It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  As it turned out, this was but the first of three times I would rent the rototiller. A week later, I got back the soil analysis that I’d sent weeks earlier to the county extension service and promptly forgotten. The report said that my soil was highly acidic and recommended that five pounds of lime be thoroughly mixed into each hundred square feet of soil. By this time, I had become a man to whom the phrase “thoroughly mix in” meant only one thing: another shot of rear-tine rototiller. A week after that, while talking to a neighborhood gardener about my new garden, the woman interrupted me in mid-sentence. “Wait, are you telling me you you didn’t use any soil amendments?” she asked. Her tone suggested I might as well have poisoned Emma’s Cheerios. The local soil, she explained, was essentially clay. It was, she said, like asking your plants to send down roots through concrete. Never having heard of “soil amendments” but fearful of being labeled a sadistic gardener, I went to a nursery, where I found the prices for soil amendments appalling. After talking to one of the salesmen, I bought two cubic yards of Ortho-Mix, a “reclaimed” product that, while half the price of the “organic” stuff was, he said, just as good. I drove the stuff home—I was borrowing my friend’s truck a lot—and rototilled it into to the beds. It would be weeks before I discovered that Ortho-Mix was nothing more than sewage sludge that had been “processed,” a procedure that no one has ever explained to me. Not that I want them to. I tried to give Ortho-Mix the benefit of the doubt, much as one might hire a young criminal after he had completed six weeks of vocational education. The fact that I was growing vegetables in a medium largely composed of material that had passed through somebody else’s digestive tract was something best not thought on too deeply.

  The euphoria of rototilling—as with most opiates, the rush diminished with each successive rental but never completely went away—would turn out to be my favorite part of gardening. Fortunately, I was unaware of this at the time. I started planting. Like many novice gardeners, I found myself buying more seed than I could possibly use. I just couldn’t resist another little envelope of pumpkin or watermelon or collards. The packets’ pictures of the beautiful vegetables inside, just waiting to be unleashed, got me every time. I bought seeds for vegetables I wouldn’t eat on a bet. Beets, for example.

  Seeds were a hell of a lot more fun to buy than to plant. Especially carrots. Planting carrot seeds is no more difficult than etching a copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper on a watch battery. They may be sown for example, at any depth you like between one-quarter inch and one-half inch. The seeds themselves, nearly invisible, are to be sown three per inch, in rows fifteen inches apart. Naturally, you will want to check the seedbeds daily and moisten the surface if it seems the slightest bit dry using a “rose-type” nozzle so that you don’t blast the tender seedlings. (I Googled “rose-type nozzle” for twenty minutes before I found, courtesy of the Columbus Bonsai Society, that it’s an attachment that spreads the water out evenly, even at low pressure, which is where your run-of-the-mill nozzle shows its flaws. It has something to do with the “cohesive” nature of water and, I suspect, the origins of matter itself. Anyway, the folks in Ohio gave a glowing review of the Masakuni Watering Wand, which is a mere thirty dollars and “available from most online bonsai distributors.”) Assuming you haven’t blasted your carrot seedlings to kingdom come with a fire hose, you thin them to one plant per square inch once they attain a height of two inches. And one learns—although in my case, not until well after planting—that the soil must first be thoroughly loosened to the depth of the mature carrot, because carrots are a cheating, lying vegetable. A mature one looks sturdy and robust, fully capable of driving its way into the earth like a nail. But that’s not how carrots grow. What they do instead is send down a delicate, threadlike, easily discouraged root. And it’s only when this thing reaches its maximum depth that the carrot begins to thicken. If, like me, you’ve been fool enough to buy Long Imperator carrots, for example, that means loosening the soil to a depth of at least ten inches. Jesus! Growing carrots was like dating Winona Ryder, attractive at first but so high-maintenance that you began to wonder what you saw in her in the first place. My Rodale’s Vegetable Garden Problem Solver advised weekly inspection with a magnifying glass to check the feathery leaves. “Small dark brown, black, gray, or tan spots” indicate leaf blight. Yellowing leaves, a lack of nutrients (kelp or a water-soluble organic fertilizer may help). But they could also be a sign of “aster yellows” or the dreaded “root-knot nematodes.” All of this was terribly interesting, but I’d be damned if I was going to do it.

  Knowledge of what a pain in the ass growing carrots was gave me a new appreciation for the ones in the supermarket. I was also glad that my survival did not depend on plants so fragile. As I looked with new eyes at supermarket carrots, however, I found myself wondering about something else I’d never considered. Namely, why do we, the food-buying public, allow vegetable growers to package fruits and vegetables in plastic bags that, although they appear transparent at first glance, are actually lined with colored pinstripes—orange, yellow, green, and brown—to make the vegetables look fresher and more colorful than they are?

  Wondering about this, I spent way too much time researching variations on “carrot packaging orange stripes enhanced,” expecting to find outraged consumer groups who objected to the practice. Near as I can tell, I’m the only one who is at all worked up about this. We don’t rein in or punish the companies that deceive us like this. We give them government subsidies.

