The Four Seasons of Snow

 This week I used my Chicken Salad philosophy to bring to end a celebrated era of accomplishments. This is a story of the thrill of victory – and the agony of defeat, on one of the most significant fields of competition in all of humanity. This is a story about…my garden.

 

Last week I told you that a sage old friend of mine gave me some words of wisdom that I have not forgotten, and

those were that “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken crap”, so don’t try.  I’m facing this situation, and I am honoring the wisdom.  I’m giving up my garden, because it is chicken crap.  And by the way, please excuse the wild formatting of this column this week.  I have no clue how to fix it.  It too is chicken crap, and so I’m not going to try.

 

It is quite clear where I inherited my gardening roots – excuse the pun.  My Grandfather Snow had a garden since I

can remember.  My father, though not a vegetable gardener, loves his yard and landscaping, and all such things. My

mother is the same way.  My Grandmother Lee has had a magnificant garden, of which I will write in a few weeks, all

of my life.  When I was dating my wife, my father-in-law had the largest non-commercial garden in the state of

Pennsylvania.  They planted and weeded and harvested and canned enough food for the entire county.  After I got

married, my brother-in-law also had a huge garden, and it soon became a subject of conversation and ultimately

competition.

 

I love to garden.  I love to till the dirt, make rows with string, plant seeds, water them, and watch them come up

in some glorious, nearly magical, and orderly fashion.  A garden is artistic to me.  I plant things so that certain

rows are backdrops for the rows in front, and I bookend the rows with taller plants. I believe that a good vegetable

garden can be the basis for and entire landscaping theme around a house, but I have not done that quite yet. It is

all very complicated and perhaps not understood by others who are just looking at the garden as a collection of

time-consuming chores. In fact, throughout my teen and college years, I viewed gardens as a waste of human

productivity.

 

Just after my wife and I got married, I had some sort of nesting thing going on, and for the first time in my life,

my gardening curiosity kicked in.  We literally reclaimed our property from thick brush, trees, and sandstone, so a

garden was something that had to be worked at pretty hard.  For a few years it was tough, and my accomplishments

were humble. 

 

Several years into our marriage we moved to Titusville, PA, when I became Controller for a group of companies that

included WindyHill Farms, a 6000+ acre expanse of farm, timber, and oil/gas reserves.  About 1200 of those acres

were pasture and crop lands for a large Simmental cattle operation.  And it was there where my passion for growing

things deepened.  Today, there are few things more beautiful than long rows of tall corn, oats, or soybeans.  I

appreciate the the work that it takes to make all that happen.  I’ve driven the tractors, rode herd on the cattle

via horseback, and harvested silage from the hundreds of acres of corn.  And while I lived there, I planted my own

garden, and each year it became more magnificent. I approached and surpassed my father-in-law’s and brother-in-law’s

cabbage head size and bean count.  I grew tomatoes the size of softballs and broccoli and flowers, and on and on and

on.  And I loved every minute of it, and I was very proud of my garden.

 

Five years later, we moved back to our little wooded property in Franklin, and knowing the dirt there like the back

of my hand, I actually worked out a deal with the folks who owned WindyHill.  I got the front-end loader and I got a

large tri-axle dump truck, and I loaded “my garden” into that dump truck, and I drove that dump truck to Franklin

and deposited that huge volume of dirt onto a sunny section of our lower yard.  Yes, gardening had become that

important to me.  And the gardening successes continued.  You see, in gardening, the dirt is very, very, very, very

important.  Its consistency, its nutrition counts, its color, its workability, and even its smell is something which

is thought about by true gardeners. 

 

When we moved to Vermont, there was no place for a garden, and I was investigating and experimenting with other

long-held curiosities that would also become passions, like coaching.  So I did not garden.  I landscaped – alot-

but did not have a vegetable garden. So when I moved to Kansas, I figured that more than anywhere else on the entire

planet, this would be the place to grow a garden. This was America’s breadbasket.  This was the heart of American

agriculture.  This….was Kansas.  I was moving to a holy place. It was a place where I imagined men sitting around

the barber shop comparing their beans and recounting and retelling, over and over, their glorious 4-H victories in

pumpkin growing, in which – like fish stories – the pumpkins got bigger every time they told it.

