The Artist on the Road

It’s been ten years since we last planted a vegetable garden in a large corner of our back yard. Unknown to visitors ever since, a well-tended bed once teeming with life was hidden there under a mountain of weeds. Each year come spring, I’d mow the area along with the adjacent lawn, carefully avoiding the work that lay beneath. I knew that someday, before I could again plant, I would have to dig up the bed and lay poultry wire to keep rodents out.

There are few things more satisfying than organic fruits and vegetables, slow ripened in our own garden and picked fresh. This year, we’d been remembering how rewarding it can be to grow our own food. So we asked ourselves, why wait any longer to grow another garden?  I knew I had a couple of weeks of picking, digging, and shoveling ahead of me and I wasn’t looking forward to it. My wife had caught the bug, and was excited to create beds of cut flowers. In the end, our yearning for beauty and our taste buds won out.

In the old veggie patch, I started by breaking up soil with a pickaxe, then used a shovel to remove layers of top soil, sand, and compost, each with its own distinctive color. All along, I’d been working our garden without realizing it. Neighbors had given me soil years ago, later I put down extra sand from laying our patio, and more recently, I’d tossed in a good supply of accumulated compost. Since the earth on our property consists of dense clay, these amendments would combine to make perfect soil for planting.

While digging, earth worms wiggled out of loose soil, and roly-polies and lady bugs crawled amongst the doomed weeds. The soothing aroma of lavender flowers wafted from a nearby plant. While I took breaks from shoveling, I watched butterflies, damselflies, and dragonflies buzzing past, sometimes landing on my idle tools. My thoughts wandered to consider the honeyed flesh of cantaloupes, the tart sweetness of tomatoes, and the tang of fresh cut herbs. Imagining the crop to come motivated me to again pick up that shovel and keep turning soil.

While preparing my morning coffee, I was distracted by a motorized hum from the vineyard behind our house. Looking through the kitchen window, I spotted a dust cloud drifting skyward from the far hill. Then an orange tractor emerged from the cloud, rocking its way through the trellised vines. As I watched, tall cover crops of legumes, clover, vetch, and wild radish vanished under the tractor’s belly, leaving only chocolate colored earth behind.

Thinking on my toes, I reached for my art bag, leaving the coffee untouched on the counter. I walked across the field between our house and the vineyard, carefully avoiding the sticky weeds so prevalent at this time of year.

At the bottom of the hill, a white truck pulled up at the same time as the tractor came to a halt. The smell of fresh cut vegetation and moist soil filled the air. I asked the two men if they were tilling the cover crop. The truck driver replied in a thick Spanish accent, “Yes, but only the upper vineyard.” He added that the lower vineyard would soon be removed due to difficulty in growing Cabernet grapes in this soil.

After thanking the men, I walked back into the field and sketched them as they cleaned the tractor and packed up gear. With the overgrown cover crop now tilled into the soil, the vineyard looked trimmed and tidy. The trellised vines arched their way along the hill in rows, and I marveled at how quickly they’d grown. What had been buds just a few weeks ago, now canopied several feet in each direction, and with leaves soaking up the sun’s rays, looked ready to flower.

Each year, Healdsburg’s Farmers Market opens on the first Saturday in May. Regardless of weather, it’s an early indicator that summer has arrived and our rainy season is over, until October.

I hopped off my bike and parked near the twin footbridges crossing Foss Creek. Stepping into the canopied market, I spotted everything from sausage, cheeses, and pork tamales, to plenty of colorful vegetables. Baskets overflowed with leafy greens, along with fava beans, carrots, asparagus, and fresh cut flowers. Off to one side, pots of tomato, pepper, and strawberry plants were available for the home gardener.

After making the rounds, I sat on a shady bench near the creek. The cool breeze of early morning had now settled into a warm stillness, persuading me to remove my jacket. As I reached for my backpack, its contents of colored pencils, sketchbooks, paints, and brushes spilled on the ground, causing me alarm, but no damage. After dusting off these supplies, I began to sketch.

