Chapter Seventeen
“And welcome back.”
As the studio audience applause dies down, Martha continues reading off the cue card. “Up in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York is a beautiful nineteenth-century farm called the Beekman Mansion where our own Dr. Brent Ridge relaxes on his weekends, growing vegetables and flowers and raising his own herd of dairy goats…”
Martha and Brent are sitting side by side on small milking stools under the bright television lights. The art department has made a small pen from birch branches and covered the floor with artfully strewn straw. At their feet lie Trent, Terrence, Troy, Tammy, and Thandy, all peacefully nodding off in a pile, with their heads resting on one another’s backs. They’re glowingly snow white again, thanks to my furious wet-nap wiping out on the sidewalk. When Martha reaches down to pick up a sleepy Troy, the studio audience, on cue, sighs “Awwwwwwww.”
The Martha audience isn’t much dissimilar from the Oprah audience I’d experienced just a few months ago. Viewers flew in from all over the world to get a glimpse of their hero. Perhaps they were a bit more mannered and neutrally dressed, but still they rose to their feet, shrieking with glee, the moment Dear Leader took the stage.
What was different this time was that I was the guest. Well, not me specifically—I was watching from just offstage ready to chase any runaway goats. But Brent’s and my life was the main guest. The B-roll footage (filmed earlier at the Beekman) that played on the giant video screens above the stage looked impossibly perfect, and perfectly Martha-esque. There were no photos of our messy canning adventure, or our spindly hand-cut Christmas tree, or the sulfurous rotten egg breakfast of our very first morning. Instead the montage included impressive architectural shots, shiny and clean goats in the pasture, and non-weedy close-ups of the flower garden. Yes, our life was the guest on stage—but only the most picturesque bits. I looked at the audience members as they took in the montage. They were at the edge of their seats, smiling…rabidly. This is what they came to see. Oprah teased her fans with their impossible-to-achieve Best Lives while Martha tormented hers with Photoshopped fantasies of Good Things.
No one, of course, noticed the middle-aged ad exec smelling of goat shit standing in the wings, wet naps at the ready.
Naturally, like everything in Martha Land, the segment comes off without a hitch. Martha and Brent spend the first eight minutes chatting about the farm and the secrets of healthy country living, and the second segment after a commercial break making a flawless batch of homemade goat milk soap.
Thankfully Martha also takes a moment to acknowledge our soap mentor, Deb, who is seated in the audience. The Sharon Springs gossip network has practically blown a circuit during the past few weeks passing along word about the goats’ big-city television appearance. Even John seemed a little impressed. A little.
As in most small towns across America, everybody in Sharon Springs has his or her own unique set of skills to share with neighbors. Those who can cook bring food to those who are hungry. Those who can repair help those who are broken. Those who have extra money hire those who need work. There is no safety net in a small town like there is in larger cities. If your neighbor doesn’t have it, you won’t either. But if your neighbor does have something, you’ll probably be able to share.
Perhaps Brent and I don’t have the years of rural skills that our friends and neighbors do. We’re not around during the week to whip up a casserole for a grieving family. We’re not knowledgeable enough to fix a broken tractor. We don’t even have a snowplow to help a widow clear out her driveway.
But what we do have are connections; lifelines to the world outside of troubled Sharon Springs. By launching Beekman 1802 on Martha’s show, we’ve made the first formal introduction between Sharon Springs and the rest of the country. Who knows how well they’re going to get along. But at least we’ve done the polite thing.
After the credits roll and the studio lights are switched off, Martha walks over with Brent to say hello.
“These little guys are adorable, Josh,” she says, still cradling Troy in her arms. “Thanks so much from bringing them in this morning.”
I thank Martha for inviting them on the show.
“Of course,” she says. “I’ll have to come up to see you guys some weekend.”
“You’re welcome anytime,” Brent says. I want to nudge him with my elbow. Anytime? Really? I’m pretty sure I would need a few weeks’ notice before Martha Stewart just dropped by—months, actually.
