The $64 Tomato
Page 5
I dismissed Larry with a laugh and a wave, but the fact was, I didn’t have a clue as to how I was going to keep twenty-two beds weeded when in the past I hadn’t even kept our small tomato bed clean. While we were planning the garden, I assured myself it wasn’t really twenty-two beds. Zach and Katie would surely each want to have a bed or two of their own—the “children’s garden”—so that left me with maybe only eighteen. And part of our crop-rotation strategy (rotation is important to maintaining healthy soil) was to leave up to four beds fallow each year, so it was really only fourteen beds, not twenty-two. And Anne would be helping. So maybe the number was more like ten. Whew! That sounded a lot more manageable. Besides, I figured I had time before I had to deal with weeds. The garden was filled with virgin topsoil. Surely I would have a year’s grace period before weed spores came in on the northwesterly winds that sweep up our ridge?
Except that not only was this topsoil not virgin, it was a veritable tramp. By the first warm weather, the beds were covered with tiny ground-cover plants that I had never seen before. They didn’t come from my neighborhood. They could only have hitchhiked in with the soil. Then other weeds started arriving—plantain, bindweed, bitter cress. Weeds that looked like mesclun sprouted up alongside my mesclun. Weeds that looked like baby-carrot tops sprouted up in my carrot bed. (How do they do that?) At first I really didn’t mind; I enjoyed being in the beds, on my hands and knees, taking in the late-spring sunshine and sweet-smelling soil. I was living my dream. But it didn’t take long for the dream to start feeling like a nightmare. I was spending hours a week weeding—I mean, cultivating—by hand.
All twenty-two beds, not ten. For over the winter, finding that we were, even with this huge space to work with, once again agonizing over what to plant and what to leave out, we had ended up filling every bed. I really wanted to try arugula, and Anne had always yearned for endive, and neither of us wanted to wait till next year. So, like a couple of kids in a candy store, we bought both. And so on.
The plans for the children’s garden didn’t fare much better. For Easter, instead of chocolate bunnies, Zach and Katie got their very own set of kid-size garden tools, a “gardening for kids” book, and kid-size garden gloves. And the real treat: the news that they could each have their own garden and plant anything they wanted in it!
They couldn’t have been less enthusiastic if we had given them each a pick and shovel and told them they’d be working in the mines from now on instead of going to school.
“Do we have to?” moaned Zach, who viewed every minute outdoors as a minute away from his computer.
Katie at least feigned interest, but it was clear she would’ve preferred a bunny—real or chocolate.
But we weren’t ready to throw in the towel. Having forgotten every lesson from our own childhoods, we figured that surely once they had tried gardening, they, too, would be hooked.
In my case, even though my father was passionate about his tomatoes and apples, I couldn’t have been less interested in gardening when I was Zach’s age. Perhaps observing my father’s fervor planted the seeds of my own passion, but they didn’t sprout until, in my early twenties, in a post-Watergate, postcollegiate, living-in-my-parents’-basement funk, I clipped an intriguing job ad and, next thing I knew, found myself teaching high school math in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was amazed to find that on St. Thomas, where agriculture could be practiced twelve months of the year, there was virtually no fresh produce to be found. Everything was shipped in from the States or Puerto Rico and, as often as not, arrived spoiled.
My studio apartment in a private home was located on a lush hillside, and within a couple of weeks of moving in, I obtained permission from my landlady to clear about thirty square feet of wild tropical vegetation for a vegetable garden. Certainly the desire for fresh vegetables was a motivating factor, but, a little homesick and unsure of the wisdom of my latest, somewhat impulsive career move, I also received a great deal of comfort from that garden. Perhaps starting a garden was also a way of subconsciously staking my claim, announcing my arrival in this new land and declaring a measure of permanence. The garden served yet another purpose: I used it almost immediately as an excuse for not being able to attend a faculty get-together at the beach. I was prevailed upon to show up at the party, but I had set the precedent of declaring my preference for the solitary pleasures of gardening over social events.
Anyway, for some reason Anne and I just assumed that the kids would be interested in gardening and even excited at the prospect of a bed of their own.
“Just give it a try,” Anne said enthusiastically. “You may like it. Now let’s talk about what you’re going to plant this year.”
“What do you mean, this year?” Zach asked warily.
Anne explained that vegetable gardens have to be planted every spring, as the plants die off during the winter. This was frightful news to them both.
“Isn’t there anything we can plant just once?” they pleaded.
“Well, there’s rhubarb,” I offered. “Or asparagus.”
The alarm grew on their faces.
“Strawberries,” Anne added, averting a crisis.
So our children’s garden consisted of two beds of strawberries. The kids did help plant them, if reluctantly, and even enjoyed picking—and eating—them. The following season, Anne and I were treated to the wonderful sight of Katie and her friends collecting and eating strawberries, filling up baskets with the plump berries, a Norman Rockwell scene that was rerun repeatedly over a span of two weeks, since the berries ripened almost as fast as they could pick them. We had a huge crop that year, more than enough to split with Katie’s friends and share with neighbors, with plenty left over for breakfast cereal and wonderful strawberry shortcakes.
