The Long Haul
I just finished a book that I stumbled on at the library several weeks ago: Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land, by Kurt Timmermeister. (Grammar alert: I copied the title exactly as it appears on the cover; I do not endorse the capitalization of the preposition "off" in the title. I suppose one could argue that "live off" functions as a verb, and that therefore "off" isn't a preposition at all in the structure of the title ... this is clearly a topic for another blog. I wonder if "World Grammar Police" is an available url?)
Anyway, this is a memoir from a guy who bought a crappy farm on an island near Seattle and rehabbed it to be a working dairy farm. Eventually he quit his job, and he now makes a pretty self-sufficient living off his 12 acres. I'm not whole heartedly recommending this book — I wasn't a fan of the writing style, which relied far too heavily on adverbs to add interest to its repetitive sentence structures, and the organization of ideas within chapters wasn't always clear. There was a passage at the end of the book, though, that resonated with me:
I like the project of creating a farm and being a steward of the land; I am attracted to the enormity of that task. Years ago when I attended Henning's lecture and heard him speak about the history of his land, he talked of a fifty-year plan. He felt it would take that long to accomplish the goals he had set out for his farm. At the time I thought he was crazy, that I would be "done" quickly. I have now come to realize that fifty years is a good time frame Raising the quality of the soil, bringing trees to their maturity, learning the way the land reacts to time and weather — it all takes many years. (287)
I used to be a much more impatient gardener — never more so than when we first moved into this house and had no garden at all. Filling the beds with topsoil and compost this summer and fall made it very clear that we were starting from scratch. Our garden at the Red House had 8 to 10 years of soil improvement, and it was amazing. We know it will be years before we get back to that point here at Port Potager, but now that we have a good start, it is easier to be patient.
The same goes for the orchard. I recently came across this photo of the semi-dwarf Granny Smith tree at the Red House in Lawrence:
This photo of Kirk and his dad was taken in the summer of 2004. At that time, the tree was four years old. We planted it in the summer of 2001 as a one-year tree (the apple stick, we called it) from Gurneys. As I recall, Kirk was getting some good advice from his dad, who has own impressive organic garden (complete with fruit trees and grapes that were once part of a small winery operation). I think we were wondering why the tree hadn't come into fruit yet after four years. See? Impatient novice gardeners!
Ah, but we got better at both gardening and adjusting our expectations over the years, and of course eventually that little tree bore lots of bright green Granny Smith apples:
This photo was taken in the fall of 2009, just a couple months before we moved out of Lawrence and left this garden behind. We had a bumper crop of apples that year, and you can see how much the tree grew in the five year span between these photos.
This photo still makes me a little sad about the mature garden we left behind, but I am myself a more mature gardener than I was before. I am more content with the long view of what time means in the garden. Eventually, our orchard here in Newburyport will mature and we will have buckets of fruit in the summer. The soil will improve, the greenhouse tunnels will be built, and the honeybees and chickens will come to live here. I don't think we'll need fifty years to make those things happen, but since we began this project, thinking in terms of decades feels about right.
Anyway, this is a memoir from a guy who bought a crappy farm on an island near Seattle and rehabbed it to be a working dairy farm. Eventually he quit his job, and he now makes a pretty self-sufficient living off his 12 acres. I'm not whole heartedly recommending this book — I wasn't a fan of the writing style, which relied far too heavily on adverbs to add interest to its repetitive sentence structures, and the organization of ideas within chapters wasn't always clear. There was a passage at the end of the book, though, that resonated with me:
I like the project of creating a farm and being a steward of the land; I am attracted to the enormity of that task. Years ago when I attended Henning's lecture and heard him speak about the history of his land, he talked of a fifty-year plan. He felt it would take that long to accomplish the goals he had set out for his farm. At the time I thought he was crazy, that I would be "done" quickly. I have now come to realize that fifty years is a good time frame Raising the quality of the soil, bringing trees to their maturity, learning the way the land reacts to time and weather — it all takes many years. (287)
I used to be a much more impatient gardener — never more so than when we first moved into this house and had no garden at all. Filling the beds with topsoil and compost this summer and fall made it very clear that we were starting from scratch. Our garden at the Red House had 8 to 10 years of soil improvement, and it was amazing. We know it will be years before we get back to that point here at Port Potager, but now that we have a good start, it is easier to be patient.
The same goes for the orchard. I recently came across this photo of the semi-dwarf Granny Smith tree at the Red House in Lawrence:
This photo of Kirk and his dad was taken in the summer of 2004. At that time, the tree was four years old. We planted it in the summer of 2001 as a one-year tree (the apple stick, we called it) from Gurneys. As I recall, Kirk was getting some good advice from his dad, who has own impressive organic garden (complete with fruit trees and grapes that were once part of a small winery operation). I think we were wondering why the tree hadn't come into fruit yet after four years. See? Impatient novice gardeners!
Ah, but we got better at both gardening and adjusting our expectations over the years, and of course eventually that little tree bore lots of bright green Granny Smith apples:
This photo was taken in the fall of 2009, just a couple months before we moved out of Lawrence and left this garden behind. We had a bumper crop of apples that year, and you can see how much the tree grew in the five year span between these photos.
This photo still makes me a little sad about the mature garden we left behind, but I am myself a more mature gardener than I was before. I am more content with the long view of what time means in the garden. Eventually, our orchard here in Newburyport will mature and we will have buckets of fruit in the summer. The soil will improve, the greenhouse tunnels will be built, and the honeybees and chickens will come to live here. I don't think we'll need fifty years to make those things happen, but since we began this project, thinking in terms of decades feels about right.
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