News from Vermont Public
Gardening in Vermont: An exercise for eternal optimists
The gardening season is coming to its end here in Vermont. Reporter Erica Hyleman drove around Central Vermont and taught with people about the inevitable disappointments that come with our short growing season. Well, my friend Gabrie, I had not planned on planting tomatoes and my friend Gabriele gave me 10 slicers, 10 cherries, and they just became like trees. And I let them go. It was like the little house of horrors, you know, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That's my friend Barbara Butler who works at the town clerk's office here in Calus. All over the state, Vermonters are putting their gardens to bed and getting ready for the long winter. So it's time to look back at all the disappointments, the failures, the crazy dashed dreams of success in an impossibly short gardening season. I love gardening over all things, and even though fall is beautiful, it is an acute reminder of the long dark that's coming. And in this maudlin spirit, I set off to talk with gardeners about their failures this year. Here's Paul Shekle. I have acres of disappointment. How many would you like to see? You want to know about fruit or bears and the bees or plum curtulio that won't leave me alone? It's just I gave up. Look, there's my garden now. You see that bucket? There's four herb plants in it now. I think I can keep those going, but I don't know. This is Anne Green's filter. So what was the debt? What were your dashed hopes this year? Squash. My squash. My squash hopes were squashed. Squashed, squashed basically. This is Skip Duhurst and Elizabeth Moniz. Slug wars. And Elizabeth tries everything, putting little copper strips around things. And pythons. Just all kinds of things. Hand picking handfuls of them. Yeah, so slug wars in the wet years. We never win. This is Gordon Grunder. The failure, we decided to grow some special heritage blue corn. It was a disaster all through the summer. Crows or blue jays or something came. Not all in one day, but over like three or four days and pulled up every single one in spite of the little paper collars and everything and planted a whole other round in the shop. They grew up till they were 10 feet tall. And then a bear came and tore down the fence and just had a party. Maybe it was two or three bears. They just ripped it up. It just from start to finish. We couldn't win this year. So the wood checks moved. These were, I think, adolescent wood checks from the way they were behaving. They were quite small. They moved from the garden, I think, because maybe their parents had kicked them out into the foundation of the house. I said that's it. I can live with them and they can't really, but in the garden. But the house, no. That's it. So, Chase, my daughter out of the house, told her to go somewhere because I didn't want her to see her mom shoot anything. And I stood up in her bedroom window from the second floor. It was really like shooting fish in a fishbowl. Aimed down. Bam. Bam. It was sad. It was sad. But they went together. This is Mary Alice Prophet. I'm not a slave anymore to my garden. And back when I was young, I'm like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I got an invitation from the White House to come to dinner. Can't make it. Gotta work in my garden this weekend." And now I'm like, weed it once or twice a year, mulch it. And if you blame, you're invited to be part of my family. And if you're ugly or hard to deal with, you need to move it on down the road. I feel as though I can either have a garden or a social life. And all these years I've chosen the garden. And now I'm in my mid-70s. And it's occurred to me I should probably have more of a social life. But I'll tell you, when I go into the garden, I get to watch insects. Lots of times they're just fascinating to me. How do these insects manage to find each other and mate within a week when here I've been single for years now? Nature is awesome. In gardening, spring is the time of beginning. And it's a lot of work to get everything in there. And you finally get it in. And then there's an almost serene part in the summer where you hope you keep up with it and you don't. And then in the fall, it's finally over. And that first frost is such a relief. And even before that, you're just like, "Let's just tear it out. We're done." Okay, so you don't feel afraid of the dark? Or of the winter? No, I don't feel afraid of it. I don't like it to be as long as it is. But I also have things that I'm looking forward to doing inside. That I have put off all these months reading, sewing, reading, sewing. Right? Yeah, it's going to get rough. I know it's going to get rough. I think it's the bittersweet of knowing that life is so short. And we're at the very tail end of this period of green feeling alive and being out. And we're about to go into a period that's beautiful. But, you know, we're moving into survival mode now, right? And so the bittersweet of these faded hues. You see all the golden rod in the fields, the gold in the trees this time of year. And it's just this like golden hour at the end of the day. And this sense of, "Okay, am I prepared to be really strong? Am I going to dig down deep and do this?" I mean, I'm a single woman, right? So there's a lot of depth, I think, for us in Vermont, especially when we are moving towards the Northeast Kingdom, a lot of these places where it's so quiet, you know? I feel like I live on the moon. How am I going to do this time? Am I going to be okay this winter? And am I going to make it every year in Vermont, this time of year? I still kind of wonder, like, did I learn my lesson last year? Did I figure it out? Good luck, everyone. Honk her down and buckle up. This is Erica Heilman with Vermont Public. [BLANK_AUDIO]