My Final Farm

Never more than a dozen hens for eggs, and two does for milk. A vegetable patch big enough for everything except potatoes and corn. Some apple trees, a plum, a pear, and half a dozen blueberry bushes. Given what else I was dealing with, my forays into micro-farming were insane, but at least I kept one principle firmly in mind: small is beautiful.

My adult life is marked by three separate ventures into self-sufficiency, all of them harking back to the  farm that kept my teenage mother and her family alive and fed during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. When she wasn't plunging into creeks in the middle of the night to escape from bombardments, my teenage mother drank goat's milk and ate home-grown rabbits and pigeons and chickens and eggs and grapes and almonds and olives and cabbages and kale. Meanwhile, in their elegant Barcelona apartment my father's family quietly starved for the three years the war lasted, filling their stomachs with water from the faucet every night so they could sleep.

I was born five years after the end of the bombs and the hunger, carrying in my DNA the conviction that when times got bad you could grow your own food and survive, or live an urban life and starve.

My husband and I bought our first house from an older Austrian woman who had probably had some of the same fear-and-hunger experiences as my parents, and had filled her acre and a half with an ambitious vegetable garden, 25 fruit trees, a berry patch, a chicken house. I, who had never grown so much as a tomato in my life, plunged into self-sufficiency like a nun into her vows. That was farm #1.

It was succeeded by #2, after I had to give up my career following a diagnosis of CFS. I was in survival mode and thought, well, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, the least I can do is try to grow some food.

Farm #3, my best-loved, was in Vermont, where we moved when my husband retired. Besides the usual goats and chickens and vegetable beds and apple trees  there were for-real woods where I could gather ramps in spring, and fields where the nearby farmer harvested for-real hay. I used to stand in the front field watching my goats gobble dandelions and think, am I really here? Is this really mine?

But farming even on a micro scale and CFS don't age well together, and one day I threw my hands up and declared that it was time to be realistic and responsible and move to a retirement community on the shores of Lake Champlain. Still in Vermont, still beautiful, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a farm.

I now live in a small cottage with all mod cons and never have to worry about dinner, which is served in the community center up the hill. But this hasn't extinguished my farming drive. My tiny enclosed porch has become farm #4, my final farm.

In it, on sunny afternoons, I sit with my dog Bisou and the cat Telemann. In a Japanese-style tub beside me Yin and Yang, the goldfish, lead seemingly contented lives, protected from Telemann by an electrified scat-mat. Pots of houseplants, the successors to my vegetable gardens, surround me: geraniums prompted into bloom by the light reflected off the snow, an ancient jade plant almost too heavy for me to lift, a Christmas cactus that my cat loves to chew. And, because I haven't given up on my dreams of self-sufficiency, a Meyer lemon tree and a Calamondin orange that gives enough fruit to make marmalade in case of an emergency.

Just outside the window are my substitute chickens.  Nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, finches gold-, purple-, and house-, and woodpeckers large and small eat the seeds and suet and drink at the four-season bird bath. Beneath the feeders, obese squirrels squabble over spilled seeds, and at sacred moments clever Reynard, my red fox, trots past on his slender black-stockinged feet.

Rainy Sunday At The Farmers' Market

At the nearby farmers' market there is a little old couple--actually, they are probably my age, but never mind--who sell potatoes.  Tiny red ones the size of meatballs;  deep indigo ones bursting with phyto-nutrients; and waxy, buttery, elegant fingerlings.

Most of the vendors at the market sell more than a single product.  Especially at this time of year, the vegetable farmers sell everything from chard to pumpkins;  the meat sellers offer squash;  and even the potter sets out a basket of garlic next to her mugs.  But not the potato couple.  They only sell potatoes.

In a crowd of vendors most of whom look like graduate students who ditched their dissertations to go back to the land, the potato couple are old-time farmers.  They've been growing potatoes for so long that they've come to resemble their product, short and squat and a little lumpy.  She deals with the public and he deals with the truck and the tent and the crates.  She refers to him not by name or as "my husband," but as "He," as in,"He planted a lot of Dutch Creams last spring."

I imagine their farm, a no-nonsense place north of here.  No Araucana hens laying colored eggs in charming coops, no mache or endive sprouting year-round under glass.  Just potatoes, and maybe an old dog, and the two of them at the kitchen table with the TV on now that the children are gone.  And on Sundays, the trek to the farmers' market to sell to summer people and flatlanders and leaf-peepers who park their SUVs by the side of the highway and carry their purchases in New Yorker totes.

Last week when I went to the market the heavens suddenly opened and the rain came down in torrents.  Tents flapped and leaked;  people could hardly hear each other speak for the noise of the water; and the Indian summer day suddenly turned cold.  The potato couple's tent was at the bottom of the field.  He had strewn a bale of hay in front of the potato table, but I nevertheless sank down to my ankles in mud.  She was doing her best with customer relations, but I could tell that she wanted to go home.

How much longer, I wondered, will they be able to do this--planting and weeding and harvesting and storing the potatoes, plus the endless round of farmers' markets?  Do they have any help at the farm?  Do they have savings, a pension?  

Except for the wealthy, buying produce at the farmers' market is a moral gesture.  Yes, the food is usually better than what you find at the supermarket, but it is a lot more expensive. It doesn't make immediate financial sense, but buying from these small local farmers is an act of faith and hope in, and charity towards, the community.  Vermont, which  has the lowest rates of church attendance in the country, leads the nation in the proportion of food that people buy locally, and even on that rainy Sunday the parking lot was full and cars were lined up by the side of the road.

This is good news for the potato couple, and for the young families with their college degrees, their  home-schooled children, and their dreams of raising food sustainably.  But given the perennially shaky economy, I wonder how long Vermonters will be able to continue to support their farmers.

For as long as possible, though, those of us who can would do well to spend part of our Sunday buying garlic from the potter, some soup bones from the meat lady, and a couple of pounds of tiny red potatoes from the potato couple.  There are, after all, many ways of attending church.