The Quarter-Acre Farm Page 20

  The day that Lloyd came to visit was a grey one, as most Northern California days are between February and March (and April and sometimes even into May). But at least it wasn’t drizzling. I put on the kettle, and when Lloyd knocked on the door, I invited him in for a cup of tea. He looked like a farmer, which wasn’t surprising.

  While farmers come in every shape, size, sex, color, and creed, it is a pretty safe bet that each one of them, once having spent some time on their farm, is going to have a squint, a tan (though often a perfectly white forehead thanks to the ubiquitous hat), calloused hands, and powerful arms, plus they will move well, at least when they are outside and have some space to move around in. Lloyd had all these attributes. He was a big guy, on the quiet side, with an affable, hesitant smile underneath his beard.

  I asked him in and we sat at the table, drank tea and talked, and found we were both artists, had both spent time in Wyoming, and both loved to grow things. Lloyd, however, was a real farmer and I, well . . . after a couple of mugs of tea, it was time to stop the pleasantries, step outside, and show him what I was and what I was doing in my yard in the middle of Davis, California.

  I told Lloyd that I’d like him to critique the Quarter-Acre Farm for me as if it were a real farm and gave him an example: “For instance, I’ll bet if you had that big stump (a large piece of the ornamental cherry my neighbors had cut down and I asked to have dragged to my yard because it looked nice), the first thing you might say is, “Get rid of that thing, it’s right in the middle of the tomato patch.”

  With that, Lloyd nodded and got to work. As all good critiquers do, he threw me a few compliments to start things off. He approved of the fava beans (he called them bell beans) that I had planted, which were already about a foot tall and unimpaired by the frost. He said they were good for fixing nitrogen in the soil and he used them at his own farm as a winter cover crop. He then bent down and took a look at the dirt. He said it looked fine—dark, crumbly, and rich.

  I felt the glow I usually felt when someone was complimenting one of my kids. This was going better than I thought! Basking in good feelings over my good dirt and nitrogen-fixing legumes, we then looked at the cabbage and cauliflower patch. They were, with really no other word for it, puny.

  Lloyd looked apologetic, much like a teacher charged with telling a student they were going to have to repeat kindergarten. He asked when I had planted the miserable crucifers. I mumbled maybe sometime in late October, maybe early November. Lloyd said the plants were in stasis—planted so late in the season they didn’t get enough light for them to really get going. He told me that a good rule of thumb was that the starts for winter crops should be in before Labor Day. If you plant by Labor Day, the plants will be providing by Thanksgiving. What I would get now, he told me, was what a friend of his referred to as “bonsai vegetables.” And certainly I had already picked a few of the miniature heads of cauliflower that looked more like they were grown by Lilliputians than an average-height woman.

  We traipsed into the back and right away Lloyd said raised beds gave him the heebie-jeebies, especially the ones like I had that were wide and high. He said not only did he like to use a tractor or a rototiller on his place, which was impossible in those beds, but you also lost 25 percent of your useable space with raised beds. Worse than that, they were problematic in the summer. Planting in raised beds puts plants up in the air during the torrid weather where their roots were much more likely to get dried out and hot than if they were planted at ground level. Further, he said, it made it difficult, if not impossible, to really water well.

  At his farm Lloyd said he practices “deep-watering.” Really deep watering. Upon first planting his tomatoes, he soaks them with water and then isn’t likely to water again for three weeks. His tomatoes might only get watered five times the entire summer. Five times? That’s it? I was amazed.

  Lloyd then looked around and said the trees were a problem. I admitted to wormy apples. Lloyd said he didn’t grow fruit, but that the farm down the way sprayed their apples every ten days with Bacillus thuringiensis, a biologic alternative to insecticide. I scribbled notes furiously while Lloyd went on to explain that his problem with my trees was actually the shade. Was there enough sunshine for farm vegetables?

  I admitted that I had to be very careful to find the spots that did get over six full hours of light, but once the light shifted in the summer and we had trimmed the branches, there was a surprisingly large area that was bright most of the time.

