We spent a long time looking for a house. Even in what was supposed to be a buyers’ market, we had a heckuva time finding sellers who weren’t still living in the real estate bubble and were willing to sell at the market price. But finally, we found a sizable plot of land that just needed a little remodeling. Or, as it turned out, a lot of remodeling (www.reluctantrenovator.com).
Additionally, I spent much of my summer helping manage another successful year of the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market (www.mgfarmersmarket.com) and planning our move to our new location next to the Morton Grove American Legion Civic Center (6210 Dempster St., Morton Grove) in Summer 2012. We are kicking it off with a Winter Market from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. on December 3. And we might even work with The Local Beet to serve up a Locavore dinner sometime this summer. More on that in 2012.
The new owners of our old house were delighted to see the frames and cages I had built, but were dismayed by the crabgrass that had completely covered all the soil, as I had neglected the gardens completely while we were selling the house and I was starting a new job. Still, the new owners are avid gardeners. I have passed by the place since then, and they raised an 8-foot security fence beyond which nobody can see. However, vines of all sorts stick up above the fence line, and I imagine that they are making every square inch of the tiny backyard count toward raising crops.
The previous owners of our almost-ready-to-move-in new house already had a 5 x 12 weed-filled garden west of the garage, in which my oldest son planted autumn-harvest seeds (mini-pumpkins, jack-o-lanterns, gourds and squash). We planned on using these for household decoration and ultimately were rewarded with more than a half dozen large table centerpieces. Problem was, the garden had been bordered with railroad ties, which are notorious for carrying, at a minimum, arsenic. However, the ties were decades old and a landscape architect friend thought the poisons from the treated lumber would have long leached out by now.
Well, we really wanted to grow something we could eat sooner than Halloween. As a compromise, we planted tomatoes as far from the ties (i.e., as close to the garage wall) as possible. The problem with that, of course, is that it cut in half the amount of sun the poor nightshades could enjoy. As a result, we had a crop of green, stunted tomatoes, with a few ripe red ones in our unseasonably warm fall.
On the other hand, the house featured a 2nd-story porch/balcony up to which I carried a potted tomato plant that would enjoy the full complement of out-in-the-open weather. That plant gave us cherry tomatoes in very short order, every one of which ripened to a delicious red until we picked the plant clean and took its spent pot of soil back down.
But these were poorly designed, almost spur-of-the-moment plantings done in the throes of cleaning the place and meeting with contractors. It wasn’t the carefully planned and exhaustingly cultivated type of garden I typically enjoy. Fortunately, there’s plenty of land to play with.
The house enjoys a large backyard separated by a wide-gap metal fence from an unimproved alley. The village has no problem with us growing veggies on the alley and the area adjacent to it, behind the garage, has no real purpose. It’s too tiny to play in, but wide enough that it has to be mowed. The biggest problem is that our neighbor feeds birds every day. Big nasty pigeons get the lion’s share of the seeds she provides them, although mice, chipmonks and squirrels get much of what’s left on the ground. I’m happy to say that owls and hawks have been spotted in the neighborhood preying on these pests (although my neighbor hates the predator birds). But in the short-term, I will likely need to build fresh chicken wire cages to keep out my neighbor’s invited and uninvited pets.
This spring we will build a few 4’ x 4’ raised beds on either side of the fence for plants that love full sun. West of the garage I can cover the soil with cloth and raise it up another few inches with fresh soil for shade-tolerant plants. And up on the 2nd floor balcony we’ll continue to take advantage of the full sun as well as the convenience of picking and eating off the plant without having to walk across the backyard.
At the moment, we’re completely focused on finishing the interior of the house. The front lawn has been largely destroyed by a plumber who installed overhead sewers in the basement and left hundreds of pounds of useless clay sitting atop the grass. Most of that clay is gone, and the remaining living parts of the lawn were further destroyed by the dumpster our general contractor leaves on the front lawn. So this is our opportunity to start something new. Perhaps terraces of wildflowers or native prairie species?
It’s been a long time since I’ve had the chance to plan, build and tend my own garden. Even my kids are looking forward to growing a lot of our own food. New neighbors moved in on the west side of us, and the grandmother, who speaks hardly a word of English, has already begun preparing a 20’ x 10’ plot of garden on the west side of their property. I look forward to the friendly, unspoken competition to see whose garden produces more, and to what I predict will be much neighborly sharing of our harvests next year. Just not sharing with the birds, I hope.
Another guest post from my colleague, Mary Longe, co-conspirator at the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market. This is especially timely, given that the Girl Scouts now offer a badge for locavorism.
Managers on Scout Day at the Morton Grove Farmers Market
To attract first-time customers and highlight vendors, last spring the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market committee dedicated nine events to different community interests; among them, Dairy Day, Senior Day, Scouting Day, Harvest/Pie Day Halloween Costume Contest Last Day. There is a rhythm to the festivals that follows the chronology of the seasons that the market spans.
Scouting day fell yesterday, I approached my volunteering like any other weekend, looking forward to the camaraderie in the Welcome Booth. It’s always good for a laugh and gossip about the town (useful for making me feel more in the know), seeing the newest harvests from the farmers (plums and mums). I checked in with Randy from Providence Farms, who usually tells a story about an animal, child or their farm, and always, the honey guy, John Bailey, whose bee keeping gives him a perspective on climate change, people, the food chain that provides contrast and perspective to my day-to-day keyboard and healthcare world.
