By DAVE PRAAMSMA
If there is a role columnists take very seriously, it is that of a social watchdog – sounding alarms when troubling trends arrive. In light of this charge, I would like to address an issue Vermont has been silent about far too long. I write today about nothing less than fanatical gardening excess.
As always, I won’t tax your attention with a lot of facts and figures (of which I really don’t have an ample supply). But let me at least cite the incontrovertible, deep, and abiding conviction in my stomach that gardening has really gotten out of hand.
Lest I be accused of overreacting, I will tell you about an old neighbor of mine. Her gardens were the envy of the county. Around her house she had built lovely, meandering, stone-terraced creations that would have rivaled any English countryside manor. Her labyrinthine creations were truly the Disney World of gardens. Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar himself had nothing on these gardens.
Stopping in for a garage sale some time ago, it was quite impossible not to acknowledge all the greenery. What also couldn’t be overlooked, however, was that the handsome stones of her gardens were the same as her old farmhouse foundation. On a whim, I asked if she was ever tempted to slip one of those good-looking stones from her basement. You know, to use in her gardens. What followed was a rather awkward silence, an exasperated look on the face of her husband, and just one more reminder of the runaway Vermont zeal for gardening. (My wife later likened the situation to a dangerous, large-scale version of the game Jenga.)
(For the record, we recently met another couple looking to buy that now-empty house. We listened patiently to their enthusiasm for the lovely gardens, warmly shook their hands, and then discreetly suggested they make a good inspection of the foundation.)
But what is perhaps most astonishing about stories like this is that Vermonters are really not all that astonished. They get it. That lose-your-head kind of zeal for gardening is really par for the course here. Gardening is no longer a poky little pastime done in postage-stamp size plots. Garden expansion is now the name of the game. Whether you chalk it up to the long winters, an overdeveloped love for tomatoes, or just a post-pandemic by-product, gardening in Vermont is fast approaching the intensity of blood sport. Or, to quote my favorite Nick Parks film, “We’re just simple country folks, it’s all we got!”
I was reminded of this again somewhat more recently at an otherwise lighthearted backyard barbeque when conversation sharply turned to serious gardening. A number of the wives circled up their lawn chairs, and began whispering (almost conspiratorially) about a rumored batch of aged, composted manure a farming friend had been curing for some years. Had you missed the beginning of the conversation it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to conclude they were discussing a rare shipment of French Bordeaux.
In short order I was conscripted by my wife to acquire our own shipment of the wonder soil. A phone call that evening confirmed farmer Ray’s generosity. Only a gift of a few well-chilled beverages would be required to close the deal. I later learned that my farming friend had been gifting his aged manure to his more immediate neighbors for some time. Had he gone into local politics his newfound popularity would have been quite unrivaled.
By now, my wife had also been infected with the summer gardening frenzy. She had expanded her garden enterprises to rival Master Gardener Steve down the road. A load of Ray’s much-storied soil would be just the thing to supercharge her tomatoes. (Steve, incidentally, gardens like a doomsday prepper. He and his food fortifications from large-scale gardening could probably withstand the worst of economic collapses.)
After packing me a cooler of diplomatic gifts, she shoved the keys to our old pickup into my hands. Underlying her instructions was a tone of seriousness I had not heard since she thought her appendix had ruptured. The health of our very marriage seemed to be at stake. Failure was not an option.
Arriving with my pickup, I soon discovered Ray’s generosity for myself: he unleashed about 2 yards from his tractor bucket into my truck bed, which dropped my bumper to the ground and sent my hood toward the sky.
“That’ll do you for a while!” he bellowed from his tractor.
About 20 minutes later I limped into my driveway, flush with a lifetime of composted manure and a very happy wife. (I counted it as good fortune that my 29th anniversary was around the corner – and that I lived in a place where free aged manure is a perfectly acceptable anniversary gift.)
In hindsight, I probably was not helping much in stemming that aforementioned gardening craze. Perhaps now that the pandemic is well behind us, we’ll eventually return to more respectably-sized gardens. And maybe a time of cooler gardening heads.
