Trauma Farm

by Brian Brett

  But I continue in my ways. I keep the corpses of scrawny old hens in the freezer, beside the bones of game or pork or beef. Chicken feet make the ultimate broth. When we feast on crabs I’ve captured on the beach at low tide, we boil the shells and detritus after dinner with garlic and herbs and then freeze the broth for a good bisque. Generally, we make our soup bases in winter and freeze them. The wood cookstove in the kitchen not only simmers our broths but heats both the house and our hot water via a complex series of pipes recycling the water through a preheater that leads to our hot-water tank. A good soup simmering on the stove is an ancient cultural pleasure.

  The chicken broth can be difficult because our old, tough hens—pot chickens—are too delicious and tender upon finally hauling them out to cool and debone. A little salt, and we start picking at the carcass—an addictive behaviour—and before we know it there’s no meat to add back to the soup.

  The trick about a traditional broth is never to boil it, which clouds the broth. Then we add every old vegetable within reach, clearing out the fridge or the reedy remnants from the garden, along with chopped garlic and tomatoes that we sun-dry or dehydrate in the summer and use all year long, and leaves from our bay tree and fresh herbs. (If it’s for our vegetarian grandchildren, we omit the meat base.) After we cool this concoction in the greenhouse overnight, we skim the fat and strain out the cooked-down vegetables. If we want a minestrone, then we’ll add fresh, finely chopped vegetables and boil semolina noodles in another pot (I can’t abide overcooked noodles in a minestrone; they add a wheaty taste to the broth).

  There’s nothing like a traditional broth and fresh vegetables and noodles. I rip off a hunk of bread and slather it with butter or dry-dip it and eat two-handed—bread crust in one and soup spoon in the other. Soup and bread are only a variation on each other, the soup a watery gruel and the bread a baked gruel. Thousands of years of cookery have merely refined the recipes.

  An eccentric way to imagine the invention of bread is via a grain soup that was left out too long and then fermented. Afterwards it was dried and baked. More likely it was a slurp of old soupy gruel splashed on a hot rock on a fire. Flatbread! Bread, soup or gruel, and beer all apparently arrived around 10,000 bc . The fungi that fell out of the air into the batter and made sourdough have taken bread making through some exotic changes around the world. Bread has even driven people to madness and convulsions in what’s known as St. Vitus’s dance—if they ate rye bread infected with the ergot mould, which is related to lsd. At least our modern breads have revived since the sliced Wonder Bread hysteria that began in the 1930s and sped as fast as a yeast strain across North America and England.

  Bread is alive like clay. Just as potters will tell you that a pot never stops firing, a great bread never ceases its transformations. The yeast fungi are one of our earliest domesticated organisms. Let them loose in wet or sprouted grain, and they develop a kaleidoscope of tastes.

  In the seventies I possessed a sourdough from the California gold rush of 1848, or so I was told when it was passed on to me almost like a hallowed relic—a finger bone of the bread Buddha. You can imagine my guilt after I murdered it with neglect in my refrigerator. My latest sourdough is merely a baby. I began it with potato water and a few ironic prayers less than a decade ago, but it has some life and is slowly building up a range of tastes. I make a complex cia-batta bread with it. My focaccia I inherited from my mother. It resembles a modern two-thirds whole-wheat flatbread, pounded flat and basted in olive oil, sprinkled with garlic, salt, oregano, and basil. The good news about this bread is that if it’s left out to dry it still tastes good, chewy and filling, and perfect for soup dipping—the chewier the better.

  When we are in a frenzy of cooking, especially if the grandchildren are about, we all get together for focaccia nights, where everyone sprinkles the flatbread with a topping of his or her choice. During my childhood this was how my mother made pizza, layering the focaccia with ground hamburger and tomato sauce, cheese, and spices. I favour mine with sliced tomatoes and the original ingredients, though truthfully, I like the simple herb base best, without the tomatoes. But I’ve been tempted by black olives and pickled artichoke hearts and feta sprinklings, smoked salmon and onion slices. The choice is endless, depending on what’s in the refrigerator, and I thrill to watch the grandchildren invent a new topping when they arrive at the farm. We bake flatbreads on a round pizza stone given to us by a good friend, and if we need more bread I gather kiln shelves from my pottery studio and use them. A stone is always better than a pan.

