Abundance

Hello, friend. Thank you for joining me here!

Well: June did, indeed, bust out all over. On this July 4th holiday weekend, I finally have a moment to tell you about the first month of summer here on the farm. I was born in the Twin Cities and lived in this state until I was ten, and I always remember hearing from my parents that Minnesotans got really ‘into’ summer—which, as a grown up, made me snicker rather snottily. I mean, how could anyone lean into a season that was so short? I thought the claim was just another highly-biased, pride-fueled statement by my mom about her home state, like that pizza was actually invented in Duluth. (No, really, she says that.) I dismissed the northern ownership of summer as a silly wish on their part, especially while I lived in Los Angeles and its perpetual state of sunshine. I didn’t get it, and frankly I thought it was mildly delusional. But now, my friend, now I understand. Summer here is almost as intense as winter. This place and these people go all in, and if you know me well, you know that going “all in” is basically my love language. Summer has arrived, and I am here for it. 

Post Mother’s Day, I saw my neighbors get down to business. Out came the Harleys and the gorgeously maintained classic cars, roaring up and down the smaller state highways, winding their way through newly erupted tunnels of green. As the temperatures went up, so did the number of vaccine shots administered. Restaurants began opening their patios for dining again. Lots of places that operate seasonally announced start dates. Masks were slowly taken off. It felt like the cocoon of Covid and the cocoon of Cold were one and the same, and all of us were getting our wings back. Like the bikers’ hair let loose on the byways, I reveled in the feeling of liberation as the sun warmed my unmasked face. It took a while for it to feel safe to go anywhere without a mask, but the baby steps back to normalcy could not have been better timed to the change of seasons. Not only could we be outside again, but we could be (to a certain degree) who we were again. Maybe I have been experiencing the full-throttle emersion into the warmer months more intensely simply because it has coincided with the re-entry into a post-Covid existence. But, I have a feeling that spending our first summer on our farm might’ve been convincing enough for me to become the poster child for the Minnesota ownership of Summer.

When last I wrote, new blossoms were emerging weekly. Not only has the farm continued to reveal herself with a surprising variety of plant species, but we have begun to reveal parts of ourselves to her. You may recall that we planted apple and pear trees already? I am thrilled to report that several of the apple trees have little green fruit forming! I hope desperately for those babies to hang on and mature into a small, first harvest for our little orchard. In addition, we have planted quite a bit more in the past few weeks, each new addition representing a grand experiment. It has been as if we were auditioning aspects of this new life; what can we grow? Do we even like gardening? Will the land return our efforts? And often: are we screwing this up? Friend, we are actors. We’ve never even played farmers.

It was the pandemic that changed the way I look at food. I always thought it would be quaint to have a greenhouse (made from reclaimed windows, naturally), or to tend raised beds (made from salvaged barn wood, of course). I liked the idea of being that kind of person—or maybe I just liked the idea of having enough time in my day to be able to float around in a pretty sunhat and Swedish clogs. In my daydreams, I held a handmade basket filled with perfectly imperfect produce in every color of the rainbow as laundry waved in slow-mo behind me, drying in the sunshine. It was food as a prop in a picture-perfect domestic existence, and some kind of a vague life goal. But, there were a few weeks last spring when I was not quite sure how to get any fruits or vegetables at all. Remember, NYC was an early Covid epicenter, and the Tri-State area locked down before scientist knew almost anything about how the virus spread. Because no one understood what was happening, and everyone was terrified, the food was gone. If you found the courage to go into a store, the shelves were bare. For weeks, there were no time slots available for any of the delivery services, even if you woke at three AM to try to snag one. On top of that, the thought of paying someone to do your shopping suddenly felt unethical, knowing that they would be putting themselves in danger for your convenience. We had non-perishables and running water and a roof over our heads. I knew how lucky we were, and how much safer our situation was than that of many families. We simply had to ration our pantry and stay calm(ish). But, especially as a mother, it truly scared me. There was about a three week period where I realized that growing our own food had benefits far beyond some fantasy of dabbling in heirloom varietals to photograph for Instagram. If you could successfully grow your food, you could count on feeding your kid. Period.

