Barnheart Page 5

  INTO THE GARDEN

  STARTING A VEGETABLE GARDEN is a marriage of high-stakes poker, ardent independence, and possibly incurable masochism. The gamble of weather and new seed packets, the free food that (at times) makes you certain you could feed a Civil War battalion, and that sick need to shove your hands in dirt and stay out weeding after sunset are all well known to those of us who grow our own french fries. I am one of these people. Hand me some poker chips and call a therapist, folks: I am a gardener, and it cannot be helped.

  You start out one year with the idea that you can grow a little food. You don’t have anything extreme in mind: a modest bed of tomatoes and maybe some herbs for your pasta. So you plant a few varieties of heirloom reds, and a few months later — biting into one of these girls you pulled right off the vine — you realize that the taste is something you can’t believe was the work of your own hands. The basil makes the back steps smell like a Tuscan countryside. When you need some onions, you just pull them out of the ground. Suddenly, it hits you: Not only does this gardening business taste good, it’s also making dinner a lot easier to plan and your grocery bills fewer and farther between. It works, and you’re hooked. You decide next season to make some modest improvements. You’ll add another raised bed because you heard stuffed zucchini was to die for and you want to grow your own pumpkins for Halloween. You close your eyes and remember the hayrides to the pumpkin patches of your childhood and how great it was to pick your own jack-o’-lantern from a farmer’s field. Okay, two beds. See where this is going?

  Little changes start to happen, things normal people barely notice. Only your closest friends may start to see the signs of addiction. They can see the unapologetic potting-soil stains under your fingernails at a dinner party, or the shopping bag from the local nursery in the corner of your kitchen when they’re visiting for a cup of coffee. You start getting seed catalogs in the mail, and your borrowing history at the local library shows a suspicious number of agriculture books. You start setting aside a beat pair of jeans for sod breaking.

  Then the real addiction kicks in. A few years down the road, your basement has been converted into a nursery and the aboveground pool has been bulldozed for more raised beds and a grapevine. You’ve hired a carpenter to build a series of containers to grow more strawberries, and there are messages on your machine from orchards, seed savers, and the people from your vegetable-gardening meet-up group. Suddenly, you know famous gardeners by name and can even drop a few in conversations. Then, late one July day, you’re in the grocery store checkout line and notice the woman behind you looking closely at your basket. Meat, eggs, milk, flour, bananas, pectin, pickling spices, vinegar, sugar, and three boxes of pint jars. “You’re a gardener, too, huh?” she asks. You nod, smiling. And you see the same collage of ingredients and supplies in her cart, all produce lacking, because there’s a good chance she has that section of the grocery store in her backyard, too. You get to chatting and find out she has the tomato variety you read about in last month’s issue of Mother Earth News and you have those white pumpkins she’s been coveting. Friendship is struck, numbers are exchanged, and the nice people with plastic bags full of trucked-in vegetables are none the wiser.

  And then the big change comes. One day over breakfast, you look across the table at your spouse. Or you would look across and see him eating his steel-cut oats, but you can’t because your squash harvest is in full swing and there is a small mountain of zucchini in the way. Regardless, you kind of cough to clear your throat before asking, ever so casually, “Hey, honey, what do you think about getting a place in the country?”

  I was one of these people now. I’d never intended to be a gardener, and certainly not one with fifteen raised beds, a small corn crop, and a swirling pumpkin patch, but it happened. And while I had yet to ask a significant other to uproot for greener pastures, I could easily see myself doing so. I couldn’t imagine a life without a garden. After the summers I’d spent growing vegetables in Idaho, and knowing how good the food tasted right from my own backyard, I was already starting to make plans for my Vermont garden in early March.

