Reading in Heels

I think I really knew that I was too far gone to come back when I started going to the Williams-Sonoma website exclusively to look at the Agrarian section. Before then I had been obsessed with their food section: with the holiday cakes in the shape of Christmas trees and gingerbread houses made of black velvet cake and fondant; pumpkin flavored marshmallows and brownies from San Francisco shaped like vampire bats; and Blue Foot chicken, whatever that is (better than anything I could buy there that's for damn sure). I had visions of some insane Christmas season when I'd order a full menu for Christmas brunch that would all arrive Christmas morning by special delivery (yay! Salted with the tears of the delivery persons and pilots forced to work the holiday!) that I would just pop in the oven and end up with an effortless gourmet meal for no more than the price of a used car.

These are only $10 each? It starts to seem so reasonable. 

I was always a sucker for their awesome gadgetry too. Who doesn't love coming across stuff you've never heard of and realizing its absence leaves an enormous hole in your existence? Why haven't I heard of a salt plate--I mean, an actual square of salt crystal big enough to bake a pizza on? How can I have missed that and why. DON'T. I. HAVE. ONE. It was like this whole realm of gadgets that make it possible to luxurious do your stuff by hand. Want to make your own soda? Butter? Whipped cream in a can? You can buy. The can. You could have your own reusable can to make canned whipped cream. What's that flavor? Oh, my personal cartridge of nitrous oxide. I bought it in a pack of ten.

Mmmm. Nitrousy.

I started to find myself skipping past the sleek chrome smart tools and the fondant confections and the questionably-footed chickens to look through what's new in Agrarian. Where I once looked longingly at Nordicware mini-cakelet pans in the shape of Star Wars storm trooper heads, now I eagerly read the descriptions of reclaimed wood trugs, whatever those are, and top-bar beehives.

Trug. Starting at $12.95! Oh, no wait. That's for the plastic liner. The, uh, trug itself starts at around $300.  Wonder if there're plans online somewhere. Ah. Probably, since this arrives in pieces and you have to build it yourself. 

I was trying to think of what changed my point of view and I realized it started with that most infectious of virulent viruses, reading. I was already food gardening but had realized in doing some internet research on the reasons for my most spectacular failures (see also: Failure in Heels)that I was almost intuitively able to instinctively do the exact thing that would certainly kill the most basic and easiest of plants to care for. I put tomatoes in a strawberry bed (they kill each other). I planted only one blueberry bush (they need other blueberry bushes to bear fruit). I planted a single row of corn nice and spaced out (they need to touch to pollinate). I started a "compost bin" by basically just dumping fruit and vegetable peels into a closed garbage bin with no holes and adding water (predictably, it turned to a rotting, stinking, garbage soup). Who would have guessed? besides, you know, anyone with the ability to do even the most cursory google search?

In my search for reference materials I stumbled upon a pretty little book called"Little House in the Suburbs" . The two funny, clumsy, awkward chicks that wrote it, by their pop culture references, seemed to be about my age and had started with the same general lack of any kind of instinct for making things grow and I was immediately charmed. I learned how to compost properly and how to do it without any kind of expense, turning my existing rubbermaid garbage bin into a proper compost bin with just a power drill and a very large bit to ring the entire bottom 12" with drainage holes. Our trash consumption went from five bags a week to one, and the cost of the project, since I already had the bin, was free. I started getting excited. I'd just made a dent in our carbon footprint and I was cooking a batch of organic compost for free that had previously cost me $15 at the nursery. I read the book again. 

These girls were talking about not just food gardening but a whole lifestyle of trying to become fruitful. They inspired me with their failures and their stumbles and I started venturing into the other chapters about keeping goats and bees and chickens. I laughed at their anecdotes ("The Headless Chicken" and "The Hanged Chicken" being some of my favorite laugh-out-loud moments, when one of the authors describes her inability to save the chickens from their own stupidity and is too grossed out to touch their lifeless bodies until her hysterical six year old covers them with a towel) but really had no desire to go down that route. I mean, Jesus. What would the neighbors say?

That's how I remember it, anyway, but when I looked at my Kindle orders I see that a week later I ordered A Chicken in Every Yard. Hmm. Oh, right. I remember now. Deanna (of the Headless Chicken) had mentioned that at one time backyard chickens were common especially during World War II when rationing and Victory Gardens went hand in hand. I liked the thought of that. Three days later I ordered DIY Projects for the Self-Sufficient Home Owner because it had chicken coop plans. 

