Windrow Garden Read online

  Windrow Garden

  Copyright 1998 by Janet McClellan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No part of this book may be copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the expressed written permission of the publisher.

  For information, please contact: ArtemisPress, a division of SRS Internet Publishing, 236 West Portal Avenue, #525, San Francisco, California 94127 USA. Visit us on the World Wide Web: www.artemispress.com.

  First published by The Naiad Press, 1998.

  ISBN: 0-9726459-3-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  = Chapter 1 =

  Cold Frames & Hotbeds

  A cold frame or hotbed is the best and simplest tool whether you are a beginning or avid gardener. Either is a tried and true means for starting plants. Everything stored and grown within may be transferred, at the time appropriate for the particular variety, to the waiting garden. If you use either one of these techniques, you will be rewarded with the earliest appearance of the bounty that comes with the spring.

  Tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, peas and flowers of all variety are a few examples of the many things that may be started. All food crops or flowers that need an extended growing season can be initiated in a cold frame or hotbed. If you prefer to start, or wish to experiment with starting, your garden by seed rather than waiting or depending on nurseries, you will be well rewarded by these simple constructions.

  A cold frame is a hotbed that does not have the benefit of artificial heat. It has the dual purpose of providing a space for the hardening off of seedlings started in heated protective shelters and/or letting them acclimate to local weather conditions before placing them in the garden. A cold frame may also be used to force bulbs or to protect hardy or partially-hardy biennial and perennial flowers. Cold frames may double as hotbeds if you place them in protected places and if they face the south and have water, heat, good drainage, and location where you can keep an eye on your prospects.

  You may construct an old-fashioned hotbed or cold frame by digging a pit twenty-four to thirty inches deep. The finished, full size of the frame should provide enough space to meet your needs. A minimum of five-by-six feet to a maximum of six-by-eight feet is recommended for the average gardener. Construct the wooden frame to fit in the pit so that the walls extend above the soil line about eight to ten inches on the low side and fourteen to sixteen inches on the high side.

  Note: Place the high side of the protected hotbed against a building and face it so that the sunlight pervades the interior. Make the frame full (four sided). The high side against the building should be lined with plastic; the low side should be unlined to allow for drainage. Fill and mound the outside of the framed pit with soil. Place the mounded soil against the outside walls. This provides additional insulation and protection for the tender seedlings and plants you are trying to nurture.

  In the pit from which the soil has been removed, place eighteen to twenty-four inches of manure. It is strongly recommended that you use manure from horses or cows and that you add straw or other natural, biodegradable litter. Cover the manure with six inches of soil. Water the contents of the hotbed or cold frame thoroughly.

  Enclose the top of the cold frame or hotbed with an easy-to-remove cover of framed glass, Plexiglas, or plastic to keep in the heat and the natural moisture condensation that will form. Make the framed cover light and easy to lift or prop up so that you can get at the seedlings.

  In about two weeks the manure in the hotbed will begin to ferment and generate enough heat for the seedlings. Do not plant until then. Fresh manure is too harsh, and seedlings will perish from the lethal soil. Cold frames may take a little longer for the proper fermentation to take place. Seedlings may be started in the house or the outdoor planters after you have finished the construction of the hotbed or cold frame. Paper mesh cups or any other kind containing a planting soil and the seeds you wish to start may be placed inside in a south-facing window. The sun or, in a less temperate region, the constant heat of a common lamp, will aid your new plants in getting started.

  Planting seeds in the cold frame or hotbed takes some care. Mark off shallow rows, about four to eight inches apart in the prepared bed and sprinkle the seeds. Do not overfill; four to eight seeds per inch of row is sufficient.

  After the young plants emerge from the soil, you will want to thin the plants to one plant per every two inches. New growth will need room to expand. Firm the soil over the seedlings and water very gently, keeping in mind that these are young growing things. Make sure to mark each row with an empty container of seeds or other marker. Nothing is more disturbing than losing your place. Allow six to eight weeks before transplanting the seedlings to the garden or field. Refer to the instructions on the packages (the ones you saved) that give the proper planting depth and germination temperatures for the seedlings.

  With some attention, time, and tenderness, you will be rewarded for your efforts.

  Groundwork

  Sally Windrow straightened her aching back and leaned against the hoe. She cast her eyes northwest to the line of growing gray clouds. A woolen scarf wrapped close to her auburn hair and tightly around her neck protected her from gusts of wind and the thawing winter’s chill. The farmhand work clothes she had chosen for the day’s labors camouflaged her full, work-firmed body. She was practical, pragmatic, and unafraid of hard work. Although she would deny it, she was a risk taker. Her practical, conservative temperament shared a curious lack of recognition that she, like other farmers, gambled with their lives by betting against the unpredictabilities of nature.

