A Race Track and a Garden Circle

(A StoryADay.org prompt from yesterday encouraged us to open our stories with an event in progress. Good advice that it seems I rarely follow, despite my training as a journalist. For some reason, I enjoy back story. Perhaps that's the evolving historian in me. At any rate, today's story is about a topic that friends have been asking me to write more on: the adventures in backyard gardening. It's a story of back-story, of how it all began.)

The Race Track

Two or three years before my husband Jim and I moved to upstate New York and found our rural paradise on Squashville Road, we lived in a highly urban neighborhood in Seattle. Tucked into the valley between two of Seattle's famous hills was a small backyard where we grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, salad greens, collards, kale, and bok choy. I had started the garden in the mid-1990s shortly after buying the house with a partner-turned-friend but had walked away from it when opportunities to live and study in Hawai'i called to me. Years later, when newly-married Jim and I returned to the Mainland and moved into the house, the backyard garden had become overrun with litter, eight-foot-tall dandelions, life-choking ivy, thorny blackberry vines, several dozen aluminum soda cans, and a defunct jeep. In an act of wild-weed slaughter, Jim hacked away at the overgrowth and we discovered an amazing bed of fertile soil.

During this time, the former owner of our future home on Squashville was going through a divorce. Her rapidly aging home and backyard barn, milk shed, and chicken coop were more maintenance than she and her two boys could manage. One of the boys, a teenager, was a rebellious artistic type. He made pasta noodles from scratch, built a tree house in the back, and one hot summer day, decided to turn the spacious flat lands of the home's back yard into a drag-race course. When we looked at the house for the first time in late September 2010, we saw the track and we saw potential. Not in the track, but in the south- and west-facing flat land in which it lay.

We moved into the house the following March. Three feet of snow coated the ground, and remained in place through mid-April. Not knowing what to expect or how to plan a garden around the four seasons of the northeast, we sat back, dreamed, and waited for the snow to melt.

By the end of April, we saw what we had inherited. The combination of a Kubota-dug out yard, engine oil, and burning rubber had scarred the land, rendering it all but unuseable. The rest of the yard was filled with tall grass, dandelion weeds, snakes, and trash. We didn't yet own a lawn mower, and after closing on a house, were a bit cash-scarce. We wanted to create a garden but weren't sure where to begin.
Walking through the race-track, an idea dawned. The soil was dead, and so were all weeds. The tractor had razed the land to create what looked (to me, at least) to be a series of garden beds. Topsoil (which could be purchased), sheep manure (which wasn't too expensive) and goat manure (which was free) would allow us to create a series of spiraling raised beds.

And so the garden circle was born.


The Garden Circle

We started with peas, which we planted from seeds. We bought basil, pepper, tomato, zucchini, cucumber, and brussels sprout plants at the local farmers market, and added them to the garden in increments as the weather warmed. We added cilantro, cat nip, rosemary, and tarragon. Our spirits were bolstered as the plants began to grow. Then we read that planting potatoes was one natural way to replenish spent soil. Rebecca Stannard of the Stannard Farm in Cambridge, NY, sold us three pounds each of red, white, and blue potatoes, and taught us how to cut them so each piece would have one or more eyes.

We planted the potatoes in mid-May. I didn't really expect them to grow. I just figured that if we could help the soil, we might be able to add more tomatoes later.

But Jim who always acts one step faster than I think had other ideas. I was in my first year of work as a tenure-track professor, and traveling out of state several times a month. While I traveled, he drank beer and made numerous, unannounced trips to the area Home Depot's garden store, purportedly to buy topsoil, but returning always with more plants: more zucchini, more cucumbers, more peppers, and an eggplant. And then more zucchini. He planted them with care, if not skill, and while he placed the little seedlings so close to each other that the greenery nearly choked the plants out, his enthusiasm was infectious. Before long, the plants began to grow. Flowers appeared and soon individual vegetables formed.

"I have news for you," announced Jim one July morning. In his hand was a small, yellowish white ball, covered with dirt. "We're potato farmers."

I looked closely. By George, we were.

We baked the potato that night, and split it in half, which amounted to about two bites apiece. It tasted like the soil, and a salad, and the starchy goodness of a fresh potato all together.

With the potato, we also ate fresh peas and a salad made from kale and basil that I had hastily gathered up. And zucchini.

The next day, we planted beans.

We had reached a point of no-return. We had become not backyard gardeners but farmers. Novice farmers, but farmers nevertheless. Tilling soil, turning a race track into a garden circle.