The Seasons on Henry's Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm

White-tailed Deer

I. HUNTER’S MOON

WEEK 1. Garlic Descends

NOVEMBER STARTED WITH A WEEK OF FIRSTS. THE FIRST HARD frost. The first glaze of gold hitting the ends of oak branches. The first V of geese leaving an audible wake in the autumn sky. The first deer on the road, fine neck curved back, graceful even in death.

And then, on our way down to the bottomland, I heard Henry muse, This might be the first year we won’t get the garlic in.

Not getting garlic in would be a first. But getting it in is also a first—the first planting for the next season’s crops. We plant garlic at the beginning of November, under the Hunter’s Moon, when all the other crops are coming out of the ground.

But much of this growing season had been wet and cool, and planting in general had only been accomplished in the nick of time through a combination of luck and preparedness. With most crops, you have a number of windows of opportunity, and you actively space out plantings across the season to have new lettuce (for example) maturing every week. For much of the season, you can just as well plant carrots or beans or lettuce one week as the next. But garlic is an all-or-nothing proposition. You plant it all at once in the fall, and you harvest it all at once in the summer. Or you don’t.

This might indeed be the first time in Henry’s 16 years of raising garlic that he won’t. If the soil remains too wet to plant, we will have no garlic at all for the next season. The garlic we saved back for seed will instead go into sautés and sauces. This is not such a bad fate for garlic in general, but it would mean that a decade and a half of our careful selection of the biggest and best garlic heads—those best suited to our particular patch of earth—would be lost. We would have no green garlic to sell at the market next May and June, and no dry bulbs to sell the rest of the year. Worst of all, we would be back at square one the following fall—purchasing commercial garlic from the seed catalog rather than planting our own stock, which has adapted itself to our soil, our climate, our terroir.

The 10 percent of the total garlic harvest that we hold back to use as seed adds up to about 3,000 heads—roughly half each of the soft-neck and hard-neck varieties. This seed garlic has been hanging in long strands from the barn rafters ever since we dug it in early July. We try to hang it out of the way of traffic, but the barn is so well trafficked that it’s pretty much impossible. After conking your head a few times on a low-dangling bunch, you learn where you need to duck.

Each strand consists of five bunches, and each bunch has 20 garlic plants. The bunches are tied each one to the next, so they cascade down in vertical sheets of repeating garlic. The plan is to break the 3,000 heads of garlic into some 40,000 individual cloves, and plant them all—except for the very small cloves and any that may have gotten moldy over the humid summer—for next year’s crop.

Normally, Henry waits for the first week of November to plant to ensure that a late October warm spell won’t encourage the garlic to send up its green shoots early just to be killed off by the winter cold. This year, however, he decides to plant as soon as a window of dry soil opened and to take his chances with any ensuing unseasonable warmth. So for the last two weeks of October, he follows each day’s weather forecast closely. But every time the soil is a few days from being fit for planting, another rain comes. With each passing day, cooler air means less evaporation, and as each day shortens and the angle of the sun’s rays fall lower in the southern sky, so do our hopes.

At this point, it seems the field will never dry out enough for the annual garlic planting. But on Friday, as we spend the day harvesting for the Saturday farmers’ market in Evanston, a warm wind begins to blow, reviving our dying hopes. Henry judges the soil nearly dry enough, and says that with any luck, we should be ready to start planting immediately after returning from the market Saturday evening.

Our luck doesn’t hold. It rains most of Saturday. Not only do we have a meager market day, but we also watch our window of opportunity slide shut once more. On Sunday, the field is far too wet to even contemplate working it. Monday and Tuesday are cloudy, and the weatherman forecasts a cloudy Wednesday as well. So we go to bed with scarcely a glimmer of hope.

Nevertheless, the first thing Henry does on Wednesday morning is go down to the field to check the soil. The verdict is the same: too wet to plant. And so the day fills with other chores—moving the cows to a new pasture and digging some of the last potatoes. Then, without warning, the cloud cover cracks open and the sun pours through. At the same time, a breeze picks up, and so do our spirits. We can almost see the soil getting drier by the minute.

Henry reins in our enthusiasm and waits until noon to check the part of the field set aside for next year’s garlic patch. He grabs a harvest knife and jabs three or four inches into the soil near the west side of the field, where the sun has been hitting the longest. He picks up a handful of the loosened earth and crumbles it through his fingers, feeling for stickiness. It falls apart easily, so he moves to the center of the field and uses the knife to loosen more soil. He picks up another handful and rubs the soil between his palms to see if it forms a ribbon or crumbles apart. No ribbon.

