Category Archives: Gardening

Highway 36 (revisited)

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Has anything changed? One might wonder if a trip down highway 36 this spring, in the midst of a pandemic, would yield a garden or two? Inquiring minds…. This piece was written in May of 2014.

storms building in the north

I spent a couple of days in the heartland this week. I flew into the Indianapolis airport and took the two lane highway 36, from Indiana into the heart of Illinois. A drive, straight as an arrow, that takes you though some of the richest agricultural land in this country. Small towns were planted every five to ten miles, even an oddly placed suburb in what seemed the middle of nowhere, and vast oceans of farmland.

Having nothing better to do with my time, I counted vegetable gardens. I counted as I drove through towns on the highway. I counted as I passed subdivisions. I counted as I passed farms by the dozens. Finishing the trip two and half hours later with a grand total of zero vegetable plots spotted. My recent digs at neighbors for not planting gardens now seem misplaced, because well over half of the homes in our valley have some sort of vegetable garden. But zero? 

Now we can assume I missed plenty. But I was diligent in looking and even a casual survey should have turned up the odd patch of tilled ground behind a house or two. But I also didn’t see any small orchards or vines. Most homes in our valley sport at least a pear tree or two in the front yard. 

What could account for a food desert in this landscape? Was this the curse of rich land and commodity prices? Or was it that I was simply looking at 200 miles of an industrial park disguised as an agrarian landscape. A bit like those fake Hollywood towns of yore, looks the look at first glance but nothing supporting it. 

It was odd to see old farmhouses with the corn and soybeans tilled and planted up to the driveways. The houses bobbing on the landscape like lost boats at sea. Gone were the outbuildings and barns of the past, now replaced with corrugated buildings housing supplies and gargantuan equipment. No room in this landscape for the personal or something as humble as a vegetable patch or fruit tree. No need for the homestead pig or grapevine, the message is clear, this is valuable land. 

Yet what explained the absence in towns of vegetable gardens? As is my wont, I’m no doubt guilty of reading too much into this simple lack of observable gardens. But vegetable gardens, a few chickens and a fruit tree or two make a statement. And their absence in our rich heartland is a statement, something darker, a yielding of ones will or culture. 

Perhaps it is better to farm or garden on land that requires a bit more struggle?

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Reading this weekend: Living in the Long Emergency (Kunstler). The just published update to his 2005 bestseller. A concise overview of “where we are”. Although, since the work was written just before the pandemic, one imagines the author wishes to have been able to add an addendum.

Still Missing the Sweetwater Fruit Market

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Nothing is duller than a prepackaged seed packet. What started in January with the hopeful perusal of vegetable catalogs ends in February with the arrival of parsimonious clutches of lonely seeds, each variety sprinkled into the bottom of a small envelope. Like the childhood prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, the reward is always less than one had hoped for.

It was usually in late March, in coastal Louisiana, that my brother and I would accompany our father to the local hardware store to buy our annual garden seed. The store was an old-fashioned place. Galvanized washtubs and spring-jawed animal traps hung in jumbled confusion over open bins of seed. The bins were mounted on boards and sawhorses, side by side, and filled the entire middle aisle.

The seed choices seemed unlimited. Beans of every color and pattern. Pole beans, bush beans, butter beans, crowders, and cowpeas. Kentucky Wonder, Grandma Rose’s Italian, Rattlesnake. Fungicide-treated corn dyed shocking pink and labeled with quaint names like Country Gentleman and Golden Bantam. Collards and turnips, and, of course, mustard greens, the lovely regional belle courted by all.

At each bin awaited a scoop and a stack of brown paper bags in small, medium, and “I’m going to feed the world” large. Even today, I can conjure the sound and feel of running my hands through the bins, allowing handfuls of pole beans or okra to cascade through my fingers.

Preassembled seed packets are, at best, for the social isolate. They are the paint swatches to the painted wall, a meager sample of a promised result. They are the anti-community.

Yes, yes, yes, I buy seeds in packages. And yes, commercial seeds have been mailed out for at least a century and a half. And yes, the commerce of the mailbox differs but in kind to the commerce of the bricks and mortar. Except, except (and unless you have had the pleasure of buying seeds in the old-fashioned way, you can’t understand this) … when your father tells you to grab a scoop and get a half-pound of Romano-type bush beans, something tangible happens. You have become part of a membership.

When you carry your paper sack up to the front of the small hardware store and place it on the scarred wooden counter next to the seeds your dad and brother have selected, and the owner says, “Good afternoon, Mr. Bill, who we do have here?” and your father replies, “These are my sons, Keith and Brian” — well, that is not just a packet of seeds arriving in the mail or bought off the rack at the big box. It’s not just a purchase, in fact. It is the seed of something more, something needed, something that provides for so much more than a mundane meal.

(the title refers to an older post, called Habitat Loss)

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Reading this weekend: The Earl of Louisiana (Liebling). It has been 38 years since I read this classic. There just really isn’t anything else like Louisiana politics, even in these tamer days. But, if you want the full flavor of our northern most banana republic, then Liebling’s account of Earl Long’s last race for governor is not to be missed. Political corruption as sport and excellent writing are served in equal measures. “As it was, it made a perfect waiting room-a place in which boredom began in the first ten seconds.”

Enjoy.