In planning the event, I’m not sure whether the committee realized at the time that that weekend also commemorated 9/11, but the combination of Scouting and 9/11 was profound. I’m usually in the second shift of volunteers, which means the table and processes are set up, and we have a transition meeting, like nurses handing off patients, but ours usually takes forty seconds, if that. Yesterday, proved different. We had the usual drawing for a free bag of Market goodies and the hidden cow–a foot-high blow-up toy that is placed at a farm stand until a child finds it, returns it to the Welcome Booth for a prize, then re-hides it. This week, Bessie remained hidden from the last week, so yesterday we substituted a blow-up pig. We offer free use of the covered wagons to tote toddlers and we collect Food Pantry donations. We added a drawing for a commemorative 9/11 flag and offered doughnuts from Meiers Bakery and lemonade from Super Cup in exchange for Food Pantry donations. We also asked visitors to help create a banner recognizing Scouts, which will eventually be hung in the American Legion Hall. That’s where my attention focused. For me, it seemed a unique volunteer task, I didn’t realize it would be so poignant.
We asked everyone passing the Welcome Booth whether they were ever a Girl Scout, Boy Scout or Camp Fire Scout. If so, we encouraged them to add their hand print or outline their palm to a 4’ x 20’ plain white banner. Hand-size ink pads in blue and red, a selection of Sharpee pens in every color were available and an industrial-size bag of wipes stood at the ready. Directions included writing their name, troop number or place and the years when they were a Scout or leader. Word got out to the kids participating in the festivities and most stopped by the table to smear a hand over the ink pad, then blot it on the banner. Some wound up with so much ink they would be eligible to join the Blue Man Group. Outlining their hand in marker was a neater alternative and gave more variety to the artistry of the banner. In many cases, especially when two people were together, they combined the process and outlined the hand while pressing it down to create the print blot.
A dad, mom and thirteen-year-old daughter stopped their stroll through the Market to look at the banner. The dad said he had been a Scout, the mother didn’t commit and the daughter said she wasn’t. Though the dad hesitated, he eventually agreed to make a handprint, when he got his daughter to agree to help. The dad reached to the top of the banner with his left hand and his daughter traced around his fingers in Boy Scout blue. The dad reminisced about his days as a Scout, trying to remember the exact years, when the mom also engaged the daughter to outline her right hand next to the dad’s and added her years as a Scout. As the happy family left, they remarked that they would return to the Market.
A while later, three women approached and the leader and elder of the three said she’d not only been a Scout, but was the leader (and mother) to the other two. The three agreed to make prints and went whole hog. Each dipped their hands in the ink pads, and one of the others outlined the hand. The mother/leader on top, the daughters beneath. The discussion for me was like listening in at the dinner table when someone trips a memory. The girls (”in the grandmother faces”, as May Sarton said) got into bits on who was older and who got to do things that the other didn’t. The mom scolded in a joking/loving way that it must be part of their usual repartee. The three women were at the banner table for 20 minutes, entered a conversation with another seasoned leader for another 20 minutes, left, and returned to make sure that the years they wrote, (sometime in the 1960s) were accurate. They also said they’d be back to the Market.
One woman took me aside after she made her print and listed her leader years and her cookie years. In our conversation, she told me about the success she had when she was responsible for the cookies for two troops. “It was easy” she told me. And then proceeded to describe the entire book-keeping process she had created. It didn’t sound easy to me. It equaled the complex process the nurses use to track a patient’s progress and outcomes. I was impressed by her ability to handle the details, I was aware of the gift she gave the troops by enabling an important fund raising event. I was touched by how much this effort meant to her 20 years later.
My own mother was born in 1912 when the Girl Scouts were founded. She led our Girl Scout troop into getting their hospitality badges. We learned about what it takes to make someone feel welcome. My hospitality badge is the only thing I still have from those days.
And there it is–the Genesis of how I came to work the Welcome Booth–uncovered on Scouting day at the Morton Grove Farmers Market.
My co-volunteer on the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market committee wrote a personal essay about our pre-opening Mother’s Day Market. I don’t think I could have better summed up the spirit of why we put our time and energy towards helping our community buy and eat local. The following was written by Mary Longe.
It wasn’t cold; it wasn’t sunny; there weren’t fruits and vegetables. But it was the Mother’s Day preview of the upcoming Morton Grove Farmers’ Market and the elements of summer were falling into place. People were out in Midwest high fashion. A pleasant mix of Ugs and shorts, flip flops and ski parkas: the hopes and reality of May in Morton Grove, IL.
For me, desperation for the market set in on Thursday, when I’d parsed out the last of the honey I’d bought last fall from the beekeeper from downstate. Greek yogurt and walnuts are truly foods of the gods when combined with his seasonal honeys.
Seeing the vendors and community organizations from last year felt like seeing old friends. And seeing the new farms and sellers created a whole new market. I left with tomato, basil and rosemary plants in anticipation of fresh, home grown bruschetta in 63 growing days. I’ll pick up the mozzarella from the Cheese People and bread from the bakery when the tomatoes mature.
As I visited the stalls and hung out at the Welcome Booth, the words of three separate conversations help me convey what the market means for me beyond restocking my honey stores and preparing for meals in a couple months.
First was a chat with a young mom who told me her Mother’s Day tomorrow would be spent at a friend’s farm outside Racine, WI. She and her friends celebrate a twenty-first century version of Beltane – the ancient ritual of the druids to welcome the new growth of spring. “It’s about honoring the earth—about the beauty of nature,” she told me. “And, the market is part of that, too. That’s why it’s important to me.”