You can tell this garlic is not for seed, but for braiding, because it’s tied near the top. Gravity tugs at the bulbs, straightening the stems and making them easy to braid.

So he moves on to the east side of the field, where the sun has just started to warm and dry the soil. He needs to be sure that working the moist soil will not destroy its structure and turn it into lumpy mud, which will turn hard as rock when it dries. So he loosens another patch of earth and rubs it back and forth between his palms. When he opens his palms, he finds a loosely formed ribbon that crumbles apart when he pokes at it with his finger.

Henry swipes his hands along his thighs with satisfaction and calls to the apprentices, No break today. Just grab a bite to eat, then come back down to plant garlic.

While they eat, Henry rough-tills the beds to open them up and let more moisture escape. Meanwhile, his longtime farmhand Matt and I take the old pickup to the barn. Matt, tall and thin as a beanpole, scrambles gracefully up the rickety ladder. He has been with Henry for eight years, helping tend the vegetables from March through November, and then making art from December through February. The two endeavors are in constant interaction, with ideas and materials from the farm flowing into his art, and with him lending more than a touch of his art to the way he reaches high into the rafters to cut the baling twine holding the long strings of garlic. He is quiet and thoughtful, and he bends low to make sure I have hold of the bottommost garlic bunch before he lets go.

As the heavy strand of 100 heads travels from heaven to earth, I catch a middle bunch and then carry the swag to the waiting truck, lay it in the bed, and return to the barn for the next one. As I carry each swag to the waiting truck, I think about the garlic’s round trip—not ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but from summer to autumn, truck to truck. There is always death involved in the daily life of a farm, and in the daily life of the world, but in general, the movement is from life to life.

With a third of the curtain of garlic dismantled and the truck bed full, Matt and I drive down to the field, where Henry’s wife, Hiroko, and the apprentices are waiting as Henry tills the beds three inches deep. He has attached three clamps to the back of the tiller, and the clamps draw straight lines over the smooth bed to guide us as we plant three rows per bed. As soon as Matt kills the engine, everyone grabs a big string of garlic and walks down a row, laying garlic every few feet so one is always within easy reach. We then fall to our knees, breaking apart bulbs and plunging each clove an inch down into the yielding earth.

Head bent to the task, I breathe in the yeasty aromas rising up from the freshly tilled earth and the sweet woodsy smells descending from the forests surrounding the field. The next time I look up, I see that Clare Howard, a local journalist, and her partner, photographer David Zalaznik, have joined us. Agricultural reporting in the Midwest is generally a recitation of statistics and weather, but Clare seeks out the largely untold stories of local sustainable agriculture. In the field, she shadows each person, asking questions as we work. A few weeks later, we read her description: Farmhands stoop low over the ground as they push thick cloves of garlic into loose loam that has lost all memory of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and compaction. She calls this cradled field both a throwback and a prayer and explains that it’s chemical-free, diverse agriculture more typical of central Illinois a century ago. It’s also an environmental and economic prototype for global survival in an era of accelerating carbon emissions, erratic weather patterns, and commercially raised produce shipped thousands of miles from field to plate.

Pockets-Full-of-Garlic Soup

Garlic planting signals both an end and a beginning. The sabbath begins at sundown. The phoenix rises from the ashes. Life, some say, begins at death (which is true, at least insofar as fungi and bacteria, those vital decomposers of dead matter without which life would be impossible, are concerned). At the end of one long exhale, the inhale begins. And what better to inhale on a cold dark evening than a bowl of garlic and onion soup to celebrate an ending, a beginning, or both? While planting garlic, we take the tiny cloves too small to grow into big bulbs and put them in our pockets. We end up back in the house with every pocket nearly bursting with garlic cloves.

3 tablespoons butter

2 cups chopped onions

¾ cup cloves garlic (about 30 small ones), peeled

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

5 cups chicken or vegetable broth, homemade, from boullion, or canned

1 cup half-and-half

½ cup dry sherry or white wine

1 teaspoon dried thyme

1 teaspoon dried sage

1 small bay leaf

3 slices old-fashioned white bread (or 2 medium-sized cooked potatoes)

Salt and pepper, to taste

Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic. Cover; cook until the onions are tender but not brown, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. Add the flour; stir 2 minutes.

Add the broth, half-and-half, sherry, thyme, sage, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer gently, uncovered, until the garlic is very tender, about 15 minutes. Remove the bay leaf.

If you have one, use an immersion blender to purée the bread into the mixture in the pot, or instead, purée the mixture and the bread together in several batches in a conventional blender until smooth and then return the batches to the pot. Season with salt and pepper.

