Fleur-de-Puff

When I moved back to State College 10+ years ago, the Centre County Master Gardener group gave me a ready-made community. Sure, I miss my Lehigh Valley MGs, but I still keep in touch and it was nice to expand my MG connectedness locally.

Norm at home in his Magic Garden

At one point along the way I was invited to dinner at the home of Pam and Norm with my mom and another MG. Norm is a master vegetable grower and we traded garlic bulbs and vegetable stories in my early years of returning to State College.  Sorry to say I can’t remember the meal Pam prepared, but I remember the conversation. One of Pam’s favorite stores was my mother’s gourmet kitchenware shop, The Country Sampler in Boalsburg.  She talked to my mother about her memories and favorite recipes from the shop.

Pam and Norm live on several acres and a beautiful home not far from Colyer Lake, one of the most scenic spots in Central PA. They moved there from Park Forest (which gardeners disparagingly call “Dark Forest”), a neighborhood in State College that challenges even the best vegetable growers. 

Now they have Sun, with a capital S. Wide-open views. Soaring birds of prey. And their closest neighbor, neigh-neigh, is Magic the Horse.  

Norm planted apple, pear, and cherry trees. Not far from his patio, he has an 8-foot-high chain-link fence (to keep the deer out) around a vegetable garden that’s the size of a tennis court. The patio is a staging area for transplanting seedlings from cold frames and seeding trays.  There is another vegetable plot along the road in front of their house, Norm’s “low-rent” garden.

The closest Pam gets to any of Norm’s vegetable gardens is when she’s on the lawn tractor, mowing the grass that surrounds the beds. Once the vegetables are harvested and brought into the kitchen, that’s another story. Pam takes over. 

For years Norm has grown vegetable plants for giveaways to Food Bank customers as part of our MG Homegrown Project, which Norm and my friend Jan co-chair. But what about the actual vegetables grown in Norm’s garden, the excess that Norm and Pam can’t eat or preserve? Well, for a few years several Food Banks made produce pickups at Norm’s place.

Fast-forward to spring 2021. Norm and Jan create a hybrid called the Food Bank Farm Team.  The FBFT was initiated to assist Norm with the planting, weeding and harvesting of crops bound for local food banks. Norm is the vegetable production brains; Jan is the Sign-Up Genius brains. She recruits and juggles the womenpower assisting Norm in the garden, makes sure each bin and box is weighed or counted, and generally organizes everything.  Norm calls her “The Countess”.

Meanwhile, what does the rest of the team do? A little bit of everything. 

Norm’s Golden Rule of Soil Care: Don’t step on the planting beds, that’s what paths are for. Even leaning on the soil in a bed with your hand is verboten.  Norm has a 4-foot-long plank to lay between rows especially for that purpose.  Norm’s Magic Garden is his pride and joy, the soil fueled by well-aged and abundant horse manure, courtesy of Magic.

Early on I bragged that my specialty was pushing the wheelbarrow, after years of caring for ponies and horses, llamas and chickens. So, I steer the barrow filled with garden debris to compost piles. When the wheelbarrow is filled with hefty butternut squash or pumpkins, I let Norm take the lead.

We transplant romaine, oak leaf and Bibb lettuce, and then plant some more. We weed around garlic, carrots, and peppers. Over the summer I probably pulled my weight in purslane, Norm’s No. 1 weed. And, no, I did not give The Countess that number. We pick tomatoes, beans and eggplant; pull up red onions, white onions, and blueish-black skinned red beets.

Pam, bless her, welcomes us to use the house bathroom (despite our garden crud), and treats us to snacks of Melitzanosalata (Greek eggplant dip) on toast, coffeecake, or Sungold tomatoes. 

We make it fun. Norm cuts off heads of cabbage and lobs them over the 4-foot-high fence surrounding the low-rent garden.  I catch and stack them in the garden cart. Barb tugs a tangled web of cucumber vines as she recalls teaching English in Hungary when the Berlin Wall came down.

