Welcome to my garden. This patch of dirt has grown so many pantries-full of food, my mind boggles. But that was back then. By the time I came along, nobody had the time, and boxes of store-bought tomatoes were cheap enough it hardly made sense to grow your own. Of course, they weren't organic. Who cared about that? Maybe a bunch of California tree huggers, deluded individuals, stupid vegetarians. But here, we were hard nosed. We laughed at the hysterics of environmental groups, saying that chemicals were bad. Hadn't they heard the phrase "green revolution"? It was a new age of miracle applications. I remember hearing about a neighbor of ours who used his bare hand and arm to stir tanks of chemical...until his arm broke. X rays revealed the bone was all eaten away. By the 90's, Ladder Creek valley seemed to be a cancer hot spot. It was easier to list the neighbors who had not had cancer than the ones who did. And Grandpa was not immune- he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the 90's. He did a round of radiation. It was only a blip, a scary blip, but still a blip on his radar as he worked moving irrigation pipe and keeping ahead of weeds in his fields. Grandpa could never afford all the the chemical applications his neighbors could, but he never could afford to take three years completely away from them either, in order to certify his fields as organic. In the end, it was not the prostate cancer that took him down. It was a three-bean salad that Grandma fed us for lunch one summer afternoon between loads of irrigation pipe. Okay, not exactly. But the three-bean salad started the symptoms of heartburn that two years later, still had not gone away, and the doctors finally found the diagnosis they had been missing for the past two years- stomach cancer. Unrelated to his earlier episode with prostate cancer. He was one of four men in a six mile radius-which says a lot in an unpopulated area- who went through cancer treatment during the time he had his prostate irradiated.
I worry that whatever caused the explosion of cancer in the 50 and 60 year olds in Ladder Creek Valley in the 90s is still here, lurking. Nobody knows what it was, or even if it was. Theories abound. Wind patterns from old nuclear testing sites. The proximity of Caprock, the mega feedlot, just five miles away. Farming and spraying practices. At any rate, the water tests in the safe zone (barely) in nitrates, regardless of the proximity of 120,000 cows, pooping and peeing five miles away and the zealous application of liquid nitrogen by area farmers, and we live further than most of our neighbors from pesticide-drenched fields, since we are surrounded by a half-mile buffer zone of grassland.
The bottom of Ladder Creek Valley really does not grow much in our area. Grass, sure, and there are farmers able to coax 180 bushel per acre corn from it with manure and irrigation, but mostly, it is buffalo grass, kochia weeds and CRP. I remember there being several acres of potatoes once but I don't remember if they grew well. There used to be trees. In fact, there used to be a dam and a lovely stocked lake a mile from our house, a summer resort named Lake Pla-more. Or something like that. I remember seeing a flyer for it once, men in embarrassingly small swimming trunks and women in embarrassingly large ones, enjoying themselves in a scene that looked more at home in a much wetter area than Western Kansas. But then, that was then. Western Kansas did not used to be such a desert. The farmers here have seen to it that every stream bed that used to run is now dry as they suck gallons of water from the aquifers hidden under us onto their fields, to be eventually returned by half, laden with nitrates. But when the other option is taking a hit financially, it is what they do. A local paper reported this week that it has finally been determined that our aquifer is not sustainable. The article said that now, the fight is not to keep the water table levels up, but to keep them up enough for two to three more generations to use them yet before they are completely gone. And so I shall irrigate my garden like Grandma did, because in the face of irrigation wells pumping hundreds of gallons per hour, my little garden hose dribbling life down the rows of my garden hardly seems like an issue at all, and shutting it off, while we would be forced to eat food grown thousands of miles away and trucked in, would do nothing by way of protest.
Deciding to grow our own food has me analyzing all the angles, lest I become self-satisfied and judgemental of other people's less sustainable diets. In truth, no diet is without it's downside. I am already seeing around me the laughability of conserving my few drops of precious water in the face of such drowning over consumption. And I can't even boast of living cruelty free.
So, one reads in idealistic websites and magazines and gets the message PETA ads, a vegan diet is a cruelty free diet. I bet you think so. Well, I have news for you. My garden is far from cruelty free. So is most of the organic grain on the market, and here is why.
Cow poop. Where does it come from? A nice family cow, lounging and pooping out yesterday's grass? Nope. No family cow or even herd of cows can come close to the fecal factory that is 150,000 cows in a feedlot. It comes from factory farms. All the cruelty and inhumane living conditions imposed on factory farm animals results in a very valuable by-product that is the only reason organic grain farmers can grow anything at all in our depleted soil. So into our soil that is certified organic and has seen no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides for at least the last three years, goes ton upon ton (in measurements of ten or twenty tons per acre) of barely digested corn product, complete with all the leftover hormones and antibiotics that the cow has been given. If it was composted first, this means that the heat from the compost has (probably) killed the bacteria, so e.coli is not such a concern, but on the other hand, once it is composted to allow for instant release of it's fabulous growjo, half the nutrients are already gone and it has to be reapplied the next year. Whereas raw manure (my husband's specialty) will slowly break down over the next two years, giving extra grow-juice in increments instead of blowing it's grow-load all at once like compost does. Now, I tend to think that by the time I eat the tomato that has come from the soil fortified with compost from cow poop, there is really no need to worry about the junk that may have found it's way into my soil from the cows. But it does mean that fewer organic food items than we think are truly cruelty-free. As I was talking enthusiastically one day about a future shift out of necessity from meat-based to plant-based diets, thus freeing our food to feed humans instead of the animals that then feed far fewer humans, my husband pointed out that such a shift would put him out of business. I pointed out that it wasn't happening tomorrow, so perhaps he would be out of the business by then. After all, being a manure mogul really wasn't his lifelong dream, was it?
