Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  In addition to weeding, we spent the July 4 weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes. In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o. In May, we'd set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand. In another month they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.

  This is why we do it all again every year. It's the visible daily growth, the marvelous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden. Fueled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt. Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer's heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes. We gardeners are right in the middle of this with our weeding and tying up, our mulching and watering, our trained eyes guarding against bugs, groundhogs, and weather damage. But to be honest, the plants are working harder, doing all the real production. We are management; they're labor.

  The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us. On the same July 4 weekend we pulled seventy-four carrots, half a dozen early onions, and the whole garlic crop. (Garlic is fall-planted, braving out the winter under a cover of straw.) We dug our first two pounds of gorgeous new potatoes, red-skinned with yellow flesh. With the very last of the snap peas we gathered the earliest few Silvery Fir Tree and Sophie's Choice tomatoes, followed by ten more the next day. Even more thrilling than the tomatoes were our first precious cucumbers--we'd waited so long for that cool, green crunch. When we swore off transported vegetables, we'd quickly realized this meant life without cukes for most of the year. Their local season is short, and there's no way to keep them around longer except as pickles. So what if they're mostly just water and crunch? I'd missed them. The famine ended July 6 when I harvested six classic dark green Marketmores, two Suyo Longs (an Asian variety that's serpentine and prickly), and twenty-five little Mini Whites, a gourmet cucumber that looks like a fat, snow-white dill pickle. The day after tomorrow we would harvest this many again. And every few days after that, too, for a month or more, if they didn't succumb to wilt and beetles. Cucumbers became our all-day, all-summer snack of choice. We would try to get tired of them before winter.

  A pounding all-day rain on the seventh kept me indoors, urging me to get reacquainted with my desk where some deadlines were lurking around. When evening came, for a change, I was not too worn out from garden labor to put time into cooking up a special meal. We used several pounds of cucumbers and tomatoes to make the summer's first gazpacho, our favorite cold soup, spiced with plenty of fresh cilantro. To round out the meal we tossed warm orzo pasta with grated cheese, lots of fresh-picked basil, and several cups of shredded baby squash. After three months of taxing our creativity to feed ourselves locally, we had now walked onto Easy Street.

  The squash-orzo combination is one of several "disappearing squash recipes" we would come to depend on later in the season. It's a wonderfully filling dish in which the main ingredient is not really all that evident. Guests and children have eaten it without knowing it contains squash. The importance of this will soon become clear.

  By mid-month we were getting a dozen tomatoes a day, that many cucumbers, our first eggplants, and squash in unmentionable quantities. A friend arrived one morning as I was tag-teaming with myself to lug two full bushel-baskets of produce into the house. He pronounced a biblical benediction: "The harvest is bountiful and the labors few."

  I agreed, of course, but the truth is I still had to go back to the garden that morning to pull about two hundred onions--our year's supply. They had bulbed up nicely in the long midsummer days and were now waiting to be tugged out of the ground, cured, and braided into the heavy plaits that would hang from our kitchen mantel and infuse our meals all through the winter. I also needed to pull beets that day, pick about a bushel of green beans, and slip paper plates under two dozen ripening melons to protect their undersides from moisture and sowbugs. In another week we would start harvesting these, along with sweet corn, peppers, and okra. The harvest was bountiful and the labors were blooming endless.

  However high the season, it was important for us to remember we were still just gardeners feeding ourselves and occasional friends, not commercial farmers growing food as a livelihood. That is a whole different set of chores and worries. But in our family's "Year of Local," the distinction did blur for us somewhat. We had other jobs, but when we committed to the project of feeding ourselves (and reporting, here, the results), that task became a significant piece of our family livelihood. Instead of the normal modern custom of working for money that is constantly exchanged for food, we worked directly for food, skipping all the middle steps. Basically this was about efficiency, I told myself--and I still do, on days when the work seems as overwhelming as any second job. But most of the time that job provides rewards far beyond the animal-vegetable paycheck. It gets a body outside for some part of every day to work the heart, lungs, and muscles you wouldn't believe existed, providing a healthy balance to desk jobs that might otherwise render us chair potatoes. Instead of needing to drive to the gym, we walk up the hill to do pitchfork free weights, weed-pull yoga, and Hoe Master. No excuses. The weeds could win.

  It is also noiseless in the garden: phoneless, meditative, and beautiful. At the end of one of my more ragged afternoons of urgent faxes from magazine editors or translators, copy that must be turned around on a dime, incomprehensible contract questions, and baffling requests from the IRS that are all routine parts of my day job, I relish the short commute to my second shift. Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows for an hour to address the concerns of quieter, more manageable colleagues. Holding the soft, viny limbs as tender as babies' wrists, I train them to their trellises, tidy the mulch at their feet, inhale the oxygen of their thanks.