A table alongside the Welcome tent held the supplies for face painters and a Henna artist. A hugely talented artist named Asma, whose age is no indication of her stunning artistry, created designs on hand after hand. She told me she was named artist of the month at her middle school. (Seriously, have her Henna a Wind-Wish wheel for something small, or a full back-of-hand design to experience the fragrance of the Henna herbs and her artistry.) At the other end of the table a little younger child sat painting a design with face paints on his own leg.
“My name’s Mary, what’s yours?” I asked him.
He kept his focus on the fire-engine red creature emerging from his paint brush. “Ethan,” he admitted.
“So, Ethan, you about… seventeen?”
He finally looked at me, incredulously, but straight eye-to-eye. (It always works.) “Nine. I’m nine.” He said as seriously as my statement to him.
“Not nineteen, then? Are you sure? And then he smiled a huge smile with big shining brown eyes. He recognized my teasing.
“What do you do with your summers, Ethan?”
“I go to a bunch of camps.”
“What kind of camps? Do you learn how to fix air conditioners?” He looked directly at me again.
“No, I go to nature camps.”
“How come nature camp, Ethan?”
“I love nature. I love the animals and I love the trees and plants and Earth. I like all the activities with the other kids there. I like it here.”
And, there it was. Ethan, the nine-year-old, gesturing at the Farmers’ Market, told me with conviction, he connected the market to nature.
Later, I took the opportunity to shop the stalls and talked to the farmer from whom I bought the tomato plants. “My family and I do nine markets a week,” he told me. “I take a couple; my wife and older son each take a couple too. Then we take Sunday off.”
“When do you have time to farm?” I asked.
“We have 27 acres. Three grow the produce we bring here. The others have hay and pasture for the cattle. We all work hard and we get the work done.”
“So, do you take Sunday off to rest after all that or for religious reasons?”
“Well except for picking a few zucchini and cucumbers when they insist on being picked, which we don’t clean ‘til Monday, we figure God had a good reason for setting aside a day to rest each week. We gather with other people on Sunday. We gather our family and make time to enjoy each other on Sunday. Imagine,” he said wistfully, “if everyone with all their busy lives did that. Imagine how we’d be less frantic and have better relationships. The world would be a better place; people would be happier.” He went on to tell me how he went to school and worked in the Chicago, then decided to go back to the country where he could see storms roll in and smell fresh air.
I was struck by the idea that this man loves his job and the life it provides his family. He takes a day from the fields or the other markets every week to spend a different kind of time with his family and his community. His day of rest allows him to come back to our market renewed. His love of the land and his self awareness of what it means to him and his family affected me.
And so a summer full of markets begins. Listening to the mom, the nine-year-old and the farmer, I got a better understanding of what brings me back, too. A common thread with nature, relationships to people and the food wove through each conversation. Now, I realize that’s what brings me back, too. That’s why I volunteer—for the regular reminder that our food comes from the hard work of people who live just down the interstate, for the people of all ages whom I’ve met and who share an interest in nature, and for the food I take home. The Morton Grove Farmers Market will be open again June 4th. I’m optimistic it will be warm and sunny and truly summer. See you there!
As my family sits impatiently waiting for the spring thaw to heat up the housing market so we can finally acquire a piece of land in our desired area, I find myself more and more detached from the soil. I haven’t grown anything in well over a year and I miss it more and more. Having helped found the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market last year was a great experience, but I miss the day-to-day experience of watching growth, battling nature and eating fresh from the vine.
A whole slew of books—it’s its own genre, really—have been written about the spirituality of farming. Organic farmers like Joel Salatin have detailed organic farming as a political statement, suburbanites have penned journals about leaving the banality of their sterile white collar lives to grow things for a living. I’ve read many of these and put just as many down halfway through the first chapter.
Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life stands out in the crowd like a cabbage among weeds. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. As a travel writer, She has crafted elegant prose that elevates the most mundane farm tasks into mesmerizing tales. Here is her description of compost:
“Of all the confounding things I encountered that first year, the heat of decomposition—its intensity and duration—was the most surprising, the one that made me want to slap my knee and say, Who knew? That heat comes from the action of hordes of organisms, some so tiny billions can live in a tablespoon of soil. They are in there, eating and multiplying and dying, feeding on and releasing the energy that the larger organisms—the plants and the animals—stored up in their time, energy that came, originally, from the sun. I think it’s worth it, for wonder’s sake, to stick your hand in a compost pile in winter and be burned by a series of suns that last set the summer before.”
Unlike other journals of farm life, she is honest about her and her husband Mark’s finances. They had little cash to begin with, and Mark sought to live a bartering lifestyle anyway. Other books gloss over the costs of acquiring or maintaining the land much and make me wonder if the white-collar farmers were really just trust fund babies opting to get their fingers dirty. (To be fair, my wife thinks I’d make a better gentleman farmer than actually get my hands dirty.) Kimball does not shun the dirt, and offers a glorious description of the different types of filth that cling to her skin and clothing on a daily basis. She eloquently describes each injury to herself and her husband as well as the animals they own and the ultimate death of her beloved horses and cows. She also pulls no punches admitting that, although she loves her farm life, it is exhausting work that never gets any easier, despite the eventual addition of full-time staff as Essex Farm’s reputation grew along with its CSA members in the North Country of New York state.
Late in the book, Kimball contrasts her 500 acres to a modest farm she visited in Hawaii, which she describes as a suburban garden plot. Kimball remarks that those who love growing food but are looking to relax and enjoy tranquility are better off becoming gardeners than farmers, whose livelihood depends on good weather, functioning equipment and cooperative livestock.
