Gardening

Every year, Oregon’s April just hammers me. I’ll toddle briskly through winter’s months, savoring the rains, blissfully indulging an interior life, inside our house and inside my own skull. I revel in the rains, regard them as profound blessings, in their various forms, from the feathermist, so light it won’t dimple the meniscus on a pond but will leave a walker soaked, to the guttergusher that floods fields and leaps river banks. I fret when, as recently, we enter a dry spell.

The numbers are in, says The New York Times: 2012 was the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous U.S. 2012 also turned out to be the second-worst on record for climate extremes, amassing 11 weather disasters that exceeded $1 billion in costs, including tornadoes, freak storms, floods and catastrophic drought. Globally, the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the warmest on record. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th century average, because the last such month was February 1985. Welcome to a warmer world. 

One of the smallest and nicest farm stands in Eugene can be found in the courtyard of the Excelsior Inn on 13th Avenue. It is operated each Friday, July through October, by Angela Andre, manager of Excelsior Farm. When Andre’s garlic caught my eye, it was the first I’d heard of Excelsior Farm. In the fall of 2009, the owner of the Excelsior Inn and Restorante, Maurizio Paparo, turned a 5-acre pasture on his property into a farm to supply the restaurant with fresh organic eggs and produce. He hired Andre, a veteran organic farmer, to set up and manage the farm.

To all the people who grow and sell vegetable starts, thank you! Those little trays of baby plants, locally grown and ready to go, are well worth the money for a casual gardener like me. I love eating out of the garden, but there are only two of us. I don’t need to grow a heap of food, and I don’t have a lot of time to harvest and put food by. Besides, I like to support the local farmers, who grow many things far better than I can.

When the great March snowfall struck the Willamette Valley, I was basking in unseasonably warm New York sunshine. As we landed in Eugene a few days later, piles of grayish snow at the airport were still evident. But by far the more powerful testimony was the carnage we saw among the trees. The streets were mostly cleared but broken branches were piled everywhere, in front yards, medians and park strips. The first thing we noticed was that most of the destruction seemed to involve purple leafed plums, which had been in full, ravishing pink bloom when the snow fell.