  And did I ever have plans for this place. The cabin’s garden was ready to be worked, and I was champing at the bit. Finally, after months of ice and snow, seed catalogs, and online browsing, I had come to some decisions about the layout, vegetables, and planting schedule. Lacking a tiller, I chose to stick with the same semi-raised-bed method I had in Idaho. I say “semi-raised” because I dig the soil about eight inches deep, removing stones and roots along the way, then pile on about nine cubic feet of compost for each five-by-eight-foot bed and mix it in. I edge the beds with whatever’s around: scrap wood, fallen tree limbs, old license plates, or broken tool handles. These beds have served me well. So I planned on filling the entire garden area with as many beds as I could. I would place stones and sunflowers between the raised beds; I would make even smaller plots and plan for herbs and strawberries, too. It was going to be like walking through a Whole Foods produce section — no, better, a farmers’ market! — in my own backyard. I was going to start with the basics, though. I had lettuce, broccoli, and peas to plant that first planting day in spring, and it would start with a ravenous hoe.

  I raised up my favorite hoe (well, my only hoe) and slammed it into the dirt. With my iPod blaring and the morning sun cresting the hollow, my body got warm and happy with the purposeful work. I had broken sod before and now knew what to expect. Sweat started to bubble on my forehead. Within the hour my arms were screaming and my blue bandanna was soaked around my ears. Gardening has taught me to care little about discomfort in the present. Sore arms and stinging eyes are so temporary. With every thrash and grunt, I could already feel the hot shower, smell the mint soap, and feel the clean clothes I would wear later. And as I stood over those rows of freshly planted starts, I could sip my hard cider and smile.

  Growing your own food isn’t easy, but it’s wonderful to earn. Every bite of future salad is enriched with the education of days like this.

  This garden gospel is easy to spread to the seed-saved, but what about when a nongardening friend from New York City comes to visit for a weekend?

  My friend Nisaa sent me an e-mail saying she’d been thinking of me and was eager to hop a train to Brattleboro to spend the weekend. She wanted to visit the cabin and get her hands dirty. She’d been reading my blog and thought my homesteading adventures were intriguing, a feral alternative to her city life. She wanted to come and help me put in the gardens, settle in the new laying hens I’d bought off Craigs-list, and see my new neighborhood.

  I invited her with open arms but was a little concerned she’d be miserable. Not so much with me, but with my life. I was the same friend but in a different world now. After all, this was a lot different from Manhattan; I didn’t even have cable. Would she really want to come perform manual labor for food she wouldn’t get to eat? It had been years since we had spent time together, and when we did, it was in her city. Why would she want to come out to the sticks and play in the dirt? Was she sure? Apparently, she was. We made our plans, and she bought her Amtrak ticket. Away we go.

  Nisaa and I had gone to the same college in Pennsylvania and had become fast friends, but we couldn’t be more different. Nisaa, quite frankly, has style. She is into fashion, celebrity, music (we have that in common), and probably knows more about pop culture than the editors at Rolling Stone do. She is also black, and raised Muslim, and grew up in Philadelphia. I am from Palmerton, Pennsylvania, a place so white that the 2000 census indicated that minorities made up less than one percent of the population. As for religious and ethnic diversity? I think the Greek Orthodox church at the edge of town was as exotic as our town got. We didn’t even have a synagogue.

  But despite our different backgrounds, Nisaa and I clicked. On car rides and in classes, we had each other laughing till our stomachs hurt. I adored her. I just didn’t think she’d be into getting chicken shit on her shoes (which, by the way, would be far nicer than mi
ne).

  In a few weekends she was by my side, hoeing in the garden. It was hotter than usual in Vermont that May. We both cursed at the bugs and checked our hands for blisters between our fingers. I could tell she hadn’t expected the work to be so exhausting. Bugs were swarming. Our heads got foggy. Like all people in uncomfortable and close quarters, we got short with each other at times. We silently fumed at the rocks and roots. But to her credit, she kept at it. She worked hard and dove right into the dark soil, ripping out sod with her bare hands. I could not believe this was the same person who had called me from Strand Books just days before. She had gone a little feral herself.