She goes on to note that in times of upheaval, people return to the land. As America’s current two-front war escalated, the size of her volunteer staff grew. Surfing the crest of the Return to Agriculture trend, Kimball and Essex farm also spearheaded the Write-about-the-Return genre.
As for myself, odds are against us having land in time for a spring planting. If I’m lucky I’ll plan for some late-season crops. We feel that homeowners in our district are slowly realizing that the housing market isn’t what it was in 2005 and they must drop their prices to attract buyers. Soon, if all goes well, I’ll be planting again and bragging about my square foot gardens on these pages. Until then, stay warm and think of spring.
I am taking a brief, unpaid sabbatical from helping run the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market so I can visit some of our fellow Chicagoland Saturday markets. First stop was Green City. No doubt they’ve been mentioned countless times on this website, and I’m sure it’s all true. It’s a fantastic market. Unbelievable produce that I’ve not seen anywhere else (yellow watermelon flesh!). Oriana was there and we bought a bag of her unique Asian pears. My 12-year-old sampled wheat grass juice, which was pretty adventurous of him, even if he did spill most of it out on the ground. We came home laden with cider, peaches, elk burgers and apples, after having roamed around the Lincoln Park Zoo for a spell. Next week we’ll stop by Glenview and see how our friends at Wagner Farm are holding up.
Running the Market has been a wonderful experience. In addition to meeting neighbors throughout Morton Grove, I’ve gotten to know the farmers and other vendors. When they have a profitable week, I’m happy. When things are slow, it means we have more time to chat, and while I wish they were busier, we’re always discussing new ideas to make the community more aware of our presence. Watching their harvests change–from asparagus to corn to apples–has more than made up for my lack of a garden this year. To top it off, so many friends are enjoying the abundance of their own gardens or CSA boxes that they insist on sharing to prevent the excess produce from going to waste.
We do have a compost box in the yard where we live. There’s enough non-edible landscaping that can still benefit from humus and the boys enjoy collecting leaves and dead grass to add to the pile. Still, I pine for my own land again. We’re looking at houses in the Morton Grove area, and I pay special attention to the neighbor’s trees. If they shade our backyard too much, I know it’s not good garden area. Some houses are dwarfed by neighboring McMansions, and while it may reduce our air conditioning bills in the summer, I’m aware of what a two- or three-story building to the south of a tomato plant can do to it in our region.
We’re almost finished with the herbs that we salvaged from our old house just before moving out. The chives, marjoram and sage went nicely with some fish we caught at Lake Julian Trout Farm. Once these bags are gone, we’ll have severed our final link to the land we owned more than a decade. Hopefully before this year’s snowfall we’ll be envisioning next spring’s planting in a brand new location.
Because we sold our house recently and due to my 50-hour-a-week job and long commute, It was untenable for me to plant a garden this spring. Also, helping start and run the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market took up a good chunk of my free time and gave me an outlet for my green and locavorist tendencies. Surrounded by professionally grown fresh, seasonal produce every Saturday morning, I was less inclined to spend time planting my own.
It is no great tragedy to let a garden lay fallow or let a farm return to nature. The glorious chaos that occurs when many species make a home in the careful order we once enjoyed is the way of all things in the end. I don’t want to get too melodramatic about this, but agriculture is a struggle against life’s tendency to spread out and occupy every fertile nook and cranny. In the wild, you never find a single type of plant lined up neatly in a row with nothing else occupying the neighboring soil. And it is better that plant roots should hold the soil in place than that wind or rain should carry the loose nutrients into the alley or the sewer system.
At the same time, I am amazed (and a little bit flattered) at how tremendously fertile my garden plots are. While my sparse lawn features patches of brown interspersed with green weeds, the garden plots are so covered in a cornucopia of useless (for people) and unloved plants that I have to push aside several layers of thick stems to see the black soil. It’s not just crabgrass, chickweed and dandelions. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in my three plots, and I’d guess at least a dozen species of green things growing in there. The weeds have blanketed the plots in some cases. Near the fence, a few volunteer tomatoes came up this spring, as well a return of the beans and squash. I cleared weeds away from the stems of these plants to give them a fighting chance at producing fruit. The squash blossomed nicely, and despite Melissa Graham’s suggestion of frying, I ate some raw right off the plant. They have a very mild, and not unpleasant flavor and are so thin they almost melt in my mouth. The tomatoes have yet to produce fruit and we will close and be out of the house before anything interesting might happen with them.
I hope the new owner will appreciate all the equipment I am leaving her and the careful siting of the square-foot gardens she is acquiring. In future springs I might swing by the old house to check out what she does with the garden. If she decides to replace it all with sod, that’s her business. But my secret wish is that she’ll take advantage of the easy access to the rain barrel, the optimal sunlight exposure and the critter-proof cages and grow something special on soil that was lovingly blended, poured and nurtured by someone who really cared about what grew on his land.
If Earth Day isn’t enough to encourage you to grow something, then I don’t know what can make you plant some seeds. But if you’re just afraid of failure, here’s a few vegetable gardening tips to help you out.
Now go out and grow some local food already!
Eating home-grown food is an enormously satisfying experience. On a beautiful fall day, the pleasure of eating raw broccoli right off the stem was superior to eating it in most restaurants I’ve been to. Sharing my extra potted plants with neighbors and friends was especially gratifying as we compared notes and tips and they bragged about how well the collards and potatoes were doing in their backyard soil.
The elaborate planning and hard work that went into helping greens emerge from the ground, combined with the anxiety involved in protecting them and watching them change and grow daily and finally a quick, exciting harvest reminds me somehow of the preparation Olympic athletes make in advance of the big event. But maybe that’s because I was watching NBC while writing this essay.
