Midnight Mutterings | Gardens and another island

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

I didn’t grow up with gardens, though I did get lost in a cornfield when I was three or four years old. I’ve never had a good sense of direction, but that was the first time I knew I was lost, the first time I can remember being afraid. Memory is like that: spotty, unreliable, feelings stronger than facts. The cornfield must have been near our house near the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, but I don’t remember it being planted, the baby stalks growing twice as tall as I was. I don’t remember entering the corn- field. I only remember being surrounded by tall cornstalks, with ripe ears of corn erect, corn silk hanging from the ends of the ears. It was so hot and I was so scared. I didn’t know that if I just followed a row, I would eventually get to an edge of the field, so I just kept turning, always surrounded by corn.

I don’t remember where Winston Churchill was. Why he didn’t come into the cornfield and lead me out. Winston Churchill was an English Setter, probably why he had that name. (Later when I heard about the original Churchill, I thought he was named after our dog.)

Our Winston reliably found and delivered me home regularly. But not that day. In fact I don’t remember how I got out of the cornfield. I just remember the heat, the sweat, the thirst. There were probably gardens all around. Maybe my father had a garden. Surely neighbors did. I don’t remember them. Then when I was five, my father and I joined the rest of the family: my mother and siblings, and we all moved to the seventy acres of forest where I was frequently lost, but not afraid, knowing the two new dogs, Pointers this time, with regular dog names, would find and lead me home. And it was cool in the woods.

I don’t think we had a garden, though my father planted a hundred grapevines. They grew on seven foot poles connected by a grid of wires at the top. My father’s back meant he preferred to harvest things above his head. It also meant I couldn’t reach the grapes and had to put our tiny Shetland pony into unwilling service in order to get the grapes. The pony’s name was Virginia Dare, after the first European child born 1583 in North America in the First Colony, brought from England by Sir Walter Raleigh under the direction of Queen Elizabeth I. Other than her name, our pony didn’t have much in common with her namesake, unless the first Virginia Dare was very, very stubborn. The Colony disappeared. No traces were ever found except a the word ‘CROATOAN’ carved on a tree. Experts in many fields are still trying to be solve the mystery centuries later. You can read all about it HERE. 

I only know about this stuff because my maternal grandparents lived on Roanoke Island when I was growing up, their having brought my mother, age 12, and her younger sister from England where they were born. Occasionally, my cousin Harry (who grew up in Greensboro, NC) and I speak by phone, recalling our childhood times hiding from our grandmother in our grandfather’s boathouse. I don’t think our grandmother liked any of us, but Harry and I were the least fleet of foot. as the youngest of her six grandchildren and formed a bond that has lasted over 80 years. It’s been more than a half century since we last saw each other.

Oh that’s right. I was supposed to be muttering about gardens before I got lost in a cornfield and then on Roanoke Island three thousand miles and four and a half centuries away from Orcas Island.

So here’s the short version: My gardens here on Orcas have been sorely neglected after a family illness took me away for more than a decade eighteen years ago. These last years my vows to reclaim the gardens have been short lived. This spring a kindly neighbor took pity on one of the beds in my little garden by the water and cleared it to bare soil. I had planted a few vegetable starts (broccoli, lettuce, garlic, parsley) at one end of the bed among the weeds.

Then came the rains, and the bare soil my neighbor had cleared was covered with tiny two heart-shaped leaved plants. I didn’t know what they would be, these hundreds of brave green babies. Well, they turn out to be a carpet of kale. Now three and four inches tall, they are from plants gone to seed years ago. I’ve tried to thin them a bit, The plants are so small, working with them is max fiddly, so I mostly steam them just a bit. At this point, they are so sweet, I can only hope they will be half as good when they are mature. I did manage to send a few baby plants to Waldron, and would love to give lots more away before they are too big to transplant successfully. Otherwise, thinning them to three or four plants per square foot is still too crowded, and even I, in my enthusiasm, can’t manage to eat but a fraction of the thinings. The soil is lovely. In the thirty years I have had the property, there have been no chemicals added, and probably long before that. The garden is usually flooded several times a winter when the wind and high tide cooperate in overwhelming the berm where the ‘lawn’ meets the beach. But the salt water doesn’t seem to do anything but encourage the plants. Otherwise, there was just some sheet composting of the beds in the early years before the weeds took over.

So that’s my volunteer kale story, after veering three thousand miles and four centuries to the east.

And postscript:
 Apparently I’m not the only one with a poor sense of direction. Here’s an interesting factoid from Wikipedia about the explorations of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (Roanoke Island is between the Outer Banks and the mainland):
‘The Outer Banks were explored in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, who mistook Pamlico Sound for the Pacific Ocean, and concluded that the barrier islands were an isthmus. Recognizing this as a potential shortcut to China, he presented his findings to King Francis I of France and King Henry VIII of England, neither of whom pursued the matter.