 

And so when we moved into our own home here, I ceremoniously went to the sunniest place in the back yard, mapped out

where the garden would be, and started to remove the sod.  This is back-breaking work, but it must be done.  And

after I removed the sod, I rented a roto-tiller.  And it was then that I got my first clue that my dreams of having

the most celebrated garden in all of Kansas history might be further away than I thought.  The soil would not till.

In fact, it wasn’t even soil.  It was clay..no, it was paste.  Their was nothing soily about it.   

 

When you work in my garden, one of two things happens, depending upon moisture content.   If the soil is on the dry

side, it turns into large baseball-size chunks that have rock-like characteristics. You can’t dig without bending

the shovel. And you certainly can’t plant, as it is like planting a seed in a bucket of basetballs.  You have to

place the large balls of dirt around the seed.  It is really quite ridiculous. If the soil is even the least bit

moist, it turns into playdough.  When you walk in it, it builds up on the bottom of your shoes, and you can’t get it

off.  You end up being four-five inches taller, and there is NO exaggeration in that.  You have to knock it off with

a hammer.  And when you dig, it builds up on your shovel. And after a few shovel fulls, the shovel becomes extremely

heavy, and it won’t penetrate the ground anymore because the clay has built up on the blade.  It is really quite

ridiculous.  Shovel, clean the blade.  Shovel, clean the blade.  Shovel, clean the blade. 

 

So, this is undoubtedly the “chicken crap” of all soil in all of the Earth.  And despite my many hundreds of hours

tilling and fertilizing and mulching and cleaning my shovel and scraping my shoes, here is what my garden looks

like.  It’s worse than anything going on in Somalia.  The Mojave desert has more crop production per square foot

than my garden.  I can’t even grow zucchini, and everyone knows that if left unabated, zuchhini plants would cover

the entire Earth. 

 

So far this year I have planted two dozen bean plants, four tomato plants, one dozen pepper plants, two zuchinnis,

six broccoli plants, four cauliflower plants, and a variety of other one-offs.  I have harvested seven beans, three

zucchinis, and about a dozen cucumbers. And the “straight-8″ cucumbers that I planted are really “curvy-4′s”.  They

are pathetic. (Notice that I have spelled zucchini three different ways above.)

 

 

 

And so, my vegetable gardening days are over.  I am resigning from that club before they rip off my stripes. I am an

embarrassment to all gardeners everywhere. And I will be bitter about it the rest of my life.  This used to be MY

territory, my success, and my accomplishment. But I guess I’ll have to pass that baton.  Note the picture to the right.

 This is my nephew Jeremy.  He is one of the nephews in the story about our Great Dane.  He is all grown up now, and

he is in “nesting” mode, just like I was and his father was at his age.  He is experimenting with his own garden

curiosity, and apparently, he is doing quite well.  Buckets of beans and cabbages the size of basketballs. Bushels of

tomatoes and sweet onions the size of grapefruits.  He has the chicken salad of dirt.  I have the chicken crap of

dirt.  And I’m not too happy about it.  If I ever acknowledge Jeremy again, it will be waving to him from the

triaxle dump truck that just pulled out of his yard, taking his garden with me back to Kansas, where I can show

“them Kansans” what real dirt looks like.  Yes, it is that important.

 

Anyway, I have found some constructive use for my chicken crap dirt.  Since I can’t make chicken salad out of it -

or a tomato – I am using it as construction material.  There is a little ledge down beside our stream, and I simply

quarry the dirt in large 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot cubes.  It comes out nearly perfectly and makes great landscaping

units.  Just like my basketball coaching experience, I guess I’ve found a way to make something positive out of

this. If I put the cubes out in the sun for a day, they turn into bricks.  I’m thinking of starting a business.

 

Keep an eye out, Jeremy. If you look out your window and see a giant swimmming-pool sized hole in your yard, you’ll

know what happened.