Trauma Farm (22 page)
SHARON HAS GONE BACK
to the garden. I am alone savouring my bean soup, salad, and focaccia. I feel like a thief because I know that this is a rich feast for a man in debt, and that I am lucky enough to live in a time when even a low-income farmer can eat like the wealthy if he has his wits about him. Maybe this is why we farm. I also recognize this simple meal is a form of gluttony. Despite my futile attempts at ecological living, I am still looting the planet— the sources of my “basic” lunch circling the world, like my breakfast. How complex the simple lunch has become.
Now I’ve spilled soup down my shirt front. I’m an enthusiastic eater and accidents happen. I’m so full I’m starting to think about a nap. This tendency is known medically as “dumping.” The word scares me. I better get outside and working before I fall victim to the hazards of a fat lunch, which is why many farmers I know will only stop for an apple or a handful of plums and a cup of tea. They are smarter than I am. And instead of contemplating the work that needs to be done, I’m thinking about the food in my belly and on the table, its provenance and its structure— these variations on the vast palate of my species. We are grazers of enormous range and tastes. But I will save the meat that surrounds the good bones for dinner.
I
WAS STANDING WITH
my arm around Sharon’s shoulder on the front deck on a romantic summer afternoon, the year after we arrived at the farm, watching the sky turn white as gusts of thistledown blew across the pasture like snow out of season. Since then, every year, skies of seeds and pollen have whirled around us, whether it’s the whirligigs of maple seeds, the fluff of dandelions, or the rich yellow pollen of Douglas fir. Within the richness of summer the land is always planning for winter and, more importantly, the next spring. Now that the horses are gone in this eighteen-year-long day at the farm, the thistles are returning, and we have to remember the ancient farmer’s charm, which only works with back-breaking labour. And one missed year forces you to start all over again:
Cut thistles in May, they’ll be back in a day.
(They resprout.)
Cut thistles in June, they’ll be back soon.
(They resprout, though weaker.)
Cut thistles in July, then they’ll die.
(They don’t resprout and they don’t seed.)
SEEDS WILL DISPERSE IN
many ways. They fall to the ground and scatter their genetics a few inches. They drift high in the air and float across oceans or hook onto fur or skin or clothes or hair. They explode in every direction. They are eaten by birds and deer and civets and shat in a distant valley after, travelling with their hosts. They rot in their fruit and rise into giant trees born of decay. Seeds are patient. Some survive a century until they decide conditions are right. I’ve encountered domesticated plants that must have come from miles away sprouting among our vegetables. No wonder the Mayans declared seeds the “spiral of life.”
Aside from lichens, fungi, algae, rusts, ferns, and their ilk, all the plants around us are born of seed—the germ. The germ was once a beautiful creature, until 140 years ago, when the word was first used to label a disease rather than a source of life. My
Oxford
tells me that a germ is capable of developing into a new organism, as well as being an elementary principle or an original idea.
Germ
derived from the Latin word for “sprouting.” Out of a tiny germ is born the giant sequoia.
There’s no knowing when the first astute neolithic hunter-gatherer recognized that those little things falling off a plant would become another plant next spring. It was probably a woman, as women were almost universally the gatherers in pre-agrarian societies. We do know that plants were found in a sixty-thousand-year-old grave in Shanidar, Iraq, and some had medicinal uses, so they were probably collected. Wild wheat has been found in paleolithic sites. Emmer and Einkorn wheat are the most ancient grains. Black Einkorn is still grown in Ethiopia, and we regularly seed a row in our garden because it is a lovely ornamental with feathery bracts and kinked stems.
Another archaeological discovery was a man christened Otzi—his 5,300-year-old tattooed corpse was found frozen in a glacier in the Otzal Alps. It’s believed he fled into the mountain heights after a violent encounter, tried to build a new bow, and then set all his gear down and quietly bled to death. An analysis of his stomach contents shows his last meal was venison and an unleavened bread made out of Einkorn grain. That strikes me as a fair last meal.
We got our Einkorn seeds from Dan Jason’s renowned Salt Spring Seeds. Dan is a tall, likeable man operating his worldwide network out of a small island residence and, with the help of growers across North America, building a web of gardens that provide heirloom seeds to North America, Europe, China, India, Africa, and Australia. He specializes in beans and seed garlic, though he now stocks more than seven hundred varieties of vegetables and flowers. An avid gardener, he was one of the earliest of my generation to recognize the looming extinction of seeds and to do something about it.
