Pushing the Seasons

Pushing the Seasons

The irony is not lost on me that as our neighboring ski resort tries to drag in winter by making snow, I am out in the garden with my little spade, still trying to hold onto our luxuriously long autumn as I plant my wintering-over garlic.

The snow machines on the mountain are groaning away, every snow gun arcing a blast of engineered crystals over the trails. Chewing up and packing down the new snow, groomers line along their length, going back and forth. We need snow on the mountain to attract tourists in winter.

No clever riff on Teflon or Astro-turf will cut it. Snow--even bad snow--provides the right kind of glide, the right sort of bracing cold, and the right variety of micro-conditions to make skiing and boarding fun. An icy patch here or a mini-swamp there test our mettle and supply us with topics for the chairlift.

I’m trying to warm up one raised bed enough to (I hate to admit it, after our extended warm autumn) plant garlic. What was I doing that was so important I couldn’t take 20 minutes to go out, poke some holes in the amazingly fertile bed I’d built up, plant the garlic and cover with some mulch? What indeed.

I just went out to investigate my chances of getting these cloves in.

The soil is ice. No home picked scapes for us this summer. It serves me right.

At the same time I’ve called the people coming to lime our fields and find out if the ground is frozen hard enough to support their equipment. The ground has been so wet all year, we’ve had to put off the liming because of the risk of miring the spreader. This one is not entirely my fault.

Meanwhile, we spent the weekend in New York City, and visited the Gardens of Saint Luke in the Fields, in the Village at Christopher and Barrow Streets. There is a yellow rose in bloom there, or was before Saturday’s snow. The south facing brick wall retains enough heat to boost the microclimate to a zone 7. That’s northern Georgia. To prove it, there is a fig tree, and a pomegranate growing happily right in New York City!

It does set one’s mind racing. If they can have a zone 7, couldn’t I edge my little garden corner up a notch to a solid 5? This would make it safe to grow a quince tree—not just the hardier flowering quince, but the tree whose fruit are full sized. Maybe I could grow a butterfly bush that doesn’t croak by February.

It’s a slippery slope for people like me trying to cajole summer into staying. If I wanted Ventura, CA, why don’t I move there?

Well, because the seasons operate on you. Your character is improved by waiting, by enjoying (or trying to enjoy) the contrasts. The rapturous Vermont summer is only possible in a climate that dishes out five months of sleet and snow.

The task of enjoyment (now there’s a New England oxymoron for you!) requires more imagination than we sometimes can muster. I, for one, am not flexible enough.

We don’t, for instance, embrace mud season with much enthusiasm; many locals floor it out of here, come April. Apparently the charms of driving muddy roads in unpredictable weather are lost on them. Navigating a muddy road is like driving across a very large bowl of Jell-o. Couldn’t this be made into a sport: bumper cars meet curling?

Health clubs could offer snow shoveling as an upper body building option. I bet Michelle Obama got a start on those terrific arms hoisting a shovel growing up in snowy Chicago.

I am stumped as to how one could celebrate the leafless, dark desolation of November in Vermont. It’s best to contemplate the harvest, with Thanksgiving upcoming, and resist reciting Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” (“One must have a mind of winter…”) more than once a day.

Once it snows, what light there is gets reflected. Spirits rise in anticipation of the holidays. To-do lists lengthen. New Year’s resolutions lurk just around the corner.

My first item on said list?

Get the garlic planted in October.