The tale of our 2020 kitchen garden

 

Yesterday I savored the last tomato from my kitchen garden and immediately lamented its loss. 

Sweet as sugar and dripping with juice, it was the last of its kind, lining the kitchen sill to mellow in the sun.

It had been a long road to this tomato.

Last March I first envisioned the perfect tomato.

Furloughed due to the pandemic, I sat at my desk writing a shopping list, thinking about the depleted contents of the fridge and the sparse shelves in the supermarket. And that’s when I first pictured this tomato.

I saw in my mind’s eye dozens of canning jars in my pantry, filled with the chunky red fruit.

"There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown," wrote Alice B. Toklas.

What if we could grow enough vegetables in our 16- by 8-foot kitchen garden to banish these worries?

I plotted the plot for a couple of months.

Then in May we tilled the soil.

After visiting three greenhouses with no success, we found a handful of tiny tomato, cucumber and hot pepper plants at a small farm stand.

We planted them and watered them every evening.

Back to work, but working remotely from home, I charted their sluggish progress. Slowly, the little plants began to flower.

One morning in June we gazed in horror at the garden plot or what remained of it. During the night deer had eaten all the tomato plants. Only the cucumbers and peppers survived their rampage.

We found another farm stand, offering a few tomato plants with the unusual name “Mortgage Busters.”

Not taking any chances, we fertilized and coddled the new plants that were getting a very late start on the season.

Unbelievably, they liked their new home and seemed to sprint overnight. We placed cages around them.

Then we awoke one morning, and all our work was for naught. The deer had returned for a second helping, and this time they delicately ate all the young fruit, unable to reach inside the cages.

This was the final straw. My husband hired a carpenter friend who built a fence around the kitchen garden.

Following suggestions from a friar, we began a Mary Garden within the fence, placing a small statue of the Mother and Child in front of a big beautiful bush of red roses. Herbs, including rosemary, encircled the saint.

We left the ravaged plants alone, and miraculously, they regenerated without interference. Wild birds at the feeder nearby swooped down on the plants, keeping the insects at bay. When the tiny fruit appeared, they were an unusual purple pinkish color.

Looking back, we could have bought bushels of tomatoes and paid a chef to prepare them for what it cost to fence the garden and buy all those plants.

But in the end, our 2020 kitchen garden survived on a wing and a prayer.

'In The Garden'

Driving through the dense fog and drizzle, I pass through miles of country back roads in Dighton and Rehoboth, Massachusetts.

But even under overcast skies, the vegetation is gorgeous. The trees, heavy laden with new leaves, bend across the road creating a tunnel into the Garden of Eden; and bright spots of fuchsia rhododendrons catch the eye around every bend.

The mist gives this isolated place an ethereal quality, and my slow speed navigating unfamiliar roads gives me the opportunity to pay close attention to my surroundings.

I begin to notice how many pre-Revolutionary homes sit close to the street with their barns and outhouses nestled close by. 

And I imagine colonists on horseback galloping by...                         

Arriving for the service at Reboboth Congregational Church, I climb the old wooden steps, and I am greeted by Pilgrims.

There is a Pilgrim with a musket over his shoulder and a Pilgrim couple on the seashore, depicted in two of the beautiful stained glass windows. Along another wall of windows, Jesus beckons. 

According to their history, the congregation has been entwined with that of the town of Rehoboth since 1643. The Reverend Samuel Newman, along with others, established the settlement and erected the first meeting house on the east bank of the Ten Mile River, and called the town “Rehoboth.”

A book enshrined in a glass case at the front of the church is open to this King James passage: “So he called its name Rehoboth, because he said, ‘For now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.’” (Genesis 26:22)

Wanting to worship regularly, the Reverend David Turner, and ten founding members of the new congregation, completed a “new” meeting house on November 29, 1721.

The third meeting house, their present sanctuary, was completed in 1839 and was known as “The Church in the Barnyard.”

The stained glass windows were added in 1906.

A plaque on the wall commemorates the life of one of their members, a deacon of the church who was born in 1744 and lived for 98 years.

Sitting on the small hard bench, I pray silently, while I await the start of the service.

I smile when the lovely young minister takes the pulpit. What would our Pilgrim forefathers have thought of that?

Stepping out into the bright sunshine, I retrace my path on the winding roads; and this time I see the contemporary homes sprawled on acreage along the way.

As a New Englander, I am rooted to this land; and sometimes I feel I have one foot in the past and the other in the present.

I crank up the engine of my shiny blue sports car and glide along these now familiar roads with the words of the old hymn "In The Garden" still ringing in my ears:  

 

“I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses; and the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own, and the joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”