The Homestead Gardener..on harvesting…and dreaming

by Derrick Gentry –

“What is paradise, but a garden … full of pleasure and nothing there but delights.”  William Lawson (1668)?

It is the middle of October, the clock running down in the harvest season, and in these waning days of the season most of our potatoes still lie sleeping in four different beds.  The shelves in the root cellar are bare.  Yes, I know it is getting late.  Normally, at this time of year, all the potatoes have been harvested and long since been put to bed in another dark place after two weeks of air curing.  This year has been different.  We have been occupied with more tasks than usual in addition to the routine busyness of canning, fermenting, and curing.  So we have dug up a few potatoes now and then when we needed them, while the vast majority — the ones destined for winter storage — wait patiently in situ with few above-ground signs to mark their location, the green leafy plant tops having long since withered away into nothingness.

One virtue of potatoes and carrots and celery root and many other late-season crops is there is no special sense of urgency about harvesting them. They will wait patiently — unlike fruit that ripens and falls from a tree, tomatoes that ripen and split on the vine, or (earlier in the season) garlic that must be taken up not a day too late or too soon.  And there are rewards for waiting.  Many would agree that kale is not really kale until the cold autumn nights come, the starches converting to sugar, and carrots likewise get sweeter and tastier the longer they oversleep in the ground.  Forget about the so-called lazy days of summer; it is the unrushed interlude of these mid-October weeks that I cherish the most, when every morning the goldfinches keep returning to the seed heads of the cone flowers, when the ground is weeks away from freezing, and one by one the leaves fall from the trees at exactly the moment each feels called upon to do so.  There is still time to watch from the window, time to wait another day.

Baskets Full of Potatoes

The fact that we can harvest potatoes at our own leisure (ideally when the ground is dry and the sky overcast) means that they are the ideal garden crop for harvesting with the helping hands of young children. To dig for potatoes is to dig for treasure – though whenever I pitch it that way to children, as an advertisement for this fun chore we can all do today, I invariably get a faint “oh, come off it” look from the above-six-year-old crowd. So I have learned to tone down my circus barker act. I conceal from them the fact that the digging work will also involve sorting work. I have found that the treasure hunting game naturally transitions to the equally satisfying game of sorting the treasure we have found. Perhaps potato digging/sorting is a bit more like Pokemon card collecting … but now the circus barker is talking to himself.

The only excavation tools required for potato digging are a simple garden fork and our hands. And for sorting, all we need are pairs of hands and eyes and some baskets covered with towels (to protect from the sun).  The first challenge in the art of potato treasure hunt is to guess the right spot to sink the garden fork, a foot or so away from the remains of the plant stem, so that we loosen the soil and gently lever up the potatoes without impaling a perfect-looking potato with one of the tines of the fork. There is a recurring moment of suspense every time we move on to the next plant.  

And then the dramatic moment of discovery: when the bright redness of the Red Norland potatoes suddenly emerges from the dark and rich-smelling soil.  And as we burrow our hands into the loosened earth, there is the tactile thrill of discovering a giant Yukon Gold potato and knowing its existence with our hands before we know it with our eyes.  Seeing is not always believing when we harvest potatoes.  The whole experience can feel like an exercise in restoring all of our senses to the same level of significance.  Ah, the ecstasies of groundedness, of digging in the dirt!

[“Get real, dad!”  Yes, yes, you’re right: Time to come off it and get back to work…]

The sorting process begins at the moment of harvesting. Sorting potatoes demands a different kind of attention than the mid-Summer sorting we did with the onions and the garlic. There is a basket for the unblemished potatoes, which we bring inside to air cure in a well-ventilated darkness (not at all like winter squash, which is rubbed down with vinegar and cured by sitting in the sun). Then there is a discard basket for the potatoes with discolored patches and tips, the over-eager ones that have peaked through the mulch and exposed themselves to the sun. Remember to place them, not drop them, in the basket that we keep covered with a towel. Bruised and cut potatoes do not heal over time.

Over there is the “eat right away” basket, where we put the ones we have accidentally forked (the moral: every accident is an opportunity for mashed potatoes). And beside that basket is the less damaged but still compromised “eat before Christmas” cohort. Sometimes there are emergencies to deal with: “Stop, everyone!” someone jokes. “We need to eat this one right now!!”

