Jigs Gardner
Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
This is a lesson in petty capitalism; it is also an implicit lesson in the thermodynamic constraints that lie behind all systems of production.
I do not think we realize what a blessing we have in American farmland. It is all we know and we think it's the norm. We took our prodigious production in Vermont for granted. The cold cellar under our kitchen was twelve feet from dirt floor to ceiling, the granite block walls were fifteen feet on a side, and we filled the room with food: four barrels of cider, a barrel of salt pork, a barrel of curing hams and bacons, a twenty-five gallon crock of sauerkraut, cabbage and carrots and beets buried in sawdust, shelves loaded with jars of canned beans, tomatoes, corn, juices, pickles. We needed it because we were feeding twelve, nine of them growing boys, and we had many visitors, sometimes seating twenty-five at table, but the point I want to make is that we thought we could manage that kind of production anywhere.
When we moved to Cape Breton, however, we found ourselves in an agriculturally marginal environment on podzols, those soils of the north stripped of minerals by glaciation, heavy unyielding clays. We did not realize what we were up against, but we had sense enough to lime the land (thrice in our first ten years), which helped the hay to improve, but we were never able to get a significant second cutting, and the pastures, pervaded by native grasses which I couldn't plow so often, were inferior to the hayfield. Of course, for summer milk production first-rate pasture is necessary, so none of our cows produced much more than 10,000 pounds. I sometimes felt that we were pushing production out of the land, struggling with a grudging environment.
I have been thinking about this because I am writing an account of our thirty years in Cape Breton, delving into our voluminous records and journals. Yesterday, for instance, I asked Jo Ann if she could recall what she sold at her first craft sale in 1986, and at once she reached into a drawer to produce a thick envelope of inventories from the fourteen years to 2000: she started with jam and herb salt, and by the end was selling cheese, herb tea, soap, dried flowers, horehound, rag dolls, mittens, potpourri, herb blends, flower seeds, basil, dill, and mint vinegars, booklets of her recipes, and copies of her books. By then she was earning as much as $2000 at a Friday-Sunday sale.
Speaking of money, that's all in the record, too. We earned nothing, and I mean nothing, the first two years and we spent $5000 each year out of our savings. That's what we spent every one of those thirty years, give or take one or two-hundred dollars. We began to earn something, $1700, in our third year, and although the amount fluctuated, we were in the black by 1976 and never looked back. In 1992 we made $8,486 from farm sales, $4,912 from craft sales, and $6,851 from writing. Jo Ann had three books in print and we were both writing for magazines.
What were we actually producing? I have already mentioned our low milk production, which was, however, sufficient for our needs. We didn't sell much milk, but we did a good business in butter, cheese, curds, buttermilk. Here are some figures that I found surprising: from 1962 to 2007 we made 10,417 pounds of butter, 2,330 cheeses from 1966 to 2007, and Heaven knows how many pounds of curds - I got tired of all the addition. It's not so much when you average over the years, but still, I'm impressed.
We always canned a lot, even after we bought a tiny freezer in the mid-1980s. In 1979 we canned: sausage, headcheese, lard, horseradish, rhubarb, string beans, blueberries, pickles, chicken soup, apple sweetmeats, plums, shell beans, broad beans, catsup, pickled beets, chard, salmagundi (pickled herring), codfish, smelt, smoked herring and mackerel and salmon, tomato juice, apple butter, venison stew, nasturtium relish, and the following fruit juices - rhubarb, strawberry, elderberry, grape, cranberry/apple, raspberry, black currant. We picked 512 quarts of strawberries and 187 of raspberries, and we dried three gallons of apples and made two and a half feet of apple leather. By the 1990s Jo Ann was making over 500 jars of jam each year for the craft sales.
The demands of the sales taught us much and made us work harder. There were four major ones in Sydney, the big city on the island, in November and December, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, with 200-250 exhibitors, so popular that admission was charged. Five thousand people might pass Jo Ann's booth on a Saturday afternoon. I think the popularity was due to the fact that people were only a generation or so away from living crafts when they had woven cloth, spun wool, reddled flax, carved handles, built boats and woods sleds as part of their lives. I knew people who had done all those things, and I even knew a man who had built a sawmill from scratch, forging metal parts in a potbellied stove.
Once Jo Ann induced customers to sample her herb salt, she had her foot in the door, and gradually she added other herb and flower products to her repertoire, which meant we had to produce more and do it more efficiently. We had been harvesting from all our gardens, but it wasn't enough; they couldn't sustain gleanable growth, leaves and blossoms, throughout the summer. Earlier we had discovered the answer to the soil infertility problem in our vegetable gardens by building raised beds lined with plastic and filled with soil made of rotted manure, sawdust, and eel grass, so we made one sixty-five foot long and four foot wide just for harvesting herbs and flowers. Of course we limed and manured and fertilized all our gardens, and we trimmed and cleaned them in the fall, but we were more meticulous with the harvest bed. Not a trace of weeds or plant debris was left to harbor pests or diseases, and the earth outside the logs was scraped with a hoe to kill slugs and cut worms. All added manure was carefully worked in with a fork. In spring a sprinkling with an all-purpose fertilizer like 10-10-10 ensured heavy leaf growth and sustained fruiting and budding.
Not all harvesting was confined to the bed. Apple blossoms were needed for one of the potpourris, and since we had a dozen trees around the house, we spread sheets on the ground in June and every day we would pick them up and shake the fallen blossoms into a tub. For rose petal jelly we had a thick hedge of Rosa rugosa "Rubra Plena," and in the afternoon we would pick the abundant blooms. Rosa gallica "Officinalis," Apothecary Rose, is more fragrant when dried, and that was the basis for Jo Ann's rose potpourri. We drove the express wagon out on the roads in July to gather White Sweet Clover or Melilot (Melilotus alba) with its lovely fragrance of new mown hay, coumarin. In October we walked a couple of miles through the woods to a lagoon near the lake where we picked cranberries. These were the gleanings from the natural world on which we could not always depend, but the harvest bed never failed us.
We sold the farm, and now it is a rarely used summer home. An old friend went by there not long ago, and he writes that the daffodils still bloom beside the lane; a lilac, badly in need of pruning, still grows beside the house, but of the harvest bed nothing remains but a tangle of brush and traces of rotted logs. Nevertheless, here are the account books filled with firm writing, done at the end of a day of work I can hardly imagine doing today, and yet we did it and here are the figures to prove it, to show that with some thought and determined labor the force of entropy in an inimical environment can be overcome for a time. We cannot ask for more than that; we must not settle for less. *
