by Brian Brett
Within only a few years I recognized the consequences of our appetite for gathering original companions around us.
“ WHAT’S THAT? ” I YELLED. “Stop the car!” In the road was a sprawling, twitching, brown-green creature the size of a dinner plate. I climbed out of the passenger seat and walked back. It was a giant frog, one side of its face swollen and its eye blood-red. I scooped it up and took it back to our car. We were going to visit the grandchildren, and I thought the little ones would be mighty astonished by it. Sharon was. We released it in their small pond, but after the afternoon party the frog appeared less stunned, almost healthy, aside from the bloody eyeball. I didn’t want it to eat the children’s goldfish, so we collected it and returned to the lake near the road.
Although this monster was the size of a small chicken, and I’d heard somewhere that it had a bad reputation, I let it go. There was an odd sense of fair play in me that demanded giving it a fighting chance. That was five years ago, and I’ve regretted the decision ever since. It was as surprised as I was when I liberated it in the reeds. It hovered there a second, and then kicked off.
The American bullfrog, Rana castesbeiana, is a species introduced to southern British Columbia by delusional entrepreneurs in the 1930s who thought they were going to corner the frog-leg market for French restaurants. When the frog farms failed they released the frogs, and their numbers have been increasing since. Now they are swallowing endangered red-legged frogs whole, along with rare salamanders. Not long after the incident I saw a video of these frogs sucking down a flock of tiny ducklings, one by one, as they paddled behind their mother. There have been reports of attacks on kittens. This is one mean creature. And it’s not alone. Whether it’s gypsy moths, starlings, zebra mussels, or Himalayan blackberries, we are introducing an increasing quantity of alien creatures into ecosystems where they can cause untold harm.
If you fly over my island in June, the hills are yellow with Scotch broom flowers. Broom seeds can be “banked” in the soil for thirty years. A single plant can, theoretically, produce eighteen thousand seeds every year. Captain Walter Grant of Sooke, a homesick Scotsman, brought twelve seeds in 1850. Three survived. The invasion of Vancouver Island derives from the offspring of these three seeds. Broom will overwhelm entire fields in a few years, driving out native plants, and it has no North American predators. Its oily branches can suffer tip die-off, making it one of a few plants capable of spontaneous combustion—a real hazard in our dry summers—and we’ve got it forever.
A line of broom follows our snake fence alongside the gravel road leading to our home. A neighbour has suggested, several times, that I remove it. I keep intending to, but on a farm, one never has enough time to reclaim an environment under constant threat. After an acquaintance mentioned how beautiful all the yellow blooms looked from the air, I began to wonder what other invasive species there were on our ten acres. Reading the available material I was shocked to learn how much our species is changing the world’s environments. British Columbia’s original grasses (before colonization) now cover only 2 percent of their native habitat.
The number of invasive plants and species across North America is astronomical. Only in the last few decades have we begun to restrict the traffic in animals. Meanwhile, brown snakes, insects, and diseases like West Nile virus are hitching rides everywhere. When I tried to look up Canadian government regulations for introducing plants and seeds I realized that, except for a few specific disease watches, most of the guidelines are voluntary—the bureaucratic term for “anything goes.”
Lately there’s been a ban on importing certain potted plants from the United States, out of fear of oak root fungus, and plant soil must be fumigated. Some disease outbreaks are recognized and the plants sprayed. Otherwise, the nurseries are wide open. My horticultural friends tell me the oak root fungus is already here and the government inspectors are just going through the motions so they will look good. Every day the skies are filled with planes airlifting exotic orchids and plants from all over the world, along with their insect or disease hitchhikers.
On Salt Spring the cornucopia of plants at our nurseries is a lush Eden—bulbs, seeds, rare species from the Himalayas or the deserts of New Mexico. Most people are not aware of how dangerous these plants can become in a new location. The history of farming and gardening is the history of infecting landscapes with beautiful plants that turn into monsters in another habitat—like the kudzu “mile-a-minute” vine that grows a foot a day and can overwhelm a parked car in a week. A few years ago I decided to plant milk thistles for their healthy seeds (good for the liver). I missed a few flower heads at harvest. Five years later, milk thistles are still appearing. We now have them under control, but the experience made me realize how quickly an alien plant can escape. That’s why Canada’s fields are plagued with so many varieties of thistle.
