Papa’s future theory of plant-positive farming, for which he would gain renown, was based on Sir Albert’s claim that “the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” Instead of adhering to the mainstream concept of pests as a negative and using the alternative methods of pest control advocated by J. I. Rodale, Papa saw that simply creating fertile soil made the plants happy, and happy plants did not attract pests.
The secret, Sir Albert believed, was to leave the land better than you found it. That meant putting more nutrients and organic matter—in the form of compost and manure—back into the soil than you harvested from it. “The law of return,” Howard called it. The concern with chemical fertilizers was that the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—or N-P-K—were used directly by the plant and didn’t provide food for the soil. It became a vicious cycle similar to a drug addiction, leaving the victim unable to function without drugs. Sir Albert felt it was more productive to feed the soil for future growth. This age-old concept was far from revolutionary, but its discovery was, for Papa, a revelation. As long as we fed the garden, it promised, the garden would feed us. And because it seemed like such old-fashioned common sense, Papa had little idea that it was on the forefront of what would become an organic agriculture revolution.
The dragons along the path took the form of Butz-style ag extension agents who were quick to say ideas about compost and manure were full of shit. Despite their dismissal, further reading in books such as The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour left Papa confident that the natural sources of N-P-K were far better over the long term than the chemical versions. The only catch was that the old ways required trial and error and a good dose of patience to get the balance just right.
When Papa succeeded, people said it was the best lettuce they’d ever tasted. When he didn’t, the pests were just as happy to eat the unhappy plants and leave us with cabbages full of holes, or in one infamous case, slugs in the lettuce that we sold to Jonathan’s, a fancy restaurant in town—resulting in one very unhappy diner and chef. Though we sometimes had pithy celery, extra-bitter radicchio, or aphids and worms in the corn, Papa believed that with enough attention and trial and error he could figure out the problem and solve the imbalance organically.
“Gardening skill is something of a mystical thing,” Papa told Stanley for the newsletter, his thinking influenced, perhaps, by Helen’s Theosophical leanings. “In the garden, I empathize. As much as anything, I feel what needs to be done. That’s why it occurs to me that in another incarnation I must have been a gardener because working in the garden is just heaven for me, just right. It’s what I know I should be doing.”
Soon enough, Papa’s successes in the garden, and the sharing of these findings with others, would become far more vital to him than the less compelling—by comparison—demands of homesteading. While Mama relished the myriad tasks of the good life, Papa had found his true vocation in farming.
Chapter Three
Sustenance
Sue and Lissie in the strawberry patch (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellows of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries.
“Drove by the Holbrook orchard today,” Papa announced as he came in the door, just back from a trip to town in the jeep. “The apples are ready.”
“Time to go foraging?” Mama smiled from the stove, where she was busy canning vegetables. She reveled in the spark in Papa’s blue eyes, the backward sweep of his silver-tinged hair, and the wiry strength of his body, so utilitarian in form. His simple excitement over ripe apples ignited in her the love she felt deep in her soul for their life together. At its essence, theirs was as simple a relationship as that, united by this passion for their lifestyle, for good food, and for their mission of self-sufficiency. Food, from its procurement to its enjoyment, was the force that held them together.
“We’ll get apples tonight,” Papa said, and Mama’s eyes brightened in return.
Even during the first winter in the woods, before I was born, there was more than enough to eat. The root cellar was stocked with vegetables that Mama brought from their Franconia garden—carrots, potatoes, beets. Onions and garlic were braided together with the dry stems into chains to hang in the kitchen. They had the goats for milk, which Mama made into yogurt and cheese. The chickens provided eggs, and Mama sprouted alfalfa sprouts in mason jars topped with cheesecloth for salads. Not only did they find the vegetarian diet suited to their sensibilities, but it made their limited food choices simpler, and they enjoyed the shared commitment with their neighbors.
“We don’t eat anything that wiggles,” Helen liked to say.