  Bread is the stuff of civilization and family. It’s a communal dish that’s gone through a million mythologies and rituals. Turn around and someone will stick a biscuit in your mouth and call it the body of a god. It’s also the base rate by which most civilizations judge themselves. When the bread ran out the cities died. The Egyptians made their bread in such vast quantities that illustrations show bakers kneading vats of dough with hoes. Our granddaughter Jenna, mucking sauces onto the dough, or the astonished expression on the face of our grandson, Aubrey, as he bites into an olive and anchovy pizza topping—they are just a continuation of the great tradition.

  SHARON HAS GONE BACK to the garden. I am alone savouring my bean soup, salad, and focaccia. I feel like a thief because I know that this is a rich feast for a man in debt, and that I am lucky enough to live in a time when even a low-income farmer can eat like the wealthy if he has his wits about him. Maybe this is why we farm. I also recognize this simple meal is a form of gluttony. Despite my futile attempts at ecological living, I am still looting the planet— the sources of my “basic” lunch circling the world, like my breakfast. How complex the simple lunch has become.

  Now I’ve spilled soup down my shirt front. I’m an enthusiastic eater and accidents happen. I’m so full I’m starting to think about a nap. This tendency is known medically as “dumping.” The word scares me. I better get outside and working before I fall victim to the hazards of a fat lunch, which is why many farmers I know will only stop for an apple or a handful of plums and a cup of tea. They are smarter than I am. And instead of contemplating the work that needs to be done, I’m thinking about the food in my belly and on the table, its provenance and its structure— these variations on the vast palate of my species. We are grazers of enormous range and tastes. But I will save the meat that surrounds the good bones for dinner.

  12

  SEEDS OF THE DAY

  I WAS STANDING WITH my arm around Sharon’s shoulder on the front deck on a romantic summer afternoon, the year after we arrived at the farm, watching the sky turn white as gusts of thistledown blew across the pasture like snow out of season. Since then, every year, skies of seeds and pollen have whirled around us, whether it’s the whirligigs of maple seeds, the fluff of dandelions, or the rich yellow pollen of Douglas fir. Within the richness of summer the land is always planning for winter and, more importantly, the next spring. Now that the horses are gone in this eighteen-year-long day at the farm, the thistles are returning, and we have to remember the ancient farmer’s charm, which only works with back-breaking labour. And one missed year forces you to start all over again:

  Cut thistles in May, they’ll be back in a day.

  (They resprout.)

  Cut thistles in June, they’ll be back soon.

  (They resprout, though weaker.)

  Cut thistles in July, then they’ll die.

  (They don’t resprout and they don’t seed.)

  SEEDS WILL DISPERSE IN many ways. They fall to the ground and scatter their genetics a few inches. They drift high in the air and float across oceans or hook onto fur or skin or clothes or hair. They explode in every direction. They are eaten by birds and deer and civets and shat in a distant valley after, travelling with their hosts. They rot in their fruit and rise into giant trees born of decay. Seeds are patient. Some survive a century until they decide conditions are right. I’ve encountered domesticated plants that must have come from miles away sprouting am
ong our vegetables. No wonder the Mayans declared seeds the “spiral of life.”

  Aside from lichens, fungi, algae, rusts, ferns, and their ilk, all the plants around us are born of seed—the germ. The germ was once a beautiful creature, until 140 years ago, when the word was first used to label a disease rather than a source of life. My Oxford tells me that a germ is capable of developing into a new organism, as well as being an elementary principle or an original idea. Germ derived from the Latin word for “sprouting.” Out of a tiny germ is born the giant sequoia.

  There’s no knowing when the first astute neolithic hunter-gatherer recognized that those little things falling off a plant would become another plant next spring. It was probably a woman, as women were almost universally the gatherers in pre-agrarian societies. We do know that plants were found in a sixty-thousand-year-old grave in Shanidar, Iraq, and some had medicinal uses, so they were probably collected. Wild wheat has been found in paleolithic sites. Emmer and Einkorn wheat are the most ancient grains. Black Einkorn is still grown in Ethiopia, and we regularly seed a row in our garden because it is a lovely ornamental with feathery bracts and kinked stems.

