A Southern Gardener Visits New England

Two weeks ago, we traveled to San Diego, California, which is located near the border with Mexico in the desert.  I wanted to see gardens and farms there, but I could not find any.  Yes, our houseplants and tender annuals like plumbago and Bougainvillea grew wild and weedy, but I saw nothing that was edible besides a few fruit trees in backyards. 

From the plane, though, I saw industrial fields of green sprouting from the desert in eastern California and Arizona.  For miles I would see the brown desert floor, and then neat squares and circles of green appeared.  It was impossible to tell how large the fields were from 30,000 feet in the sky.  Farmers irrigate these fields frequently to insure plant growth; San Diego gets 9 inches of rain a year.  

During the trip, I remembered another October trip to New England.  I found many gardens there to explore so I could understand another ecosystem.  Unlike California, where the weather is so perfect it is boring (I enjoy a good cold, rainy day that keeps me indoors, summer thunderstorms, and other unpredictable weather–within reason of course!), New England’s farmers have to deal with difficult weather.  I will take the difficult weather to live somewhere green things grow without irrigation.  

I thought you might enjoy my description of this trip from 2012.  

Fall, if you can avoid hurricanes, is a perfect time to travel to the New England states.  My husband and I traveled there for our first trip in mid-October, fortunately for us the week before Hurricane Sandy struck, and we enjoyed the beautiful leaves, perfect fall weather, and absence of crowds of tourists. 

The tiny beach communities, which tourists packed a couple of months earlier, were pleasantly empty, but the businesses had not yet closed for the winter.  Of course, it was too cold to go to the beach, but who wants to go to a New England beach when we have beautiful ones at home?  

During my trip, I sought out farms and gardens, and I was again fascinated, as I was during my trips to the Midwest, to see corn, tomatoes, beets, and lettuce sharing space in a farmers market where all the crops were locally grown.  The farmers did confess that they grew the tomatoes in greenhouses. 

In Boston, in the spaces among skyscrapers and 400-year-old churches, farmers brought beautiful potatoes, lettuce, spinach, and apples for sale to city residents; I said, apologetically, that I was a tourist without a home or a kitchen and couldn’t buy anything, although I wished I could. Free range eggs were $7 a dozen, but organic meat cost about the same it does in SC.  Some of the farmers confessed that they were looking forward to the end of the season when the work would end for a time; farmers can work year round in our mild climate. 

In Maine, we visited Wolfe’s Neck Farm in Freeport.  As we drove up, we saw a farmer unsuccessfully trying to get a recalcitrant pig back into his quarters; he failed, and the pig later greeted us, wagged his tail like a dog, and scratched his back on picnic tables and benches.

We saw a pen of cranky chickens in the barn; they were nearly silent instead of constantly clucking. Most of them were molting, or shedding their feathers, and that process irritates chickens.  They had access to the outdoors, but only a few seemed interested in venturing outside.  Perhaps they knew that 6-8 months of snow and ice would come soon, and they were mad.

Although frost had nipped some of the tenderest plants in some places, fall-blooming flowers such as salvias, dahlias and asters shone among the brilliantly colored fall leaves. We saw flower gardens in any place I could peek among fence slats to see the garden.  I especially enjoyed the gardens, and touring the house at the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, inspiration for the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel of the same name.

Although I complain about my clay, and I loved the beautiful black soil in New England, I am glad I do not have to contend with the rocky soil of New England.  Rocks cover the coastline and beaches, and farmers in New England pick more rocks out of the soil every spring as the frost heaves them out over the winter.  I look on my relatively rock-free soil with new appreciation, even if I have to recreate the topsoil that long ago washed away while the land was farmed for cotton.