Anything that’s left on the farm after the sales day Tuesday usually won’t make it until the next week and would go to the compost pile. Not waste, really, but wasted seeds, space, time, and energy. Like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, I hate waste. We don’t have anywhere large enough to store fifty heads of cabbage, thirty pounds of radishes, and another thirty pounds of split kohlrabi until I finally get around to borrowing a backhoe, digging a hole in the side of our hill, and cementing rocks together until I make a little cave to store our produce. It feels like, at this moment in the season, I’d be digging my own grave.

That’s not very appealing, so I started fermenting.

Our farm is only open to customers one afternoon a week, and radishes have a short harvest window. If we’re not lucky on timing, the radishes are too young to harvest for sale on Tuesday, but won’t make it until the following week. Leave them in the ground for more than a few days once they ripen, and they start to go to flower, leaving the bulb spicy, and woody in texture. I like to eat spicy things - woody, not so much. Fermenting is a great way to save produce from going to waste. We ferment all the leftovers radishes and kohlrabis on the beds, the ones that didn’t quite make the cut to go into bunches - nibbled on, split, or too small.

I spent several pleasant evenings the last few weeks in the outdoor kitchen, listening to the stream, sipping a beer, and cutting radishes. Once they are washed and cut in half, I spread out the clean jars, drop in radishes (or diced kohlrabis) by the handful, with garlic scapes and dill. Then I pour a saltwater brine with three percent salt into the jars until they’re filled. Close the jar and leave it out for a few days if it’s the right temperature. You’re looking for a nice spring day, 64-75 degrees Fahrenheit, or 18-22 Celsius. This is, for most people, room temperature. We don’t have AC, and it’s been in the nineties. Luckily, we’ve got a couple big fridges, one raised at a higher temperature. That’s where the ferments go.

These radishes are causing chaos in our family. Our three and a half year old daughter is often refusing to eat her dinner, demanding only more fermented radishes. We put them out for sale on Tuesday with a sampler jar, and they fly away, sold for three times the price of fresh radishes by weight.

Hot days and the inevitable arrival of the dreaded flea beetle, the little buggers that eat thousands of tiny holes in all the brassica family of vegetables (broccoli, arugula, kohlrabi, turnips, etc), signaled that it was time for heads to roll.

Viktor helped cut off the pale green cabbage heads, and we wheeled them to the outdoor kitchen where, along with Jitka, we chopped the heads into shreds. Take out the scale, plop down a tub, tare the scale, and fill the tub with cabbage, slices of garlic scapes and salt. The scapes aren’t necessary. The salt it. Three percent salt by weight is my preference, but anywhere from two to four percent does the job. Work it over by hand for a couple minutes, and it’ll start to sweat out the juices, kind of how they used to make wine by stomping on grapes. My Uncle Jim says any good wine’s got a few toenails in it.

Once you can squeeze it and the cabbage juice drips out from your grip, it’s ready to be stuffed into jars. Fill it to the top of the jar, press down, fill it some more, then press down until it submerges in its own juices. Tear a piece of the outer leaf and tuck it in at the top to hold the cabbage down and prevent the air from spoiling the top layer. You want it to ferment, not rot, and that requires an anaerobic setting. Bury a body in the ground and it turns to dirt. Bury it in an acidic beat bog, or better yet, a salt mine, and you’d recognize the face a couple millennium later. If you don’t know if it’s ready, taste it. Want it more fermented? Raise the temperature a bit, or leave it longer. Keep it simple: chop it up and add salt. It’s an art, enjoy it. Make it a science, and you’ll spoil it.

Here’s the part where I should say how cabbage has more vitamin C than oranges, and compounds that help prevent cancer, and fermented foods are great for your gut health, and make you irresistible to the opposite sex. No doubt that’s all true, except maybe the last one. More importantly, though, is that it just tastes good, there’s no waste, and you’ve got a store of food that, if kept cool, will keep just fine all winter.

Greek mythology says that the first cabbage was born from a bead of sweat from the king of the gods, Zeus. Fittingly, our sweat is salty. The best aspects of cabbage are brought out when mixed with salt. Every grower swoons over tomatoes and peppers, but the humble cabbage is truly something beautiful and divine. I can close my eyes at this moment and think about our sauerkraut and my mouth begins to salivate. The sauerkraut bought in a jar in the supermarket is sterile, cooked to kill the life that would otherwise make it something fit for the gods. So if you want the good stuff, stop by your local farmer’s market, or better yet, grow your own.

-BG

In my finer moments, despite having no musical abilities whatsoever, I feel like a conductor. But what is a conductor without his orchestra? A lunatic waiving a wand at empty seats. So no, perhaps I’m more of a painter, or yes, sculptor. My grandfather was a sculptor, you see, he formed people and animals and beautiful shapes from clay.

The making of this farm was a sort of sculpting of a landscape which attracts all sorts of life, be it bees, people, ladybugs or chickadees. It’s the life of the place that makes me ponder intelligent design, how the natural world all just makes so much sense. The ground cracks when dry to receive the rain. You must give something to the soil to get something from it, the pest feeds the predator, death brings life in a cycle where there is no waste. We invented all the waste.

Chance can’t explain all this, I know that now. There are laws and an order to this universe, and that cannot be explained by the chance bouncing of atoms. You can name the processes and organisms in a compost heap, describe them even, but you cannot explain, in any meaningful sense, how death becomes life again. Anyone who’s investigated this question in detail will reach that conclusion. It’s the conclusion of one of the most brilliant physicists who ever lived, Neil Bohr, when he said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”

I think our farm is intelligently designed, but then again, I would, because I designed it. Designing a farm, or garden, is a different process than planning a season. If you want to really optimize your farm, you’ve got to have a plan.

I don’t have a plan. And I also don’t like the word optimize. It sounds like a word salesman or chatbots use. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to run a farm for a living without having any sort of crop plan, and lack of one is frustrating for my wife and farm students at times. But you know what’s even more frustrating? When things don’t go according to plan.

I’ve tried to make one before, but have given up. It’s working out just fine, mainly because we’ve been able to grow the farm organically (pun intended) over the last seven years, and this has given me a chance to begin to grasp the soil, scale, microclimate, resources available, and observe what grows and sells well, and what doesn’t. I see a season’s crop plan like trying to anticipate what will be on a test and attempting to memorize the answers. I’d rather try to understand the patterns of a season and go from there.