  I told her we should take a break. I had a water station set up on the porch with a five-gallon container of springwater and some lemons in Mason jars. But she shook her head. Her wonderful stubbornness kept her hoeing and ripping up clods of soil. I watched in silent awe while I worked beside her. Eventually, we did take a break and walk down to the stream to soak our feet in the cold water. As we sat there in the shade of the woods, we rinsed off our foreheads and arms and talked a little. She and I were both ready to quit, but the sod we were breaking still needed more work. And after the soil had been turned, I wanted to mix in some compost and get the lettuce starts in the ground.

  We both let out a long sigh as our feet splashed. We knew this job wouldn’t be over until it was over and that the garden wasn’t getting planted while we sat in the shade. We groaned happily and got back to our feet, a little shaky. We were both out of shape, and the garden was making that point all too clear. It was just a five-by-five-foot salad patch, but it had two strong adult women ready to pass out. We sighed and walked back up the hill to the sun and the dirt. Back to work.

  It took another hour or so, but we got the thing planted. We made little rows and lined the edges of our beds with scrap wood, and eventually it looked like a garden. After showering and having a few beers (and, thus, in a slightly better mood), we strolled back out to the garden in the dusk. Nisaa stared at what we’d done. I watched her watch the earth. In the middle of this shoddy, fenced-in, scrappy pile of turf was one beautiful garden bed. All around it was ugly sod, long-forgotten rusting fences, and a broken gate, but in the center was this promise of clean food. The baby lettuce shoots in the black soil shone like jewels. For an amateur job, it looked good. Nisaa crossed her arms and smiled: “I get it now.”

  After Nisaa’s visit, every weekend (and some weeknights) became a date with my hoe, compost, seed packs, and trowel. I’d tie a bandanna around my head, braid my hair into pigtails, and hike out into the garden in my busted coveralls with a smile much akin to something roller-coaster fans may display outside the locking-bar gates. I always carried music to work with. Usually, it was my iPod, loaded with playlists appropriate for sod breaking. (A lot of Radiohead went into that first garden. If I ever meet Thom Yorke, I’m going to tell him all about how great my OK Computer–inspired arugula was on pizza.) By late April my arms stopped hurting and picking up the water buckets seemed easier. In a few weeks I had planted fifteen raised beds. I could stand at one end of the garden, look over my little plant minions, and feel genuinely wealthy.

  I am comforted, even if it’s just a little, by my garden and flock of hens. Knowing that there is a free source of protein and vegetables right outside my door brings me a little security at a time when the prices of gas and grain and the world’s shortages of food are all I hear about on the radio (that and the wars). While I think it would be tough to survive for a long time on what my little homestead produces, I know I can make at least half of my meals during the summer with food from the backyard. It’s a lot of work, but I also save a lot of money. A six-pack of broccoli plants costs me $2.79. Depending on the season, a head of organic broccoli at my local grocery store costs $3.49. Growing my own seedlings from a $2.75 pack of seeds is even cheaper. And I can always keep planting more if the skillet calls.

  It’s not simply about collecting eggs and harvesting vegetables, either. There is comfort in the other skills I pick up along the way. When strawberries are in season at a nearby-farm, I can make a year’s supply of jam in one afternoon with just a few dollars and some Mason jars. With a few pounds of flour and some yeast, I can bake all the bread I can eat. A good tomato crop will give me all the pasta sauce I can stand through the winter. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a few jars of golden honey and some homebrewed wine as well. Knowing how to produce, preserve, and create some of your food feels pretty good when the average price of a barrel of oil is heading northward with no signs of stopping. If there was ever a time to start learning to garden, it’s now.

  I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I don’t expect the recession to drive us into a depression. I don’t think all of us in America need to turn our lawns into victory gardens. (I do, however, strongly believe we’d all be happier if we did. It’s harder to be angry at the news when you’re biting into your own roasted and buttered sweet corn.)

  Homesteading, and gardening in particular, is the best way I know to be rich without spending a dime. You might be swiping a credit card at a giant grocery store and eating expensive food till your gullet is overflowing, but that’s just plastic and gluttony. If the power goes out and the store’s cash registers won’t run, you’re not eating a grain of rice. In that same blackout, though, you can walk out to your backyard with a flashlight, eat a fresh organic salad for free, and watch the stars.

