Yvan Plouffe’s Bountiful Harvest
by Nancy Wood,
August 25, 2011, page 10.....

Tall sunflowers, bright heads nodding in the breeze along Plouffe Lane, are the first indication of the creativity and green thumb of Yvan Plouffe. The sunflowers curve up his driveway, past six-foot-tall fork and spoon cutouts. Good food ahead? Sure enough, Yvan greeted this visitor with fresh-picked plums to taste, bursting with juice and flavor: a yellow Japanese Shilo and, sweeter yet, a red Santa Rosa. Peaches were next, right off one of the trees filling his yard.

Many Charlotters know Yvan Plouffe only as the man who brings beautiful bouquets of roses every week to the Post Office. Others may have received peaches, spaghetti sauce or other bounty from his garden – all given with a cheerful generosity.

Peach and plum trees, flower beds, vegetable patches and large pots of herbs are planted throughout Plouffe’s hilltop homestead. The Swiss chard is three feet high; six-inch-long beans are temptingly in reach on a trellis. Bushels of tomatoes are ripening in a bed protected with a roll-up plastic cover, which Yvan hand cranks to let in the sunshine. And then there is the rose bed. Scores of plants grow in a greenhouse, covered with blossoms of every color and type. Huge horseradish plants are also sheltered there, a holdover from a planting outside an earlier and smaller greenhouse.

Plouffe said he was told by Remo Pizzagalli that to be sure to have peaches, he should plant a couple of trees each year over a period of time. He took that advice, plus some. He’s also just planted his first blueberries.

Asked what he uses to fertilize his gardens Yvan reports, “I have a neighbor with horses, and I compost the manure.” He apologized for the condition of one area, recently damaged when a giant maple went the wrong direction when being felled. He showed the marks on the stump where the first maple taps were placed 57 years ago. Yvan’s sugarhouse is tucked in the woods nearby.

The maple tree was removed because it was rotting; it yielded three cords of wood. Plouffe heats his home entirely with wood. It is a radiant heating system with an outdoor furnace that heats hot water piped under tile floors in the house and also piped underground out to his shop where a blower distributes the heat as hot air.

House and shop are more testimony to Plouffe’s creativity and ingenuity. He built the house himself using wood from his property, and moved in during October 2010. Sunrooms, empty now, are filled with the pots of herbs and other plants during the winter. Colorful flowerboxes grace the windows outside.

The dining room table and other furniture are also his handiwork. He does his woodworking in the spacious shop, where there are signs of many more projects. The metal gate to the house was one of last winter’s projects, a whimsical creation with cats and a rose. More cats are lined up above the door to the shop. “I like cats,” he said. A sculpture in metal of a fanciful blue face adds a light touch to the outside of the house, and another is down along the driveway. “I added broken glass to the paint, so when you drive in at night there is a quick flash. You wonder, what was that?” he said.

Plouffe put up 250 jars of spaghetti sauce last year and has started on this year’s batch. The sauce is filled with ingredients he grows: tomatoes, celery, onions, garlic, basil, thyme, oregano, with a touch of honey or maple syrup to cut the acid of the tomatoes, plus meat. He shared a jar from his freezer, and, like the plums and peaches, it couldn’t have been better.

It was truly a treat to visit this generous man and his bountiful hill top gardens.