The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  This is why many people consider hoeing backbreaking work. The hoes are simply too short. Of course, it is backbreaking work anyway, because you have to use a lot of strength to pull a flat blade with twenty to thirty square inches of surface area through the soil, particularly heavy, clayey soil. I often felt (and looked) like Millet’s man after a few minutes with a hoe. Until I discovered the stirrup hoe.

  The stirrup hoe, also called the oscillating, Appalachia, or shuffle hoe (buyer beware: several different styles of hoe are called shuffle hoes) has a U-shaped steel blade that swings through a small arc on the end of its too-short wooden handle. In fact, it looks just like a stirrup on a stick. As you draw it toward you, the blade runs under the soil and slices the weed (or whatever else is in its path) several inches below the surface. With a standard hoe, at the end of your draw, you must lift the hoe out of the soil, push it away from you, and make another stab into the soil. With the stirrup hoe, you can leave it in the ground and continue working it from and toward you, because it is effective with either a draw or a push stroke. Thus the name shuffle hoe.

  There’s only one problem: except for shallow weeds, which the stirrup may bring up, roots and all, in one piece, all this shuffling and slicing hasn’t removed or even killed a single weed. If anything, this hard pruning may make the weed come back even stronger, and perhaps with multiple shoots replacing the single one severed. But remember, this is the “weed control” strategy of cultivation. It’s what farmers have been doing for thousands of years. True, the weed will come back, but if you cultivate on a regular basis (say, weekly), the weeds will never get established and threaten your vegetables or flowers. Because it doesn’t have a large, flat blade, it requires much, much less force to use than a standard hoe, and it doesn’t turn over the soil, bringing fresh weed spores to the surface. On a warm summer morning, it can be a downright pleasant and even soothing activity, as you get into a nice, easy back-and-forth rhythm. Now, this is cultivating. If only the handle were a foot longer, I could use it comfortably.

  I keep my stirrup hoe clean and dry. Its effectiveness is dependent on its sharp blade. One does have to be careful with a good stirrup hoe. It doesn’t know a tomato plant from a knotweed, and more times than I’d like to admit, my gentle to-and-fro rhythm has been punctuated by a piercing scream when I realize I’ve gotten careless and whacked off a corn stalk. Or a Brandywine tomato. Or a drip irrigation hose. I’ve killed them all.

  WEED REVISIONISM (MY OWN TERM) was all the rage a few years back. It was hard to pick up a garden magazine without encountering a weed apologist. Under weed-revisionist theory, weeds are not inherently “bad.” They are only “bad” because they happen to be growing where you don’t want them. In other words, the revisionist’s definition of a weed is “a plant considered undesirable in its present location.” In fact, although this belief was popular in the 1990s, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said a hundred years earlier, “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Still, all of this weed revisionism had always seemed to me like a bunch of nonsense. My definition of a weed is somewhat narrower. A weed is usually (but not necessarily) unattractive, always invasive, difficult to eradicate, and undesirable in its present location.

  But something happened recently to make me reconsider revisionism: The corn bed, because it is in the lower, nonterraced area of the garden, is not a raised bed. Thus it never received the glacial topsoil that the rest of the beds did when the garden was constructed, and the native soil there is the heavy clay typical of our property. After a few years of struggling with it, I decided to make it a raised bed and asked our landscaper Carmine to add eight inches of a fifty-fifty mix of topsoil and compost. Naturally, being a landscaper (fancy title for “the guy who cuts the grass”), he ignored me and instead dumped—well, you can’t really call it topsoil—pure dirt. No compost. And the dirt he put in wasn’t appreciably better than what was already there. Now I just had more of it.

  I was steamed at Carmine—again. The previous year I had asked him to plant two pine trees to give us more privacy on the porch. We had plenty of trees on the property but no pine, and I wanted to be able to clip my own boughs for decorating the house at Christmas. Normally I would have gone to the nursery and selected the trees myself, but feeling overwhelmed, I took what seemed to be the reasonable shortcut of letting my landscaper select and plant the trees. In other words, the way I imagine many homeowners do it.