  Like our friend David who meditates on Creation while cultivating, I feel lucky to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and watch a nest of baby chickadees fledge from their hole in the fencepost into the cucumber patch. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in the domain of the little miracle. As a hobby, this one could be considered bird-watching with benefits.

  Every gardener I know is a junkie for the experience of being out there in the mud and fresh green growth. Why? An astute therapist might diagnose us as codependent and sign us up for Tomato-Anon meetings. We love our gardens so much it hurts. For their sake we'll bend over till our backs ache, yanking out fistfuls of quackgrass by the roots as if we are tearing out the hair of the world. We lead our favorite hoe like a dance partner down one long row and up the next, in a dance marathon that leaves us exhausted. We scrutinize the yellow beetles with black polka dots that have suddenly appeared like chickenpox on the bean leaves. We spend hours bent to our crops as if enslaved, only now and then straightening our backs and wiping a hand across our sweaty brow, leaving it striped with mud like some child's idea of war paint. What is it about gardening that is so addicting?

  That longing is probably mixed up with our DNA. Agriculture is the oldest, most continuous livelihood in which humans have engaged. It's the line of work through which we promoted ourselves from just another primate to Animal-in-Chief. It is the basis for successful dispersal from our original home in Africa to every cold, dry, high, low, or clammy region of the globe. Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities. Archaeologists have sturdy evidence that plant and animal domestication both go back 14,000 years in some parts of the world--which makes farming substantially older than what we call "civilization" i
n any place. All the important crops we now eat were already domesticated around five thousand years ago. Early humans independently followed the same impulse wherever they found themselves, creating small agricultural economies based on the domestication of whatever was at hand: wheat, rice, beans, barley, and corn on various continents, along with sheep in Iraq (around 9000 BC), pigs in Thailand (8000 BC), horses in the Ukraine (5000 BC), and ducks in the Americas (pre-Inca). If you want to know which came first, the chicken-in-every-pot or the politician, that's an easy answer.

  Hunter-gatherers slowly gained the skills to control and increase their food supply, learned to accumulate surplus to feed family groups through dry or cold seasons, and then settled down to build towns, cities, empires, and the like. And when centralization collapses on itself, as it inevitably does, back we go to the family farm. The Roman Empire grew fat on the fruits of huge, corporate, slave-driven agricultural operations, to the near exclusion of any small farms by the end of the era. But when Rome crashed and burned, its urbanized citizenry scurried out to every nook and cranny of Italy's mountains and valleys, returning once again to the work of feeding themselves and their families. They're still doing it, famously, to this day.

  Where our modern dependence on corporate agriculture is concerned, some signs suggest we might play out our hand a little smarter than Rome did. Industrialized Europe has lately developed suspicions of the centralized food supply, precipitated by mad cow disease and genetically modified foods. The European Union--through government agencies and enforceable laws--is now working to preserve its farmlands, its local food economies, and the authenticity and survival of its culinary specialties.

  Here in the United States we are still, statistically speaking, in the thrall of drive-through dining, but we're not unaware that things have gone wrong with our food and the culture of its production. Sociologists write about "the Disappearing Middle," referring to both middle America and mid-sized operators: whole communities in the heartland left alarmingly empty after a decades-old trend toward fewer, bigger commodity farms. We are quicker to address our problems with regional rather than national solutions. Local agencies throughout the Midwest are devising their own answers, mandating the purchase of locally grown organic food in schools, jails, and other public facilities. Policies in many states aim to bring younger people to farming, a profession whose average age is currently about fifty-five. About 15 percent of U.S. farms are now run by women--up from 5 percent in 1978. The booming organic and market-garden industries suggest that consumers are capable of defying a behemoth industry and embracing change. The direct-sales farming sector is growing. Underneath our stylish clothing it seems we are still animals, retaining some vestigial desire to sniff around the water hole and the food supply.

  In the forum of media and commerce, the notion of returning to the land is still reliably stereotyped as a hare-brained hippie enterprise. But image probably doesn't matter much to people who wear coveralls to work and have power meetings with a tractor. In a nation pouring its resources into commodity agriculture--corn and soybeans everywhere and not a speck fit to eat--back to the land is an option with a permanent, quiet appeal. The popularity of gardening is evidence of this; so is the huge growth of U.S. agritourism, including U-pick operations, subscription farming, and farm-based restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts. Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

  In summer a young rooster's fancy turns to...how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I've ever had to watch. (And yes, I'm including high school.) As predicted, half of Lily's chick crop was growing up to be male. This was dawning on everyone as the boys began to venture into mating experiments, climbing aboard the ladies sometimes backwards or perfectly sideways. The young hens shrugged them off and went on looking for bugs in the grass. But the three older hens, mature birds we'd had around awhile, did not suffer fools gladly. Emmy, an elderly Jersey Giant, behaved as any sensible grandmother would if a teenager approached her looking for action: she bit him on the head and chased him into a boxwood bush.