But I’m rambling now. Too many long days are catching up with me.

We grow a lot of crops in a very small space. One of our strategies for doing this is succession planting.

In this case, spring onions were grown in trays on our hotbed and transplanted in late March. We add wire arches on onion beds to keep the fleece from damaging the tops. Before we added the arches, I ran radish seed in between the rows with our seeder. The small radish roots don’t interfere with the deeper onion roots and also don’t mind a little shade, even once the onions mature.

Onions work well as a companion plant with many herbs as well, especially the types that can be cut several times, like parsley, cilantro, basil and tulsi. We plant onions in between our strawberries, too.

The lettuce beds are at peak season now and have a few more weeks remaining before they start to bolt and make flowers. Then they become bitter and don’t taste very good. Two weeks before you harvest out greens, whether it’s lettuce, arugula, or spinach, you can harvest a few patches down the bed and transplant zucchinis, or peppers, or whatever larger crop you’d like. The new plants then have two weeks in the ground to establish and all that time you can still be harvesting your greens. We like to transplant zucchinis directly into beds of our Asian salad mix or spinach that is usually finishing right around mid-May when the zucchinis are ready to go in the ground.

We seeded radishes in these zucchini beds after we transplanted. I don’t think this one will be very successful, because of how rapidly the zuchs take over the bed once they get established. I didn’t have much hope this would work, but there’s no harm in trying.

We don’t leave any space bare on the farm. Nature abhors a vacuum. If there isn’t something planted, weeds will grow, and we are wasting our space, time and energy. That’s why we always try to keep extra lettuce starts on hand that can be transplanted into gaps that arise if a slug eats something or a transplant just doesn’t make it.

This middle bed has broccoli and cabbage that was inter-sown with spinach. We got three cuts off the spinach, pulled it out and filled the gaps with basil. The bed on the right with the trellis is for peas, and underneath is a bed of our Asian salad mix. The peas go up, and we can use the space underneath for a quick crop.

Another succession we’re trying this year is planting beans into garlic beds on our field. I think the beans should be a reasonable size once we pull the garlic and will have a month start already for sooner harvests.

As I surveyed the garden beds on the meadow the other evening, I counted around fifteen ladybugs patrolling the dill. It’s always been one of those crops that we’ve had a hard time growing because they’re always crawling with aphids, the vampire bugs, sucking the sap from the plants. But not this year, the dill has grown splendidly. The ladybugs were doing what the love to do, what they were made to do, eating aphids.

The lightning bugs will start glowing soon. They’re already crash landing in my salad at dinner, preparing for their glorious mid-summer display. What a remarkable creature, a lightning bug. Magical, really.

I’ve heard some discussions the last few years that we are living in a simulation, someone else’s video game. When I listen to these discussions, what I hear are people lost in a digital hell talking about “intelligent design”, what new-agers call “nature”, or what simple people simply call God. To think this is all just bits and bytes, or atoms colliding by chance with a bang, is not intelligent, and strips life of its mystery and beauty - and that’s directed at myself for most of my twenties. It’s an ignorant and blind way to experience life. But if you want to see, just watch a ladybug eat aphids, or better yet, follow the soft glowing light of a firefly on mid-summer’s eve.

-BG

We’ve got two daughters. The older one is three and half. When she’s in the mood, which is almost always when she’s well-fed and has had enough sleep, she enjoys tagging along with me while I do various jobs on the farm.

Usually I’m up before she is, feeding the chickens and taking care of morning chores. If I get a late start and Marie is up, we put on our boots together, she reminds me to put my dirty socks away so mom doesn’t get mad again, and we hold hands through the forest to the chicken run. Marie takes her little wheelbarrow, I take mine, and we walk up to the brewery for the food scraps. She stops me at the road to look both ways, and she knows to stay on my right in case a bike or car comes flying down the hill. When we get to the brewery we turn the wheelbarrows around, she parks hers next to mine, and I put a couple pounds of potato peels and dumplings into hers, and empty the rest into mine. On the way back she tells me to pick her a lilac flower off the bushes on the side of the road. She tries to hold it while wheeling, then decides to stick it in her little pocket.

We roll them back to the run. She runs ahead, and I open the gate for her. She wades through a flock of a hundred hens and tilts her wheelbarrow up till the food scraps fall on the compost heap, then she turns and hold the gate for me, closing it behind me as I enter. Sometimes a hen escapes and I hold the gate as she shoos the escaper back into the run, telling her in mixed English and Czech to go home.

In late afternoon, we collect the eggs. She climbs up on a bucket or old chair and takes the eggs carefully out of the laying boxes and places them in the cartoons. If they are dirty, she passes them to me and I brush them off with a wool sponge. We count the eggs together as we put them in the cartons. Right now she makes it up to seven and then starts again at one.

We’re fortunate enough to live on a little piece of land surrounded by a forest and bordered on two sides by streams. It’s a paradise. When I stop to think about it, I’m living my childhood dream, outside from sunup to sundown, playing in dirt next to a babbling brook. She has no idea how lucky she is, but I know, one day, she’ll know.

Even if you’re not fortunate enough to have a farm, there are still plenty of opportunities to put your kids to work. My wife had a friend over the other day who has a son around the same age as our daughter. She wasn’t interested in playing in the sandbox with the boy and was crawling all over Lucie in the outdoor kitchen. Lucie wanted to visit with her friend in peace so she paused the conversation, pulled out a crate of leeks with some yellowing leaves and told Marie to peel off the old leaves. That kept her busy for half an hour. Pealing the paper off of garlic or onions works too.

When you harvest and dry beans, inevitably some of them with shrivel up and brown. These aren’t good to eat. Pour a jar of beans on a plate, explain that we don’t want to eat the shriveled ones, put on some Chopin, and you’ve got at least an hour of peace.

Cooking with kids is great, if you’ve got the time. When you have four hungry farm students to feed before noon, sometimes you’ve got to get chopping and don’t have the time or patience to pick eggshells out of batter or make sure your child isn’t going to cut their fingers off with a knife. This was the case for Lucie the other day with a five-month-old in the carrier on her chest and Marie throwing a fit because she was hungry. I heard the crying all the way in the garden. By the time I walked over to our outdoor kitchen, Marie was happily pulling pumpkin seeds out of the slimy innards of a squash. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me with a smile that we would bake them and that they will be crunchy.

