The Homestead Gardener
Growing Together: A Review of Farming on the Wild Side
- By Derrick Gentry
It is a fact of some importance that Henry David Thoreau, the proponent of self -reliance who wrote of planting beans and of sharing a portion of his harvest with the woodchucks, nevertheless chose not to share his cabin with a soul mate. The one-room on Walden Pond was, among other things, a bachelor pad. His stay at the pond, moreover, was hardly a long-term commitment: Within a couple of years, Henry was back in town living with his parents.
Any experiment in living a more sustainable and ecologically sane life gains another interesting dimension when pursued alongside the experiment of sustaining a long-term relationship with another person. Over the years, a distinct sub-genre of garden writing has emerged that adopts the first-person plural voice and charts both a stewardship learning curve and the growth of an interpersonal relationship. There are some famous “gardening couples” who have written famous books together. Among Americans, Helen and Scott Nearing come immediately to mind. On the other side of the pond there is Margery Fish and her classic We Made a Garden, which tells the subtext-heavy story of the not always harmonious relationship with her husband Walter. (Fish originally wanted to title the book “Gardening with Walter,” but a friend of the couple later reported that “We Made a Mess of Our Marriage” might have been a more appropriate title…). At first glance, these books may not be as radical or as inspiring as Thoreau’s Walden; but they tend to be more grounded in the day-to-day challenges of living in imperfect harmony – which, at the end of the day, may be the only kind of harmony there is.
In their new book, Farming on the Wild Side: The Evolution of a Regenerative Organic Farm and Nursery (Chelsea Green, 2019), Nancy and John Hayden join company with Helen and Scott and Margery and Walter. The Haydens have spent the past quarter-century living together and farming together on an eighteen-acre property in the foothills of the Green Mountains in northern Vermont. Their joint memoir chronicles the evolution of what started out as a small-scale livestock grazing and meat production and has since transformed into “an agro-ecological fruit farm, nursery, and pollinator sanctuary.” At a deeper level, the book tells the story of a gradual philosophical change in the way the couple conceives of their long-term relationship to the land and of their role as stewards and promoters of biodiversity. Their story also deals with the familiar theme of how to pursue grand ideals while making ends meet at the household level.
There is no discernible subtext of marital drama or strain in the story they tell, and they divulge little that is personal let alone confessional, but it seems pretty clear that the Haydens have not made a mess of their marriage. Farming on the Wild Side opens with an account of an ordinary daily routine in which the practice of stewardship merges with that intimate pastime of long-married couples, going for a walk together:
“It’s early morning or midday or evening, any day in every season no matter the weather. It’s time to walk the perimeter of the farm. Time to walk the dogs. […] A great way to start and finish the day, it’s also an important step in learning about the various habitats on our land, the plants and animals that live there, and their complex relationships – the definition of ‘ecology.’ Watching our own lives unfold along with the phenology (the plants’ and animals’ seasonal cycles) reinforces our sense of place and connectedness with our world.”
The “evolution” mentioned in the book’s sub-title is generally a move away from labor-intensive practices that, in many cases, were also undermining some of the Haydens’ longer-term regenerative goals (which have recently become primary goals). After several seasons of preparing their garden beds to plant annual crops, even employing light tillage, the Haydens began to notice some degradation in their soil structure and rapid loss of some of the organic matter they had worked so hard to incorporate. Since that revelation, there has been a gradual shift away from growing annuals to establishing perennial fruit trees and berries – for example, the hoop houses where tomatoes once grew having been replaced with trellised dwarf apples and apricots and raspberries.
And then there is the Haydens’ “rewilding” project, which has meant rethinking the more vigorous maintenance and management methods practiced in their early years on the farm, and making wiser decisions about what NOT to do moving forward. The Haydens still raise some animals on the farm, but not nearly as many as they once raised. Much of the old pasture land has been converted to a “wild” pollinator and wildlife sanctuary—to the initial dismay of their neighbors, who perceived it as unmanaged and unkempt. On page 8 of the book, there is a photograph of the main entrance to the farm taken in 1992, with cut grass and wide opens spaces, juxtaposed with a more recent photograph image showing a much less manicured farmscape of berry bushes and fruit trees and a jumble of native plants – a messier scene, but far more biodiverse.
