The Taste of Four Season Farm
By Noah Salt
For anyone who loves good food and great gardening wisdom, April brings a special gift in the form of The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook ($22.95) by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman, America’s foremost authorities on organic gardening and the gurus of sustainable living. These two national treasures have put together a sumptuously illustrated and powerfully useful exegesis on how to create the perfect sustainable garden — and what extraordinary things you can do with what comes out of it. The first half of the book is devoted to why and how you should grow your own food, including detailed, easy-todigest advice and helpful working plans for providing the best soil and growing the most nutritious organic food. Part two takes you into the kitchen at Four Seasons Farm near Blue Hill, Maine, where Barbara and Eliot dazzle their guests with 120 of the finest homegrown recipes you’ll ever taste ranging from the simple sandwiches to the most memorable stews, soups, roasts, salads and desserts (hint: the Stuffed Squash Blossom Fritters are a sublime opener), often served alfresco in the garden. Take it from the Almanac Gardener, who has been lucky enough to dine with them twice, this is one garden and kitchen resource you’ll be using like your favorite garden gloves. Look for an excerpt in next month’s O.Henry magazine.
By Noah Salt
April commences with a celebrated day of pranks dating to medieval times and winds up with our national homage to trees, also known as Arbor Day. Between these calendar points, temperatures range upward seven degrees, rain typically falls in abundance, and Southern gardens burst forth with flowers galore — beds of tulips and hyacinth, iris and dogwoods, apple trees and azaleas have their big moment, as do rhododendron and early daylilies, daisies and allium. Lawns are at their greenest, dotted with dandelions and screaming for a good mowing. Now is the time to plant cosmos and zinnia seeds straight into the warming soil. The woods are full of Virginia bluebells and the roadside ditches wear carpets of the first buttercups — so common in grazing meadows worldwide. English farm lore holds they are the reason butter is yellow.
Out in the garden, Out in the windy, swinging dark, Under the trees and over the flower-beds, Over the grass and under the hedge-border, Someone is sweeping, sweeping, Some old gardener. Out in the windy, swinging dark, Someone is secretly putting in order, Someone is creeping, creeping.
In Roman mythology, Flora was celebrated as the goddess of the flower and the renewed cycle of life with a festival of eating and drinking and weddings, making the beginning of the critical growing season for grapes and olives. The precise origins of April Fool’s Day are unknown, but it is mentioned as early as The Nun’s Priest’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales (1392) wherein a vain chanticleer cock is fooled by a wily fox. Iranians also make a claim to the tradition of innocent prank-making that dates back to 536 B.C., and the French and Italians each have their own days dating from medieval times in which masters attempted to fool servants and even lovers played innocent tricks on each other. In Scotland, the unwitting “fool” is sent in search of “gowks,” a fowl that does not exist, while in Poland elaborate hoaxes are common. The idea seems to be to throw off the seriousness of winter and embrace the whimsy of returning spring. For those of you who don’t fancy fooling friends or planting trees, National Golf Day is on the 18th, National Kiss Your Mate Day on the 28th. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Katherine Mansfield, from Out in the Garden, 1922
Writer in the Garden “Peace — and grief — made gardens more precious. The gaze turned inwards, away from the world. A retired friend of mine remembers her father-in-law’s garden, so vital to him and the family. He had been badly wounded at the Somme, but seemed completely at peace in his garden, which was tremendously long but very narrow, the width of their little terraced house. He grew practically all their vegetables and fruit, and his wife celebrated Whit Sunday each year with a lunch off the season’s first crop. He saved his own seeds, sorting out and sowing them in soil that was rich and black from the compost and manure dug in over many years. He had a small shed with a folding chair and outside it a patch of lawn circled with snapdragons. The other flowers — Japanese anemones, gladioli, roses, chrysanths, stocks, sweet peas, sweet Williams — grew in rows, like the vegetables. They were poor, since he could not work for a long time after the war, and the garden was their lifeline, as it must have been for many people. It used to give him huge pleasure to load his grown-up children with boxes of vegetables when they called. He never went to a garden centre in his life.” From A Little History of British Gardening, 2004, by Jenny Uglow OH April 2013
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