| Garden as Guru—Introduction |
When I was a child my mother watched one of those 1950s television shows, locally produced in Cincinnati across the Ohio River from our home in Kentucky. The hostess would greet folks in the studio audience asking how they made their living and they would sometimes answer “Oh, we’re just farmers…” That just annoyed me, even as a kid. City bred, I’d only experienced a couple of farms—my uncle’s in Missouri, a friend’s closer by—but to me a farmer was a hero engaged in mighty deeds. In the sweep of a vast landscape of fields and woods and barnyards, my farmer milked huge horned cows, slopped feed to snorting monster pigs, commanded regiments of exhaust-belching implements doing mysterious things understood only by him. And these heroes of mine brought forth plenty. On the farm we had fresh berries, vegetables straight from the garden, home-grown meat, rich, aromatic, frothing milk like none I’d ever experienced; ears of sweet corn as long as my arm, dripping with home-made butter; piglets, calves, chicks and puppies. On the farm were legions of pettable [and not so pettable] creatures, while at home in the city I had no pets at all. As for that wonderful raw milk fresh from the home cow, when I came home from one of those infrequent farm visits I refused to drink the homogenized, pasteurized, stale, lifeless version served up by our milkman. [I was bribed with chocolate milk and I relented.] In the city, for the most part I learned things from books. Life was ordered and tame. In the country it was all intense and direct experience—smells, sights, sounds, terror, tumbles, and total abandon. I was intoxicated by the smell of the hay mow, the horse’s stall, even the pigsty. The view of the land stretching out in front of me always beckoned to more adventures. The vibration and clangor of the tractor, with me aboard standing exactly as Uncle Elmer told me and holding on for my life, exalted and terrified. I got hung up in barbed wire sliding under the fence, got upended by a sow 10 times my bulk, held my ears as uncle pounded hammer on anvil in the workshop and blasted a stump in the pasture with dynamite. We fired .22s and .410 shotguns and tin cans toppled off fence posts. We rode ponies and fell, hard, in the stubble. I got sunburned, blackberry-scratched, chigger- infested, and half-drowned, and at the end of every day except the last I celebrated the thought of more of the same coming tomorrow. When the farm visit came to an end and what I had to look forward to was going home, my spirits were bereft. Mom said, “Why on the farm that boy can have more fun rolling an old tire into a ditch than when we go to Coney Island!” As I grew up I was gradually co-opted by the rewards the culture had to offer…seduced away from my childhood agrarian tendencies by jobs, cities, college, marriage. It wasn’t until I was 25, in graduate school at the University of Kentucky, when the pull towards the country overtook me. An ad appeared in the “Houses for Rent” classified for a home in the country about halfway between Frankfort, where my wife worked, and Lexington where I was attending classes The rent was $50 per month. This is 1965. I got directions and drove out into Woodford County to find the place…drove further and further on progressively narrowing roads, then gravel, down into the Kentucky River valley. Over a cattle guard at Roy Thompson’s farmyard, down a two-rut road and take a right at the fork by the sinkhole, down even more steeply, to a gate. The rental place is there, literally at the end of the road, the Watts Ferry road. When I realized that I could have the proprietorship of 100 acres of rough fields and woods a kind of land greed seized me, and after renting the place for a year or so, when I found out the owner was willing to sell, I bought it. $14,700. There seemed little difference to me between proprietorship and ownership. I related to the farm pretty much as I had before I bought it: mostly I walked, inspecting every feature of the place with my dog and my gun. I “possessed” the land. I marked my territory, but I was no kind of steward. I was there four years and a little more when I lost the farm in a relatively amicable divorce settlement. Having owned and had the use of land, but not having taken it under stewardship in any productive way, it was easy for me to leave the farm and begin a career as a wandering writer and finally a wandering farmer. From Kentucky, then, to New Brunswick, to New York, to West Virginia…west to Nevada and Oregon and on… In each of these places I lived in the country and almost always, I gardened. Each of these gardens was a guru; each taught me lessons, subtle or dazzling. Many times the lessons were not apparent to me until much later and most of the time I characteristically denied and resisted them anyway. So the plan of this book is to navigate through this oddball career of mine, unsettled farmer and gypsy peasant, and see what these lessons have been for me and whether we can make any sense of them at all, and live the lessons that do make sense. Later is time enough to detail these gardens and farms, but it might help to have a bird’s eye view of the itinerary of my adult life. Don’t ask me why I bounced around like a flea on the hide of North America. Each move seemed to be a good one at the time, and most were accomplished with little more than a van or pickup load of stuff. I learned early on to travel lightly on the Planet. From central Kentucky with its bluegrass and the Kentucky River to ⇒ Hopkinton, NY [not much of a garden there], to ⇒Fallon, NV [multiple gardens there, and my first undertaken with a family to feed,] to ⇒ Charles Town, WV and my introduction to Biodynamic witchiness, back to ⇒ Fallon, and then to ⇒Fossil, OR, [two gardens, both instructive, plus a sunflower patch, just for the birds], to ⇒ Charles Town WV again for training as a swineherd, to ⇒ Lake Jem, FL [tropicals], to East Eden, NY where I once again was faced with how little I knew, to ⇒ Blacksburg, VA and a backyard salad garden and a nurseryman’s training, to ⇒ Kimberton, PA where I finally got to experience Biodynamics and learn it from the ground up and the planets down. This is a long interlude, from spring 1981 through the 1984 growing season, and the seminal experience of my career, in large-scale gardening, greenhouse work, time management, volunteer direction, crew care, compost making, chickens on a large scale and pigs aplenty. Leading, in late 1985, to ⇒ Camphill Village Minnesota, in Sauk Center for my formal introduction to cows, the basis of compost making in the biodynamic way. On to ⇒ Fowler, IL and a smallholding that included major gardens, greenhouse building, pigs and chickens, and Lynda, a Guernsey. Here Woody undertook to feed 27 families, CSA style, in 1988. To ⇒ Temple, NH, almost the heart of the CSA movement, and a three or four year hiatus from gardening. Now it’s off to ⇒ the Tom Miner Basin, just north of Yellowstone, and a challenging but very nicely underwritten garden at 7,000 feet…enough supplies, enough help, a chance to grow 39 varieties of lettuce and flowers forever. Now the dry. On to ⇒Patagonia, AZ to garden in high desert, without cow manure. This lasted less than a season. On to ⇒ Honeoye Falls, NY, where the challenge of gardening never-before cultivated land and feeding, ultimately, 100 families was matched by the social challenges which I either met or didn’t meet, depending on how you read the story. In 1998 to ⇒ Aurora Farm, the last, best place, on a hilltop overlooking the Kootenay River and the Creston Valley in southeastern British Columbia. Here I am learning the ultimate lesson, surrender. And finally to ⇒ The Big Wood River in Idaho, just south of Sun Valley, where ever finer nuances of surrender may be required. * * * * MISSING PERSONS I have pledged to spare the reader an account of my non-gardening life which, be assured, is fully as idiosyncratic as the gardening part. As a consequence, I appear to have plowed, sown, cultivated and harvested these many gardens all by my lonesome, which is not true at all. Others shared the work and what glory there was to be had, and sometimes these “others” were wives and lovers. Except for my current-and-forever wife and garden partner Barbara Mary Victoria Scott, founder and guiding light of Aurora Farm, they remain nameless and unacknowledged here, for to detail the relationships and how they impacted on my life and career would serve little purpose and smack of self-inflicted gossip. Not to my taste at all. You may imagine then, if you wish, that there was a domestic scene with all of the complexities and joys and missteps that implies, adjacent to each of the garden landscapes I write about. |