When she walks away I finally have a chance to check the steadily vibrating BlackBerry in my pocket.
Beekman 1802 New Order Notice.
Beekman 1802 New Order Notice.
Beekman 1802 New Order Notice.
Beekman 1802 New Order Notice…
Chapter Eighteen
Before the show had finished airing on the West Coast, our lives had changed completely. Martha’s influence exceeded even my expectations. I’d always admired her for the effect she’d had on America’s homemaking aesthetic. I grew up in an era where the vast majority of people bought their furniture and housewares from places like the Sears catalog and local hardware stores. Martha almost singlehandedly turned America’s housewives into eager design students, with the television show and magazines as her classroom.
Even though I recognized her wide-ranging influence, I hadn’t experienced the power behind it firsthand until the soap segment on her show. We’d been anointed. Or rather, our soap was. Her followers were rabid to get a piece of the same soap that Martha used. The soap touched her body, and now vicariously, they could too. The resulting enthusiasm was orgiastic.
We’d had tens of thousands of hits to our new Web site, and it showed no signs of slowing. Beekman 1802 had become a living, breathing business. And like every other living, breathing thing on the farm, it needed to be constantly fed.
We’d spent the weekend immediately after the Martha show wrapping and mailing more than eight hundred orders of soap. The first flush of orders had abated slightly the following week, so Deb was able to have most of them mailed off before we arrived for the weekend, which meant we had time to begin on our other springtime chores, which took on an even greater importance than last year now that more than a thousand people tuned in daily to Beekman1802.com. They’d be watching our every move.
After the goats’ Martha appearance, the Beekman went from being a weekend getaway to a flagship HQ. No longer were we satisfied making our own yogurt; now we had to photograph every step of the process and write a blog entry about it. We didn’t merely make another batch of soap; we created a whole beauty line inspired by the different seasons at the farm. Scratch that—at Beekman 1802.
Even though the ground was still frozen solid, it would soon be time to put in the garden again. But we’d decided that a replica of last season’s garden wasn’t good enough. If we were going to include a garden section on our Web site, we’d have to create something worthy enough to blog about, something more impressive than a regular backyard garden.
Something like the Beekman 1802 Historical Heirloom Kitchen Garden.
Luckily, we’d recently met a new set of neighbors who lived over the hill from us—Peter and Barbara. They were a semiretired couple who’d decided on a whim to buy one of the country’s oldest seed companies, D. Landreth Seeds. Once the largest seed company in America, Landreth had recently fallen on hard times and was rapidly sinking into oblivion. Single-handedly, the couple was reviving its historic catalog collection of heirloom vegetable and flower seed. The company was getting ready to celebrate its 225th anniversary, which would make it the fifth-oldest company in America. Its historical achievements included being the first to sell tomato seeds to Americans, introducing the zinnia from Mexico, and selling seeds to every U.S. president from George Washington to FDR. By the mid-nineteenth century the company was so large that it was sending a seed catalog and almanac to every single home in America.
I’d asked Barb if William
Beekman would have sold Landreth seeds in his mercantile, and she assured me that he wouldn’t have had many other options. They were the perfect corporate partners for the new Beekman 1802 garden.
Now we simply had to build one.
Brent and I huddled over the kitchen table with the fire roaring against our backs. We’d been poring over the pages of the Landreth seed catalog for hours, referencing and cross-referencing all of the historical varieties.
“Ooh…look at this one,” I said, pointing out yet another listing to Brent. “It’s a white cucumber from the eighteen-forties!”
Brent started to pen a star next to it and then realized that we’d already starred five other varieties of cucumbers so far.
“We have to thin out this list a little,” he said.
“But all of these seeds are so interesting. They have stories.”
