the Walnut Diary

All summer when Roz came to the farm she would spend just enough time with us to be polite, and then she would disappear. Occasional searches would turn her up in the garden, sitting or lying in a row, plucking weeds from around her cherished plants. Roz had never been around a garden until she discovered Forfar.

So this year I involved her in the seed purchases and even put up with her desire to have green beans (too much work), peas (blow over in a good breeze), and beets (yuck!). Kohlrabi and butternut squash made it into the basket as well. Roz is very fit and relentless when it comes to work. Bet and I didn’t resist when Roz read the instructions on the seed packs and methodically planted the seeds in the rows I had laid out in the garden.

This task requires more than my personal capacity for patience and bending. Other years I would stuff a package of seeds into a seeding wheel, take aim down a row and walk until the seed gave out. This could occur anywhere from three feet in to halfway to the stake at the other end. So I’d start with another packet of something from the other end. The large gaps in the middle of the rows were ideal areas for melons to spread, so it usually worked out fairly well in my tangle. I also discovered that volunteer tomatoes look much less weedy than other weeds.

This year Roz showed up each week to check on the progress of her seeds. The rain wiped out the cucumbers, tomatoes and melons, but she lovingly tended the surviving root vegetables, communing for hours with her charges, plucking the weeds from their midst with a delicate, two-fingered grip.

And then came the harvests. The girl was so delighted with her first bowl of peas that I couldn’t rain on her parade. And she didn’t mind the work of picking the string beans. But the beets! Oh man, the beets! The rest of the folks at the table were raving about these bleeding red things, and Bet had shrewdly added some feta and garlic to the mix, so I ate a few slices. The horrible-taste memory of my childhood fell away in an instant and I very much enjoyed this new food.

After losing a war with the raccoons I vowed never again to grow sweet corn. But Roz had never had a corn patch, so we put in five rows. The raccoons struck on schedule, but Tony helped me build an electric fence around the patch. It worked. We saved the rest of the crop.

Roz remembered her garden: “I enjoyed it all far more than was reasonable. I don’t know why. I love picking raspberries. Maybe it has to do with pride in something you think you have created. Even though I know it’s cheaper to buy any of those foods than my time is worth, there’s something that makes me incredibly proud when I make a dish from ingredients that I’ve grown. I confess more than once I ate beets and raspberries until I made myself sick on them, especially the raspberries. But it’s because I enjoy collecting them so much.

“At Thanksgiving dinner in Ancaster when I told Papou* about my vegetables, my grandfather immediately insisted that we make the trip to his house to see his garden before the sun went down. He does so much. He gave us eggs, figs, pears, oregano. With the language barrier when I was a little kid I never really paid attention to him, but now I wonder if there is something hereditary in the pride he takes in his self-sufficiency, because I really enjoyed the garden and I have no idea why.”

Charlie and Martin’s syrup-making exploits last March continue to reverberate in the family as we work our way through their product. I asked Charlie what possessed him to take on such a project.

“The trees were there, and the stuff costs fifteen dollars a bottle. Roz makes me pancakes on Saturday morning and she kept sending me to buy the syrup.”

Of course Charlie and Martin had many commitments during the day so they did all of the work at night. Charlie didn’t see anything particularly unusual about that. “If you only have a two week season, odds are pretty good you’ll work most of the day on it.”

I asked him to explain the essential difference between maple syrup and corn syrup, the current nutritional public enemy #1. “Syrup is a lot more expensive and dangerous. You create it by boiling something over open flames. And inherently less is produced, so it’s less fattening. There’s also something exciting about making it.”

Roz is already making plans for next year. “I found myself thinking that the peas were more work than they’re worth, so I’ll plant more beans next year. Yesterday my grandmother dismissed rutabagas as cattle feed, but I found that you can make a rutabaga pie, and even a carrot pie. You cannot, however, make kohlrabi pie, so I think we can do with fewer of them next year and more carrots.”

*This is the simplest of five or six different spellings of the Greek term of endearment for grandfather, each of which someone on the Internet claims is correct.