Right now, my garden is home to: thirty carrot seeds that may or may not be germinating, thirty beet seeds that may or many not be germinating, and twenty fragile purple cabbage plants about four inches tall. Little bits of compost that my husband spread over my garden with his truck, leaving tire tracks down the middle of it, crunch when I wiggle my toes in the dark soil. I conposted it because I did not know what sort of nutrients the soils already possessed. However, after application of manure and tilling it, I did discover that it was home to several thousand earth worms, so that did encourage me about the integrity of the soil.
Not that I know this stuff. Since I got married nearly ten years ago, I have grown about ten tomato plants, three cucumber plants, two cantaloupe plants, two watermelons and a truckload of zucchini. Plus a few flowers. Most of these were in this garden, the summer we spent in this house seven years ago the spring after Grandpa and Grandma died. We spent that summer living outside, sunburning ourselves to a crisp, sitting out on the south-facing side of the house after dark soaking up the day's heat from the concrete like lizards and gorging ourselves on hamburgers, homemade dill pickles, cucumber-tomato salad, and gallons upon gallons of homemade ice cream from the White Mountain ice cream freezer that was on it's last leg after having churned out a generation's worth of creamy caloric artery-clogging goodness. My husband's brother and sister and several friends showed up at any given time to help us hold down camping chairs, and we spent weekends at the lake an hour and a half's drive away, water skiing and camping and wishing winter never had to come. I gardened then because it made me feel crafty, not because I had anything to prove by it, and the night the neighbor's black lab dragged off all my tennis-ball sized cantaloupes and watermelons, I shrugged and bought some from the store. No biggie. I had never really expected it to grow anyway. That was a particularly wet summer, so my garden pretty much grew itself. I stuck the seeds in the ground and it took very little time for them to sprout, spring up and produce fruit. I made a half-hearted effort at weeding until the sun got hot and I let the Kochia (the weeds that turn into tumbleweeds) grow and called it gardening.
But this is different. This time, I am in earnest. I can't afford to fail. Years of being a mountain town hippie chick has me hating to be dependant on a supermarket, and hating the taste of non-organic produce, let alone the thought of what I am putting in my body. So this time, I have two hundred plants started in Dixie cups and seed starting trays in my south-facing window- heritage and hybrid tomatoes, pickling and slicing cucumbers, purple cabbage, lettuce, chard, kohlrabi, cauliflower, onions, sweet peppers, banana peppers, bell peppers. They will go out to the garden just as soon as the frost-free date, May 15, passes. And I will hope and pray that the hailstorms stay away. And that my husband can make enough money without me working to build us a greenhouse by winter.
For helpful tips, I take the word of the local grow-god, my hippie friend Galen, an old family friend who spends his summers outside growing, selling, preserving and arranging flowers for art shows, craft shows, weddings, funerals, and Colorado farmer's markets, who grows his own food in the summer and as soon as summer selling season is over, takes a bus to Denver, jumps on an airplane, and spends his winters in Argentina, Chile, Nepal, India, wherever his whims take him, there he finds good food, drink and company with like-minded individuals. Some of my early memories of finding a sense of place in an out-of-place place have to do with being at his house, in his garden, under a canopy of trees in his sun-dappled, deep, soft bluegrass yard as jazz blared through massive, peeling wooden box speakers in his yard and garden. We picked our way through rows upon rows of unidentifiable (to me) food growing in fluffy piles of green as he showed my mom his asparagus, his spinach, his morning glories, his yarrow. Every time we went over there, we came home laden with flowers that he cut for us- flowers that I could not then and still cannot tell you the names of. There was the smell of dirt and garlic and sweat as we followed his dark brown, shirtless back around his yard while he bounded with enthusiasm from one plant to the next. In the shed, there was the straw-like scent of drying flowers, hung row upon row on wires strung between the walls, stretching into the deep shadows at the back of the shed. And a hint of tomcat, from the strays he fed. And a whiff of essential oils from his potpourri mixes, and just the slightest hint of motor oil from when the shed once held tractors and trucks and planters. I was there again the other day to ask his advice on my new ventures and his feelings on the temperature of the community, since I am the newest hippie to move into a community to whom few things are as important as church, guns and Glen Beck. I mentioned I have dreams of starting a yoga studio with a retail portion in which to sell produce from local growers and bulk health foods. He chuckled, his slowed-down laugh that some may think comes from smoking a lot of weed in his lifetime, but I suspect is just from too much sunshine and not engaging in conflict. That was all he had by way of reply. We did, however launch into a rambling dialogue about how many folk would benefit greatly from a trip outside the good old U.S of A., how observing real poverty can change one's perspective, and how simply being aware of an outside world can make one a much better, less judgemental person. I left his house armed with a few good tips, such as, "Asparagus only grows out here if you start it in the ground- if you start it in the house and then transplant it, it won't make it", and a sense of sadness settling over me, realizing that yes, he has lived in this community for thirty years, and yes, he has great rapport with his neighbors, but he still feels alienated. He tunes into Al-Jazeera and other foreign radio programs for a feel of events that are not reported here, while all around him, the neighbors are switching to AM Radio for their daily Rush Limbaugh. It is not easy living with a mindset of expanding awareness while all around you, people see awareness as something to be squelched, lest un-American ideas come of it. Or worse, an un-fundamentalist Christian bent.
