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.

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 Seeds

Dear Carrot Friends it is time to order your free carrot seeds.

Over the last few weeks, as I looked at my garden and spring has arrived after a hard winter here in Hull, I have been disheartened by the lack of work I did in the garden this past fall and winter. For the first time in over twenty-five years, I did not gather seaweed and lay it on top of the soil. I can see the impact of this inaction when I look at patches of bare soil and at the street around the garden where I see eroded soil from the garden.

I am disappointed that in my retrenchment and grief after we elected Donald Trump, I did not care for the soil as well as I usually do. While I have practiced the advised gardening methods to develop and maintain healthy soil and grow food for the past 28 years in Hull I did not do it this year. There are still plenty of living roots in undisturbed soil and most of the garden is covered by mulch from other years and not all was bad but I was not the steward of the land I usually am and work to be.

In my reaction to living in a country where a little over half of the voters choose a government which among many plans vowed to roll back actions intended to mitigate climate change, I retreated and did less when I wish I had done more. Now that it is the end of March instead of having lots of food growing under cold frames and beginning to eat food I have grown, I will need to wait to eat food I have grown this year. I have to acknowledge that and move on and begin again. In the cycle of the garden, spring is when we begin again.

Speaking about beginning again I am a huge fan of Sharon Salzberg the Buddhist meditation teacher. One of her central teachings is the idea of beginning again. She writes, “The invitation to begin again (and again and again) that meditation affords is an invitation for the practice of self-compassion — to heal through letting go rather than harming ourselves with cycles of self-doubt, judgment, and criticism. Beginning again is a powerful form of resilience training.” In this passage, she explicitly advises us on how to respond to our wandering minds within the practice of meditation, but she often brings this same concept to all of life. As she says when we begin again we strengthen our resilience and we need resilience right now.

Spring is a beginning again.

We are beginning again when we plant a garden, no matter the season. Please order your free carrot seeds here and begin again being a member of a community of growers of our own food.

While I hope I do not respond to dangerous events by again doing less and neglecting the soil in the garden, one winter of poor gardening does not undo 28 years of good practices. When I did put seeds in the ground a few weeks ago, the soil was beautiful and healthy. Rome was not built in a day, nor is it destroyed in a day.

Hope you have a great year, and if there is any way you can grow any of your own food, please do.