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By Root 847 0

We relied as much as possible on the organic section and skipped the junk, but were getting our food mostly from elsewhere. At some point we meant to let go of the food pipeline. Our plan was to spend one whole year in genuine acquaintance with our food sources. If something in our diets came from outside our county or state, we’d need an extraordinary reason for buying it. (“I want it” is not extraordinary.) Others before us have publicized local food experiments: a Vancouver couple had announced the same intention just ahead of us, and were now reported to be eating dandelions. Our friend Gary Nabhan, in Tucson, had written an upbeat book on his local-food adventures, even after he poisoned himself with moldy mesquite flour and ate some road-kill. We were thinking of a different scenario. We hoped to establish that a normal-ish American family could be content on the fruits of our local foodshed.

It seemed unwise to start on January 1. February, when it came, looked just as bleak. When March arrived, the question started to nag: What are we waiting for? We needed an official start date to begin our 365-day experiment. It seemed sensible to start with the growing season, but what did that mean, exactly? When wild onions and creasy greens started to pop up along the roadsides? I drew the line at our family gleaning the ditches in the style of Les Misérables. Our neighborhood already saw us as objects of charity, I’m pretty sure. The cabin where we lived before moving into the farmhouse was extremely primitive quarters for a family of four. One summer when Lily was a toddler I’d gone to the hardware store to buy a big bucket in which to bathe her outdoors, because we didn’t have a bathtub or large sink. After the helpful hardware guys offered a few things that weren’t quite right, I made the mistake of explaining what I meant to use this bucket for. The store went quiet as all pitying eyes fell upon me, the Appalachian mother with the poster child on her hip.

So, no public creasy-greens picking. I decided we should define New Year’s Day of our local-food year with something cultivated and wonderful, the much-anticipated first real vegetable of the year. If the Europeans could make a big deal of its arrival, we could too: we were waiting for asparagus.

Two weeks before spring began on the calendar, I was outside with my boots in the mud and my parka pulled over my ears, scrutinizing the asparagus patch. Four summers earlier, when Steven and I decided this farm would someday be our permanent home, we’d worked to create the garden that would feed us, we hoped, into our old age. “Creation” is a large enough word for the sweaty, muscle-building project that took most of our summer and a lot of help from a friend with earth-moving equipment. Our challenge was the same one common to every farm in southern Appalachia: topography. Our farm lies inside a U-shaped mountain ridge. The forested hillsides slope down into a steep valley with a creek running down its center. This is what’s known as a “hollow” (or “holler,” if you’re from here). Out west they’d call it a canyon, but those have fewer trees and a lot more sunshine.

At the mouth of the hollow sits our tin-roofed farmhouse, some cleared fields and orchards, the old chestnut-sided barn and poultry house, and a gravel drive that runs down the hollow to the road. The cabin (now our guesthouse) lies up in the deep woods, as does the origin of our water supply—a spring-fed creek that runs past the house and along the lane, joining a bigger creek at the main road. We have more than a hundred acres here, virtually all of them too steep to cultivate. My grandfather used to say of farms like these, you could lop off the end of a row and let the potatoes roll into a basket. A nice image, but the truth is less fun. We tried cultivating the narrow stretch of nearly flat land along the creek, but the bottomland between our tall mountains gets direct sun only from late morning to mid-afternoon. It wasn’t enough to ripen a melon. For years we’d studied the lay of our land for a better