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.

Spring into Summer

I planted one cold frame in late February and now it is in its full glory with lettuce, arugula and beets. There were radishes, but those have all been eaten.

Friday night, I went to the 30th graduation of the South Shore Charter Public School. Thirty years ago, as a Kindergarten/First Grade classroom teacher at the school, I went to the first graduation. I have been to about 25 others since, and I have loved every one of them. I write to you about the graduation and that community because Carrot Day comes out of South Shore Charter, and many of the readers of this blog are connected to the school.

A great deal has changed in those thirty years in that once-little school and the larger communities around it. Thirty years ago, there were about sixty people at the graduation of three or four students, and last night, there were about 1,400 at the graduation of 78. It is certainly not the same school it was thirty years ago, and yet it is the same school.

One thing I remember as being the same at all these graduations was the expressions of gratitude from the graduating seniors. At the first graduation, all of the graduates, who wanted to speak to the audience, spoke. That became a tradition and has continued in every South Shore graduation since. If a Senior had something they wanted to tell everyone, they got/get a chance to do so. The speakers were/are not chosen by school leaders, or selected because of their grades, or even by a voted of the members of their class; the speakers chose themselves. What a remarkable thing it is to have the opportunity to create one’s own opportunities. And for thirty years, that opportunity of self-determination has remained and remarkably remains despite a twentyfold growth in size of the graduating class.

The students who chose to speak on Friday night spoke about what had been their experience of “Charter.” (I loved that that was still what they called their school, as that is what we called it in the first years when we were the only charter school in this part of Massachusetts.) They spoke about how they had created a community and what it meant to them to be in that community. They spoke of their gratitude to each other, their teachers, and family members. I love expressions of gratitude, and Friday night I felt so grateful.

I am grateful I got to be a part of that community for so long and I am grateful that my friend and colleague, and faithful reader of this blog, June Fontaine, was honored as she retires after being associated with the school as a parent of a student and then as a teacher for nearly all of the school’s thirty years. The send off was moving and captured her grace and wisdom, her kindness and her skill, and even mentioned the carrots she grew with her students in what is still called the Garden Project.

You see, the Garden Project began in the second year of South Shore, and Carrot Day comes out of the Garden Project. In the Garden Project, we planted carrot seeds in the late spring and harvested them in the fall. Over time, I learned about the impact of frost on carrots’ flavor and the day expanded to beyond just the students who grew the carrots to be a celebration of the garden and of life and work in the garden.

Here is to June and June Fontaine and the people who grow carrots and celebrate the beauty of growing their own food and sharing their own food with friends and neighbors and those they don’t know.

Here is to spring turning to summer. I have sent out the carrot seeds to those who ordered this spring, but I still have thousands of Scarlet Nantes carrot seeds to send to you. If you order this week and I get them out, you can still plant on Juneteenth, a perfect day for planting carrots to harvest in late November or early December.

Here is the order form.

Below are more pictures of the Hull Garden at 41 Western Ave as spring turns to summer.

The mint crop, which I will harvest at the end of the month before it blooms. The first cutting is for me and tea, and the second growth will be for the pollinators.

Gardens like schools have a flow that goes with the seasons, and the month of June, with its graduations and greens, and long days, is a beautiful part of the yearly cycle. Hope you have a great June and don’t forget to request your Scarlet Nantes carrot seeds. Hope you grow and celebrate carrots with us.