She’d show fishhooks to visitors, lures with three-pronged hooks on them. “Would you want to bite this?” she’d ask, brandishing the hook at them. “Then why would you want a fish to do the same?”
“I became a vegetarian because life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans,” Scott wrote of his decision. “As a vegetarian I do the least possible harm to the least numbers of other living entities. Recognizing that all forms of life are worthy of respect, I disturb the life process as little as I can.”
Papa’s hesitance to harm animals came partially from a childhood memory of killing a squirrel with a BB gun and the feeling of regret over the surprising weight of the limp body in his hands. “When you have animals, you see their individuality and name them accordingly,” Papa told a visitor, adopting a dose of Scott’s self-righteousness. “How can you eat cranky old Tom or winsome young Will? We prefer not to. To provide milk and cheese we have goats, such attractive creatures. We feel perfectly healthy and vigorous as vegetarians. We feel good about it. Good in body and spirit. I’m perfectly sure the reason we get through the work we do is because of the excellent fresh vegetables and fruit we eat.”
As I later found out, I was probably the only child in America in the 1970s who actually ate my vegetables. Little did I know that my peers across the country were hiding peas and carrots in napkins or milk cups, sitting cross-armed refusing to eat, and otherwise disparaging anything that came from a plant.
“Kids are smart, they know a shoddy knockoff,” Papa said. “Not only don’t the supermarket vegetables taste good, they didn’t have the nutritional value of vegetables grown and picked from your own garden.”
Learning from his enthusiasm, I would come to know each month of spring, summer, and fall by what it produced. May meant Jerusalem artichokes boiled and covered with butter like a new potato but tasting crisper and fresher—tasting of spring. Asparagus poked from the earth in stiff tufted spears to be snapped off and steamed to an even brighter green, making our pee smell of wet money.
June brought snap peas, lettuces, spinach, spring onions, and wild edibles, including dandelion greens, purslane, nasturtium flowers, sorrel, and the succulent sea grass found along the beach. July saw yellow summer squash, zucchini, purple and white cabbage, string beans, and tomatoes that had been started in the greenhouse. August produced more tomatoes than we knew what to do with and everything else—new potatoes, shell beans, bell peppers, celery, cucumbers, kohlrabi, turnips, parsnips, cauliflower, and broccoli. September and October were a bounty of melons, pumpkins, winter squash, garlic, and onions.
Fruits were also magically spaced across the summer by Mother Nature to make sure each month provided something for dessert. May was rhubarb, which we sautéed with honey to make a threaded tart-sweet pink mush that we ate over yogurt. June was strawberries; July, raspberries; August, wild and cultivated blueberries and blackberries. Late September, of course, was apples.
Under cover of darkness, Mama and Papa drove to the old Holbrook orchard and wildlife sanctuary, Jeep’s headlights off so as not to wake the sanctuary ranger, and me, age one and a half, nodd
ing out in the back. Giddy in the shared adventure, they imagined themselves members of the French resistance in dark clothing, pillaging the orchards of the aristocracy.
Putting away enough food to get through the thin months of winter was a challenge we couldn’t afford to shirk. It was a simple equation: if we didn’t save enough food and money from summer, we would go hungry in winter. The obstacles were many. Canning seals didn’t hold, chipmunks ate apples stored in the woodshed, and vegetables rotted if the root cellar got too damp, but Mama and Papa held to the fact that humans had been surviving the winter for centuries without the conveniences of refrigerators and supermarkets. They were further encouraged by the Nearings’ words in Continuing the Good Life:
We can be and we are largely self-sufficient in food. Self-sufficient means that we can feed ourselves. During half a century of gardening there has never been a time when we have lacked a supply of organically grown produce. This food comes directly from the garden for a large part of the year. During the late fall, winter and early spring we have three additional sources of supply.
1. It may come from the sun-heated greenhouse where we grow lettuces, parsley, radishes, leeks, kale, spinach.
2. It may come from our root cellar where apples, potatoes, carrots, beets, rutabagas and other root vegetables are stored in bins of autumn leaves.