Earlier this week I walked into the home garden and saw Marie sitting on a blanket in the shade pealing the shells off of boiled eggs. I don’t enjoy peeling boiled eggs, but Marie was completely into it. She was careful and precise. We had egg salad for lunch and I don’t bite down on a single bit of shell.

If you want your kids to learn how to work, you’ve got to have tools their size in a place that is easily accessible. When I cut the grass with a mower and the trim the edges with the weed whacker, it leaves bits of grass on the ground. I don’t have to say anything and within an hour I’ll see Marie in the yard raking up the grass, putting it in her little wheelbarrow, and mulching the currant bushes.

When I killed about twenty-five hens a few weeks ago, Marie saw me out the window while playing with her dolls, which means backing cakes in her little toy kitchen out of pine cones and flower petals. She ran outside and asked what I was doing. I told her I was killing hens because they are old, and when they are old they stop laying eggs. But that’s alright, because we also eat the chickens’ meat and boil the carcass into a broth. She helped me pluck off their feathers and stood on her chair to get a close look as I pulled their innards out. Sometimes I’d pull a whole egg out, which I handed to Marie, and she added it to her wicker basket telling me that we’ll eat them for breakfast.

We have way too many toys that we got as gifts from family and friends. They mostly sit unused in boxes in the corner. When we go for walked around the garden or in the forest, Marie gathers sticks, pine cones, pebbles, and flowers. Her little table is always full of them. She sorts them and arranges them just as I used to arrange toy soldiers.

I’d be lying to say that it’s not tempting to pull out a screen when we get desperate. So far, Marie watches maybe 2–3 hours of nature shows a month. Usually, this is only because we lack the creativity in the moment to give her some little project to work on.

Of course, kids should have lots of unscheduled time to play. But even at a young age, it’s important that they have a role in the household economy. They, just like all of us adults, want to feel like they have purpose, that they are useful and skilled. Give them the chance, and you’ll be amazed at just how capable they are.

-BG

If you think you’re more inclusive, more accepting, more patient, you’re probably right. But try for a few years to employ and instill some decency in those white leghorns, and I’d wager you wouldn’t judge me for what I did. Besides this, they’re getting old, and old chickens stop laying. Most importantly, our freezer is getting precariously low on stewing hens.

I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed the other night, after reading fairytales to my daughter, and go to the chicken coop to round up those destined for this race-based execution. So, I woke early, filled the big steel pot I found at the dump with water, lit the gas on the outdoor stove, walked to the coop, positioned myself as the gatekeeper, and opened the small hen door. Out hopped a black, black, brown, cock, black, white! Gotcha. Any black or brown hens that didn’t look in peak health, missing feathers, or pale combs, also went to the crates. Buckets of feed thrown down, waters filled, and trip to the brewery for the kitchen scraps completed, I wheeled twenty-three poor leghorns away from the flock to the execution tree.

Sharpen a couple knives, dip my pinky into the steaming hot water on the stove, take a deep a breath. One by one, I take them out of the crate, give them a pet on their back, and thank them for their eggs, compost, manure, entertainment, and broth. Then a take them by both feet, turn them upside down and lower them through an upside down aluminum cone. Pull their head down by their comb till their neck is stretched tight, and draw a knife along the bow of their jaw. Blood lets out, warm and sticky, bright at first, then turning to a maroon red, staining, then soaking into the damp moss growing up the shady side of the tree stump.

From what I’ve been told, once the blood is flowing, the chickens are dead within seconds. I sometimes doubt it when they manage to kick themselves upright and hang with one wing over the side, and shake their half severed necks so blood spatters everywhere. They sure look alive. But I know they’d behave in such a way, even without their heads. My Oma used to tell a story about how when she was a little girl, her grandmother chopped a chicken’s head off for a stew in their basement. It ran around in circles spurting blood everywhere for half a minute. That memory lasted her a lifetime. I assume anything without a head is dead.

Most of what I do day to day in running our farm and homestead is work that I enjoy doing. Often times it doesn’t even seem like work. Killing, plucking, and cleaning hens feels like work. Though the work isn’t fun, I’ve had worse jobs, like selling women’s shoes in a shopping mall. There are few things more valuable for our family than a freezer full of our own livestock. Or, in this state, deadstock?

Yes, it’s meat. I know you’re not supposed to joke about killing animals. I learned this when we named our pig Sir Francis Bacon (we called him Frank). When killing farm animals is brought up around polite society, the response is often a shallow somberness, even slight disgust. This is, mind you, from people who eat meat, who just laughed with friends while eating a burger, a third of which ends up in the trash can.

Then there are those that think it’s more humane, or healthier, or “eco-friendly”, or just want to control some aspect of their lives, or display their virtue, or conscientiousness, for not eating meat. Well guess who ate that thrown out burger? The chickens who laid the eggs you just bought. Chickens love meat. Give a hen a choice between a worm or a sprouted grain, it will go for the worm every time.

And if you only eat plants, I’ve got news for you, plants love meat. Drop a fish head or pour chicken blood at the base of a tomato plant and watch what happens. GMO soybeans shipped from South America, processed in a factory into tofu, and wrapped in plastic, is not reducing suffering, or “good for the planet.”

But you’ll hear that phrase repeated like mockingbirds. We did too, my wife and I. Before we started a farm, we flirted with vegetarianism. But what we realized once we started growing our own food, and understanding the flow of energy, is that if we are to have anything resembling a permanent system of agriculture, animals are a necessary part of it.

The problem comes not in eating meat, but in buying meat that is from tortured animals. You are what the thing that you eat, eats. If that animal was fed industrial, toxic garbage, what’s that make you? If it suffered in life and death, does that suffering not become a part of yourself?

