“When the soil is healthy, then one doesn’t need any pesticides whatsoever,” he reminded me. “Look over here.” I followed him to the center of his universe, his compost piles, contained in large wooden bins. He picked up a handful of compost from the pile that looked almost finished. He let it sift through his fingers—dark, fine, and slightly fluffy—before handing it to me. He signaled me to mimic his movements as he held another mounded batch in cupped hands, and it wasn’t unlike tasting a special wine with a South Tirolean friend. As we let the compost flow through our fingers and back into the bin, it was clear we had a vintage year in our hands: earthy, with a slight hint of something close to a barrique character. “The earthworms have done this,” said Robert. “Everything is worked up and is now so fine. There aren’t any more earthworms in it. It’s all completely worked by the earthworms.”
Robert raised the remnants in his hand slightly skyward, toward the light, not unlike the way monks just up the mountain raise their sacraments, and then gave it one last smell before putting the rest back into the bin: “Ah—super, herrlich, herrlich, herrlich. Exzellent, exzellent.” He was a connoisseur. The superlatives flowed.
He then walked over to an upended log filled with hack marks on its face, a Tirolean hatchet left sticking in it. He pulled out the hatchet, picked up a handful of collected brush from the pile beside it, and started hacking. He then gathered the finely chopped pieces and tossed them into the newest batch of compost. “That’s the secret,” he said, “that and the stone meal.” He explained that they had an excellent original soil in their garden plot but adding the stone meal provided needed minerals in faster form than would come from natural processes, given their constant planting and harvesting.
Edith waited patiently off to the side while Robert shared his craft, plucking a few weeds that had intruded in nearby beds. Once he was convinced that my fertile mind was fully saturated with his methods, he pointed over to Edith: “It’s hot out here. Let’s go over there and get a drink and a little something to eat.” Edith nodded and ducked into a small wooden shed toward the far end of the garden, only to reappear with a large cutting board full of hearty bread slices covered with a variety of soft cheeses, herb pestos, edible flowers, berries, and nasturtium leaves. It was a culinary rainbow unlike anything I’d ever seen: biodiversity served up fresh, with herb-infused water to help take it all in.
Edith motioned for me to grab a few samples and walk with her through rows upon rows of raised beds chock-full of vegetables. The garden was somewhat different from an ordinary modern kitchen garden: Instead of being harvested, many of the crops were left to go to seed. Annuals, such as old varieties of lettuce, had gone from leafy bunches to stalky spires of seeds. Carrots, of which Edith had a rainbow of heirloom varieties, were biennials and had been left in place to go to seed in their second year. The complexity of placements, seed harvest, and rotations was mind boggling, but having Edith walk me through the rows was like having a parent read the lines of a well-worn book out loud, rote in content but delivered with fresh enthusiasm each time it was shared.
As we walked along, Edith would pluck samples for me to taste. At one point she bent over a bed of carrots and pulled three varieties for me. Using the top of a plastic barrel for a makeshift tabletop, she diced them up into bite-sized slices. Robert came over to join us in the taste test. I tasted each of the three, trying to see if my palate could detect any way in which the slightly different tastes somehow related to color. As we compared our impressions on the subtle differences in flavor, they followed my gaze out over the valley.
The garden location provided a perfect vantage point for capturing the topography of almost every village in the Mals township as well as a sweeping vista of almost the entire Upper Vinschgau. To the right lay towns just below Mals, filled or filling with new apple plantations, while the view to the left was much different, at least for the moment, with the broad, flat valley floor tilting sharply upward toward the Austrian border, tall mountains flanking either side. Robert pointed toward the unusual sloping of that end of the valley. “You know what it’s called, that part of our valley, right . . . ?”
“Der Malser Haide, meinst du?” The Mals Heath, you mean? I asked.
“Yes, exactly. Our Mals Heath is something very special. It was famously known as the Breadbasket of the Tirol.”