If I notice a wimpy lettuce seedling in the garden, I tease Jo that she must have planted that one. (Jo is an interior decorator; she normally plants for blossoms, not for vegetables, and doesn’t mind a little ribbing.)  Hours spent side-by-side with Jan, Phoebe, Lisa, Sharon, Chris, Kate, and Laura are as colorful as the monarchs that balance on the Tithonia and the goldfinches that snack on sunflowers.

Throughout the summer we see the garden ABCs: apples, broccoli, cantaloupes, cherries, cauliflower, and cabbages, ah, Norm loves cabbages. All the way to the end of the alphabet and into fall, three of us spend two hours stripping and unweaving pole bean vines from the X, X, X’s of the chain-link fence. WhY, I got a lot of Zzzz’s that night!

After one work session, Pam came out of the house and mentioned they had weekend visitors and she made my mother’s “Puff.” 

What a rush of memories. My dad would pour coffee from the French press into Hadley mugs while my mother brought The Puff to the atrium, placing it in the middle of the white wicker dining table.  She made The Puff in a fluted brown Dansk casserole.  Daughters, sons-in-law, and probably a handful of toddling grandchildren were ready for breakfast. The Puff was more than a dish, it was entertainment, as my mother squeezed a lemon inserted with a spout over the puffy golden pillow dusted with powdered sugar. 

A quick email to Pam and a recipe arrives electronically. To commemorate The Country Sampler’s 25^th anniversary my mother gave packets of favorite recipes to her customers. More than 25 years later, Pam still has hers.  I’m sure my mother is smiling. Laurie Lynch

Norm’s the Man: To mark the end of our season, we gave Norm one of my old Fleur-de-Lys Farm slates. “What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” by Charles Dudley Warner, 1870. On the flip side we wrote: “And the Food Bank Farm Team FBFT” with each of us signing our name.

Pam’s the Star: On my last visit with members of the FBFT, I brought Pam a special treat.  One of my homegrown Meyer lemons to squeeze on her next Puff.

The Countess Countdown: This growing season 4,500 pounds of produce from Norm and Pam’s place were packed into pickup trucks driven by Food Bank volunteers, bound for Philipsburg, Port Matilda, and Centre Hall.

The Laurie Countdown: Besides his vast knowledge, Norm shares his garden bounty with helpers.  Among my favorites are a personal-size Savoy cabbage, asparagus, rhubarb, and knobby gourds for fall décor.  He also gifted me with calla lily bulbs for containers, and lupine seed pods, and black-eyed Susan, Sue, and Suzannah, for next year’s flowerbeds.

Happy Thanksgiving

Fleur-de-Mast

I’ve known the term mast year for a while … but I didn’t know—or knew and forgot—the definition of mast.

But that’s the great thing about life, we’re always learning.  Or re-learning. 

After reaping the benefit of my neighbor’s Lodi apple surplus (and spotting apple trees all over Centre County chockful of apples), noticing the oak tree on my walk with a good 50 gallons of acorns, and spying conifer branches dangling with an abundance of golden pine cones, I decided to take a closer look at the word mast.  

In a mast year, we get bumper crops on certain trees. And mast, it turns out, is the collective term for fruits and nuts, just as livestock is the collective term for cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and horses. Depending on the species and probably a lot of other things, mast years occur every 5-10 years.  Although this increased production of fruits or nuts slightly stunts the growth of the tree, it does provide extra food for birds, squirrels, chipmunks, deer and other wildlife.  Most importantly to the tree itself, a mast year increases the chance of offspring—slender apple, oak or pine saplings—getting a foothold in the yard, orchard or forest. 

In one sense, I could boast about having a mast year with my Meyer lemon tree, but I don’t know if that is necessarily correct.  You see, this is the first year she has borne any fruit to maturity, so I don’t know if 10 gorgeous, plump Meyer lemons are par for the course or a bonanza. 