  Another archaeological discovery was a man christened Otzi—his 5,300-year-old tattooed corpse was found frozen in a glacier in the Otzal Alps. It’s believed he fled into the mountain heights after a violent encounter, tried to build a new bow, and then set all his gear down and quietly bled to death. An analysis of his stomach contents shows his last meal was venison and an unleavened bread made out of Einkorn grain. That strikes me as a fair last meal.

  We got our Einkorn seeds from Dan Jason’s renowned Salt Spring Seeds. Dan is a tall, likeable man operating his worldwide network out of a small island residence and, with the help of growers across North America, building a web of gardens that provide heirloom seeds to North America, Europe, China, India, Africa, and Australia. He specializes in beans and seed garlic, though he now stocks more than seven hundred varieties of vegetables and flowers. An avid gardener, he was one of the earliest of my generation to recognize the looming extinction of seeds and to do something about it.

  Despite their beauty and variety, seeds are being intentionally eliminated by agribusinesses. Their variety alone is the bane of the factory farm. There’s even a seed potato that’s illegal to sell in Canada because its tough, ropy leafage tangles up large machines. Canada’s Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, in its eagerness to support industrial farming, has been attempting to drive this potato into extinction for at least twenty-five years, but the Caribou potato has proved remarkably government-resistant. Developed a century ago by a hermit living in a wilderness cabin, it’s a delicious, crisp-fleshed, winter-keeping potato. Although you can be arrested for selling it, farmers have discovered it’s not illegal to give someone four potatoes for “experimental cultivation purposes.” The more the potato police try to enforce the law, the more the potato spreads. The Caribou potato has become a matter of principle among guerrilla gardeners and a protest against our government’s agricultural policies.

  SOMETIMES AT NIGHT, AFTER I shut my eyes, I dream of the dark earth, its texture—life, marauding earthworms, mycelium spreading, microbes, bacteria. This is the home of our major crop at present, garlic—Allium sativum—the “stinking rose.” A different kind of seed, resembling an elongated pearl, the garlic clove grows and divides and builds a bulb filled with what could be the greatest assortment of medicinal compounds ever in a single living organism. It’s a food, a spice, a cure.

  Garlic, like corn, wants a friend—to dig up the bulb, separate the cloves, and transplant it. Forgotten in the ground for a second year, each clove will attempt a bulb in confined circumstances, some rotting, some sprouting simultaneously. Without us it would undoubtedly devolve into a few survivors with tiny bulbs struggling on an unknown steppe, as the wild form, Allium longicuspis, did for centuries. I would love to have known that first brave individual who stuffed a whole roasted chicken with garlic bulbs. Originally garlic released seeds, but we tried to breed evolution out of garlic, creating seedless bulbs in the hills. A lot of good that did. Over the years the seedless clones evolved in our gardens, using gardeners as tools to help diversify.

  There are two major subspecies of cultivated garlic and an impossible number of varieties. Despite, or maybe because of, thousands of years of cultivation, garlic nomenclature is a confusing mess—imagine a seed catalogue that lists tomatoes by their colours or by the countries where they’re grown. Sharon and I grow nine kinds at present. Observant people can easily tell the difference between the soft-necks and the rocamboles. The hard-necked rocam-boles form miniature bulbil stalks like twisting serpents; after that, identifying a garlic becomes a dicey business.

  Earlier I mentioned the complexity of farming. It’s a surrealistic house in the world, doors leading to rooms with other doors, stairs going up and down, rooms inside rooms, all lateral or converse to our demands. Seeds are such an endeavour, and garlic is a great seed, maybe because the clove is not even a real seed, though we call it that. It has many rooms within the haunted house of stories where we were born. According to Herodotus, garlic was fed to the slaves who erected the great pyramid of Cheops, and the first recorded strike in history occurred when the workers were deprived of their daily ration of this energy-giving herb and staged a wildcat walkout. It’s commonly believed that garlic originated in the Eurasian steppe and was cultivated as long as ten thousand years ago. A fine storing bulb, it followed nomadic hunter-gatherers, invaded with Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, and returned with Marco Polo. Mention has been discovered in Sanskrit writings, on clay tablets and papyrus, and in ancient versions of China’s reputedly 4,500-year-old Hsia agricultural/ astrological calendar. The price of an Egyptian slave was fifteen pounds of garlic.