Public places, like this market, are challenging for me to draw because people often move too fast to capture on paper. Looking into the crowds, I search for people lost in conversation so they stay put for a longer period of time. Sometimes when I start a drawing and the person moves away, I’ll look for another person in approximately the same position, and combine the two. And in this drawing, the static background of canopies, umbrellas, and food stands provides an anchor, and also reflects the festive atmosphere of the morning.

An hour passed when my wife Marilyn and her friend Sarah stopped by to say hello, with baskets full of fava beans, kale, and alstroemaria flowers. Marilyn mentioned the tomato plants at the far side of the market and how excited she is about our garden. I agreed, I can’t wait to plant a kitchen garden in our back yard this year. It’s been years since we’ve done so.

After finishing my drawing, I packed up my art supplies and rode home, excitement building at the thought of breaking out the dusty gardening tools to plant our very own vegetable garden.

After feeling cooped up over the past week, I finally experienced a break from both work and wet weather. Setting out from the house, I leashed our two Australian Shepherd dogs and stepped into the spring sunshine. In the open area out back, we walked about a quarter mile around a pond and toward a vineyard, arriving at the pear tree I painted last winter and autumn. There in the shade, I set up a sketching camp with folding chair, pencils, paints, and my handmade sketchbook. The dogs roamed the open field, poking noses down gopher holes, sniffing out snakes, rabbits, and rodents, and occasionally barking and chasing each other about.

Soon after set up, my wife Marilyn arrived with her guitar and a snack of dried fruit, nuts, and bottles of water. She sat in the nearby grass, and while I sketched, practiced tunes by Neko Case, George Harrison, and Elvis Costello.

Much had changed since winter. The northward moving sun had warmed up the earth, and saffron-gold California poppies replaced yellow mustard. Most grasses had morphed from green to yellow, orange, and dusty purple. The pear tree, recently all bare branches, was covered in fluffy white “popcorn ball” blossoms that attract bees. In the distance, a cover crop had grown tall amongst the vines pruned in February, and several wooden vine posts now sagged from the weight of winter rains.

As I began to draw, I discovered that my usual method of starting my sketch in ink wouldn’t be the best approach this time. The pear blossoms needed to be kept white, and with my transparent watercolors, I’d have to work around them. After laying out a sketch in soft pencil, I painted around the blossoms in blue, rose, violet, and green, then filled in the trunk and branches, saving the remaining landscape for last.

Two hours passed and I stood to stretch my legs. Setting my sketchbook on the chair, I walked across the field toward the vineyard and paused with the sensation that I’d walked right into my painting. I remembered my brush forming on paper the plants and trees surrounding me, and the two dimensional world I’d been sketching now expanded to three. With heightened senses, I smelled spicy grasses and sweet flower fragrance, watched small insects flying all about, and everything felt alive, active, almost fluid.

After a few moments, I settled back to the reality of my surroundings and walked back to my chair. As I returned to painting, I hoped to capture some of that heightened awareness. Although the experience in the field lasted only a few moments, the feeling stayed with me the entire afternoon. With the dogs now resting and panting at our feet, I put the finishing touches on my painting while Marilyn continued to play guitar in the afternoon sun.

Every winter, while the grape vines are dormant, wild grasses and flowers awaken and thrive in the chilly, wet environment. In the earlier part of winter, the grasses grow in many shades of green, but beginning in late January, mustard flowers paint the hills bright yellow, in stark contrast to the dark brown vines. In February, wild radish appears with its varied soft pinks, whites and purple blooms and soon after, chamomile flowers blanket the landscape in snowy white.

Some of these wild plants are cultivated as vineyard cover crops, and contribute organic matter, nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil. They also help contain soil erosion from the heavy winter rains, and provide a habitat for beneficial insects and birds such as ladybugs, spiders, owls, and other critters. Cover crops often consist of grains like barley and oats, legumes such as peas and bell beans, as well as mustard, vetch, clover, chamomile, and wild radish.

In late spring, cover crops are often tilled into the soil to provide nourishing organic matter, and to eliminate interference with budding grape vines.