Today’s walkabout set me counting, as it has done on other occasions. Despite our vigilance, there are several dozen introduced noxious weeds on the land that arrived before us. They’d come in via the wind, bird droppings, the fur of wild animals. Then there were the other introductions— mine. The pecans, the bananas, the artichokes, the hawthorn, the dogs, the chickens, the domestic sheep—the list seems endless. Even the colourful willows. Who knows how many alien insects and fungi and introduced diseases lurked invisibly around me?
The Global Invasive Species Database list is chilling: giant African snails, Asian tiger mosquitoes, the crazy yellow ant, Eurasian milfoil, blue crabs, a crayfish plague, walking catfish. What a roll call of monstrous species! With a growing horror my thoughts return to the potentially dangerous material I have introduced. I consider myself an ecologist, yet surrounding me, on what had been wild land only a hundred years ago, is an increasingly alien landscape, and I am the most dangerous alien invader of all.
6
LIVING INSIDE
THE SOIL
ENTERING THE MOON GATE, I see Sharon is already headfirst in the flower bed, tossing onto the lawn behind her a growing pile of thinnings, trimmings, weeds, dog bones, and surprising bits of detritus from the entrance walkway, discarded by guests and puppies, who seem equally casual about what they chuck. Sharon looks cute from my perspective, face first under the camellia, butt in the air, hurling the rejects into the pile, but I refrain from wit because I know she’s in her own world when she’s weeding. Even Bella, the puppy, gives her a wide berth, and returns only when Sharon waters everything and Bella has her chance to play her favourite game with the hose, chasing water and never catching it, as Sharon joyfully uses the jet of water to lead her into some impressive acrobatics.
My earliest memory comes out of the ground. Was it my first day of school? I’m scooping up mud and pea gravel outside the classroom window where my teacher is watching with horror. I whip around and hurl the mess at the bullies taunting me. Then I am hauled into the principal’s office while the bullies move on to a new victim, and the kindly principal informs me there are better things I can do with earth than throw it around.
My next teacher of the uses for soil was a Japanese farmer in the delta of the Fraser River—perhaps the most fertile farmland in Canada, forged from a temperate climate and millions of years of river silt. The old farmer and my father were negotiating the price for several tons of potatoes that my father would sell door to door. More to distract me than for any other reason, the farmer nodded to my father and said, “Tell the boy to take a cabbage home.”
I was gone—a pygmy among the rows of Goliath heads. These cabbages were so large they seemed as tall as I was. I can’t remember my age. I was always a little child. I yarded on a monster head I could barely get my arms around. The roots were deep. I punched my tiny fist into the earth. Elbow deep, my fingers clutching the narrowing root, I yarded again and it snapped underground. I rolled backwards underneath a cabbage as big as a medicine ball, and it was just that—a medicine ball—the gift of a memory of when the ground was rich and a Japanese farmer had the talent t
o put more into the earth than he took. I lugged my prize to the truck while my father and the farmer watched, bemused. Fifty years later, I wonder how many children would prize a cabbage.
Today that farm grows apartments. The town councils of the delta committed one of the largest transgressions against nature in Canada by paving that lush earth, justifying their crime with the need for a tax base and income for their friends in the business community; yet the tax base is probably worse now than it was fifty years ago because of the infrastructure all the development required. When I look back on that lost farm, and its black, good earth, I recognize that’s where I found my roots.
Roots need their nurture. Mine were watered by my Italian grandfather’s garden. In Vancouver he used to follow the horses of the milk wagon with a bucket and a shovel, treating the manure like the treasure it was. Once, manure was gold for the garden, composted in small piles and recycled back into the land, but when we shifted to industrial farming the unnatural volume converted manure into toxic waste. Modern industrial farms produce three tons of manure for every North American. That’s a lot of shit condensed into so few factories.
