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March 15, 2008

Back to the country, like in the '60s

N.Y. Times
The way we were: But it's not us. It's former Brooklynite Benjamin Shute and Miriam Latzer, who run Hearty Roots farm in Tivoli, N.Y., and sell food grown on the 25-acre organic farm.

Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat is a nice Sunday story in the Times about young New Yorkers turning to organic farming.

Back to the land again.

The Whole Earth Catalog and The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing were my inspiration for plunging headlong into the rural life my ancestors gladly abandoned.

There's a long excerpt on the Web, Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing from Mother Earth News, the March/April 1977 issue.

The Good Life Center, "located at the last hand-built home of Helen and Scott Nearing, located in Harborside (Brooksville), Maine on five acres of forested land overlooking Spirit Cove," is looking for help, if you want to try out the life: WANTED: Summer 2008 Apprentice!.

In 1976 I moved to Western Coventry, the country, to grow things. It unfortunately turned into Man and Woman vs. Nature, one of the Great Books themes. The house didn't have central heat, and the cooking oil in the cabinet froze that winter. So the did the forced hot-water heating pipes we had installed after that in the crawl space. Bursting copper pipe sounds just like corn popping.

As a city kid, I also didn't adapt well to 35-minute nighttime drives for cigarettes or Pampers, nearby stores and restaurants all closed by 9 p.m. The falling-down barn was infested with hornets, and the hard well water ran red with rust that tinged all our washed clothes and tasted gritty and metallic.

But the heartbreaker and dealbreaker was my large sunny garden, overrun with invasive Japanese knotweed, sometimes called "walking cane," or even Japanese bamboo, but it isn't bamboo. It's fallonica japonica,the young shoots at right. I'd pull it out, and by evening it was back, and in the morning it was 4 inches tall.

I confess I even used Agent Orange on it. It recovered.

We fled back to the city, where gardens are small but the soil is rich, the bugs are few and the knotweed owns only the aprons of underpasses and vacant land along Rt. 95.

I love gardening still, but our yard is shady from old trees, and harvests are small. We're grateful for the veggies we get. Flowers are easier. Life is easier.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 3:16 PM | Permalink