by Hal Borland
So now we plant only a few varieties, variants of Marcross and Golden Bantam, mostly, but a few rows of Lincoln too. But we plant them in series, a few rows every two weeks, from mid-May till the latter part of June. This nearly always gives us corn when we want it. Our heaviest planting is the one in June’s second week. That is for the freezer. We have found that corn is one of the most satisfying of all things we put in the freezer from the garden. We are always pleased with the strawberries we freeze, and with the small wild black-cap raspberries, and with the asparagus and the sweet corn.
Some freeze their corn on the cob. We cut it off, for economy of space. We think it tastes better, too. We have kept our frozen corn a year and a half, on occasion, and found it as good then as it was two months after freezing.
Whoever first used the expression “getting your feet on the ground” had a pretty good idea of the relative importance of things. The job of tilling the soil doesn’t automatically confer wisdom or rectitude on the tiller, but anyone who deals with the earth and the seasons, even in the way of a back-yard garden, has a better sense of time and a better sense of proportion. You can’t talk a weed out of existence or arbitrate with a bean beetle. And you can’t pass a law that will compel a tomato to mature in sixty days.
The soil isn’t temperamental, and it isn’t given to ideological argument. You plant and cultivate, and you take precautions against bugs and blight, and usually you harvest. You do your share, and the soil does its share, and the job gets done.
The primary requisite is that one not be afraid to get his hands in the soil and that he keep his feet on the ground.
Decoration day, and May at its close, and June and Summer are here at hand. May, which came in with daffodils and goes out with peonies ready to burst bud and lilacs fading, and in between almost all the flowers of Spring. That’s May for you, and you can count on it as on few months in the year. It may start cold or it may start late, but before it comes to its end May has fulfilled its promises. It is no welsher’s month.
Regardless of calendars and solstices, May is the height of Spring and when it ends Summer begins. With roses, true, and often with a few fine Spring days. Those wondrous pastel greens that were new leaves, different for every tree in the woodland, have now merged into Summer greens, so like each other that the eye can scarcely tell a maple from a birch on a still day and on a hillside across the valley. The meadow grass that was not yet ready for pasturing when April ended is now almost ready for the first mowing; and what rural chore is more completely Summer work than haying? The orchards that were leafing out a month ago have shed their bloom and set fruit.
There is a cold certainty about January, and August is ripe as sweet corn. But May is all growth and flowering, from the last of the bloodroot to the first of the daisies and buttercups. May is new as a baby radish, prime as a scallion, sweet as a swamp violet. May is full of bird song, bee hum, flowing brooks. Here it is, and almost gone; and having lived with it again, having felt its pulse and exaltation, I know that any year with May in it is a year worth living.
There is a sweetness at May’s end that no other time of the year can equal. And by sweetness I mean more than flower fragrance or honey taste; this is the greater sweetness of understanding and emotion, the glow of pleasure in being.
This is the sensory season. Trees are in leaf and it is a green world full of elusive fragrances. Walk through an orchard and you can smell as well as feel the strength of grass underfoot, new grass reaching toward the sun. Boughs naked only a little while ago, then bright and heady with blossom, now rustle with leaf and tingle with the strength of fruition. When I pause to listen I can almost hear the flow of sap and the mysterious workings of chlorophyll.
The hills are rounded with their own green growth, the soft hills of lush and friendly land. The valleys sing with running water, valleys that have not yet felt the thirst of Summer. Even the rocks are alive with vine, the creeping tendrils of life that would root in granite and suck faint sustenance from sandstone.
We walked up to the shoulder of the mountain today and looked far across the valley, to the green fields and the green of woodlands and the shadow of valleys. The air vibrated with bird song, which is the great rhythm made palpable to the ear. All the senses tingled, alive with the season as the world itself is alive. Nothing was impossible. High achievement was all around us, beating on every one of our senses for recognition.
