Trauma Farm

by Brian Brett

  THE FINAL INGREDIENT OF a good garden is labour. A gardener needs “a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” It often feels like I am either leaning exhausted on a shovel at the end of a row or wrestling with a bucking bronco of a Rototiller that wants to go wherever I don’t want it to go—usually seeking garden netting to snarl in its tines. But then when I look upon the rich rows of earth, I feel the comfort of knowing we have made something well. Lately, we’ve divided up our labour because of my hectic schedule. I always complain I get the short end, the heavy mechanical business, while Sharon has the thrill of seeding and the flower beds, though she also inherits too much of the dreaded weeding.

  In February Sharon organizes the seeds, and the greenhouses fill with trays of tiny seedlings—the hairlike onions, the slow and delicate peppers that take so long to sprout even on a heated soil tray. When the winds of March brush the moisture from the earth we can cultivate the high, dry sections of the garden.

  All our vegetable planting is wide-bed. We till the four-foot-wide raised beds and then dig a trench or path around them, heaping that dirt atop the beds. After they’re raked out and their corners staked, they’re never stepped on again. Trampling and compacting the soil is as bad as not weeding it. That’s why my grandfather laid down ten-inch-wide cedar planks between the garden rows. If I ever stepped off a plank and onto the earth, I got my ears boxed or pulled until they grew as red as his Spartan apples.

  Despite my admiration for his garden, I know our wide beds work better. The Chinese have used wide beds for centuries. I first saw them in the Chinese farms I visited with my father when he was buying potatoes for peddling. I remember one farm with soil so healthy you could practically serve it up for dinner. I’ve seen soil as healthy as that only in Cuba, where—because of the American boycott— the lack of chemicals and the organic local farms have created a rich earth and plants that glow electric in the Caribbean light. You can easily see the physical and colour differences between plants grown healthily in healthy soil and plants grown in maltreated soil.

  Several women were always working in that soil-rich farm I visited with my father, their wide-brimmed basket hats dipping as they weeded. Today I know they must have been indentured labourers, but to a child they looked lovely in their commitment, and I admired them. For a while that prolific little ten-acre farm produced most of the summer lettuce for the city of Vancouver. Then cadmium and other heavy metals from the city dump across the highway leached under the road, and they had to shut the farm down because its priceless soil had become toxic—so they put a subdivision over it.

  Those women flowed, yakking, down the rows of lambent mustards, lettuce, and choi, their fingers flicking like scissors as they plucked weeds with unrelenting energy. After watching them in action I had no trouble understanding Voltaire’s famous phrase when I encountered it years later: Il faut cultiver notre jardin. “We must cultivate our garden.” A cultivated garden produces more and costs less labour. If you leave the weeds too long, they become difficult to remove and stunt your cultivars. All gardeners eventually learn this unusual natural law—the more often you weed, the less you have to weed.

  When we weed at Trauma Farm, we throw the weeds in the rows between the beds and then cover them with canary grass or straw, which won’t reseed. Big stuff might go into the compost dump, but everything else goes into the rows, except for dangerous, stem-or-root-reproducing weeds like morning glories or quack grass, which are thrown into a big empty plant pot to dry up and die. In autumn, preparing the soil for our winter-crop greens (along with garlic, shallots, and fava beans), we heap the now composted material from the paths onto the harvested bed and dig everything in with ashes from our wood stove to supply the necessary potassium. We often also lay down several bags of slow-releasing rock phosphorous and dolomite lime, and include any extra compost, horse manure, and seaweed we can scavenge— mixing this mélange with our chicken manure, which we “cure” in a pile at the end of the garden.