An uncomfortable fact of life is that some things have to die for others to live. To some, the cow that’s killed to make a burger is a tragedy, a crime even. They eat bread, or soy, and say it’s good. They’ve never watched a flock of ravens follow a tractor, feasting on the shredded remains of nesting birds, moles, rabbits and worms. Or felt the specter of pesticides drift over a field, which smell like paint, and poison every living thing in its wake. Is there not death is that loaf of bread? In that can of beans? Isn’t how the animal lived just as important as how it died? If in life and death, it was treated well, and died without suffering, then what’s wrong? To ignore the circumstances of the life and death of an animal, and construct a diet around categories of food, is just blind ideology.

My three-year-old daughter joined me for a while. I wasn’t sure how she would react, but she was interested, and asked a lot of questions. Why are you killing the chickens? Why do you put them in hot water? Will there be a whole egg inside them when we cut them open? Why don’t we eat the heads? A very good question. We feed them to the cats, but next time we’ll add them to the broth. She helped me pull their feathers off after scalding them, but mostly just followed me around and watched and listened as I told her what I was doing and why. When I had killed the last one, she asked if we shouldn’t bring more to kill. She likes broth.

I don’t feel good about killing our farm animals. Though, it doesn’t keep me up at night either. In fact, I sleep much better knowing we have a freezer full of meat, that when simmered on the stove, yields a thick broth, the kind that fills you up, cures a cold, or a hangover; the kind of broth with a layer of yellow fat on top, that seizes into gelatin when it cools down.

And when it’s my job to clean the bird, to strip the meat from the carcass, I clean it like one would eat a crab. I scrape the lungs out of the cavity, along with the tiny boiled yokes of eggs that will never be laid, and peel the thin strips of meat from the vertebrae. I dig with my nails into the crevices between joints, chew on cartilage, and suck the marrow from the bones.

And if that sounds weird, or like it’s too much, maybe you should draw the knife sometime. Or think about the person you pay to do that dirty job for you. And after that, spare a moment for the meat on your plate, that was once a living, breathing, feeling being. You might feel somber. Sit with that for a moment, but only for a moment. And then give thanks.

-BG

About ten years ago now, I was riding my bike home from school one day and saw this author by himself outside a pub smoking a cigarette. I stopped my bike, said hello, and told him I enjoyed his book. In the most typical Czech self-deprecating manner, he told me, Someone gave you a bad Christmas present, eh? I asked him what he thought about the approaching election between Trump and Clinton, and he told me what was either the most glib, or most profound thing I’ve ever heard about modern politics, Some people like rap music, some like country, others like classical. Choose your album, but the record label is the same. What type of music do you like? With that, he took a final puff of his cigarette, flung the butt on the ground and walked back inside the bar.

Building a safer world and more hopeful tomorrow, yes we can, change we can believe in, hope, stronger together, I’m with her, future to believe in, forward together, make American great (healthy) again. Which song did you like?

I almost met the Czech President the other day. I pulled in the driveway with a truck piled full of horse shit and saw my wife and two daughters returning from a walk. My wife told me that the president and his entourage had just walked up to the brewery, a stone’s throw from our farm.

I’m going up there to meet him, I tell her. Don’t be silly, she says. I ask my little girl if she wants to go meet the president. She bobs her head and offers me her hand. As we start walking up the hill, she asks what a president is. He’s kind of like a king, I tell her. I practice saying Good day, Mr. President aloud in my finest Czech.

We walk up the hill past a couple of black Mercedes with tinted windows and two unimposing Secret Service guys on the bridge that return my greeting and keep chatting. The brew master meets us by the door. Today’s a big day, Brette. That’s how Czechs say my name when they address me. The president’s here. I tell him I heard the news, that I’d like to meet him. As we stand talking by the door, an old guy wearing a hat with CIA stamped on it comes walking slowly up the ramp. I almost laugh out loud at the thought that he is actually in the CIA and this is his ironic cover. I wonder if in Russia, people wear KGB hats.

We follow the CIA agent inside, and stop at the bar to order a beer and lemonade, for me and Marie, respectively. The barmaid pours the drinks with a little extra enthusiasm today, pointing with her eyes to where the president sits. I turn and take a good look at him sitting with his entourage. I wonder if they feel comfortable. They look comfortable in their nice clothes and makeup, all smiling, eyes wide, sipping their beers. How well do they know him? Do they speak formally or informally together? They must be aware that everyone in the place is aware of them, though Czechs aren’t gawkers. I’m not Czech. He’s got a nice look, the president, dignified, full head of silver hair, thick but trimmed beard to match.

The brew master is inside now and waves us over to the last free seats in the opposite corner of the President. We sit down at the edge of the table next to a pudgy guy on his laptop, a huge camera lies next to him. I put it together that he’s the president’s photographer when he turns his screen towards me and shows me the president, mid-stride, walking through a field that I recognize as up the hill from the farm. Nice one, I say. The guy nods, satisfied with such good feedback of his photo. I tell him that we have a farm just down the hill. I don’t know what the president’s plans are, but if he wants to stop by and get a few photos with our chickens, they wouldn’t mind. The guy turns his screen back towards himself and doesn’t say anything. I feel like an idiot. He’s not the one to talk to about what’s on the president’s schedule. I’ll probably have to send an email.

I turn to the brew master and ask if the big visit was a surprise. He tells me no, that they knew, but kept it a secret for weeks. I wasn’t in on it. The manager of the bar goes up to ask the president if she can get a picture with him. He graciously agrees. I help Marie finish her lemonade and ask her if she wants to go meet the president. She tells me that she wants to go home. I try to imagine shaking hands with the president and then look at my hands. They’re filthy. I realize my coat and jeans are splattered with mud and my boots still have horse shit on them. I take Marie into the bathroom with me to wash my hands. I ask her again if she wants to meet the president, and again she says no, she wants to go home. Alright, I tell her, we’ll ask Miša if she can take our photo with him. I give Miša my phone and start my approach, carrying Marie on my hip. She starts trying to climb over my shoulder with the urgency of someone escaping a river full of snakes. My heart starts beating faster. I try to run through what I’ll say. I get within ten feet of the back of that silver head, and a serious-looking Secret Service agent, in too small of a jacket, stands up, shakes his head at me, and moves his arm a little, like he might cut my throat if I take another step forward. Message received, I turn around, take my phone, and head to the door, defeated.

I kicked myself the rest of the night that I had missed my chance to meet a president in real life. I would’ve told him that I’m an American immigrant, but I love this country, and that my wife and I started a farm. And if that went well, I would’ve invited him there to meet our chickens. He could get a photo with them, too, if he wanted.