Rewarm the soup over medium heat and serve. Croutons and/or small pieces of pan-roasted ham make an excellent garnish.

The repetitive actions soon become automatic—reaching for a head, breaking it apart, and placing each clove into the ground five inches from the previous one, blunt end down, pointy end up. I remember that when Zoe and Kazami were very young, my dad told them that if they put them in the other way around, then next spring the garlic would emerge not in Congerville, but in China. As the afternoon sun warms us, I shed layers of clothing—first my jacket, then my hooded sweatshirt, and then my shirt. I get down to my long underwear, an old red union suit, and sweatpants, but I’m still hot. I take off my boots and socks to sink barefoot into the soft earth for the last time this season.

The next time I look up, I see a compact, curly-headed, 13-year-old package of fearless life force hurtling down the hillside on a blur of bicycle. Henry and Hiroko’s youngest child, Kazami, has just gotten off the school bus, and he races down to help us. Whenever he or his sister Zoe or brother Asa come into the fields, it’s like switching on a light in a dim room. You didn’t notice before that the room was dim, but with the light on, everything becomes brighter and clearer, and the work becomes lighter and full of laughter.

In five-inch increments, the augmented team moves down one 200-foot-long bed and up the next. We plant row after row, working our way through the New York White, Russian Red, German Extra Hardy, Inchelium Red, Sicilian Silver, German Red, and Kettle River Basin. Except for the Sicilian, each of the garlic heads is tightly wrapped, with layers of paper skin strong as packing tape. Every so often, you hear a grunt of effort as yet another head is broken open.

When my dad helped us plant garlic in previous years, he used a screwdriver to help his arthritic hands do the task, wedging the tool into the center of each head to force the cloves apart. This year, he hasn’t been in the field as much. After a sickly childhood, he’s enjoyed some seven decades of excellent health. Now, as he approaches his seventy-third year with a host of undiagnosed symptoms, he is more frail and weak. I find myself beginning to feel the long, slow slide as well, in my knees and hips and in fingers that aren’t as reliable in garlic deconstruction as they once had been. As I break the heads into their constituent cloves, my thumbs begin to feel bruised, and Dad’s screwdriver seems like a very good idea.

The sun begins to sink toward the lip of the hill at the western edge of the natural bowl that cradles the bottomland fields. Chill air rolls down the hillside, seeping into the soil and into my soles. I run to the edge of the field to put my socks and boots back on. Back to planting, I realize I’m still cold, and the next time I reach the end of the bed near the stream, I put on my shirt and hooded sweatshirt, saving the jacket for my next return trip.

The team has nearly finished the last tilled bed, but Henry is tilling another, so he sends Matt and me up to the barn to bring another load of garlic down. When we return, it seems like someone has sped up the movie. Everyone is planting faster, racing against the turning clock of the earth, which is like a tide lapping at our heels as we try to outrun it. The weatherman is certain that tomorrow will bring rain, so this afternoon is our one and only chance to plant garlic this year. We have put more than 20,000 individual cloves in the ground, but thousands more await.

Clare has asked her questions and taken her notes, but she lingers like a girl on the sidelines at her first junior high school dance. Finally, she asks if she can help us plant, and we welcome her into our ranks.

The horizon suddenly gulps the sun, but a tangerine glow lingers in the sky. Henry tills yet another bed, which, even if we could complete it, still wouldn’t be the end of the garlic we saved back for planting. It feels good to have accomplished what we have over the past six hours, but it seems a pity the task has not been completed.

As we leave the newly planted field, I glance back like Lot’s wife—not the one in Genesis, but the one in the poem by Anna Akhmatova. That wife looked back at the place where she was born, where she had sung and worked, and she doesn’t mind paying the penalty, if a penalty must be paid for looking back lovingly at one’s home. I look back, with just the barest light still hanging in the sky—just enough to make out the white confetti of garlic husks and stems left scattered over the black earth. The first crop of the next season is in the ground, and to celebrate, the earth is decked out in black tuxedo and white tie for the evening.

WEEK 2. One Turkey Gets Lucky

I CAN’T QUITE SAY WHY, BUT DURING MY FIRST YEAR BACK IN CENTRAL Illinois, after nearly two decades of living in major metro politan areas in the U.S. and abroad, I decided to raise turkeys. This was before my life was taken over by the Land Connection—the educational nonprofit I founded in 2001—and the turkey-raising was taken over by my sister Teresa.

