Morning Friend,
Dad and I managed to get the garden out at the Lake tilled and planted over the weekend and typically, the sojourn with nature left me wiser, humbler and calloused.
Please note I said “calloused” as in, “There goes my hand modeling career”, and not “callous” like my agent telling me, “There goes your hand modeling career”.
I’m talking of course the good old fashioned thickening of one’s palms that comes from a few hours of wrestling and wrangling our trusty “Merry Tiller” through the rich but sparse Canadian Shield soil that is thick with roots, rocks, and more rocks.
The Canadian Shield is a vast horseshoe-shaped area around Hudson Bay covering eastern and central Canada, and a small part of the Northern United States. Some 1.9 million square miles, very nearly half of Canada’s total area, is occupied by the Canadian Shield.
The rocks of the Canadian Shield were formed in Precambrian times 500 million years ago during a lengthy period when two tectonic plates converged, causing the surface rock to be forced down into the interior of the earth, melt, rise back to the surface and slowly cool. The rocks are igneous and metamorphic and contain large areas of granite.
Due to the effects of glaciation during the most recent ice age which started about two and a half million years ago, the Canadian Shield has very thin soil with rocky outcroppings frequently showing.
We’re not talking about prime farm land here unless of course there was a sudden demand for “pet boulders” for which we’d have the market cornered.
But with a little persistence and hard, but “merry” work behind the Merry Tiller, we do manage to get a nice little crop of potatoes, squash, onions etc. out of a modest sized patch of rocky earth.
Over the years the edges of the garden have become strewn with grapefruit to watermelon-sized rocks and boulders merrily heaved there after frequently and frustratingly stalling the tiller’s tines.
And despite the evidence that they did not crawl back into the ground, the bounty of yet more tine-tingling rocks each spring has led to the belief – Dad’s anyway – that the rocks we remove have left “babies” behind that grow in their parents stead over the winter.
It is uncanny really, to till the same patch of ground year after year and find new cantaloupe-sized rocks that you could not possibly have missed, re-appearing like perennial plants.
Like die hard revelers from the tectonic plate party of 500 million years ago, are they late arriving home, straggling to the surface, a few dozen each year catching a Cambrian Taxicab with the rising frost line?
It is a mystery my friend, but no less mysterious or humbling than the sheer rugged beauty from which we will merrily harvest a miraculous feast in the fall ( as anyone who’s tasted new potatoes, onions and cream served at Grace and Jer’s Full Deck Lodge will readily attest !)
There are great sentinel slabs of stone and granite strewn about too large to be heaved aside which we obviously till around.
Older than civilization, they will be here long after you and I have harvested our last potatoes from the fertile bedding of their millennial home.
They silently remind me of life’s certainties and immovable truths.
You till the soil and remove the impediments that you are able to.
How the rocks and roots get in your way is not as important as the fact you have the capacity to remove them, and are wise enough to let the larger ones be.
You plant where you can, as best as you can.
The garden of my life has the gargantuan slab of alcoholism right smack in the middle of it.
It is timelessly old and cumbersome; too huge for me to move and the only thing I’ll ever manage to grow on it – as you can imagine- is moss.
The remaining soil though is arable enough; with a fair bit of tilling and weeding and tending I’ve got a pretty good crop on the go.
There is the familiar endless supply of rocks and roots – small boulders even - but they are proving to be no match for a calloused, and merry, ( bordering on delirious), tiller...
...who’s always available as a “before” hand model?
love tImMy:/
Laugh as long as you breathe...
Love as long as you live ( harvesting)