Many of the heirloom vegetables’ stories are as interesting as the history of actual people. They are the history of America, in some sense. Many of the seeds immigrated to America in the holds of ships, tucked into the pockets of the men and women who wanted to find a better home, but couldn’t bear to part with their favorite foods. Others were brought back from exotic continents by horticultural and culinary explorers. Some were on the brink of extinction before the modern movement to save our heirloom horticultural history discovered them growing in the backyards of Appalachian mountain homes and old midwestern farm gardens.
With the exception of heirloom tomatoes, most heirloom vegetables haven’t yet rooted into the consciousness of American grocery shoppers. Because they haven’t been genetically hybridized to be shipped across the country or to ward off common pests and diseases, they aren’t grown commercially on a scale that would allow them to be sold in the local A&P. Which is a shame, really. How fun would grocery shopping be if instead of simply grabbing a plastic bag of carrots, we could choose between the Chantenay long variety (developed in France in the 1830s) or the Belgium White carrot (a snow-white carrot that was one of the most popular varieties sold in 1863)?
“We don’t have room for all their stories,” Brent said.
“Maybe we need to make the garden bigger,” I said.
“We were hardly able to keep up with all we grew last year.”
“Yeah, but think of the Web site,” I said. “The more varieties we have, the more recipes and canning we can blog about. It’ll give us new content to keep up our hits.”
“And you’re going to take care of this new huge garden?” Brent asked, dubiously enough for me to take slight offense.
“Of course,” I answered. “I’ll design it so that it practically takes care of itself.”
I spent most of the rest of the Saturday indoors, plotting out a new, expanded garden on my laptop. On Sunday, when the meager winter sun was at its highest point, I grabbed Brent and we went to survey my proposed locale for the new garden. We paced across the frozen tundra of the barnyard, occasionally consulting the laptop, stringing twine along the outline of where we wanted our new garden to be.
Bubby watched from his perch in the hayloft as we tramped across his most fertile hunting ground.
“I designed the plan so that we can plant the pumpkins here, along the edges,” I explained to Brent. “That way the vines can grow out into the field as far as they want. And over here will be a row of blueberry bushes. On that side will be the corn, which should grow tall enough to shade the lettuces from the afternoon sun.”
Watching us march across the frozen barnyard with our laptop, Farmer John’s curiosity finally got the best of him. He came out of his house and joined us.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re thinking of expanding the garden this year,” I answered.
“How big?”
Brent pointed toward the stake we pounded into the hard earth at the far corner of our plot. John raised his eyebrows ever so slightly. For a moment I worried he was upset about our plans. After all, when we were in the city for the week, it fell on John to water and keep an eye on the “crops.” John looked at the staked outline, glanced down at my computer screen, then looked up again, trying to visualize the space. The proposed new garden was easily eight or so times larger than the old one. He squinted, then smiled.
“Cool.”
I’d forgotten how, when John had sent us that very first letter introducing himself, he’d extolled his skills and passions as a gardener. As our first summer together went by, he’d been mostly preoccupied with moving his herd over, building new pens, getting hay in for the winter, and generally turning the Beekman into a working farm. This year he’d have more time to help with the gardening.
“Are these all raised beds?” John asked, pointing at the computer screen with his gloved finger.
“Fifty-two of them,” I answered. “Each one is four foot by six foot, twelve inches deep.”
“Maybe we should make them eighteen inches deep. It’ll be easier to weed,” John said. For the rest of the afternoon we staked out where each of the beds would go. By the time the sun began to set in the late afternoon, the barnyard was covered with stakes. When I squinted my eyes I could almost see the rows of bean trellises and tomato cages. Our feet and fingers were numb in the cold, but we’d all worked up a sweat building our imaginary garden.
Before we left for the train the next day, we’d divvied up what the account executives in my office would call “next steps.” John would contact someone about building the beds and see if he could borrow a bulldozer to completely level the area. Brent would finalize the seed list and place the order. I’d research and buy the growing lights, seed pots, and warming trays to start the various tomato, melon, and pepper seeds.
