The Greenhouse

Saturday morning and its pouring rain hard like the beginning and the end of everything; my dreams are about playing basketball with my friends in the city and red acid soil erosion everywhere, nothing for miles but gray asphalt and housing projects, dry leafy lettuce fluttering in the dusty wind. I sit up in bed and now Im here and the mist is rolling off the lake and the wind is blowing a loud cry pounding the windows of our dark room in the farmhouse. Everythings green and wet as usual. I write down Abbys dreams next to mine: she dreams about being on a ship with her friends off the coast of Africa, the hoodlum kids she went to high school with doing spraycan art in a yellow room with a swimming pool and some big gathering. Untangling from the blanket fortress weve created I slip out of bed into my dirt encrusted pants and wool socks; tip toe downstairs pulling on my heavy black rubber boots and yellow rain jacket and stumble out the door and down the rocky path. Ive just started my first day of two weeks on greenhouse duty, checking to make sure everythings growing alright in our warm plastic and rebar world weve created for the seedlings down the hill. Walking along the path, my boots crunching on the gravel and splashing puddles, I pass by Liz and Brents house and theres smoke coming out of the chimney, thick and cedar. I picture them in bed snuggling and I smile. Our teachers house is like a little fairy hut covered in vines with plants and trees growing out of everything. I stare at the cayenne pepper plants in their window as I walk past and think briefly about the summertime. I pass the red barn where all the cows are hiding from the rain, their black eyes peaking out behind the door curiously, run my finger along the dead electric wire fence, and continue down the path along the creek and the fruit trees.
I've been living on a farm in the middle of the forest on a tiny island between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island for the past month now. My back is strong from shoveling manure and wood chips and pushing wheelbarrows of rocks around all week. I can feel the muscles in my thighs sore from lifting heavy stuff and riding my bicycle on windy roads. I gaze up into the forest which surrounds us on all sides. This place is more like a museum than the real world I know all too well, a model of how the world could be if we hadnt fucked it up so bad with our industrial revolution and greed. There are so few places like this left on the planet. The forest is like a university, infinitely complex in all of its multilayered relations.
The farm is at the bottom of a valley, a cold sink in the thermal belt, 2 or 3 degrees cooler than other places around here. Were at the bottom of a watershed too so the soil is full of nutrients and were right next to a lake. The land Im walking on used to be swamp until the creek was dug to rechannel the water in the 1920s by the first group of homesteaders. People making a place for themselves amidst the wild.
The greenhouse is filled with wooden flats full of seedlings: tomatoes and broccoli and spinach and cauliflowers and onions and leeks and peppers and eggplants and lettuce, rows of little green cotyledon hands reaching for the sky. To get the seeds to germinate we have to create the right mixture of moisture, temperature, light, and air so that the enzymes inside the seed coat are activated and start breaking down the stored carbohydrates into sugars for the little dormant plants inside. Its all pretty fucking incredible. The plant embryos are made up of the radicle (pronounced radical) which develops into the roots, the cotyledons which are the first leaves to appear above the soil, and the epicoytl which is the growing tip. As the embryos get bigger, the seed coats burst and the radicles anchor into the ground as the epicoytls shoot up through the flats. I have to make sure everything gets enough water and open or close the vents to let air in or out.
Today the air in the greenhouse is warm and moist from the huge compost pile in the corner that we built at the beginning of the week. The compost pile is a mixture of compost and nettles, manure and dead leaves. The trick with compost is to get a good balance of carbon and nitrogen so that we create the right conditions for bacteria and everything breaks down evenly into high quality soil.
When I get back to the farmhouse me and Abby start cooking up a bunch of food. Because class is early during the week, we usually only eat oatmeal or cereal for breakfast, but this morning we go all out. We bake a flat of wheat biscuits with raisins and cinnamon and fry up the sweet potato pancakes from last night, finish off the jalapeno corn bread that our house mate Adam cooked up and dish out the sweet tofu sour cream experiment thats been sitting in the refrigerator. The weekends are our time to relax and eat. Me and Abby spend the rest of the morning in the kitchen studying Spanish from this old textbook we found in the student library upstairs. Its from the late 60s and was put together by something called the Modern Language Association and has all these crazy photos of businessmen walking down the street in Buenos Aires, Argentina and petroleum refineries in Bogota, Columbia and supermarkets in Lima, Peru. and students battling police in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. On an island with absolutely zero Latino culture, we both struggle to keep the language flowing in our mouths. While we wash dishes, we listen to the Los Compadres/Nico Saquito tape from Cuba and Abby teaches me how to meringue, my graceless feet trying to keep up with her flowing three-step. It occurs to me that were really good for each other sometimes, we balance each other out and have so much to teach one another.
