When I was growing up in our farm town, yards were consumed with vegetable gardens. They were a source of great pride, and neighbors were given narrated tours when visiting one another, not unlike the way we stroll with one another through our flower gardens now. Much time was spent on summertime porches, shelling beans and husking corn, and much summertime conversation revolved around the subject of crops and the exchange of recipes.

Our own vegetable garden was nearly an acre. We grew rows of peas and assorted beans – pole, yellow, lima, green, cranberry for succotash, cantaloupes and watermelons, zucchini and summer squash, butternut and acorn, pumpkins, root crops – carrots, onions, potatoes, radishes and garlic, cucumbers and pickling cukes, all varieties of lettuces and tomatoes and peppers, asparagus, eggplant, cabbage, broccoli, turnips and parsnips, rhubarb, and rows and rows of corn, ‘Silver Queen’ and ‘Butter and Sugar’, even popcorn. It was mesmerizing to observe my father counting paces, hilling plowed soil, scattering seed, so much information stored in his head and in his hands, annually retrieved and expertly applied. My father was raised on a farm; his father cultivated plants in the “old country”, and his mother harvested wild ones. She could identify edible mushrooms and edible grasses and prepared recipes using “weeds” such as dandelions and sorrel.

Our summertime picnic table looked like Thanksgiving every evening – plates of fresh cut cucumbers and tomatoes, bowls of buttery beans, recipes using squash, fresh salads, new potatoes, crisp dill pickles in the brine, and a steaming stack of sweet corn. Whatever we couldn’t consume, we preserved. There were jars of bread-and-butter pickles, stewed tomatoes, watermelon rinds and relishes, potatoes, carrots and onions stored in the root cellar, and a freezer filled with beans and corn.

What’s changed in our backyards is not the desire for fresh vegetables. It’s the varmints. They’ve multiplied to the extent that growing crops has become an increasingly difficult endeavor. And a frustrating one. Raccoons, woodchucks, rabbits and deer – one or the other can consume all that we’ve labored to grow. Not everyone has the time and the money to expend on warding all of them off from their own particular favorites. While we used to employ tactics like flood lights and a loud radio in the garden nights, the only full-proof option is to install tall and elaborate fencing, which is more expensive in the long run than purchasing the produce of those who’ve fenced because it’s their livelihood, and in frequenting their markets, we support their efforts to cultivate the land with the noble ideal of providing neighbors with healthy food. We are ever grateful for our local farmers and their response to the increased desire for fresh vegetables, organically and locally grown.

Few New Englanders, however, can leave off entirely growing things to feed our families – the single most rewarding aspect of gardening – cultivating, from seed to plate, nutritious food. Instead, we can limit our endeavors and protect a smaller space. With that in mind, we established a raised vegetable garden right outside the kitchen door that provides lettuces in the spring and tomatoes in summer and fall. It’s an ideal solution: because it’s close to the house, most animals are afraid to enter that realm of proximity; raising the crops a few inches off the ground protects them from creeping critters; it’s steps away from the kitchen when we pick ingredients for a salad. Most importantly, it seemed the perfect repurposing for the space that served for so many years as a sand box, right next to the kitchen where I could hear the children’s voices while they prepared their own recipes – pies and cakes for “dessert”. This experiment was so successful we sacrificed space in the herb garden for another raised bed where we grow a variety of peppers. I’ve also noticed terraces draped with cucumbers, cabbages punctuating flower gardens, and corn stalks lining driveways. These small scale operations, close enough to human activity to caution wildlife, cannot fully satisfy our summertime desire for fresh produce as our local farmers can, but they are nonetheless satisfying. Of all the things I grow — and I love every single flower — the tomatoes bring me the greatest summertime joy.

I recently came into possession of a book titled “Vegetables”, with worn edges, a fraying binder, and the words: I think you’ll want this. Opening it, I found page after page filled with my father’s notes — records of every crop planted, dates and diagrams, instructions on thinning and mulching, furrows and fertilizers, prices and plot plans and tables, sketches and schedules – along the margins and on the endsleeves and the flyleaf and every other spare space: …next to onions 5/30/82 1 row French horticulture $1.75 68 days…5/28/91 beans 2 rows succotash east of corn and 6 pickling cucumber plants from Mike Chapel…7/18/99 Sunday short row green beans 50 days short row yellow 54 days germination 6-10 days thin 3” apart when 3” tall. A message with my name was scrawled on the inner cover surrounded with details such as these. Apparently, this was a Christmas present. My father was always the most difficult person to purchase gifts for – he never wanted anything and there’s just so many ties and pajamas a person can use. What a wonder to discover this forty years later, such a treasure to preserve for future generations – to show them — this was the importance of the earth to your great-grandfather, of growing things, of feeding his family. This was his heritage; this is yours.