A View From My Garden

November 28, 2005

It does seem to me that fall is an unlikely time to start a column dealing primarily with the natural world and yet here I am, picking up a thread from many years ago, when I was a young woman, in another corner of our everlasting intermountain west. At that time I lived at the foot of some of the highest mountains in the lower 48, in the extensive rain shadow they cast over eastern California and Oregon, Nevada, southern Idaho and Utah; some of the harshest and loneliest land I know.. I wrote about that land because it was what I knew, and people rewarded me with their blessings and their praise. I hope to be able to do the same thing here, in this better watered, more lush land that is also harsh and lonely in its own way, and which has adopted me.

Fall is the ending of the seasons, but it is also a beginning. It is like our river, always going and coming, never really finishing, but only leading us on into the next season and the season after that, with remembrances of the season past. And so as I put the garden to bed for winter, my head is full of visions of spring. Will this just-dug and moved perennial like its new home better than its last, or will it just choose to not show up? I have no way of really knowing because I am still new to this garden and each year of the nine that have passed since the Montana Boy moved us here from our desert home, has had a different lesson to present. The year just passing is no exception. A long rainy and cold spring during which I waited too long to plant even the early cold-earth vegetables, and then when the soil warmed, in late June it was too late, so the Early Girl tomatoes ripened only three or four in the garden, and the Romas, none at all. The potatoes were the size of large marbles and well suited to one of those very, very French presentations that I do not favor. They have ended up whole in the first potato soup of fall, each perfect little dark red Norland holding a whole grown potato's share of flavor.

The green beans were another matter. I have found a variety of bush bean that is flavorful and fast to grow, and that does not mind cool nights and light shade. I had just gathered our first supper's worth when the deer moved in and chomped them down. The deer have been here every winter, but never in summer, and they have never before ruined anything.

White tail deer are extremely adaptable animals and if they are pressured out of their usual feeding ground by, for instance, a nurseryman's electric fence, then they will find another way to live. For our local herd, the other way is in town. I am looking at electric fence myself, and then where will they go?