by Dylan Tomine
Back at the house, job one is mud and sand removal. The kids line up for the outdoor hillbilly shower – a hot-water hose bib is surely one of humankind’s greatest inventions – then streak inside for dry clothes. Grown-ups kick off boots and pile them with gritty, oyster juice-soaked gloves for a mass hosing down later on. Right now, we have to get busy in the kitchen.
While Stacy builds a fire and Glen starts cracking beers for the crowd, I throw a big pot of Lundberg wild rice in chicken stock on the stove. Then I give the oysters a quick rinse and put them in a colander to drain. A sprinkle of garlic salt and cracked pepper, and we’re ready to start production. First, a mix of flour and cornmeal goes into one big bowl. Next comes a bowl of eggs whisked with milk. And finally, a plate mounded with panko, the light, flaky Japanese breadcrumbs. Then it’s just a matter of taking each oyster down the line in order, ending with perfectly breaded bivalves and dough-covered fingers the size of hammer handles. Meanwhile, kids are racing up and down the hallway, with Maren Sweeney playing director and big sister to the whole careening brood. Candace has the big crab pot loaded with clams, butter, garlic, white wine, and parsley. A couple of big crusty loaves from the bakery up in Port Townsend are warming in the oven. Stacy’s tossing winter greens with dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, and vinaigrette. Sweeney, Glen, and Mia keep the oyster production rolling forward. Gary has a pan of mac and cheese going as an alternative for kids who might not be so enthusiastic about oysters.
If we’re going to get everyone fed, I’ll need to use the dreaded two-pan frying approach tonight. When the oil sizzles, I take a deep breath and start laying breaded oysters into the first pan. By the time I’ve filled the second pan, the first oysters are browning and ready to be turned. I have to move fast. Using long bamboo chopsticks, I get into a rhythm of lifting, turning, pulling finished oysters out and adding new ones. As each oyster reaches golden perfection, I set it on a rack and drop another one in. I sprinkle the first full rack of hot oysters with a pinch of kosher salt and slide it into the warm oven next to the bread. Reaching into the oven takes me out of my rhythm, though, and on more than one occasion, I return to my turning duty a little late. The resulting darker-than-golden oysters are advertised as “extra crispy.” I’m sure a professional chef would find my task simple; for me, the frantic two-pan dance is more than a little stressful. But man, does it smell good in here.
Stacy yells “Soup’s on!” and the feast begins. The crisp oysters burst with the briny flavor of the sea. Stacy has made three dipping sauces: a sharp horseradish cocktail; creamy sweet-pickle tartar; and my favorite, a mixture of soy sauce, lemon juice, and wasabi. We tear bread into chunks to absorb buttery clam broth and some use empty shells to spoon the broth directly into their mouths. A rich, citrusy amber ale from 7 Seas Brewery down in Gig Harbor quenches thirst and complements the food. We are getting down to some serious eating now.
Much to the surprise of several parents, calls of “more oysters please” ring out from the kids’ table, even from the picky eaters. Nothing like a day of mud, water, and weather to build kids’ appetites, especially for food they helped gather themselves. The crowd is silent, save for the sounds of eating, for the first time all day.
And then, suddenly, it’s late. Our friends rush to pack up gear and load sleepy, pajama-clad kids into cars for a mad dash to catch the ferry. Where did the day go? And for that matter, what responsible parent lets small kids stay up until eleven at night? “Bedtime!” I shout to the kids while Stacy and I clear dishes and put away food. There are three oysters left on the rack, and I’m already planning the sandwich I will make with them. Skyla comes into the kitchen with her nightgown on and sleepy eyes. “I’m still hungry,” she says, spotting the oysters. “Hey, I’m saving those for tomorrow,” I say. “Please?” Like the old man at the oyster spot, I can’t refuse her. She grabs all three, then stands at the counter eating them from her hands.
I offer what’s left of the dipping sauces and she shakes her head, crunching through another bite. “No, Daddy,” she says. “If you put sauce on the oysters, you can’t really taste them.” A purist. “Tell Chouinard I ate nine oysters tonight, okay?” she says, popping the last of them into her mouth. “Who?” I ask. “You know, your friend in Canada who always eats the crab guts and shrimp heads. He’ll be real proud of me.”
