This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [22]
With some luck, Papa located a large straw-bedded stable in a neighboring town with owners tickled to give their manure to anyone who wanted to haul it away. Papa hitched the wagon to Skipper’s old army jeep, often referred to as “Jeep” and later “Good Ole Jeepie” for its fortitude, and made trips back and forth with a pitchfork until there was a steaming brown mountain next to the garden. This he tilled into the soil with rock phosphate and limestone to help increase the pH to more desirable levels. And though he didn’t have to, come summer Papa would compensate the stable owners by bringing them the delicious resulting vegetables.
Every morning Papa was back at it again, though even the lengthening days of spring proved too short. In the last of the light before going in for dinner, he spread the new garden plots with white rock powder over the compost and manure, so that when he returned in darkness it would catch the moonlight to guide the rototiller down the rows. The noise of the old red Troy-Bilt from Franconia growled into the silence of the dark woods and drifted out as far as the ocean. Though Papa wished he could turn the earth in silence with horse and plow like the original homesteaders, he knew the concession to the modern rototiller was necessary to attain his goals for the garden. But then, inevitably, the tiller conked out, and he was up all night in the woodshed with a kerosene lantern, trying to fix it.
“Son of a gun,” he swore, lying on the dirt floor next to the tiller, hands greasy and oil smudges on his cheek. But as he worked to replace the broken belt, he felt a sense of peace settle in his chest. He had all the time in the world. No one to answer to—except himself and his family. Nowhere he’d rather be than here.
“How many sons of a gun are lucky enough to have such problems?” he said aloud into the night, and then repeated the words under his breath like a mantra.
When it was time for my seedling siblings to make their way into the world, the flats were cut into cakelike squares of potting soil containing white cobwebby roots topped by a V of leaves. Papa gently lifted the squares and placed them into holes in the newly cultivated soil along straight rows marked by string. Once I was old enough, he let me tuck the earth in around them.
“There’s nothing more hopeful than those rows of new plants,” Papa said, looking back at the lines of green against brown. For the first couple weeks after planting, Papa listened anxiously to the weather for any signs of frost. Temperatures below freezing could quickly put an end to my new family. At the slightest risk, he and Mama dragged out sheets and blankets, newspapers and paper bags, anything they could lay hands on to protect the tender plants from freezing.
Soon enough the weather warmed and the garden exploded with growth. Come midsummer, when Papa climbed the tall blue spruce near the well with Mama’s camera to capture the results, the plots marched across the acre in front of the house with the formation of a medieval army and its many varied regiments. As the Nearings recommended in Living the Good Life, the beds ran east-west in straight rows, with the low crops in one area, and permanent plants such as asparagus, rhubarb, berries, and herbs in another. Though Papa would soon surpass the Nearings with his passion and innovation in the garden, he used their practices as his initial guide. As in the Nearings’ garden, our rows of pea vines were supported with tree branches, the beans with twelve-foot poles; cedar stakes marked the straight rows, the variety of plant noted on them in pencil.
“One of the most important secrets I learned from the Nearings was succession planting,” Papa claimed. Rather than the garden beginning in spring, producing in summer, and ending in fall, the Nearings succeeded in extending the short Maine growing season by continually planting new crops. When the peas were done for the season