  Chicken manure—like a select few manures such as llama and rabbit—is the richest shit, far more nutritious than cow or horse manure. It’s the gold that enriches our garden, providing ample phosphorus and more potassium and nitrogen. We still collect the horse and sheep manure, but that’s mainly for texture and colloids to sweeten the soil. As you may imagine with a regime like this, the garden grows wealthier every year and even more abundant, especially since we rotate our crops of peas and beans to fix the nitrogen in the soil. A surprising number of gardeners aren’t aware that if they don’t manure but use only chemical fertilizers, they can lose up to an inch of soil a year; their gardens turn to sand and dust. Farmers have destroyed some of the great soils of the world with bad practices that led directly to erosion and salinization. The plow can be a weapon of mass destruction, depending on how it is used.

  Over the years I’ve met a few gardeners who seem to irrationally believe that seeds contain everything necessary to grow the entire plant. I like to think of the seed as a trigger for a process that thrives on water and minerals, millions of organisms, and organic matter, all powered by sunlight. Gardening is a technique for turning sunlight into carrots, and once you eliminate a participant in the process you begin the inevitable destruction of your garden. Bad irrigation practices are the main reason why the Garden of Eden (which became the green fields that once surrounded Baghdad) is now a salinized wasteland that will take thirty thousand years to recover. We are working toward the same fate in factory farms around the world.

  LIFE IS COMPOST—A PROCESS that goes back to ages before the first mutant child now called Homo sapiens squirted out of the womb. Yet we obviously caught on to compost long ago in the history of the garden. Most impressively, our mothers even discovered their placentas will feed not only the child in the womb but the garden after the birth, and thus began another time-honoured fertility rite—the burial of the placenta.

  As soon as our hunter-gatherer ancestors stopped moving, they had to think about compost. In the beginning, it was natural gaps in the forest—burn-downs, decayed wind-blasts— that could be used a few times before exhaustion. Then some genius discovered that you didn’t have to wait for lightning. You could “slash and burn” the forest or the grasslands yourself, and the soil was temporarily rich. Shortly afterwards, an old corral or coop sprouted richer greenery than the land surrounding it, and we discovered manure.

  This year I noticed unusual size patterns among our garlic. We make our beds about twenty feet long. One of these beds contained three circles of enormous garlic heads. Early in the fall, I had dumped my wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure on those spots and then got distracted (small farming is all about distraction). I never managed to dig it in until planting time. I rushed the job and did a poor tilling before we planted. The nutrients remained in a cluster, creating my prizewinning garlic bulbs. Those fat bulbs, and their runty neighbours, were a lesson in nutrition. Like Thomas Jefferson, I might be growing into an old man, but I’m still a young gardener.

  HISTORY—IF WE ARE NOT approaching the end of it—will remember our era as the Oil Age. It’s a short era among the many eras of our species. It began around 1850 and it should last until 2050, two hundred years. After that, all bets are off. Maybe before then. These hydrocarbons took more than 500 million years of creation in the long song of the earth. Currently, we are consuming them about 2 million times faster than they were produced.

  The polyculture and permaculture we naturally practise at Trauma Farm have been displaced by industrial mono-culture. Vast amounts of energy are now spent on both the production and the ingredients of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and their distribution. It’s so strange when you realize this frenzy of energy and labour is merely a dangerous, complicated replacement for old-fashioned livestock manure and good garden management.

  During the early days of the garden our species needed only human energy and common-sense husbandry to grow food. In what we think of as the small farm’s historic garden,
it’s been estimated that 100 calories of food were returned for every energy calorie that went into producing it. Now in the globalized greenhouse production of plants such as iceberg lettuce, the process has been reversed, and it takes as much as 127 calories of energy to produce a single food calorie. The system has become so insane that lettuce produced thousands of miles away can be sold in our local market for less than it costs Sharon and me to grow lettuce four miles from the market. The purchaser pays for the real, hidden costs with government subsidies to factory farms, increasingly toxic environments, and less nutritious and often unhealthy food.

  Now that we have become oil consumers, or necro-phages— eaters of the dead, our civilization based on the fossilized lives of earth’s history—we have lost our knowledge of the local. Oil, in an odd way, has made transportation too easy, and its child, globalization, has separated us from contact with the soil and moved us at an accelerating rate into cities. And city people no longer understand rural life, speeding up its rush toward extinction.

