There is so much happening over at the vegetable garden that I haven’t even had time to write about it. After two years of trotting around this Island from farm to farm, getting to know farmers and watching how hard they work, you’d a thought I would have anticipated this. But no, I thought doing a “part time” production garden would tuck right into my schedule. A little cooking, a little writing, a little gardening. Ha! (Many “Ha!s,” in fact.)

The really tricky part is finding time to market your product when transplanting, weeding, and watering are calling. All of a sudden I have lovely lettuce on my hands—Royal Oakleaf, Lollo di Vino, Red Sails, Tom Thumb Bibb, Salad Bowl, Butterblush Cos—that needs to be harvested, and now! With this unusually hot weather we’ve been having, it is getting almost too hot for the poor things. All the hearty greens (Red Russian kale, Cavalo Nero, Mustard, Tat Soi) we transplanted several weeks ago are also ready to be harvested. The young leaves are just the right size for stir-fries and sautés, but the two of us can only eat so much of this stuff. And the gorgeous purple pak choi we grew is looking just perfect right now (except for a few little holes from the flea beetles).

Since it’s early in the season here on Martha’s Vineyard, we don’t really have the traffic up at the Native Earth farm stand on North Road to sell much volume, but I’ve decided to keep a cooler of greens and lettuce out there every day nonetheless, just in case folks stopping in to get some of Rebecca Gilbert’s tomato plants might be tempted by a bargain. Also, I convinced our kind land lady, Rhonda, (who also manages Alley’s General Store) to take a basket of baby lettuces today for the Alley’s farm stand. So we are officially in business. Now I’m off to buy more soaker hoses. I said we were in business, not in profit-mode!

P.S. The pygmy goats at Native Earth are due to give birth any day now! Can’t wait to see those little kids.

It’s only mid-May, and already the vegetable garden is leading me by the hand, showing me things about myself and my world that I sometimes ignore, don’t appreciate enough—or might not choose to think about all the time. Like the fact that I have pale skin (#30 sun block, my new best friend), am not in great shape (achy back and knees), and HELLO, I can’t do everything myself. Lately, I’ve been feeling really, really grateful for my partner Roy, who, when I suggested the crazy “production” garden idea last fall, embraced the idea enthusiastically. I’m quite sure I’d be a complete nervous wreck by now if he weren’t on the case, what with my book just coming out, deadlines swirling, etc., etc.

I bring this up only because I thought if anyone else is contemplating a big garden project like this, you might appreciate the suggestion to do it with a partner. The funny thing is, it’s not so much the (physical) load-sharing I appreciate. (Though there’s plenty of that, like the hour Roy spent fertilizing seedlings last night while I did some writing). It’s the cerebral stuff—the great ideas and the practical solutions that Roy brings to the garden because he thinks differently than I do (and often acts more quickly, too). Watching Roy work out the solution to some garden problem we’re having often turns into an “a ha!” moment for me, stimulating some long-sleepy area of my brain. Better still, the solutions in action are almost always some of the most fun garden moments we have.

Last week we needed to take the row cover fabric off of our baby pea plants and little bok choys, but we were still concerned the crows might get to them. “We need a scarecrow!” Roy kept saying. Sure, that sounded like a good idea to me, but I know if it had been up to me, we’d still not have a scarecrow. It was Roy who rustled through his old clothes to find a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a tee-shirt for the face, and a hat, and then stuffed them full of hay. He tied Mr. Scarecrow up with twine, took him to the garden and tied him to the deer fence, and all Libby (his daughter) and I had to do was come in at the last minute to draw a face on Mr. Scarecrow and take his (and Roy’s) picture! So far Mr. Scarecrow is doing a great job, even fooling several human passers-by.

This weekend it became clear that our newly planted beds of lettuce, chard, arugula, and spinach were in bad need of mulching. We’ve had very little rain this spring, we don’t yet have drip hoses in place, and the soil is so dry that it isn’t holding the water from our morning douses very well. We’re also trying to keep our expenses down, so buying mulch for all these beds isn’t a great option. “We need seaweed,” Roy said. At first, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around this. I’ve heard seaweed makes a great addition to compost, and I thought it was something you laid out (in its wet form) on your garden beds over the winter. It hadn’t occurred to me what a great mulch dried seaweed makes.

“Get in the car,” Roy said Saturday morning, dragging me away from the computer. “We’re going to the beach.” He had stuffed a couple of tarps into the back of the car, and off we went. It was one of those big blue-sky days, warm and sunny, breeze gently blowing. We wore shorts and tee-shirts, dug our toes into the sand, and scooped up two tarp-loads of dried seaweed. I looked around at one of the most breathtaking vistas on Martha’s Vineyard – Rugosa roses and beach plums already blooming along the sand dunes that spilled out across the shore—and thought, what in the world could possibly be a more enchanting activity? Back at the garden, it felt so satisfying to spread the seaweed around the seedlings (like this arugula, right), knowing the soil would now stay moister (and a little less weedy).

There are lots more ways that Roy has made the practical solutions fun for us—like the cold frame he made out of an old sliding door. At first we had it positioned outside the deer fence, but found that awkward. “Let’s move this inside,” Roy said. Now it sits centered along one edge of the garden, surrounded by pansies that Libby and I planted. It doubles as a perch; at the end of a working day, we close it, sit on top it, and look out to admire our beds.  And then there’s the bamboo pea trellis (another adventure to collect the bamboo) and the refurbished wooden wagon (from a church).  But again, it’s not the trellis or the wagon—the material things—that matter so much. It’s what the garden offers as a true microcosm for everything in life: Without our friends, without help, without fresh ideas, we—and the garden—can’t thrive. I know the garden has more lessons in store for me this summer, but I’m glad I learned this one early on.