Finally, there is the smaller basket for stand-out, healthy-looking potatoes that we discover nestled together in a cluster of other stand-out siblings, all of them born of the same plant. These we cure and save for seed. There is a good deal of serious deliberation over what goes into the “save for seed” basket; one voice asking “is this a seed potato?” sets into motion a series of inquiries from other voices repeating the same question verbatim. Soon, the inquiring children have stopped taking their questions to the tallest treasure hunter and have begun to deliberate among themselves. The stakes are not nearly as high as they think, but it’s nevertheless fun to see kids get absorbed in something and get carried away as foolish grown-ups tend to on occasion. I hope they do not come off it any time soon.

Screen Time and Garden Time

I much prefer harvesting potatoes and other storage crops in the company of young people. The process does go faster if I do it myself. But there are no silly jokes to respond to and no questions to answer; only questions to ponder. Why do I feel so ill at ease by myself? I suppose I feel less selfish when it is a group effort, and with storage crops in particular it feels less like I am hoarding and prepping for the harsh winter months ahead. It is also psychologically important for me that I grow a surplus of potatoes for sharing with friends and family and neighbors. There are some primal fears and hopes at play here that I do not fully understand.

Children of a certain age generally do not want to spend long stretches of time – all afternoon, for example – digging in the garden or collecting fruit in the orchard.  It is fun, but only up to a point.  Then kids naturally want to go off and do something else. I try to make the most of this brief window of time spent with them, and I wonder what, if anything, they will take away from the experience, whether the meaning I read into it will ever remotely resemble the meaning it has for them.

My friend Petra Page-Mann, who is one of the founders of Fruition Seeds in Naples, likes to recount her childhood memories of time spent in the garden with her father.  She was not fully aware of those memories-in-the-making at the time of harvest, of course. Such is the nature of lived experience in contrast with reflection and rumination.  But now that she does have the time and distance to reflect upon last season and upon seasons past, the grown-up Petra appreciates that working in the garden with her father was not just “work,” but rather set of meaningful rituals and chores woven into the fabric of life, day to day and season by season.  Sowing seeds at the beginning of the season, moreover, meant saving seeds at the end of the season, a ritual that Petra now recalls as “so implicit I did not think anything of it, any more than the thought of brushing my teeth.”  

Now that I spend my seasons cultivating a garden and raising a son, I wish I could talk with Petra’s father and get some coaching.  However, I am not sure that he would be able to answer my questions or be in any position to play the role of coach.  Role modeling is an implicit line of work: the models do what they do, and that exemplary activity on display somehow becomes an action-at-a-distance force.  It is as impossible to engineer nostalgia as it is to predict or control the future.

What values would I like to be the take-away from time spent in the garden doing things in quaint fashion, by hand in the company of others? I can at least compile a wish list in my private journal. “The old ways are the best ways” is certainly not the intended moral.  The old ways, now the current ways, are what need rethinking and reprogramming. What I would like my son and his friends to appreciate is something about the value of patience and close observation. The sorting at harvest time is only the final stage of a long process of attentiveness and care. And I would like them to remember something about simplicity – including the elegance and rightness of simple tools like the garden fork, tools that are made to last and are tailor-made for the human body.  I would like him to appreciate his own body as a tool for knowing and experiencing and being in the world.
Then I think about ways of naming these abstract and hard-to-name values, words that I know of as well as some newer buzzwords that I think I like: words such as “voluntary simplicity” and “attention economy.” (Some buzzwords are good, new tools to have on hand.)
I should also include on my list an attitude that I suppose I have begun to model, almost unconsciously: a gently ironic awareness of the absurdities of the current ways of doing things: the incredible amounts of energy that are wasted on packaging and transporting food, not to mention the energy wasted on manufacturing the 30-plus herbicides and other chemicals that are applied to potatoes grown outside the garden. We can begin with the absurdity of over-packaging, a topic that comes up when we cure the skins of freshly harvested veggies (packaging that requires no additional energy and is very easy to recycle).  I recently detected that critical awareness when my son remarked of something: “That is so wasteful.” The price of that awareness and that attitude is that we kay lose some of the intrinsic, non-relative sense of rightness and simplicity. I also want to be careful not to model a wholesale contempt for society, because that is where all the people live.
Role modeling, however, is an implicit line of work. Journal entries can sound like prayers or pleas, both of which are sometimes hard to distinguish from wishful thinking. The ghost of old Polonius counsels me to come off it. And whenever I start a sentence with “I want my child to appreciate that…” I soon come to the curious realization that I have no idea who I am talking to. I suppose I am addressing that most abstract of all abstractions: the Future.

