The Gardens

The little house that Vake and Milly built in Coos Bay sat uphill from a swamp with the trickle of a creek running through it. The rich loam of the swampland was excellent garden soil, so Vake and Milly planted a garden that grew wonderful cabbages, but they had to clean them carefully. Inevitably, there was a slug hiding under the outside leaves.

 They also installed a chicken yard, fenced with chicken wire of course, that straddled the creek. At the corner of the chicken yard was a classical chicken coop.  It had a salt-box shape, an entry door opening outside the chicken yard on one end, and a little chicken door with a ramp from the coop out into the chicken yard on the opposite end. The coop was tall enough for a man to walk in. Chicken nests filled with straw were set up on a shelf along the inside, where Vake and Milly could raid the nests for eggs.  But they would make sure the rooster was out in the yard before they went into the coop, because it was mean. Still, Milly felt like her hard-working hens were entitled to the company of a rooster.

Sometimes Sandy and I could throw handfuls of chicken scratch over the fence, and watch the chickens scramble for their chow.

However, the chickens began disappearing.   A chicken-hawk circled overhead, but it didn’t seem to be attacking the hens. Eli kept an eye on things, and caught a neighbor’s Airedale that had gotten into the yard. Still, even with the Airedale under control, the chickens continued to disappear. Eli set a trap in the water of the little creek than trickled through the chicken yard, and that solved the problem.  One morning he showed up with his catch, a huge, chicken-fed raccoon that had been squirming under the fence by crawling in the creek.

We always had a garden. Vake and Milly grew great rhubarb, by surrounding each of three plants with an old 25-gallon tar bucket with the bottom cut out. One a year, they would fill the buckets with manure, then water, and let the manure tea sink into the plants to nourish the roots.

When they planted rutabagas, every single tiny seed seemed to grow—which I recall, because I did not like rutabagas. One year, at Florence, the rutabagas were stored in a burlap gunny sack in the pump house. When Vake and Milly left for a hunting trip, the babysitter, Mrs. Warner, found the bag of roots, and thought she was in heaven, and fixed them for our dinners as often as she dared.

(Aside: One of the babysitters, whom we saw only once per year during hunting season, was a Seventh Day Adventist. She asked Sandy what she wanted for dinner. “Pork Chops.” She asked Sandy what she wanted to do when she grew up. “Cuss and smoke cigarettes,” Sandy said.)

A number of us are still gardeners—Jon, Sam, Marcia, Sandy, Mark and I are all growing  Eli’s loganberries. But Sandy introduced her boys to gardening in an award-winning way.

One of the boys needed to do a science project for school, which of course he waited until the very last minute to do. He had always heard that beer attracts slugs, those slimy mollusks that are shell-free snails that inhabit slimy, wet places like the Oregon coast. To keep the slugs out of your garden, you are supposed to set out pans of beer so that the slugs will be distracted from your lettuces,fall in, and drown.  He set pans into several places in Sandy’s garden, and filled them with beer,or  ½ beer and ½ water, or ¼ beer and ¾ water, and plain water, and counted the slugs that he caught. It’s true! Beer attracts slugs. The beer and half beer attracted equal numbers. The quarter beer and plain water didn’t work at all. The number of slugs he caught on a damp spring weekend numbered a couple of hundred little ones. The teacher was astounded and wondered where in the world he lived, and course, he scored an “A.”