Robert went on to explain that the traditional grains of the Vinschgau were known as some of the finest in all of Europe. They were even a favorite of the Vatican in Rome and the royal family in England prior to the twentieth century. There was something special about the Mals Heath that produced exceptional grains, and as it turns out, it all goes back to geology.
Throughout my three decades of living in and returning to the Vinschgau, I’d always admired the curious character of the Mals Heath. It seemed obvious that there was some unusual geological origin to it, but I couldn’t interpret what it was, and I certainly had never linked it to the famed grains and breads of the region. However, in 2011, three geologists took a new look at the feature and came up with a new theory for its origin. It seemed unlikely to them that the 6.8-mile (11 km) long Malser Haide was formed simply from gradual alluvial deposits, as long assumed: It is simply too broad and long, and the deposition too deep, for such a scenario.
After looking at the topography and geological history of the surrounding area, they speculated that the Malser Haide and similar formations in the Vinschgau were created by the collapse of a mountain that was likely more than 10,000 feet (3,100 m) high—probably through seismic activity. As the mountain broke apart and tumbled downward, it deposited massive amounts of material all the way from the village of Plawenn (Konrad’s home) to just below Burgeis. In essence, the agrarian heritage of the township of Mals was rooted in what these geologists dubbed a megafan.
The geologists weren’t sure if this megafan formation, similar to a sprawling river delta formation but confined between mountains on each side, was the result of one enormous cataclysmic event or several such events spread out over time. Either way, the megafan theory helped make a lot more sense of the unusual geomorphology of the vista Robert and I were admiring. It also helped explain in part how the area had become the Breadbasket of the Tirol.
The unique soils and climate of the Vinschgau proved ideal for cultivating several historically important grains such as rye, spelt, emmer, einkorn, barley, and oats, as well as hay. The dry, steppelike conditions created by a combination of sun exposure, steady air currents throughout the year, and well-drained soils minimized disease, while the deep soils and broad valley made for good plowing, planting, and other cultivation practices. In addition, the megafan forced the two rivers in that part of the valley to its edges, on either side of the collapsed mountainside that now formed the Malser Haide. The Adige River and its tributary, the Puni River, would—in conjunction with other mountain streams—feed the ancient network of irrigation canals that crisscrossed the Malser Haide, supplying farmers with needed water for their grain, hay, pastures, and vegetable crops at critical times.
As we looked out over the valley, I remarked that I could remember seeing many more grain fields when I’d first come to the South Tirol in the early 1980s. In a valley where conditions were so optimal for them, their dramatic decline in recent decades didn’t make sense to me. Where had they all gone? Grain production in the Vinschgau Valley went from a peak of 24,710 acres (10,000 ha) in 1906 to 366 acres (148 ha) in 2013.4
Robert said the answer could be summed up in one word: Verarmung. Impoverishment . . . of both landscape and culture. The irony in it all, he noted, was that the rising economic status of the valley’s people created the impoverishment he was alluding to. In the decades following World War II, more and more people in the South Tirol finally began to move beyond subsistence lifestyles and have some disposable income. One of the first simple luxuries many took advantage of was the fresh bread available on a daily basis fr
om the local bakeries. However, it wasn’t just the frequency of fresh bread that they enjoyed but also the availability of white bread, that is to say, wheat bread.
It might be worth reading this twice: Until the latter half of the twentieth century, South Tirolean farmers traditionally baked bread only two or three times per year. Maybe four. The harder the times, the harder the bread. Making bread was hard work, and so was getting grain to the miller and back home again as flour, whether by cart or a wooden-framed backpack. To boot, farmers couldn’t risk spoilage or loss of the flour—it was the lifeline that wove its way through the turning pages of the calendar. Turning the flour into bread sooner rather than later was some of the only insurance farmers had.
