Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [163]
I was the rebel, that was my cause. I had more than just sentimental reasons for wanting to see my turkey hens brood and hatch their own babies, however unlikely that might be. I plowed on through my antique reference for more details on nesting and brooding, and what I might do to be a helpful midwife, other than boiling water or putting a knife under the bed. My new turkey-sex manual got better and better. “Male turkeys,” I read, “can be forced to broodiness by first being made drowsy, e.g. by an ample dose of brandy, and then being put on a nest with eggs. After recovery from the hangover, broodiness is established. This method was used extensively by farmers in Europe before incubators were available.”
I don’t think of myself as the type to ply turkey menfolk with brandy and hoodwink them into fatherhood. But a girl needs to know her options.
Six quarts of spaghetti sauce, four jars of dried tomatoes, four onions, one head of garlic at the end of a long, skinny, empty braid—and weeks to go. January is widely held to be the bugbear of local food, but the hungriest month is March, if you plan to see this thing through. Your stores are dwindling, your potatoes are sending pale feelers out into the void, but for most of us there is nothing new under the sun of muddy March, however it might intend to go out like a lamb. A few spring wildflowers, maybe, but no real eats. Our family was getting down to the bottom of our barrel.
Which was a good thing for the chest freezer. I know people who layer stuff in there year after year, leaving it to future archaeologists, I gather, to read the good and bad green-bean years like tree rings. I’ve taken microbiology, and honestly, ick. I’m pretty fanatical about emptying the freezer completely before starting over. A quick inventory found our frozen beans long gone, but we still had sliced apples, corn, one whole turkey, and some smoked eggplant from last fall. Also plenty of zucchini, quelle surprise. We would not be the Crayola Family, then, but the one that survived on zucchini pie. Pretty cushy, as harrowing adventures go.
Maybe March doesn’t get such a bad rap because it doesn’t feel hungry. If it’s not the end of winter, you can see it from here. Lily and I were now starting our vegetable and flower seeds indoors, puttering in earnest under the fluorescent lights of our homemade seedling shelves. She had given up all hope of further snow days. And one fine afternoon she bounced off the bus with the news that the fourth-graders were going to study gardening at school. For a kid like Lily, this was an unbelievable turn of events: Now, children, we are going to begin a unit on recess!
It wasn’t just the fourth-graders, as it turned out. The whole school was that lucky, along with three other elementary schools in our county. School garden programs have lately begun showing up in schools from the trend-setting Bay Area to working-class Durham, North Carolina. Alice Waters founded the Berkeley programs, developing a curriculum that teaches kids, alongside their math and reading, how to plant gardens, prepare their own school lunches, and sit down to eat them together in a civil manner. She has provided inspiration nationwide for getting fresh-grown food into cafeterias.
But most of the garden-learning programs scattered through our country’s schools have been created independently, as ours