Afterwards, Grandfather moved to the country, and his garden expanded by a couple of acres. Not long ago I realized I’d spent my adult years attempting to recreate his garden. There was no front lawn, only paths between flower beds. His gladioli won fat ribbons at the local fairs. Out back there was a strip of lawn large enough for bocce games and for laying out tables for Sunday dinners alfresco. Beyond were the garden rows, the raspberries fat and sweet, the plum and apple trees.
IN A GARDEN YOU learn the value of time. Weeding, like farming, is never accomplished. It’s an activity, not a result, so a good gardener learns not to fret about finishing a job. It’s all in the doing. Otherwise, the quack grass will drive you insane. After a while you learn to go into the “zone” and just work. Beautiful work. You work until your mind runs free. There’s a Ch’an (Zen) story about the monk who was hoeing all day. The dinner gong sounded suddenly, and the monk threw down his hoe, laughed, and happily strode off to the temple. “That’s it!” exclaimed his ancient master. Enlightenment. The glorious complexity of rural life soon teaches us how to think simply—when you listen to it. Dinner becomes dinner. Dirt becomes dirt.
OUR PLANET IS A soil-creation machine. All the elements come from galaxies created at the advent of time, far away and long ago. When I first read William Bryant Logan’s Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, and his reference to all life on earth as “the dust of ruined stars,” I suddenly understood how big the issue of dirt was. It made me think of the rock singer Roger Daltrey, an obsessive gardener who, ruminating on an epic, ongoing garden project, remarked wisely, “Nothing lasts forever. Nothing,” he said. “We’re just pushing dirt around.” More or less—like your average beetle or earthworm.
We took up the cause with great gusto at the farm, and between Sharon’s unrelenting devotion to the flower and vegetable beds, my tendency toward megaprojects, and our clan of inherited young friends and helpers, we moved a lot of dirt.
VOLCANOES SPEWED GREAT CLOUDS of dispersed particles, which mixed with the oxygen in the air, then precipitated upon the planet. Wind and freezing rain crumbled the rocks heaved up from the planet’s molten core. After several million years the stone-dust of the earth broke into its chemical basics, and the first compost hesitantly formed in the organic broth of what Darwin suggested was some “warm little pond”—out of the muck and into the slime of birth. Decomposition and composition. Existence is the child of death. I’m convinced the decomposers outnumber the creators. Once the plant world began, the compost supply increased rampantly, along with the rich underground civilizations that now inhabit the soil that breeds us. We are the garden, and we are healthiest when we live in it. Farm children are the least susceptible to the immune diseases crippling modern urban society.
Yet when was the last time you saw a bug on produce from a supermarket? Imagine the chemicals and the pesticides needed to keep those millions of beetles and trillions of other creatures out of your food. We’re no longer eating bugs; we’re eating the chemicals that kill the bugs. They’re in our air, our soil, our bodies—swimming through the cellular universe of our blood. About 125,000 tons of toxic chemicals were used in the First World War. The results were so horrifying that finally, in 1993, the United Nations outlawed their use in warfare. Yet 500 million tons of chemical poisons were dumped on North American soil in 2001 alone. The noxious insects don’t show any sign of surrendering. If anything, they are increasing, while the good and the beautiful are dying all around us.
All life is born in the alchemy of earth, some creatures in impressive quantities. A possibly apocryphal story claims that when the eminent evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what evolution had taught him about God, he speculated that God “must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.” There are over 350,000 varieties of beetles on the planet. Yet they are merely one of millions of creatures thriving upon the dirt under our feet. However, nature actually isn’t especially fond of beetles—it prefers composting, and beetles are merely one of its tools. When I dip my hand into the soil of our garden, I am scooping up trillions of micro-organisms. There is more biomass beneath than above ground. This provides rich feed for plants, which have evolved innovative root systems for utilizing its nutrients. An intrepid agrologist with time on his hands teased apart the mazy roots of a single rye grass. Finishing his calculations, he concluded that this lone plant had more than 6,800 miles of root and root hair.