  I did, however, come across a 2003 MSNBC news story about the carrot industry’s turnaround moment. I refer, of course, to the creation of fake baby carrots. On the off chance that you don’t follow the industry closely, here’s the deal. In the late 1980s carrot consumption flatlined. We were eating carrots but not a whole bunch of them. Mike Yurosek & Son, one of California’s largest growers, was looking for a way to juice sales. The company found it in the “baby carrot,” which quickly increased carrot sales by a whopping 50 percent. It was the most dynamic carrot development in decades. And not only did consumption of carrots increase dramatically, but it was found that baby carrots could be sold for twice as much per pound as regular carrots and sometimes even more. The real genius of the invention of baby carrots is that “baby carrots” aren’t baby carrots at all. (True baby carrots exist but are a small speciality market.) Read the fine print and you’ll see that what that bag says is “baby-cut” carrots. A baby-cut carrot is nothing more than a two-inch piece of a bigger carrot that has been cut and peeled—“abraded” is the term of art—by a machine that essentially grates off the outer layer and rounds the ends so it looks like a baby carrot. And the beauty part is that you can get three or four “baby-cut” carrots out of a regular carrot.

  I felt a fatherly duty to expose Emma to the idea of gardening. If she hated it, that was her right. At least I’d have done my part. She had been mildly curious about my rototilling sprees and I hoped that this might lead to actual gardening. In our particular historical moment, anything that gets a child playing in the dirt should be encouraged. You want to subsidize something? Subsidize that. Thus it was the one afternoon I called her over as I worked in the yard. “Monkalula,” I announced solemnly, “it is time to plant the carrots.” I decided against burdening her with the joy-trampling exactitude of planting as instructed by the seed packets and gardening books. We were just going to get the damn things into the ground and hope for the best. We each found a stick with which to scratch five rows each across one of the raised beds. Next, taking seeds between thumb and forefinger, we sprinkled them into the scratched furrows. At least we may have been doing this. The seeds were so tiny that you wondered whether they were subject to gravity at all, so tiny it was hard to see them in your own hand. Once released, they disappeared against the backdrop of the earth. We sprinkled until we emptied two packets, then knelt and teased soil over the furrows with our fingers. The next step was to water, something Emma was eager
to do. I handed her the running hose and was about to tell her to water gently, as our Masakuni Water Wand had not yet arrived. But she had already buried her thumb in the nozzle and was blasting the seeds with such violence that it was like a mini diorama of the Birmingham riots. She was undoubtedly launching some of them ten feet out of the garden. One of my worst faults as a parent is my tendency to overinstruct. But the unreasonably detailed and horatory nature of the carrot-planting instructions I’d read had freed me for once from the compulsion to dictate. “Good job,” I said approvingly. “They’re nice and wet now.” The great thing, I decided, was that my daughter and I had just planted something together. Anything that actually survived was gravy.

  Late that evening, after Emma had gone to sleep, I strolled out back and surveyed my five beds, all more or less seeded, now quiet in the still of the suburban night. I tried to imagine tiny vegetable shoots already bursting out of the seeds and pushing toward the surface. I felt as if I were in the opening scene of the movie Patton, where George C. Scott, facing an unseen assembly of untested recruits, tells them, “All real Americans love the sting of battle.” Like him, I knew what these young shoots did not, that they would shortly enter the crucible of competition, fighting to get as much light, water, and nutrients as they could if they hoped to survive. Trying to channel my own inner Patton, I growled, “Get motivated, motherfuckers” to the newly planted seeds in my beds. “In the weeks and months ahead, we will separate . . .” Here my speech stalled. I was not quite sure what we’d be separating. There had to be some vegetative equivalent of the men from the boys, but it was beyond my current level of knowledge. It was about this time that I noticed the glowing orange dot of a cigarette from the patio of my closest neighbor, barely forty feet away, sneaking a last smoke before bed. She had undoubtedly heard every word I’d said. I turned and slowly retreated inside, thinking, Great. You are now officially the crazy single dad who waits until his child is asleep to sneak outside and issue profane pep talks to non-existant plants.

  The damnedest thing happened to not a few of my carrots: They sprouted. Not, I hasten to point out, the ones in the fifteen-foot carrot “strip” I bought and secretly put down to replace the carrots that Emma had hosed into eternity. I had bought this high-tech, foolproof carrot contraption so that my daughter’s first gardening experience would be a success. The packaging promised that each of the 570 tiny seeds had been placed the optimal distance from its fellows. It was sheathed in some environmentally friendly fabric packed with all the nutrients carrots require. Those carrots never even woke up. Instead, it was the ones that we planted together that had somehow sent up their lacy green tops. I noticed them on a June afternoon while mowing the lawn and was so taken that I let the mower stall and dropped to my stomach to marvel at them “Em!” I hollered. “C’m ’ere!” My daughter was in her favorite spot in the yard, the crotch of the slowly dying dogwood tree in the front yard.