  By this time, Goosteau had seen us and commenced honking at us like five lanes of rush-hour traffic. Lloyd winced and asked, “Your neighbors don’t mind this?” He looked like he’d appreciate returning to the peace of the front yard, but I figured I was going to get Lloyd to solve all my problems, so I ignored the noise and told him about my nematode problems with tomatoes and ushered him over to the bug damage on the chard.

  Lloyd told me that they were starting to graft heirloom tomatoes to nematode-resistant rootstock, and so maybe in the future I could grow heirlooms after all. As for the other insects, if he really needed plants to be pristine, like basil to sell to the supermarket, he used floating row covers on those crops. Otherwise bugs didn’t bug him, it was the weeds that threatened to break the bank. (I was suddenly very glad I’d taken pains to weed when Lloyd looked around and said that wasn’t a problem here.)

  We talked weeding a bit and he said he had a few tools that were his favorite to work between the rows. If the rototiller wouldn’t work, he’d use a stirrup hoe on a wheel. He said he had great control that way and he could nudge in really close to the plants. I asked if he planted through sheet plastic and he said never. He said it took another tool to lay the plastic then to tamp down the edges. Besides, he didn’t like plastic, didn’t like to buy it or throw it away. I agreed with him, and on that note I thought I’d impress him with my potato savvy, so I led him over to my carefully orchestrated potato-planting still life.

  He raised his eyebrows and said it was kind of early to be planting potatoes. He liked to plant mid-March. The potatoes would be ready by June. He offered that Lockhart Seeds in Stockton was not only a great place to buy seeds, but they would also give me a good planting chart for this region (obviously my calendar was one of my weak points).

  When Lloyd said it was time for him to go, I asked him to come back when the weather changed, intimating that he had caught the Quarter-Acre Farm mid growing stride, and hoping he’d believe that the place could give Eden a run for it’s money on the right day. I was still hoping he’d teach me that secret farmer’s handshake and figured I had some time between now and then to make changes, pull those bonsai vegetables, plant the summer crop in good time, nix the narrow masonry raised beds, and maybe dig up one of those stirrup hoes he had told me about and thereby prove my chops as a farmer. Further, Lloyd’s visit was just the shot in the arm I needed (a sort of spring tonic!) to get excited about growing things all over again.

  The next time Lloyd visited it was the first day of summer. He came with his farming and life partner, Sarah, and we walked around the Quarter-Acre Farm. This time there were tomatoes on the vine, pepper plants growing, grapes dangling from the arbor, and the geese were as noisy as ever. The potatoes were ready to be dug (luckily I hadn’t ruined them by planting too early), and Lloyd, Sarah, and I compared notes on how many tubers we were getting and how big they were. I admit to feeling just a little bit farmer-y shooting the breeze with Sarah and Lloyd, chewing a piece of green sorrel as the hens clucked and the fruit hung heavy on the trees. Lloyd looked a little puzzled over my onions, however, and when I visited his farm I could see why.

  Lloyd’s farm was about twenty miles out. A flat six acres with straight rows, most of them a rototiller’s distance from the next. He had beans, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, herbs, cabbages, basil, and of course, onions. The onions were huge! Not only that, they weren’t flowering like mine. We had already ascertained that we had planted at the same time. What the he
ck?

  One reason for the difference in size was also one of the things that set Lloyd’s farm apart from mine: water. Lloyd got his water from a deep well. The well was a good one, and the water abundant, cheap, and chlorine free. He worried more about the electricity to pump the water up than he did about the water itself.

  At the Quarter-Acre Farm I was always being stingy with water because town water was expensive. While Lloyd laved his farm with water, deluging certain areas until they were flooded, and again when they dried, I tended to underwater instead. And my onions reflected it. But that wasn’t the only reason for the differences in our onions. Lloyd started his onions from seed.

