Trauma Farm (39 page)

In this new and crazy universe I found our refrigerator overflowing for several years with alien produce and condiments from around the world. Now I’ve begun limiting myself to simpler meals and local food in season. There are those who glamorize the small-farm diet. But as I’ve noted, the real rural diet is not always so pretty—especially if you’re poor and have just spent a year living on potatoes. If I stop and consider the local food of millions of people trapped in isolated communities where it’s millet for breakfast, millet for lunch, and millet for dinner, I’m grateful for the feasts I’ve embraced, even though I’m too aware of the damage caused by the population explosion and the demands of my refrigerator.

Food fetishism also includes health bores and vegetarians, who can rattle off their diets and colon cleanses interminably, and, worse, the pill freaks who still don’t eat their vegetables but thrive on vitamins and nutritional additives. There are disturbed people out there, I’m sure, who spend more on their vitamin and health supplements than on their food. Meanwhile, organic-lettuce eaters can be as obnoxious and insanely righteous as nonsmokers and their counterparts—exotic food cultists wired into the Food Network with its unreal “reality” shows and what’s often referred to as food porn. Food has always been a jungle.

DINNER! ISN’T IT AMAZING
the changes it has gone through over the centuries? Whether you’re contemplating a stuffed lobster, a feed of mushrooms sprung from decaying trees, a New Age vegetarian hamburger, lettuce grown in that age-old standard—composted manure—or flesh slaughtered by hook or gun, it’s the endless, mysterious cycle that matters. According to Stephen Sondheim in
Sweeney
Todd,
his play about the mad barber of London, “The history of the world, my sweet . . . is the story of who gets eaten and who gets to eat.”

As the small farm faces its greatest crisis, it also celebrates its greatest glories—on the land and on the table. When I recall our feasts and those I’ve encountered everywhere from Beijing to Morocco, I wonder if our greed will ever end, even as I stand in my garden among the arugula, yard-long beans, chicories, radicchio, cantaloupes, artichokes, and the gaudy Swiss chards while enormous chickens lumber like dinosaurs after cutworms in the pasture and the lambs gambol under the willow trees. The foreign has become local. We have too much, and someone will eventually pay for our gluttony. Somebody already is paying. People and landscapes all around the world have fed this feast that is our small farm, and I know we can’t go on forever.

That’s why, like a recovering addict, I am trying to wean myself from the banquet laid out on the increasingly empty table of the planet, eating what I can grow, eating what is at hand, eating the garden. We have learned to love arugula and coriander, although both are introduced greens (but local now), out of the garden. They’ve become ours. They’ve joined the tasty bones of our lamb shanks and the broth I can braise them with, along with other herbs. The lost art of organ meat is returning. Liver and kidney and heart and intestines and tripe are re-entering the diet as the slow-food movement introduces new attitudes toward food and revives traditions. At last we can enjoy once again the real fat of real animals—the healthy smoothness of that fat and the gelatin of cooked bones warming the tongue. Like our dogs, I love the good bones in my dish, their marrow well herbed. Lots of vegetables, root and stem and leaf, and the fruits of shrubs and trees—sweet apples and luscious plums, hard pears and raspberries. The old foods. They thrive in our fields and they are our true diet. They don’t need all the condiments of Vietnam or Provence. You can cook them straight and ungarnished, and their ambrosial essence is obvious.

Every year I find more delight in less. And maybe, at last, I have learned one small thing about consuming the world— take everything in moderation, including moderation.

20
A TOUR IS GOOD
FOR THE DIGESTION

A
FTER I’VE EATEN
heaven in our dinner a sleepiness falls upon me, usually while I’m drinking my tea. Walking is the finest cure for lethargy. I’ve always been a walker, and in the fire of my youth I could walk the shoes off my feet. At the age of twenty-two I walked across Mexico City in a single day.

As soon as I’m at the door and pulling on my shoes, a thrill goes through the dogs, and they lunge to their feet with anticipation. I wish I still had their eagerness for such simple pleasures. Bella is bouncing high on the springs of her young legs, while Jen watches her with suspicion. Olive, black and glistening, her legs bowed, her back painful with arthritis, is still game. The puppy will turn back when it’s evident there’s no sheep herding or raccoons in the trees. The others will follow to see what surprises I stir up.

Walking our small orchard, I stop at the magnolias we planted on the perimeter for the pleasure of our neighbours, who drive by the pink cuplike blossoms every spring. The trees are of varying sizes, ranging from four-footers mauled by deer that pushed through the fencing to fifteen-foot-tall young trees. Already, though it’s barely summer, their leaves are losing vibrancy. They need watering. Fifteen years to reach fifteen feet, and that’s the best of the lot. When I planted the same variety in our front yard in White Rock nearly three decades ago it took only six years before it was half the size of our house. The difference? Water. Healthy plants seldom need more than the environment they belong in, but after failing to provide them with the simple essentials, people will bombard them with fertilizers and pesticides instead.

Our farm, like most small farms, is abundant with the hedgerows that nourish the birds and small mammals which have lost vast swaths of their natural habitat as human development dismantles meadowland and wilderness. On Trauma Farm the hedgerows are a mess and thus rich. In small farms around the world hedgerows remain like ours. In Europe they became more formal as the forests disappeared, turning into topiary hedges and rock or wood fencing of property lines. The disappearance of the margins has spread to North America and even to regions of Asia and Africa. This loss of habitat can be devastating. The North American grosbeak population has declined 78 percent in the last forty years, and much of that loss is blamed on habitat destruction.

