Welcome to the mudroom, a joint commentary project of Rumblestrip Vermont and the door yard.

We opened with Walt Amesis, who, in the $17 tomato, welcomes us to the tyranny of gardening garden in Vermont.

I almost had a garden last year and I enjoyed it so much I'm almost having a garden this year as well.

I used to have actual gardens, but bushels of tomatoes

the size of walnuts, the texture of golf balls that cost when all was said and done $17, coupled with the feeling that I worked on a collective farm during the

Cultural Revolution, caused me to come to my senses.

Each vegetable seemed to have its own individual perversity.

Spinich, for instance.

One afternoon in a dreamy August far far away, I'm titillated at having enough spinach

to feed every rabbit in the Northeast Kingdom with enough

leftover to juice Popeye's forearms and keep olive oil swooning. While I walk

back to the house for a basket, it all goes to seed. Corn too was an interesting experience because it introduced me to raccoons,

relatively cute furry things that I'd previously associated with highway carnage,

cartoon robbers and rabies warnings. with Highway Carnage, Cartoon Robbers and Raby's Warnings.

I'd never actually seen one alive until I planted corn,

and it didn't see many of the little beasts then, either.

Probably because they only come out at night night and that's when I sleep.

We had a dilemma.

I did anyway.

They seem to prosper quite nicely, stuffed to the tips of their fuzzy little whiskers with every single ear of corn that I grew.

When I finally saw one stumbling across the lawn toward the cat's bowl, it was almost too fat to walk,

a masked precursor to America's love affair with corn syrup and subsequent

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