The strawberries took care of two of the beds on the planting and harvesting side, but all the gardening in between—namely weeding—we couldn’t get the kids to do without dragging them into the garden, practically kicking and screaming. It didn’t seem worth it. Thus, when all was said and done, Anne and I—mostly I—were weeding twenty-two beds by hand and falling behind quickly. I was ready to try something else to control weeds, something that would prevent them from sprouting in the first place: the barrier method.
There are a couple of ways to do this, but the approach that I tried (and that many farmers use) involves laying a physical weed block on the soil. This is the condom approach to prevention, and it does have its strong points. Weeds will definitely not grow through plastic. Slugs don’t like it, either. And the weed block (usually black) warms the soil and can produce earlier crops. In the large vine bed, where we were planting melons, cucumber, and squash, I cut a sheet of heavy black plastic to fit the bed and weighed the edges down with a few stones. Then I sliced openings where I was planting the seedlings or seeds. I did the same in one of the lettuce beds, but because I was sowing almost continuous rows of minuscule lettuce seeds, punching holes was impractical. Instead I cut the plastic into strips, leaving a couple of inches for the seeds between each strip.
Anne preferred a different barrier method. One afternoon I came into the garden to find her kneeling over the rhubarb bed with a tall stack of the New York Times.
“All the news that’s fit to plant?” I wisecracked.
“Very funny.”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Using newspaper and grass clippings to keep the weeds out.”
More than likely planting the seeds of disaster. “Please don’t do this,” I begged.
“Why? I used to do this at my parents’ house. It’s a common method.”
“Because it’s going to end up a big mess, and we’ll have a fight.”
“Only if you start one.”
Undeterred, she laid down thick layers of newspaper topped with several inches of dried grass clippings.
The first year was okay (if a little ugly), but by the following spring the newspaper had decomposed and become interspersed with the brown grass clippi
ngs and fresh weeds, giving the bed the appearance of a garbage dump. We had a brief fight of the “I told you so” variety.
Truthfully, I wasn’t any happier with my plastic. Before long I came to two conclusions about the barrier method: (1) it works, and (2) I’d rather have weeds. The plastic looked horrendous in the garden—shiny black, with puddles of standing water for days after every rain. And it was horrible to walk on. Some gardeners hide the plastic with a cover of grass clippings, but I think that looks almost as bad, and smells worse. Others prefer to use “landscape fabric,” which is less shiny and allows water to permeate, but eventually weeds also permeate, coming up right through the fabric, and then you never get them out.
In the rhubarb bed, I cleaned up the paper and grass and laid in a good, thick layer of dark bark mulch. This did suppress weeds, but to the neighborhood cats it said “kitty litter.” You can guess the rest. So much for dark bark.
My biggest objection to the barrier method wasn’t the appearance or even the kitty magnet. I missed the soil. I didn’t spend a thousand bucks on beautiful, sweet-smelling glacial soil to cover it in plastic, fabric, newspaper, or mulch. These materials isolate you from the earth, from the feel and smell of the soil, from the gardening experience. The metaphor was not misplaced: it was exactly like having sex wearing a condom.
I did love unprotected gardening. I never wore gloves. I exalted in my rich, black topsoil. I loved the feel of it. I loved the fact that on a chilly but sunny spring day the soil was warmer than the air, that kneeling in it was comforting and warming. I delighted in finding earthworms, the gardener’s best friend, wiggling among the potatoes. So over the winter, I pondered the whole issue again. As I considered the various approaches, I came up with four basic strategies for dealing with weeds: Prevent, Eliminate, Control, or Ignore.
Having already discarded (for the time being, at least) prevention, I was left with the three remaining options. To eliminate weeds, you must get the root—the whole root—out of the ground. This is the route that Anne and most suburban gardeners take. She lets the weeds grow for weeks until she can’t stand looking at them anymore (that is, when they’re obscuring her flowers), then disappears into the garden in her straw hat and gloves, wielding a weapon called, not surprisingly, a weeder or weeding fork. (Note that it is not generally called a cultivator.) This tool consists of a hard wooden or plastic handle with a steel rod that terminates in a broad, forked prong. With this device, you stab into the soil and get the blade under the root of the weed, then try to push the root up with a wiggle motion as you yank out the weed with the other hand. Drop the intact weed into a basket, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. For each weed. Anne does this literally until blisters on her hand make it too painful to continue. A month or so later, she has to do it all over again. Yet somehow she is sold on this technique, flirtations with newspaper mulch aside.
But she was mainly tending only the few flower and herb beds, leaving me with what is botanically called “the rest”—that is, the tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, lettuce, spinach, carrots, leeks, potatoes, endive, snap peas, green beans, arugula, squash, and corn. I’m not quite sure how this informal division of labor came about. We never discussed it, and I certainly hadn’t planned on it, but a pattern had quickly, quietly emerged: I was the vegetable gardener, and Anne was the flower and herb gardener. This was fine in principle, except that the garden was predominantly a vegetable garden, so the division of labor was unexpectedly weighted heavily in my favor.
