My first vegetable garden holds a special place in my heart. I was living in Vermont working as a reporter in the Montpelier bureau of the Associated Press. I had spent a little less than a year on a weekly newspaper on the coast of Maine but the AP was my first big job in journalism. Instead of taking an apartment in downtown Montpelier, which was probably the normal thing for a 23-year-old single male to do, I rented a farmhouse in the village of Plainfield eight miles east of the capital. It was about a half-mile up a steep dirt road from the Plainfield general store. (It’s where I bought my first cast iron skillet, which I own to this day.)
My landlords were Mr. and Mrs. Perry, a kind elderly couple who lived in the right half of the house and rented the left side to me. The furniture was old and smelled faintly of cat pee. The kitchen had an electric stove whose coils would glow a sinister red when I cooked. There wasn’t much hot water in the upstairs bathroom so I’d boil water on the stove in pots and ferry it upstairs to take a bath. I’d wash my hair by pouring water over my head with a plastic cup. On the plus side, Mrs. Perry would often leave a piece of apple pie and a slice of cheddar for me in the front hallway to welcome me home from work. I gained about 10 pounds!
It was a beautiful setting, a former dairy farm with a big white barn surrounded by acres of open fields and a commanding view of Camel’s Hump mountain 40 miles to the west. I moved there in January with my cat Pete and admittedly was a little lonely when I wasn’t working, especially during what turned out to be a bitterly cold winter. It was so cold some mornings that my mug of coffee would freeze to the roof of my little orange Peugeot Le Car if I put it down there while I scraped ice off the windows before heading to the AP bureau for the early shift.
When spring finally arrived I decided to plant a vegetable garden.
I had never had planted a garden so I bought a book. I followed it religiously. I’m pretty sure Mr. Perry was tickled with the idea but it’s hard to say. He had a twinkle in his eye most of the time anyway, and was something of a gardener himself. His special pride was his hollyhocks, which grew in beds on both sides of the front door. I’ve never grown hollyhocks but maybe I should now in his honor.
Mr. Perry took me to the barn, pointed to a massive red rototiller and a rusty can of gas and told me to have at it. And so this young kid from the New Jersey suburbs started tilling the soil. I’m lucky I didn’t lose a leg. The grass was thick and the soil was heavy with clay, but Mr. Perry told me the spot alongside the barn had been the site of a garden back in the day.
The funny thing is I can’t remember much of what I grew except I know I had great success with zucchini, which the garden book had instructed me to plant in mounds of soil.
My biggest success, though, was convincing my girlfriend to come up from New York and spend the summer with me in Vermont. Katie had just finished her first year getting her MFA at Brooklyn College. When she arrived in her Ford Pinto, her little black dog George riding shotgun, she quickly set up a studio, started painting verdant green landscapes with maple trees and figures, and enthusiastically joined me in tending to the garden and enjoying its harvest.
It was the summer of zucchini bread, zucchini pizza and zucchini pancakes, courtesy of recipes inspired by the Horn of the Moon cafe in Montpelier, which served a delicious hippie-veggie cuisine that we would rediscover a few years later in Mollie Katzen’s landmark Moosewood cookbook.
It was also the summer when Katie and I fell fully in love. Forty-four years later, she’s here gardening alongside me in the Berkshires and painting in her studio. You can find images of her beautiful paintings at kathrynfreeman.com.
Here’s Mollie Katzen’s recipe for zucchini-crusted pizza, which we still make now and then, sometimes with a little less cheese!