As we climbed back into the truck to leave for the station, Brent turned to me and asked if I really thought we could build and install such an ambitious garden in just a few weeks.
“Well, it’s too late now,” I said, patting my bag containing my laptop. “I’ve already announced it to our readers.”
Chapter Nineteen
A rusty light brown sedan of early-1990s origin pulled into the Beekman driveway and around to the side of the barnyard where John, Dan (the neighbor helping us construct the beds), and I were working. The driver, a woman who looked to be about sixty, dressed in church clothes, leaned over the front seat to manually roll down the passenger-side window.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if she was actually pissed or simply kidding.
“We’re putting in our garden.”
“Oh,” she said, puzzled. “I thought you were turning the place into a cemetery.” Then, without another word, she rolled the window back up, reversed out of the driveway, and roared back down Route 10 from the direction she came from.
The three of us had to chuckle at the absurd interaction, but quickly got back to work piecing together the collection of fifty-two four-by-six-foot plain wood boxes that would soon become the Beekman 1802 Historic Heirloom Kitchen Garden.
Drop-in visits by strangers were becoming almost commonplace. The previous weekend, Brent and I walked into the barn to find a middle-aged couple chatting happily away with John. We joined the conversation, and it wasn’t until they’d departed that the three of us realized that we had no idea who the couple was. “They called me Farmer John,” John explained, “but I’d never met them.”
We figured out that they knew his name from Brent’s mention of it on the Martha show and from our weekly blog entries on the Beekman 1802 Web site. They simply looked up our address on the Web site and drove on over. From where, we had no idea. Along with the Beekman, Farmer John was becoming famous. While he might have been a little surprised at his new celebrity, he didn’t seem to have a problem with it.
Starting with the Martha show, we’d begun referring to him publicly as “Farmer John.” We’d never asked him if that was okay. It just seemed colloquial. I’d learned after publishing my first book that in the media, all introductions are reduced to
their simplest form: Farmer John, Former Drag Queen, Martha Stewart’s Dr. Brent. There is never any time to go into further detail. A lot has to be crammed in between commercial breaks.
So, without asking or desiring, John had become the famous Farmer John. Even his goats were celebrities. People dropped by specifically to see the ones we’d brought to the show. Normally, Trent, Terrence, and Troy—the males of the bunch—would have gone off to “finishing school” by this time of year. But because of their newfound fame, John wound up selling the three male kids to a hobby farmer who wanted to attract visitors with the “goats who’d been on Martha.” They’d become a tourist attraction. As seen on TV.
As soon as we finished installing our massive historical garden, I planned to put the map of it online. It would probably become a tourist attraction as well. But even without the constant interruptions, the garden was turning out to be an almost overwhelming undertaking, just as Brent had predicted. In addition to leveling the ground with the ’dozer, we had to lay the boxes out in a precise grid, with weed-preventing landscape fabric underneath every aisleway between them. John sat by on the tractor, scooping up dirt to fill each one as we laid them out. Then we planned on carting in wheelbarrows full of gravel to line the paths.
Barb, our neighbor and seed proprietress, had come up with the ingenious idea of dividing our garden up into three different “eras.” We’d have seed varieties that would have been planted in the original Beekman garden (1802–1850), seeds that would have been grown in a midlife Beekman garden (1850–1900), and finally, varieties that would have been planted from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. From the comments on our Web site, people seemed to love the idea of such a historical garden.
The progress had been slowed a little because Brent was needed elsewhere. The soap orders were still coming in steadily, so Brent was spending nearly every waking hour of the weekends with Deb. Together they were making batch after batch of soap, wrapping them individually in brown tissue paper, tying them with string, and packaging them for mailing. The publicity we received after the show brought additional editorial coverage on everything from individual blogs to radio shows to e-mail shopping newsletters.
The Bucolic Plague Page 14