Labor aside, for the most part this specialization of roles has worked out well over the years, and Anne and I make a good pair in the garden, her yin complementing my yang. Anne can keep our kitchen supplied with herbs throughout the year, growing, drying, and bottling thyme, lavender, oregano, and savory. I can build a compost heap that literally steams, turning oak leaves and horse manure into sweet, crumbly compost in six months. Anne is skilled with the flowers and knowledgeable about their habits. I can’t remember any of their names (common or Latin), especially the p flowers: petunia, pansy, peony, poppy, potentilla, even im p atiens. It is not unusual for me to find myself caught in an embarrassing sentence like, “Isn’t that a nice—uh, you know, p flower.” Which doesn’t give me much credibility as a gardener.
This de facto specialization, however it evolved, did leave me with a lot of weeding, and I realized early on that if I was going to survive, I had to become more efficient at it. Anne could get away with a weeding fork in the flower beds she was tending, but if I were to weed the vegetable beds this way, weeding the garden would be like painting the George Washington Bridge. To New Yorkers, it seems that work crews are always painting the George Washington Bridge. They never finish, because by the time they work their way to the east end, the west end needs repainting. I had to find a better way.
Having had no success with prevention or elimination, my two remaining options were to control the weeds or to ignore them. While ignoring weeds sounds uncomfortably close to another strategy, one called giving up, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Why not just leave them? I know the argument, and it sounds pretty convincing—that weeds rob your vegetables of precious nutrients from the soil. But how do we know that there aren’t enough nutrients for all? A little kelp extract or the occasional buried fish ought to take care of that. How do we know that weeds in close proximity to broccoli don’t have some beneficial effect, like keeping aphids away or something? Certainly in the extreme case, if you let weeds get out of hand, they will crowd out your plants and block off sunlight as well, but aside from appearance, is there really any harm in letting a few weeds sprout up between your tomatoes? Not according to one small farmer in California I read about who had stopped weeding his garden, which supplies organic greens to the trendiest West Coast restaurants.
It was tempting. Very tempting. The next year, I did a trial, letting the corn bed (about three hundred square feet) go weedy. What a disaster! I never got to find out if the corn minded, because I minded so much. By midsummer, weeds of every variety had spread so voraciously and rapidly that the land—and my expensive glacial topsoil—seemed to be threatening to return to nature. Things must be different in California (duh!). I bit the bullet and spent four hours on my hands and knees with Anne’s weeding fork, painstakingly pulling out every weed. When I finished, I had a blister the size of a quarter on my palm, but the bed looked beautiful again, rows of corn separated by strips of clean, weed-free soil.
Having now discarded preventing, eliminating, and ignoring them, the only remaining option was to control them. Which is how I eventually, inevitably, came to fall in love with the hoe. I say “inevitably” because the hoe turns out to be my kind of tool, a tool steeped in history, reverently represented in art and literature. A real gentleman farmer’s kind of tool, the farmer’s equivalent of the woodworker’s chisel.
The hoe was probably the first farming tool invented. Wooden hoes are believed to have been used in the Paleolithic era, around 9000 BC. Even into the twentieth century, the hoe has retained a certain nobility, a symbolism of hard, virtuous, and backbreaking work.
Perhaps the most famous painting depicting a hoe is L’Homme à la houe, or Man with a Hoe, completed by Jean-François Millet in 1862. It is a bleak painting, depicting a downtrodden French peasant with a strong body but a prematurely old, exhausted face, leaning heavily on his hoe in his hopelessly rocky, weedy field. Millet himself wrote of hoeing, “Is this the gay, jovial work some people would have us believe in? But nevertheless, to me it is true humanity and great poetry.” The painting, which was widely interpreted as a socialist protest about the plight of the peasant, created a storm of controversy in Europe. It gained an audience in America in 1899 when Edwin Markham, after seeing the painting, published his poem “The Man with a Hoe” in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Here is the opening stanza:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
And on his back, the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Wow. No starry-eyed romantic view of farming here. The poem was reprinted widely and struck a nerve with an American public recovering from the stock market crash of 1893 and facing the closing of the American frontier. Pundits from William Jennings Bryan to Ambrose Bierce weighed in on the ensuing fierce debate on labor and society, while the wits of the day published poetic parodies such as “The Man with the Dough” and “The Man with the Lawnmower.”
With a history like this, the hoe was destined to wind up in my hands, the hands of an English major, better designed for turning pages in a book than for turning over the soil. When I picked up a hoe, I felt connected not only to the land but also to some of my favorite painters, such as Millet, Seurat, and Brueghel. The hoe is designed to either cut through or lift up the roots of weeds and bring them to the surface (along with a fresh supply of previously dormant weed spores). But unlike a hand weeder, a hoe at least allows you to stand up.
If you stand less than five feet tall, that is. Here is one of my pet peeves, and I hope somewhere a tool manufacturer is reading this and taking note. All hoes, as well as most other garden tools, are made with five-foot handles. Anyone of average height (and I am well above average, thank you) cannot stand up straight and comfortably use a hoe or a rake with a five-foot handle. This isn’t 1780, when people slept in those impossibly short beds you see in historic homes. America has grown up (physically, at least). We’re all taller, but the tools we use are still made for Dolley Madison.