Later, when the kids are asleep, I step outside to clean up our gear. There’s a brisk chill in the air. I can see my breath under the porch light, and water from the hose stings my hands with icy needles. Winter isn’t over yet. But tomorrow we’ll have three more minutes of daylight, and that’s enough.
THE FOOD STARTS HERE
About the time yellow skunk cabbages open their fragrant blooms in the creek bottoms, Stacy starts getting ready for Up-potting-palooza. This will be an all-day festival of gardening, with friends, their children, yards of dirt, compost, stacks of four-inch pots, and hundreds of delicate seedlings that have been sprouting in our laundry room. It has always been Stacy’s intent that her gardening efforts should produce not only food, but a sense of community. And as with most anything she puts her mind to, she’s achieved both goals.
We get up early to prep for the big day. While Stacy and Weston head outside to pick leeks for soup and organize pots, Skyla and I make muffins for the crew. For expediency, we’ll use my dad’s “quick muffin” recipe: commercial pancake mix, corn meal (for crunchy crust), Scottish oatmeal (for chewy interior), Grape Nuts (because we have some), a pinch of salt, a little sugar, and some extra baking powder. Then we add water and Skyla starts mixing the batter while I dig through the freezer for the last of our summer blueberries and blackberries. To avoid purple-stained muffins, I give the berries a quick cold-water rinse and fold them into the batter while they’re still frozen. We fill the pans, put them in the oven, and crank the heat up to activate the baking powder. Within minutes, the aroma of baking fills the house.
Outside, we help Stacy drag the picnic table into place and dump a wheelbarrow load of soil and compost on a tarp next to it. After that, I’m pretty much done. I’ll help with kid control or carry something heavy from time to time, but mostly I’m going to spend the day cutting up the maple that fell in a neighbor’s yard, tending berry plants, and trying to stay out of the way.
Just as I’m pulling muffins from the oven, the gardeners start to arrive. They come bearing boxes of seeds to swap, gardening tools, homemade jam, and all the news from preschool and kindergarten. Kids race into the house for muffins, then tear back outside, leaving the door swinging open.
Today’s festivities might mark the physical start of our gardening season, but the process actually began months ago. Way back in the short, dark days of winter, when growing vegetables felt as unlikely as winning the lottery, we were already waiting for the signal that kicks off our gardening every year. On a raw, blustery January afternoon, it arrived by U.S. mail: the Territorial Seed Company catalog.
If there’s a better entertainment value for 25 cents anywhere in the Western world, I’m not aware of it. More than a mere catalog, it’s 167 pages of helpful information, mouthwatering photos, pithy writing, and, yes…seeds. Everything from Flashy Trout’s Back lettuce to Super Freak pumpkins, and enough tomato varieties – 77 at last count – to conjure dreams of summer glory from the depths of winter.
These pages launched the trajectory of Stacy’s year. There followed a run of late nights spent sitting by the woodstove, brow furrowed, pen cap in mouth, as she thumbed and rethumbed the pages. Then the operation moved to the kitchen table, where notes from previous years, scribbled on notebook pages and the backs of old seed envelopes, were arranged in a cluttered halo around The Catalog. Planting maps were plotted, crumpled, redrawn. Sunlight angles and hours calculated. Page corners folded, new species and old favorites circled for consideration.
Catalog time is also the final opportunity for me to weigh in with observations from the previous year. I say observations because, as I mentione
d earlier, I am for the most part a mere observer of our family’s vegetable production. But as a consumer of the results, I feel entitled to offer some input.
“I think we had too many tomatoes last year,” I said, recalling the slowly ripening green orbs that covered windowsills, bookcases and every other horizontal surface in our home from the first frost until well after Thanksgiving.
“So you’re not going to eat any more of the spaghetti sauce we put up?”
“Oh…right. I think we need more broccoli…”
“We still have broccoli in the freezer, and nobody’s eating it anymore.”
“Okay, well, then…carry on.”
It wasn’t just Stacy, either. The kids were in on it too, like some big secret that Dad just couldn’t comprehend. One February night, I asked Skyla what the best part of her day had been. “Planting seeds,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand, Dad.”
