The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
So it isn't my imagination that strawberries and peaches and most particularly, tomatoes, don't taste as wonderful as they did years ago?
Not enough goat poo.
In graduate school, we plowed a garden behind our little house. This was Keswick, just outside of Charlottesville, where horse farms abound, so we took a large trash can and drove to a neighboring farm and knocked on the door, trashcan in our arms and asked if we could buy a can full of horsepoop.
The lady of the manor laughed and told us to help ourselves, no charge. THere is a blank space in my memory of how we got the stuff into the can, but I remember driving home with it in the back of our VW van clearly, windows all open and laughing at the smell.
Our garden that summer was bounteous. We had so many tomatoes we couldn't use them all and would have friends over for tomato throwing competitions using the trees for targets. The cucumbers were three feet long. Even the eggplant flourished and I learned to make a great ratatouille.
I would go out into the garden with a shaker of garlic salt, pull warm tomatoes off the vine and eat them right there, the juice running down my chin. I've eaten in some of the best restaurants here and in Europe and nothing has come close to those tomato lunches.
It was like living in Eden- I sang a Haydn aria once from The Creation and I always thought of that garden
With verdure clad the fields appear,
Delightful to the ravished sense
And all because of a trashcan full of horsepoo.
So bring on those goats. |