JUNE
I NEVER REMEMBER IN APRIL how tall the grass will be in the pastures and hay fields by June. Or that daisies will frost the fence row and buttercups gild the meadow. I forget that choke-cherries will be in bloom with their sharp-tanged fragrance, and that June is other things than roses and honeysuckle.
June is really a time of relative quiet, serenity after the rush of sprouting and leafing and flowering and before the fierce heat that drives toward maturity and seed. June’s air can be as sweet as the wild strawberries that will grace its middle weeks, sweet as clover, a sweetness that might be cloying if it weren’t still so new.
Birds are still singing at their best, not only morning and evening but all through the day. The oriole, the tanager and the robin can make an early day vibrate with song, and a part of the song seemed this morning to be in the air even when I couldn’t hear a bird note. The rasping that is July and August, the scraping of cicadas and all their kin, is yet in abeyance. June doesn’t assault the ears. It flatters them and softens the call of the frog and the whippoorwill and is a joy.
These things I seem to have to learn all over again each June, and I wonder how I could have forgotten. I shall forget them again, and next March I shall think of June and roses and wonder what else it was that made last June so wonderful. Then June will come again and I shall find it a happy memory rediscovered and ready to live again.
Robert Bridges said, “Beauty is the best of all we know.” I wonder if beauty doesn’t also bring out the best of all we are. That takes me over into the verge of aesthetics, where the study of the beautiful always follows the practice. Man made and worked in the materials of beauty before he tried to explain what beauty is. Theory followed the thing itself, and at some distance. The beauty itself came from inside, instinctive; analysis was imposed upon it from outside. The created beauty was a sum of certain elements, and when the analysis took it apart, to study it piece by piece, all that remained was the pieces. The analysts never could put it back together quite the same way they found it. It lacked some mysterious quality; it was only the sum of its parts, not a whole any longer.
I am thinking of today, a June day that had its particular beauty. If I try to analyze it, it was considerably less than perfect. It had fifteen hours of sunlight. The temperature reached the high 80s, too warm for seedlings in the garden. There were occasional clouds, but no shower, although we need rain. Even the morning was hot, and this evening has a touch of sultriness. When I take it apart it wasn’t a beautiful day at all. But as long as I left it alone, a day complete, it was beautiful, a part of the best of all I know.
There are all kinds of fishermen, as well as persons who do not fish at all. Probably the most baffling of the cult are the still-fishermen, those who spend hours in a small boat or on the bank with a bamboo pole or a bait rod, apparently sitting in the sun with no pressing purpose, no worries, no energy. Nonfishermen shake their heads in bafflement. Fly fishermen smile condescendingly. But the still-fishermen go right on fishing, for perch and bluegills, bullheads, even the lowly rock bass. Pan-fishing, some call it; they fish not only to catch fish, but to eat them. And usually they fish with worms for bait.
Still-fishermen are generally quiet, patient folk with a touch of poetry in their souls. They seldom talk about it, but they find something soothing and reassuring in a river bank or a pond, at dawn, at dusk, even at midday when the fish seldom bite. They know the quiet waters, these fishermen, and the look of a mud turtle on a log, the quick beat of a kingfisher’s wings, the flash of a dragonfly. They know sunris
e and sunset. They know where a man can have an hour’s meditation between bites as well as where he can be kept so busy he has no time for thought or worry.
Fishing is not all catching fish, by any means; but I think it is well to come home with your supper. And what better supper for any fisherman than a couple of fat, 12-inch yellow perch? Some may argue the point, but few of the dissenters will be still-fishermen; most of them agree that any man’s choice is his own catch. Worm-fishing breeds individualism and tolerance in about equal proportions. I don’t recall ever hearing of a bait rod or a bamboo pole being used to pound an opinion into a dissenter’s head.