A New Season, A New Ecosystem

My son, who is now eight years old, has recently begun to think of work in the garden as a chore that he can perform in exchange for “screen time” playing video games. That is the activity that currently absorbs his attention and makes him lose track of time. Part of me feels sad over this development, but I have nevertheless resolved to pay more attention to this new fascination of his, to educate myself on “gaming” and prepare myself for a world that is new to me. I am told that there is even a video game that involves managing a farm; I am not sure if it involves battling zombie woodchucks and mutant voles.

The game I have been researching the most is the popular one known as Fortnite, which is sometimes referred to as the “Fortnite Ecosystem.” There are different versions of Fortnite.  There is “Fortnite: Save the World,” which is a post-apocalyptic game in which the objective is to be the last player standing.  I have also been learning about different game modes: There is “Player versus Player” (PvP) mode, which ultimately leaves one player standing; and then there is “Player versus Environment” (PvE) mode, also referred to as “Player versus Monster,” casting nature as an antagonist and source of primal fear (sort of like the primal fear/antagonism that is a subtext in the epic Beowulf).  On Wikipedia, it says that “characters playing in PvE mode are often protected against being killed by other players and/or having their possessions stolen.”  The line between PvE and PvP modes is not always a sharp one, which reminds me of what Rachel Carson wrote about PvE and PvP being interrelated: “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”  

The game I have been researching the most is the popular one known as Fortnite, which is sometimes referred to as the “Fortnite Ecosystem.” There are different versions of Fortnite.  There is “Fortnite: Save the World,” which is a post-apocalyptic game in which the objective is to be the last player standing. I have also been learning about different game modes: There is “Player versus Player” (PvP) mode, which ultimately leaves one player standing; and then there is “Player versus Environment” (PvE) mode, also referred to as “Player versus Monster,” casting nature as an antagonist and source of primal fear (sort of like the primal fear/antagonism that is a subtext in the epic Beowulf). On Wikipedia, it says that “characters playing in PvE mode are often protected against being killed by other players and/or having their possessions stolen.”  The line between PvE and PvP modes is not always a sharp one, which reminds me of what Rachel Carson wrote about PvE and PvP being interrelated: “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”  
In either mode, the narrative seems to be intensely goal-driven and player-centric: players are on quests/missions that are either thwarted or succeed to new levels.  Players can get heavily invested in these goal-driven narratives. The internet access at our home is spotty, and I note how deeply upset my son gets, to the point of tears, when the connection goes out and he loses any progress he has made in the game (which is a less violent and intense version of Fortnite).

This quest-narrative achieved a dramatic and much-discussed apotheosis just this month, as season 10 of Fortnite (they are referred to as “seasons”) came to an end when all of the players and the entire ecosystem itself were swallowed up by a black hole that suddenly appeared as a rupture in space-time. Can a post-apocalyptic game end in apocalypse? At any rate, season 11 – a new beginning – is on its way.

The World is Watching

When did garden writing become so heavy and serious? Until fairly recently, writing in this genre – like the hobby of gardening and like the garden itself – was a space in which the writer could adopt a comfortable persona and then wander off to revel in their own eccentricity and aloofness and cheerful disregard of the noisy world outside. How easy it was to slip into this first-person persona. Garden writing has traditionally been written by and addressed to the kinds of people you would expect: older people, retired people, those who have the time for the slow-paced, mock-heroic quest of tending to a garden.  

The world outside the garden has since changed. The writing also seems to have changed. We have come to realize that scale matters, and that small-scale gardening therefore matters in new ways beyond being the quaint hobby it has long been. Michael Pollan, whose gardening book Second Nature is already a classic, wrote a very serious essay on gardening and climate change more than a decade ago under the title: “Why Bother?” . The essay was reprinted in the best-selling Drawdown anthology on ways to reverse global warming. Dave Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture gardening, posted a widely-circulated essay earlier this year titled “The Apology: From Baby Boomers to the Handicapped Generations.”

I am mostly happy to see gardening talked about in these contexts, and it is nice to see serious writers like Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry mixing it up with Margery Fish and Eleanor Perenyi and other old-fashioned garden writers that I love. But these days, I feel it is all the more important to remind ourselves that when we reflect upon why it is worth bothering to do something, one of most logically respectable answers is that it gives pleasure. I still believe this, even though the current context makes it more difficult to rally in defense of the cause of pleasure, particularly when it is the kind of pleasure that involves privacy and privilege.

