My Vegetables

The academic year after I got back from my summer on Wheatland Vegetable Farm, I was in a poetry writing seminar. Every poem I wrote was about the farm, like it was someone I was in love with who was far away. Which, of course, it was. I remember a poem about getting poison ivy on my arms, which happened because the hay bales we mulched the fields with was strung thick with the leaves. I believe one of the metaphors dealt with thick green mucus coursing through my veins. Another poem was about the way that my skin was disintegrating under the constant pressures of colliding against stubbly hay, stubborn red Virginia dirt, poisonously itchy tomato leaves which left a yellow film on my hands, staining yellow basil leaves which left my thumb black with licorice-smelling sweetness, abrasive okra plants that raised red rashes, and the aforementioned poison ivy. Add a couple of accidents with a pocket knife and strong castile soap (it was an eye issue), and my body was feeling the farm all over.

Since childhood I’ve been obsessed with the idea that I grew up in an era that I wasn’t meant to be born into. I loved Little House on the Prairie and some of the best parts of those books were the pantry scenes in The Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, and the Silver Lake book. The descriptions of each of the foodstuffs as they lay in the larder—the salt pork, put up in a barrel by Ma; the dried ears of corn, which the girls had picked in an August field; the dried blackberries, reached only though scratches and blood—made me feel envious. At the time, I didn’t quite analyze why. But now, since I worked on the farm, I’ve realized that what I was thinking was “if I had to work like that to produce my own food, everything would taste amazing.” I thought food like that, like Laura and Mary ate, was better because each thing had a story attached to it, a story of a summer day or a winter spent in front of a fireplace. My own foodstuffs had no history, except that we got them in the grocery store.
I think perhaps the reason I was obsessed with the deteriorating quality of my skin during the time at the farm was that my pathetic aspect was the proof that I was really, finally, participating in the production of what it was that was giving my body energy.

Barbara Kingsolver, who now lives on a farm in Kentucky, once wrote that she had carefully raised her kids to not eat fruits and vegetables that were not in season. She justified the move as a way to teach the kids self-denial. Although this sentiment is a bit straight-backed for my taste, I can see her point. At the beginning of the summer, when we were engaged constantly in the struggle to give each little seedling a home in the ground, the only farm products to speak of were diminutive, red-to-the-core strawberries, hard-to-pick spinach, sour cherries from the farm’s few scraggly, holdover trees from the orchard by the road, asparagus, which we didn’t get to eat, because it was expensive and there wasn’t that much of it, and garlic scapes, the tops of the garlic plants which came curling up light green—pungent alien tendrils. They weren’t good for much but chopping into stir-fry, which we didn’t have any vegetables for. We had to rely on the big bags of carrots, onions and potatoes, which we bought at a food co-op a couple times a month.

The situation in my intestines after ten or so days of carrot, onion and potato meals was becoming dire. So I rejoiced all the more when the first squash and zucchini came in.

I still like to deny myself the winter tomatoes in the grocery store, putting off all of my tomato love into a few red and gold weeks in August and September. And yes, Barbara, I think it is good for me.
The day of the first squash and zukes was also a great day for me, because it was the first time a plant I’d put in the ground came through its life cycle. The strawberry plants and asparagus were holdovers from last year; the spinach just came straight up out of the ground, boringly; I’d seen fruit grown in an orchard before; garlic had been planted earlier that spring. The squash were a revelation to me.

The life cycle of a field was defined for me by the example of the squash. After the farm’s owner tilled the ground, we laid down black plastic with a tractor, which heaped up long molehills of dirt along the sides of rows so that the plastic wouldn’t blow away. We rode on another tractor pulling a rig which punched holes in the plastic and dribbled in water, while we hastily pushed seedlings in plugs of roots into the ground. Then it was pushing metal hoops into the ground at intervals, then walking across the field unrolling a big long roll of netting (meant to keep off squash beetles), two on either side of the dowel and two others walking behind and anchoring the white fabric with shovelfuls of dirt. Then we waited, spying on the plants in their futuristic waiting room, watching them push until they were right up against the walls of their prison. About fifteen days later we pulled off the net and they were there, baked to perfection, poking everywhere with wide flat leaves, dark green and saucy and with blossoms lengthening cheekily into squash.

I learned how to cook. I started to play the flute again for the first time in years. I read and wrote and learned how to make bread. I played basketball with the other workers. I didn’t use deodorant all summer long. I sewed. I walked into town by myself. It was as though having learned that I was capable of making vegetables, I had decided it was possible to do all things.
A few of my fellow workers got bit by the farming bug, and are still working on one farm or another. They’re all hyper intelligent and spiritual, even if some of them, like my friend Ali, whose other career ambition was to be a Marine, wouldn’t admit it. It makes me sad that this is such a hard field (no pun intended) to enter these days. One of my coworkers did end up buying a farm, nearby Wheatland Vegetable Farms, but a lot of others just seem to float around working at other farms, not really knowing how this could translate into a real life

I live in New York City and everything I eat is made for me, just like when I was little. Is it enough to know that the idea of farming is out there, that some people do it, and that I could do it one day if I really wanted? That remains to be seen.