Now, I do have a nice sunhat, but I quickly discovered once we started actually planting that my dream version of gardening and the reality of gardening differ severely. I mean, bugs, for one. And for two, heat. There isn’t a ton of weeding and watering done when it’s 75 with a slight breeze. For all its seasonal chutzpah, Minnesota loses points for sheer humidity. Sticky, sweaty, sunburned, dirty, and bitten are the cost of getting future dinners in the ground—and all that for mere baby steps toward food freedom. We had to start small for a few reasons, namely the ongoing house renovations, but also because WE KNOW NOTHING. We are making this up, friend. But, like almost everything in life, you can’t succeed unless you try. 

First up were herbs. Simple! I like to begin intimidating projects with an easy step. That way, I supposedly gain confidence and momentum. So, on Mother’s Day, we went to the plant nursery up the road and I got seedlings of pretty much every herb you’ve ever heard of. I found two large containers, one a cast iron tub and one a huge galvanized barrel, along with several empty pots. Finley helped me plant the herbs, and I rubbed the different leaves between my fingers for her to smell. She tasted most of them, too, albeit with wary, kid-sized nibbles. We watered them all and placed them in sunny corners of the back patio. Now weeks later, we have a veritable herb jungle out there. I probably have more than we could ever use, but just the abundance in those pots is life-giving. I recognize that because I didn’t start them from seeds in the basement in the cruel days of March, I really am a cheater, but our basement is seriously creepy (see my previous entry, “Mouse House”), and I am giving myself a little grace when it comes to all these new pursuits. These are still plants whose abundance means fewer purchases at the grocery store, saving on money, packaging in landfills, and gasoline. I try to remember to go out and cut some fragrant leaves to add to most dinners, and I’m calling it a win.

The next logical addition was berries, because yum. Back on the east coast, we had planted two blueberry bushes, and I hated leaving them behind. (I sometimes obsess over the new owner of our old house and whether they are watering and caring for all we left behind…sigh.) Thankfully, blueberries also do well in Minnesota, and we planted three varieties here, including one called “Pink Popcorn.” The berries are actually pink(!) and apparently have a slightly floral aroma. Can you guess who in our household pushed for that purchase? Yep: Finley. She says it is her blueberry bush, just as our Honeycrisp is her apple tree. The kid has good taste. Together, we are trying to grow an indoor strawberry basket from seeds. It was a kit she got for Easter. Thus far, only a few, tiny leaves have sprouted up, and I’m not terribly optimistic. I also got an actual strawberry plant, complete with flowers and a few emerging berries that I have kept in its pot. When I first brought it home, we still had some late frost, and I was shuttling plants in at night. Even as the days warmed, I got nervous that the rampant farm critters would scarf up the berry bounty and kept up my nightly gatherings a while longer, but I finally let that go. The little strawberry plant seems happy and safe (so far), and is just now providing some plump, red fruits. I will put it in the ground at the end of the season and hope it returns next year. As for raspberries: no need to plant those. We discovered several massive patches out by our burn pile in the back pasture. Such a bonus! They are wild raspberries with tiny fruit, but there are so many that we can likely share with the birds and still have more than we can eat. I also found a mature gooseberry plant, casually leaning up against the pump house, it’s translucent, veined globes challenging my culinary creativity. I’m no aficionado of the gooseberry, but if it is edible and on our land, I am going to find a way to use it. Similarly, we have a gigantic, old rhubarb plant that sprang up unbidden in the spring, like some radioactive creature. The largest leaves are as big as a bicycle wheel. I swear we could fashion clothing from them in a pinch, or an award winning Derby hat. David has also made some cool discoveries. One day he proudly lead me down the back walkway and showed me a surprising find: grapevines! We have several growing among the perennials and he made a little trellis for them to climb. Grapes in Minnesota, who knew? I have visions of ice wine dancing in my head…And, just last week, he found a White Mulberry tree. What? Hey, they bear edible fruit, so we’re gonna make something from them, gosh darn-it! So, that covers blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, mulberries, grapes, rhubarb and gooseberries for this year. Can I get an Amen?! 