  She stood on the southeast corner of the modest house that had once been her parents' home. Her father had built the house on the farm shortly after his return from Vietnam. Before he’d managed to use his GI Bill, and until Sally was five, they had lived in one of the two cottages his father had built for the hired hands. He had built their home with timber from their own woods. He’d milled the lumber himself and then sold the small lumber saw for the money he needed for a poured concrete basement. White vinyl siding, trimmed out in black on the frames and windows, now covered the former clapboard. It was the same rambling three-bedroom ranch house Sally had grown up in except for the expanded living room she’d added to accommodate her new fireplace. Her daughter claimed her old bedroom. Sally used her parents' bedroom for her home office, and she had laid claim to the larger spare bedroom as her own.

  From where she stood at the side of the house, she could view the wide sweep of the five-acre clutch of barns, restaurant with its parking lot, hired-hand housing and cottages, outbuildings, machinery sheds, sheltered greenhouses, and animal shelters with their fenced pens. It was the working nucleus of her farming domain. It was the heart of what her life had returned to, where she regained a peace with herself and a sense of belonging again.

  The farm had changed during the seventy-five years her family had owned it. Her grandparents had first secured a toehold in the land, and with hard work they let their roots sink deep to secure the future. Each generation had added something —barns outbuildings, animal sheds, tool and equipment sheds, and garages for all manner of vehicles. In the Forties, Grandfather Windrow had planted new orchards of nut-bearing trees, added strategically arranged beehives, and constructed the two large glass-paneled nurseries.

  In the Sixties, Sally’s father added several small cottages and converted an old barn into a triplex for the live-in hired help and their families. The li
ving quarters for the hired help had been her mother’s idea. Her mother had reasoned, and rightly so, that good help was hard to find and keep without offering more stability than mere wages. Her mother’s insight had changed Windrow Garden from a family concern into a small community.

  As she looked northward, Sally could see, sense, and smell the coming changes in the weather. The unusual, teasingly balmy last days of winter would shift again, and not for the better. What had passed for warmth had made it possible to begin to prepare the machinery for spring chores. The sky and rising winds foretold the possibilities of cold or freezing rain. A typical March prank. Neither would be welcome. If the freeze did come, Sally knew that winter might not loosen its hold completely until April was well underway. Bad weather now would slow and make difficult the work that she and her staff needed to complete before one of the busiest times of the year.

  Spring required the preparation of the land, fertilizing, disking, sowing, and transplanting the readied seedlings. Everything took time, and delays would produce uncertainties for the intended truck-farm crops. Farm creatures might suffer and reduce their gifts. Chickens would lay fewer eggs, cows would produce less milk, and ewes would have hard birthing. Everything responded to the weather.

  Weather was the conversation, concern, and consternation of all who depended on the land. It focused the attention, shaded the mood, and tightened the stomach in dismay. Her father had once told Sally that the reason people in the Midwest spent so much time talking about the weather was because there was so much of it. He’d meant change, and change in weather was the constant of farming life. She’d sought stability and comfort in every other aspect of her life that she could manage. It had not done that much good. When the cancer had taken her husband, she’d discovered that change came in more forms than weather and often with more devastating results.

  The weather threatened now. Sharp, gusting breezes danced about her in warning. A northern blow was coming, and she felt her irritation rise. She’d hoped and prayed for a lasting and gentle end of winter, but the dark cloud bank made her realize she’d been hoping against her own better wisdom of Kansas. Cold rain and tiny pellets of ice and snow might come from those clouds. If it did, it would confine her to the house or tiny roadside restaurant and the tasks she might manage there. It was not an idea she relished. She preferred the outdoors. Fresh air, even cold fresh air, was stimulating. She’d grown accustomed to it, and she felt more in her element outdoors than in the confines of the restaurant she’d built.

  She squinted. Fine lines traced their minute, sun-etched paths from the corners of her green eyes. Sally knew they were there, but she wasn’t bothered that they’d begun to show at thirty-two. She’d earned them. They might have begun in the lonely hours and years that had passed since her life had been unaccountably rearranged by death. For her part, Sally believed the lines had begun to arrive with her return to the sun, wind, and rain that farmwork exposed her to. It did not matter. As far as she was concerned, they were a small price for the life that brought her heart joy again.

  She’d come home to the farm three years ago to become the third generation to own and operate the farm. It had been something she never thought she would do. But come back she did, six months after her husband’s death. She and her daughter returned after Sally graduated from a culinary school. Sorrow and the need to put distance between them and their old life brought them home. They arrived with a small faith in the certainty of the changing of the Midwestern seasons, the hope for a reaffirmation in life, and time. Hope and work had sustained them as the shock of their loss slowly receded.

  Her mother had been so pleased when Sally brought her own contribution and the fourth generation to the farm with her. Sally’s daughter, Gwynn Marian, named for both grandmothers, was twelve going on twenty-five. A miniature replica of Sally’s youthful, wiry self, Gwynn Marian had initially been appalled at being transplanted into the country life. Bright, gregarious, flamboyant, and a serious tomboy, she quickly acclimated. She discovered the freedom of space, the liberty of rolling hills, the secrets of wooded tracts, and the opportunity of heady speed that her pony provided. When not engaged in pursuits across the two sections of acreage deeded to her mother, Gwynn Marian would read, surf the monitored Internet, and entertain herself with the affordable luxury of cable television.