Though my parents are both skilled gardeners – part of the original organic hippie wave of the 1970s – I did not inherit even the palest of green thumbs. And I seem to demonstrate my ignorance at every opportunity. Last winter, as she crunched through a Honeycrisp apple from the supermarket, Skyla asked if we could grow a tree from its seeds. “Nah, those are sterile hybrids…they won’t hatch,” I said. “And it’s not the right season for planting anyway.” Today, half a dozen Honeycrisp apple saplings grow in pots on the back deck where she planted them.
The seeds, then, of both this morning’s gathering and my minimal participation were sown long ago. But I don’t mind feeling a little left out. There’s plenty of other work to do.
While Stacy and the kids take care of our vegetables, I’m responsible for the fruit. And the warming days mean I can no longer ignore my duties. Last summer, our strawberry beds were so crowded that the plants hardly produced any berries. So I decide to gamble and go for a radical, late thinning, pulling out nearly three quarters of the crowns and cutting off all the remaining foliage. When I’m done, I have a pretty good idea of what the moon’s surface looks like up close. They’re either going to be a whole lot better or a whole lot worse this year, but they won’t be the same.
For the blueberries, I simply turn the surface dirt with a four-tined cultivator, sprinkle in some organic rhododendron food, then cover it with a couple inches of compost and water it all in. Winter took a heavy toll on the plants, and I’m doubtful about their prospects. Lots of branch tips that should be budding out are withered and gray. And there’s a distinct lack of the larger, scaly buds that indicate flowers. I prune away what I can and leave some of the withered tips in place, hoping for a miraculous comeback. Is there a soil issue? Did I let them fruit too heavily last summer? Are they not getting enough sunlight?
As a backup, we bought two new blueberries – a Chandler and a Bluecrop – for the kids to grow in pots on the deck. Weston named one Cream of the Crop, and Skyla named the other Fuchsia. When there’s a lull in the up-potting, the kids come over to where I’m working and we fill two big pots with compost, potting soil, and a little rhody food. Then we pull Cream of the Crop and Fuchsia from their black plastic nursery pots and examine the mass of tightly twisted roots, trying to fluff them out a little without tearing any away. Weston helps me tip the big watering can, and Skyla lies on her stomach to tell us when water runs out of the bottom. “These are your plants,” I say. “If you take good care of them, and we’re lucky, we might get a few berries this summer.” Stacy calls this my standard Mr. Pessimism mode or “raining on the parade.” I call it expectation management. “Dad,” Weston says, “we’re gonna have a lot of berries.”
Our raspberries look good. The Tulameens, which bear fruit once a year on two-year-old canes, seem to have wintered well, and small, bright green leaves are already unfurling along their bare stalks. The Summits will fruit on lower sections of canes that produced berries on the tips last year, so I cut the top couple of feet off to encourage lateral growth. At ground level, new shoots are poking up through the composted steer manure I spread in November. These shoots will be the Summits’ main bearers late this summer. I’m hoping for a big berry year full of fresh ice cream, shortcakes, pancakes, and freezer bags full for next winter. But then I remember that so far, no matter how much fruit we produce, the kids eat most of it before it ever gets to the kitchen.
A flicker of movement catches my attention. A tiny olive-gray bird, delicate as a hummingbird, hops through the just-pruned canes, stopping to hang upside down and peer beneath new leaves. It flutters from stalk to stalk with a distinctive, dipping flight pattern, as if tracing the shape of waves. A ruby-crowned kinglet. My favorite bird. Some years ago, when I was steelhead fishing up on the Skykomish River, a kinglet came flaring out of the brush and landed on the tip of my fly rod. I froze, letting my line swing through the current and trail below unattended. The bird looked at me carefully, and when I resumed casting, instead of flying away in alarm, it perched on a streamside willow barely an arm’s length away. It kept pace with me for over an hour, watching with bright, inquisitive eyes, as I fished my way down through the long run. Since that day, I’ve always thought of kinglets as friendlier and more cheerful than other wild birds. But maybe that’s just cheap anthropomorphizing. In any event, I stop working and watch this one, feeling buoyed by its presence.