So the deal is Ive been going to this farm school studying sustainable agriculture where we intermittently have class or work in the fields starting at 8:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. Its something Ive been wanting to do for a long time and by a very convoluted set of circumstances I finally took the plunge and here I am living on a tiny island growing food, my backpack in the closet. We live in a house with a bunch of people who come from much more rural backgrounds than me and my friend Abby. Ive been feeling stupid constantly because I dont know how anything works and theres so many things I just never learned about being a total city kid. its blowing my mind on a daily basis. But Ive also been going through really intense shit: flashing back to elementary school and having all these crazy realizations about how traumatic and fucked up my childhood was. Now that Im actually in one place I have a little bit of time to stop and reflect all sorts of stuff has been kind of hitting me in the face. The memories come in floods and theyre hard to deal with, I feel insane a lot of the time. Its strange to realize how full of hate and insecurity I can be sometimes, how I beat myself down and can see the seeds of self-destruction of our entire planet in my own thoughts and actions, how Ive been mangled by my surroundings a lot more than I used to think. All my crazy neurosis become really apparent when Im alone in the woods with myself and all the city noise is gone. As peaceful as it is here, I walk through the woods and have old songs about nuclear war in my head, songs about the end of the world.
But its really awesome here and Im learning a whole wealth of knowledge thats opening my eyes really wide. Im learning about how trees grow in spirals and how the moon revolves around the earth and the earth revolves around the sun; how the seasons change because the northern or southern sides of the earth get more light because the earth is tilted at a 23 1/2 degree angle and constantly spinning and the tropics of cancer and capricorn where the sun hits the earth at a 90 degree angle during the summer and winter solstices; all our lines of ladditude and longitude -- how we split up our space and time, days and nights, hours, days, weeks, years. Im learning about how to germinate all different types of seeds and all the different parts of a flowers and plants, all the different kinds of trees around me.
So much of the organic farming were learning is about figuring out ways to work with nature, using the materials that are already around -- learning how to plant companion crops that help each other out rather than just planting big fields of the same thing. Ive been learning little things like that carrots and tomatoes grow really well together, redwood pigweed makes eggplants more resistant to insect attack, broccoli grows well with sage and peppermint. Ive been learning about how its possible to sow cover crops of clover or alfalfa to keep the weeds from coming up and then planting straight into them so we dont have to rely on herbicides. Mulching the ground with a layer of straw or cardboard to keep everything moist and keep the weeds from coming up, mimicking the forest floor; trying to create attractive environments for birds and snakes and other predator insects so we dont have to rely on pesticides to kill off the bugs munching on our vegetables. Ive been learning about putting together the right amount of nitrogen and carbon materials to make good compost mixtures - putting everything back into the earth and fertilizing our fields without using chemicals that are going to destroy our soils; learning about crop rotation and letting the chickens and sheep graze and shit on sectioned off pieces off the farm to keep the grass down and the soil rich.
Modern day industrial agriculture is so based around the practice of monocropping - killing off everything and using tons of petro-chemicals and sketchy irrigation systems and fungicides -- fighting against the natural order with our skewed views of progress. Ive been studying the history of agriculture and how it mutated to the agribusiness world of today and the genetic manipulation of crops and all the recent insane politics behind bio-technology that keeps me up at night. World food production is so much more based around the assimilation of the developing world into the market economy and multinational chemical companies profiting off peoples fucked political situations than it is about trying to actually create sustainability and feed everyone. I knew this stuff vaguely but it all clicks together when youre out there working in the field everyday. As Ive been living on this lovely peaceful island, Ive been reading about genetic erosion and how were slowly losing all the diversity in our global crops by forcing farmers all over the world to grow hybrid varieties of staple crops while the old varieties that the seeds are originally descended from become extinct within less than a generation; Ive been learning about how all those new global trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT that have been passed in the last few years have given private companies the right to patent plants they discover in the jungles of the developing world so they can further control our food and drug supply.
I spend some time reading but I spend most of my time outside learning about indicator plants --species that only show up under certain conditions like dandelions who have deep roots and indicate the sunsoil is easy to penetrate, ferns that pull up calcium from deep under and show up after clearcuts (of which there are quite a few on this island, the sound of chainsaws all the time.) Ive been learning about solar mapping and building greenhouses and the and the right way to prune trees so they produce more fruit. We have a weekly tool making workshop where weve been melting down steel rods in a propane brick forge and hammering and grinding them into blades.
In our permaculture class we learn about this method called time stacking which is a way of regenerating land that isnt being used for food production and has been all depleted and fucked by abuse. The idea is to plant a series of young fruit trees, shrubs, windbreak, ground cover, and annual vegetable beds all together at one time. If things are set up in the right way with intercrops of taller and shorter species then produce can be harvested every year, the soil can get built up over time, and within 20 years therell be trees everywhere. So much of the problem is that us humans have a hard time thinking about the long term effects of our actions, its so easy to feel distanced from the future in the middle of the city. Im trying to find practical applications for all this stuff in an urban context, thinking about community gardens visions of tearing up the concrete and planting trees, teaching kids how to grow food and laying the groundwork for alternative economies based on self-sufficiency and community empowerment.
So yeah, were out here learning about sustainable models and trying to create some kind of future out of what we have left to work with. Trying to gain autonomy from the nightmare culture and empower ourselves by learning about whats going on under our feet and all around us. Its all about learning how to place elements in an order where they assist each other -- learning how everythings connected, learning how to view stuff as positive resources instead of problems, cycling energy back into systems rather than letting it all drain out. Its incredible realizing that so many of the lessons Im learning out here are metaphors for relationships between people and life in the city. Just like out here in the forest, stability is all about diversity and thats a lesson that everyone out there has to learn in one way or another.