3. It may come from our stock of bottled soups and juices and applesauce which we put away during periods of surplus production and use when the garden is in deep freeze.
“The Nearings never mentioned stealing from abandoned orchards,” Mama joked.
“We’re obviously more resourceful.” Papa smiled, parking on the edge of the sanctuary’s dirt road. It wasn’t that the apples belonged to someone, they told themselves—the orchard had long ago been abandoned by the original owners—but they knew the ranger would object.
The orchard distinguished itself from the forest by the bent and gnarled stature of trees possessing the dignity of Scott’s aged yet sturdy frame. Papa climbed the bunioned trunks of Northern Spys and Baldwins to shake the branches, apples hailing down with thuds onto the grass below as Mama followed to collect them into burlap bags. She paused now and then and bit into a fruit, savoring its crispness as she watched Papa swing down from a tree, land solidly on his feet, and head for another, the pale light of the waxing moon catching the youthfulness of his features. By the time the moon was high, they carried their bounty of apple-lumped bags to the jeep and placed them around my sleeping body. Whooping like Indians once they passed the darkened houses of town, headlights off in the moonlight, they returned home to put their loot in the root cellar. Bounty was where you found it.
“It’s amazing what we can store in the root cellar,” Papa explained to anyone who would listen. We had a small cellar under the trapdoor in the kitchen floor and another built like an underground cabin in the rise above the garden. For the most part, the cellars maintained a thirty-seven-degree temperature in winter and low fifties in summer. Those bags of apples could last for months. The same for brassicas like cabbages and brussels sprouts. Potatoes, turnips, celeriac, carrots, and other root vegetables were stored upright in sand or in buckets. If left too long, they grew masses of white roots and eventually turned to stinky mush, but by that time we usually had early crops growing in the greenhouse.
As Papa did in the garden, Mama was constantly planning ahead for our food storage, preparing now in order to feast later. She used her Foley food mill to transform boiled apples into golden jars of applesauce, some with raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries added for a taste sweet as pie. She carefully canned the overabundance of late-summer vegetables with boiling water in mason jars sealed with canning lids. Her favorite concoction was a mix of tomatoes with basil, oregano, onion, garlic, zucchini, and cauliflower that could later be made directly into a hearty winter soup. She also dried apple and carrot slices, blueberries, beans, peas, and corn on the cob in the wood oven on low heat, as they’d read that drying best preserved a food’s nutrient value.
This was all long before Martha Stewart became a household name, though today’s homemaking maven has admitted to being inspired by the Nearings. Back then, Mama was doing the kinds of housework many women believed they’d left behind with their virginity in the 1960s. Rather than resenting the work, she found solace in the repetitive nature of what were already becoming the lost arts of the kitchen.
For fruit juices she poured boiling water into mason jars with wild raspberries and honey to make raspberry juice, called “shrub” by the Nearings, and the same for rose hips from our hedge, their orange fruits floating like lobster buoys at the top of the jar. Come cold and flu season, the jars of raspberries and rose hips were worth more than gold for their vitamin C content.
Helen was known to have a soft spot for exotics like avocados, bananas, and Florida oranges, which she had shipped to Maine, but as they didn’t support the self-sufficiency stance, these were conveniently not mentioned in their books. When we could afford it, we’d go in on an order of those Temple oranges from Vero Beach, and if there was enough money, a case of peaches to boil and store in mason jars as well. By first snow, the apples, brassicas, and root vegetables in the root cellar were surrounded by shelves lined with as many as four hundred colorful jars of preserved vegetables and fruits.
“Those peaches are as bright as summer sunshine when I shine my flashlight into the dark root cellar on a cold day,” Mama told Helen. “And the oranges look like jewels from some exotic land.”
