A Chinese Garden Attitude

When I was I China I spent a lot of time on trains in the countryside.  It was the middle of the summer and the fields were bright green with rice and squash.  I loved to observe the beautiful landscape, complete with water buffalo and those characteristic terraces that give the place such distinction.  One of the things I found most satisfying was the way the Chinese used every available inch for growing food.  Little places we might ignore, such as traffic islands and boulevards along streets or the sides of drainage ditches, were alive with vegetable vines and trellises.  I have often thought about how much space we take for granted and how different our diets would be if we would cultivate food crops instead of lawns.

Anybody who’s known me for more than five minutes has heard about how I can’t grow any vegetables because my yard RECEIVES NO SUN!  Except for this tiny strip next to the driveway, which until recently has been overgrown with weeds.  It’s a problem area:  Reggie, the snowplow guy, scrapes it and piles snow on it all winter long so you can’t have grass or perennials there.  We used to pile wood along the driveway, but it became too much hassle with the snowplow.  What to do?  I decided to go Chinese on this one and cultivate it for hill crops and pole beans.

I realize there are few neighborhoods where this course of action would be acceptable.  It looks pretty funny to see my heavily mulched cukes, squash, and pumpkins (never mind the “rustic” trellises for the pole beans) right out front along the driveway.  Our neighbor next door is actually excited about the veggies.  We’ll see how he feels when the ninety-fifth zucchini hits his doorstep.  If the experiment is a success, we’ll have pickles and slicers and fresh beans…and Halloween Jack O’Lanterns.  And I’ll feel virtuous making good use of formerly wasted space.

One of the best things about gardening is there’s always next year if this plan doesn’t work out.  I’ll let you know…

Terroir

my lettuce, Opus I, May 5th

Sometimes we act like we just invented eating.  I’ll admit I’m a bit of a sideline foodie–I read a few food blogs, I watch Top Chef, I only use eggs from free-range chickens.  When I encounter the full-blown rhapsodizing about terroir and localvorism (?), though, I can only muster a weak smile.  I do grow some of my own food using gallons of homemade compost but can’t get too worked up about the unique qualities of this patch of earth.  For, you see, if we get technical about it, most of my home-grown produce has its roots literally in coffee grounds.

My little patch is on a north-facing bluff overlooking a lazy oxbow in the Black River.  It’s taken years for me to realize that though most of Vermont is Zone 4, my own particular piece of it is more like whatever the zone is for the North Pole.  Bordering this arctic landscape are four giant maples, my lovely friends, who provide thick shade for the entire growing season.  So I can grow lettuce, spinach, a few herbs, coleus, hosta, impatiens, bleeding heart, and a few willful lilies.  I feed them with compost from the backyard bin.  I feed the compost every day with vegetable peelings, egg shells, rotting leaves, and the like but mostly with coffee grounds.  We drink several pots of coffee every morning and I dutifully dump the grounds out of the filter into the compost bowl as I refresh each pot.  The compost degrades with local microorganisms, mixes with local minerals, soaks up local rain, and becomes unique to this spot.  With a little jolt of caffeine, perhaps.  In any case, I’m willing to eat this bright lettuce where I eschew most other lettuce as more trouble than it’s worth.

When I was growing up we drank milk from a local dairy.  I  remember during certain times of the year the milk tasted pretty funky as a result of what the cows were eating.  That’s terroir.  I remember the way my auntie’s fried chicken tasted on the 4th of July after she butchered a few hens from her own flock.  I remember pork and beef from the same farm, meat my mother wouldn’t allow to be touched by ketchup or A-1 Sauce because it would “ruin the flavor.”  I guess most people nowdays haven’t had the experience of tasting where their food comes from.  Some of the tastes of specific places are not entirely pleasant and that’s probably why the move to standardization.  One of my favorite moments of terroir-related ecstasy is in the film Mondovino where the old Italian guys gush about the vineyard soils.  Let’s face it–there are some “earthy” tastes in wine we don’t always like.  We tend to gravitate to the familiar and the predictable.  You have to be a pretty die-hard foodie to accept constant gustatory surprise.

