By JK, on April 13th, 2012 
I’ve been reading a lot of farming books for the last year (as the members of my book club can attest). Inspired by the wonderful annotated lists at 49th Shelf, I wanted to share my own selections for essential tomes on my Gardening, Farming and Food Shelf. (I’ve also thrown in a few documentaries, just for fun.) Not surprisingly, my list got pretty long, so I’ll break it down into a three posts:
 Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman
Because this is jubilant poetry to be read in the ecstasy of summer, lying in the grass (and naked if you can manage it). This kind of love for the land and all its people is my heartsong.
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 Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
Though first published in 1854, Thoreau is still an essential text for today’s self-sufficiency movement. In this collection of essays written while living in the woods (if barely), Thoreau emphasizes self-sufficiency, return to nature, solitude, and the spiritual discovery that comes from all of these choices. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” (There is more beyond those topics to enjoy. Consider these words on reading (though Thoreau was, it must be admitted, a terrible snob about these things): “The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.”)
 Trauma Farm, by Brian Brett
I’ve talked about this one a great deal here, because for me, this was a life changer, and probably the reason this bookshelf list is so long. A memoir distilling 18 years of small farm life into a single day, Trauma Farm is part personal memoir, part natural history, part environmental manifesto, and part poetry, a sort of hymn channeled from the land itself. This modern day Walden is a love story for the land, calling on us to rediscover our relationships with nature, our food, and each other.
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 Grow Great Grub, by Gayla Trail
When I’m trying to convince people to pick up a spade, this is the book I give them. It’s a gorgeously (and clearly!) designed book, with just the right amount of detail that makes it great for a beginner or a worthwhile text to return to (I reread it frequently). Above all, though, it’s Gayla’s down-to-earth (no pun intended) and realistic attitude that makes this book inspiring. I’d also recommend her first book You Grow Girl, which is a little more basic with less focus on organic growing. Sadly it’s not as pretty due to the chick-litty illustration explosion, but it still has the same great information and approach. Stay tuned for an interview with Gayla (!) and more on her brand new book, Easy Growing (also recommended as a great companion to one of the other two). Her blog is a daily delight.
. Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life, by Julia Rothman
A whimsical, illustrated guide to farm life from tractor types to tomatoes to rooster combs. While it has some basic information (and a few recipes), it’s really all about the beautiful illustrations, which are sure to get you assembling these “parts and pieces” into your own dream farm.
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 No-Impact Man, by Colin Beaven
Part environmental experiment (and let’s face it, stunt), part philosophical text, part personal memoir, I include this book because it’s an interesting study in what we really need, and what we can do without. While the experiment is about trying to reduce the impact you have on the planet, the book isn’t about regression to the times before the glory of the toaster or the hot shower (two things I’m not sure I could live without), but rather about being consciously aware of what you do need and the impact it has. There’s a good documentary of the same title I’d recommend as well, although it’s a much less philosophical work than the book itself. (And yes, you can watch it on Netflix!)
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 Small-Plot, High Yield Gardening, by Sal Gibertie & Larry Sheehan
There is a tremendous amount of information packed into this book. While there aren’t any photos or illustrations, and it’s not really notable for design, if you want planting peppers broken down step by step (something that’s often necessary), this is the book for you. I’ve highlighted the heck out of mine, and still refer to it all the time.
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 The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir, by Josh Kilmer-Purcell
A charming, funny and candid memoir by a Manhattan ad exec (and former drag queen) who buys a farm with his partner, Martha Stewart VP Brent Ridge, and eventually launches a goat-milk soap business, Beekman 1802. This book had me laughing out loud within pages, and while you won’t get a lot of practical farming advice, our two gentleman are fascinating characters and their clash of ideals (perfection vs. self-actualization, or, as Josh calls it Martha Stewart vs. Oprah) will resonate with many. While many books by farmers disparage “hobby farmers” (read: wealthy city folk who buy up land and don’t properly use it), this book allows this oft-maligned category to speak for itself. (They have an impressive website chock full of useful info, which I’d also recommend. Their story also became a reality TV show, The Fabulous Beekman Boys, but I haven’t seen it.)
