To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard - Hardcover

Haspel, Tamar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593419537 ISBN 13: 9780593419533

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A love-letter to the unexpected delights (and occasional despair) of so-called “first-hand food”—meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us. To Boldly Grow is “part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful” (Washington Post).

Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that’s not about to stop them from trying…even if sometimes their reach exceeds their (often muddy) grasp.
 
With “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel embarks on a grand experiment to stop relying on experts to teach her the ropes (after all, they can make anything grow), and start using her own ingenuity and creativity. Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her and discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our food--and ourselves.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tamar Haspel writes the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post column Unearthed, which tackles food from every angle: agriculture, nutrition, obesity, the food environment, and DIY. She’s also written for Discover, National Geographic’s The Plate, Vox, Slate, Eater, Fortune, and Edible Cape Cod.

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Chapter 1

We Begin Unsoiled

Let me introduce you to our house.

When we were shopping for it, we told our real estate agent we were looking for a small house on one of Cape Cod's many ponds-a shack on a lake, basically.

Most of the shacks built on Cape Cod waterfront property have been torn down and replaced with much more majestic homes, but ours somehow slipped through the cracks. It was built in the early fifties and measures some 900 square feet. It was very shack-like.

I don't think I realized quite how shack-like until our first winter. After the first snowstorm of that first winter, I was at the top of our driveway shoveling the pile of snow the plow had deposited, and met for the first time our neighbor across the street, who was doing the same thing. We introduced ourselves and chatted for a bit, and she mentioned that despite having lived there for fifteen years, she had never seen our house. I of course invited her over, and we walked together down our very long driveway. It took a couple of minutes; you can't see the house until the driveway bends to the left at the bottom of the hill.

She knew it was on the water, and she was clearly expecting the usual majesty. When we rounded the bend, I watched as her face did that cartoon thing when a smile of anticipation morphs into a little grimace of disappointment. Since then, people's reactions to our house have become a running joke between Kevin and me. When they see it for the first time, almost everybody-literally almost everybody-looks around and says, "Nice . . . um . . . nice . . . spot," clearly relieved to have settled on the right word.

It is a nice spot. It has privacy and giant rhododendrons and a view of the sunset over the water. The house is much closer to the water than current regulations allow. The lake is clear and cold and deep. So when we first saw the hills and the trees that cover nearly all of the property in dappled shade for most of the summer, we didn't think, Well, that's not so great for gardening. We thought, Nice spot.

It was only after we'd moved in and started thinking tomatoes that the shortcomings of our property came home to us. And it wasn't just the hills and the trees. It was also the soil; even I could see it didn't look good. In fact, it didn't look much like soil at all. It looked a lot like sand. And the plants that seemed to be thriving were the same ones you see all over Cape Cod: scrub oak, pine, and various kinds of grasses that can scrape by on limited nutrition and prefer fast-draining soil that keeps their roots dry.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed my suspicions, and if you have suspicions about your own soil, they can confirm those, too. They do that with what I think is a remarkable database: the Web Soil Survey. Starting in 1899, the government has been sending soil surveyors out to every corner of our very large country so that we, the gardeners, can know exactly what's in our backyard. Now, 120-odd years in, they've covered nearly 95 percent of U.S. counties, so the chances are good that you can check yours right now. When I first found this out of course I fired up the computer immediately, with feelings of foreboding.

And sure enough, this was my soil profile:

0-7 inches: Carver coarse sand

7-17 inches: Carver coarse sand

17-64 inches: Carver coarse sand

And then it added, "Ha-ha!"

Okay, not that last part, because the government is circumspect about laughing at the agronomical plight of taxpayers. But I can read between the lines.

If you check out the literature on growing vegetables in sand, you will find nothing but pessimism. But I knew that other people on Cape Cod managed to have gardens. Could their soil be that much different? One of the first things we did when we arrived here was join the Cape Cod Organic Gardeners (annual dues: $5), in the hope of tapping into the local expertise. And two of the first people we met were Al and Christl, a couple about our parents' age who have the best garden I've ever seen. On the south-facing side of their house is the spot they call "the riviera," home to tomatoes that produce all summer. Farther down their backyard there are the biggest rhubarb plants east of the Mississippi. And then there's the asparagus.

Al and Christl's asparagus patch has been there for a couple of decades, and it's the purple kind. The first time they gave us some, I was skeptical. The stalks were a good inch in diameter, and I figured they had to be stringy and tough. But seriously, do you really think the best gardeners you know would give you stringy, tough asparagus? It was wonderful and tender and flavorful. And as a bonus, the purple kind doesn't make your pee smell.

Could their success be in their soil?

I hopped back on the Web Soil Survey and typed in their address. I felt like a voyeur doing this, as though if I zoomed in far enough I'd catch them cavorting in the gazebo, so I quickly got the information I needed and zoomed out again.

It turned out that Al and Christl built their garden on something called Hinesburg sandy loam. Loam is, and I'm quoting the Soil Survey here, "a mix of the small particles that form clay, the large particles that form sand, and the medium-size particles that form silt." Okay, that's better than flat-out coarse sand, but nowhere in that description were words like fruitful or fecund. There were still lots of teeny rocks.

If Al and Christl could grow rhubarb plants the size of a Volkswagen and enough tomatoes to get them through the winter in Hinesburg sandy loam, surely, perhaps with some compost and fertilizer, and maybe a little advice from Al and Christl, we could coax enough vegetables out of Carver coarse sand to keep our first-hand food commitment going.


Just Sow


There's no denying that seeds are miracles. You start with this little tiny roundish thing, add water and sunlight, and get food! At least some of the time.

Seed season takes its time coming to Cape Cod because the water we're surrounded by is quite cold in March and April, and it keeps temperatures depressingly low through what is known as spring in other parts of the northern hemisphere. The joke is that our calendar reads: January, February, March, March, March, June. (The flip side is a spectacular fall; September is the best month to visit, but it's a secret, so don't tell anyone I told you.)

This means that even though you invariably start thinking about gardening in the first March, you can't really do much about it until the third-unless you can give your seeds a head start.

We almost didn't go to the Cape Cod Organic Gardeners' seed-starting workshop. I mean, really, you put the seed in the little pot and give it water and sunlight. It's the stuff of kindergarten projects. But we figured there might be agricultural techniques that weren't covered in kindergarten, so on a brisk second-March Sunday we headed out to Kelly Farm. Its owner, Jean Iverson, who stands a formidable (I am not kidding) four-ten and was then in her eighties, grew way more vegetables than you could imagine a third of an acre could produce. And she could still push the big Gravely rototiller, and no thank you, she didn't need your help.

There were about fifteen of us, and Jean walked us through the process of starting our own seeds. First, you have to use a soil mix specifically designed for the purpose (mostly, that means it has to retain water; seeds don't need fertilizer to germinate since they have their first helping of food built right in). You have to keep them moist but not wet. They have to be in a warm, dark place (indoors) until they sprout, and then moved into the light (outdoors), but still kept warm. We learned to be ruthless in our culling. And we learned about cold...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593419537
• ISBN 13: 9780593419533
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar