ROCKS & WEEDS
Backwoods Blog;
in the woods and on the road…
One of my earliest memories of gardening is our family garden in the late 1960s. It was an average size garden located just behind our barn and my Dad’s Super M Farmall tractor was our only mechanized means of assistance. He would plow up the garden spot and then it was up to the hand laborers to do the rest. My grandparents who lived less than a half mile away on top of the hill shared the garden with us and my grandmother served as the de facto garden supervisor. My mother and grandfather also helped in the garden and my twin sister and I rounded out the rest of the crew. When my grandmother pulled into our driveway early in the morning in her 1964 two-door powder blue Ford Galaxie we knew our work shift was about to begin. May I say that my grandmother ran an ordered and tidy garden operation even by 1960s standards. To my sister and I, nine or ten at the time, we felt all the attention to rocks and weeds was a bit excessive, but who were we to say otherwise? Each weed was pulled, hoed or removed and placed in a pile in the middle of a row. When the pile was large enough it was loaded into a wheelbarrow and taken to the edge of the small swamp about 50 feet away and unceremoniously dumped. Rocks held the same fate; raked, piled, loaded and dutifully dumped alongside the swamp in like fashion. My grandmother loved and cherished her early radishes and turned out bumper crop yields of squash, tomatoes and cucumbers, but common weeds and rocks had no place in my grandmother’s garden plan. And besides, it gave child laborers like my sister and I something productive to do with our lazy summer days.
Fifty years later, gardening views have changed regarding weeds and rocks. Now, gardeners value organic material like weeds as a valuable source of nutrients for compost. Nothing is discarded. If it’s green, it goes in the compost bin making its small contribution to the larger garden effort. And rocks are now something people pay good money for. And if there’s one thing New England has – it’s plenty of rocks. My Dad used to say “I don’t want to pay good money for dirt or rocks! Makes no sense livin’ around here…” I remember when I was building the cabin, sauna and privy I scoured my father’s entire 50 acre farm in search of rock piles and stone for foundations and fire pits. I eventually exhausted the resource and began eyeballing neighboring farms. My Dad was amused by the whole ordeal. Here, he had worked for years by the sweat of his brow to eradicate such useless inconvenience from his land and here I was going out of my way to retrieve it. He went on to say that if I wanted to haul stone from other farms in Monticello, I should at least ask for permission to do so (strange request though it might be). My Dad, to his credit, helped me haul rock and stood by as I asked the landowners for permission to haul away some of their rocks. They were just as bemused and puzzled as my Dad and encouraged me to haul away all that I could. Everything has its time and its place, even rocks and weeds.
In the woods,
Dave
July 13, 2022