Being part of TheLocalBeet put me in contact with growers, retailers, chefs and eaters who think carefully before they plant a seed, stock their shelves, select produce or fill their families’ mouths. Some of these people shared the same experience of reading Michael Pollan to awaken them to this new way of thinking. Many were simply raised that way. In truth, though, most people I know could care less where their food came from as long as it’s not poisoned (in itself an article of faith that has little reason for trust). Whether their chard came from Switzerland, Chile or Chicago means little as long as the price is about the same. But most people don’t make the effort to compare the taste, texture and appearance of one farm’s vegetable to another and many farmers who put their hearts into growing a better product decry their inability to convince the buying public to demand to know where their food was grown, let alone whether soil differs from one location to another. Hanging around and reading about locavores for the past year has taught me that the difference between quality local food and commodity food has a value that can be measured. It may not always be worth it for me, but buying local food has become a more regular activity for me than buying organic ever was.
My tenure as a LocalBeet writer helped springboard me into another (volunteer *sigh*) position in helping launch the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market. This has has been a terrific opportunity to work with some dedicated people and some extremely cooperative village officials. Tellingly, most people I speak to about the market are more interested in creating a regular community event—the locavorism is a side benefit.
Since planning my own garden, I have gained a respect for farmers and growers and have talked with about the mundane aspects of planning, growing and harvesting. In a few weeks I will attend a Farm to Fork forum, focusing on the economics of growing sustainable food, an aspect of agriculture that leaves me bewildered. But for some people, the value of improving our local economy and society by supporting our neighbors who grow our food is something to invest in. That’s something that just a few years ago I might not have understood.
Also, in previous years, my wife and I just threw seeds or seedlings in the ground and made do with whatever came up. Being asked to write about the experience encouraged me to plan carefully, to set goals and to do research. I challenged myself as a gardener knowing I would be brutally honest in my reporting, and while the soil did most of the work, I’m proud of my results.
One other benefit to come out of the last year of writing for TheLocalBeet is something I could never have predicted. After a childhood of suffering repeated wasp and bee stings, and an adulthood of wincing at the sound of buzzing insects and often avoiding the outdoors for fear of being stung, an assignment put me in the center of a hive of busy honeybees. Standing on a Chicago rooftop last summer while Anthony McKinney showed off his urban hives was a life-changing experience. Since that day, I’ve barely flinched as bees pass me by. Between the research I did to prepare for the article and the zen-like sensation of standing calmly (protected by a bee suit and bonnet) while the ladies went about their business swept away my phobia, a la Fear Factor. I’m all better now, thank you. And I hope the girls are tolerating their first Chicago winter well.
My biggest disappointment were the pawpaw seeds given to me by Oriana’s Home Orchard. I let Oriana down, and the seeds never sprouted. Our backyard is pawpaw free, which is probably not such a tragedy, as we are selling our house and the soil I so carefully tended and fertilized will become someone else’s property (soon, we hope). Still, the education that I received taught me a lot, and I look forward to starting a new, more productive garden on some other patch of land.
William Alexander’s The $64 Tomato is a treatise on how one family spent thousands of dollars to grow a few bushels of vegetables. While Mr. Alexander’s methods and situations are very different from my own, I found myself sympathizing with his outlook on life, his reasons for gardening, his frustrations with nature’s refusal to obey his will and his children’s propensity to roll their eyes at his gardening obsession.
For the few hundred dollars I spent on gardening supplies in 2009 ($250, to be close to exact), I got a modest return in food ($165, by my estimation). The value I put on the harvest is based on farmer’s market prices rather than on-sale-at-the-local-grocery-store costs. And the input costs don’t include long-since-amortized capital investments like the rain barrel, compost bin and, of course the land on which I grew the greens. If I had to add a portion of the mortgage payments to my input costs, the results would be much worse.
But since I’m doing the math my own way and since the balance sheet has to balance, the $85 difference between input and output paid for trial-and-error gardening lessons that I won’t need to learn again next year. Here (free to you!) are a few of these lessons, at a cost to me of just over $10 a lesson.
The Cages Worked
More than once, I watched a flock of birds land on the caged Square Foot Gardens and I chortled at their helplessness. Perched in confusion atop the plastic rigging, they seemed bewildered at how yummy insects could be so close, and yet so unobtainable. They squawked and chirped a lot, crapped a bit, and left my garden little worse for wear.
While the unprotected tomatoes were quickly stolen by squirrels, the ones in the cages avoided animal attack. It was weather that killed the caged tomatoes, and we only four or five fruits from the square foot gardens. Still, they were the tastiest fruits I’ve ever eaten. Candy-like, in fact. With each bite (actually, these were small enough that there was only one bite), I smugly thought, “I get these and you don’t.” I shook my tiny fist in victory at the rodents who were no doubt hiding behind a wall somewhere.
Something There is That Doesn’t Love a Cage
One problem with fencing out the world is that, in upsetting the natural order of things, I was faced with a slug problem that could otherwise have been handled adroitly by the birds who frequented the unprotected garden. The cages were a pain to build and to move each time I needed to get at the garden. It was an eyesore to visitors who came looking to buy the house and storing two 64 cubic foot, splinter-covered wobbly monstrosities remains a challenge.
