Beans and Cornbread D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
October 2009
Finding My Green Avatar
Three more tales of Silver City gardeners' first gardens.
Anne McCormick, Democratic party activist
I was too much of a self-obsessed teen queen to even notice my father's garden back in West Virginia. There was no way that I'd get my hands dirty, anyway. But years later in Canada, I became an ardent market gardener.
In 1970, my first husband traveled to Nova Scotia to dodge the draft and I was with him. He was Pennsylvania Dutch with a strong farming background. We rented a house near the foggy eastern shoreline and raised cabbages.
Later we discovered that there was $10-an-acre logged land available farther inland, about 90 miles from Halifax. We purchased acreage there and fell in with some back-to-the-landers. Although it wasn't a commune, it was a cooperative community where we helped each other build our houses, bale hay, slaughter chickens and share tools.
In those days, we were physically strong and adventurous, and managed to live on one thousand dollars annually.
The soil was decent, requiring only TLC. Many vegetables flourished in the rain and cool nights. Both lettuce and peas loved the damp climate. We also cultivated an acre of corn and potatoes, two acres of tomatoes, carrots, broccoli and squash, and a half-acre of strawberries. Eventually we had pigs, cattle and chickens as well.
Our twice-weekly harvest returned good money: Wednesday we sold vegetables from a truck parked in front of the Halifax coop, and on Saturday we traded with the general public.
I believe that we represented the second generation of organic gardeners (the Whole Earth Catalog folks) who followed first-generation pioneers like Helen and Scott Nearing in their pursuit of a healthy, simple life. The Nearings knew, as we learned, how empowering and transforming gardening can be.
Now I find it very hard to both vegetable garden and hold a job. I love garden design and still have a yard full of ornamentals, including lavender, rosemary and salvia — but our strong New Mexican sun, water issues and pests require time and constancy.
Instead, I buy from people who are growing food and support local agricultural efforts. Eating freshly picked produce is worth the extra cost and enables you to get off the grid of the industrial food chain.
Jerome Emanuel Placencio Martinez, supervisor
My maternal grandfather, Manuel Placencio, was born during the Depression and never knew his exact birth date. He and his family often lived on wild plants that grew in the Gila, including acorns, pions and wild spinach.
Meat was a rare treat, so cultivating a garden with staples like beans was one of life's safeguards.
After grandfather Manuel's parents died, he raised his two sisters. That experience instilled in him a lot of humanity.
By the time that I was six years old, Manuel had moved to Silver City to work as an underground miner. He often picked me up from school and then we'd walk to his house on Brewer Hill with its plum tree and garden.
In my grandfather's company, I'd eat unusual snacks — food that I wouldn't have tolerated at home. He almost always kept a can of sardines in his pocket. On other occasions we shared cow tongue topped with Louisiana hot sauce.
He grew vegetables, herbs, and peppers and spread crushed jalapeo seeds to ward off cats and rodents.
Grandfather was very hands-on. Together we dug holes, turned the soil, cut up leftovers and dead fish to feed the garden. When the plums ripened, we climbed the tree to pick them. Food had to be eaten, never wasted, and water was considered a precious resource.
I learned basic carpentry early by helping him frame tomato crates and make walking canes. In fifth grade, he bought me a lawn mower so I could earn pocket money.
By the time that I was old enough to ask my grandfather in-depth questions, he was quite ill with emphysema. Nonetheless, he would remove the asthma inhaler from his pocket and amuse us by performing handstands.
Grandfather was not educated, but he had a connection to the earth that he passed on to me. He loved being from the Gila and did whatever he could to keep his family secure. He truly enjoyed life and every day that we were together I learned something,
Elizabeth Foster, massage therapist
I grew up outside Chicago in a little house in a big woods. My first try at gardening occurred when I cleared a ravine and stuck some stems in the ground. I was six years old, a reading junkie and an avid fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series of children's books.
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The Foster-Bonyun Garden is a reflection
of a team effort involving construction projects as well as gardening
and maintenance. |
Fifteen years later, I found myself in Northern California on a 500-acre sheep ranch facing the Pacific Ocean. Other independent and jobless young women like myself also lived there. The rent was $25 a month, but we worked it off running 500 sheep between the tidal water and the hilly upper ground. I was also the person who positioned the sheep before they were sheared.
On the property was an old garden overgrown with immensely thorny blackberry bushes that I cleared with a machete. Before long I was staring at a 50-foot-square plot of fabulous river-bottom soil.
The ranch owner, Joe, said that I'd have to dig my own well, so I bartered with a guy who owned a truck outfitted with a rig and boom. Since the plot sat in-between the Ten Mile River and the ocean, we hit water quickly.
My efforts resulted in a very serious garden of a dozen vegetables, plus five varieties of lettuce. The lettuce resembled giant green roses and fetched 50 cents per head at a hippie restaurant in Fort Bragg. One of the proudest moments of my life was when — unsolicited — the restaurateurs raised the price per head to one dollar because the lettuce was so large and robust.
Between eating from the garden and Joe's occasionally roasting a lamb, we really ate well. Joe was a great old guy who had bought the ranch with his father and brother back in the 1920s.
Years later, when I had resettled in my first home in Tucson, I met a woman at a sweat lodge who had been Joe's hospice nurse. He had died in his 90s and left the ranch — my land of milk and honey — to the Nature Conservancy.
My husband Stephen and I have been together for eight years. He farmed organically in Maine, so when we met, neither of us had to ask who owned a shovel.
Vivian Savitt gardens at Ditch Cottage in Silver City.
Her Southwest Gardener column will return in spring.