  A little loner, transplanted from the urban environs and progressive educational systems of Dayton, Ohio, Gwynn Marian found her local classmates little more than amusing. She tolerated them but found it hard to take them seriously as friends, academic competition, or athletic contenders. She missed her father. She’d try to remember his kindness, interest in her life, and the confidence he’d provided. In the three years since his death, his face had faded from sharp memory to a faint shadow renewed only by disheartening curious reminders offered in photos.

  Sally glanced at the hotbeds and cold frames where they lay huddled against the south sides of her house, nearby greenhouses, and barns. In two to four weeks, the cold frames and hotbeds would become the first homes to a variety of vegetables for the gardens used by the people and families on farms and in towns throughout the county. She and the other hands on the farm would begin sowing the vegetables that needed the greatest length of time before transplanting. Sally was in a hurry for spring and wanted to see the new shoots working their way through the soil.

  It was very different from the farm her grandfather had bought. His original garden plots had grown from feeding his small family to supplying the local farmer’s market and grocery and health food stores throughout the surrounding metropolitan area. From small and modest beginnings, the truck farm had grown under the careful and watchful hands of her family for seventy years. It had become a family corporation of truck farming, greenhouses, and Sally’s addition of a restaurant featuring home cooking and scrumptious cheesecakes served in the house that had once belonged to her grandparents. The sign for Windrow Garden Restaurant faced the two-lane blacktop. Its reputation, if not the location, drew people from the surrounding small communities of Leavenworth, Lansing, Bashor, Tonganoxie, and even a few strays from both Kansas Cities snuggled against the banks of the Missouri River.

  Two meals a day, Wednesday through Sunday, and all the cheesecakes that Sally’s imagination and available ingredients might provide were offered. The meals were simple. You got whatever was the one main fare prepared for each sitting. Everyday it was something new, but there was only one choice coming out of the small converted kitchen, and that was whatever Sally had planned.

  Soups, hot breads, potatoes mashed or fried, salad, and cheesecakes were staples. Even a vegetarian could thrive on the fresh or home-canned creations she prepared in the kitchen. The main meal was always the surprise and the point of basic culinary interest for her guests. The Midwestern taste for meat and potatoes received a jolt through the nontraditional glories she packed into the chief course. Fish, fowl, beef, lamb, or pork, but only one. One drawn and created with heart and mind bent on pleasing the eye, filling the inner void, and titillating the tongue. One at a time. It saved money in preparation and ensured full use of what she’d provisioned. The day’s fare was available to paying guests and farmhand alike. There was always enough but not so much that profit was thrown away.

  The idea of converting her grandparents' house into a restaurant had seemed a good idea at the time. Lately, however, Sally had begun to wonder if she’d bitten off more than she might chew. Her mother, Gwynn, had encouraged her in her entrepreneurial spirit and happily moved to the nearby town of Leavenworth, Kansas, to be closer to other retired friends. Sally had no difficulty securing a loan for her project. The farm and its long legacy had been more than enough collateral. Legacy or not, money had been a little tight over the last year. There were resident hired hands to pay and new restaurant staff to compensate. The combined operations made money, paid the bills, and provided for her and her daughter’s needs. It had taken most of Sally’s time and much work to g
et the restaurant operating as a quasi-profitable venture and to keep the farm prosperous. She tried never to steal time from her daughter. Instead, she stole it from herself. Her social life had been reduced to the hub of her farm.

  She put time, heart, and soul into the farm and restaurant. She had not forsaken love. Sally simply put it out of her mind. She did not allow herself time to think or do anything other than work. When she did think of love, she conveniently fortified her resolve to ignore her heart’s whispered yearnings by attending to a project until the idea evaporated under the exertions.

  She would tell herself that she had her daughter, her work, and the farm. She tried to let that be enough. Sometimes it was. She could toil in the restaurant with staff or labor in the field with farmhands and could go for days without feeling lonely. Her mind knew there was no other place in the world she would rather be, no other thing that she would rather be doing, and no life she would rather live. Still, her heart’s regret was that her satisfaction came at the price of being alone.

  Sally stretched her back against the awkward strain her tasks had caused her, frowned again at the low rolling clouds, and turned back to her work. There was always work to be done on the farm. And in Kansas, spring would have its typical struggle to take hold of the world again.

  She dropped her hoe, turned back to the wheelbarrow, and lifted out another shovel of dirt to cover the hotbed’s layer of manure. She automatically glanced at the untreated wood of the hotbed, checking it for weathering and rot. She never used treated wood. It would have leaked chemicals into the soil and tainted the seedlings she intended to grow. There would be no taint in her organic farm. However, she would have to repair the plastic sheeting on the framed lids. Even thickest clear plastic could not last through more than two seasons. Wind, weather, storms, and accidental rips were part of their lot.