The Naked Gardener Read Free Page B

every year. But I hadn’t counted on the deer munching their way through everything I planted as soon as it came up high enough. They loved the tender shoots. I cursed them and chased them and yelled at them. Sometimes I got so aggravated, I thought about buying a gun. But every time I thought of shooting a deer I pictured those beautiful eyes, calmly staring at me.
    Deer weren’t the only marauding intruders. My garden was a regular animal magnet for rabbit, skunk, raccoon, possum. Maze finally fenced the entire garden with a six foot tall wood frame and heavy gauge fencing wire that kept out all but the most persistent diggers. We added a perimeter of cinder blocks dug deep into the ground as a buffer, used the stones we removed from the garden to build a perimeter wall and that did it. After that the asparagus was reliable and the woody herbs came back with gusto. I planted melons, squash, and coddled the old apple and pear orchard beyond the barn back to life.
    Maze created an archway across the path to the garden. I encouraged a wisteria to take root with results that I would regret in future years when its rampant growth required a strict hand every two weeks during the growing season. I planted more flowering vines around the outside. Once the vines had covered the fence, the garden became my private space.
    I looked out past the dewy grass and far off, beyond the garden, awaiting me was the pond. But that was for later. Now, I took up my trowel, slipped on my garden gloves and breathed in the scent of earth and green leaves warmed by sun. I planted a straw hat on my head and walked naked in my boots down the path I’d worn through the field of Queen Anne’s Lace to the garden. Their delicate flat white heads bobbed slightly as I brushed past letting their lacy heads caress my skin. I let go of the annoyance, opened the gate and entered my garden.
    I leaned down to loosen some weeds that had sprouted around a clump of lettuce and it occurred to me that I probably had no tan lines and, if Maze noticed, he would never know why.
    As I worked my way down the row of lettuce, I came upon the crown of a large rock. Rain had washed off its surface, revealing it for the first time. Was this an erratic? It didn’t seem big enough.
    I didn’t know anything about erratics until I came to Vermont. The poor old farmer, Mr. Reichelm, walked the place with me before Maze came north to see it. He hadn’t shaved in weeks and took me wandering up and down the hills and valleys. We skirted the woods and, from out of nowhere, came upon a gigantic slab of a stone sticking out of the earth like some leftover from an ancient Celtic past.
    “Oh, now that there is what they call an erratic, you know. Aye yuh,” he told me when I asked. “Erratic boulder some calls ’em. Some as big as that barn.” He pointed behind us to the old barn where no cows now chewed their cud and the stalls sat empty. “Some like that, size of a car, right there stickin’ up at the bottom of that field beyond all them springs in the way of everything like that. Come down with the ice they says. It lays in there inside the ice for about a million year or so and then up and melts and the ice goes and the rock stays put. Balanced like what you see there and everything. Too heavy to move so we just plow around him and that’s that then.”
    The stones were always popping up out of nowhere. They hide beneath the soil forever and then one day, there they are at the surface. At first I was amused by them. In Virginia, I never encountered a rock in any garden. Clay maybe. Roots. But the soil I knew was rich, red, moist and airy. You could throw a seed into it and watch it take root almost the same day. In Vermont the soil is stubborn, unyielding. I discovered that right away. It is easier to keep weeds down in a healthy soil than one that has been starved. It is easier to excise the undesirable growth if the soil can breathe. I had to breathe life into this