Teresa is the fourth of the six Brockman siblings, the one I was jealous of when we were growing up for her beauty and kindness. She is slender and fine-featured, with dark hair and eyes that reflect our mother’s roots in southern Italy. Even as a young adult, I was jealous of her and the charmed life she seemed to lead: marrying a doctor, having three beautiful girls, living overseas.

But things are often not what they seem. Many right things are proven wrong in this world, and many wrong things are proven right. Although it now seems abundantly clear that I was, in fact, the petty and insecure older sister, and that Teresa had made a bad match, she and I may never have become close except for the fact that her marriage ended. This bad thing led Teresa to find a house surrounded by five acres for herself and her three girls just five miles north of where Henry, our parents, and I live. And that led to a very good thing—her farming career. The very next spring, she started planting fruit trees, berries, and herbs. Within a year, she had established her own business, Teresa’s Fruits and Herbs, and began a local CSA in addition to selling at the Evanston Farmers Market.

CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, although I have often thought it would be more accurate to call them ASCs, for agriculturally supported communities. It is a direct farmer- consumer arrangement in which people subscribe to a farm by paying a set amount of money at the beginning of each year, just as they would for a magazine subscription. Instead of receiving reading material each week, they receive eating material. Every CSA arrangement is slightly different: Teresa provides a different type of fruit nearly every week for a total of 18 weeks. Henry provides seven to nine different vegetables each week for 26 weeks, ending the week before Thanksgiving.

Although Teresa’s enterprise is primarily a fruit and herb farm, she also raises flowers, goats, hens, and bees—plus about 25 turkeys a year, to help provide fertilizer and pest control. They range freely under her fruit trees by day, fertilizing the ground while feasting on dandelions, grass, rotten fruit, and bugs of every description. Each night, Teresa herds them into moveable pens to keep them safe from predators. After they are fully grown, and their fertilizing and pest-controlling work is done, they become holiday dinners for the extended family and a select few market customers. Similarly, although Henry’s farming operation is predominantly vegetable production, he also raises chickens and goats—again, mainly for the fertilizer they churn out—with the side benefits being meat, milk, and eggs.

Because they pair crop-growing and animal husbandry, Teresa’s and Henry’s farms, as well as many of our neighbors’ organic farms, mimic the symbiotic relationships between plants and animals in the natural world. For nearly all of the 10,000 years we humans have been engaged in agriculture, farming has involved a mix of plants and animals for the simple reason that plants feed animals, and animals feed plants. In nature, large herbivorous mammals coevolved with grasslands. The animals’ manure fed the plants, while the plants fed the animals. At the same time, the animals’ grazing allowed a variety of plant species to maintain viable populations. Some research shows that ungrazed vegetation tends to inhibit the germination and growth of plants by using up most of the available water and mineral resources in the soil and by producing large amounts of thatch.

From the dawn of civilization until the early part of the twentieth century, most U.S. farms integrated both crop and livestock operations because the two were highly complementary, both biologically and economically speaking. Like all their neighbors, my grandparents raised wheat, oats, alfalfa, and corn to feed both animals and humans, along with cows, pigs, horses, chickens, ducks, geese, and sheep to feed the crops with manure, as well as to feed the humans with milk, eggs, and meat.

In contrast to this elegant system with proven long-term sustainability, today’s livestock farmers have a manure problem, while grain farmers have a fertility problem. A confined animal feeding operation with, for example, 100,000 pigs, produces as much sewage as a town of 100,000 people, but the farm’s sewage is untreated. This means that by doing the right thing, according to the experts, and going to a factory model of efficient meat production, a livestock farmer has a waste problem—animal manure stored in lagoons that foul the water and air. On the other side of the coin, grain farmers who heeded the expert advice of university ag schools and the policy directives of the U.S. government (most notably, Earl Butz’s exhortations to get big or get out and to plant from fencerow to fencerow) now have fertility problems. To get their corn to grow, they must purchase fertilizer in the form of anhydrous ammonia made with vast amounts of natural gas. This fertilizer is not just increasingly expensive; it’s also a major source of pollution of groundwater, and the major culprit in the pollution of surface waters that have created the enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, a mutually beneficial arrangement with complementary solutions, where plants feed animals and animals feed plants, has turned into two intractable problems.

Luckily, here in the hills of the Mackinaw Valley, our poor timber soils and rolling terrain meant that it was impossible to get big. Because it was not possible to farm thousands of acres of row crops, many small, diverse farms continued to have both grains and livestock, which enriched the economic and environmental quality of the farms and the community. Instead of buying commercial fertilizers, our neighbors spread the manure from their livestock over their grain fields. Henry uses composted manure from Dad’s cattle—collected during the winter—to maintain the fertility of his hoophouses, which must produce thousands of seedlings each year without benefit of fallow time or legume cover crops. The manure is always composted at high temperatures, so by the time it is applied, all pathogenic bacteria have been killed. Teresa uses the high-nitrogen fertilizer of composted turkey droppings to keep her fruit trees thriving.