Rye and spelt were the most common and reliable grains in the Upper Vinschgau, although barley, emmer, einkorn, oats, buckwheat, millet, and some wheat could also be found. Some anthropologists surmise that rye probably came into the South Tirol as a weed seed when wheat was brought in for planting from Bavaria or elsewhere. As it turned out, rye was more reliable in the cool and wet mountainous areas than wheat, which performed much better north and south of the Alps. Although farmers continued to grow wheat in the South Tirol, rye became the dominant grain, followed by spelt. They relied on the tough-hulled spelt’s hardiness in their Alpine conditions; it also grows well in poorer soils, as does rye. The very traits that help rye, spelt, and the region’s other heritage grains thrive in the Alps also make them easier to grow without inputs. As Robert continually reminded me, grains like rye and spelt need neither synthetic fertilizers nor constant manuring—much less applications of Gülle, a liquefied combination of animal urine and manure. All of it is too strong, he says, and excessive nitrogen actually brings down the nutritional quality of the grain.
Grains beget breads beget traditions, and so it was in the Upper Vinschgau. In fact, the ur-bread tradition in the area came directly out of Marienberg Abbey, where monks purportedly abided by a bread recipe for several centuries before they finally shared it with the farmers. The Ur-Paarl nach Klosterart, the “ancient pair made in the monastic style,” became the standard bread of the Vinschgau. It became so ubiquitous in the region that it is commonly referred to by its dialect name, the Vinschgerpaarl.
The traditional Vinschgerpaarl is a sourdough bread containing a small proportion of wheat flour but more rye flour, along with wildcrafted fennel, blue fenugreek, and caraway. Its distinctive flavor is matched by its unique form: The bread is typically about 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick, consisting of two connected circular loaves. Why this sourdough rye bread is made of a pair of joined loaves is left to conjecture, but there is no question about today’s culturally embedded symbolism of a Vinschgerpaarl representing the sharing of bread and, taken a step further, a marriage.
Once baked in an enormous stone oven, typically on the outside of or even separated from the farmhouse, the bread was placed on edge in wooden racks that would be hung from the ceiling in a room with good air circulation to promote drying and to prevent mold formation. Of course, rodents also stood little chance of finding their way to the carefully located racks. Once dry, the bread was often too hard to bite, or at least without cracking a tooth. A special cutting board called a Brotgroamml was used, with a pivoting knife attached by a metal ring on its tip to the board for safe chopping and with vertical boards on three sides to catch the flying crumbs. Attaching the knife tip to the board prevented a slip of the knife as it hit the hard carapace of the dense bread. The pieces of cracked bread would then be put into soup, milk, or even wine for softening. While it wasn’t easy to eat, the bread was highly nutritious, and it was every family’s best bet against starvation in an often unforgiving landscape. Plummeting temperatures, floods, blizzards, avalanches, landslides, and occasional droughts were all part of life for the mountain farmers, and bread could mean the difference between life and death in a landscape where one weather event could turn bounty into desperation.
The spelt bread laid out before us may have grown out of that cultural tendency toward nutrition-packed loaves, but its density was far more suited to modern times. I grabbed the last piece, topped it with cheese and a nasturtium flower from the cutting board, and asked Edith and Robert if I could see their seedsaving collection.
“Natürlich, natürlich,” Robert replied heartily, and he grabbed the empty board and waved us forward with another arc of his long arm. Edith and I picked up the glasses and our pace and hustled to try and keep pace with Robert’s long gait. We rinsed the cutting board and glasses with a garden hose and tidied up a few tools before heading out the gate, over the bridge, and past the agricultural school on our way to the village.
The magnificent ruin had a long history as an agricultural and forestry school, but a recent earthquake had toppled part of the tower—and the classrooms and offices were impressively reconceived by the renowned architect Werner Tscholl. Did the students ever come to work with them in the garden? I asked. “Nie genug,” Robert replied. Never enough.
Edith laughed. “But when people like you from all over the world start coming here to see our display garden, then everyone at the school starts watching us a little more.”