My wife can tell I’m sad as we eat our dinner of pork chops and potatoes. She says there’s no point in being sad and repeats that phrase loved by all Czechs, nedá se nic dělat. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t change it, so don’t worry about it.

First thing in the morning the next day I drive up the hill to the lumberyard to pay my tab on some planks of wood I bought for a shed last week. I brag to the guys working there that I almost met the president the day before. They perk up and say they read he was in the brewery in the papers. And is he good? I ask. Yea, sure, he’s good. He’s good. They nod, assuring me. When they don’t say anything else, I tell them that I have no idea, I’ve never even heard the guy speak. He’s got a good face though, looks like someone who could talk you into doing something. Yes, he’s good, they say. Normal. You know, normal. They’re all fuckers, but he’s alright, just a normal fucker. In a nation where pessimism and cynicism are considered the only rational approach to life, that’s about as great of a compliment as anyone could receive. I think the President himself, had he heard that coming from these working class guys could turn that into his next campaign slogan, just a normal fucker. Slap that on the side of a bus.

So I figured the guy was alright. The only things I know about him are that he used to be a communist back in the day (just like the current Prime Minister), and more recently, was a big shot general in NATO. When confronted on the campaign about being a communist, he said he was young and stupid. As far as excuses go, those are two very good ones. I voted for Bernie Sanders back in the day. I was young and stupid.

As far as I know, he didn’t offer any excuses for being a NATO general. I guess he felt like he didn’t need to.

Jan used to work on our farm. He’s now starting his own farm. I asked him recently if he gave it a name yet, and he told me it’s called Dědova Farma (Grandpas’s Farm).

Jan’s grandfather was a school teacher in the 1950s and got into a bit of trouble passing out some literature to his students. What was written on those papers was deemed to be against the State. So he was arrested, and because it was the 1950s in Czechoslovakia, he was sentenced to death. He went to work one day and never came home. His young wife had no idea what happened to him.

His execution was postponed a few times, and eventually his sentence was reduced to only ten years. He served time in five different prisons all around the Czech lands during his decade locked in a cage, and would come to call it “his little tour.”

Jan’s grandfather met all kinds of guys in prison: murderers, WWII resistance fighters and Czech pilots that flew with the RAF, actual Nazis, everyday guys like himself, and even had the distinction of doing time with a former president of the nation, Gustáv Husák, whose last name means “goose.” They’d all eat lunch together, and according to Jan’s grandfather, they all more or less all got along, except with the former president. Some of those guys would later fill a box with white feathers and mail it to Prague Castle with a note that said, We plucked your goose.

After ten years, Jan’s grandfather was released from prison, and like any good husband, went looking for his wife, only to find she was now married to another man, and pregnant. His wife left her second husband to return to him, and the other poor guy killed himself. They ended up having a boy. That’s Jan’s dad.

Jan’s grandfather took up gardening. It could be hovering above freezing and raining sideways all day, it didn’t matter the weather, he was in the garden. He spent the rest of his life, in every moment he could, planting flowers, weeding carrots, watering tomatoes, and pruning his fruit trees. If you’re ever lucky enough to go to the village where Jan’s family lives, you’ll drive down a country lane sheltered by a row of large walnut trees. Jan’s grandfather planted those.

He lived to a ripe old age, saw the Wall fall that brought a record scratching end to the reign of the communist party, and witnessed the revolution which followed, that set the track to, well, whatever weird sounds you can call the satanic pop music screeching through every supermarket speaker. Till his dying days, whenever politics came up, his grandfather usually didn’t say anything. But if he did, it was this: The political situation in this country was shit, is shit, and will be shit.

There’s no shortage of people who have only ever known peace and material progress that would bristle at this sentiment, who think that if only they could play their song, things would be better.

But they’re just young and stupid.

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” - Kurt Vonnegut

“To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain and worse for the heart.” - Wendell Berry.

Everyone talks about how healthy gardening is for you, but that’s a pile of horse manure. Which, as a gardener, I can’t get enough of. It makes great compost, and once you start making compost, you’ll want to put it to use. And when you do, you’ll be inflicted with an intoxicating desire to continue stewarding death and resurrection, as I discovered, when I returned from a summer away to find an enormous pumpkin sprawling out of our guerilla compost bin. It was all downhill from there.

Over time, this compulsion festers into a form of madness, the deepest ravines of which can be avoided in the realms of your own garden indefinitely, or in someone else’s garden that shares your sickness. But to venture beyond the guarded spaces of a well-made garden, in this day and age, is to invite an onslaught of imagination - that south-facing wall would be an ideal spot for a fig tree, and those piles of leaves would be perfect to make potato beds. I’d plant an apple there, and a service berry to the south of it, with mint and lavender below it, and yes, definitely a few sea berries and raspberries as a hedge along the fence to hide the neighbor’s lawn. He waters the grass? You’ve got to be kidding me. And now he’s got the Roundup? Get a goose, for God’s sake!

On a recent visit back stateside, I told my friend he ought to compost his food scraps.

“You’ve got the space. Wire four pallets together and put a lid on it to keep the critters out. If it smells bad, add leaves, wood chips, charcoal, or shredded cardboard. That’s it. That’s all you do.”

He sighed. He’s patient with me because he knows about my condition.

“What am I gonna tell the neighbors? ‘There’s my compost pile.’”

“What else are you going to talk about with them? Football, the weather, Washington D.C.? Hell yea, that’s your compost pile! You tell them this: ‘I’m not a sucker who spends his weekend bagging leaves all day. I just throw them in this box here I made for nothing, and it all decomposes to a nice black earth that smells like a forest floor, and then I toss it in those buckets over there on the deck and grow some kickass jalapeños. You like spicy stuff, No? Well hang on there buddy, I’ll go get you a jar. Hey, Suzy! Bring out one of those jars. No, not the tomato sauce! Ah sure, bring one of those out too for Phil here. He’s going to start his own compost pile. Ain’t that right, buddy?!”

That’s what you tell the neighbors, man.

“Uh, yeah, sure, man, maybe I’ll give it a try.”

