James and Ruth have a large garden in the sunny backyard of James's
A teacher of James authored this book
parents, Bill and Janet, who live just down the street.
Ruth and James have a shady yard, and so it came about that they garden behind Bill and Janet's house and have a small herb garden in front of that house. I took pictures of the garden in October and visited them in their home down the block a couple weeks later. While the children played upstairs, the garden topic took us through time: back through the last year of the garden, further back through James's learning about gardening, through the history of their garden, and then into the futures of next year's garden, and into the extension of the garden, into harvesting and preserving. James and Ruth are great storytellers and I let the audio go, but I've divided their talk into four long sections. I invite you to travel around in time in gardening talk.
Ruth and James have a shady yard, and so it came about that they garden behind Bill and Janet's house and have a small herb garden in front of that house. I took pictures of the garden in October and visited them in their home down the block a couple weeks later. While the children played upstairs, the garden topic took us through time: back through the last year of the garden, further back through James's learning about gardening, through the history of their garden, and then into the futures of next year's garden, and into the extension of the garden, into harvesting and preserving. James and Ruth are great storytellers and I let the audio go, but I've divided their talk into four long sections. I invite you to travel around in time in gardening talk.
James described his fall garden with his usual humor, looking forward to the next year. Gardeners in the fall think about the next year, redemption, how to change something just a wee bit, or not. I know that pleasure: the yearly, quiet, autumnal, little plans to shift the garden of this year into the dream of next year's garden. In the second recording, he tells a bit about how he learned to garden and he describes, quite lovingly, teachers and the land that taught him.
In the next two recordings, Ruth talked about harvesting, the modern schedule, and gardening at a location that is not directly behind her house. James talked about preserving the harvest, the generational knowledge we are losing, the "canned goods."
Please look at the slides below to see what the Peltz family garden looked like in the fall. If you like scroll further down and play the Greg Brown song that James mentions in the last audio recording. It makes a nice sound track to the photographs.