About the Farmer

As a young girl, my family would go for weekend drives in Pennsylvania, where we lived at the time, to walk along some creek or through some natural areas. Along the way, the car windows would be open and whenever we passed a farm – there were many – I would take a big whiff of “country air” (the delightful aroma of animal manure) and think it was just the most wonderful smell.

I loved the sight of those old farms, with their wooden barns and brick silos; cows, horses,  pigs and sheep standing in pasture or in corrals. All the neat rows of corn and other crops, draped over the picturesque Pennsylvania hillsides; with a farmer in a straw hat, sitting on an old tractor, tilling the soil.

I wistfully imagined myself living on one of those farms, playing with cats in the barn, or tending to chickens and goats.

Truth be told, I’ve always been a night owl and anyone who knew me in my younger years was well aware that I was not farm material. Not one to put up well with inclement weather, and certainly not to get up in the wee, dark hours of the morning to do laborious chores. I was a skinny little thing, with weak wrists and the complete opposite of a robust constitution.

But my romantic notions of farming have persisted. When I first met my husband, we were walking across an icy Minnesota lake in winter and I suddenly had a vision of him as a farmer and of us living in the country on a small, organic farm.

Turns out, I’m actually from some serious German farming stock, going way back on my mother’s side. My mother would spend her summers with aunts, uncles and cousins on her grandfather’s farm in Laddsburg, Pennsylvania. One summer, when we were visiting other relatives out east, my mother decided she wanted to try once again to find that farm, which she had not visited in many years.

Laddsburg is basically a crossroads, just south of New Albany.  We wiggled around on old country roads and finally found the Laddsburg cemetery where we also found many old family names on crumbling tombstones.  My mother had tried in the past to find the farm itself, with no luck, and was determined to find it this time. Which she did. I met a distant aunt and uncle and was given a tour of the cow barn, after which we went into the house and had fresh, raw, cow’s milk. I will never forget that trip.

There’s one old, black and white photograph of my great grandfather, who had built that farm in the 1800’s. He’s standing in a field, between rows of large cabbages, leaning on a hoe. My mother told me that when he got older, he was no longer able to unfurl his fingers because  they had essentially frozen in position, as though permanently wrapped around that hoe. Although I never met the man, I think of him whenever I am out, hoeing between rows in my garden.

I now live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in a modest home with a lovely, big yard. There was nothing at all adorning the yard when we first moved in and I spent years building up perennial beds, putting in ornamental bushes and digging up a bit of a vegetable garden. I am strongly opposed to using chemicals, especially synthetic ones. After a few  gardening attempts, I realized that growing my own food, especially organically, is not so easy as I had imagined. It’s fun to think that you can drop a seed into the ground, feed and water it, pull a few weeds and then harvest great quantities of good, fresh food.

I gave up for a while, because the Saint Paul Farmer’s Market, so close to my home, offers only locally grown produce in abundance and without the headaches of trying to figure out who’s eating my cabbage, why my tomato plants are wilting, what that white or rust colored stuff is all over everything, how to keep ahead of the creeping charlie and other profuse ‘weeds’ and so on.

I have been paying very close attention to the issue of climate change for a couple of decades now. I regularly read articles about what to expect as the globe heats up and it’s been pretty clear to me lately, that many of the things scientists have been anticipating are coming to pass. The steady weather patterns we have taken for granted for so many years, are changing considerably. As Katherine Hayhoe calls it, we are now experiencing “Global Weirding”.

Frequently these days, I read articles that indicate that what scientists anticipated happening at the end of this century, are either already happening, or are now expected to happen by 2030, or 2050, or 2080, depending on what situation is being talked about. In other words, changes are happening faster than scientific models were predicting just a couple of decades ago.

With this in mind, I decided about three years ago, that it would be a good idea to learn how to grow my own food for real. Because as the weather becomes less predictable around the globe, it will be more and more difficult for ‘big ag’ to do what they have always done, in part because they are destroying the soil the crops are grown in, turning it into a chemical slew. It is my feeling that the best way to feed ourselves in the decades ahead, is to bring the scale of farming way down to a community level and to respect our most precious resources; soil, water and air.

I’ve never been one to follow directions or recipes well, and have always done things my own way. Of course this often translates into “doing it the hard way”. Which means that in this blog, you will likely read about something I have attempted and will wonder why I didn’t use the tried and true method that every farmer has known about forever.

I’m very much intrigued and interested in the concept of Permaculture and also think that there are some benefits to the general idea of Square Foot Gardening, and sometimes think that traditional rows of plants make the most sense. So I combine all these things, using some slightly raised beds, envisioning my entire front and back yards filled with edible plants and picturing chickens roaming about my garden, keeping unwanted bugs off of my plants and hopefully leaving the beneficial ones. (We can keep chickens, goats and pot-bellied pigs within Saint Paul city limits and it has been my desire to include both chickens and goats on my little urban farm. Someone else can keep the pigs.)

I will likely write in more detail about most everything I have mentioned here in my lengthy introduction. It is my hope that as I continue to learn all about this magical cycle of life –  from seed to plant, from plant to plate, from plate to compost and worm-bin, from compost and worm-bin to soil – that perhaps I can encourage others to explore and share their urban farming experiences with me.

Peace and happy gardening.

Elinor