  “What?” she called back, in what I realized was becoming her default tone—a combination of irritation at her play being interrupted and suspicion that whatever I had to say would not be something she wanted to hear. She had adopted it for a perfectly good reason, which was that more often than not when I summoned her, it wasn’t to praise her, give her a treat, or invite her to do something she’d enjoy. It was far more likely to be on the order of telling her to start her homework, clean up her room, or get into the shower. It was humbling—shameful, really—to realize that I was the author of how my daughter perceived me. I vowed to spend more time enjoying this curious, bighearted, spirited child, and less trying to bend her to my will. “You’re not in trouble,” I called back. “C’m ’ere! Your carrots came up!” My excitement somehow conveyed, for she came running.

  “Look,” I said, pointing. She flopped down beside me for a closer look. The foliage was all of an inch long, but unmistakable. When I heard my daughter’s sharp intake of breath, my heart leaped. All was not lost. There was yet time for me to change course, be a better father, be something more than just the hairy thunderer who pointed out her failures. We were in business.

  “Let’s water the sunflowers!” she said.

  I had forgotten all about planting sunflowers. I had dropped a few seeds in the hard clay by the air conditioner condenser or whatever that thing is that blows hot air all summer. Its only advantage was that the spot that got maximum sun. The sunflowers hadn’t sprouted, but I liked the way she referred to them as if they were already facts. I turned on the hose and she applied her thumb as before. She aimed it at the sunflowers, the air-conditioning unit, the cement walkway, and most of the bricks in the back wall of the house. For once, I let her waste water. I simply stood and enjoyed the delight with which she watered bricks.

  I was astonished at how swiftly and directly the gentle act of vegetable gardening led to murder, but lead there it did.

  By high summer, from my office on the converted porch, I had but to turn my head to see a bounty of squash, tomatoes, eggplant, beans, kale, peas, peppers, watermelons, and carrots. Even some of the damned beets had come up. My greatest love, like that of many gardeners, was reserved for my tomatoes. Until this point I had thought that a tomato was ripe when it achieved the proper color. Now, however, having learned what a truly ripe tomato tasted like, I revised my criteria. A tomato at its absolute peak of ripeness, I’d discovered, was not only something I’d never had before. It was almost a different species. The fruit, having little fragrance until a certain moment, gave, at the moment of peak ripeness, an earthy, vegetal, almost sexual odor, and the flesh had a particular voluptuous firmness. Such tomatoes are not sold in the supermarket. They couldn’t withstand the handling. And the ripeness was so short-lived, no more than a day or two. But, my God, they were good. I couldn’t get enough of them.

  The problem was that there were five or six squirrels living in the big red oak at the very rear of my property. And the squirrels liked tomatoes, too. What they liked above all things was to wait until a tomato gave off that odor of perfect ripeness and then take a few deep, chisel-shaped bites out of it. Which they then spat out. They did this so consistently that I began to wonder: Was ruining tomatoes simply one of the great pleasures and privileges of being a squirrel or was it, rather, a duty? Were young squirrels taught by their mothers that ruining the tomatoes tended by a species that sometimes hunted and ate them was a revenge they owed their ancestors? Maybe it was a nutritional thing. Maybe their mothers said, “You should always take a bite of ripe tomato, dear, for the phytochemicals. You don’t have to eat it, just swish it around your cheeks. And if it pisses off a human, well, so much the better.”

  One afternoon on the porch, I happened to look out and see three squirrels frolicking in my garden. One was new to me. It had a different hop—bouncier, more vertical—from the squirrels I knew. I trained the Nikon 8×42 binoculars I keep at the desk (handy for bird-watching and spying on your neighbors) on the squirrel. It had disappeared into the kale. I could track its progress, however, by the waving stems and leaves. Magnified eightfold, it reminded me of Kong among the palms. It reversed course, returning as it had come, through the tomatoes. Then it stopped, standing nonchalantly with one elbow (I’d never thought of squirrels as having elbows) resting on the lowest wire of a tomato cage, one paw resting on its hip. It looked strangely relaxed and jaunty like a guy hustling fake Rolexes who wasn’t worried about the cops. Except for its jaws, which were working rhythmically and at superhuman speed, doing the squirrel bite-and-spit on one of my tomatoes.

  The planting of crops on any scale makes of one a farmer, and it is a fact that farmers live in a state of continual enmity with the animals that prey upon their crops. Squirrels weren’t my only foe. Mice and voles gnawed on things—I could see the evidence on my pumpkins and watermelons. And it was birds, I was sure, that pecked to death a good many of the uppermost tomatoes. But squirrels seemed both to do the most damage and with the greatest insolence
. They alone destroyed tomatoes for the sheer joy of it. The rodents had already killed half of the green tomatoes I had carefully caged. In most cases, the cause of death was a single chiseled bite near the crown of the tomato. Every time I threw another ruined tomato onto the compost heap, I thought of my labor: the getting and planting of seed, the watering and the worry, the Miracle-Gro and the tying with twine of frail tomato plant limbs to cages. The rototilling and rerototilling and re-rerototilling, I thought of the growing weight of my magnificent Early Girls and Beefsteaks and Better Boys—all the young tomato lives cut short by these bastards.