Planning Pays Off
The notion of succession planting—that a single plot of land can bear multiple harvests in a season—was only possible because I sketched the garden out in advance and thought through what seeds or transplants would fit nicely in which spots. By knowing ahead of time exactly which seeds went where, I was able to give most of the plants enough space to grow unfettered and live out their leafy lives to the best of their abilities. After that, it remained up to me to figure out how to cook vegetables that I only grew in the first place because they fit my plan, and not because I really looked forward to eating them. Still, it was pretty easy to fall in love with collard greens.
I Should Plan Better
Among the many things I failed to think through was how large some plants can grow (both tall and wide) and how their heft might affect their neighbors. My Brussels sprouts, which produced two or three meals’ worth of veggies for the four of us, were so tall and heavy, that the smaller cage lacked the height to let them grow. So I had to let them lay on the soil, which took up precious horizontal space in my square foot garden. Next year, I can extend the height of the cage so I can stake them up vertically.
Despite all my careful planning, I didn’t think in terms of shade. An important lesson I learned is that plants needing the most sunlight should be on the south end of the garden. Kind of a no-brainer, I guess, but it’s hard to tell when they’re seedlings that they’re going to block each other’s light. My tomatoes and peppers, suffering from a cool summer already, didn’t need the knockout punch of being on the far side from the sun. Out of more than half a dozen pepper plants, I probably only harvested eight or nine fruits altogether. On the other hand, three luscious purple eggplants (no thanks to my foresight) got enough sunlight (even when shaded by beans) to grow to fruition and contributed to a few outstanding all-garden eggplant, hot pepper and basil sandwiches. For some reason, the unprotected eggplants avoided all insects and critters. No tiny fist shaking necessary. Nobody wanted to nibble on them except me, and they were as pretty as they were tasty.
I had thrown a bunch of peas in the ground weeks before the frost hit. They sprouted a few inches, then died a feeble death. Had I been quicker to plant them, or even started them indoors so I could have transplanted them while six inches tall, I might have gotten one last crop. Next year, I shall plan in four dimensions and not just the boring old three.
Experimenting Is its Own Reward
While adding Epsom salt to my tomato roots seemed to do absolutely nothing (or may, in fact, have done damage) one of my biggest finds was how good broccoli leaves can be. I had originally assumed they were poisonous, because you never see them in the grocery store or on menus. But when picked young, they are the culinary equivalent to collard greens, and retain a smell of broccoli when eaten.
Much of the reward for me has been just watching different plants grow, seeing what effect treating plots differently had on my plants, and noting how wind, water and sunlight influenced the outcomes. I garden, in part, just to satisfy my curiosity. Next year I intend to change things just for the sake of change.
Once thing I tried that I’ve never done before is intentionally saving seeds. In this case, I emptied out a number of bean pods, dried the beans in the sun and placed them in a sealed jelly jar with several silica gel packets (do not eat the silica packet!). They’re sitting in a cool, dark place, and we’ll see if they can spring back to life in May.
Nature Can Restore its Own Balance
The hawks who had been circling I-94 in the spring later began circling over my neighborhood. One day I drove down the alley to see a hawk perched on a neighbor’s tree and stopped the car for a minute just to observe it resting. I waited and admired it until it flew off on its own before I parked in the garage.
The Avian virus had killed off first the large grackles and crows, then the smaller sparrows, robins and starlings earlier in the decade to the point where we would wake up on a spring morning, Rachel Carson-like, and hear only silence. Shortly after that, squirrel and chipmunk corpses began appearing on the sidewalks.
Two years later, free of predators, the small mammal population skyrocketed. Chipmunks dug holes freely wherever they liked and springtime squirrel orgies were so frequent that cars had to slow down on our street to avoid squashing two or three of them chasing each other from tree to tree. Although they hid themselves better, somewhere there were rats or mice as well. On our block, a single cat, owned by a neighbor who doesn’t believe in neutering or restraining their pets, roamed the alley, fattening itself on the abundant prey. But one cat alone does not make the peak of a food pyramid.
Finally, just recently, the rodent population declined and leveled off. I believe it’s the hawks that brought death from the skies, probably eliminating the babies first, then bringing fear back to the alley so the chipmunks conceal their holes better and the squirrels keep their fornicating in the privacy of wherever the hell they do it.
Nature Works Best Without Our Help
My lawn, compared to my neighbors who hire services to spray and maintain theirs, is a sad-looking plot of earth. And yet, you could eat off it. Or from it, as it were. The clover and crabgrass have found their niche and reached an accord with the Kentucky bluegrass that lets them co-exist in harmony. I won’t make the cover of any home care magazines, but if I decide next year to start eating wild dandelions, I won’t have to worry about ingesting pesticides.
This Would be a Heck of a Way to Make a Living
As much as I’ve read about American farmers and as many as I’ve spoken to, I’m still quizzical about why they do it. I know much of what draws farmers to the soil is tradition, history, a love of solitude and self-determination and a desire to avoid the draw of urban life. Still, as much as people complain about subsidies to farmers, our financial system is stacked against them. Our economic/agricultural system is built to make middlemen rich (futures and options traders, petroleum companies, transportation networks, retail stores) and suppress the true cost of good food for consumers. Those who don’t own their own land but instead work to harvest someone else’s crops are even worse off.
Gardening means I don’t have to feed anyone but myself and my family. I don’t need motorized equipment and I don’t have to anticipate what the market might desire by harvest time. I eat what I plant and I plant what I like. I’ve become closer, physically and spiritually, to the land I own and spent more time outdoors as a result. I intend to turn this hobby into a habit and turn these cheap lessons into a better harvest in 2010, when I try again to double my record and grow enough food to feed my family for at least 9 days.
A happy new year to all, and best of luck in 2010.