  True wealth is not about money; it’s about independence. Gardening gives you back that basic freedom. And that all might sound a little cliché, even to the greenest of Prius-driving Sierra Club members, but it’s true. Want a chance to make a million dollars? Sign up for the stock market and throw your hat in the ring. Want to taste a million bucks? Plant some snap peas; when they’re ripe and covered with dew, bite into a pod and start chewing. Now that’s rich.

  MEET THE LOCALS

  GETTING COMFORTABLE IN A NEW PLACE gives you a little confidence. Knowing names and faces at the feed store, in the parking lot at the office, and around the hollow made me feel slightly assimilated to my new Yankee Life. I was starting to pick up on some of the local sayings, like “Sorry about it,” which is often used in place of “Screw you” but makes the person cutting in front of you at the grocery store to grab the last head of broccoli seem mildly empathetic to your plight. This was pointed out to me by my coworker Andrea, who had experienced the same little vernacular trick after moving from Connecticut. Nobody is sorry about anything. It’s simply something people around here say to acknowledge that they just ripped off another living being. I’m pretty sure deer hunters say “Sorry about it” after they pull the trigger, too.

  Yet not all my realizations about this new place were negative; in fact, few were. And those that were only seemed to add to the color of the area’s social topography. Most of the new experiences were quite wonderful, actually. Mud Season lived up to its name but also brought Maple Syrup–Tapping Season. It seemed like the time of year that scared away 97 percent of the tourists was the best time to be a New Englander. I’d drive to work and the roadside sugar maples were connected with lines of plastic tubing, collecting sap into giant metal tanks. It looked like the whole forest was hooked up to a delicious IV. I was able to buy some syrup from Merck Forest, a local operation that sold several grades. The woman behind the counter explained to me that locals eat grade B and the tourists eat grade A. “We like the taste of maple in our sugar water,” was her pithy explanation. I bought two quarts.

  The staff at Wayside, the local general store, started conversations with me about gardening and introduced me to neighbors with chickens. I started to settle into the place and into my life as a small-scale-homesteading, day-job-working Vermonter. I learned there were a lot of us, too. Other folks at work had chickens and bees; a few had horses or sheep. Everyone (and I mean everyone) seemed to have a garden.

  But even in the most rural of places, there are extreme differences among the citizenry. While some fau
lt lines exist in politics or religion, the biggest divider between neighbors seems to be class. I began to notice it more and more. I’d be standing at Wayside, two gruff men in matching red flannel jackets with bushy beards ahead of me in line to pay for their Sunday coffee and paper. We’d talk about the things that bind us as country neighbors: the weather, our livestock, the price of gas, and what we read on the front page of the paper.

  Then the lot of us would walk out to our cars, and suddenly I’d realize the difference between the two men I’d assumed were members of the brotherhood of agriculture. One walked over to his new Toyota Tundra and the other tried to open the frozen door on his rusted twenty-year-old F150. It hit me how different these country neighbors’ lives truly are. I homed in on the details, noticing tiny giveaways I hadn’t put together in the coffee line. The one getting inside the $43,000 truck was wearing top-of-the-line silicon Muck boots; the other wore the rubber ones that cost $19.99 at Tractor Supply. The Tundra had a purebred golden retriever in the front seat and the Ford hosted a small bird-dog mutt curled up on duct-taped upholstery. One man had retired here to become a gentleman farmer, raise some horses, split wood, and fill his days with fly-fishing and deer hunting. The other was barely getting his dairy out of the red. They both lived in the same town, shared conversation over the same cup of coffee, but their lives were utterly different.

  The truth is, money silently rips people apart. It’s never spoken of in public, but it’s strongly understood. You notice it the most when bad things happen. The power goes out, and you lose your running water and heat, yet your neighbor with the 134-acre property starts up a generator so loud it wakes your dogs. You understand immediately which side of the coin you’re on. While you’re busy wrapping pipes and splitting firewood for warmth, he’s watching a WWII special on the History Channel with a hot toddy in hand.