Flax, plain old-fashioned blue flax, comes to bloom in a corner of the flower garden, and if there is a more beautiful floral blue than that of a flax flower one hour after sunrise I have yet to see it. Forget-me-nots, bluets, even spiderwort, cannot match it. Blue-eyed grass, out in the pasture, comes closest; but the flax so outsizes the blue-eyed grass that comparison is difficult. Flax flowers are an inch and a half across and a hundred to the clump. Each flower lasts only a day, but new ones keep coming from buds that look, under my ten-power glass, amazingly like rosebuds with their tightly rolled petals. Blue roses!
Historically my flax plants speak of the pyramids and the flood plain of the Nile, and of far migration, and of northern Europe where men had flax-blue eyes and women wore flax-yellow hair in long braids called flahta, one of the lingual ancestors of our word flax. But this morning, seeing those blue flowers, I think of Dakota, where I once saw two hundred acres of flax in one field, and all in bloom.
“To every thing there is a season,” said the moody author of Ecclesiastes, “…a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”
No gardener or farmer could quibble with that, but I do ask why, at this particular time, the seasons so conspicuously overlap. This is a time to plant and tend the seedlings. It is also a time to pluck up the weeds which planted themselves. This is a time to mow the grass and rake it, a time to hoe and spray and till and dust and nip off dead lilac blooms and tie up the rambler roses. This is a time!
Why does grass grow two inches overnight, now, when it has all Summer ahead? Certainly there is an answer, simple and based on the solid facts of botany. But why, then, does that answer not apply to beans, say, or sweet corn? Of course I am not asking for simple answers, or logical ones. I am pleading for time, time to get all the jobs done and go fishing.
The grapes should be sprayed again. So should the pears. The raspberries are in bloom. Buttercups are everywhere. Hawkweed runs wild. Chickweed flourishes in the lettuce bed, and so does purslane. Clover spreads among the flowers. Iris are in flower.
“To everything there is a season.” This season seems to be it, the season for everything at once.
It is surprising what a good day’s work does for the garden. After my complaint of yesterday I went at the weeding, finished it soon after noon, unlimbered the power mower and had the lawn in hand by four o’clock, tied up the rambler roses, snipped off the most offending of the dead lilac heads, and hoed the tallest corn. And I still had time to catch a small mess of perch. Had someone laid out such a schedule of work for me I would have said flatly that it couldn’t be done.
It is also surprising what a good day’s work in the garden does for me. I feel fine and fit this morning, and very virtuous indeed. Virtuous enough to last for another week.
Albert has started mowing the second pasture, which he saved for hay. I can’t stay at my desk with all that activity going on. Besides, the smell of the new-cut hay, combined with the fragrance of the new-cut lawn, comes billowing in my study window. It’s like a sniff of salt air to an old sailor.
Albert wasn’t making hay. He was cutting grass and chopping it and putting it into his silo. Charley was there helping, with his hired man, and they were running the mower with one tractor, the chopper with another, and hauling the grass away with two high-sided trucks. It was virtually a production line, and they had that pasture sheared and in the silo by noon. For the man who runs in bad weather luck, as they say, the chopper and the silo are priceless. A man doesn’t have a whole field of hay down and curing when an unpredicted thunderstorm hits. He doesn’t have hay, either, but he has good ensilage.
After the noon meal they all moved up to Charley’s place, and I went along. Charley cut his alfalfa yesterday, turned it this morning before he came down to help Albert, and it was now ready to bale, thanks to a sizzling sun. I rode the baler for a round or two, then helped wrestle bales onto the trucks. Charley stopped the baler twice while I was with him, to shoo pheasants out of the hay. Otherwise they would have just crouched there and been caught up and killed by the baler. Charley doesn’t hunt pheasants, and neither does Albert, and they hate to see anything killed needlessly. I once saw Albert stop his mower to allow a mother cottontail to get out of the way, then get off and move her young ones out of the nest and over onto the mowed grass, safe.
Charley had about ten acres of alfalfa in that field, and we got it all baled and under cover this afternoon. A good thing, for it is muttering and flashing lightning tonight. We’ll have a shower before morning.