If he needed a hit of vitamin C, Papa would climb down into the cellar under the kitchen, unscrew a mason lid with a creak and a pop, tip the jar back, and drink from it right then and there. The raspberry-and-honey-flavored water was tantalizingly sweet to his sugar-free tastebuds, and at the bottom was the prize, a thick pulp of berries that colored his lips red as they slid into his mouth.
“You’ve been into the berries,” Mama would scold, but she couldn’t get too mad because she, too, snuck them like that.
Despite the importance that food held in our lives, or perhaps because of it, Mama and Papa sometimes fasted during holidays, as the Nearings did, when the rest of America was “glutting,” as Helen called it. Practiced over the centuries for religious and political reasons, fasting in moderation is thought to benefit health and slow the aging process. For my parents, it was cleansing and helped ease the burden on our winter stores of food. They drank only water and tea or juices made from carrots, beet, wheatgrass, and apples. One of Mama’s favorite inventions was a grater and cheesecloth that she used in place of an electric juicer.
Mama loved fasting and the light-headed euphoria that set in after the first day or so of hunger, her mind free to wander more endorphin-laced paths. There was a sense of control in it for her that went deeper than the political and health stance of the Nearings. Somewhere along the way, the endorphins produced by hunger became an addiction for Mama equal to any drug. For Papa, hard labor had a similar effect. As with alcohol or drugs, the high of fasting and the grit of a good day’s work momentarily eased a troubled mind. While the material addictions of the outside world had given way to purer ones, the effect was the same. As with alcohol, Mama often became spacey from fasting, a side effect of initial low blood sugar that made the simplest tasks exceedingly difficult. Little details such as fixing my dinner didn’t matter so much anymore. I would try to communicate important things to her in my rudimentary language, how hungry I was, for example, but she wouldn’t really hear me.
“Uh-huh,” she said as she busied herself making her fruit and vegetable juices with her grater and cheesecloth. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yup, sure.”
Fasting became another way, really, of checking out.
Food for Mama was equal to love, and, though she might withhold it when fasting, she usually meted it out to Papa and me straight from her heart. The preparing, cooking, and storing of food made up the pulse o
f her days. I’d wake in the mornings to the sound of Mama grinding grain. Clamped to the kitchen counter, that steel mill from Hatch’s was her magic tool, transforming inedible whole grains into vital ingredients as she stood beside it, hair pulled back, working the crank. The groats went in a funnel in the top, to be ground by opposing metal wheels attached to the crank, and depending on the setting, meal or flour streamed or puffed from the spout into a bowl.
To supplement the food from the greenhouse, root cellar, and stores of mason jars, the fourth component of our food supply, also not mentioned in the Nearings’ books, was the ordering of bulk nonlocal foods. We went in with the Nearings on orders from the organic supplier Walnut Acres: twenty-pound bags of oats, wheat groats, and sunflower and sesame seeds, plus five-gallon metal containers of oil, nut butters, maple syrup, and honey. Most important to our diet were the whole grains, which had not been processed to remove the fiber and nutrients, so had to be ground by hand instead.
For breakfast, Mama often made hot cereals—twelve-grain, Irish oatmeal, or cornmeal, all ground with the mill and served with butter and maple syrup. Lunch might make use of the leftover cornmeal for corn dodgers with baked beans. For dinner, the organic Durham winter wheat groats were ground for bread to go with her famous vegetable soups, served with salads from the garden or greenhouse.
Once I was old enough, I’d come and wait expectantly by the stove as the smells of baking bread filled the house. The cookstove was our most important possession, without which we would either starve or freeze to death. To my young imagination it looked like a black animal with four stout legs under a square body, a flat top with lids that opened to the fire, and one long tail of a chimney that curved through the wall to puff smoke outside. It had three mouths, a small one to make little fires for cooking, a bigger one for overnight fires, and the biggest of all for the oven, with white enamel around a temperature dial ranging from “cool” to “very hot” and the brand name, “Kalamazoo.” When the bread was done, Mama opened the oven door and the loaves came out golden brown and steaming, to be placed on the counter to cool.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 7
