Back in time

Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall

The peaches are excellent this year, succulent and juicy. White and yellow peaches both have wooed me in the past week with their tartly sweet flavor that melts into the corners of my mouth.

This is a point of nostalgia for me. I’ll admit, over the past few years I have avoided peaches entirely, skirting them in the grocery store and even at the farmers market. ‘They won’t be as good as my dad’s peaches’ is what goes through my mind. Ever since my dad sold his final few acres of Jersey Queens and John Boys in that hideaway south Jersey town, I’ve upheld this opinion. But this year – perhaps because I have grown more aware of the trials and rewards of growing food, I have come back around to the fuzzy fruit that followed me through my childhood and adolescence.

Our old Russian tractor, with orchard behind.

Roadstown, New Jersey - Home of the Ware Chair. That’s what the sign when you entered the town used to say. There isn’t a town really. There used to be a general store, it looks like, and a small town center. But now those buildings have been worn down into barns. They house farm tractors if they’re lucky, or flocks of pigeons if they’ve just been around awhile. I used to go down there and spend a day, or weeks in the summer. I would bring liters of water and packets of Emergen-C to revive me halfway through the day, after the dust and relentless sun began to get to me. My dad would fill the gas tank of the old John Deere or Belarus, and I would jump onboard. It felt like boarding a horse to be honest, saddling up. And then I would sit up there, all day long, driving up and down each row, keeping the Deere’s left tire aligned with the left side of the sod strip down the middle, waking up enough to turn the machine deftly around each hairpin turn. It was five rows at a time – you’d do one and then skip a row on your way back, skip another on your second turn and then fill in the blanks. Every so often I would stand up for a row, feeling tall and flexible on the rumbling mower. And then I would sit down and the rows would keep on going by.

I would sell the excess peaches sometimes. My dad sold most of his peaches to a farmers co-op, Jersey Fruit, but by the end even they were giving him pennies for his produce. I would go out to the orchard and pick all the ripe fruit he had to leave on the trees and reserve a booth at Cowtown, sell it all straight to the consumer for three times what we made through the co-op. Once or twice my mom and I took a dozen boxes to Reading Terminal Market in Philly, set up a table and sold them all quick. We handed out samples, that’s what did it. His peaches were good, honest.

We even branded the business, thanks to Lindsey Fyfe's handiwork.

But then he sold the trees, and the tractors, and the irrigation equipment we had all set up and painstakingly fixed each year – my brother, my dad, and I, and he moved to the city. I haven’t been down there since, though every summer my muscles and my mind still long for it. Hours sitting up there on that John Deere were some of the best I spent through college. I learned a dozen Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs up there, borrowing my dad’s heavy-duty discman and black leather fanny pack. I cleared my mind just going up and down those rows, stopping for rabbits and birds and whatever else I saw.

Peaches aren’t the same when you buy them in the store. I guess they never will be, even though they’re damn good this year. Still, whenever it hails in June or when there’s a drought in July, I think of the peaches. Or the peaches that never were. The peaches that my dad and I would be picking off the trees right now if he still owned those trees way down there in Jersey. And then, if they were ours, they would be the best peaches you ever tasted.

In Mourning

My garden has a terminal illness. 

Yesterday I came home from a girls weekend at the beach to find debris littering the bean-side of the garden, and the ivy that had been growing unchecked along the back fence hanging precariously over the snap peas and eggplant.  It looked like a tornado had torn through my triangle of life, breaking tomato plants in half and shaking climbing beans from their trellises.

The neighbors had cleared the foot and a half of garage that butted against our fence of its ivy, ripping sticky cleavers from their whitewashed brick and allowing the top-heavy vines to bow sickeningly over our cultivated beds.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only damage.
 
I picked up the broken bits of ivy last night, and hoped a day of sunshine would perk up the flowering beans and help the tomatoes straighten up.  Instead, I came home to a garden even droopier than the night before.  The bean leaves, with their first purple flowers just opening along two or three vines taller than me, were upside down.  The climbers were all taking nose-dives instead of reaching sunward.  The herbs – our six basil plants and out-of-control cilantro – were falling amongst themselves like drunk teenagers, and the lettuce patch splayed out as if a beach ball had repeatedly flounced on top of it.

It turns out it wasn’t just debris, but something much more terrible.  I called my dad, the trusty ex-farmer, and told him my garden’s symptoms.  Is there some sort of fungus that would attack every one of my plants?, I asked.  Some kind of blight that I’ve never heard of?  He asked if we were at the bottom of a hill, if some kind of poisonous runoff could have swept through the yard.  I went to ask my neighbor.

Sure enough, poison was the culprit.  Weeds B Gone to be exact.  She had dumped a bunch on the roof of her garage, “to keep the ivy from coming back.”  And then it had rained.

The ivy looks fine, by the way.  It’s just the vegetables that are dying.

It’ll take a few days, but one by one these plants – almost all of which I started from seed – will yellow, and shrivel, and die.  I don’t think I can bear to see that, so I’ll probably go out there early tomorrow morning and yank the whole lot of them out. 

But before I do that I’ll have some time to think about what we are doing to the earth, and to ourselves.  I know- this Weeds B Gone is just a bit of over-the-counter yard material.  But this is also about the grasses and the flowers and the food that we live on.  Eventually those chemicals will drain into the Wissahickon just down the hill, and from there into the Delaware (not to mention into our taps), then to the bay, then the ocean.  So many people don’t think about how our actions affect the rest of the world, not to mention our local ecosystem or our neighbors.

I’ll start over again, this time by pulling out all that ivy and buying a bunch of pots and fresh soil.  But I won’t forget the lessons this episode has to teach me, and the sight of a beautiful bursting garden simply turning over and dying.