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65 Kinds of Vegetables
65 Kinds of Vegetables
Veteran gardener Vannilu Harrison puts down roots in the hilltownof Middletown Springs
by Euan Bear
Vannilu Harrison is the best gardener I know, and she’s had a lot of practice. The only time she didn’t have a garden was in her first 5 years of teaching school, when she was boarding or renting an apartment and there was no land available for digging into. She now grows “oh, 60 to 65 different things, including all the varieties,” she says.
Take a deep breath: Twelve varieties of shell beans, peas, carrots, beets, onions, lettuce, kohlrabi, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, egg plants, cabbage, collard greens, spinach, Swiss chard, kale, peppers both sweet and hot, turnips, potatoes (white, yellow, red, and blue), corn, parsnips, cucumbers, horse radish, summer squash and zucchini, winter squash, lima beans, tomatoes (plum, cherry, and slicing), leeks, radishes, soybeans (“Oh, yeah,” chimes in her partner Sherry Underwood, “We’ve just discovered how good they are green, just cook ’em up like lima beans, mmm-mmm.”), pumpkins, and okra, just to name a few. That’s not counting the fruits (blueberries and raspberries, among others) and the flowers.
And she does it in Middletown Springs, a small town huddled on the hills (elevation 1500-2200 feet) southwest of Rutland. We’re not talking banana belt here. It’s nowhere near the lake’s warming effect.
She started gardening with her family in south-central Georgia during the Depression. “I was born in 1929, I’m a Depression baby. We grew all our own crops, plus pigs and chickens, and we fished a lot. Peaches, two kinds of pears, apples. We used to dry our fruits on the tin roof of the chicken coop. We had a pecan tree and walnuts …” she gazes off into the warm dusty past, remembering.
Her short white hair frames a face that looks like it loves the sun, even in April. She peers across the table through oval glasses, smiling often in a way that makes you understand how the lines got there. She exudes a warmth that would bring out crocuses and daffodils well before their time.
“When I was 5, I picked cotton. Where the cotton bolls, the pods open up, there are sharp points, just like thorns, and when you pick out the fluffy boll, your hands would get all scratched and bloody. We had butter beans and peas planted on the little hills, called ‘terraces,’ between the cotton rows.
“We grew cane – sugar cane – and made cane syrup. We saved our own seeds.” After the harvest, Vannie continues, “the boys would go down near the crick [that’s creek to us] and dig a hole, and lay down pine straw,” (Sherry interrupts, “That’s needles.”) “lay in the sweet potatoes, and cover ’em up again with dirt. An’ that way, see, we could go down and just dig up a corner, take out a few, and cover ’em up again, keep ’em nearly all winter and they wouldn’t freeze.”
She got her first northern garden when she was teaching in upstate New York. She was talking to friends, a straight couple, about how much she missed having a garden. “‘Oh, I’ll plow up some ground for ya’ the guy said. ‘You can have my old garden,’ she said. Come to find out that the year before she had these wonderful, just-ready-to-pick beans, and she was going to pick ’em the next morning. Then the next morning, they were all down to about half an inch. A woodchuck had come and eaten everything down to just a half an inch.” Vannie leans back and smiles all over her face at the memory.
She took that ground and planted a garden in it.
“One day, here comes Mr. Woodchuck with his paper bag to the garden to gather vegetables. Nobody would b’lieve me when I told ’em he was there with his paper bag. There must’ve been something inside that bag that he wanted, and he kept throwing it up in his paws. The guy did give me a piece of fence to keep the woodchucks out.
“One time I grew okra, and my friend [lover at the time] cut off the blossoms because they look kinda like pods. Well, naturally, we got no okra that year. Another time, that same friend took and, well, I had these tomato plants just kind of sodded in together in a corner until I got around to planting them. She took and pulled ’em out for weeds.
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Vannilu and Sherry have been together 25 years as of this August, 20 of them spent on their 20 acres of south-facing hillside meadow in Middletown Springs. They decided to build their house in 1981, and had some garden areas plowed two years in a row to break up the tough grass. “And then we bought a Troy-Bilt tiller that is still chugging,” adds Sherry.
The first couple of years, every time friends or relatives came to visit, the two women would send them out to the garden to pick rocks. “This land is really bony,” Sherry says. “When the guy came with the backhoe to dig the cellar, he kept saying we should sell this land for a gravel pit. I just told him ‘Keep digging.’”
The first few years, Vannie worked out a labor-for-space barter with the owner of a commercial greenhouse to start her seeds in the early spring. Even now, 20 years later, Vannie gives some of her seeds and her planting timetable to the woman who owns the greenhouse, and buys back the sets when it’s time to plant. She has a cold frame of her own with 8-foot workshop lights over it to start some seeds.
“My philosophy is I plant a lot of vegetables, and rather than plant just a few and pour water on them, I plant more and take whatever [produce] the Father gives me,” Vannie says. They don’t water their acre or so of gardens, relying on natural rainfall and groundwater. There is a stream through the woods and down the bank, but that water would have to flow uphill to be of any use.
Asked if she had any secrets to share, Vannie says, “You mean, do I plant by the moon and stuff like that? I tried planting by the moon one year, but I couldn’t see a difference.” Sherry adds, “Well, we do know that the full moon is often the colder part of the month, especially early in the season, around last frost.”
“She’s definitely connected to growing things,” says Sherry. She searches unsuccessfully for the right word or phrase to describe an energy that is less aggressive and more innate than “driven,” stronger and more intimate than “enjoyable.”
“I won’t grow anything unless we’ll have enough for us and plenty to give away,” says Vannie. “I dearly love to give out food from my gardens.” Sherry adds, “We’ve got 3 freezers for 2 people, what does that tell you?”
Vannie makes good use of compost and would use more manure if they had it. But they no longer keep chickens, and there’s only one farm left in their town. The farmer spreads his herd’s manure on his own pasture land. She swears by chicken manure mixed with sawdust bedding.
“I always plant a marigold between every cole crop plant,” (cabbages, broccoli, etc.) she says. “It really helps keep the cabbage worms down.” Sherry adds, “Our garden is very balanced, we don’t need to use pesticides.” Vannie again: “I bought ladybugs a couple of years early on. I make sure to till everything under in the fall. We used a chemical once to get rid of flea beetles.” Corn and potatoes, she says, get fertilizer because they’re heavy feeders.
“I soak my seeds and lay them in wet paper towel so they’ll sprout, especially okra, which hates to be transplanted. I just dig a little hole and put the little seeds in. I get on my hands and knees and cover them up so-o carefully,” Vannie demonstrates, cupping her hands together, and there’s that crinkle-eyed smile again. “Whenever I can dig in the dirt it just makes me happy. I can be so tired at the end of a day, but still, being in the garden, digging in the dirt makes me happy.”
Somehow, I think that is her best gardening secret: happiness and love and digging in the dirt to help things grow.
