Settling into Summer

Barbara Kingsolver is always quoting or referencing Wendell Berry in _Animal, Vegetable, Miracle._ Okay, maybe not always, but frequently. The first time I read _Miracle_ I was excited by the references because I have a tenuous connection to Wendell Berry. Professor Graham included _Fidelity: Five Stories_ by Berry in the syllabus of the Law and Literature class I took during my second year. (This was my favorite class, by far. I know you're shocked.) Wendell Berry is from Kentucky and if I remember correctly, was an emeritus or adjunct professor at UK while I was there (but Wikipedia says he resigned from the faculty in 1977).

I was kind of disappointed, in 2005, to discover that _Fidelity_ was not a novel, but a collection of short stories, but I liked Berry's writing. Through Professor Graham's now mostly-forgotten lecture on Wendell Berry and my experience with his short stories, I knew I liked Berry. But when Kingsolver, and then Michael Pollan, started throwing his name around, I knew I needed to read more.

Consequently, I was delighted to learn last spring that my new book club would be reading a Wendell Berry book this summer. I didn't catch the title the first time, but later learned the book was _Jayber Crow_. A little investigation proved that the story was a novel, not a nonfiction piece on sustainable farming, as I'd been hoping, but I was still interested. Imagine my delight when, on page 183, I encountered this passage:

"Buying a tractor at that time was not unusual. A lot of people were doing it. The young men who had been in [World War II] were used to motor driven machinery. The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans. Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before. And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think.
"You couldn't see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors. The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things - which made it finally a dependence on credit. The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn't dream, then, that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land. The time was going to come - it is clear enough now - when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers."
Berry, Wendell. _Jayber Crow_. Counterpoint, 2000. p. 183. (I do not have the proper citation format for any single style memorized and am on summer vacation and did not look it up. Sorry.)

You might think this little essay on industrial farming is strange coming from the mouth of a 30 year old bachelor barber who was mostly raised in an orphanage, but Berry manages to blend it in with the rest of the narrative so that, if you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't even notice that the book had gotten very political all of a sudden.

I'm not finished with _Jayber Crow_ yet (our July meeting was canceled due to vacation plans, and the book was pushed back to August, so I have plenty of time to finish it) but it is a really good read and I will most likely be reading more of Berry's books - both fiction and nonfiction - in the near future.

Michael and I enjoyed our honeymoon, as you can tell in my previous post, but we did miss most of strawberry season and the best of the peas. The garden in Madison has gotten away from my dad and me a little bit this summer (I think the kohlrabi has gotten woody, tough, and inedible, I only ate our lettuce and spinach once or twice, and I missed the cherries completely) but I actually enjoyed picking several pounds of peas - and shelling some of them with Adele! (For some reason, she decided that the largest pods, and the big, round peas that were inside, were "Man peas" - cue deep two-year old voice. She could see that the man peas - and the mama peas, and baby peas - came out of the pea pods like her baby sister came out of mommy's tummy. She and I decided that the biggest peas of all were the Bapa (grandpa) peas. I have no idea where Man Peas and the deep voice came from, but they prove that I have the cutest niece ever. Luckily, Memaw got home from the store (with fresh-ish sweet corn!) in time to take a couple of pictures. Adele is a good helper and a good worker. I missed her help this morning when I had to shell all of my peas myself!


See how hard she was working - her little tongue is sticking out!

Adele is no ordinary girl - do you see her mermaid tail?

Anna Kate didn't help very much with the peas, but she was a little yellow-clad sweetheart.

I planted about seven or eight rows of peas this year, picked four times, and yielded 3/4 lb of shelled peas and 1.5 lbs of pea pods in the freezer, and another cup or so of shelled peas in Indianapolis, along with a small bunch, maybe half a pound in the pods, in my parents' fridge. There are still a few peas still on the vine, but they're basically done. We also have 3/4 of a pound of peas in the fridge from our CSA, which need to be shelled. I hope there will be more at the farmers market on July 10, because I love peas, and don't have enough to last through the winter right now!

I've discovered that I need more gardening advice. I have a book about gardening, my dad has several, and I've read the bulk of them - but they don't include enough information about Harvesting the darn produce. I've noticed that there are exacting, scientifically based (?) research-proven methods and calendars available to ensure that you plant all of your seeds in just the right manner, with the correct soil density and temperature, during the right phase of the moon, when the wind is blowing from the proper direction - but there is no information about when foods are ready to be harvested. Peas are easy to see and pick. Beans, beets, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, winter squash, and pumpkins are also easy - we've grown/picked those before. The onions and potatoes are tricky. And the basil. I didn't read about pinching back the basil to prevent it from flowering until it was too late . . . but the basil is still good. (It seems to be flourishing among the tomatoes.) I have no idea when the onions are going to be ready. They look ready now, but I thought they would be harvested closer to fall - you're supposed to be able to dry them and store them in a cool place . . . I don't have a cool place right now! And the potato plants have flowers but I felt under the straw and couldn't find anything remotely resembling a baby potato yesterday. Did they burrow in under the dirt which we thought would be too heavy? And why won't my carrots grow? The radishes did very well, and the turnips are bursting out of the ground (although I thought they would not be ready until later) but the carrots refuse to grow. According to the seed packet, they were supposed to take twice as long as the radishes. The radishes have been done for weeks, but the carrots are not carrots yet. I've pulled a few in an effort to thin the carrot patch - which really doesn't need to be thinned because it's very sparsely populated - but there is nothing beneath the leaves but the tiniest little thin white root. The carrot greens could be attached to anything at this point - there is absolutely no indication that a carrot is going to emerge. At least I know I'll be able to get them at the farmers' market. Sadly, the same could not be said for celery last year. Maybe this year will be better. Imagine all the soup we can store after Michael and I get our chest freezer!

I eagerly bought seed packets and worked in my dad's garden this spring without really knowing what to expect from my first attempt at gardening. Likewise, Michael and I joined a CSA without knowing what we were going to do with things like bok choi and kohlrabi (to name a few vegetables currently waiting patiently in my fridge to be made into dinner). So far, I've learned to plant less lettuce (our CSA provides more than enough) and more peas, and also that you can't freeze too much asparagus or too many strawberries. I'm trying to plan ahead for tomato canning, corn freezing, and apple-butter making (slightly worried about the canning part because I grabbed my last jar of last summer's tomatoes out of the cupboard in preparation for dinner tonight, only to discover that the lid had popped, the jar was no longer sealed, and the tomatoes were only fit for the garbage disposal).

Here's what's competing for space in the yet-unpurchased freezer so far:



Strawberry jam (this is actually my last jar from last year's six batches - this year's jam is still at my parents' house, along with the top layer of my wedding cake, which Michael is still intending to eat on our anniversary), whole strawberries, mashed strawberries with a little sugar (I bought eight quarts of berries from a farm stand in town after we got back from our honeymoon- my mom couldn't believe they still had berries on the 26th), peas, peas, and more peas. Not shown: two pounds of asparagus and big plans for the rest of the summer!