Playing Farm
Posted: April 20, 2010
Categories: News from Sustain Members / News from Sustain Ontario
One acre & one tractor at a time
Article from Edible Toronto written by Gavin Dandy of Everdale Farm.
You are what you pretend to be. It works that way even for wannabe farmers from the city.
It was like that for us. Fifteen years ago, on a whim, Karen and I grew an acre of veggies on a farm owned by a friend’s uncle. It was intended to be a fun way to spend a summer before we went back to the city, to real jobs and real life. No one told us that the simple act of pretending would transform us into bona fide farmers.
We played lots of make-believe farming games that summer. We had a well-thumbed copy of Eliot Coleman’s The New Organic Grower that we read and reread in the weeks leading up to spring planting. Coleman was our mentor; even when the farming season began we couldn’t put the book down. When we worked in the fields we kept his book clutched in one hand and a farming tool in the other. It was as if he were an old timer sitting on a rocking chair on the back deck calling out instructions.
And of course there was the tractor – no farming game would be complete without one. Ours was an old Massey with a wobbly front-end loader. I was grateful each time that old Massey did me the courtesy of starting when I turned the key. She was a champion. A bit heavy on the steering perhaps but she plunged fearlessly into grassy manure piles, emerging with prized buckets of black compost hoisted high above her head. We played inside, too. We had hundreds of tomato transplants in the house, crammed onto shelves made from old doors and steel scaffolding salvaged from the barn. Modern advances in irrigation were as nothing to us. We painstakingly tended each plant with watering can and spray bottle.
Our farmhouse played its own part in the pretending although, to be honest, it wasn’t one of those classic late-nineteenth-century double bricked beauties. It sat on a treeless knoll overlooking the road, looking like an awkward teenager in its tight grey aluminum siding. The interior was a labyrinth of weird angles and unidentified odours. But it did boast a large country kitchen with a massive harvest table that could support the full weight of any feast you could throw at it. We ate well and we ate often – mostly wholesome farm stuff, but we weren’t so naïve to think that farmers don’t have their food vices like everyone else. That spring we were expecting our first child and our midwives had given us strict instructions to keep a good supply of Coke on hand (for them, not the baby) in preparation for the birth day. We made the mistake of keeping the stash close at hand in the fridge, and by the time Bea was born I was completely addicted to icy cold caffeine. I convinced myself that since I was working like a dog (or, more accurately, like a farmer) every day from sun up to sun down it was okay for me to have Coke with breakfast.
Read the full article on the Edible Toronto website: click here.
For more info on Everdale Farm: www.everdale.org