  I came home one day to find a pair of seven-foot fir trees planted in the ground. Not pine, fir. I know that a lot of lay-people make this mistake and call every evergreen tree they see a pine, but I did expect a little better of my landscaper. Not wanting to cause financial hardship for him, I let it slide. But to this day, every Christmas, I look out the window, lamenting, “I really wanted a pine tree.”

  Sometimes it seems as though I can’t win. If I insist on doing everything myself or overseeing every last detail, I’m obsessive, controlling, and stressed out. If I try to let go a little and delegate, the job is botched, which ends up causing even more stress. If there’s a middle ground to this dilemma, I haven’t found it. But with hundreds of dollars of worthless dirt in my corn bed and a pair of fir trees needling me from the porch, I figured that firing Carmine was a step in the right direction.

  “We can’t,” Anne said after I’d presented my case. “He and his wife are patients.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t fire a patient. How awkward would that be the next time Carmine or his wife came to my office?”

  “Half the people in town are your patients. That’s quite a restriction you’re putting on us.”

  “We are not firing him. Besides, have you forgotten that no one else will cut our grass?”

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. But it was true that we had already run through just about all the landscapers who would. Our sloping, irregularly shaped lawn is a little challenging. When I was phoning around for a new landscaper a few years earlier, Carmine was the only one who hadn’t said, “You mean the Big Brown House?” and hung up.

  Most of the landscapers in town were born and raised here and never left. Maybe played a little football on the high school team, got their diplomas, didn’t know of any other place they’d rather live (understandably), so they stayed right here in the Town That Time Forgot and managed to scrape together a living out of cutting other people’s lawns. A few of them became rather successful, over time expanding their solo ventures into full-fledged enterprises with several trucks and a staff; others remained one-man operations, a guy with a lawn mower. But all of the ones we met had one thing in common: “In high school I used to come here and drink in that field,” they would reminisce, pointing to what was now Larry’s yard, “look at the river, and get drunk.”

  Our first landscaper, who sported uncombed hair and taped-together eyeglasses that sat askew on his face, escalated that tradition into adulthood, stopping traffic on a major Hudson River bridge for hours one day when he climbed the superstructure with a six-pack and refused to come down. This behavior disturbed but did not surprise Anne, who always felt uncomfortable in his presence and was suspicious of his uncanny knack for showing up on her day off, which varied.

  “I don’t like the way he looks at me,” she had complained.

  “What way is that?”

  “Like a dog eyeing a raw piece of liver.”

  His successor insisted, despite our repeated pleading, on blowing the grass clippings toward the house after each cut, his leaf blower shooting a hundred-mile-an-hour jet of grass, dirt, pollen, and dust through the numerous cracks and gaps in our ninety-year-old house. We found ourselves having to dust and vacuum after each cutting. Once, he used a rope of mine to tow his mower out of the wet clay he had wandered into after a heavy rain. This would have been fine, except the rope was part of a rustic tree swing I had meticulously built for the kids, risking life and limb (mine, that is) to tie it to a branch some thirty feet high. When I
saw the sixty feet of flaccid rope, loosely coiled on the ground, I almost cried.

  With our checkered history of landscapers, I let Anne convince me that we couldn’t fire a patient (as if I had a choice), and Carmine stayed. Until a few years later, when he fired us, without even telling us; the grass just kept growing taller and taller, he wouldn’t return our calls, and finally we concluded he wasn’t coming back. We had to scramble to find a new landscaper, in the middle of summer no less. Anne saw Carmine in her office shortly after.

  “So just how awkward was it?” I asked.

  “Not very. He acted like nothing had happened.”

  I tried to amend the corn bed’s twenty-four-dollar-ayard dirt with homemade compost when I could, but after a few years of heavy corn crops, the soil was looking and acting exhausted. It was time to revitalize it. I had been reading about what are called green manures—that is, crops that you grow to turn into and enrich the soil—and decided to give it a try. A couple of seed houses sell green-manure mixes, usually containing things such as legumes and oats and other annual species that will not come back the next year after you’ve turned them in.

