(HOST) Commentator Edith Hunter has been thinking about the garden she inherited and is now turning over to a new generation.
(HUNTER) In 1975 Aunt Mary Peirce turned her wonderful garden over to me. She was 83 years old and diagnosed with cancer. The almost 100 foot by 100 foot garden was complete with a strawberry bed, an asparagus bed, and fine rich soil. Every year a neighbor brought a couple of loads of manure and spread it on the garden.
Mary and her older sister Margaret had arrived in Weathersfield in 1942 to reclaim their ancestral home. Their great-grandfather, the Rev James Converse, had lived and farmed here, while he served as pastor of the Center Church from 1802-1839.
Margaret and Mary came from a privileged background. and were used to having hired help. Margaret, would be in charge of things inside the house with a woman to help her, and Mary had a hired man to help with the garden and the grounds.
But the hired help had died by 1975 when I took over the garden, and I ran the show for the next 30 years. By 2006 I began turning more of the garden chores over to son Charles. Of our 4 children, 2 are gardeners – daughter Elizabeth who gardens intensively in North Carolina, and son Charles who had a community garden in Bellows Falls.
Charlie offered to give up the community garden and take over mine.
I pretty much gardened as Aunt Mary did, and maybe as the Rev. James did. I laid everything out in long straight rows. This enabled son Graham, who mans the rototiller to till between the rows the length of the garden.
Charles loves raised beds, He plants maybe 20 feet by three feet in a raised bed with lettuce, arugula, mesclun. Further on he plants another bed with carrots and beets, and another with swiss chard and kale. All the time he is planting he is enriching the soil with compost. No rototilling for him.
All summer, Charlie came every other day to work a few hours in the garden. Charlie is by profession an artist and everything he does reflects this gift. All his little raised beds are things of beauty. When he lays out the onions and the potatoes to dry, they somehow betray the hand of the artist. Even when he brings in a basket of beans and carrots, for me to process, they show the artist’s touch.
Now only hardy leeks wait for late harvesting. The rest of the garden has been put to bed.