Oh, but there’s more. Drumroll, please… In addition to the small apple, crabapple and pear trees we have planted, David found a big farm secret. In the spring, he called my attention to two large blossoming trees tucked away behind the smaller barn. Using the plant identifying app on my phone, we discovered that they were Paradise apple. We asked a relative of the former owner about them and were told they did not bear fruit to his knowledge. The flowers were gorgeous and we off-handedly hoped that perhaps they had only lacked proper cross-pollination in years past and might benefit from the new apple species we’d introduced. Sure enough, both old trees are now covered in emerging apples! And that’s not all. As David cut back the invasive Buckthorn near those apple trees, he noticed a couple of shorter trees with hundreds of round, green fruits forming. We identified them as American plum. Bonus, bonus, bonus! I would not have necessarily planted plum trees myself, but I will 100% be looking up how to make plum tarts, plum jam, plum cocktails…all the things. So, to sum up the fruit tree situation: we have Honeycrisp, Snow Sweet, Haralson, Honeygold and Paradise apples, plus Luscious and Patton pears, along with abundant American plums. Not a bad orchard!

OK: on to the savory side. That relative of the lady who lived here for over 50 years, whom we’d asked about the mysterious apple trees, actually visited the farm in person in the spring. He asked if he could hunt for mushrooms—something he had grown up doing here. He was really sweet, and we were not exactly skilled fungi sleuths, so we agreed. I had actually found a couple of morels near the bleeding hearts, but they seemed to be a one off. I wanted to know more about finding them and preparing them. The man, Joe, was not able to find any more morels on his visit, but he did find some huge Pheasant Back mushrooms. They grow on tree bark and smell vaguely of watermelon. Still a bit nervous about which mushrooms were safe to eat, we encouraged him to take them. He gave us hints for future morel hunting: go after heavy rain, look near dead trees, and shake them after picking to disperse the spores for more next year. Apparently, the farm has had a good amount in the past. Fingers crossed for the mushroom omelets in our future. However, this year will hopefully bring us a good number of earthy delights in the form of spuds. Friend, I planted potatoes! In very early spring, when green was a far off dream, the plant nursery had a table of brown lunch bags, under a sign that read “Seed Potatoes.” I had never heard of these. We were there to order our fruit trees, and the woman who was helping us explained the process: you take these seed potatoes, which are certified to be disease free, and cut them into pieces and plant them. From the eyes on each piece, a potato plant will grow. That sounded easy enough—even for a fledgling farmer like me. I chose three varieties: Yukon Gold, Kennebec, and Red Pontiac. They stayed in their securely stapled bags until mid-May when I took them out and cut them into 1-2” cubes, making sure each piece had at least two eyes. They already had many pale and leggy sprouts, so it was easy to tell where to cut. I let them sit out for about 36 hours because I read that it helps seal the cut flesh before exposing it to anything harmful in the soil. I cleared a patch beside the orchard that seemed to get enough sun. I weeded and tilled it with a rake and trowel, cutting large roots with clippers. I wore my sunhat. On the day we put the seed potatoes into the ground we used a tape measure for spacing and took turns carefully placing each piece: Finley, Mommy, Daddy, Finley Mommy, Daddy…We filled the two rows I’d made and had more left over. I decided to plant the Yukon Golds in large containers on the patio, just for comparison. Some potato people are team ground, others are team container when it comes to the best growing method. We shall see. One clear difference thus far: tending the potatoes that we put into the ground is truly dirty work. And that leads me to a massive downside to this whole gardening in Minnesota shindig: ticks. 

Uhhhhg. Effing ticks!!! I am terrified of lots of things, but ticks are definitely in the top 10, possibly equal to dental work and finding rodents inside my house. First of all, there is the fear of Lyme disease, though I have learned since arriving here that that comes only from deer ticks, not wood ticks. (Thanks to my Dad for really getting me to hear that.) Wood ticks are the common species here. They are larger and will bite you, but you won’t get a horrible disease. However, a close second and more important: THEY CREEP ME OUT. Crawly, blood sucking, sneaky little bastards. Yuck, yuck, yuck! All that business about pulling out the head and leaving nothing in you??? I mean, come on! I work with deep and studied dedication to protect myself and my family from these tiny terrorists. I really thought I was winning the war until…the potato patch. 