These decisions to scale back are philosophical in nature, but they are also thoughts that occur to cultivators of the land – and to people generally – when they reach a certain stage in life. One of the more telling passages in “Farming on the Wild Side” comes at the beginning of chapter 8, on the growing and harvesting of black currants. As the Haydens point out, there are many attractive reasons for growing currants and related species (such as gooseberries). The problem is that harvesting currants can be a tedious and physically demanding chore. The Haydens have several hundred bushes to manage and harvest. One year, Nancy Hayden harvested an amazing 300 pounds of currants, one berry at a time, within a single day. Age has caught up with them, however, and “those glory days are past now.” Several pages in chapter 8 are devoted to discussing, with kinesthetic precision, the art of picking black currants in the most efficient way possible, causing the least amount of wear and tear on the body. The young athletes they recruited to assist in the harvest did not know how to pace themselves or how to make good use of their energy, adopting the misguided approach of “move your body, and move your body faster.” As a middle-aged non-athlete who is beginning to feel his age, I will keep in mind the advice in the section of the book the next time I am crouching down amid currant bushes (and it will remain a cautionary tale in the back of my mind if I ever consider expanding from a few dozen bushes to a few hundred).
The Haydens have made compromises along the way; for example, the draft horses have been replaced in recent years with a small tractor with a front loader. But in their advancing years the couple remain dedicated to some older ideals: appropriate technology, small-scale (that is to say, human-scale) food growing, and the belief that “small is beautiful.” Many of their navigational adjustments over the years have been informed by a sense of economic sustainability and basic time management. At one point, for example, John Hayden realized that he was working 60-80 hour weeks on the farm at something less than minimum wage. (Nancy’s academic position has been the primary source of income.) The book concludes with a wise meditation on “biggering,” or the question of whether or not to scale up some part of the business (such as their syrup production in response to increasing demand). In the end, perhaps one of the most important lessons from the Haydens’ experience may be to have a diversity of broader goals in mind, not just a diversity of revenue streams. For the Haydens, that includes non-lucrative but meaningful goals such as building ecological biodiversity, building community, and sharing knowledge with others. Nancy Hayden at one point says that from the beginning they had “wanted to open the farm to the world.” By telling their story and sharing their experiences in this book, they have taken a major step toward achieving this goal.
Advertising Ways of Life
“This is the future of farming” reads the back-cover blurb from Andre Leu, international director of Regeneration International. Chris Smaje, the British farmer and author of the Small Farm Future blog, declares lower down on the back cover that “we need more books like this.” Do we? What purpose do books like this serve? I think those are fair questions to ask. A how-to guide in the form of a scenes-from-a marriage-memoir is also, in effect, an advertisement for the possibility of living one’s life a certain way.
One of the virtues of the Haydens’ book is that it genuinely opens out to the world and aims to inspire individuals to form communities (and a marriage may be thought of, I suppose, as a microcosm of a society). By contrast, Thoreau’s “Walden” comes dangerously close at times to an advertisement for the hermit lifestyle, an unplugging from the larger economy and from society itself that is unsustainable in practice and perhaps impossible in principle.
If the intent of these memoirs of farming at a small scale is to demonstrate that a certain way of living is both possible and desirable, it is best to be completely honest about what one is getting into. The Haydens do an admirable job of that on the whole. Nevertheless, there are a few facts that need to be openly acknowledged and out on the table.
First of all, the Haydens’ memoir, like most works in this genre, begins with the purchase of the property. That is where the story begins; there is no mention of how they saved up the money to purchase the property, or how it came to them. The possibility of property ownership at a young age is a particularly relevant question today, when more young people are saddled with debt and working precarious jobs (compared with three or four decades ago).
Then there is the problem of how to manage a multi-acre operation when it will very likely be a supplemental source of income at best. Nancy Hayden, a tenured professor at a public university with salary and full benefits, appears to have been the primary breadwinner over most of the period of time covered in the book. This fact is mentioned repeatedly, but it is most often presented as a fact about their particular financial situation rather than a fact of our larger economy. And when we talk about breadwinners and primary sources of external income, then at some point we should probably talk about gender roles and economic power and autonomy within these relationships.
Finally, there is the question of the long-term viability of the biodiverse system that has been regenerated and established by people (like the Haydens) who have dedicated a large part of their lives to this noble task. Regenerating a healthy forest ecosystem, for example, requires more than a single lifespan and generation – hence, the famous line on planting trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit. It may be that couples who aspire to long-term regenerative projects (with abandoned and abused farmland, for example) are in much the same position as traditional family farmers and family-run businesses. You do not know whether the property you have tended will stay in the family, whether those newer generations will have anything like the same interest in stewardship, or whether the property will simply be abandoned once again.
It is easy to imagine the voices of future neighbors: “I think there was an older couple who once lived there; it probably got to be too much for them.”
On this last point, I think the Haydens already have some wisdom to offer. They have clearly given the matter some thought. In a section on “Rethinking Cultural Philosophies,” they include a brief meditation on why they have both been attracted to the Japanese aesthetic of “wabi sabi,” the philosophical attitude that appreciates beauty and value in the impermanent. Change is the only thing we can count on. Is that not an eminently sustainable attitude to adopt toward marriage itself, the key to growing together rather than growing apart? Yes, that old couple made a garden, and they also made a life together. It can be done. That is indeed a good way to start and finish the day.