  He explained that onions were biennials. During the first year growing, they produced bulbs then went dormant over the winter. In the spring, they roused again to grow a bit more, put out flowers, and then seed. I hadn’t grown my onions from seed. I grew them from the little clove-like bulbs called “onion sets” that I got in a net bag at the garden store.

  Apparently that was the problem. It was Lloyd’s experience that those little sets practically ensured your onions would bolt. He didn’t know exactly how they got the onions to produce those little bulbs, but it seemed that once planted, the onions considered themselves in their second-year growth pattern.

  You learn something new every day.

  We walked through the rows of produce then went into the shed to consider the famous wheeled stirrup hoe. Lloyd took down a hand-held hoe he’d gotten for a song at a place in Woodland. He showed me how the family that owned the place welded old disc blades into well-balanced hoes with a really good heft. The scar from the weld was neat and uniformly ribbed—a skilled job. They’d obviously made a lot of them. Lloyd liked the hoes not only because they were solid, but also for the idea that the disc blades were made in some distant place, but re-made into this simple good tool there in Woodland. I understood completely.

  I figured it was kind of like planting a seed or grafting a limb. Lloyd and I had both worked with ceramics, so maybe it was that mud-to-mug feeling—using what was seemingly worthless to make something useful and well balanced. Once again I enjoyed that good fellow-farmer feeling. But even as I indulged myself in that camaraderie, I knew better than to imagine we two farmers were doing the same thing—at all.

  This knowledge was brought home about a month later when I rolled my foot while running and broke the fifth metatarsal in my foot. It so happened that I did so while Louis and Sam were out of town for ten days and I was alone at the Quarter-Acre Farm. My foot swollen, tender, and demanding total rest, I found myself benched. Seeming to sense a window of opportunity, Thalia the hen managed to literally fly the coop and headed for the sweet potatoes to dig for worms. I caught sight of her and tottered outside as quickly as I could with my crutches, weaving and tripping on the uneven ground. I got the hen imprisoned once again only to catch sight of the new peppers, which weren’t on the drip system. I dragged the hose out to water the desperately wilted plants and almost fell over a raised bed. I got the peppers watered, then remembered I needed to put the next row of beans in . . . but then I snagged my crutch on the hose and barely caught myself from taking a nosedive.

  Reeling, my heart pounding at the near miss, I thought how stupid I would feel if I worsened the metatarsal break and had to have surgery—and all in order to save some sweet potatoes and pepper plants. That would be stupid, indeed. I turned off the hose and went inside.

  I could do that on the Quarter-Acre Farm because though I was feeding myself and my family with what I grew, I could, if I had to, buy sweet potatoes in the fall, or do without them altogether. We’d be fine. If, however, I depended on that crop to make the payment on the land, or the tractor, or to buy next year’s seed or irrigation pipe, then the escaped livestock and the dying produce would be much larger and more serious problems.

  I don’t have the same consequences of failure that a larger farm does. My losses are a dollhouse mirror’s reflection of a regular farm.

  Yet that truncated risk is why the gamble is within reach for most of us. And why someone who doesn’t know much about gardening can weather the ups and downs of learning to grow their own food. The learning curve is steep, but it isn’t expensive. However, it would certainly be nice if we all had a Farmer Lloyd in our lives to counsel us on hull-less oats, growing onions, and the calendar of planting.

  Maybe we could hire farmers in a program where a farmer would always be on call to answer frantic questions about raising tender things to full growth, feeding them, and preventing disease, one who knew when it was right to intervene and when it was right to let growth happen on it’s own. To counsel on nutrition, balance, and how much sunshine is required. To recommend books and tools and skills . . . and give knowledgeable advice—just like a pediatrician.

  Recipe

  Onion Potato Puff Pastry Pie

  It was Lloyd’s beautiful torpedo onions that gave me the idea to combine them with my (finally larger than a ping pong ball) potatoes. The onions were the color of merlot and their shape was reminiscent of . . . torpedoes, perhaps, but more the old-fashioned Indian juggling clubs of the Victorian era. Each one weighed over a pound and felt like it would make a decent weapon should I be faced with a home invasion as I made dinner.