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 This American Life (TV version), Season One, Episode 6 “Pandora’s Box”
I include this episode because it was my first real exposure to the realities of factory farming. A journalist goes to a pig factory and gets an introduction to the feeding, housing and reproductive practices. The cameraman is totally overwhelmed, and actually has to take time outs from filming. He doesn’t eat meat again after the experience. (The TV series is fantastic viewing start to finish, by the way, so if you haven’t watched it or listened to the This American Life podcast don’t delay — your Ira crush is waiting.)
That’s it for this round, but there are many more books on the shelf, so stay tuned!
By JK, on April 9th, 2012 A confession: I’m a big supporter of community building in theory, but when I have to get involved, I get a little gun shy.
I was raised in a family of mostly introverts in the suburbs, where comfortable lawn buffers insulate us from our neighbours. In university I had a roommate from small-town Nova Scotia, and I discovered the inherent intrusiveness of small town living from her, listening in on phone conversations or gossip with her family as they sussed out the 5Ws of every town happening with the dedication of the most hard-nosed journalist (and a lot more delight). A couple years later I ended up in Toronto, where people may mind their own business, but sheer density and proximity force us into one another’s orbits.
Gardening is often praised as a community builder — which, as I said, I’m all in favour of in principle, or for others, but I’m wary of myself — it’s “Stranger Danger” all over. Sometimes I don’t want to impose on people, and generally I’m reluctant to go through those halting steps and stumbles that often come with new conversations and unfamiliar terrain. I usually choose the awkwardness of mutually ignoring someone over the awkwardness of conversation. (At least the former is quicker and more conducive to reading.)
But our backyard garden is itself a product of community. As I’ve mentioned before, it was our elderly Italian neighbour, Vito, who taught Steph the fundamentals of gardening, and, we’ve recently learned, his family has been growing food in our garden for the last 40 years. He has since passed away, but his wife still lives there, looking on approvingly as we work our land. Vito’s grown son passes on advice, and the occasional plant or garden implement to keep us going.
The suburban introvert in me is still occasionally uncomfortable with these over-the-fence interactions, but this weekend I may have had a breakthrough. Good Friday was a good day indeed, 14 degrees and sunny, the perfect weather for the heavy lifting of early spring garden prep. Steph had her sights set on a big day of digging and clearing and repairing and trimming, and when a couple of apartment dwelling friends came over, they soon ended up with shovels in hand. As soon as I saw the team working away (and heard the strains of the Tragically Hip over our portable speakers), I too joined the taskforce, planting the tomato seeds soon to take their place under our brand new grow light. A barbecue seemed inevitable. My boyfriend arrived and was recruited to help, and soon our neighbour insisted he pick up a shovel and expand the main bed, and we had six people on hand. By the time we sat down to burgers and beer, Steph’s boyfriend arrived, and my BF and the neighbour were discussing dinosaurs over the meal. We’d found a suspected horse tooth in the garden. The music played on. At one point I looked down from my 3rd floor apartment, and took in all the people working and all the progress we’d made. I felt a leap of pleasure.
The next day Steph and I were back in the garden on our own, continuing th e previous day’s work. We both fell to what we do best, with me attending to planting and planning, Steph to clearing and building. And then Mrs. Vito Sr. emerged from the house next door, shuffling our way with some difficulty, a plate in hand. She reached over the fence, handing us a plate of deep-fried something, which turned out to be rice balls. They were piping hot, the grease on them still glistened in the sunshine. In her broken English she explained what they were, and we talked about the weather and the garden and all the food that it had produced. And then she shuffled back inside, leaving us to smile through hot, gooey mouthfuls. I might just be developing a taste for community.
By JK, on April 6th, 2012  It seems appropriate to start Gardening, Farming and Food month with a book that not only contains all three, but could be called an essential text of the local food movement. Published in 2007, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle documents a year in her family’s life after they leave their urban Arizona home to live off the land in Southern Appalachia. Along with her husband, an environmental science professor, and her daughters Camille, 19, and Lily, 8, Kingsolver builds a food network for their family in an attempt to get all their food (or at least most of it) locally.
