Trauma Farm (23 page)

GARLIC IS PLANTED IN
the fall—when the ground is cooling and the leaves are turning. Since we have wet winters, we trench around our raised beds to drain the water away during rainstorms—after we’ve mixed in our rock phosphate, ashes, kelp, composts, and manure. First we break the bulbs apart, discarding the diseased; then we dibble the ground and plant the cloves two or three inches into the earth, where they will send out their roots, sucking up nutrition. You should plant your clove base-down and pointing at the sky above, though legend has it that a wrongly planted clove can do a backflip underground during a good winter.

A couple dozen cloves of garlic grow easily, promising wealth for new farmers. However, garlic is a sensitive, labour-intensive crop, as you soon learn while breaking thousands of bulbs into cloves for planting. Sharon gets tendinitis every autumn. A single bulb dries beautifully. Five thousand bulbs need a barn, drying racks, fans, and an absence of rain in the two weeks before harvest. Like a good, maturing wine, the bulbs demand proper storage. They also need workers to trim the roots, peel the dirty outer skins, sort according to size, and discard the sick bulbs that might infect the drying shed with bacteria. For a plant with so many medicinal properties, garlic is surprisingly prone to disease. White smut can infect a field for at least seven years. That fungus blew through our islands like a storm ten years back. Good luck and good drainage saved us, but a few friends still cannot grow garlic without having it rot into guck in the ground.

WE ALSO GROW PEPPER
and tomato seeds for Salt Spring Seeds. I love my peppers many ways: fresh in a salad, baked, stuffed, preserved in olive oil, or stir-fried in a black-bean or Szechuan sauce. We grow heritage varieties to eat as well as sell their seeds. I once abhorred hot foods because I’d grown up living in a macho culture where burning your tongue with chili sauce was considered a culinary high. Ugh! Then I went to China. Tasting real Szechuan sauce, I instantly understood how a hot sauce can make flavours explode and unfold into complex variations.

Tomatoes are another of our favourite seeds. Today Sharon cultivates and collects about eight varieties. Along with the pepper, the tomato originated in the Americas—probably on the west coast of South America, where ten varieties still grow wild in the Andes. Once called the love apple, the tomato was first regarded as poisonous by North American colonists. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century North Americans kept it at arm’s length. Yet in continental Europe, where it arrived courtesy of either Columbus or Cortés and was first documented in the mid-sixteenth century, it moved from ornamental fruit to food within a century. Today Italians assume the tomato has always been common to their country’s diet, along with the bean, which illustrates that “traditional memory,” as accurate as it often is, can also exaggerate.

Now the tomato is ubiquitous, one of the most common fruits we find in our produce. Mandatory at salad bars, it’s also essential to many sauces. I eat tomatoes sauced, fried, dried, roasted, and fresh in any variety of recipes. One of the lovely qualities of the tomato is that the fruit has evolved to match recipes that use it. We grow Romas for their thick pastes and sauces, and big slicers for just that. Sharon’s brother passed on to us an unnamed heirloom he’d encountered, so we called it Graham’s Goodkeeper. It lives up to its name and sells well in the seed catalogue. An indeterminate variety, it continues ripening and fruiting until frost, and the tomatoes are long-lasting. Another of my favourites is the Principe Borghese, a drying tomato. Its centre is juice and seed, without any divisions. You can scoop it out with a spoon and then dry the shell, which we do in our food dehydrater. It’s also determinate, like corn, meaning these tomatoes generally ripen around the same time, so you can preserve them in volume. It’s great for soups in winter. Our decorative tomatoes, yellow cherry, tiger stripe, and green apple (which ripens without turning red and tastes like a green apple), give style to a salad. Some tomatoes have a higher acid content, so they are grown for canning, because they are not as susceptible to botulism.

Sharon gathers our tomatoes and runs them through an Italian hand grinder, a clever heritage machine that crushes tomatoes and squeezes the juice out for us to freeze while separating the seeds and skin, which she puts in a bucket of water and ferments in the greenhouse. Tomato seeds need to ferment for viability, as the fruit does in the wild, dropping to the ground and rotting. After the bucket develops a thick layer of mould, she stirs the mess, releasing the seeds, which sink to the bottom; she pours off the top gunk into the compost and rinses the bucket until the seeds are clean. Then she sieves them and scatters them onto a plate or a piece of glass to dry. Afterwards they can be stored for the following year. Meanwhile, we pour the paste-juice into containers and freeze it for later in the winter, when we are less busy and can cook large batches of barbecue or tomato sauce, or salsa on the wood stove. We put aside our own seed and sell the remainder to Salt Spring Seeds, since they are all heirlooms and breed true.

UNLIKE PRE-AGRARIAN SOCIETIES, WHICH
thrived more on perennials and fruits—what we now call permaculture— farmers have shifted increasingly toward the annual crops of today. Along with fruit and nuts, these crops dominate our produce. Thus we have become dependent on seeds. However, as the transnationals systematically buy up seed companies, they are reducing their stock through attrition.

A real seed catalogue should be a winter fantasy. We settle back with it by the fire, drinking hot chocolate, dreaming the summer and fall cornucopia into existence— every plant perfect and in far greater abundance than we will ever grow in reality. A gardener needs those fantasies to accept the reality of what summer produces, because gardens are always what they are, not what we imagine.

