Gardening in Vermont

Last summer, after having lived in Arlington since childhood, I was finally able to follow a long-held dream and move to the Vermont countryside, in sunny farm country where gardening couldn't be much different from shady Arlington.

The soil is different-- moderate to heavy clay. The critters are different-- red, not gray squirrels, rabbits and mice, not racoons. The bugs are different-- millions of Japanese beetles and cabbage loopers, but no lily leaf beetles or, so far, aphids. Even the water is different-- cheap municipal water drawn from nearby Lake Champlain, not the wildly expensive MWRA liquid. On the up side, you can drink and bathe in the MWRA stuff without feeling like you're drinking swimming pool water from the heavy cholorination, as I do here. The cats won't touch it, but the plants don't seem to mind.

The climate zone, at least, where I am in the Champlain Valley, isn't much different from my former cold corner of Arlington. I figure I was 6A there, and 5B here.

The previous owners of my 1860s house (for 50 years!) weren't much for gardening and my two acres of property, though separated from the adjacent farm fields by sugar maples, a couple of elms, a nice stand of white spruce and other trees, are mostly golf-course-like lawn. So I'm struggling to figure out how and where to transform at least some of this property into the kind of flower/shrub gardens I like. I haven't been proceeding in a very organized way at all, just thrown in a shrub or two and experimented with some perennials in a couple of hard-dug beds around the house. I've really got to get organized this winter!

I've put much more of my gardening energy this first summer season into establishing a large vegetable garden, with mostly terrific results this first year in the virgin soil, and learning how to manage the very fertile clay and the 10 or 12 hours of sun a day. Now I'm plunging into canning my overload of tomatoes, freezing beans and corn, and figuring out how to store my potatoes and beets so the mice don't eat them before I can.

One of the few things I regret about moving here is the absence of anything resembling the kind of on-line community Arlington has. Most people here have Internet service of one kind or another (my tiny local telco has DSL that reaches all the way out to my house-- nowhere near as speedy as Comcast or RCN cable broadband, but good enough), but the concept of on-line community groups is only beginning to catch on in Vermont's "cities" -- Burlington, the biggest, is 30,000 population, and it goes rapidly down from there -- and hasn't reached the rural areas at all.

So the community of Menotomygardeners looms large for me as a resource, an outlet, and a connection back to the town that was my home for so many years, and this blog should be a fun extension of it.