We have been lucky here, because of our benevolently neglected hedgerows and determined planting of trees, shrubs, and flowers that provide shelter and food for birds in the gardens surrounding the house. The “birdvine” soon spread the word, and although our summers are particularly rich, the shrubs of Trauma Farm vibrate all year with juncos, quail, towhees, finches, wrens, bushtits, and sparrows, augmented during the summer by flocks of migrating warblers, crossbills, grosbeaks, thrushes, tanagers, goldfinches, waxwings, and whatever. The world is impressively resilient, given the chance.

IF FARMING TEACHES ANYTHING
, it’s tolerance. My tendency in garden design is toward the Oriental rather than the classic “garden rooms” philosophy of European gardeners. And I haven’t the patience for the repressive linearity of a manicured garden like the geometric knot garden. But Sharon and I have the greed of the average North American, so we often plant too much too close together, which demands greater maintenance. Our display gardens combine English cottage gardens with Zen stylings, achieving the success of neither.

I’ve never favoured row planting, even with vegetables, which we generally plant in our raised wide beds to allow more dense, often nonlinear plantings. Nature has few straight lines. I always smile at flower gardens where the tulips resemble soldiers on parade days. This is a mechanistic sensibility enjoyed by municipal gardeners, who prefer linear arrangements, especially along roadsides—the flowers marching like little leafy drummers to the tune of the idling cars locked in rush-hour traffic. In their few concessions to the natural world, shopping malls feature evergreen shrubs in stiff cement islands or rows separating parking stalls.

To plant our bulbs we dig out the area and then throw the bulbs up in the air and cover them where they land. This technique inevitably provides a more natural formation. We hardly ever plant in twos and fours, preferring the Japanese bonsai-grower philosophy of odd numbers. For various reasons even-numbered plantings, especially in flower gardens, irritate almost all observers except those with control issues. Even-numbered plantings work only in a formal design, and a missing tree or shrub can be jarring.

In a spirit of anarchist defiance I planted our orchard in crooked rows, thinking foolishly that as the trees aged it would take on the look of an ancient orchard. All I got was a crooked orchard, which is a pain to mow and water, and that doesn’t impress Sharon, who you’d think by now would have gotten used to my wacko ideas. Sometimes I think my history on this farm is one of tradition, education, and idiocy. Then again, that might be the history of the average small farm. All that said, Sharon grudgingly admits the orchard now looks old and picturesque.

A lot of our failings at Trauma Farm stem from the scarcity of teachers. Fewer than a dozen farmers with a rich past, like the Byrons, remain working on the island, along with a greater number of talented and self-educated amateur gardeners and perhaps a dozen horticulturally trained master gardeners. Traditional knowledge is dying, the community is breaking, and because of that, knowledge is now coming more from books or government agriculturalists informing farmers about good practices such as “Don’t put the corral above the well.” If you had done that fifty years ago, you would have been laughed out of the local coffee shop. Today such information seems original and is sometimes frighteningly necessary.

Our pasture is still green, though drying in its open, sandy heart, where the sun strikes it hardest. In another few weeks there won’t be much nutrition left in the grass, and by the end of the summer, instructed by the sheep’s grazing pattern, I will know which soil is weakest and needs liming or tilling or reseeding. When the sheep see me they rush up, led by the big ram, Jesus, named by a waggish friend because he was “resurrected” after a rough birth on Easter, and because that’s what I usually swear when he sneaks up behind me and tries to bang the food bucket out of my hand. Jesus is a beauty among rams, docile and gentlemanly, except for his occasional desperation at feeding time. He can be intimidating when he charges the food trough with the single-minded dumb hunger of a sheep. He caught Sharon once when she wasn’t looking and hurt her back. Almost all injuries with farm animals are the result of a distracted moment’s inattention, which can be rewarded as harshly on a farm as when driving down the road.

Trust in dealing with animals is hard to explain; it can be learned only by contact. When our grandchildren were young every one of them would break out in wails as soon as they saw Olive galumphing happily out of the house. Ajra was particularly frightened. She’d been visiting and living with our animals for a few years, you’d glance out the window and see this tiny girl hilariously shooing the big ram away from her flower collection, while Olive dutifully followed.

Working with animals can be scary at first because relationships in the natural world usually involve a combination of trust, power, and the pecking order. Only once all that is established does the relationship fall into place. The livestock understand that we are demanding obedience, and natural rebels that they are, they want to push for their freedom. It’s a bizarre relationship, if you think about it. Once our livestock and dogs realize that the rules are not onerous, that we are gentle and firm and want to work with them, they come over. Then they start to listen and often take delight in having direction. The sheep nature is inside every animal, including us. Good relationships are also tactile. I constantly touch them, but casually. I have no illusions about my power relationship with them.

And I must also admit I’ve taken the occasional perverse pleasure in watching our livestock startle a friend. A good surprise every now and then teaches us to recognize when to run and when to stand—a skill generally neglected in city living. A friend, a Native artist from back east, once dropped by for a visit, and while we were touring the lower pasture Jackson caught wind of us and charged in our direction, no doubt hoping to mug someone for a sugar cube. My friend took one look at this big black horse barrelling at us and from a standing position leaped the six-rail fence into the neighbour’s llama yard. I was impressed. He quickly scrambled back over the fence, away from the hissing llamas, while the horse eyeballed us cravenly, wondering what had happened to his sugar cube. I’ve always enjoyed a man who can move quickly.