  Though it can be difficult in this absurd era, I am relearning how to live and act locally. When the Oil Age inevitably ends we are going to see the failure of globalization, as the transportation system collapses under escalating costs. The captains of industry, along with the rest of us, will be forced to discover a unique formula for earning our keep—creating the kind of land where a child can drive his fist into soil up to his elbow. If we don’t—well, then we’re facing a big collapse back into a hunter-gatherer civilization. Long, long ago, a woman emerged out of the forest with a digging stick, and we could meet her again.

  7

  RUNNING DOGS AND

  FELLOW TRAVELLERS

  BACK IN THE house, the dogs loll on their cushions as I make tea. Three dogs, two of them border collies, are too many. I regret the day we decided to keep Bella, though she’s a beauty and I love her—she’s a born troublemaker. Jen, the older collie, is a control freak and keeps everyone in line. Olive—the gentle, bullheaded Labrador-Rottweiler— is in rough, arthritic shape these days, since she broke her back climbing up a tree after a raccoon.

  It’s thought that the first domesticated animals were dogs. A tiny puppy skeleton was discovered in the hand of an elderly woman in a 12,300-year-old burial site in Israel, so we can assume our relationship goes back further. Skeletons of domesticated dogs in North America date back to 8500 bc , suggesting that they moved around the world quickly, probably alongside us.

  Domestic dogs were soon used for hunting—sight hounds for spotting distant prey, scent hounds for tracking, and “catch dogs for the kill”—though they probably began their domestic careers as alarms against predators and for comfort in the cold. A North American Native description for very cold weather is a “three-dog night.” In the Arctic and a few other regions they found a place as sled or pack animals. When agriculture appeared, people became less nomadic, and dogs were relegated to more specialized uses—herd dogs and fighting dogs, retrievers, guard dogs and lap pets. When we consider the varieties of domesticated dog, from the wolf hound to the chihuahua, our evolutionary manipulation over maybe fifteen thousand years is impressive indeed. Dogs have been bred for both useful and distinctly non-useful purposes. For example, Pekingese were bred to resemble miniature lions (until the bored ladies of the Chinese court reputedly discovered an alternative use for that flattened nose and little tongue). Some dogs, such as the much-maligned pit bull, have been bred to kill dogs or valiant animals merely for sport.

  We try to keep a herd dog—a border collie—for the sheep, and usually a Labrador to guard against raccoons and marauding dog packs. Dogs are helpful and sometimes necessary allies on a small farm.

  Goats and sheep and pigs soon joined the dog in the human fold, quickly followed by the cow and an increasingly exotic menagerie, ranging from the yak to the guinea pig, the silkworm, the camel, the cat, and the turkey. The art of domestication rapidly grew more complex. At the same time the grains and rices and fruits and vegetables began to transform under our guidance into a stunning array of varieties. You only have to consider the Brassica genus—mustard, cabbage, broccoli, canola, and a myriad of other cultivars—to recognize what diverse characteristics we are capable of breeding into the world. The history of domestication is mainly the history of the small farm, which tended toward a balanced mixture of horticulture and livestock that suited the local environment.

  I’ve always bonded quickly with animals, despite the livestock and game I’ve slaughtered and despite the number of times I’ve been kicked, bitten, and trampled. Wherever I’ve been, all my life, animals have come to me, even so-called ferocious dogs, schizoid cats, or twitchy horses. I also lean, instinctively, toward physical contact with animals. I brush against them, rest my fingers on a shoulder. Simple gestures in the middle of hard tasks. I love their physical world. They recognize that, and they come forward to be touched. If you are unafraid and open with animals, you will learn how much they want to like you. I’ve been chased around a few trees by bulls and horses, and I slammed more than one gate just in time on a charging dog while peddling with my dad when I was young, but I’ve also stopped stampeding livestock and vicious dogs in their tracks. You have to trust yourself in the world, and learn when to run and when to stand. I’ve never been bit while offering my hand slowly to a slavering German shepherd, though I’ve met a couple of dogs who’ve kept me in my vehicle.

