View from the Mountain

My Theory of Soil

As I wrote in November 2021, there has been dirt on my hands for many years. I started serious gardening in the summer of 1972 on our farm in St. Croix, Nova Scotia.  It was grass pasture that we turned into a garden. It was plowed with my John Deere tractor and its three furrow plow. It was then harrowed, covered with old chicken manure. The next spring we tried beating it into submission with a tiller with front-mounted tines. It was a bone jarring experience.

We were young and strong so it still became a great garden. We grew so much broccoli that I am still traumatized if I eat broccoli more than once a week. We moved to New Brunswick where we raised cattle for ten years. Not only did we garden, I also planted twenty acres in oats most years. We did not harvest the oats as grain but green chopped them in the fall to extend the pasture season. The oats were a cover crop for reseeding an old field in grass and clover.

The garden spot that we inherited on the old farm in Brunswick had been used for quite a while so it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from our garden spot in Nova Scotia. It was also rocky, well-drained soil while the Nova Scotia soil was heavy clay once you got down over a foot.

If you a trying to grow new grass where mostly weeds and brush grew, you work the land hard. If you are trying to build up a worn out soil, you hardly work it.  What did do was apply as much rotted manure to the old garden as we could. We never plowed. We would use a disc harrow to work the composted manure into the soil.  Then I would till it in the spring before planting with my tiller that now had rear-mounted tines.  Towards the end of our time on the farm in 1984, the garden really did not need tilling.  The soil structure had been restored.  You could easily stir it with a three-tined digger. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the rocks. As the old-timers were fond of saying, the most reliable crop in the area was rocks.

Since the farm we have lived and gardened on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. Next we did the same along the marshes at the North Carolina coast and finally here on ridge in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The recipe for good soil has always been the same, plenty of compost, mix it with the soil so the air, soil, compost, and moisture can do their thing.  This year our soil needed stirring, I used a broadfork to lift and break the soil a little. It was not turned over like with a plow. I figure three or four years of this and I will be able to stir it with my three-pronged digger. As for no till gardening, it can work if your soil is in good shape. As for no-till farming, I am all for the no-till not so much for all the chemicals.

Tomatoes and Me

I would not venture to guess when it was that I ate my first tomato.  Tomatoes likely appear on every page of my life story.  Shortly after we moved to the small town of Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem in 1952, my mother had tomato plants growing in front of our house.  When she moved from her Mount Airy house to our Roanoke house, there were still tomatoes growing near her back steps.   When she got to our house, there were tomatoes growing by the side of the house.

I remember loving tomato sandwiches, even to the point of ordering BLTs for breakfast when traveling.  Some time during my teenage years when on an overnight fishing trip with a friend, I learned about bologna, cheese, and tomato sandwiches. It was love at first bite.  This was well before all cured and processed meat was pronounced as bad for us.   However, we can cling to the knowledge than nothing is better than a plain tomato sandwich on the great bread of your choice with the perfect mayonnaise which in my case is Duke’s.

To eat really good tomatoes, you must face the challenge of growing tomatoes unless you live in an area with lots of farmers’ markets.  I planted my first tomatoes in Nova Scotia in 1972, on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  We started the plants from seed and hardened them off in cold frame made from salvaged windows.  We barely managed to get tomatoes before the first frost. Since they were all we had and North Carolina was a long way off, they seemed delicious. However, there just wasn’t enough heat out on the shore for tomatoes to be a reliable crop.

For lots of reasons including better hay making weather for our cattle, we moved inland to the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was much easier to grow tomatoes (and make hay) there.  By the time we got to the mountainside in Roanoke, in 1989, I had a lot of experience growing tomatoes in harsh conditions.  Even so, getting a ripe tomato by July 1 on our Virginia mountain was a challenge.

Then in 2006, we decided to make a move to North Carolina’s coast.  We ended up on a marsh on an inlet of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  It was definitely a tomato friendly climate. The spring of 2007, we planted our first coastal tomatoes. Even though we got them in the ground late, we had ripe tomatoes before the end of June.  The next year we had ripe tomatoes before the end of May.

Eventually, in 2016, we managed to grow tomatoes for twelve months using wagons to move them in and out of the garage.  The ripe ones we got in January and February weren’t the best but by the time the heat came in March they were pretty tasty. 

Now we are back in North Carolina’s Piedmont where my mother grew her first and best tomatoes.  On March  8, I planted my tomato seeds for this year’s crop. I will get them into the ground in late April.  Hopefully, we can still manage to beat that July 1 date that I used to chase on the mountain.

Last Mowing Revisited

Eighteen years ago, I wrote a post, the Last Mowing.  We had been living in Roanoke, up on the mountain for fifteen years.  It was hard to get used to mowing the yard in December after years in New Brunswick where the snow could come in November and cover the ground until mid-May. 

Except for the green grass in December, there  were parts of living on the mountain that reminded us of our years in Canada.  The sometimes snowy weather was one thing and the friendly people were the other.

When you come over our hill after dark, it is almost like an approach to the airport. The city is spread out before you, street lights blinking, and buildings glowing. There are not many views in the world that can compete with it.