Let’s be clear: container plants are cute. Container plants are easy. Container plants need extra watering, but you can put them on your patio. That means on hardscape, not in the earth. This has become exceedingly attractive the more I tend the separate potato crops. The containers practical take care of themselves, but the patch is a whole other story. It is work, and a lot of it is just physically hard. I tried to squat at first when digging and tending the patch. But, I suppose inevitably, I finally wound up on hands and knees. I gave up by degrees, cursing the fact that I did not have one of those foam knee pad things you see in the garden section, as I reluctantly let go of avoiding the dirt and bugs. As I relented, I realized that this was what was meant by “getting your hands dirty.” I mean, I am a capable human. I was not going to quit on my garden in order to stay clean. Eventually, I actually sort of got into it; I embraced my task—not the picture perfect idea of what the task should look like, but the actual task, mess and all. It was the day that I hilled the potatoes that finally brought me to the level of full-on-farmer. Do you know about hilling? I didn’t. Once your potato plants get about 8-10” tall, you mound dirt up around the stalks, covering all but the top leaves. This encourages more potatoes to form down there in the dark. It sounds easier than it is. The second you water them or the wind blows, the dirt slips down. I am certain that if I had done as much YouTube research as my husband does on his projects, I would have found a superior method for hilling, but I didn’t have time to both do the job and watch endless videos of other people doing the job. I read an article and jumped right in, figuring it out on instinct and logic. And it sort of worked. The potato plants have since shot up gleefully, so I must’ve done something right. But there was a cost. On the day I pushed all that dirt around each leafy specimen, I really had to embrace the whole “one with nature” thing. I got all up in that soil. And…I may have forgotten the bug spray. Sounds impossible coming from me, doesn’t it? Alas, at lunchtime, in the cool of the temporary kitchen—yes we do have AC, thank you god—I felt something moving on the back of my neck. I reached up and plucked off a flat, round wood tick. Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! Shaking and disgusted, I put it in a kleenex and ran outside to where David was working. He confirmed that it was a wood tick—not a deer tick. At least that was something. I then started whipping off my muddy clothes right there on the lawn, as he scanned my skin for more. Under my sports bra, between the shoulder blades, he found another, not yet fully attached. Ewwww. And then it happened: as I slid my shorts down a little, just under the waist band, a tick was embedded, sucking my blood like the nasty little vampire vermin it was. I stared in disbelief—and not a little panic. David calmly went in to get tweezers as I stood without breathing, contemplating my parasite. It was not yet engorged with blood, but it was completely at home. I may have left my body for a moment because I became coldly observant—standing slightly outside myself as I watched the scene. David returned, and I looked away while he expertly removed the thing, leaving only a small red mark on my stomach. I felt dirtier than any dirt could have made me, like I was immersed in a fifth of violation. I showered, but it didn’t help much. It was similar to the dead mouse grossness of the fall, like there was no amount of cleaning that could ever wash away the creepiness. My post-tick shower was very Silkwood. For days afterwards, and following every subsequent tick sighting, I woke in the night feeling phantom bugs. It took hours sometimes to fall back to sleep. A few times I leapt up, searching the sheets with my phone flashlight, convinced they were everywhere. Perhaps one gets inured to the presence of critters the more one is exposed. I’ll let you know. For now, I hope only to have a bumper crop of spuds to help me forget. Kind of like the sweetness of a baby is supposed to dull your memory of labor? Ha.