My small education in organic chemistry tells me there’s really not a lot of difference in the composition of food from site to site.  chlorophyll is chlorophyll, cellulose is cellulose, on and on.  But I do love the bright color, the immediate smell, the feel of young lettuce cut in the cool morning air.  I love looking out at the plants in the morning sun, a cup of coffee in my hand.

“nearing” the good life

 

If you have a story in your imagination about life in Vermont, it probably goes something like this:  You move to Vermont when life “below” gets just too hectic and materialistic.  You find a scraggy piece of land and carve out a nice garden, which you fertilize with homemade compost.  You build your own house of native materials–maybe the rocks you pick as you clear garden space.  You find some kind of homegrown skill or product you can use for income–maybe you raise organic produce, or you make furniture, something like that.  You gather with your like-minded friends to play music, sing, and dance.  You create your wardrobe and household furnishings from stuff you find, or swap, or buy at the thrift store.  You eat a vegan diet, most of which comes from your own garden, though you do have to buy the organic tofu from the coop.  In all of this, you find a sane balance lacking in the “real” world, which you gladly leave behind.

This mythology lives on in large part due to the lives of Helen and Scott Nearing, urban intellectuals who came to Vermont during the Great Depression of the 1930′s and wrote about this lifestyle:  “the good life.”  The Nearings bought a tumbledown farm at the base of Stratton Mountain and started a maple sugaring operation there.  They built their own house and outbuildings, had the dream garden, made music.  Their philosophy was the “four-four-four” plan, being four hours of “bread labor”–the work needed for income, four hours of work on the homestead, and four hours of personal enrichment such as music and writing every day.  This plan, they insisted, could restore a human to a level of sanity not attainable in the rushing world of market capitalism.

Their romantic vision,as outlined in their book Living the Good Life,  was irresistable and soon hundreds of pilgrims flocked to the little farm to learn more.  The Nearings welcomed the pilgrims and put quite a few of them to work, ostensibly “learning the ropes.”  The homestead flourished with the added attention.  The Nearings, gaining momentum, tried to engage the neighbors in their enterprise.  Here’s where the myth gets a few frayed edges.  The neighbors, being old Vermonters, weren’t impressed.  They didn’t think of their way of life (which, let’s face it, existed long before the Nearings arrived on the scene) as all that precious and some of them were actually looking forward to availing themselves of a few modern conveniences.  Heavens.

So the Nearings moved to Maine, started over in another spot, still utilizing their “four-four-four” method, and wrote Continuing the Good Life.  More acolytes followed.  Eventually, those around them started to spill the beans.  Scott lived on trust-fund money.  The move-up hippies who came to visit them ended up doing all the work.  The Nearings went on book lecture tours every winter because their Maine stone house was too cold and drafty.  Though they protested “animal slavery” and wouldn’t do things like keeping bees, it turns out Helen had a pet cat.  They went out for ice cream from time to time.  The had feet of clay, as it turns out.

Still, it all sounds so good.  The “four-four-four” method seems as though it should work.  I’m able to see a few lingering outlines of the Nearings’ thinking in activities around me.  Most of us in Vermont live on the grid, work outside our homes, and participate fully in mainstream culture (that is, we watch TV as much as everybody else does).  However, we are a bit more skeptical of “progess,” we remember the analog ways of doing things even if we don’t use them as much, we’ve never really stopped “reducing, reusing, and recycling.”  I can allow for the Nearings’ imperfections.  They made the simple ways seem noble, and I’m grateful to them for that.