We walked through the curving, cobbled streets of Burgeis, dodging mountain bikers a good portion of the way, some of them solo while others followed the leader in weaving, serpentine chains. I decided that as long as there was a waft of cow manure in the middle of the village, the tourists still hadn’t won. Agritourism is great, until the agri- prefix falls away like a shed reptilian skin.
We walked past several high-end restaurants tucked fairly discreetly into their stuccoed medieval carapaces but given away by ornate doorways crafted from tinted glass and fancy metalwork, then veered up a small side street. Edith pointed to the stairway of their house and pulled out her key. Their neighbors were bringing hay into their barn, located right in the center of the village. Hay chaff was thick in the air, and the sound of machinery drowned out any chance of conversation. A woman fit a large grapple hook around a load of loose hay on a hay wagon while a young boy operated the winch that would lift the load up on a cable and into the hayloft. Up above, an unseen character with a deep voice issued curt commands and pulled the load deep into the barn’s loft, where he would release the hay from the grapple and send it swinging back above the hay wagon, at which point the lad would lower it to the woman waiting below. A faint hint of manure permeated the scene. There was still hope.
Robert waited for me at the top of the stairway and bid me inside, and by the time I entered Edith was waiting by the door of their seed room. Bundles of grain hung from above, all neatly tied and labeled. Below the sheaves of grain was a workstation, complete with a variety of storage containers, labels, and tools. The entire scene resembled a photo shoot for a harvest celebration, but Edith’s previous skills in managing a lab were on display, too. She began pulling out container after container of different kinds of seeds, with everything carefully labeled, describing which ones needed to be replanted every year and which ones could be planted during alternate years or even a bit less frequently, since different kinds of seeds maintain their viability for varying amounts of time.
Then she took down a sheaf of her pride and joy, Burgeis spelt, explaining that spelt was coming back into favor among local farmers, bakers, and consumers. Some of them wanted to tap back into the disappearing agricultural traditions while others were interested in new market opportunities and more diversified farm operations. Consumers, on the other hand, were calling not just for local and organic products but also for more digestible grains, including gluten-free options. The gluten in spelt has a molecular composition more fragile and water-soluble than the gluten in modern wheat; it’s broken down by heat and by mixing, and it also has a higher fiber content. This combination of factors makes spelt easier to digest than wheat.
Edith’s smile waned as she continued, and she shook her head in dismay. Just when people were f
inally beginning to recognize the value of these old grains and how well they fit this landscape, culture, and even tourism opportunities, she lamented, monocultures and pesticides threatened it all.
Having started their seedsaving focused on vegetables, herbs, and fruits, Edith and Robert realized that there was a lack of focus in the area on collecting and saving heritage grains. So in 2000 they began trying to find sources for seeds of and information on varieties of grains once grown in the Vinschgau. They decided not to focus on rye varieties since rye pollen can travel such long distances, meaning that cross-pollination would be a constant challenge for them. The other grains proved a bit simpler. Local farmers could still remember the names of old spelt varieties and even had some seeds, whereas the Bernhards had very little luck in finding old barley varieties in the local area, even though barley is another grain that adapted very well to the Vinschgau’s soil and climate. Barley was an important grain for soups and porridges; when roasted, it was even used as a coffee substitute—for the taste, that is, not the caffeine hit. Farmers also used it for chicken food, and it was known for its many healing capacities, including its help in treating digestive ailments.
Edith and Robert had assembled an extraordinary living library—seeds collected, cataloged, stored, and shared. As part of a small but growing network of seedsavers, they would travel to various seed swaps and conferences, where their display table was always inundated and their seeds tended to disappear almost as soon as the events began. In addition to their seed room, they had another storage facility next door, with pounds upon pounds of stored grains ready both for eating and planting. Robert took me to the adjacent storage area, where we cleared off the weighted-down lid of an intricately carved grain trunk and opened it up. Waist-high and approximately 3 feet wide and 10 feet long (1 × 3 m), it was full of different grains. Every farmhouse used to have at least one of those old grain trunks to sustain them between harvests.
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