My favorite Galen story is one I am not even sure I remember correctly, but it seems illustrative of his life in western Kansas. He drove out to the state park, a local oasis of bluffs, wildlife and a small stocked lake, one late spring day to pick some wildflowers that were blooming with wild abandon. As he was leaned over snipping a clump of stems, suddenly behind him there were engines, squealing brakes, and authoritative voices- "Hands in the air!"
His hands went up, his fingers still laced through the scissors handle. "Drop your weapon!"
"Weapon? I just have this scissors..."
"Drop your scissors!"
He dropped the scissors and racked his brain, trying to think which law he had broken. Here the story gets fuzzy. He may or may not have been arrested, but he was definitely questioned. In the end, they had to tell him why they had so rudely interrupted his flower-gathering. It seems there was a patch of marijuana growing close by, whether planted there or wild it was never clear, since there is the occasional wild clump that shows up along windbreaks, or in the ditch in front of the Mennonite church (but that's another story.) It stood to reason that the man with the long hair braided into a bun, beard braided and in a knot on his chin, looking like the child of Woodstock and Vietnam protests quietly picking flowers in the vicinity of the errant patch of weed must surely be their man. In the end, he convinced him he knew nothing of the patch, that they should keep watching it. And they let him go.
While I am there in his oasis of towering trees, rows of flowers and vegetables and his cavern of a shed from which comes pure creativity, I feel like my old self. My Colorado self. My bike to work to save the planet self. My vegan yogi self. Then I leave, and I drive past houses with neat yards and enormous SUVs parked out front, little farm wives carrying in the groceries, people who haven't been on a bike since they were kids, who spend their days in tractor cabs, and I start to feel Kansas creeping back into my bones. And then I come home to even more Kansas when I overhear my husband on the phone discussing which handgun he should buy with a hunting friend who, I suspect, can't wait for the global economy to collapse and regular folk to turn into raiding zombie packs so he can start popping them. Okay, that wasn't fair. This friend only wants to protect his family should Armageddon start. And I think about how we might be on the same page, if we weren't reading from completely different books. I know I am a bit idealistic to be wanting to beat all of our swords to plowshares so soon, for wanting to spread a ripple of peace and sustainability before the boys get their guns out. Not that my husband thinks a zombie apocolypse is so eminent (only one possible path of many that global unreast could force us all down yet), he is just reacting to living without city rules for the first time in his life. He wants to stand on his front porch, pack a gunbarrel full of stopping power and testosterone, pull the trigger and claim his maleness. I try to understand. Men must protect, and men feel the need to demonstrate their capabilities to do so on a regular basis. I also try to talk him out of a nine millemeter and into a hunting rifle, because just seeing a handgun makes me feel squirmy inside. They are just too easy to shoot in unintended directions.
As far as how I feel about the right to bear arms, I have been thankful for a gun a time or two- like the time I used one to euthanize a rabbit that had been run over, and if our beloved Golden Retriever was ever mortally wounded, I cannot not bear the thought of needing to drive him a half-hour into town to put him to "sleep" while he was writhing, thrashing, screaming, bleeding and peeing in the seat beside me. (Yes, I draw from real life experience with this visual. Once you hear the sound of a dying dog, you never want to again.) A bullet in his brain would be the quickest end to my beloved puppy's agony, as horrible as it sounds. I do think it is a good idea to be armed out here because law enforcement is in town, and town is fifteen miles away, and there are no neighbors to hear you call for help. A mutual understanding out here that most people sleep with a gun beside them means that doors are not always locked and theft is unheard of, unless from shops and barns that are far from the house. But I want a critter gun, not one to stop a human. I don't want to think I would ever have to do that. I want to love and trust humans. I like it in my happy little world where there are flowers everywhere and everyone wishes me well. I have dreams of using my garden to change lives. More on that later.
So, welcome to my garden, where the dreams are big and the corn is small, in Western Kansas where everywhere else, the corn is big and dreams are...honestly, sorta small. The next year will be an adventure, and I plan on recording it here- all the crazy things that happen when the prodigal daughter moves back home.
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