Trauma Farm (20 page)
I love the river of fruit and nuts that begins in July, when we collect our few cherries and the golden egg plums adorn the green leaves, reminding me of a Christmas tree with only one colour of bulb. And the red blush on the yellow Canors! The late, great crop of Italian prune plums. They all come in their time, and it remains one of the joys of life on this planet to stroll through an orchard over several months and to finally reach up and pull down a ripe fruit.
We have close to a dozen fig trees in two varieties, Turkish brown and what might be a variant of desert king. My late Italian uncle, Giuseppe, gave me a half-dozen cuttings of the latter—about six inches long—which I merely stuck in the ground, according to his instructions. They all sprouted and thrived in the spring. He told me they came from the old country—one of the many varieties brought over in the pockets of impoverished immigrants. Most failed, but this variety flourished and was passed through the community. Now it dominates the Italian backyards of Vancouver, and I pass along the vigorous cuttings in spring to islanders.
The fig is a sensual fruit. It’s the oldest living tree whose planting date is known. The Sri Maha Bodhi of Sri Lanka was planted by King Tissa in 288 bc . Technically, the fig isn’t a fruit but a flower, and it is one of the kinkier plants in the kingdom of flora. If you want to get very technical, it’s not even a flower but a false fruit, a mass of flowers and seeds merging together; and, even stranger, it’s part insect, since it contains minuscule wasps that crawl inside and pollinate and die in its ecstatic embrace, every tiny thread pollinated by a wasp. It’s a meaty fruit indeed. And different varieties are pollinated by specific wasps, so I would suspect my uncles somehow brought the wasp eggs with them, accidentally, or a variety of wasp that already existed on the North American continent got along just fine with this green fruit from the mountain regions of Basilicata in southern Italy.
One of the encounters of autumn is the battle with the chattering Steller’s jays. Brilliant blue bandits, their obnoxious cries signal that the hazelnuts are ripe, and the race is on. As soon as Sharon hears them she sends me up the tree with the ladder, grabbing nuts while the jays scream at me, often from the same branch, and the dogs scurry below, happily collecting whatever falls in the fracas, then go running off to crack and devour the nuts themselves. Despite this melee we usually manage to save enough for winter. In a few years, as more hazelnut trees come to prime, we will have many nuts, and sell them. Even the strong beaks of jays can’t crack our almonds, so those trees give us both almonds and their fragrant pink blossoms. We lost one of my walnut pollinators to drought and thoughtlessness and had to replant it last year. It will take ten years to bear nuts, but I’m hoping it will pollinate its large partner sooner.
OCCASIONALLY PEOPLE ASK ME
why, as I approach sixty, I’m still planting fruit and nut trees, some of which won’t bear for ten to fifteen years, if then. So I tell them an old Arab story I heard decades ago.
While the sultan was travelling he noticed an old man in a field, planting olive tree seedlings. This aroused the sultan’s curiosity, and he stopped to talk to him. “Old man, why are you planting olive trees when you won’t live long enough to see them bear fruit?”
The old man said, “Sire, I am planting for my children as my father planted for me.”
This made the sultan happy and he said, “Sir, if your fortune allows you to live long enough for these trees to bear fruit, bring the first bushel to me.” Then he travelled on and forgot about the incident until many years later an ancient man arrived at his palace, declaring the sultan had instructed him to bring a bushel of olives. The sultan remembered him, and when he saw that the farmer had actually lived to see the fruit of his labour he was so pleased he had the olives in the bushel replaced with gold. The old man left enormously grateful that his labour had earned him and his children wealth beyond their dreams.
The next day a young courtier purchased a bushel of olives in the market and brought it to the sultan. “What is this?” asked the sultan.
“When I saw you reward that old man with gold for his olives, I thought I would bring a bushel also,” the clueless young courtier replied. He was promptly stripped and whipped and tossed out in the street.
I have always understood that the continuum of time planted this garden for us to celebrate, and it would be shoddy not to enrich it for those who will arrive after I’m gone. During our years on Trauma Farm we have already created a living, growing wealth on this land. When the future arrives I would like its children to find themselves rich with grapes, persimmons, olives, walnuts, king apples, golden egg plums, dark wine and honey, cherries, sweet figs . . . .
O
VER THE HILLS
and into the trees we ran. I was clutching an enormous sun-warmed watermelon. The farmer’s tractor grumbled across the field, its dust rising like a nuclear doom-cloud. Did he see me? I loved the taste of fear in my mouth when I ducked down the ravine, tripped on a root, and fell with a sternum-numbing thud beside the creek, my hands outstretched, as if offering the watermelon to the god of garden raiders, or at least my two friends, whose eyes widened as they watched me sail through the air with our stolen treasure. The backs of my hands slapped the earth—the watermelon cracked in half.
I was trying to laugh and breathe simultaneously. My aching chest! I loved the panic on my friends’ faces before they shifted to delight, snatching the halves and scooping out fistfuls of the red flesh while I tried to suck back the wind whacked out of me. Soon I joined them, and we passed the shells, biting into our juicy, sticky chunks. It was so sweet I felt stoned on the sugar, or maybe it was the thrill of the run and the clearness of the air and the pale armour of a crayfish haunting the stones in the creek bed. Our elders always told us forbidden fruit is the best. We are hard-wired to the taste of the taboo.
I was a prince of garden thieves in my childhood. Plums were a great prize. We’d wait for a tree down the lane to ripen, and then one day, like raccoons that can sense you’re ready to harvest your fruit, we’d swarm the tree. For a few moments it would shiver with children, branches breaking, plums falling everywhere. Then we’d flee, screaming, our T-shirts bellied with plums. Strawberries, sweet tomatoes, raw corn—we’d raid them all. Carrots were another favourite. I’d just wipe the dirt off on my jeans. People grew real carrots then—fresh and young, they tasted nothing like those woody orange sticks in today’s supermarket. I look back upon those thieving years with a mixture of horror and bemusement at the greedy insouciance of a troubled child—and the lost tastes of an era when the tongue commanded and the food was uncontaminated.
