Published: June 05, 2008 08:48 am         

Up on Hawthorn Hill

By RICHARD J. deROSA

Seems the normal patterns have revealed themselves up here on the hill. As usual this time of year, there is more than enough work to keep us busy from dawn to dusk. Lists abound, but what gets done on any given day has more to do with inclination than anything else.

Perhaps the best news, pattern wise, is that a bluebird inspected several possible summer residences yesterday, and our hope is that within days we will see a pair or two going about the business of nest building. I particularly enjoy watching both bluebirds and phoebes sit atop fence posts waiting patiently for tasty insects to make their fatal presence known in the grass below. Theirs, as is the case with their avian friends everywhere, is an endless array of organic food choices.

There are, of course, exceptions wrought upon the environment by human hands. We do our best up here to ensure that meals for all are as pure and healthy as is possible in a world not as yet committed to its own salvation as it should be. I remain convinced that there is, as Scott Russell Sanders has put it, reason for hope. If that is the case, it will come in small, incremental doses, each of us doing what we can to nurse our planet back to health.

Our greatest challenge this summer is to convert emptying daylily beds to organic vegetable production.

Over the years, we have figured out how to keep things going so that there is an ample and ongoing supply of fresh produce for us, as well as friends and family. Our children live in Boston and New York, where they have access to upscale organic food sources, so we always feel compelled to send them home with oodles of good stuff in no way inferior to the costly fare they get at city purveyors of organic foods. Having visited several of these places in New York and Boston, I feel blessed that I have the space, time, and inclination to grow most of what I need, the greatest expense incurred the physical exertion required. That is a cost we can bear willingly.

Patterns of thought and behavior are comforting and invigorating so long as they do not bind one to wasteful consistencies.

This time of year, now that the gardens are pretty much in, one of my greatest joys is the morning inspection tour, which Gabby and I just completed. Seeds are incredibly magical creations. áDraw a furrow in the ground, toss in a few seeds at appropriate intervals, cover them up with a light blanket of soil, and in a few short days succulent green shoots pop their heads up, promising tasty morsels for days, even months, to come. Of course, there is the stewardship needed to make sure that all goes well, and that their sub-soil lifelines are adequately supplied with the nutrients required for their short but healthy lives. As Sir Albert Howard puts it, healthy soil produces healthy plants. Well-tended soil rich in organic matter makes any plant feel pretty good about itself.

When Gabby and I head back up the hill after getting the paper, we now wend our way about the gardens. Actually, I wend and she noses along her normal sniff routes. I inspect fruit trees leaves to make sure no unwelcome guests have arrived in the night and set up camp. I work my way along daylily beds to see who might have come to life overnight. We have quite a bit of lettuce well along now in the lower vegetable garden, and there are few pleasures that equal an early morning chaw on a cool, dew-laden leaf. I check the beds one at a time looking for growth, especially those beds where we have planted some new varieties of greens, mostly Asian.

Working my way up the hill, I also keep an ear alert to bird song. Several days ago, a Pileated woodpecker flew right over my head as I pulled the paper out of the box. A few minutes later, I heard two Scarlet Tanagers in the poplars nearby. Now, had I gone looking for them, I am sure I would never have found either.

I used to bird a lot more. Now I just go about my business and more often than not, my avian friends oblige me by catching up with me without my hiking about looking for them. It makes multi-tasking, a way of being I am not good at, much easier. A new planting pattern than we established last year involves potatoes. For years I dug the usual trenches, plopped in the eyed seeds, covered them up, and then harvested them in the fall by getting down on my knees (saves the lower back!) and digging carefully with a very short shovel.

Now we just plop them down on a bed of compost, throw some hay over them, and watch them grow. No more digging. We just remove the hay and handpick the potatoes that we want. It is an organic growing method I read about years ago. I did not try it until last year, only because tradition is hard to break, even when a better idea comes along. Every morning now I walk the hay covered rows glorying in all the greenery popping up through the hay, aglow with the prospect of not having to dig come fall. There is new growth to witness every morning. I am just as prone to evening tours as well.

It is a good thing that I am easily entertained. Every moment of life on one’s home ground is a sort of magical mystery tour. Tomorrow morning the beets and carrots and beans might just decide to come up out of the darkness into the light, thus exhibiting their exemplary journey to wisdom. Gabby and I will be there to welcome them into the world, promising to be thoughtful stewards throughout their lives.