions, chatting with neighbors as they pass my front yard garden, pulling weeds, cutting arugula and harvesting. I love just being in the garden and also writing about being in the garden.

Chard, Kale and Beets on the left and baby lettuce on the right

I am still learning and adjusting. Right now my biggest adjustment is when to pick the tomatoes. Yesterday I decided that a big Brandywine tomato should wait another day on the vine. In years past I would have thought it was three or four days from perfection but as so many of the tomatoes have been eaten by animals (when only barely ripe) I knew I should pick it soon. The next morning I learned that I was too late as I saw that an animal had pulled it off the plant and eaten half of it. It had eaten the ripe half. That Saturday morning decision not to pick that tomato was the wrong decision. Because of that learning I picked the Brandywine in the photo on the right (the lower one behind the leaf with just a touch of pink) and it is ripening well under a dish towel in the kitchen. We always need to be adjusting.

May your fall garden and your carrots keep growing. After four adjustments to the fence around the carrots, I think I have it right now, and it will continue to keep the bunnies out. Looking forward to that December Day when the neighborhood kids come over and we eat carrots. Please tell me how your carrots and garden are doing.

Summer

Well it is just about high summer here in Hull. The lettuce has been plentiful but is now almost over until fall. The beets are glorious and the Rattlesnake pole beans are high and about to be ready. The cucumbers are growing up their trellis and about to explode in production. And then there is the ever present arugula. I have written before about how I try to disturb the soil as little as possible and most of the garden is made up of the areas between what is planted or transplanted. In those spaces I am harvesting arugula nine months a year. I spend more time on the arugula than any of the other crops even though the arugula doesn’t have its own space. Several days a week as I harvest the arugula I am selecting arugula plants to cut or pull for that harvest. On the edges of the garden, which are filled with mint, tansy and other flowers I allow some of the arugula to mature and go to seed. It is those seeds that replenish the soil with arugula seeds and all summer there are new arugula plants emerging between and under the other crops. As with all plants arugula does best in great soil with plenty of room but its seeds germinate so well I am constantly selecting out the plants I want to thrive and then pulling those as they get bigger for younger plants to take their space. That way all summer there is beautiful arugula to eat.

Around twenty-five years ago, I bought one packet of perennial arugula from Johnny’s Seeds, and from that planting, the arugula keeps coming back. June and July are arugula’s most prosperous months, and the picture of the harvest below with beets, radishes, and arugula shows a fairly typical harvest. In June and July, we get two or three of these a week.

On July 15th, I received this email from an old friend and the author of a recent Carrot Day Blog. “HI Ted! Our last planting of carrots just got scuffle hoed and hoping for a nice rain later today. Hope you are well and keeping the rabbits out! Love–Nancy“

When Nancy Potter sent this message with an amazing picture of her farm and one of its carrot plots, I felt pretty smug because my carrots planted on Juneteenth were thriving and bunny-safe. But that success didn’t last long. A few days later, I looked into the garden and saw a bunny in the middle of the carrot patch. I ran out to scare it and saw the bunny jump over the nearly three-foot chicken wire fence. It only took me five minutes to go to the basement and enclose the bed with a taller four foot fence, which for now at least has since done the job, and the carrots are now recovering.

The series of photos below shows the bed as a whole as well as details of the section that the bunny or bunnies ate and of the un-bunny-eaten section. Perhaps in time, the extra thinning the bunnies did will give me super big carrots — only time will tell. In the middle picture, you can see the purslane and arugula baby plants. While purslane is also a tasty green that, like arugula, bunnies don’t prefer, its season is much shorter than arugula’s, and I only see it showing up in the garden at the end of June or July.

Whole bed, bunny eaten carrots on the left

This past week, I visited the Victory Gardens on Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace. This famed site, started during World War Two, was one of the 20 million Victory Gardens that Americans planted and tended during that war. Those gardens produced 40% of all fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the US during that time. Now in 2025, even in the Fenway Victory Gardens, most of the gardeners focus on flowers, not vegetables. Gardening flowers does bring many of the social and physical benefits of growing food for the gardener. Right now in America, there is not the same sense of scarcity around food that drove the Victory Gardens of World War Two. That said, I do hope you do join us to grow your our own food. The benefits of developing your soil and growing your own food are so worth it, and carrots are a great entryway into gardening.

The bank of pictures below is what the Fenway Victory Gardens looked like on July 25th. Please note the wonderful composting system as well as the gardener who chose flowers and the other who chose vegetables.

Please send me pictures of your carrots and your garden.

I have one more image to leave you with, the mint around my garden, which is such a draw for the bees and other pollinators. I just love watching the bees and the butteryflys as they come and vist the mint flowers.

Planted the Seeds

Well, I planted the carrot seeds on Juneteenth, as has been my practice the last three years. It felt good to get the seeds in the ground on such an important day. Hope that all goes well.

As I got ready to prepare the bed, I was disappointed in the look of the cover plants. As I pulled them before putting in the carrot seeds, their color of light green with small leaves, was a sign that something was amiss with the soil. They did not have that robust, healthy look that I like to see in the garden. There was one small section where things looked better, but overall, the plants did not look right. As I have written here before, I neglected the garden and did not put on the usual layer of seaweed in the late fall/early winter, and it showed.

I often use my hands to prepare the soil and after pulling the cover crop, see all the roots, I dug with my hands as I prepared the carrot bed.

There have been piles of seaweed at the beach, pushed up by storms in May, that have been there for about a month. A week before, I had gathered the top dried layer of seaweed and used it as a bunny barrier at the base of two of my fenced-off areas after I noticed that the bunnies were burrowing under the fences. On Juneteenth, I determined that I would take a fork and gather from these same piles, but get the smelly decomposing underbelly of the piles. It was too late to amend the soil by mulching the surface with seaweed and allowing the natural processes of the living organisms in the soil to bring the nutrients down from the surface to where the plants’ roots will use them. What I could do was to make some compost tea. Which I did by gathering the mucky seaweed and filling a garbage barrel with water and stirring it around, and then filling watering cans with the resulting tea.

I did notice that the poured tea had an impact on my pole beans, as there were a few leaves from the beans that got burned from too much of a good thing. Anyway, time will tell, but it felt good to be pouring brown water onto the seeded carrot bed, and next winter I will do better.

The harvest from Juneteenth includes arugula, lettuce, dill, and cilantro

The light of June is so good for growing, and the arugula and the lettuce are center stage. Where a month ago it took time and labor to pick a salad, (more time than going to the store) now, day after day, the garden makes more than Katy and I can eat, even when we have three parties in three days, with the main feature of the meals being salad. The garden is now saving us time, and it is the time of sharing the harvest with family, friends, and neighbors.

Hope you remember, as you plant, tend, and weed your garden, that the days of the easy and glorious harvest can come. While there are months of tending between now and the frost, I am hoping and working to keep the carrots safe from the rabbits, in nutritious soil and I expect I will need to water and perhaps use some more compost tea.