This time of year in Maine where summer has turned to day after day of blue skies and sunshine, vegetable gardens have taken off.
The food from a Maine garden is satisfying on many levels. First the wholesome, natural home grown taste can make your mouth water as you think of new potatoes, beats, lettuce, peas, beans. Or plucking onions, looking for cucumbers and eventually squash and corn can have the same reaction.
Maine has lots of roadside vegetable stands and down town farmers markets. But the garden out behind or beside a home spring up all around the area of Maine I live.
Pride in some Maine gardens with flowers mixed in along the edges.
Or a hanging plastic owl to attempt to keep four legged thieves out of that garden.
But too much rain, or an infestation of potato aphids, other pests mean a watchful eye is needed to get the garden from spring planting to harvest through the summer in to fall harvest. That is the true essence of farming. Planting, tilling, watering, providing love and attention.
Gardens in Maine, anywhere do not just happen. And they can get away from you. Or you can be slow on the draw getting them in. Seedlings germinating in moist paper towels in the kitchen cooking bowl. Planted in peat pots with the green peppers, tomatoes destined for the south side sun porch as they shoot skyward.
Maine home grown local food is pretty addictive.
Three times a day at least it is nice to be able to sit down, put on the feed bag and get the empty stomach alarm to go off. Settle down. But working with the Maine weather you have adds to the unpredictable sport of gardening too.
Do you plant a garden and how big, what kinds of vegetables or fruits? Have you been part of the very chatty, social lot that show up at local Maine farmer’s markets? And while we’re on the subject, do you raise chickens, eggs, other produce? What you eat, where it came from and saving money make being on your knees in a Maine garden a win win win situation. Where I live on the Canadian border, trips to pick strawberries, apples is common to subsidize what we grow on our own on this side of the Maine International border.