Looking for a gift that will keep on giving when the winter snows melt? Get your handy loved one a rain barrel or a rain barrel kit. (Better yet, help that person assemble and set it up!) Not only will this help cut down on the energy and fluoride needed to process municipal water (or well water, if such is the case), but well placed rain barrels can help keep excess water away from foundations and into gardens where it belongs. Here is a link to aquabarrel.com, and here are some other links. Here, here and here.
No doubt headlines like this will be cropping up soon. English scientists now think that many more plants than were once thought are actually carnivorous. Potatoes included! And they’re hungry!
Some of us will recall that in Jon Krakauer’s book (and the movie, replete with Eddie Vedder songs), Into The Wild, the protagonist died after accidentally eating toxic wild potato roots or seeds. Although the jury is still out on the cause of death, this notion that potatoes might be hunting and eating humans (albeit veeeryyyy sloooooowwwwwly) is intriguing and causes me to reconsider the leftover tubers buried in a few sites around my house.
Am I in danger? Is my family’s safety at risk from vegetable attack?
In short, no. But upon further reflection, also no. Still, the article reminds us that plant roots ultimately grab their nutrition from whatever happens to be decomposing nearby. And while digestion via root is much less dramatic than being swallowed by a Venus Flytrap, the whole story serves as a reminder of that crazy old circle-of-life thing and that, ultimately, we all wind up back in the ecosystem sooner or later, part of somebody, or something’s next meal.
And yes, that was a pun in the first sentence, and it was intended.
The root vegetable medly wasn’t quite the hit as, oh, the pumpkin pie or the sweet-sweet-sweet potato soufflé with marshmallows on top. All the adults at Thanksgiving dinner swallowed a heap of it to counterbalance the traditional fat- and carb-intensive meal that covered the rest of our plates. Several kids were given a small “no thank you” portion mostly of potato or carrot.
Turnip, rutabaga and parsnip have a unique flavor that, while savory and sharp, isn’t too bad. Roasting might not be the best way to serve them. A big chunk of rutabaga is a challenging piece to polish off by itself. Maybe mashing and mixing with a balancing flavor would work in the future. Parsnips always make it into every batch of chicken soup I make, but my kids and wife avoid it out of habit. Perhaps it’s an unattractive vegetable, but soup isn’t a beauty pageant. Parsnip brings a tangy, zesty aspect to my soups that distinguish them from the canned, salty stuff that’s quicker to prepare. My task now is to get the kids to eat rutabaga once again and ask for seconds.
For Thanksgiving at my parents, we were requested to bring green beans. Typically baked to a mush in a casserole dish blended in cream of mushroom soup and crowned with onion strings, this dish screams “I came from a can” nearly as loud as the can-shaped cranberry sauce mould.
Little about the dish bespeaks Pilgrims, autumn or gratitude. True, both beans and onions might have been on the first Thanksgiving menu. But the onions are now battered, dried and fried beyond recognition and the beans are concealed by the mushroom sauce to the point where most kids will happily eat them.
I’m not ragging on the green bean casserole. It’s a reliable stand-by. However, as the black sheep of the family, I am breaking with tradition to bring an underground dish I’ve never before seen served at our November holiday (or made before). I will roast an array of root vegetables (few of which come from my garden) but all of which might have been stowed in a cellar or beneath the earth by our foredads and foremoms at some point in the past, to be dug up as needed.
An Internet search pulled up several recipes with squash and peppers as the central ingredients. While not a root, the squash is permitted in the dish because of its historical authenticity. Peppers, a Central American, heat-loving fruit neither the British nor the Wampanoag would likely have eaten, have no place at the table this week. And so, roasting along with generous heaps of onions and garlic will be carrots, parsnip, turnips, taters, rutabaga and whatever root vegetables I find at the produce store tomorrow. Some sage and marjoram have survived in my herb spiral until now, so I’ll throw them in as well. Pretty much whatever’s fresh and available and fits in the theme goes in the casserole dish. (Yes, this is how I cook. My wife covers her face in shame at the thought of me serving untried recipes to other people).
Which brings me to my thoughts of gratitude. When I talk with people whose parents and siblings reside in another state or are no longer with us, I feel so blessed to still be surrounded by family in northern Illinois. Family who will forgive my culinary experiments and humor my agricultural obsession.
To live in a region not ravaged by war, famine, flood or fire. To have the freedom to pursue my passions. To watch my children grow and stay healthy. Despite this miserable financial crisis, to enjoy a prosperity unseen by hardly anyone before us in history. To have access to open land, fresh food and clean water. We may choose to take these for granted, or we may choose to see them as precious gifts. I am grateful for the luxury of having that choice. Have a joyous Thanksgiving and enjoy the bounty before us.
A lone pumpkin sits in a corner of the garage. Vicki, of Genesis Growers near Kankakee, let us scour her pumpkin patch for the biggest gourd we chose to carry home the eve of The Local Beet Farm Dinner in September. She also gave me four different types of onion (white, Spanish, sweet and Bermuda), from her enormous hoop-house drying huts, which I’ve put to good use. My younger son, Pikachu, slashed a growling face into the orange orb after we hollowed it out for Halloween. Nothing says fall like a carved pumpkin, awaiting trick-or-treaters.
The Square Foot and uncovered gardens are all black now. Their exhausted soil is covered in last year’s compost—a well-deserved reward for a job well done. As I prepared for last week’s frost (followed by this week’s mild weather!), I tore up every plant except the snap peas, which are still somehow bearing fruit.