So, let’s go back to those lovely, clean container plants. Alongside the strawberries and Yukon Golds, I now have four tomato plants and two peppers. I was not planning on those, but they happily came my way. We joined a CSA, which is a share in a farm’s crops, for the whole summer. Each week we pick up a box full of whatever is ready to harvest. In June we received kale, lettuce, chard, beets, radish, spring onion, purslane, broccoli, salad mix, cabbage, lemon balm and a few surprise seedlings. We got tiny tomato, mini pepper and cosmos plants in little cups. I would not have felt confident enough to take these on myself without the push, but I was excited to try them. I optimistically put the tomato and pepper into large pots with tall cages, even though they were at first dwarfed by their new homes. I’m glad I did that though, because they are now HUGE! The tomato is almost my height and has little green fruit ripening. The pepper is a lush, deep green, and has spread beautifully—quite large and in charge. So, I was feeling pretty good about my veggie success when, at the local farmer’s market, a woman gave me more. She runs a booth with baked goods, but her hobby is starting seeds in the spring. She had brought a dozen to give away to anyone who would take them. I was amazed by this. Free?! I mean, seedlings aren’t super pricey at the plant nursery, but it just seemed incredible to me that this lady was giving away food like that, especially veggies she’d nurtured lovingly all spring. At her insistence, I carefully chose a tomato plant, and quickly looked over the items she was selling so that I could support her business. She laughed because my guilt was obvious. She told me to take more plants. I bought some crackers. She demanded that at least another tomato and a pepper go home with me. Alright, already! Twist my arm. I made a donation in her honor to the the farmers market’s green grocery shares—a program that gives free vouchers for produce to those who cannot afford to buy it otherwise. I dutifully put my new babies to the car and immediately drove to the nursery for more pots, potting soil and cages. And while I was there…

I COULDN’T STOP!! I got wild. I swung my big cart up and down the greenhouse aisles like a pro. New seedlings called to me like sirens from my garden fantasy world. I added mini watermelon, honeydew and pumpkin vines to my haul. They were two dollars. Even if I failed and they shriveled up overnight, wouldn’t it be worth a two dollar try? The generosity of the free food gifts I’d been given enveloped me in a generosity of spirit. Gratitude makes hard things feel possible. I guess that’s why we’re all supposed to keep those journals of what we are thankful for, huh? It just puts you in the mood to live bigger and better. So I bought the melons and planted them in the orchard. I got the free plants potted up, and I now spend a great deal of time watering all of the above. I am highly motivated by the desire to eat food we’ve grown. It feels special and exciting. It is empowering. The month of June was an explosion of the farm as it was meant to be: a place to grow things. In a state known for its bitter winters, I am astonished by our bounty. We are growing, too. Learning as we go. I’ve already lost a few flowers to hungry deer and one tomato to rascally rabbits, though I replaced it right away. Next year I’ll be better prepared. There is no going back. We are actually doing this, no acting as if.

As for July, I plan on learning how to preserve all this food. Let me know if you have tips! Of course, I have dreams of a well stocked, organized pantry and the joy we will feel as we unleash canned summer flavors in the the middle of February. I guess I need to dream it to do it. On we go, on this epic summer adventure. Soon, we will have been here a year. How is that possible? Such a change. NYC to MN. City to country. Actors to renovators to farmers. I will never stop acting—as long as there are open theaters who will have me. But now I think I’d like to do this forever, too: plant seeds of harvest and of hope. I like knowing I can rely on myself to create nourishment for the spirit through my art, and nourishment for the body through our farm. I feel really lucky in this season. I feel like moving here was the right choice. I’m not sure why the garden piece is what I needed to complete the puzzle, but I think it has to do with justice. Odd, no? When you give a seed good soil and enough light and water, it will grow. Things can go wrong, sure, but for the most part it is a perfect example of positive cause and effect. You can count on it to work, a lot of the time. How much of life can you say that about? And how many of the things you can say that about are good things? We are certain of death and taxes, but they aren’t so much fun. The growth of something you care for well brings simple, yet profound, satisfaction. (I’d like to think children are the same, but they are way more complicated.) At this time in our world, and at this time in my life, I am delighted and renewed to find something wonderful to count on. I tend, it grows. It grows, we eat. What a marvelous equation. How right and wholesome. How fair. It saves money, and it helps save the planet. Maybe it saves the soul, or maybe I’m going too far. If you are able, plant something in July. Adopt a tomato plant for your window sill, even. It’s not too late. It took our move to one of the coldest places in America for me to understand the gifts of the warmest months. This life, and this season, is not a dress rehearsal. These are the days. My friend, you can have what will feed you.

You need only plant the seeds.