My potted Meyer lemon (ML for short) was a gift from my son Richard, several years ago. Citrus x meyeri, as botanists would say, is native to China, a hybrid thought to be a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange. The Meyer lemon fruit is said to be sweeter than other lemons and I’ve read that the peels are tasty and great for cooking. 

We were living at my mother’s house with a beautiful, sky-lit atrium filled with tropical plants, sunshine and a tile floor with a drain for easy, hose-held watering. ML was in paradise. She filled the room with the fragrance of her tiny white-smudged-with-violet flowers.  And, with or without Laurie and her Q-Tip, many of those blossoms evolved into teensy green fruit (the size of a lemon seed), and then they would disappear.  I blamed it on the long, wagging tail of Sandy 3, but I have no scientific evidence.  Further reading led me to realize that it takes several years for a Meyer lemon to successfully fruit.  Sorry, Sandy 3.

The end of 2020 came along and ML decided it was time to set fruit.  The house was sold.  In early 2021, I bought a home in Pleasant Gap. The moving van came but ML rode safely in my car, fruit intact. Easter weekend she moved into my new kitchen, on a small table under a window. Pleasant Gap, nestled along the Nittany Mountains, can be temperamental in early spring. 

By Memorial Day ML was still holding onto her fruit. I couldn’t believe my luck. I moved her to the sunny deck in the front of the house with pots of petunias, flowering tobacco, a pair of Tithonia, rain lilies, and chocolate mint. 

In June and July, Sandy 4.0 established his favorite passageway from the deck to the herb planter by squeezing between the rain lilies and ML.  True, Sandy’s nub is about 3 inches of wagging fluff, but no fruit fell. (Like other citrus, the fruit’s skin and leaves are toxic to dogs and cats.  I guess that’s why my genius dog was never tempted with his front end.)

ML’s fruit grew, starting to look like large limes by mid-August. 

“Are you growing lemons?” my sharp-eyed neighbor Sonja asked.  Besides keeping track of my vegetable garden, I guess she took a fancy to my front deck container plants. 

“Why yes, they still look like limes though. How did you know?”

Sonja just smiled, her eyes twinkling. 

By the end of September, ML’s lowest hanging fruit started turning … lemony yellow. 

I kept a kept a constant eye on evening temperatures.  ML remained on the sun-drenched deck until mid-October, when I relocated her to my living room. (We had our first hard frost night before last and the oak and maple leaves are fluttering down.)

Citrus fruit only ripens on the tree, I read. The sign for when a Meyer lemon is ripe is when it turns egg yolk yellow in color (ML sure picked the right Momma, I certainly know my egg yolks!) and is slightly soft to touch.

Yesterday, I carefully used a small paring knife to harvest my first homegrown Meyer lemon. I went outside with it cradled in my hands. I walked across the yard to Sonja’s front door and rang the bell. When she opened the door, I handed her ML’s first golden fruit. In my head I heard a childhood (maybe Brownies?) song: “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other, gold.”  Laurie Lynch

Nine to Go:  The rest of the fruit are gradually pushing out the last of the green.  Sonja’s brother (Mr. Lodi Apple) will get No. 2.  Nos. 3 and 4 are going to Pam and The Puff.  You can read about Pam and The Puff in my next blog post. 

Latest Read:  While I share cucumbers, beans and tomatoes with Sonja, she supplies me with books to read as well as Pleasant Gap history.  Sonja has read all of Nicholas Sparks’ 20+ books.  I just read my first, “The Wish,” courtesy of Sonja. She always laughs when I tell her I was up all night with one of her pass-along books. Hurry up retirement! 

Re-Learn History:  You think you know all about Johnny Appleseed?  Pick up a copy of Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire”.  Pollan takes a refreshing look at apples, tulips, marijuana and GMO potatoes. His research and insight will make your head spin.