July 2014 Newsletter

If I was tasked to name say 10 things which brought me great joy as a youngster, most of them would involved pleasures associated with leisure time—hunting small game, fly fishing for trout, trot lining and cane poling for catfish in the nearby river, picking berries, camping, swimming, and other aspects of just being a boy growing up in the heart of North Carolina’s Great Smokies. Yet one youthful source of pure delight, and it has stood the test of time wonderfully well, involved all the myriad aspects of raising a garden. Plenty of hard work was involved, but the simple delights of enjoying products of the sweat of one’s brow, walking newly hoed rows to look at corn and beans, or seeing a labor of love’s end product through harvesting all were deeply meaningful.

Gardening was a part of my life as far back as my memory goes. Daddy and Grandpa Joe both took gardening as a matter of serious concern. Part of this was sheer necessity—the food they produced made a significant difference in the family budget—but there is also no doubt whatsoever that they found the whole process enjoyable. From when the ground was first turned in early spring (there were no tillers; everything was done by horse, plow, and harrow followed by hand labor with a hoe and other implements) until everything was harvested in the fall, there was always work to be done.

Each step, from planting the first seeds of spring vegetables or putting out onion sets and cutting up seed potatoes right through to the gathering of October beans and pumpkins after the first frost, was part of the rhythm of life. Some things, such as feeding chickens and slopping hogs, went on throughout the year, but gardening was a March to October deal. It’s been well over 60 years since I first raised my “own” garden (Daddy let me have a little spot which I worked up with a spading fork), and in my mind’s eye I can still see those Charleston Grey watermelons growing until they finally reached maturity in mid-August. A few years later, matters got a bit more ambitious, but it wasn’t until I had finished undergraduate school and was out on my own that garden became more than a hobby. Since I was in my 20s it has been an ongoing, mostly delightful love affair.

As every gardener knows, there are some down times, and it seems most of mine revolve around dealing with critters. While I have the normal problems such as blight, nematodes, squash stem borers, Japanese beetles, and the like, my major sources of misery come from deer and squirrels, with occasional intrusions from ‘coons and rabbits thrown in for good measure. I also have trouble with terrapins (really painted turtles but we always called them terrapins or “tarpins”) taking a bite or two out of any ripe tomato they can reach, and forget growing cantaloupes. They wait until the melon is on the edge of perfection and then eat into it.

In the case of the bushytails, I’ve been working on them with a will, and I would imagine that over the past month I’ve averaged killing one a day. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to make any difference other than to increase their awareness of the fact that my appearance sends an instant signal to light a shuck to some place far away. They play hob with the bird feeders, make me spend a lot of extra time pulling up oak and pecan sprouts from nuts they have planted, make trying to harvest pecans an exercise in futility, and more. This year they have pretty well denuded a pear tree of fruit long before it reached the ripe stage, they are getting figs as soon as they ripen, and seem to have a penchant for taking one or two bites out of green tomatoes.

Deer are a major problem on many fronts—they work on newly sprouted or planted stuff of all kinds, can devastate a patch of corn as it reaches the milk stage, nip away at new growth on my raspberries and muscadines with a will, and generally seem to stay a bit ahead of me in an ongoing war that has no foreseeable conclusion. I’ve tried tape, tin pie pans, urine, hair, netting, perfume, hair spray, and perhaps two dozen other “solutions.” All work temporarily; none work for long. The same is true, albeit to a much smaller degree, with rabbits. Still, all too often I find evidence of rabbit browsing (they cut stems at a 45 degree angle while deer clip them pretty much straight across), and they are particularly fond of young beans, limas, and crowder peas.

Then there are the birds. I love to watch them feed, and we go through a considerable amount of bird food each year, along with sweet water for hummingbirds. ‘Coons have gotten into the hummingbird act (or at least that’s what I think it is, because the raids come at night and are undertaken by some type of climbing critter) and have taken to emptying and often knocking down our feeder. My main bone to pick with birds focuses on blueberries and to a lesser degree on raspberries and thornless blackberries. Some years I cover them with netting (a considerable undertaking, because if you leave an opening birds will find it); others I just write off substantial losses. This year I’m taking the lazy approach and thus far the blackberries are faring pretty well although there are ongoing inroads on the blueberries. I don’t mind sharing but sometimes the birds, and robins, brown thrashers, and mockingbirds are the worst, have a decidedly different idea of what constitutes their share from what I have in mind.

Usually the blueberry patch I planted some 40 years ago and which now sports plants eight or nine feet high, has far more berries than we need. That is not the case this year, and that’s another reason for me to be a bit irritated with the birds. Although the explanation lies beyond my understanding, some bushes are covered while others, heavy bearers in the past, have few if any berries. Still, we have plenty for our needs so I guess I shouldn’t complain, and blueberries will be a part of our daily diet for the next six weeks or so. This month’s food section is also devoted entirely to this healthy, delicious, and relatively easy to cultivate plant. In fact, once established, blueberries need little other than mulch, being kept free of weeds, and maybe a bit of fertilizer every other year. They do require acidic soil, and in times of extreme drought I usually give them a bit of a hands up with the soaker hose. Most years no watering is needed.

Beyond that, there’s a bit of daily war at dawn with Japanese beetles (I knock them off heavily laden muscadines into a bucket with a couple of inches of water and a dash of liquid soap in it), keeping an eye out for any squirrel who dares give me an opportunity to shoot, and the genuine pleasure of just walking around in the gloaming surveying what a lot of hard work and the good earth have given me.