Despite their beauty and variety, seeds are being intentionally eliminated by agribusinesses. Their variety alone is the bane of the factory farm. There’s even a seed potato that’s illegal to sell in Canada because its tough, ropy leafage tangles up large machines. Canada’s Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, in its eagerness to support industrial farming, has been attempting to drive this potato into extinction for at least twenty-five years, but the Caribou potato has proved remarkably government-resistant. Developed a century ago by a hermit living in a wilderness cabin, it’s a delicious, crisp-fleshed, winter-keeping potato. Although you can be arrested for selling it, farmers have discovered it’s not illegal to give someone four potatoes for “experimental cultivation purposes.” The more the potato police try to enforce the law, the more the potato spreads. The Caribou potato has become a matter of principle among guerrilla gardeners and a protest against our government’s agricultural policies.
SOMETIMES AT NIGHT, AFTER
I shut my eyes, I dream of the dark earth, its texture—life, marauding earthworms, mycelium spreading, microbes, bacteria. This is the home of our major crop at present, garlic—
Allium sativum
—the “stinking rose.” A different kind of seed, resembling an elongated pearl, the garlic clove grows and divides and builds a bulb filled with what could be the greatest assortment of medicinal compounds ever in a single living organism. It’s a food, a spice, a cure.
Garlic, like corn, wants a friend—to dig up the bulb, separate the cloves, and transplant it. Forgotten in the ground for a second year, each clove will attempt a bulb in confined circumstances, some rotting, some sprouting simultaneously. Without us it would undoubtedly devolve into a few survivors with tiny bulbs struggling on an unknown steppe, as the wild form,
Allium longicuspis,
did for centuries. I would love to have known that first brave individual who stuffed a whole roasted chicken with garlic bulbs. Originally garlic released seeds, but we tried to breed evolution out of garlic, creating seedless bulbs in the hills. A lot of good that did. Over the years the seedless clones evolved in our gardens, using gardeners as tools to help diversify.
There are two major subspecies of cultivated garlic and an impossible number of varieties. Despite, or maybe because of, thousands of years of cultivation, garlic nomenclature is a confusing mess—imagine a seed catalogue that lists tomatoes by their colours or by the countries where they’re grown. Sharon and I grow nine kinds at present. Observant people can easily tell the difference between the soft-necks and the rocamboles. The hard-necked rocam-boles form miniature bulbil stalks like twisting serpents; after that, identifying a garlic becomes a dicey business.
Earlier I mentioned the complexity of farming. It’s a surrealistic house in the world, doors leading to rooms with other doors, stairs going up and down, rooms inside rooms, all lateral or converse to our demands. Seeds are such an endeavour, and garlic is a great seed, maybe because the clove is not even a real seed, though we call it that. It has many rooms within the haunted house of stories where we were born. According to Herodotus, garlic was fed to the slaves who erected the great pyramid of Cheops, and the first recorded strike in history occurred when the workers were deprived of their daily ration of this energy-giving herb and staged a wildcat walkout. It’s commonly believed that garlic originated in the Eurasian steppe and was cultivated as long as ten thousand years ago. A fine storing bulb, it followed nomadic hunter-gatherers, invaded with Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, and returned with Marco Polo. Mention has been discovered in Sanskrit writings, on clay tablets and papyrus, and in ancient versions of China’s reputedly 4,500-year-old Hsia agricultural/ astrological calendar. The price of an Egyptian slave was fifteen pounds of garlic.
Garlic’s healing powers have been extolled since history began. My diminutive Italian uncle, even in his sixties, was a terror on his dancing feet. But after suffering a heart attack and recovering slowly, he could hardly walk, was depressed, and decided his dancing days were over. Then I saw him months later. He was a ball of fire. Entering the room he immediately challenged me to a boxing match. I was shocked by this resurrection. After much cajoling I learned what had put the Italian back in the Italian. Garlic! He’d encountered an old family healing legend about finely slicing a raw clove of garlic into a cup of warm milk each morning.
There are thousands of folkloric claims for garlic’s curative powers. Its ingredients and the ways they break down are so complex they’re difficult to analyze. Garlic’s major power lies in a compound called allicin, which is also responsible for the notorious odour. This highly unstable substance can dissolve into a maze of pharmacological activities, trace elements, and healthful supplements. Garlic’s antioxidants slow the deterioration of the brain in rats with a syndrome that resembles Alzheimer’s. And to top everything, it appears to help the brain’s serotonin system in controlling depression. That’s right; its enthusiasts claim garlic can even make you happy.