DIY Projects was a great book, with plans for a compost bin, a basic raised bed, planters, chicken coop, beehive...but it also had solar panels. It was the first book I saw that crossed that line from basically sane gardener to slightly paranoid survival prepper. Prepping for what? Why are you living off the grid? Why is the government after you? Why do you need to make a water reclamation system that can purify your own urine? It was literally a fine line in the gardening section of the Barnes and Noble shelves, where you could go from perfectly reasonable books about canning your own jam to 50 Proven Strategies to live in a Car, Van or RV. The covers were always gray and clouded with apocalypse smoke. The people when they were pictured looked like the type of person who would grimly blow your head off with some sort of shotgun unless they didn't want to waste the bullets. In which case they had a hard carved machete made from a radiator belt that could cheerfully take off your head in any case. Okay. Maybe time to head back into the gardening. 

I discovered the Storey publishing guides, helpful little pamplets on everything from growing strawberries to pruning apple trees to keeping chickens (with a rather large section on specific techniques for butchering) for $3 apiece. I kept the strawberry, blueberry, and tomato guides, and returned the chicken keeping book with a shudder. Meat birds? Uhhhhghlck. I smugly ate my burger and paused to feel superior to those monsters who raised birds for the purpose of killing them for their meat. Barbarians. Mmm. Meat juice. Since my tomato/strawberry murder/suicide beds had been a disaster, I read up on companion planting; to maximize our space, I looked into vertical gardening. Finally, exhausted with trying to keep up with my crazy eclectic choices, Amazon suggested a book that I think permanently reset my browser history--Animal Vegetable Miracle. 

I had read Barbara Kingsolver before and as I delved into this non-fiction memoir I realized quickly how many of her other fictional novels dealt with the subjects that she apparently had encountered in her day to day life--the preacher from The Poisonwood Bible with his faith in seeds and flawed farming methods, the old lady farmer in Prodigal Summer fighting her neighbor to keep his farm's pesticides from floating over to hers, the young wife in Flight Behavior realizing the dire effect our encroachment on nature is having on the pollinators. From the first chapter of Animal Vegetable Miracle, though, I was changed. 

Barbara Kingsolver told me about why we had such a glut of corn, wheat and soy in our country--nitrogen rich ammonia that had been used in munitions in World War II had to be used up, so they found a way to turn them into fertilizers. Bingo, unheard of abundance of the three crops that we're now choked with. Startled, I turned to google. It checked out. I read on.

Barbara told me about the topsoil viability fading; the pollinators disappearing, the plight of the domesticated turkey (now bred for such docility they have literally lost their mating instinct and are incapable of reproducing without human intervention). She calmly butchered a flock of young roosters for their meat; bought an Italian pumpkin in Italy as their souvenir, so she could return with the seeds for their garden; harvested cherries and pushed herself out of the house on frigid mornings to make it down to support the local Farmer's Market. She struggled to find local sources of her favorite foods and when she failed she gave up eating that food. In short she painted a portrait of a dream of living, neither off the grid nor entirely in the world but beautifully, humanly, flawed, failing and stumbling with the world--as it was meant to be, that is. It changed me.

I've been searching for book like Animal Vegetable Miracle for a year now as I supplemented my inspiration with real non-fiction; I potted solid blueberry bush rows, mulched with pine needles from the tree down the street, companion planted the perfect strawberry-mint bed, harvested a few hundred eggs from my chickens, and composted gallon after gallon of apple cores, carrot peels and cardboard. Now when I go to the agrarian tab of the William's Sonoma website I see chicken coops and beehives I know how to build myself; a carbonating tool that seems silly when I know how to make homemade soda; gorgeous vegetable trug planters that I know now wouldn't hold enough strawberry plants with enough space for them to send out runners. Still, even though I'm not really a beginner anymore, I'm looking for the book that can make me feel the way these books did--an author who can talk about the satisfaction of making sandwich bread your family craves so much you have to make a double batch every week; how you start watching the rain forecasts to see if there's any chance of filling the rain barrels and looking at people's grassy lawns thinking of how much your chickens would enjoy that bluegrass feast. I'm looking for the absolute fascination of watching how baby chicks seem to double in size overnight, how they scream bloody murder if they're separated from the other hens in their little flock, and laughing watching an adult hen run at the babies on the other side of the chicken wire with her wings spread like Steven Spielberg's version of a dilophosaurus.

Back off, chickies, you're effing up the pecking order.

I guess because something in me, now that I've started, gets annoyed when I'm reading about urban farming, when the chicken litter could be composted; new seedlings could be started, the raised beds need to be weeded, I should put out some sweet peas to climb the fence and attract pollinators, I should be building a new raised bed. I should be turning the compost. I should be pruning the roses and planting more garlic in the rose bed to keep out the aphids. In fact I should be digging up last year's garlic and dividing the bulbs to get more. 

That's the problem once you start reading. Inspiration starts burning a hole in your pocket, begging to be spent.