It’s sugaring season again and I think of the Nearings’ operation.  I imagine somebody is working that sugarbush at the base of Stratton Mountain, still dumping buckets (or emptying tanks linked by plastic lines) and boiling the sap pretty much the same way they did it.  There are plenty of people starting greens in cold frames, planning their organic gardens, and turning the compost.  Lots of neighbors still swap tools and children’s clothes and get together for contradancing on Saturday nights.  I’m happy to live in a place where living the good life still seems possible, even though we know it’s a lot of hard work and not all of us are going to have disciples or trust funds.  At least we can still go out for ice cream.

nothing nuke in vermont

No one should be surprised the Vermont legislature voted against relicensing Vermont Yankee, the state’s 38-year-old leaky nuclear power plant owned by a Louisiana company that has lied repeatedly about safety breaches, underground pipes, groundwater contamination–you get the picture.  When the company’s shiny new executives (old ones having been ritually sacrificed after a whistleblower blew their cover) offered a sweet deal for “lower enery costs” in the short term in exchange for  relicensing , the stout New England temperament could be felt bristling statewide.  Trying to BRIBE us?  With ELECTRICITY?  Most of us hardly use it anyway (this is actually true–Vermont is one of the most energy-efficient states in the Union) and offering bribes on such a conspicuous level really sets us off.  So, the answer is no.  It seems clear to me that Vermont Yankee will be a dead letter and probably will close as scheduled by 2012.

So, since we’re all a bunch of granola-crunching, tree-hugging, green-as-can-be hippies, we’ll just set up a nice wind farm, right?  Not so fast.  The people trying to set up a small wind farm in the northern part of the state have hit HUGE resistance from the locals, who just won’t play.  It’s TOO NOISY.  Can’t cope with the noise.

Well–then we’ll just go solar.  Solar panels don’t make any noise.  And they don’t really produce any power, either, in Vermont where the average number of sunny days  is 58 (same as Seattle, according to the “World Facts” website).  You’ll see solar panels dotting the roofs of many Vermont homes, but depending on them for all your daily energy neeeds probably means a lot of cold showers.

That leaves only one option.  Cow Power. Central Vermont Public Service offers consumers the option to buy power generated by, well, cow poop (www.cvps.com/cowpower).  We all know dairy farmers in the Northeast are having a terrible time making any money selling milk.  But poop?  It’s a whole new market.  Goodbye Yankee, hello Holstein!

and that’s no shit…

The Root Cellar

Our house, built in 1890-something, has a cellar with stone walls and a dirt floor.  Dug along the north wall is a large root cellar, complete with wooden bins.  Since we use wood heat so vigorously as a supplement to oil, the cellar is very cold because the furnace rarely goes on.  We’ve lived in the house for twenty-five years and this is the first year we’ve made use of the root cellar.

“Putting food by,” using techniques like home canning, drying, and root cellaring, takes a lot of time–which, until lately, I have never had.  I’ve always done a bit of canning because I prefer homemade applesauce and stewed tomatoes, not because I needed to use my homesteading skills for survival.  I like the idea of eating food grown locally and focusing on foods native to one’s own home ground; gradually, we’re eating more often with this in mind.  This year we were forced by circumstance to rewire and clean out the cellar.  During the process we saw our root cellar with fresh eyes–and saw it as a treasure.

Walter raked it out and swept out the bins.  We went to a local farm stand and bought 50 lbs. of potatoes for $14, 20 lbs. of carrots for $6, and five HUGE cabbages for $10.  I prepared the bins by lining them with dried maple leaves, then layered the carrots in one and the potatoes in another.  I wrapped each head of cabbage in newspaper, then put them in a separate bin.  We also bought a bushel of Northern Spy apples, but stored them individually wrapped in newspaper in another part of the cellar.  Apples and potatoes don’t do well together.

So far our experiment is a huge success.  The vegetables are in perfect shape having been stored for two months.  I feel a bit sheepish taking so long to come to this point in homemaking.  When I read about the trials and tribulations of those building root cellars into new construction, or improvising root cellars using coolers or buried garbage cans, I realize how lucky we are.  Little by little we’re weaning ourselves away from the self-indulgent “asparagus and strawberries in January” way of eating.  Besides, carrots and potatoes are delicious.

Is it crazy to believe the house is a tiny bit proud of itself?  Whenever I go to the root cellar and sift through the dry leaves for the buried vegetables, I feel a real sense of order, thrift, and satisfaction.  I am one in the line of householders who went into the dark, cold root cellar and came out with enough for supper.  It’s a simple pleasure, one I’m glad to add to my life.