As I uprooted the fruitless and space-wasting tomato plants from the uncaged portion of my garden I noticed some chunky slugs hanging onto the undersides of the leaves, and I realized why the garden had been such a popular hangout for the neighborhood birds. I flicked the meaty gray and white invertebrates on top of the garbage can and left them to their fate. I know that inflicting cruelty on pests does not set an example for other pests to learn from. It’s more a reward for the birds, who did a good job controlling insects in the uncovered garden and who looked pathetic trying to stick their beaks into the poultry netting of the Square Foot Gardens in pointless attempts to reach prey.
My neighbor got a far better crop from the potatoes I gave him in the spring than I did and I’m happy for him. He cautioned me to pick my volunteer melons before they rotted on the vine, but I had bet they were really squash and left them to mature longer, even though most of their leaves were dead. Turned out I was right, and the delicious spaghetti squash made a great dinner. If I had to guess, I’d say some seeds from a squash meal in 2008 survived their stay in the compost bin and made a new home in the garden in spring 2009. Not only did this happy accident result in another meal, but the leaves never conflicted with the eggplants, which resulted in three nice medium-sized fruits that went into a Thai stir-fry dish.
The last edible bits of the harvest were the Brussels sprout. Each of the two spine-like stalks bore 30-40 tiny nubs resembling mini cabbages. I sautéed them before steaming, and even my mother-in-law, who hates hates hates Brussels sprouts, enjoyed them. Although my wife maintains that her mom exaggerates how much she likes my cooking just to make me feel better. I’ll take it either way.
The winds are helping cover my lawn with colorful leaves from someone else’s trees. The compost tumbler is filled with the excess of the garden plants and the cages, stakes, netting and fencing are put away for the winter. It’s going to be a long wait until the next planting. I don’t even know if it will be at this house, so it’s hard to start planning already. Looking out over the backyard, though, is a mixed bag of emotions. The piles of dirt that gave us so many interesting meals throughout the summer and fall sit quiet with the promise of another season to come.
With so many lessons learned, I feel confident that next year I can not only break even financially, but beat my current record and feed my family for more than a full week from our yard. Although I made many naïve errors, generally, I feel a sense of accomplishment. I successfully fought of birds and rodents, wind and excess rain, lack of sunlight and insets to grow more food than I had hoped for. With complete faith that the Good Earth will come through for me again, I look forward to next year’s planting with eagerness and determination.
Expenses: $250
Benefits: $165
Days family could survive off our crops: 4.5
As well as being one of the nicest people you can meet, Shelly Herman delivers a great box of local produce. The heavy order of greens from Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks included the most enormous and juiciest green peppers I’ve ever seen (shown below in comparison to an avocado, it’s mild enough for my wife to enjoy, but sweet enough for my taste) as well as some Chinese eggplant, Chinese broccoli and yukina savoy parsley that I stir fried in some sesame oil. So many vegetables at once that I bartered some with a friend in exchange for leftover tomatoes from their CSA share.
I’m still unsure what sort of melons are growing in my garden. As you can imagine, the Internet can be less than helpful when searching the word “melon,” and without knowing what sort of melon it is (see below), I can’t tell when it’s ripe. I’ve been thumping it regularly, and it’s still solid inside. Once you pick a melon, it stops ripening. So with only two available, I’m not about to experiment with pulling it from the vine. The vine, however, is wilting just about everywhere. And when the last leaf turns brown, I may have to pull the melons no matter what. Perhaps we’ll simply carve them out for Halloween—if they can last that long.
The beefsteak tomatoes have begun splitting. Shallow crevasses opened up from the stem and have healed over, leaving unsightly scars. To make it worse, I’ve been picking them while slightly green to keep them from the squirrels and chipmunks who take a single bite or leave them half eaten in the alley. And they don’t taste that great, either. The sight of a fissure-laden unripe tomato on my kitchen counter reminds me how well my collard greens and broccoli have done this summer.
And they have done very well. As the peppers, tomatoes and eggplant suffered in the unseasonal August weather, these diehards kept producing leaves and flowers faster than I could consume them.
Happily, the past week of sunshine has sparked a renaissance in the eggplant, which blossomed for the first time. A few hot peppers are growing, and more cherry tomatoes are popping up where I’d lost hope. The best part is that while the bean and melon leaves are shrinking and dying back, the eggplant leaves that share the plot are spreading and growing greener. I had not planned this seasonal baton transfer, but watching it in action is a glorious thing. While the peas I threw in the garden by the compost bin never came up, a recent planting of lettuce is germinating there. Strangely, the peas I planted in the Square Foot Garden in the same spot as some transplanted peppers are doing well and using the peppers as climbing trellises. So whichever way the weather turns, I feel I’m covered.
At an impromptu stop at the Huntley farmer’s Market, I met Jamlady Bev Alfeld, author of Pickles to Relish and rare-fruit evangelist. The market featured a gazebo bandstand with a folk duo playing, as well as country crafts and eggplant the size of a newborn baby.
Any anxiety I might have had earlier this year about my garden paying for itself is gone. I am confident it’s not going to happen, so I’m not worried about it anymore. I am positive, though, that I could break even next year and the land would begin paying for itself—except we’re selling the house, so that won’t happen either. The bigger problem is my family’s eating habits. I’m the only one who enjoys the wax beans and hot peppers. While I claim to have grown three and a half days’ worth of food for four people so far, the math is subjective and complex. I’ve eaten a few dozen meals so far made from little more than what came from my garden, a few eggs and some cooking oil.
Expenses: $250
Benefits: $120
Days family could survive off our crops: 3.5