“Really!? That’s great. I knew you weren’t like all the rest of them. So let me tell you about composting your own humanure and using it to grow food. I promise, it’s not crazy, and completely safe, and actually really easy, and will save you water and money, and you’ll get exercise and, and…”

But now my friend’s eyes are glazed over, he’s got a queasy look on his face. He gives me a limp smile, nodding absently as he guides me out the front door and slowly shuts it in my face as I blabber on about compost toilets, permaculture, no-dig beds, and chickens.

His wife walks in the room shaking her head. “What happened to Brett? He used to be so… normal.”

My friend looks up at the ceiling, closes his eyes, let’s out a sigh, and replies, “He started making compost.”

I’m ruined, really. Try as I might to find beauty, inspiration, or a single thing worth preserving, Suburban America, my homeland, now cripples me with thoughts of waste and lost opportunities. And mind you, I’m not just talking about growing good food. Food is certainly needed, as everyone has to eat. But the ugliness of the landscapes we are creating is destroying us from the inside, faster and more surely than the toxic food most people eat daily. We are rapidly turning what was somewhere into landscapes indistinguishable from any other, one gigantic strip mall. The green spaces that remain are sterile parks, dead cemeteries, and golf courses, more toxic than coal mines.

We have ritualized the disposal of fertility, and therefore the potential productivity of the land people live on, when each year, how many tons of grass and leaves are thrown away? This energy, this sunlight, this ‘waste,’ could grow nearly as many tons of food. A shame? No, it’s a tragedy leading to disaster and destitution.

I am more at ease here in central Bohemia because it is an edible landscape, and an edible landscape means a beautiful one, naturally. Within a literal stone’s throw from my house there are two apple trees, an English walnut, four hazelnuts, lindens with edible leaves, honey fungus and Judas Ear mushrooms, dozens of elderberries, rose hips, a handful of wild plum trees, a cherry tree, a patch of red and black currants, gooseberries, wild garlic along the stream, and stinging nettles everywhere in spring. Aside from the cherry, I’m not responsible for any of it. This is not unique. Even within the city of Prague, there are public orchards and vineyards. Walk through any park or drive down a country road, and you’ll find fruit and nut trees everywhere. Go to any Czech’s house, and I mean it, anyone’s house, and at an absolute minimum, you’ll find an apple, or plum, or pear, or walnut tree in the garden. More likely, you’ll also find a plot of potatoes, a few rows of garlic and onions, a small greenhouse for tomatoes and cucumbers, a pumpkin growing out of a compost pile, and currants and raspberries along a stone wall.

In these landscapes, I am well. Take me to an Ikea parking lot, or a massive monoculture field that characterizes much of the agricultural land in the U.S. and Bohemia, and my eyelids will start to twitch, an idiotic trance will take hold, and only a straightjacket will keep me from throwing something hard through glass, and running for my scythe and shovel.

I sometimes lose hope that I can recover from this madness. In these dark times, I confess with shame, I wish madness upon the rest of the world, and I hope that Mother Nature works her magic in her well-known mysterious ways. I, after all, was saved by a mulberry tree. It grew along the edge of a thicket of trees that me and my friend used to play in as kids, planted by a bird, no doubt. The sweet taste of those long black berries, the glossy big leaves of the tree, leaning out of the thicket for light, and the feeling I had plucking them off the tree and stuffing them into my mouth, and knowing that this was good. This is what it was all about.

Then the tree was cut down, and I went to school, and watched TV, and played football, and did drugs in that thicket we used to play in as kids, where the mulberry grew. I nearly forgot what I had come to know as a child.

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He explained that the chickens can learn to go through the chains, like a curtain, but if a predator shows up, they think it’s a solid fence and don’t bother.

I was doubtful. So what did I do? Well, what would you do? I went home and scoured the internet, searching for confirmation. I turned up nothing

This was back when we only had about fifteen chickens. So, I thought, might as well give it a try. Five years later and we’ve never had a fox or marten in the coop, though I see them around sometimes.1

We train new chickens by taking out 6 chains the first day, 5 the next, then 4 and so on until they know they can come and go through the curtain as they please.

There are automatic openers out there, I know, but I like this no-tech solution - no batteries or electric needed, no chance of malfunctioning.

I wrote that over a year ago. We now have an automated door straight from the Republic of China that runs on three AA batteries. I can set a timer for when it opens and closes. It’s great, until it’s not. Luckily, my wife and I just so happened to be taking eggs in the late afternoon when the door suddenly closed the other day. I checked it, and it appeared that the extreme cold zapped the relatively new batteries, causing it to reset. No warning light, no alert. It was now, according to the timer, midnight. If we would have taken the eggs only a few minutes earlier, the door would have been shut for the night without us seeing it and there is a good chance we could have lost the whole flock. The automated door is great, until it fails. And given enough time, it will.

The reason we installed the automated door was because a fox learned how to scale our fence. With the chains, the chickens come and go as they please, and given the chance, they are out the door at dawn. Here in Bohemia, it’s fully light at 4:30 A.M. in June, so the chickens were out while everyone was sound asleep. As long as we had the chains on the door, we never had an predator get into the coop, but we started loosing hens to early morning raids from hawks and foxes simply because we were sleeping when they raised the alarm. If I want to sleep well, I still have to check each night that the door is down. The automated door means I can sleep in. But I know I shouldn’t. Any good farmer is out the door at dawn. That’s the best part of the day.

Keeping a flock, being a flockster, if you will, teaches one a lot. It sure has me. Sometimes I’ve even learned the same lessons twice. So I’d like to impart a few tips, tricks and pieces of wisdom on keeping a flock of healthy hens, which have saved us time and money, bettered the living for the flock, and kept them safer.

Take eggs from outside the coop

Build egg laying boxes that allow you to take eggs from outside the coop. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. I remember thinking that first year while taking eggs each evening, “Wow! Could this ever get old?” It does. Especially after a long, hard, day, when it’s cold, and muddy, you haven’t cleaned out the coop in awhile, it’s already dark, and you forgot a headlamp. The last thing you want to do is go on a blind egg hunt while stepping on chickens and chicken shit in the coop. I built a simple shelf with doors that open to the outside so we can comfortably stand outside while taking eggs. Our chickshaw has a similar design. I highly recommend you do the same when building a new coop.