A Spring Update: Self-Isolating, With Beer

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Ghost flights above the farm

I walk with determination from the house, past the barn and chicken coop and into the hoop-house, with the sole goal of catching a rabbit munching on my tender cole crop transplants. Sunrise is still an hour or more away, and the light is just enough to see that while the rabbits had been having their way (again), none are visible and within blasting distance of my shotgun.

Come high summer I may take a live-and-let-live attitude toward the cute little rodents. At a time when we are deep in the largesse of a bountiful garden, I can afford a bit of noblesse oblige. But in these first days of spring, a sacrificial rabbit is the only deal on offer. There are only so many veggies to go around, and I’m not willing to share, unless the rabbits do the same.

Earlier in the week we spent a couple of hours castrating a dozen ram lambs. We left another two intact, both large singletons, that showed remarkable growth. We will graze them through the summer with Joey, the big boss ram, and see how they shape up for possible use in fall breeding. This morning, through the far open door of the hoop-house, past the nibbled kale, the ewes and their lambs lie at rest, scattered across the corral. Quiet for once, they seem at peace with the morning. I know this will change. For now though, I simply take enjoyment in watching them.

I turn after a few minutes to walk back to the house. Passing the barn, I glance inside to see how our neighbor’s project is coming. He is enclosing for us a 10 x 16 storage room with a low ramp to house equipment and tools. Anyone with experience around barns knows how dusty they quickly become. After 20 years with the need, we are finally moving forward with the construction. The flooring is down and the framed-in walls up. Standing on the floor, I give a jump and find it firm.

Back outside, I approach our three beehives. A steady thrum of activity is audible from a foot away. My recently mandated downtime allowed me the opportunity to act as Cindy’s beekeeping assistant a couple of times this past week. Two days ago she completed a split (a form of swarm intervention), creating a new hive, while I relaxed nearby and drank a beer with drop-in friends. Now, in the predawn, the newly split hive hums contentedly.

Before heading to the house I stop back by the barn and cast a nasty look at the lawnmower. Yesterday I gave it a start for its inaugural cutting. Only after pulling the cord and listening as it idled much too slowly did I realize that I had forgotten to replace the spring on the governor last fall. It was a simple enough fix, which begs the question, why wasn’t it taken care of six months ago? That is one of those eternal questions I ask myself. The answer is that it is all too easy to put aside a repair and move on to another task. The second best response is to fix it on the spot. So, yesterday, that is what I prepared to do. Without thinking, I released the throttle to stop the engine. I then reached down to turn the mower on its side to repair the missing spring. It was at that exact moment that my pain receptors notified my brain that the blade was still spinning.

Thirty minutes later, after bandaging my bruised and bleeding fingers (each mercifully still attached), Cindy went back to her small tractor and continued mowing around the barns and outbuildings — but not before sagely suggesting that I call it quits and instead self-isolate in the backyard with a beer. I did, vowing to maintain proper social distancing from the mower, at least until next week.

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Reading this weekend: A Place on Earth (W. Berry).

Unfinished Business

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Call me…. I have stood with Ishmael on the piers that surround the city, with the other Manhattoes, staring seaward, more times than I can count. I have voyaged with him to Nantucket and signed the articles, met Queequeg and seen Captain Ahab. I have looked seaward and yearned to spot the great white whale. But, yea, long about page 275 and facing 500 more, I abandon the adventure and leave Melville to sail alone.

I love Moby Dick for the language and the story. Still, it remains after decades part of an exclusive shelf: Books begun and begun again, ones that I would really like to finish but somehow never do. Books distinguished from those begun and discarded as soon as the brain reaches an understanding as to their true worth(lessness), those for which Dorothy Parker reserved this ignominious fate: “This is a book that should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” The latter category is vast, the former very select.

The books I am talking of are the “retries.” A retry is not the book the reader pick ups and continues reading after a 15-year interim, as in the case of, say, a history of the Spanish Inquisition or the fall of the Byzantine Empire. (Because, really, how many auto-da-fé cook-offs does one need to witness, how many early medieval emperors does one need to know?) The true retry calls upon the reader to go back to the beginning, the first page, the first “Call me Ishmael.”

The weekly pic: the smokehouse has a draw.

On the shelf of retries, just to the left of Moby Dick, sits A Confederacy of Dunces. It is a book I am contractually obligated by the Motherland to read to its end at least once before I die. To date, I have read, and reread, and reread, the forward by fellow Louisianan Walker Percy, the description of how he discovered the brilliance of John Kennedy Toole’s manuscript only after the mother of the writer, who had committed suicide, pressed it into Percy’s hands so many times he could no longer refuse it. Yet I have never ventured more than halfway through the actual story. I have, on at least a dozen occasions, stood alongside Ignatius J. Riley in front of the D. H. Holmes department store, where together we watch — he of the green hunting cap squashed on his fat head and I of the gray tweed flat cap —both of us judging the crowds for signs of bad taste. Inevitably, though, somewhere around page 185, Ignatius J. and I part company. The story is laid aside in a place where, fully intending on picking it back up later that day, the next, or the next week, I never do.

Eventually, I recognize the inevitable. I dust and then shelve Mr. Toole next to Messrs. Melville, Faulkner, Marquez, Gogol….

I’m making this confession publicly now not because I expect it to shame me into actually completing these works. But rather, there is the hope and dream that it gives more than a little insight into why I never quite finish weeding my row of turnips. Why I lay aside the hoe only to pick it up again a week later and start at the very, very familiar beginning.