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Gardening in Vermont: An exercise for eternal optimists

A woman with gray hair wearing hat posing and smiling in front of tall green corn
Anne Greensfelder
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Courtesy
Anne Greensfelder poses with heritage corn, before it is decimated by blue jays and bears.

The gardening season is coming to its end here in Vermont. Reporter Erica Heilman drove around central Vermont and talked with people about the inevitable disappointments that come with our short growing season.

This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Barbara Butler: Well, my friend Gabrielle — I had not planned on planting tomatoes, and my friend Gabrielle gave me 10 slicers, 10 cherries, and they just became like trees. And I let them go. It was like the Little House of Horrors, you know, "Feed me!" (Laughter).

Erica Heilman: That's my friend Barbara Butler, who works at the town clerk's office here in Calais. All over the state, Vermonters are putting their gardens to bed and getting ready for the long winter. So it's time to look back at all the disappointments, the failures, the crazy, dashed dreams of success in an impossibly short gardening season.

I love gardening over all things. And even though fall is beautiful, it is an acute reminder of the long dark that's coming. And in this maudlin spirit, I set off to talk with gardeners about their failures this year.

Paul Scheckel: I have acres of disappointment. How many would you like to see? You want to know about fruit? Or bears and the bees? Or plum curculio that won't leave me alone? It's just, I gave up. Look. There's my garden now. You see that, that bucket? There's four herb plants in it. I think I can keep those going, but I don't know.

Decimated parsley plant
Anne Greensfelder
/
Courtesy
Parsley, dispatched by porcupines.

Erica Heilman: So what were your dashed hopes this year?

Anne Greensfelder: Squash. My squash. My squash hopes were squashed. Squashed squash, basically.

Skip Dewhirst: Slug wars. Lizabeth tries everything, putting little copper strips around things—

Lizabeth Moniz: Beer and pie tins—

Skip Dewhirst: All kinds of things.

Lizabeth Moniz: —and hand picking handfuls of them.

Skip Dewhirst: Yeah, so slug wars in the wet years. We never win.

Gordon Grunder: The failure. We decided to grow some special heritage blue corn. It was a disaster. All through the summer, crows or blue jays or something came, not all in one day, but over like three or four days, and pulled up every single one, in spite of the little paper collars and everything. We planted a whole other round in the shop. They grew up till they were 10 feet tall, and then a bear came and tore down the fence and just had a party. Maybe it was two or three bears. They just ripped it up. It just — from start to finish. We couldn't win this year.

Anne Greensfelder: So, the woodchucks moved — these were, I think, adolescent woodchucks from the way they were behaving, they were quite small. They moved from the garden — I think, because maybe their parents had kicked them out —into the foundation of the house. I said, "That's it. I can live with them (I can't, really) in the garden, but the house, no, that's it." So I chased my daughter out of the house. Told her to go somewhere, because I didn't want her to see her mom shoot anything, and I stood up in her bedroom window from the second floor. It was really like shooting fish in a fish bowl. Aimed down, BAM, BAM. It was sad. It was sad. But they went together.

Closeup of hole in grass
Anne Greensfelder
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Courtesy
One of hundreds of inexplicable holes in a front yard.

Mary Alice Proffitt: I’m not a slave anymore to my garden. And back when I was young, I'm like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I got an invitation from the White House to come to a dinner? Can't make it. Gotta work in my garden this weekend." And now I'm like, weed it once or twice a year, mulch it. And if you bloom, you're invited to be part of my family, and if you're ugly or hard to deal with, you need to move it on down the road.

Anne Greensfelder: I feel as though I can either have a garden or a social life. And all these years, I've chosen the garden, and now I'm in my mid-70s, and it's occurred to me, I should probably have more of a social life. But I'll tell you, when I go into the garden, I get to watch insects — lots of times, they're just fascinating to me. How do these insects manage to find each other and mate within a week when here I've been single for years now? Nature is awesome.

Gordon Grunder: In gardening, spring is the time of beginning, and it's a lot of work to get everything in there and finally get it in and then there's an almost serene part in the summer where you know, you hope you keep up with it, and you don't. And then in the fall, it's finally over, and that first frost is such a relief. And even before that, you're just like, "Let's just tear it out. We're done!"

Closeup picture of white red and purple potatoes
Anne Greensfelder
/
Courtesy
Potatoes that actually look pretty good.

Erica Heilman: OK so you don't worry — you don't feel afraid of the, of the dark or of the winter?

Anne Greensfelder: No, I don't feel afraid of it. I don't like it to be as long as it is, but I also have things that I'm looking forward to doing inside that I have put off all these months. Reading, sewing. Reading, sewing. (Laughter) Reading, sewing. Yeah, it's gonna get rough. I know it's gonna get rough.

Man kneeling down smiling next to large pumpkin, with broken dead corn behind him
Anne Greensfelder
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Courtesy
Gordon Grunder with a successful pumpkin in front of bear-ravaged corn.

Mary Alice Proffitt: I think it's the bittersweet of knowing that life is so short, and we're at the very tail end of this period of green, feeling alive and being out. And we're about to go into a period that's beautiful, but, you know, we're moving into survival mode now, right? And so the bittersweet of these faded hues — you see all the gold of the golden rod in the fields, the gold in the trees this time of year, and it's just this, like, golden hour at the end of the day, and the sense of, "OK, am I prepared to be really strong? Am I gonna dig down deep and do this?"

I mean, I'm a single woman, right? There's a lot of, like, depth, I think, for us in Vermont, especially when we are in these, like — moving towards the Northeast Kingdom, a lot of these places where it's so quiet, you know. I feel like I live on the moon. How am I going to do this time? Am I going to be OK this winter? And am I going to make it? Every year in Vermont this time of year, I still kind of wonder like, did I learn my lesson last year? Did I figure it out?

Erica Heilman: Good luck, everyone. Hunker down and buckle up.

Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message.

Erica Heilman produces a podcast called Rumble Strip. Her shows have aired on NPR’s Day to Day, Hearing Voices, SOUNDPRINT, KCRW’s UnFictional, BBC Podcast Radio Hour, CBC Podcast Playlist and on public radio affiliates across the country. Rumble Strip airs monthly on Vermont Public. She lives in East Calais, Vermont.
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