Met Home Editor’s Page: July/August 2009
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Once upon a time I gardened like a maniac, totally loving every step of the experience. On the coldest, darkest winter days, I’d spread out seductive seed catalogues on my kitchen table and make tough decisions about 'Red Swan' beans versus 'Fin de Bagnol' haricots, wonder if I could fool Mother Nature and get artichokes to survive in zone 6A and calculate how many little lettuces I could fit into the eight-foot-square spot I’d assigned to them. I smuggled seeds back from abroad, saving the packages as personal ephemera.
No matter how much compost we work in, we’ve always had a base of heavy clay soil with a vernal spring nearby (who knew?), so the garden remains practically under water until well past the Saint Patrick’s Day plant-your-peas date. But faithfully, as early in the year as our floods allowed, we’d turn over and “improve” the heavy earth, and I’d spend blissful, buggy hours painstakingly planting seeds of every vegetable I’d ever tasted in a European restaurant, plus family favorites. I added every color of zinnia and sunflower for bright spots I could see from the house and later I'd plunder them for flowers to grace my table.
Calamities occurred regularly: One year a creature ate off the tops of every newly unfurled bean plant. The lovely lettuces all had tiny, little holes from tiny, little bugs. The horses managed to lean in over the fence far enough to snack on sunflowers, mesclun and beet greens. Last year they even sampled the heirloom green tomatoes I’d mail-ordered from California. (At least I’ve always been canny enough to put the carrots dead center.)
Then there’s the weeding. Why do weeds grow ten times faster than anything else? I’ve had weeding parties with white wine, used ugly plastic mulch, hired kids who left the roots. I actually don’t mind weeding—it’s relaxing but truly time-consuming. All this has led me to question my gardening (in)sanity when I’m now able to buy most everything I ever grew at local farmers’ markets.
But what about the amazement of picking dinner, knowing it all started from those tiny seeds, that all those hours of “work” resulted in such a miracle? It’s now mid-May. I’ve been away for three weekends in a row at trade shows, and the garden (thanks to a wet spring) hasn’t even been turned over. I never ordered seeds. I’m wondering what it would look like as a weed patch.
Then last night I had dinner at the famed working farm/restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The staff showcased everything they’d grown in their gardens or foraged nearby—exquisite spring fiddleheads, ramps, asparagus. The restaurant served Andante Dairy cheeses, named by cheese maker Soyoung Scanlan because, as the website explains, andante is the musical tempo mark that indicates the "moderate rate of speed of a strolling walk.” Scanlan chose the name, it went on, “in order to describe her longing for the slower speed of life, the proper speed of traditional cheese making.”
I got the point: Slow down and plant your garden.
—Donna Warner, Editor in Chief
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