One of the very coolest things about the vegetable garden we will tend this summer is that it lies squarely between a hog pen and a goat yard. All summer long we’ll be in the good company of Olive the Berkshire pig, who is (cross your fingers), hopefully pregnant, so we’ll be joined by some little black piglets, too. Soon, Thunder the boar will also be back at Native Earth. He’s been on loan to another local farm for the last three months.

The goats, who are the very cute mini-goats known as pygmies, will probably move around a bit, as they have a job to do—clearing brush. But they’ll be close enough for us to say hi to every day. And these gals are expecting, too, thanks to a new billy goat who’s joined them.

Besides the goats and pigs, there are sheep and hens and guinea fowl and ducks and geese and I- don’t- know-what-else at the farm. I am beside myself with excitement. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I get kind of goofy about pigs and goats, and pretty much every other kind of farm animal. I’m just crazy about them. Fortunately, Roy and his daughter Libby (with Olive, above) share this passion of mine. We dropped by the farm today, ostensibly to add some kitchen scraps to the compost pile. But secretly we’d brought along a few slices of last night’s pizza (plain cheese) to offer to Olive, even though we understand she’s getting plenty to eat right now. Hopefully we won’t get in trouble. We just thought it’d be nice to make friends early on. It seemed to work. Olive smiled. So did Libby.

On our way home from Native Earth, we stopped in at Whiting Farm to see the newborn lambs. The Whitings’ sheep are a handsome breed known as Cheviots, and even the babies have distinctively upright ears. Allen Whiting let Libby help him bottle-feed a lamb who’s not getting quite enough milk from Mom. Libby asked if he had named the lambs, and he explained that he usually doesn’t, as most of these lambs will become meat. Libby understood that, just as she did when we mentioned the piglets would be raised for meat. “Bacon?” she asked. Yes, really, really good bacon.

Between our vegetable garden and being around the farm, Libby’s going to learn a lot about where her food comes from this summer. (Jamie Oliver would be proud!) We’ve picked out some vegetables—like baby carrots and mini-pumpkins—just for her, and she’s hoping we’ll get a hen or two for her to help take care of. (She loves fresh eggs, too.) I can’t help but feel grateful for this: The chance for her to learn and be challenged—while we all spend time together outdoors—is just one more bonus to our vegetable garden project.

I am pretty sure I didn’t turn out the way my parents had planned. They sent me to good schools and had high hopes for my future. When I was in college, my father announced that he had found the perfect graduate program for me. It was a combo law-school-and-business-school all rolled into one. Was he kidding? Sounded like pure hell to me. “Sorry, Dad,” I said, “I am going to New York to be a writer.” Yikes, could there be any words a father would rather not hear?

I give him a lot of credit for being a good sport then—and for standing by for the next 25 years as I pursued not one, but possibly two of the worst paying career choices a girl could make—publishing and cooking. I shifted back and forth from one to the other, finally managing to splice the two together to earn a halfway decent salary as the editor of a cooking magazine. But then I longed to be poor again and quit that job a couple years ago.

Now, unbelievably, I have found a third passion to pursue that very definitely has the potential to earn me even less money than the first two careers—growing vegetables. It could, however, be the most satisfying pursuit of all. Who wouldn’t want to play around in the dirt all day, sun screaming down from a perfect blue sky, little green edible jewels poking up all around you like candy spilled out from a piñata?

Okay, I know it’s not all like that. Not hardly. I went to work on a friend’s farm in upstate New York last summer to try and see if I had what it takes. I spent one entire week on my hands and knees weeding carrot seedlings. My friends were really polite and claimed that I “saved” the carrot crop, but all I could think about was how slow and out of shape I was, and how hard (REALLY hard) they worked.

Still, I can’t get this growing urge to go away. I’ve had little vegetable gardens over the years, but this year I’ve really gone and done it. Along with my partner Roy Riley, I’ve rented a big plot from my friend Rebecca Gilbert over at Native Earth Teaching Farm here on Martha’s Vineyard.  By big, I don’t mean huge, as in acres; I mean big by backyard vegetable garden standards, about 2800 square feet. Much of that will be paths, of course; what Roy and I have drawn on paper is actually 16 beds, each 24 x 3 feet, plus two longish borders with perennial herbs. (So it’s really more like 1400 square feet.) Roy, thankfully, is a builder, so he has already started crafting useful garden stuff for us, like cold frames to harden off the seedlings (and the seed-starting shelves in the photo at right).

We’ll be growing peas, sugar snap peas, snow peas, pole beans, bush wax beans, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, carrots, beets, onions, potatoes, winter and summer squash, lots of different kinds of cooking greens and salad greens, fresh herbs, and flowers. All winter long we’ve been hoarding vegetable gardening books from the West Tisbury library, ordering seeds and equipment, and figuring out a budget for this project. We’ve already started a few hundred seedlings inside, and we hover over them like ridiculously nervous parents.

Our plan is to help Rebecca get the farm stand (on North Road in Chilmark) to be a more robust destination for veggie-, herb-, and flower-hungry Up-Islanders. So Roy and I will be selling our harvest there, and possibly at a few other places. My goal is to see if there’s any way that this growing thing could become a permanent part (albeit a really tiny part) of my future livelihood. So while it’s not exactly farming, I’d be proud to call myself a grower if I can learn the secrets to this art. I’m optimistic and excited, because I know how much I’ll enjoy the process even if our yields are less than stellar the first year.

By the way, I realize this website (and blog) is supposed to be dedicated to cooking vegetables, so I’ll try not to get too sidetracked with talk about growing them. I will, however, give you an occasional update on the garden as the season gets going. Because, after all, what better excuse to develop more new vegetable recipes!