“What’ya doing, Dad?” he called as he approached. “Just a little gardening, Zach.” Whap! I swung the pickax into a clod of clay. “That’s not gardening, Dad.,” he said without missing a beat as he passed. “That’s mining.”
by William Alexander
Every gardener has experienced it, especially if s/he is rooting around (pun intended) in Aroostook soil. It is not even soil sometimes … topsoil accumulated on our more tropical continent before the North American plate drifted quite so far north and before north traveled quite so far south multiple times, the last time about 11,000 years ago. During the Pleistocene epoch, glaciers three miles thick scoured the tops of mountains, gouged out river valleys, and carried most of that organic matter directly out to sea.
Somewhere well south of the Maine coast is an octopus’ garden enjoying our soil! The story of the last ice age, complete with eskers, talus, and scree, is told by the spade that bounces back like a pogo stick when you jump on it with both feet. It is found in pail after pail after pail, year after year after year, of stones picked behind the tiller (Are they breeding down there?). It is etched across a patch of sparse, ledgey, pale yellow, barely there lawn that resists everything you have tried to green up the area to match the rest of the swathe. What’s up with that piece of ground anyway?
Many times gardening adventures start with a picture — in a magazine, in a gardening book, in a seed catalog, in memories from childhood. You try to recreate that picture on your property. You make multiple trips to local gardening suppliers and write multiple checks for mail order. You buy seed. You buy lime. You buy fertilizer. You buy compost. You buy loam. You buy hoses and sprinklers and rain gauges and edging. You buy shovels, rakes, trowels, hoes and other implements of destruction. You buy Doan’s little pills and a trip to the chiropractor. What you can’t buy, necessarily, is success in planting what you want where you want it. Sometimes the last ice age got there first. Sometimes what Aroostook County soil grows best is rocks.
There are tricks — raised beds, soil tests and amendments, green manures, variety selection. When it stops being fun or challenging or whatever makes you continue to take on gardening in your “spare time,” there are local growers at farmers markets who are happy to sell you fresh fruits and vegetables that taste almost as good as what you grow yourself (or would if you could).
They try to plant just what you want and time it to mature just when you want it. They try to price it so that it feels fair for both of you. They do their darnedest to be good stewards of the land. They are happy to share their tricks, their successes and failures, the names of varieties that thrive, their back stories.
Now if they could only figure out how to market rocks …
Editor’s note: This weekly column is written by members of the Presque Isle Farmers’ Market. For more information or to join, contact their secretary/treasurer Steve Miller of Westmanland at 896-5860 or via e-mail at beetree@xpressamerica.net.