Since nearly all Broad-Breasted White turkeys are dispatched while young, it is rare to see a fully mature adult tom (male) like this proud, though slightly tattered, fellow we named Lucky Tom.

Although many people have commented on how stupid turkeys are—the classic statement is that they are so stupid that when it rains, they look up to see what’s happening and drown (which, in defense of turkeys, I must say I have never seen happen)—I suspect they are a lot like people. When they are in a bad environment, they are recalcitrant and appear dull-witted. But when they are in a lush and stimulating environment, they are lively and engaged. You can hear this in the turkey conversations taking place under Teresa’s fruit trees, which are full of chirps and whistles, purrs and clucks and cackles, and even gobbles.

Back when I first raised turkeys, I had 50 of the factory farm-standard Broad-Breasted Whites and 50 heritage breeds, consisting of 25 rare Bourbon Red and 25 even rarer Narragansett birds. I got them in the mail (yes, the U.S. Postal Service delivers chicks, or poults, as baby turkeys are called) and made them comfortable in a big cardboard box in my basement, with a heat lamp hanging overhead in place of the warm breast of a mother, a feeder and waterer, and plenty of wood shavings to absorb their droppings. This would be their home for the next few weeks, until they were big and hardy enough to move into the coop outdoors, and eventually out into the pasture.

Everyone falls in love with the bright-eyed fluff balls that are baby birds. I am hesitant to share them with people who consider any cute animal a pet and recoil at the notion that it will become dinner. But when two chefs from Chicago came down to visit, they wanted to see the turkeys. So I brought them to the basement and showed them how to hold one—cradling its feet under one hand and cupping the other over the top of the bird, barely touching, so as not to squeeze the life out of the delicate creature. I left them there cooing to the baby birds while I went out to do chores. When I came back, they announced they’d named one of the birds.

Oh, no, you can’t do that, I said. We don’t name birds we’re going to eat.

But that’s why we named it Dinner, they said.

And so it was that little Dinner and his cohort led a bucolic life for the next 24 weeks, growing tall and strong on organic feed (grown and mixed by our neighbors, Dennis and Emily Wettstein) and a pasture full of delicious plants and insects. The birds grew quickly and soon became like unruly teenagers, wanting to go where they wanted when they wanted. The fast-growing Broad-Breasted Whites were soon too heavy to jump or fly, but the heritage breeds were leaping over the four-foot fence with a single bound. We clipped their wing feathers so they wouldn’t fly off into the trees to roost at night—there, they most certainly would have been eaten by raccoons or other varmints. But even so, their powerful legs, plus a little flap of their ineffectual wings, brought them up to the top of fence posts and other roosts.

Eventually we decided that, for their own good, we’d put them into mobile coops we could drag along the ground to new pasture each day. As Thanksgiving Day grew near, the males began fighting, less from their ability to read the future than from the hormones of puberty. I would often return in the evening to find a number of the males with wounds on their heads and necks after a day spent working out the literal pecking order. There was not much that I could do, except look forward to the day when it would all be over.

There is only one poultry processing plant left in central Illinois, and it’s about three hours east of us, in the Amish community of Arthur. Our neighbors Larry and Marilyn Wettstein (Denny and Larry are cousins) raise a lot more poultry than we do, so I had arranged to combine my turkeys with theirs and use the same processing date. Just after dark on the evening before that date, the turkeys had settled into their lethargic nighttime state. Larry came over with the lowboy trailer and backed it up to the moveable coop. That’s when I saw that my turkeys’ planned date with destiny had come one day too late.

The males had been at each other worse than ever before, and two bloodied birds were down in a sad, feathery heap, unable to get to their feet. I grabbed each of the other birds, one by one, and handed them to Larry, who put them in the trailer. At night, even the most feisty or nervous turkey turns mellow and docile, so we quickly got all of the able-bodied birds into the trailer. Then I turned to the two casualties. Now that the tormentors were gone, one of them seemed to be recovering. I got him to drink some water, and found that he was shaky, but could stand. So I handed him up to Larry, and he, too, went into the trailer for the night.

Then I tried to get the other bird to come around. Although he would eat and drink a little when I coaxed him, he could not stand. Even when I lifted his body up, put his legs right under