Our small farm, like every other small farm, is built upon the empire of the underground. When I hold my handful of dirt in front of me I can only wonder at the processes that took millions of years to make the flesh of that hand out of the earth. And the earth my hand is holding? The most diverse ecosystem of them all. Fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, mites, microarthropods, amoebas, flagellates, classes and subclasses of each other, maybe a fat earthworm or an ugly (to a gardener) cutworm. Then a tiny beetle rushes out of the dirt and skips off a finger, back to its source.
Farming is all earth, or at least real farming is. The factory farms, ignoring ecology, are attempting to create nutritious soil with basic chemicals and minerals, and maybe a few squirts of liquid manure that fools the farmer more than the soil. Life is about relationships, and the closer the relationships between the land and our belly, the better the food. This is the task Sharon and I set for ourselves from the beginning, building a circular relationship with our soil, feeding on its products and feeding it more in return. We have our differences, of course. I tend toward philosophy. I see systems. Sharon sees weeds and stalks them with an unrelenting single-mindedness.
At Trauma Farm our fastidious horse, LaBarisha, politely craps in the same general area each day, providing manure. The sheep waste hay, pulling it recklessly from the racks in their sheds and shitting on it. This provides another excellent compost. Mixed livestock is part of a real farm’s complex structure. The animals produce manure, fibre, feathers or down, hides, meat or dairy products, eggs, labour for the fields, management of grazing land, and thus protection against fire. As the proportion of livestock on a mixed farm diminishes, small farms lose their most important element—that circularity.
Earth is the great decomposer. Here before me, in this handful of soil, I’m witnessing the creation of life. I don’t want to spray it or poison it, because to work with soil is to praise and nurture it. Real science, real culture, real understanding goes so much deeper than the narrow, linear, reductionist methodology of the factory farm. Our planet has always been polycultural. That’s why the permaculture movement is becoming popular—these are gardeners who believe in creating self-sustaining environments centred on perennial plants rather than the annuals that have become the mainstay of gardens and cultivated farms.
Gardeners are also relearning traditional cultivating techniques from Europe, Africa, the Orient, and what many aboriginal commun
ities long knew. For instance, Native tribes, from Mexico to Maine, grew corn with beans and squash. The Iroquois called them the “three sisters.” Corn and squash are heavy feeders, but beans are a nitrogen fixer, and their compost and the decayed leaves of the bean plants and squash helped fertilize the corn and squash. Like the Iroquois, we replace any missing nutrients by digging seaweed and the remains of our fish dinners into the soil, along with ashes from our fire for potassium. The scratchy leaves of the squash plants also keep raccoons away from the corn. Balanced crops can coexist happily for hundreds of years, and even increase the wealth of the soil. If you grow only corn, using artificial fertilizers, you will gradually strip your land of life, as many farmers have belatedly discovered after damaging their soil so badly it will take centuries to heal. Our three sisters grow proudly every year in the garden, messy yet rich.
One of the intentions of Trauma Farm is political—to create while leaving only a small footprint. It’s an argument against the modern mythology of agribusiness that believes we can control the gorgeous organic complexity of the planet. The small farm is a dying anachronism in our age, but it is here that some of us are taking a rebel stand, returning to the traditional knowledge that grew good food for thousands of years. This is why we have tried to make our farm as circular as possible. We purchased this land not only for its fine soil but for its natural wealth of water and sunlight, two of the most important ingredients in a farm. I can irrigate the garden from our biggest pond and the excess water will drain back down to the pond below, where it can be pumped back to the garden. All of our compost is recycled into the gardens or the chickens. The chickens recycle their grain and the compost and the grass and bugs they harvest from the field, and they provide us with chicken manure, the major nutrient for our garden. Even the water from our septic system filters through the soil for a safe distance and eventually seeps down to the lower ponds so that our well water is not wasted.