Kingsolver narrates most of the book by combining the informational and the intensely personal into meditative prose that can be measured or lyrical, as her subject matter requires. Her principal narrative is complemented by informational sidebars from her husband and end of chapter recipes and perspectives from Camille. While at first I had to suppress an eye roll that Kingsolver’s teenage daughter contributed to the project, I came to appreciate her perspective, one I wish I had had at her age. Her recipes (with an emphasis on seasonal ingredients, naturally) are inspiring, and it’s fitting that the book, like the farm, became a family project.
And interestingly, it was the way food played a part in family connections that stayed with me. In Kingsolver’s family, the preparation and consumption of meals are an occasion for the family to come together, to share the events of their day, to be helpful, to be playful, to celebrate. While she acknowledges that some meals must come together quickly, she notes, “If I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, as ‘Get it over with, quick,’ something cherished in our family life would collapse.” Cooking and eating become sacred ritual activities that extend beyond the practical (though this is an important part of it.)
When it comes time to put up the harvest, so much more is being preserved than peaches or tomatoes. Food not only strengthens their ties to each other, but to tradition, to family members long gone or far away. One of my favourite chapters was “Celebration Days,” a time in which food and family traditionally come together, and Kingsolver finds herself reflecting on kinship beyond her immediate family circle, and on the kitchen legacies she has been bequeathed:
“When I’m cooking, I find myself inhabiting the emotional companionship of the person who taught me how to make a particular dish, or with whom I used to cook it. . . . my tiny great aunt Lena, who served huge, elaborate meals at her table but would never sit down there with us herself, insisting on eating alone in the kitchen instead. My grandmother Kingsolver, who started every meal plan with dessert. My other grandmother, who made perfect rolls and gravy. My Henry grandfather, who used a cool attic room to cure the dark hams and fragrant cloth-wrapped sausages he made from his own hogs. My father, who first took me mushroom hunting and taught me to love wild asparagus. My mother, whose special way of beating eggs makes them fly in an ellipses in the bowl. Here I stand in the consecrated presence of all they have wished for me, and cooked for me.”
Of course it’s not all cooking and eating, there’s a good portion of the book dedicated to growing and harvesting, whether it’s the first asparagus of spring, the unstoppable summer squash, or the first eggs of Lily’s egg laying business (yes, this is an eight-year-old with an entrepreneurial spirit). Her trip to visit some Amish friends is particularly fascinating. One can’t help but be carried away by Kingsolver’s blend of enthusiasm, reverence and practicality. She makes cheesemaking seem like a snap (if not an obvious choice), raising chickens child’s play (literally). That’s not to say it’s all fun and games, like every good farm book, she’s got a fairly graphic chapter on slaughter day, she spends much of August cooped up in a steamy kitchen over canning jars, she does miss some of the foods she’s given up.
And yet my only complaint with the book is that overall everything goes deceptively smoothly. Unlike books like The 100-Mile Diet, which honesty documents some of the conflicts, tensions, and frustrations that emerge when embarking on an ambitious local eating project like this one, this is a fairly sunny portrait. (To be fair, those crazy 100-Milers, who did their experiment around the same time, were much stricter and had fewer resources.) But further, this is not the debt-ridden experience of most first-time farmers. They already owned the land, and both Kingsolver and her husband have flexible, well-paying jobs that allow them to work on the farm while earning a reliable paycheque. Sadly not everyone can have Kingsolver’s “A Year of Food Life,” as the subtitle suggests. But its main principles are still available to anyone: eat locally, and if possible, organic; grow what food you can; eat meat from animals that had good lives and humane deaths; make mealtime a priority, a pleasure; and, most importantly, share all this with your loved ones, with your community. In our mile-a-minute society, she reminds us to slow down, that time and effort come back as independence, as sustenance, as connectivity. She knows, like any good gardener (or anyone who must live through winter) that “Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.”
And read over Christmas, and completed on our winter escape to my dad’s farm, that’s what this book planted in me, a balance of expectation and longing, the delicious anticipation to see how these principles, these ideas, these passions will bloom in my own backyard.
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