Being on top of the world at the end of the road seems to make us closer. Perhaps we have been drawn closer by the few times that the county has forgotten to plow the snow off the road in the winter.

Flatlanders, that is anyone who does not live on the hill, often ask how we get up the hill in the winter. Actually getting up the hill has rarely been the problem. All of us at the top have at least one four wheel drive. It takes less than one winter to realize that going down the hill is far more exciting than going up. I have been fortunate to have a job that allows me to work at home when necessary. That means that snowy morning’s entertainment usually is watching the folks who have to go to work try to get down the hill safely.

Our  first year on the mountain, we got an early coat of ice.  Everyone on the hill banded together and we cut a single tire track all the way to the bottom of the hill.  It was the first of many weather adventures on the hill.  We saw snow storms that were worthy of Canada.

It was a good place to live  and while we lived there, those of us at the top of the hill were a tight-knit group.  and I remember more parties than disagreements.  After we moved from the hill,  most friends drifted away but we remain close to one family that grew up with our children.

A lot of water has passed under me in skiff and kayak in the fifteen years after we moved from Roanoke and lived on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast.  My crocs also covered many miles of sandy beach. Yet I still fondly remember the years when we partied on our decks whenever given the slightest chance. There was no close neighborhood group in our coastal subdivision. I will blame it on the lack of any steep hills.

After fifteen years in the marsh, we moved from the coast during the pandemic.  Selling, buying, and moving during a pandemic are not the easiest things to do, but with lots of help, we managed to find a nice neighborhood less than half an hour from where I grew up in North Carolina’s Piedmont. We even found a home with a real backyard instead of a marsh or a ravine.

While my family has deep roots here, many who have been close to us are much older even than us.  The younger generation has their own busy lives and there is little to connect us with the neighborhood. Last year none of our immediate neighbors even attended the annual neighborhood HOA picnic with free (well it is covered by your dues) barbecue.

When we lived at the coast, we had a wonderful church family but we lost that when we moved.  Because of the pandemic, we remain video-church goers.  If the pandemic recedes further, perhaps we will find another church family.

Age, changes due to the way people live, some driven by the pandemic and even political divisions make it harder to connect.

Much like it was in early December eighteen years ago in Roanoke, we just had our last mowing of the yard here in North Carolina’s Piedmont hill country. Our fescue yard is still green like our bluegrass one in Roanoke so there is a chance it will be mowed again.

Our yards might be much the same green in December but somehow it feels like our world has changed.   In is unlikely we will have as close a group of friends as we did in Roanoke both on the hill and in the flatlands. Having children in school makes it easy to have common ground.  The Roanoke friends will have to share a spot in our fond memories of the friends we made during our years on the farm and in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I have always believed that  there are good people everywhere, you just have to work harder in some places to find them than others.  I have seen nothing to change my mind in our latest move. We are finding our new ones, one at a time.

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

Dirt On My Hands

I grew up with a mother who spent most of her free time digging in the dirt. She loved flowers and they responded to her love. Roses grew for her in places no one else could get them to grow. Tomatoes were the only vegetable that we had room for at my childhood home, but they did incredibly well.

Growing up, the only digging in the dirt that I did was to get worms so I could go fishing. I was completely uninterested in growing anything. That certainly continued through my college years. The change and how it came about are something of a mystery even to me.  When it happened is easier.  The change happened sometime between August 1971 and January 1972 when I started ordering seeds from a catalog.

No one told or forced me to start growing vegetables, but by the summer of 1972, I had a huge garden and plenty of dirt on my hands. Dirt has certainly been on my hands on a regular basis since then. I credit two books for the huge impact that they had on me. The first is Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield and the second is Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. The two books convinced me to get my hands dirty.

Having a garden goes with having a farm or at least it did back in the seventies and eighties. When you move off a farm, it gets far more difficult to garden. The picture at the top of the post is perhaps our most difficult attempt at gardening.  We had to hire a contractor to bring in a backhoe and dig out the rocks before putting in new dirt. You can hardly see the patch of bare ground at the back of the photo. In hindsight we should have known that given our northern location, Halifax, Nova Scotia, sun should have been a critical element in our plans. In our defense, we only lived there a little over two very snowy years before moving south.

Eventually after coming back to the states, we ended up in Roanoke, Virginia. There was enough space for me to start growing tomatoes again. My wife had a great place to grown perennials and there was plenty of room for pansies and other plants. Eventually deer became such a problem that it was hard to grow much of anything. I still remember coming home one night to a deer standing on our front step and nibbling on a Coral Belle.

Still there many years when I enjoyed the great tomato race that I had with friends. The tomato race continued after we moved to the North Carolina. While it might have appeared at first glance that we had little space to garden at our coastal home but we kept working and started composting. Composting was something we had not been able to do since we left the farm.  The compost yielded amazing results.  Our garden at the coast was a resounding success year after year. We left a huge container of compost for the people who bought the house from us. The report we got is that they also had a great garden. 

We have moved to a new place with plenty of room for gardening. it is a blank slate, but we are much older so our efforts will be targeted but we expect to successful.  Neither of us mind getting dirt on our hands. It has helped us to stay grounded so to speak.