Seed catalogues of the past were filled with dreams, dreams that are disappearing like the people who live the rural life. The scantiness of today’s catalogues compared with the enormous volumes of fifty years ago depresses anyone who has gardened for years. What was once a joy is now a litany of loss. Just picking up these thin booklets is heart-rending. What’s gone this year? The crops that used to be anticipated are now the first disappointments, as you scan through the pages and learn that another favourite endive or corn or lettuce has disappeared.

It also used to be, in the mists of history, that the local farmer grew tasty varieties that might not ship well or weren’t perfectly shaped or coloured, or were incapable of cultivation on an industrial scale. These varieties are vanishing quickly from the corporate catalogues, which are designed more for the industrial grower than for the home garden. Sometimes I wonder if the corporations don’t want us to grow tasty fruit and vegetables to compare with the colourful cardboard sold in the produce departments of today. In addition, the majority of commercial seeds are now hybrids that won’t grow true in a second generation. That way you can’t keep your seed but must buy it again every year. The companies will tell you they have nothing against heritage seeds; it’s just good business to stream their customers into consuming what is more profitable.

Several of these multinationals produce pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, as well as farm machinery. The business plan is to remove the seeds from the farmer’s control and retain a limited number in the hands of the corporation, seeds that are designed to work best with that corporation’s chemicals and machinery. They now sell such “packages” to farmers: herbicide, plow, seed, fertilizer, pesticide, harvester. The culmination of this philosophy is the notorious “terminator” seed that was being developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a subsidiary of Monsanto until the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity requested a moratorium on its development in 2000. So far, that moratorium has been successful.

Combine the loss of seed diversity with the invention of gm (genetically modified) seeds, which are infecting the basic crops of corn, soy, cotton, and canola, and the history of human cultivation is facing its worst crisis since our neolithic ancestors discovered seed saving. Of 350,000 of the world’s known plant species, 60,000 are threatened with extinction today. Domesticated plants are disappearing faster than wild varieties. Seeds handed down in families and villages for centuries have been eliminated in this continuing botanical holocaust. Since the nineteenth century 95 percent of cabbages and 81 percent of tomatoes are no longer grown commercially, retained in seed banks, or listed in seed catalogues—gone!

Even more dangerous is our tinkering with gm seeds, which is radically different from the simple breeding humanity has performed since we began cultivating plants and domestic animals. Although traditional farming has ultimately created an enormous diversity of plants and animals, it never crossed the species line. You can’t interbreed different species naturally, though there’s a couple of plant species that experts are debating about, but that’s likely a classification issue and not a species cross. Diseases can cross from species to species, but that involves mutation, as with avian flu. That’s why the inability to interbreed is generally referred to as the “species barrier.” The closer you get to it, the more difficult interbreeding becomes. Thus hybrids will not breed true to their parents, nor will their offspring resemble them. To create a hybrid plant you have to breed two extremely different parent genera and produce one generation of seeds. Next year you must breed those two parent genera again. The same with animals, only they seem to hit the infertility barrier more often. If you breed a donkey with a horse you get a mule. Sterile. End of the line. gm crosses that line by creating mutations, injecting genes from one species into another, and, as its proponents say, opens up the universe. gm can create butterfly-killing corn, tomatoes with frog genes, and potatoes that are pesticides.

GM seeds also have the potential of creating a rogue plant. Imagine a terminator gene leaping from plant to plant: The end of flowers. The end of fruit. The end of vegetables. This scenario is far-fetched, but some of the accidents in the production of gm seeds suggest it might not be as far-fetched as transgenetic enthusiasts would have us believe. The numbers are shifting too rapidly to say how many North American crops are gm , but it is well over 50 percent in the varieties of crops released so far, and these crops are now cross-pollinating with natural, organic crops.

Equally scary is the potential of a gene containing a pesticide like Bt (
Bacillus thuringiensis
) spreading from plant to plant, endangering pollinators. Albert Einstein is rumoured to have said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” This statement isn’t entirely accurate, like most great quips. There are many pollinators besides the European honeybee. But releasing insect-killing plants into the natural world is no way to farm wisely or guarantee that life on our planet will survive this century.

Of the first ten efforts to inject a gene into a plant, all went wrong. The initial commercially produced gm corn, Starlink, engineered to enhance cattle growth, was not fit for human consumption. (Imagine developing an allergenic corn unfit for humans!) In its first year of commercial production this modified corn was accidentally funnelled into food products worldwide, sparking recalls of trainloads of corn, tacos, and breakfast cereals.

The reaction against gm seeds has been so intense that the agribusiness enablers (political and bureaucratic) of both the Canadian and American governments refused to legislate mandatory labelling on the grounds that adult human beings, though capable of voting in a democracy, are incapable of deciding what they should eat and might be subject to food panics (such as not buying gm products). Government bodies insisted “voluntary labelling” was the solution. However, the first major supermarket chain in Canada that stocked food labelled “gm Free” was visited by representatives of agribusiness, and suddenly afterwards it refused to stock any food that was labelled “g m Free” because it would give uncontaminated food an unfair marketing advantage. This tactic of banning labelling happens all the time in the food industry. That’s why it’s illegal for an American dairy farm to advertise that it doesn’t use the controversial bovine growth hormone, and thus the incentive to raise untreated cattle is removed from dairy farmers.