It's rained a lot this spring in Eastern Kentucky, and I type that knowing full well that in a few months we'll be begging for a spare drip so as not to have to haul water up to the tomatoes from the pond, and revisit the whole notion of planning to irrigate instead of doing triage in the July sun.
Today...at the risk of bragging...today we had our first real harvest. (Our friend Tim called this morning to tell us he had a strawberry. That's bragging. Or Miracle Grow. Or both.) I drove back from my father-in-law's place with our first cutting of rhubarb, what's close to a final cutting of asparagus, and a goodly handful of green onions. I could have brought a dozen eggs, but we have plenty just now and so they'll go elsewhere.
It's not a job, but it's good work, even if my back is a little troubled by the arrival of morning. And in the absence of steady employment, this is how I help to feed my family.
Digressions of various sorts threaten below...
We piddled over the winter until we'd finally manged to finish fencing the lower part of the garden, where the deer had nibbled the blackberry vines down to nothing. Where I come from, the blackberry is a happy weed that requires no tending. But, then, there aren't many deer roaming wild in North Seattle.
What we ended up with was about 10,000 feet, fenced high enough to keep the deer out, but not tight enough to keep out the box turtle we relocated this afternoon. (Oops. I think he's still in the bucket, but at least I managed not to drive over two of his kin on the road out.) We have a tractor -- my father-in-law has a tractor, and a good handful of tools (including far too many hoes, so many I'm obliged to use one regularly), but the pronouns become difficult to juggle so I'll claim the literary privilege of ownership. Anyhow, it's not quite a farm because we've no intention of selling (which is different from sharing), but it's grown a bit ambitious to pretend it's merely a garden. Down the way a bit we have an orchard that we started three or four years ago (nobody actually remembers, which is a problem, and human nature) which has yet to produce fruit, but threatens to oblige this year. The trees may be too young still to bear, and I'm tolerably certain the birds and squirrels will be the sole beneficiaries until we fence the orchard, too, and, perhaps, station a twelve-year-old with a .22 in the wings (not going to happen, just typing for the sake of typing). But we'll see.
Perhaps I should explain: My father-in-law is retired, and has some medical issues. I just turned 50. Planting an orchard at our stage in life is a demonstration of optimism, and nobody who knows me would pretend that was a regular part of my worldview. It is also a demonstration of fear. My daughter is just now six, and I worry how she will get by in the world I will some day leave to her. So I'm hedging bets as best I can.
Anyhow, once the fence went up we began spreading cardboard around the edges, where we will walk and run tools back and forth, and covering the cardboard as fast as we could with leaves and mulch. We stumbled on a goldmine at the community recycling center. On a vacant lot next to the parking area some kind soul has made his land available for the dumping of leaves and stray chips from tree services. And there it has sat, though it's free for the picking. Evidently people are still a little too complacent to go pick up a shovel and load their trucks, but I'm now a man of some leisure, mindful that it's easier to save a buck and eat an aspirin than it is to make a buck in this economy. And so a shoveling we go, for it's fine compost, some of it's even dark black soil, and the last nightcrawler I found on my shovel was a good quarter inch thick.
(Addendum: In the shower I realized I'd left out the reasons for this work. Not only do we amend the soil, when plowing under all this in the fall, but it creates an organic barrier against weeds. And I'm in favor of anything which keeps the hoe out of my hands.)
(My dad has a story from the last big Depression, when he was a kid. A neighbor, who owned a dump truck, would sometimes take him out of school so they could go down to Santa Monica and steal sand for landscapers in Beverly Hills. It was a good deal. He brought home a buck, I think, and got lunch.)
The funny thing is that the cardboard we're using comes from local restaurants, including the coffeeshop we run. There is irony buried in that, for nobody cooks anymore, least of all restaurants, save the highest end or the most humble home-style place, and even they are probably cheating. If it's cheating.
See, we've gotten into the notion that McDonalds was right and every meal should taste the same. I am happily married to a woman who, like any good magician, rarely makes the same meal twice. I like uniquity.
So there I am spreading compost over boxes which once held hamburgers and cheesecakes and raw cookie dough and whatever else. We seek to be locavores, building our soil on the detritus of corporate food.
That's it, I guess. We'll have rhubarb pie tonight. The asparagus will go in a salad of some kind, as will the green onions.
And hopefully, tomorrow when I try to get out of bed, it'll still seem a sound investment.
Thanks for reading.