John Valentine

I’m standing in our orchard, looking at the encroaching horizon. The sun is low. The clouds are gray. And the poor blueberries have been tricked again. These 60-degree days in January make it hard for them to stay asleep. They think it’s time to wake up, to show their colorful buds. The word ‘dormant’ isn’t […]

The pupsever vigilant and ready to playlooked over at me, then at each other. When their excitable gaze returned to me, they went crazy, tails wagging like whirlwinds. Someone seemed headed toward their favorite path, and they just knew they were invited, too. Indeed, on a crisp November morning, I hauled a wheelbarrow toward the […]

As we sit in our chairs off the front porch, watching the leaves fall and the dogs tease us with tennis balls, my wife asks a simple almost-winter question: “Do we have enough wood?” I tell her not to worry, of course. With reassuring woodpiles resting at the borders of several close-by paths, we’re ready […]

The moist coolness, the enveloping darkness, the fast-asleep quiet: They were all exhilarating. On an early-morning walk long before dawn, I assumed I shared the paths with only dewy spider webs. On that new moon night, the stars were everywhere. The twists and turns were so familiar that I navigated them all in the relative […]

We stopped getting eggs that week of 100 degrees. I figured it was just too hot; the times called for survival, not scrambled. I had a dozen distractions anyway, which I don’t really mind. They point the way sometimes to what should be at the top of the hit list. It felt like the old […]

This year’s all-you-can-eat, bountiful blueberry days are behind us. Those two- and three-bucket July mornings have given into August’s slimmer pickings. Still, those little morsels of sweetness continue to beckon like dewy sirens. That’s why, just a few days ago, there I was, leaning and leaning more from the fourth rung of the ladder, reaching […]

When the sleek dolphins bounded playfully toward the boat in pairs and trios, the crowd on deck offered a standing ovation. One child was so moved she burst into song, singing “Jingle Bells,” the happiest tune she knew. At that moment, we all forgot about the heat, our lack of sunscreen and the pile of […]

It’s so hard finally deciding to call in that rototiller strike, like a drone attack, from the shed to clear the expanse. A generous, wormy, thriving raised bed, it’s all still so green. But the spinach has bolted, and last year’s parsley outlived this spring’s wild potato plants, even though its alien tubers now spread, […]

The feed-and-seed plant sets started showing up a month earlier this year. It was only late March, and I was walking by a brilliant cascade of heirloom tomatoes. “What?” I thought to myself. “Am I the last person to get plants in the ground?” A few weeks later, I noticed that a few of our […]