Back at the potting table, dirt’s flying and conversation is in full swing. I can hear our friend Jenn in the kitchen, running an immersion blender through a steaming pot of potato-leek soup. There’s warm Dutch-oven bread from our neighbor Rebecca waiting on the table. With most of the crew hard at work and the kids still running through the yard, I slip inside to eat in peace.
I’m just about to start in on the soup when Stacy says they need more potting soil – can I go with Candace to the feed and seed store? And while I’m there, a few more bags of organic fish compost would be good. And popsicle sticks to mark the plants. And somebody needs a pair of cotton gloves… As the designated errand boy, I put the ladle down and reach for my keys. Lunch will have to wait.
By the time we get back from the store and sit down, the kids are done eating and back to their game, a complicated form of hide-and-seek involving princesses and baby kitties. It’s calm and quiet in the kitchen. Still, I feel like an intruder, completely out of the loop of conversations started at the potting table. The soup holds my full attention anyway: silky Rose Gold potatoes pureed with chicken stock and grilled leeks. I have three full bowls, soaking up the last of it with a chunk of dense, chewy sourdough. Then I’m off to the neighbor’s with my saw, the gardeners are back at the potting table, and the princesses and baby kitties continue running circles around the house.
At the end of the day, when the women with dirt under their fingernails and their exhausted children leave, there will be 157 tomato plants of seven different varieties planted in four-inch pots. About half will be distributed among friends and neighbors, leaving the rest to become this summer’s fresh salsa, caprese salad, sandwich toppings, spaghetti sauce, and snacks. Twenty-eight broccoli starts of three varieties will accompany meals for months. Forty-four pea plants. Thirty-two bush beans. Zucchini. Kabocha squash. Cucumbers. Acorn squash. All of which I look forward to eating. Assuming, of course, that we get enough sunshine, that slugs stay under control, that the soil chemistry is right, that we thin plants enough but not too much, that the deer don’t devour everything.
I tend to subscribe to my buddy Sweeney’s outlook – if you expect the worst, anything short of catastrophe comes as a pleasant surprise. When dealing with the variables of nature, this just seems like the safe point of view. I may be hopeful to the point of stupidity – frequently fishing, for example, long after there’s any realistic chance of success – but I never expect anything. I am, however, the lone pessimist in the family.
Stacy, Skyla, and Weston all expect the best possible outcome for every situation. Surprisingly, they are seldom disappointed. Self-fulfilling prophecy? I don’t know. If you ask me, an optimist
is just someone with a lousy memory. Stacy has an uncanny ability to block from her mind almost any unpleasant experience. She doesn’t remember the year blight took out our entire tomato crop days before harvest, so of course she expects every crop to be bountiful. Perhaps even more telling, minutes after giving birth to Skyla, following a harrowing 38 hours of labor, Stacy declared, “That wasn’t so bad. I’m ready to have another one.” To be honest, I’m thankful to be surrounded by sunny personalities. But I’m not ready to convert.
Of course, up-potting day is just the beginning of the beginning. These tender seedlings will need another month or more of careful indoor tending before they can be planted outside. Stacy will also sow carrot, radish, lettuce, chard, spinach, and more broccoli seeds directly into the ground outside in the coming months. She’ll stagger her plantings to keep a steady supply of ripening vegetables available and avoid the sudden overabundance of humongous zucchini or 40 pounds of broccoli going to flower. If everything works as planned, we’ll eat fresh garden vegetables for four or five months and then enjoy the canned, pickled, and frozen versions until next spring.
Last year, blessed with a long, warm summer, we didn’t purchase any produce from May through October. Though I haven’t performed a formal cost/benefit analysis, there’s no doubt this had a major impact on our grocery bills. And eating from the garden all summer made us feel rich in ways that have nothing to do with money.
In the evening, with a soft rain falling and the scent of blossoms in the air, I help Stacy bring trays of seedlings into the house. They look healthy and strong, already acclimating to their new, bigger pots. Off to the side, there’s a tray of mixed plants, completely unlike Stacy’s uniform, organized rows. On the popsicle sticks standing in each pot, written in Skyla’s distinctive six-year-old hand, I read: “brokli,” “tmato” and “carits.”