I wonder if Great Thunberg has read Holmgren’s “Apology.”  The remarkable young woman from Sweden has been busy inspiring people young and old, and at the same time irritating others and inspiring them to make comments that are not good examples of grown-up behavior. Both responses are sure signs that she has hit a nerve and is doing something significant.  What has she done?  Simply reminding us, in the wake of the I.P.C.C. reports, that it is much later than we think. And though she has not said so explicitly, I think she also means to say that retiring to the solitude of our private gardens is not the form of action we need to take.

I am struck, like many are, by her direct language. I am also intrigued by her subtle use of pronouns.  “My message is that we will be watching you.” There are three pronouns in that sentence, artfully ambiguous pronouns held in tension with one another in a way the only that only a handful of public speakers have been able to pull off — Abraham Lincoln being one, Martin Luther King Jr. being another.  The “you” is “me,” and the “we” includes all of us, including Thunberg herself, who also somehow also manages to throw her voice so that it assumes the critical distance of an old-time prophet.  There is some real rhetorical skill at work here.  Thunberg’s rhetorical strategy, and her message, remind me of Carl Sagan, who once startled my generation with the rhetorical question: “Who speaks for Planet Earth?”

I cannot defend the inaction of my generation to Ms. Thunberg or to the young people who have been marching with her.  They have every reason to feel the way they do.  They carry protest signs that read things like “Allow me to have a future” and “Decarbonize my world,” signs that sound like one generation speaking to another. These are poignant and necessary protests, but I am not sure they are to the point. At any rate, I would not count on older people to come to their senses any time soon. Moreover, I am not confident that the system they refer to when they call for “system change” is a system that can be reformed from within.  And I am not sure that making demands of their elders who are ensconced at the center of that system is the best approach to take. What we need is an entirely new system, and I suspect that will require all of us to take some initiative in changing our own lives and creating some autonomies outside the current system.  There is no time for watching, and no time for waiting.  

Like Dave Holmgren, I worry that we are not giving future generations — the handicapped generations — the tools they need to flourish in this new world they will be entering. The self-destructive war against nature that Rachel Carson wrote of has entered its late stages, and the “get big or get out” model of industrial agriculture that Wendell Berry warned against in the 1970s has more or less won the day.  The median age of food growers in 2019 is somewhere around 55 years old, and making a living on the margins as a small-scale grower is an extremely difficult proposition.   This is the world that Greta Thunberg’s generation has inherited.  The garden may, in fact, be one of the few places where children today can learn about things like growing food and about natural ecosystems and how to live happily and sustainably within the limits that these systems impose.

***

I was recently talking with a middle-aged friend of mine about what it is like to re-read Wendell Berry at different stages of life.  My friend brought up the classic poem by Berry, composed years before I was born, that has now taken on a different meaning in light of the concerns we both have right now about our world and about our children and grandchildren:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I think this poem has something to say about the nature of hope.  Until this year, the comfort I took from these lines felt like the fully-earned consolation we derive from an uncomplicated truth.  But now I wonder about what I may have been reading into it. I wonder, for example, whether going off somewhere to seek peace and freedom is a fully grown-up response.  “For a time”: It has been so easy to skip over that qualifying phrase.  The plain-speaking 16-year-old from Sweden has gotten me to re-read this poem written more than 50 years ago by a man from Kentucky.  She has got me thinking not just about the nature of hope, but also about the nature of honesty and facing things straight on.  

These days when I head out alone to the garden, I sometimes feel like I am being watched.  I still hope someone will come out and join me for a while as I finish doing things before dark.  Then I

I was recently talking with a middle-aged friend of mine about what it is like to re-read Wendell Berry at different stages of life. My friend brought up the classic poem by Berry, composed years before I was born, that has now taken on a different meaning in light of the concerns we both have right now about our world and about our children and grandchildren:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I think this poem has something to say about the nature of hope. Until this year, the comfort I took from these lines felt like the fully-earned consolation we derive from an uncomplicated truth. But now I wonder about what I may have been reading into it. I wonder, for example, whether going off somewhere to seek peace and freedom is a fully grown-up response.  “For a time”: It has been so easy to skip over that qualifying phrase. The plain-speaking 16-year-old from Sweden has gotten me to re-read this poem written more than 50 years ago by a man from Kentucky. She has got me thinking not just about the nature of hope, but also about the nature of honesty and facing things straight on.  
These days when I head out alone to the garden, I sometimes feel like I am being watched.  I still hope someone will come out and join me for a while as I finish doing things before dark. Then I take myself back to the house where everyone sleeps and where we tell our stories; and then time to brush our teeth, put to bed, and dream ourselves into a new day.

myself back to the house where everyone sleeps and where we tell our stories; and then time to brush our teeth, put to bed, and dream ourselves into a new day.