This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [20]
Despite my meddling, the seedlings pushed through the soil, a V of tiny green leaves folding out from a white stem. Only the wooden stakes with Papa’s scrawly or Mama’s neat handwriting differentiated the kind of seed and date planted. They grew to distinguish themselves with the waxy double oval leaves of melons and squash, lacy carrotlike fennels, red crinkly lettuces, broccoli’s thick, rounded heart leaves, the purple veins of eggplant, and hairy stems of tomatoes. We ate meals with an army of tomato plants that crept right up around our bowls, leaving their distinct cut-grass smell on our hands as we moved spoon to mouth.
“The average for this climate is one hundred and five frost-free days per year, leaving two hundred and sixty nights that might kill plants,” Scott told Papa. So the tender tomatoes and melons were part of our family until after Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was called by old-timers, the date it was considered safe to plant outside.
Two years earlier it was another book from Hatch’s, this one by Leonard Wickenden, that forever changed the way Papa understood agriculture. As a chemist in the 1940s, Wickenden set out to skeptically analyze the claims of the fledgling organiculture—or natural farming—movement, but found that not only did chemical fertilizers deplete the soil, but vegetables tasted better when grown on healthy soil amended with organic matter and natural nutrients.
“Did you know there are billions of organisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil?” Papa asked Mama, his nose deep in the Wickenden book, the concept of a self-sufficient natural system opening the door to a new world. Conventional agriculture of the time adhered to the findings of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, the guy who developed commercial baby formula, who in the mid-1800s discovered that the chemical nitrogen was an essential soil nutrient that could be isolated and used to “feed” plants. He defined the law of the minimum, which stated that agricultural yield is proportional to the amount of the most limited nutrient. If the missing nutrient was supplied in chemical form, yields would increase until another nutrient became the minimum, and so on, resulting by the twentieth century in an economic bonanza for the chemical industry.
After the world wars, the companies that grew rich making bombs sought new markets. Agriculture was the perfect niche; small farms were giving way to large-scale commercial operations that had to sustain crops on overused land. Nitrogen, which had been used for bombs, could easily be dusted on the fields for fertilizer, and chemicals used for killing humans turned out to be perfect for killing pests. Pesticides and fertilizers became the new miracle. Soon the short collective memory had forgotten there was any other way. Wickenden, by contrast, argued for a return to the practices of feeding the soil with natural ingredients, rather than chemicals.
In the spring of 1967 Papa had bought a secondhand Troy-Bilt rototiller and set to work on a plot of land on the Franconia College property. He couldn’t afford commercial fertilizers, but knew that those expensive products were just replicating the natural forms of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium—N-P-K—that nourished the organisms in that teaspoon of healthy soil. He located free granite dust in the quarries of Barre, Vermont, for potassium and chicken manure for phosphate, and a local horse farm was more than happy to give him manure that he mixed with compost and bloodmeal to till into the soil for nitrogen.
“Even the old-timer farmers around Franconia were impressed with the success of our first garden,” Papa told his students when they returned in the fall. As well as an abundance of delicious vegetables, he and Mama gained a deeper sense of satisfaction than they’d ever known before. They’d taken control of producing their food, and it had left