  Ingredients: • 2 red onions

  • 2 medium potatoes

  • 1 sheet puff pastry, thawed

  • 2 TB fresh marjoram

  • 1/8 cup shredded Romano cheese

  • 2 TB olive oil

  1. Slice the onions, first in half and then into demi-lune slices, enough to fill a 12-inch fry pan.

  2. Add the olive oil and heat the skillet on a medium burner. In short order the onions will begin to sweat and wilt and smell wonderful. Give the onions a stir every few minutes and within 20 minutes they’ll reduce to a sticky, fragrant, whiskey-colored fraction of their original mass.

  3. In the meantime, put the sheet of thawed puff pastry (I admit to buying mine in the freezer section) on a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie sheet and roll it a bit thinner, to about 1/16 of an inch thick, score a line a half inch around the perimeter (like a frame), and jab holes inside that frame with a fork. This allows the frame to puff up while keeping the interior from puffing too much.

  4. Boil the potatoes until they are just tender then slice them into ⅛-inch-thick rounds. Put a layer of the potatoes on the puff pastry (inside the frame) and sprinkle with fresh marjoram.

  5. Top the potatoes with the caramelized onion and scatter the shredded Romano over the top.

  6. Put the whole shebang in a 400-degree oven for 20 minutes.

  Oh, this is good. Potatoes, onions, and pastry make for a substantial meal, and since both onions and potatoes store exceedingly well (if they’re treated right), this meal can be enjoyed from one season to the next. Lloyd and Sarah sure know how to grow onions. And I have to say, my potatoes weren’t too bad either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  VICTORY IN THE GARDEN

  “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves”

  —MAHATMA GANDHI

  When I first began the Quarter-Acre Farm experiment, I expected that at the end of the first year I would do something big to honor the endeavor. Maybe I would have a wild bash to celebrate my freedom from the onerous grow-your-own route I had taken. Certainly, when I first started digging out the lawn, digging in seedlings, and digging zucchini for dinner day in and day out, I had envisioned such a party. After all, I figured if I made it through the year, it would be an occasion akin to landing on the moon.

  At year’s end, I did, with great delight, take the kitchen scale off the counter and put it in the lowest drawer next to all the plastics in my Rubbermaid purgatory; I also removed the notebook in which I’d written down everything I’d eaten and how much it weighed for an entire year. That first night, I giddily wolfed down my favorite Mexican take-out food—a meal that I wouldn’t have to balance with two
cucumbers, three tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and half a dozen figs. And I once again relished eating cherries I didn’t need to weigh first.

  In general, however, the end of that seminal year had a genuinely anticlimactic feeling to it. Growing our own food no longer felt Apollo 12-big. Instead it was just something we did. It was a little different, but so was the fact that I’d made a lot of the furniture in our house. Different, but hardly noteworthy.

  The Quarter-Acre Farm had become a habit.

  The more I thought about our Quarter-Acre Farm habit itself, the more I started thinking that of all the things I did on the farm, making a habit out of growing our own food was the biggest thing I had done. Especially considering that I was a person woefully deficient in willpower. Heck, most of my farming was done in my tatty but cozy twenty-year-old robe, because I knew if I went inside to change I’d find an excuse to eat something, call someone, or work on that novel before attending to the plethora of weeds choking the eggplants to death.

  Habit. The feeling of having it integrated into my life was akin to how I felt when I bowled a strike: I had no idea how I’d done it. So I did a little research on the science of habit.

  It is an accepted rule of thumb that a habit takes thirty days to make or to break. Actually, it is more a rule of limb. In the 1960s, a surgeon by the name of Dr. Maxwell Maltz observed that it took around a month for a person to adjust to the loss of a limb, and he extrapolated that thirty days was therefore the time it took to make any practice into a habit. This thirty-day theory remains widely believed and is one of the reasons that various industries yet announce “Free 30-day trial offers” in hopes of snaring customers into long-term use.