Clean eggs?

“How do you have such clean eggs?” I’ve gotten this question from a handfull of other flocksters. The answer has a few parts. I pick up the wood-shavings and sawdust we use as our from a nearby carpenter’s shop. Mr. Olda calls me up and says, “I heard the chickens have dirty feet.” That’s the code for, “Get the hell over here and pick up these bags of shavings.”

So I drive over and park the truck behind the big wooden catapult and mosey on in through the open garage door. It always smells like fresh cut spruce, cigarettes, and glue, and there are pictures of naked ladies on the cabinets. Sounds horrible, I know, but I often manage to stick around for a while and see what they’re working on. Eventually I gather the courage to ask the old ponytailed carpenters if they wouldn’t, by chance, have a spare minute to help me heave the half-ton bag of sawdust onto the back of the truck. They do the obligatory displays of annoyed, ape-like grunting, light a new cigarette, for strength, and then we all go outside and hoist the bags onto the truck.

These shaving are basically pure carbon and act like a sponge, drying out and coating the chicken’s feet, so that they don’t track in mud on the eggs. If they happen to poop in or around the box, the droppings get coated in the shavings, like a warm chocholate ball rolled in cocunut, and therefore don’t dirty to eggs.

Chickens do most of their pooping at night. You do not want them sleeping in the boxes. To prevent this, I screw ‘L’ brackets (you can also just bend a nail) along the bottom of the row of boxes and set a piece of wood on it after I take the eggs in the afternoon. You’ve got to remember to take them down in the morning, otherwise they’ll be laying eggs everywhere but the boxes. The best time to train them is from the start. It’s harder to break already established habits. If I hen starts trying to sleep in a box, you could kick her our of the box every night for a year and she’d be there the next night. The only way to break it is to prevent her from going there in the first place. I’ve found that after two weeks of training, I can stop putting the planks up at night and they stay out of the boxes.

Those two strategies for keeping eggs clean are preventative, which is the best approach. Inevitably, you’ll end up with some dirt on the eggs. We use a soft wool sponge to lighty wipe them down, if need be.

Reduce feed loss with an old gutter

We buy an expesnive organic feed mix. It used to drive me crazy to see how our hens would kick their feed everywhere and waste at least a fourth of it. So I got an old gutter and hung it up on wires at breast hight for the hens - a chicken trough. If they try to jump on it, it swings and throws them off. We hung one off the side of the chickshaw too and it works great, one less thing we have to carry around when moving the coop.

A freind of mine puts the feed in a gutter laid on the ground on the outside of the fence, the openings of which are big enough for the hens to stick their necks through. This works well if you don’t have chicks. Otherwise the chicks find their way out these holes and the farm cats have a field day.

Put your flock to work

Our hens work for us. You could call it a coop-eration, though I’d say we’ve got the better end of the bargain. We don’t end up in a soup pot after three seasons. Chickens want to work for you, so put them to work! They are the masters of converting ‘waste’ into compost. They will work from sun-up to sun-down, doing their favorite activity in the world, scratching through mountains of organic materials to find bugs and sprouts.

Our flock can flatten a pile of leaves as tall as I am in a day or two. Once the pile is flat, it becomes much more difficult for them to work with gravity to scratch through the material and look for waste. That’s where we come in. Some people go to the gym in the morning. I turn compost. It’s a lot more fun, and rather than consuming, you’re producing. I don’t turn as much compost as I used to now that we have lovely farm students who, like the chickens, like nothing better than flipping piles. We also keep plenty of forks and shovels hung on nails in the run, always ready to recruit touring groups on the farm for a quick flip. I mean it when I say this - they really enjoy it. And I do too, standing off to the side like Tom Sawyer watching his friends paint his fence for him.

At each stage of the composting process, value is added. Chickens don’t eat raw potatoes, but worms do, and for chickens, worms are like steak. So we feed potato peels to worms, and the hens eat the worms - the highest value source of food for the hens, and because of the compost system, completely free.

Inevitably, many thousands of weed seeds find their way into the composting materials. The warmth and moisture of the pile alerts them that it’s time to sprout. The flock makes short work of what would weed seeds in our beds, converting the weeds, feed, and worms, into eggs. The eggs are just a bonus of a system that can generate enough compost to run a 50 member CSA farm.

Springs & Magnets

Put springs (bungee chords work too, but don’t last as long) and strong cabinet magnets on the gates to the run. The spring makes sure no bird slips out behind you when you enter and you don’t have to shut the gate behind youself. The magnets ensure the gate is fully shut and makes a clicking sound when it slams in place. If some debris prevents the gate from closing behind you, you hear it and can fix it, rather than coming back to the garden on Easter morning and finding eight dozen hens devouring your spring plantings. It’s good to latch the gate if you’re not around, but if you’re coming and going out of the run, magnets can save you a lot of time, and lettuce.

Wire over the run

It’s not necessary to put an entire net over the run to prevent aerial attacks, but rather, a few wires zigzagged like a drunk spider’s web works well for us.

Diatomaceous earth

I’ve found that the best way to prevent pesky parasites is to buy diatomaceous earth and add it to their dry bathing area (you should always have a dry place where your girls bathe in the dirt). Diatomaceous earth is a natural sedimintary rock formed from sharp-shelled micro algea. The powder feels soft, but microscopically is very abrasive (you should avoid inhaling it). The dust gets on the exoskelton of the parasites on the chickens and scratches their shells which causes them to dry out and die.

These are a few of the methods and materials we use to care for our flock of hens. I’d be thrilled to hear from other readers sharing their own tips and tricks. If you don’t have a flock, get one, or buy eggs from someone you know who does!

-BG

One of the biggest lies that has become a pithy adage of the last century, is that money doesn’t grow on trees. Fruits, lumber, even the leaves, are things of value that can be converted to cash. Our house is built and heated from wood. Our potatoes grow out of piles of leaves. We paid good money for trees six years ago, and now people pay us money each season to eat the fruit that is raining down from the trees and berry bushes we planted. Beyond the immediate value of their products, trees and bushes create the landscape in a way that is truly priceless. What would an Ivy League school be without those massive oak lined quads? Even more vitally, we breathe what trees exhale. How much is that worth? Let’s not be fooled by shiny screens and digits. All real value comes from the ground, and a landscape without trees is poor indeed.

