GARDENING OF THE FITTEST
February 5th, 2009 adminThe following appeared late last December in the Austin American Statesman.
My husband doesn’t get survivalist gardening. This can cause tension, because I’m obsessed with it. When I harvest twenty giant cabbages, I expect him not only to join a giant sauerkraut-canning operation, but to eat the resulting sauerkraut. Sauerkraut, after all, prevents scurvy.
But he refuses to sign on to my perfectly reasonable plan o’ panic. I desperately want us to be self-sufficient. One world-wide recession and three authors are responsible for this.
1. John Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine. Jeavons advocates a “Biointensive” method: double digging, elaborate seeding and transplanting, and the conversion of one’s land into a completely self-contained unit. In other words, you grow not just produce, but grains–such as bulgur. No person with a day job, a family, or a forgetful nature could possibly manage Biointensity, but it has a grip on me all the same.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Pa of the Little House books slapped together whole houses without a single power tool. Or even nails. And then there’s Ma, who fed the family on sacks of flour and whatever she could forage or grow, making my mouth water in the process.
3. Eric Sloane, a twentieth century renaissance man who painted, wrote, flew fighter plans and invented the job of TV weatherman, among other things. As a teenager living in New York City, I happened upon Sloane’s books on early American craftsmanship and sucked up intriguing, if anachronistic, information. In 1700s New England, for instance, transportation was easier by sled than by wagon, so people waited for deep winter to get things done. And every farmstead had its woodlot, a half-acre of carefully tended hardwoods that provided tool handles, sled runners, barrel staves-all the necessities. I’ve wanted a woodlot for 35 years.
Instead, I have a backyard filled with stuff that might come in handy, crude piles of lumber, rocks, rebar and raw material scavenged on large item pickup day.
“Our backyard is a woodlot for the modern age,” I told my husband one recent Saturday. “We should go out and see what we have and make it into useful tools and supplies. We’ll never have to go to Home Depot again. We’ll be in this together!”
His face didn’t light up.
“Come on,” I said, “it’ll be inspiring.”
We started poking around in the underbrush.
“There’s a lot of bamboo,” my husband said. “How about we make a Burmese tiger trap?”
I grabbed the notepad out of his hand and made a proper inventory:
Banana leaves–for steaming fish from the well-stocked pond we don’t have?
Two cans Day-Glo spray paint–What would Norman Rockwell do?
Broken rake handle–file to a sharp point, and. . .?
Bits of metal roofing–make sharp, dangerous raised beds?
200 feet orange plastic caution fence?
Old laundry detergent container–coat with Day-Glo spray paint for one-of-a-kind planter?
There was no embarrassment of riches here, just embarrassment, and I seemed to have become the kind of crazy old person who collects short lengths of string. Dejection set in. Seeing his opportunity, my husband fled to the gym.
Why did I think I had anything in common with John Jeavons, Pa Ingalls or Eric Sloane? Could it be the same impulse that persuades me I can break-dance because I saw someone do it on TV?
I sat down underneath the pecan tree that failed to produced pecans this year. Four ten-year-old girls emerged from the house to take turns on the rope swing tied to one of its branches. “Back in the day,” I said to the tree, “you would have coughed up artisan axe handles. Now you work part-time as a playground. Or you stand there and shed.”
Dry leaves were everywhere, a collective fire hazard designed to prevent me from the useful, Pa-like act of burning diseased tomato vines, falling across the path like a red carpet before an arriving celebrity.
Suddenly, I knew just who that celebrity should be–Patricia Lanza, author of Lasagna Gardening, the 1998 book that created a craze for what used to be known as sheet composting. Without bothering to dig, a lasagna gardener lays down newspaper or cardboard and builds her own soil out of organic layers such as coffee grounds, manure, lawn clippings and shredded newspaper, all of it interspersed with tons of leaves. Lanza argues that with enough leaves, anything is possible, including the gigantic gardens she’s built at B&Bs all over the northeast.
In fact, I’d always wanted a couple of edible flower beds in the backyard, but was daunted by the rocky dust that passed for soil. In other words, though I’d been expecting a big bowl of dry quinoa, it seemed lasagna was on the menu.
On a second tour of the woodlot, I discovered bags of used Starbucks grounds and a stash of half-rotten cedar fence posts, perfect for holding in the edges of the new lasagna beds. In thirty minutes, I raked up an inspiring mountain of leaves, with plenty more left over for compost, fallow-vegetable-bed mulching and conversion into leaf mold. It was starting to look like a productive and self-sufficient afternoon–an inspiration for future generations, even.
“What we want to do,” I explained to the future generations on the premises, “is make these leaves even smaller. That way they break down faster and turn into good dirt.”
Apparently, the early American skill of autumn-leaf-jumping has not yet disappeared from our genetic memory. Squealing and shoving, the fifth-grade girls reduced the pile by eighty percent. What remained was dense and valuable. Patricia Lanza, who admits to stealing other people’s leaf bags right off their curbs, would drool. Before dark, I’d have built and seeded three new gardens-all with the products of my own piece of land, or something like that.
It’s no Burmese tiger trap, I thought, but it’s a start.