The shower came, and it was too wet to hoe the beans this morning, so I went up the mountain to the springhouse, Pat and I, and got drenched by the water on the trees and underbrush. Going up there I thought of the wild gardens I have tried to make, one place or another, moving woods plants into a corner of the cultivated garden and dosing them with lime and leaf mold and pine needles and gravel. Only one of those wild gardens was worth half the work that went into it. That was the one into which I moved a dozen wild strawberry plants. Most of the other wildlings paled and gave up in a year or two, and the strawberries took over. Each June for three years I picked a quart of wild berries, little nuggets of June sweetness.
Some people have beautiful wild gardens, and I know the work that went into them. But I now have a whole mountainside for my wild garden, and I don’t have to turn a hand to keep it going. It thrives mightily, and it constantly surprises me. Late last Summer, on my way to the springhouse, I found two purple-flowering raspberries, Rubus odoratus, in full bloom. It isn’t a rare wildling, but there are few on my mountain and I had never seen one beside the path. But there these were with their big crimson-pink flowers, big as wild roses. Today I found cranesbill, buttercups, wild strawberries, a dozen varieties of fern, jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, Dutchman’s-breeches (now in seed pod), evening primroses still in bud, pyrola, the one-flowered variety, and dwarf ginseng with its little puff of white blossom. These I saw without even searching, close beside the path. Had I gone where Pat went, into every thicket and gully and over every ledge and stump, I should have found fifty others, I am sure, Pat didn’t flush a rabbit, but among the pines near the springhouse he put up a couple of grouse, which startled him even more than they did me.
I was out in the thinnest light of dawn this morning, looking for deer. The deer have been feeding in a small opening on the mountain, where the pines stand tall beyond and a seep spring waters the grass; I have seen their tracks there often. So this morning I was up before daylight and, leaving Pat safely housed, went there to watch. I took my stand in a thicket of saplings ten feet high, ash and sumac mostly, where I had a clear view of the glade, and I waited.
The birds were there before me, of course. A blue jay announced my coming. Then two song sparrows asked my business. As quietly as possible, I made my way into the undergrowth and waited, hoping I looked something like a stump in khaki pants and an old brown coat. Apparently I looked enough like a stump to get by, for within five minutes the birds quieted down. A chickadee came and perched on a twig within three feet of my face. A fox sparrow scratched his way into the leaves within an arm’s length, pausing only once or twice to look at me curiously.
No deer came, but within twenty minutes after I took my stand a cottontail rabbit hopped across the clearing toward my stand and sat watching me. He shook his head and fla
pped his ears as though bewildered, as though thinking, “There wasn’t a stump there yesterday.” Then he approached me, aimless. He nibbled at the grass, he scratched one ear with a long hind foot, he went twice around a clump of violets. Then he wriggled his nose at me, looked me in the eye, and hopped directly to me. He sniffed at my boot toe, nosed the cuff of my khaki pants; then he turned and hopped away, only to come back, quite unable to make up his mind, and sniff again. He was the most completely aimless rabbit I ever saw.
The rabbit went away, still undecided where he was going, still diverted by a dozen things, and the fox sparrow scratched dead leaves onto one of my boots. I was of no consequence to him, none at all. The chickadee perched on my shoulder for a moment. Two field mice, their white bellies gleaming, came out of the grass and stood on their hind feet beside a tiny maple seedling, sniffing the air.
Then the sun rose and the mists began to rise from the seep spring. The bird chorus in the woods began to swell. Another blue jay flew over, squawked a time or two at me, and settled in a pine to watch.
Still no sign of the deer.
I waited till an hour after sunrise, and then the mosquitoes got after me. Why they didn’t attack sooner, I can’t imagine. But when they went to work on me I had to give up. I came home without having seen my deer, but I had a splendid hour and a half with the other folk who live there.
Thinking of something else, I closed the garage door all the way last night, and this morning there was a to-do out there. The barn swallows demanded entry. So I let them in. Two families of them are nesting there, and I usually leave the door a few inches open so they can get in and out.