  These boys had much to learn, and not just the art of love. A mature, skillful rooster takes his job seriously as protector of the flock, using different vocal calls to alert his hens to food, aerial predators, or dangers on the ground. He leads his wives into the coop every evening at dusk. Lacking a proper coop, he'll coax them up onto a tree branch or other safe nighttime roost (hence, his name). The feminist in me balks to admit it, but a flock of free-range hens behaves very differently without a rooster: scattered, vulnerable, a witless wandering of lost souls. Of course, they're chickens. They have bird brains, evolved in polygamous flocks, and have lived for millennia with humans who rewarded docility and egg production. Modern hens of the sturdiest breeds can crank out an egg a day for months at a stretch (until winter days grow too short), and that they can do with no need for a fella. Large-scale egg operations keep artificial lights on their hens to extend the laying period, and they don't keep roosters at all. The standard white grocery-store egg is sterile. But in a barnyard where chickens forage and risk predation, flock behavior is more interesting when a guy is ruling the roost.

  Home Grown

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  Oh sure, Barbara Kingsolver has forty acres and a mule (a donkey, actually). But how can someone like me participate in the spirit of growing things, when my apartment overlooks the freeway and other people's windows? Shall I raise a hog in my spare bedroom?

  How big is that spare bedroom? Just kidding. But even for people who live in urban areas (more than half our population), directly contributing to local food economies isn't out of the question. Container gardening on porches, balconies, back steps, or even a sunny window can yield a surprising amount of sprouts, herbs, and even produce. Just a few tomato plants in big flowerpots can be surprisingly productive.

  If you have any yard at all, part of it can become a garden. You can spade up the sunniest part of it for seasonal vegetables, or go for the more understated option of using perennial edibles in your landscaping. Fruit, nut, citrus, or berry plants come in many attractive forms, with appropriate choices for every region of the country.

  If you're not a landowner, you can still find in most urban areas some opportunity to garden. Many community-supported agriculture (CSA) operations allow or even require subscribers to participate on their farms; they might even offer a work-for-food arrangement. Most urban areas also host community gardens, using various organizational protocols--a widespread practice in European cities that has taken root here. Some rent garden spaces to the first comers; others provide free space for neighborhood residents. Some are organized and run by volunteers for some specific goal, such as supplying food to a local school, while others accommodate special needs of disabled participants or at-risk youth. Information and locations can be found at the American Community Garden Association site: www.communitygarden.org.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  So Lily wanted one rooster, for flock protection and the chance to watch her hens hatch chicks next year. The position was open for a good rooster, not a bad one. Over the years we'd had both. Our historic favorite was Mr. Doodle. If a professional circuit had been open to him, as dogs have their sheepherding trials and such, we could have retired Mr. Doodle for stud. He had a keen eye for hen safety and a heart for justice. I saved caterpillars I pulled off my garden so I could throw them into the chicken yard and watch Mr. Doodle run to snatch up each one, cock his head in judgment, and dole one out to each of six hens in turn before he started the next round. Any number of caterpillars not evenly divisible by six would set him into angst; he hated to play favorites.

  But that was the ideal husband. The guys we had now were No-Second-Date. They're still young, we allowed. Even a dreamboat has to start somewhere, getting chased into the boxwood a time or two
before finding his inner gentleman. We'd be watching our boys closely now as they played a real game of Survivor. All but one would end up on our table, and we couldn't get soft-hearted. Keeping multiple roosters is no kindness. They inevitably engage in a well-known sport that's illegal in forty-eight states.

  Who would get to stay? The criteria are strict and varied: good alarm calls, unselfish instincts for foraging and roosting, and a decent demeanor toward humans. Sometimes an otherwise fine rooster will start attacking kids, a capital crime in our barnyard. And finally, our winner would need a good singing voice. We'd be hearing his particular cock-a-doodle for more than a thousand mornings. Chanticleers, as the storybooks call them, are as diversely skilled as opera singers. We wanted a Pavarotti. Crowing skills are mostly genetic, arriving with developing male hormones. So far we'd heard nothing resembling a crow.

  And then, one morning, we did. It was in July, soon after my summertime ritual of moving our bedroom outside onto the screened sleeping porch. The summer nights are balmy and marvelous, though it's hard to sleep with so much going on after dark: crickets, katydids, and fireflies fill every visible and aural space. Screech owls send out their love calls. Deer sometimes startle us at close range with the strange nasal whiffle of their alarm call. And in the early hours of one morning, as I watched the forested hillside color itself in slow motion from gray to green, I heard what I thought must be a new Virginian species of frog: "Cro-oak!"

  I woke Steven, as wives wake husbands everywhere, to ask: "What's that sound?"