  My plan was to get in an early planting of the green-manure mix, turn it into the soil in June, then follow immediately with a second planting, this one consisting of scattered dwarf marigolds to give us some color through the summer. I chose dwarf marigolds precisely because they are dwarf; in the fall I planned to mow and mulch them, then turn them into the soil as well. The family griped about a year without corn.

  “You want us to eat the farmstand corn?” Zach cried, indignant.

  This was getting interesting.

  “Do you guys realize that city folks drive an hour and a half for that farmstand corn?” I said.

  “It’s not as good as yours,” Katie grumbled, “and corn has to be cooked within a half hour of picking.”

  I was taken off guard by their resistance. But I gave them the Dust Bowl (“See what happens if you don’t replenish the soil?”) speech, and that quelled the uprising.

  The whole project—the green-manure mix and the marigold seeds—was going to cost the price of a couple of yards of composted cow manure, which probably would have been far more beneficial to the soil, but I wanted to try green-manuring, and I was not to be deterred by logic or cost.

  In April I cleared the bed of weeds, planted the oat, clover, and sweet-pea seeds, gave them a good soaking with the hose—and waited for something to come up. I didn’t know what the germination period was for these things, but peas are usually pretty quick. A couple of weeks went by and the bed was still bare. Finally I saw a few peas. Then some other seedlings started coming up. Lots of them. This is good, right? I wasn’t so sure. These seedlings looked familiar, like a weed I’d seen around. But how could I tell? Was it weed or expensive seed? I looked for the plant in a textbook but couldn’t find it. I decided to take a wait-and-see attitude. Eventually I started seeing this plant in other beds, and I realized it was indeed a weed. Nothing germinated from my expensive green-manure mix but a handful of peas, possibly because of drought conditions, compounded by my inattention to watering. I’d had to resort to hand watering—never my forte—as drip hoses are effective only for rows of plants, not the wide scattering of seeds that I had dispersed. Of course, the weed had no trouble at all germinating and flourishing in a drought, but (revisionists take note) that’s what makes it a weed.

  In June, with some difficulty, I turned this pea-weed crop into the soil with a pitchfork, questioning again my reluctance to purchase a small tiller. (I stubbornly adhere to the belief that there is no place for a noisy, smelly gasoline engine in a garden.) As I was planting the marigold seeds, I read the back of the seed packet for the first time: “Days to flower: 90.” It was June 15. My marigolds, which were supposed to give us color all summer, weren’t even going to bloom until a week after Labor Day!

  Anne, as usual, was undaunted. “But they last a really long time. They’ll be in bloom until frost.” And they did, and they were. Once they bloomed, they were quite lovely and gave the garden a great sunburst of color when everything else had faded.

  In November I wheeled over the mower with the mulching plate in place and cut them down, pulverizing the plants and flowers. I should have worn a dust mask and overalls. The flowers were dry by this time, as was the dirt beneath them, and clouds of dust and seeds and pollen were flying everywhere. I finished the mowing and turned the remaining debris into the soil with the pitchfork before stumbling into the kitchen, dusty and coughing. And cranky.

  “What happened to you?” Anne exclaimed.

  “Sometimes I wonder why I do this,” was all I could say as I headed to the bathroom for a long shower.

  My back aching from turning in three hundred square feet of hard dirt, I dragged myself into work late the next morning, missing my own staff meeting. In the car, thinking about the garden as I often do, I remembered that Bridget’s blueprint had indicated a long row of marigolds along the stone wall. Anne and I had questioned her about it: Weren’t marigolds annuals? We’d have to replant them every year.

  “They are, but if you leave them in the ground, they self-seed incredibly well. You’ll never get rid of them,” Bridget had chirped enthusiastically.

  We left them out of the garden anyway, since we had enough beds to keep us busy, but I thought of that conversation as I drove down the parkway. They self-seed incredibly well. Yikes. What had I been thinking? I had just turned literally thousands of marigold seeds into the corn bed! You’ll never get rid of them.