  Garlic’s healing powers have been extolled since history began. My diminutive Italian uncle, even in his sixties, was a terror on his dancing feet. But after suffering a heart attack and recovering slowly, he could hardly walk, was depressed, and decided his dancing days were over. Then I saw him months later. He was a ball of fire. Entering the room he immediately challenged me to a boxing match. I was shocked by this resurrection. After much cajoling I learned what had put the Italian back in the Italian. Garlic! He’d encountered an old family healing legend about finely slicing a raw clove of garlic into a cup of warm milk each morning.

  There are thousands of folkloric claims for garlic’s curative powers. Its ingredients and the ways they break down are so complex they’re difficult to analyze. Garlic’s major power lies in a compound called allicin, which is also responsible for the notorious odour. This highly unstable substance can dissolve into a maze of pharmacological activities, trace elements, and healthful supplements. Garlic’s antioxidants slow the deterioration of the brain in rats with a syndrome that resembles Alzheimer’s. And to top everything, it appears to help the brain’s serotonin system in controlling depression. That’s right; its enthusiasts claim garlic can even make you happy.

  GARLIC IS PLANTED IN the fall—when the ground is cooling and the leaves are turning. Since we have wet winters, we trench around our raised beds to drain the water away during rainstorms—after we’ve mixed in our rock phosphate, ashes, kelp, composts, and manure. First we break the bulbs apart, discarding the diseased; then we dibble the ground and plant the cloves two or three inches into the earth, where they will send out their roots, sucking up nutrition. You should plant your clove base-down and pointing at the sky above, though legend has it that a wrongly planted clove can do a backflip underground during a good winter.

  A couple dozen cloves of garlic grow easily, promising wealth for new farmers. However, garlic is a sensitive, labour-intensive crop, as you soon learn while breaking thousands of bulbs into cloves for planting. Sharon gets tendinitis every autumn. A single bulb dries beautifully. Five thousand bulbs need a barn, drying racks, fans, and an absence of rain in the two weeks before harvest. Like a good, maturing w
ine, the bulbs demand proper storage. They also need workers to trim the roots, peel the dirty outer skins, sort according to size, and discard the sick bulbs that might infect the drying shed with bacteria. For a plant with so many medicinal properties, garlic is surprisingly prone to disease. White smut can infect a field for at least seven years. That fungus blew through our islands like a storm ten years back. Good luck and good drainage saved us, but a few friends still cannot grow garlic without having it rot into guck in the ground.

  WE ALSO GROW PEPPER and tomato seeds for Salt Spring Seeds. I love my peppers many ways: fresh in a salad, baked, stuffed, preserved in olive oil, or stir-fried in a black-bean or Szechuan sauce. We grow heritage varieties to eat as well as sell their seeds. I once abhorred hot foods because I’d grown up living in a macho culture where burning your tongue with chili sauce was considered a culinary high. Ugh! Then I went to China. Tasting real Szechuan sauce, I instantly understood how a hot sauce can make flavours explode and unfold into complex variations.

  Tomatoes are another of our favourite seeds. Today Sharon cultivates and collects about eight varieties. Along with the pepper, the tomato originated in the Americas—probably on the west coast of South America, where ten varieties still grow wild in the Andes. Once called the love apple, the tomato was first regarded as poisonous by North American colonists. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century North Americans kept it at arm’s length. Yet in continental Europe, where it arrived courtesy of either Columbus or Cortés and was first documented in the mid-sixteenth century, it moved from ornamental fruit to food within a century. Today Italians assume the tomato has always been common to their country’s diet, along with the bean, which illustrates that “traditional memory,” as accurate as it often is, can also exaggerate.