Fallon, Nevada, lies 50 miles or so east of Reno. The Truckee River sluices down from Lake Tahoe, in the mountains west of Reno, flows through town [running right through the camps of the Nevada State Hospital where I worked] and north to Pyramid Lake, which is surrounded by Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation. This vast desert lake evaporates every cubic foot of water that the Truckee delivers, and then some. Some decades ago, by dubious agreements with the Paiute, water was legally diverted from the Truckee into the flat land surrounding the town of Fallon, a landscape that lacked only water to make it fertile. Churchill County is the only market farming area in the state as far as I know.
My friend and co-worker Elwood Koenig lived in Fallon, and somehow took a notion in 1974 to raise cantaloupe…the famous Fallon Heart o’ Gold melon. We were living at the time, Elwood and I and another half-dozen friends in a big house just outside Reno, all working for the same state agency. Koenig recruited a number of us to plant 5 acres of melons, and this we did on a Sunday in May, in a kind of community effort. The field had been furrowed up and we would scoop out a depression every few feet in the side of a furrow, sprinkle in a few seeds, covered them and pat the soil firmly down over the seeds. Then we placed a cone of reinforced waxed paper called a HotKap over the seeds and firmed soil around the base.
Melons love heat and the waxed paper cones were little greenhouses that would last through the unsettled May weather, intensifying whatever warmth was there. A “hill” of melon seeds went every 6 or 8 feet and the furrows were 4 or 5 feet apart. It was a big job on 5 acres, maybe 6,000 plants, but there were quite a few of us there, and the feeling of doing something extraordinary carried us through in good spirits. This stoop labor was new to us all and it was a festive kind of afternoon, with all the city folks in the field.
In June I came back to the field, riding my bike from Reno to Carson City to Fallon, in training for a 2,000-mile journey I had planned for later in the summer. I helped Woody tear the tops off of all those HotKaps, to ventilate the plants that had emerged inside. Row on row of hand-sized melon plants, stretching off into the distance.
The following year, and the year after I helped Woody with the melon crop and in 1976 I was there for the harvest, the final weeding and the marketing of those wonderful melons, and the sweet corn crop that he had added.
By the spring of 1977, I had a job at the community counseling center where Koenig was director and Iwas living in Fallon, on Cemetery Road. My house was in a little compound we called Hoogieville, three or four rental houses and a couple of duplexes with a large graveled parking area and beyond, a garden area. Events conspired for me to engage in the first garden project over which I would have full control. I was now, in effect, a father, or at least I willingly took on the responsibility. The little guy, Sky, had come [out of the blue, so to speak], on April 12. As my job paid $5 per hour, it was time to get serious about good food, cutting expenses, and doing some productive gardening.
I talked to the landlord and received permission to take over that garden area at the back of the property, a plot maybe 50 by 150 feet; just over the fence was a huge alfalfa field where the roots, we knew, went down 50 or 60 feet in search of moisture. The landlord offered us access to all the water we needed to garden, not a small matter in arid Nevada. Meanwhile two friends joined Sky’s mom and me and rented another of the little houses at Hoogieville. None of us knew a lot about gardening, but we had heard of “double digging” and took it to mean digging and then digging again the same plot. We’d started on that when another friend, Lynda, arrived from Claymont on Easter break from the Second Basic Course. She taught us the Chadwickian style of double digging beds about four feet wide. Putting aside all the soil from a trench a foot or so wide and deep in the bed, loosening the subsoil underneath, putting down a layer of grass stems or leaves or other organic matter, then replacing the top layer; the result was a bed four or six inches above the grade level, since everything’s all fluffed up. The paths between beds we scalped and left alone. As we built the beds we added quite a lot of old, crumbly pig manure we managed to acquire down the road.