  Dogs on a farm, like livestock, tend to find the most impressive ways of injuring themselves or sickening. Fortunately, on our island, we have a good vet. Malcolm has what is known as “the touch.” When he returned to Salt Spring after many years away, he performed emergency operations in his home while building his hospital. I much preferred it in the house. You’d go there, and Malcolm and his wife, Stephanie, would wipe down the kitchen table and he’d start operating. Afterwards, with the dog kennelled or in a basket by the fire, we’d clean off the table and maybe have a glass of wine and swap lies about farming.

  Our first Lab, Tara, got an ear shredded by a vicious raccoon. Malcolm stitched it up and we returned with her a week later to have the stitches removed. We were sitting around in the kitchen, chatting, and Malcolm patted the chair he was sitting on. Tara walked right up to him and sat down with her head between his legs. He took his tweezers and slowly began pulling the stitches out of her ear while she trembled, unrestrained. I’ve never seen so flagrant a “touch” in a vet before and such trust from a dog.

  Afterwards, he told her to go lie down, and she curled up in the big basket in front of the fire in the living room. We gossiped on, then got into a disagreement, mostly because Malcolm, like many farmers, is a flamboyant conservative (though he’d deny that with some vigour), and I’m definitely not—so we usually have much to argue about. It was late in the evening by then and, after finishing our wine, Sharon and I left. We were a mile down the driveway before we realized we’d forgotten the dog, who was happily snoring in front of the fire. Most times when you take a dog to a vet it cringes and shakes and looks hopelessly at you as soon as you turn up the driveway. But not at Malcolm’s place. The dogs look forward to visiting his farm. And if they are good, which they usually are, they get a biscuit.

  However, when you work a farm, you also have to deal with your own problems. Like the time old Tom Grundy brought his equally ancient but much-prized Highland collie, Cap, over to act as stud for our first border collie, Samantha. Tom has obviously spent many years hard labouring and walks with a ninety-degree stoop. Cap was so geriatric that Tom had to bring a bale of hay for Cap to jump on to get into the pickup. Samantha was a young, choice virgin, and we were all eager to see how this was going to turn out. We introduced the suitor to the virgin and it didn’t take long, even though Samantha was not sure about it all.

  Suddenly everything went south. They stuck together. Old Tom was horrified. “It’ll kill him,” he moaned. I didn’t think so. I suggested a bucket of cold water. I’d seen that work before. This doubly ho
rrified Tom Grundy. “That would surely kill him.” So we phoned Malcolm, who immediately volunteered that this was his funniest phone call of the week. I was all for letting the dogs solve the problem, and so was Malcolm, but Tom was fretting about his aged dog.

  “There’s only one other thing you can do,” said Malcolm, “and that’s stroke Cap off. Then the knot will go down and he’ll fall out.” At this point I was starting to suspect the much-delighted Malcolm was having us on.

  Sharon and I looked at each other and said simultaneously, “I ain’t doing that.”

  This even gave Tom Grundy pause. Fortunately, while we were discussing solutions, nature took its course, as it usually does, and Cap flopped out of Sam. Sam ran for cover, having experienced enough of this sex business, and Cap staggered away as if he was going to keel over from exhaustion.

  After Tom had settled down from the crisis with a cup of coffee, he and Cap returned to his old pickup. Cap climbed onto the hay bale and into the back of the truck. I threw the bale in after him, and Tom lifted the gate, but it wouldn’t close. He kept shutting it, and it fell with a crash each time. Finally, I slammed it up. That locked it. Tom slowly walked around and climbed into the cab. Sitting behind the wheel, he gave me a long, baleful look and said, “Old man . . . old dog . . . old truck . . .” Then, shifting into gear, he slowly motored down the driveway.