Today, almost fifty years later, I will have a simple lunch again, though more civilized—bread and soup and greens and a handful of fresh everbearing strawberries. It seems so basic, almost boring, though the infrastructure behind this lunch is complex, prehistoric, and world-striding.
I make a notorious “bitter salad” that I seldom inflict on my friends, yet it thrills me. Its simplicity is its joy. Shallots, a serrated-leaf variety of endive—Tosca or frisée —though their seeds are also difficult to find in today’s shrinking seed catalogues. Perhaps some
mizuna
and a little radicchio. I slice the shallots thinly. We grow three varieties, each with its own taste, size, colour. Then I toss them among the ripped greens, add a vinaigrette, and sprinkle it with “raked” salt and fresh-ground pepper. It takes minutes to prepare, yet describing this salad makes it sound like a dish that would cost you a fortune in a pretentious restaurant. That’s because it actually is an exotic creation—the ingredients gathered from the fringes of the world. The salt from a Portuguese beach, the endive and radicchio descendants of the chicory of Rome.
Mizuna
is a Japanese variant of
Brassica rapa.
The shallots, like most alliums, are from the steppes of Asia. It’s a bunching onion, more tender, sweeter, and less hot than your average onion, which is why it entered my salad. The olive oil is from Italy, and the wine vinegar was made by a friend in Toronto who keeps a perpetual small keg in his kitchen and doles out bottles to his friends when they grow desperate.
We’ve already eaten all our Belgian endives, which we dig up every fall and behead and then plant with their crowns a foot underground. They sprout, pale beneath the earth, like bright bones, in the spring. Earth-blanched endives are outrageously tender, with only a suggestion of bitterness, and I eat them like candy, often scooping them out of the mud, wiping them off on my jeans, and devouring them raw in the garden, a child again.
But how difficult it is to be a child today. Deceptively beautiful yet potentially toxic fields and orchards can lure unsuspecting children with their poisoned fruit. Our orchard borders a relatively untravelled gravel road, though we’ve still had a couple of minor orchard raids. I’m grateful the neighbourhood children know us well enough to trust that our fruit won’t be sprayed, and I enjoyed scaring the piss out of them the one time I caught them. That’s part of the social role of a good farmer.
Even twenty years ago in Third World countries you’d encounter honest, tasty produce like ours, but because of globalization the food supply is rapidly becoming scary worldwide. Eating in countries like China or Mexico has become a form of Russian roulette. Too many Third World nations are short on environmental regulations and enforcement, and toxins are slopped around indiscriminately; uneducated workers operate on the principle that if a little poison works well, a lot of poison will really do the job. Oddly, in impoverished regions, if the farmers are too poor to buy pesticides and fertilizers, their produce is clean.
The red earth of Cuba, where the American embargo has restricted oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, vibrates with life. It reminded me of mescaline trips in the sixties. I’ve never seen such verdant gardens so laden with giant vegetables, hand cultivated and healthy. Using real ingredients, the cooking in Cuba is plain yet wholesome. Only as income and trade routes improve do farm recipes grow as complex as ours.
Mike Byron says his family moved to this island during the Depression with eleven chickens. They were so poor they couldn’t eat the eggs but sold them for money for essentials. They made a deal with a neighbouring farmer to dig his potatoes, and for their labour they got enough potatoes to eat. They also milked the farmer’s cow while he took his crops to market off-island, and were paid with the milk. So they survived their first year on potatoes and occasional bounties of milk, along with whatever produce and fruit and venison they could scrabble up. When considering farm food and the multiple paths of human history it’s so easy to generalize, and idealize, assuming that American and Old World local farmers or Chinese peasants or corn-eating Navajos lived healthier lives than we do today.
I look at my aesthetic salad again and start to feel embarrassed, so Sharon takes over. We don’t often lunch together except during family events but she’s here today, sweetening my bitter creation with tomatoes and herbs, a salad we can both enjoy, and I’m being pushed aside like an old and frail ewe being edged out of the feed trough.
Though we have conflicting tastes on a very few occasions, at least we haven’t joined the tracksuit-wearing porkers trolling today’s supermarkets, loading their carts with cardboard vegetables, tasteless meat, colourful boxes, and cans of processed junk cranked up with preservatives and additives—and the terrible triad of salt, sugar, and fat. We live in an era when people are so confused about nutrition that British mothers were recently caught concealing chocolate bars in their children’s clothes after the schools banned junk food. The ignorant mothers feared their children “wouldn’t get enough to eat.” The era when children actually stole vegetables has gone with the dinosaurs.
Not only are hybrid vegetables in the stores relatively tasteless, they are also diminishing nutritionally along with their soil, as a result of single-cropping (the large-scale farming of only one crop rather than growing mixed and rotated plantings), which depends on oil-based chemicals and treats the soil as an engineered growing medium. Several recent studies demonstrate that some vegetables in Britain have lost one-quarter of their magnesium and iron and almost half of their calcium. Distance between the grower and the eater also depletes flavour and nutrition in produce after it’s harvested—except for a few rare plants or fruits, such as winter apples, that need storage to reach their prime. Today’s food is being shipped bizarrely around the world. West Coast hothouse tomatoes are sold in New York, and the salad greens of temperate Vancouver are imported from China or Mexico. Retailers prefer pretty vegetables and fruits that can be stored and shipped. It’s cost-effective, even if they taste like cardboard. During the last fifty years we bought with our eyes, not our stomachs, until the local-food movement and the recent gourmet revolution in America combined forces.