We shaped two or three furrows in each bed and planted seeds in the sides of them, in imitation of the melon plantings we’d done with Woody Koenig. For this garden was to be furrow irrigated, exactly like his fields, but on a small scale. I spent many glorious hours in early morning and evening moving hoses around, gently applying water to furrows, each in its turn, watching as it crept and flowed down the beds, soaking in around the plant roots. Again, as in the compost making at Claymont, I was accessing ancestral memories, this time of irrigation practices, perhaps in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The water flowed and I built little dams to hold it back a bit when needed, destroyed them when the upstream plantings had taken enough water, created clever diversions in order to move the hose as little as possible. Our dark-skinned forbears had no hoses, but may have had even more fun coaxing water to run where it was needed.
We planted onions, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, corn, tomatoes, peppers, melons, squash…many flowers. All along the front, on the parking lot edge, and along the sides, we planted dwarf French marigolds
At the far corner of the garden, as far away from human traffic as I could locate them, I placed a beehive, on an old pallet.
I was quite young, maybe 12 years old, when I read the Sherlock Holmes books and discovered that Holmes, in retirement, became a beekeeper. I held that thought for many years. If my hero Holmes was interested, so was I. To be a beekeeper, in my mind, was to understand mysteries of Nature few people know about; it was to work with these mysteries as manifested in a tiny insect governed by instincts and sense endowments we infer but cannot experience. Wisdom was there to be found in the pursuit of beekeeping, I was convinced.
Two years earlier, we had arrived to attend the summer course of the Claymont School the day after a horrendous early summer thunderstorm that caused extensive damage to many of the very old oak trees on the property. The evening of my first day I spied Eric among the chaos of fallen and broken limbs, trying to manipulate a wooden bee box into a buzzing mass of live bees, a swarm dispossessed of its hive in a hollow trunk by the storm’s fury. Eric had a cast on his arm [he’d fallen from a high rafter working on the Great Barn] and needed some help. Fascinated by the prospect of trying to hive a swarm, I approached cautiously. As I knelt down before the swarm and entered its aura, its fragrant and portentous buzz, I felt a peace and animated awareness that’s rarely been granted to me. I knew little about it all, except that there was probably a queen in that seething throng of bees. I knew little but somehow I understood much.
Eric’s and my own attempt to entice the bees into our dilapidated bee box failed and the next morning they had gone, no doubt to a much more suitable home. Other events at Claymont precluded any further investigation into the world of bees that summer.
In Fallon, in 1977, the spring of the birth of my son, I finally became a beekeeper. One of my counseling clients was a confused boy of 12, doing poorly in school, uncooperative at home. When I interviewed his mother she told me she was a beekeeper, working several hundred hives, on shares. In one of those happy and easeful mergers of life [my gardening life] and work [my job] I agreed to this lady’s offer to spend a Saturday with her and the boy, visiting hives. The idea was to see what needed to be done with each after the winter, assess their strength, combine weak colonies, and open up the entrances to the spring. It was a learning day for me, and my young client was much happier to show me his expertise in the bee yard, than he had been to sit in my counselor’s office trying to talk about feelings. He was competent and deft as he showed me how to manage the hives, and in a delightful role reversal, I got a of useful information and even more important, technique. Everyone has seen the standard beehive, made of several stacked drawer-like boxes, the stacks often arranged with three others on a pallet--several groups of these in a corner of a field, often placed up against a grove of trees. This is a bee yard, and my bee mentor and his mother and I worked a couple of these that Saturday morning, a hundred or more hives to inspect.
I learned facts, but more important that morning was the feelings and intuitions that were drawn forth. To hold a frame of honeycomb [there are ten of these, hanging like curtains, in each box] with thousands of bees clinging to it, going about their business in the full light of the day; to be bathed in the exquisite blended scent of honey and pollen and beeswax; to give yourself to the
Hmmmmmmmmm of the workers, to realize that vibration in the depth of you; to observe the beginnings of new life--the eggs, affixed by the Queen ever so precisely to the exact bottom center of a six-sided cell; to discover other cells next door covered with tan wax and containing—you’re told this, but you don’t disturb it to see for yourself—a pupa that in a day or two will emerge as a worker bee; other cells packed with honey and pollen to feed the larva; later in the year, full frames and supers weighty with surplus honey. Sometimes the boy and I were able to see the Queen herself, ringed by attendant worker bees. To participate in these events, I knew, was a privilege granted only rarely, and I was grateful.
