Forty-eight years ago today … or yesterday … or was it last week …. we began gardening here at the house at the top of Sleepy Hollow. Nat Stone, owner of the house which wasn’t to become ours until July, had directed Bud Feener and his tractor to the wild tangle of alders and raspberries beyond the house as the likeliest spot. It was there that Bud plowed up the ground for our first garden, furrows running down hill toward the brook.

Vonnie, Nat’s wife, took us aside to tell us that was the wrong place for a garden, but it was too late. The deed was done, the ground broken. We figured we’d make it work. She was right. Some five years later we gave up. It was indeed a lousy garden spot.

Faint furrows of that first garden are still visible if you know where to look. My muscles remember pushing a wheelbarrow full of our cow’s manure down to that beastly spot, hands remember the blisters.

But all the while we were struggling to make a real garden, to grow our own food I carried in my mind’s eye a picture of what it would look like. Neat rows of green marching down the hill. I even painted pictures of it, the cabbages and corn, tomatoes and beans, dark bands of rich soil setting them off. My mind’s garden had no weeds, no bare spots where stuff hadn’t come up, with rich, composty soil you could pick up by the handful and sniff.

Making the decision to abandon that first spot and move the garden next to the house just made the picture clearer. It didn’t make the reality much better. We were following organic practices – sort of. Meaning no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides. Making compost was still a mystery we weren’t willing to plumb; after all, we had gobs of animal manure – cow, pig, chicken – so who needed compost?

Our crops were often spotty, small, misshapen carrots, things that withered inexplicably, a few lumpy cucumbers while our neighbor, Ben Mikutajcis, who gardened exclusively with bags of 5-10-5 and never added a leaf or a speck of poop to his soil, was selling brown paper bags full of cucumbers to Dick McLaughlin down at the Pound.

Competition is a mixed blessing when it comes to gardening. The comparisons are too harsh.

Cabbage worms ate their way through our broccoli; I had to surrepticiously pick them out of the cooked stuff before feeding it to the kids; flea beetles decimated the radishes, and army worms set up housekeeping in every ear of corn. Worst of all, for the lovely vision I had of our garden, were the weeds that overcame the whole thing by the end of July.

It was a sea of galinsoga – or as we always have called it, inaccurately, chickweed – a pesky annual that has so liberally salted our soil with seed over the years that I’ll never get rid of it. It’s easy to pull up, but once going it grows taller than most of the vegetables it’s competing with. It’s all you see in August, that cloud of green with its tiny, white daisy-like blossoms waving in the breeze, taller than the green beans, filling the rows between the corn.

Gradually we began building raised beds, until last year, while in the throes of numbness and grief at being left alone, my first spring without my life’s partner, I built a maze of them. Green hemlock boards, 2 x 10s, held up with 2-foot pieces of rebar staked at either end, 30 inches apart form a couple of concentric semi-circular planting beds. We, D-I-L Tracee and I, filled them with the previous year’s garden detritus – bean stalks, tomato plants, asparagus ferns – as well as a good number of twigs, sticks and branches.

Huglekultur, using woody stuff at the bottom of a bed with a layer of compost/soil on top, is what this is called, and the theory is that the woody matter slowly decomposes over years forming a damp base that holds water, nourishing the plants growing above. Think of the forest floor as a giant huglekultur bed.

So what do those beds look like a year later. Well, the larger branches are still intact; I can’t spade deeply without turning them up, but we successfully grew green beans and peppers and herbs in them last year. I wouldn’t try root vegetables yet, but almost anything else should thrive.

What last year was a huge job making those beds, digging out paths, setting up boards, hauling stuff to fill them with has been a simple matter this spring of straightening up a few of the boards and spading up the soil.

A year-long project involved children in grades 4-8 creating, under the direction of Lincolnville ceramicist Randy Fein, a ceramic relief mural of the Megunticook Watershed. The project is described in a Pilot article. The mural will be unveiled on Tuesday, May 22 at a 6:30 program in Walsh Common.

Yesterday’s program at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland which featured our LCS fourth and seventh graders, as well as Appleton, Hope and Rockland students in those grades, was a wonderful event. Called “Stories of the Land and Its People”, this project is a joint effort between the Farnsworth and the schools’ art, science, math, and language arts teachers.

All are invited to a  presentation, 7 p.m., Wednesday May 22 at the Library by local author Susan St. John who will give an illustrated talk on her recent book To Sail Beyond the Sunset about her 30 years as a sea instructor with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.  

 Coming up next Monday, 9 am. to 3 p.m. the Library holds its annual Plant and Book Sale at the Library.  Stop by before or after the parade, find some great books, plants for your garden, and help support our own Library!

Following the guidelines of the United Christian Church Conference the congregation of the Center’s UCC welcomed the search committee’s choice for a new pastor, Elizabeth D. Barnum on Sunday. After hearing her lead the worship service the congregation remained behind to discuss and then voted to call her to serve the church.

 Elizabeth, as she prefers to be called, was ordained 11 years ago and has served as a pastor in western Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Australia and Michigan. Religious education has been her focus. A Connecticut native, she is now happily returning to New England. She will begin here in Lincolnville on August 1. All agreed it was a good day for the church.

Another Vision

Turning the old Center Schoolhouse into the town’s Library started as a vision. Somebody pictured it.

 Seeing the old general store reborn as a vital and beautiful structure serving the town started as a vision

 Somebody imagined building a spacious, modern fire station on an empty piece of land a mere half a mile from the old, out-grown one.

 Another somebody saw a functional Boat Club facility where that out-grown fire station was that included a rental space that today houses two working potters.

 Reconfiguring Atlantic Highway through Lincolnville Beach, with sidewalks and curbs, planting beds and an efficient parking lot started out as an image in someone’s mind.

 So here’s another one. Imagine that handsome brick sidewalk that stretches along the seawall, then up across Frohock Bridge is reproduced five miles inland and goes from Breezemere Park to the Library. Children at the Boat Club’s summer programs will have a safe place to walk, visitors to the Veterans Park can walk up to the Library.

 That’s a start.

 Now imagine that sidewalk leads right up Main Street past Janis Kay’s new garden shop to Petunia Pump, on to the General Store and up to the Community Building and church.

 Our Center will become a real Village with children walking/roller skating/riding bikes, parents pushing strollers, walking dogs, visiting with neighbors.

 If enough of us can vision it, it will happen.