  I told Anne that evening that I had just planted a few thousand marigolds in the corn bed.

  “In the marigold bed, you mean,” she replied, unfazed.

  Good point.

  The experience almost made a weed revisionist out of me. The marigolds—flowers that I had purchased, planted, and nurtured—had now become weeds. I would have a similar experience in a few years when I tried a “wild” (as opposed to hybrid) arugula. This wild variety was, as promised, superior in taste to the hybrid. On a whim, I let just one plant overwinter and go to seed, and the next spring, the entire lettuce bed, two adjacent beds, and even the gravel paths were overrun with arugula. Is indeed one man’s flower another man’s weed?

  What puzzles me about weeds is, Where on earth do they all come from? It’s a bit of a mystery to me. Lee Reich, in his book Weedless Gardening, implies that they don’t necessarily come from anywhere; they are lurking in your soil all along: 140 seeds in every pound of soil, according to Reich, just lying dormant, waiting for exposure to light and air to sprout and dominate. That may be, but I think that the wind is at least an equal conspirator. I say this because I have observed shifting waves of weed attack over the years, in which a new weed will arrive in all my beds at the same time. I can remember the year purslane arrived as vividly as I do the arrival of my children. I had never seen this particular weed in my garden, and then one spring it showed up everywhere, and from all indications, it’s here to stay.

  Purslane, a common weed in much of the United States, is low growing and creeping. It has succulent leaves that distinguish it from just about every other weed in the garden. Purslane is incredibly tough to eradicate, partly because it seems to thrive everywhere: in dry soils, in moist soils, in sun or in shade. Most of all, it seems to like to come up under and wrap around my drip-irrigation hoses. I’ve observed that, remarkably, the roots take several forms, adapting to the conditions presented to them. Sometimes they are shallow and spread out; other times the plant puts out a long taproot that invariably snaps off and, Medusa-like, sprouts more plants before you can hang up your tools.

  Purslane is impervious to hoeing, even if you manage to pull up the entire plant, unless you rake up (and, I suspect, burn) the debris. Left lying on the surface of the soil, the hoed-up plants reroot, like some science fiction monster that refuses to die. Thus purslane must be removed, plant by plant, with something like that horrible weeding fork my wife ador
es. In some summers it is responsible for 90 percent of my weeding time. In our garden it is the cockroach of the plant world. I suspect it will be around long after everyone and everything else is gone. I can’t figure out why it hasn’t taken over every square inch of soil in the United States. Maybe it has a weakness I haven’t found yet.

  It was after one of these brutal purslane-weeding sessions that I came in for a coffee break and saw there was an article about purslane in the New York Times—in, of all places, the Dining section. Remarkably, my nemesis was the latest trendy salad ingredient in New York’s priciest restaurants. What a hoot: the thought of all these swells paying twelve dollars for a plate of weeds! I put down the paper, went back to the garden, and put a sprig of purslane in my mouth. Briefly. Yuck! Perhaps Le Cirque knows how to prepare it just so. But there was more. The article mentioned that the finest New York City restaurants were buying purslane from a small farmer who had converted his entire farm to purslane in—I couldn’t believe it—the next town! Here I was, spending hours trying to yank out and destroy the stuff, and this guy whose farm was virtually within sight was planting it—planting it!—and selling it to Jean-Georges for God knows how much.

  And then I started to wonder. I had never seen purslane in my garden until this farmer started planting it a few miles down the road. There couldn’t be a connection, could there? The prevailing winds do come from that direction. I wonder …

  No Such Thing as Organic Apples

  It’s not easy being green.

  —Kermit the Frog

  There’s no such thing as organic apples in the Northeast,” the local grizzled old farmer and orchardist told me. Although he would object to being called grizzled. And he’s not that old. In fact, he’s in his forties, has a college degree, and probably farms with the aid of a computer. Maybe that’s why I didn’t listen to him. Farmers have no credibility until they’re old and grizzled. So I just nodded and pretended to agree, smugly secure in my knowledge that he was wrong. I had a plan.