The boy’s mother, grateful herself for my attention to her son, and generous, gave me a hive of my own.
By the time we were done and I’d hauled my new hive home to the garden corner at Hoogieville, I figured I’d gotten a good introduction to the perils – yes I got stung, plenty – and promise of beekeeping. And so it was. I would continue to keep a hive or two or four at most places I gardened.
Always I could find peace with the bees, most often situated a little way from the garden where I could be alone to meditate or cogitate garden problems without interruption, for few apprentices or customers would venture near the hives. Again that immersion into the sound and fragrance, the vibration of the hot, blossom-y day vectored by the thousands of bees into that place.
I watched carefully the bees’ arrivals and departures as they homed in on and leapt from the launching board at the hive entrance, seeing the color and quantity of the pollen the bees carried, and viewed the drunken weaving of over-laden nectar carriers—all this led me to conclusions and understandings about how the bees fared. The more activity, the better. It was when the incoming bees were empty and hungry, when the guard bees just inside the entrance attacked them, then there was trouble in the bee yard and robbing going on. Perhaps the subject hive was weakened by some mishap, or the honey flow had been interrupted by weather or changing seasons.
These troubles were rare, however, and mostly I hung out with the bees because it uplifted me to be with them.
On another edge of the garden we erected a teepee. The little guy, three and four months old this summer and the only infant I’ve ever seen with a tan often sleeps in a cradle basket swung on the on the center tie-down rope where he can swing for hours and dream of marigolds and honeybees and visions of gyring, tapering pine poles above.
In the hottest days cabbage moths and their voracious larvae attacked our cole crops: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower. As a novice gardener this took me by surprise and I watched dumfounded as those green caterpillars grew fat on our produce, holing the leaves and laying down beads of green shit and doubling in size every day. The cabbage, growing strong, wrapped new leaves around the worms as they ate non-stop and they didn’t care, just kept munching, growing and finally pupating in the nourishing dark greenness.
Our garden partners consulted with the pig-manure lady and came up with a plan to use “Sevin” a broad-spectrum insecticide developed by Union Carbide, notorious a few years later for an industrial accident in Bhopal, India, which killed 20,000 people. Sevin is known too as a honeybee killer, though I didn’t know that for a fact at the time. What I did know and communicated at full volume to our partners, was that there was NO WAY we were going to use poisons in MY garden, where MY son and MY bees spent their days. I shocked myself with that blast and them too, I’m sure.
That vehemence anticipated an as-yet-unformed set of convictions that later guided my thinking about being an organic gardener.
• It would never occur to me to use poisons of any kind to eradicate insect or disease problems or for weed control; better to lose a crop than to resort to these practices;
• Nor would it occur to me to bolster plant growth with chemical amendments to the soil; no muriate of potash [the chemical sacks stacked in piles in the hay barn at my farm in Kentucky], no anhydrous ammonia, no Weed n’ Feed, no “fertilizers” other than composted manure;
• No quick fixes allowed; I would always take it as a given that Nature would provide the bounty if I took care of the soil;
• Furthermore, why should I ever have to prove any of this to an organic certification agency for marketing purposes? Or argue with garden partners about what to me was a matter of plain common sense and moral behavior?
• If I needed to tell buyers of my garden produce about the way I gardened—that I did not use poisons and so forth—I would do just that, tell them face to face, rather than rely on third-party certification and marketing at a distance.
With little experience in marketing at all—well, I had tended a roadside stand selling to peddle Koenig’s melons and sweet corn and where I fielded customers’ questions by letting them sample the goods—I intuitively committed myself to direct marketing: farmer’s markets and Community Supported Agriculture projects for the next 30 years and I never looked back. I still believe this is the only reasonable way for a gardener/farmer to make a living and with the current trend toward Local food gathers momentum as the true costs of shipping produce [which, after all, is mostly water, albeit highly nutritious water] become known and unacceptable, it’s all the more reasonable.