Most of how we make a living comes from selling vegetables and eggs. It’s great, and I enjoy it. But to tell the truth, I got into farming wanting to start a nursery business. There is a tyranny to growing annual vegetation. Every spring, you’re once again starting from scratch. Give me a perennial tomato any day, over the frost sensitive, long maturing vines.

Perennials vegetables, bushes, and trees are where my heart is, because one can get to know them over the course of a season, or in the case of a fruit or nut tree, a lifetime. They are still in the garden when it’s freezing cold and snow blankets the ground. They grow bigger and stronger, more capable of fending for themselves, and more productive each year. These are the plants that make the landscape, that would remain, even if I took a year, or five, off of farming veggies. Which, with each season of veggie growing, starts to become a more appealing idea.

Sell a man a bowl of currants, or sell him the bush that grew the bowl of currants. We do both. The former might not be as profitable in the long run for us, but I see a bigger profit in propagating valuable species and empowering people to grow their own food. It might seem crass to reduce plants to cash. I would agree. I also see that any way of making a living that is not profitable does not last. And if we want to last on this planet, we need a lot of valuable edible perennials in our landscape very soon.

It could be that our entire system of agriculture in the old world traversed down the wrong path based on tilling. Imagine a system of permanent agriculture with trees as opposed to annual crops. J. Russel Smith had just this in mind when he traveled the world in the 1920s and wrote Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. In one chapter, he compares corn to chestnuts and finds them to have similar yields. No doubt yeild have risen since the 1920’s, but chestnuts rain down consistent crops year after year and can grow on steep mountainous slopes, with no fertilizer, tilling, or irrigation, or diesel. When we stop to consider the beauty that could be had in agricultural land as a giant forest of chestnut, and other fruit and nut trees, we’re approaching Eden. It also sounds an awful like what the first Europeans described when they landed in the Americas.

As of now, the nursery aspect of our farm remains a side project. Most of the plants I’m propagating are being planted in the young orchard/food forest at our larger site up the hill from the main garden. The plants that have left the farm are barters, or payment to neighboring farms for help, or vegetables.

We are lucky to have access to land in a capital city. Because there are enough people and restaurants within biking distance, it makes sense that most of our business is in food. There are, I’m sure, young people out there that would like to start a meaningful business, but do not want to, or can’t afford to live in or near a city. The further you go from your customers with food, the more expenses: delivery vehicle, refrigeration, gas, insurance, etc. This is not the case for plants that you can ship across country using the postal service, with customers paying the cost of shipping. Depending where you are, however, you will need to navigate (or ignore) the bureaucracy that comes with selling plants.

If this can be done, a backyard nursery offers an excellent opportunity for a young person to start a meaningful, viable, low capital start-up, and feel good while doing it - spending time outside, working with their hands.

Several dozen college students tour the farm each season. Many of them are from my alma mater, studying business, like I did. I always stop in the back corner of the main garden and float my entrepreneurial visions for them. It goes something like this:

Come on down the pathway, that’s right, file in here, gather around. Anyone here interested in starting their own business someday? A couple shy hands go up, usually a ratio of 2 out of 12. Great. What would you like to start it in? Apps, tech, vulture capital, or usually, “I don’t know.”

Take a look at this back corner of the garden, a great example of marginal land; north sloped, shady, in a frost pocket of a microclimate in this little valley. It’s weedy and neglected by us most of the season. This whole space is the size of, what, four or five parking spots?

What do you see? It’s rare anyone can identify a single plant except the strawberries when they have fruit on them. I don’t judge them. Eight years ago, I couldn’t either. There are saplings of willows, walnuts and pecans. These bushes are currants, over there is gooseberry, and raspberries, and that’s elderberry. As you can see, there are strawberries growing underneath everything.

Let’s look at just the currants, one of the easiest perennial fruit bushes to propagate. I bought four unique varieties (named cultivars) of red and black currants five years ago, paid about $10 a piece. When I planted them, I pruned them back to their base and stuck the four or five stems of each plant into the ground. Each of those stems rooted in the spring, and by the end of the year they were knee-high currant bushes, that looked like these. I can take 4–5 cuttings from each of these rooted cuttings.

Now, I could leave those shoots, dig out the bushes, plant them on the field, and the following year I’d have a little basket of fruit from the bush. Or I could prune them all off and stick them in the ground, and within two years I’ve gone from one bush to twenty. Another year of the same treatment, and I have over 100. By the fourth season I’ve got maybe 500, and five years on, well over 2,000. You get the point, exponential returns.

This little bed is about 3 square meters (three square yards). Last fall, I took pencil sized black currant cuttings from a cultivar called ‘Othello’, from that mother bush over there. There are about 60 cuttings with big, healthy root systems that are now small bushes ready to make fruit next year. In the US, you could sell each cutting for $15. That’s $900.

The costs involved are: a few hours several years ago wheeling in leaves and horse manure to improve the soil (a wheelbarrow and shovel), a half hour last fall taking the cuttings and sticking them in the ground (pruners), and less than $2 in rent to the city for the year.

The average lawn size in the United States (and Missouri, my home state) is 12,600 ft (1,170 m), or 4.5 tennis courts. With one tennis court (260 square meters) of growing space, and 20 cuttings per square meter, that’s 5,200 cuttings. Fifteen bucks a pop, that’s $78,000.

Growing the cuttings is the easy part. Now you have to sell them. But you’re all young people, you know the internet. You can easily make a nice website, do promotions on social media, add videos of how you got started, the health benefits of the fruits, recipes, whatever marketing angle you want to take, and you’re off and running. It will take a few seasons to get your name out there and build up your clientele, but you need a few seasons anyway to get the exponential returns going, improve your soil, and hone your skills. Once you have some experience and proper stock, you can pitch local landscaping companies and municipalities for larger orders.

It might be tough to sell thousands of currant bushes each year. It would also probably get boring after a few years. Luckily, there are many perennial herbs, bushes, and trees that are very easy to propagate. A shortlist of berries includes: red/black/white currants, gooseberries, jostaberry, raspberries, blackberries, grapes, and seabuckthorn. In trees: willows, cottonwoods, walnuts, chestnut, any and all fruit trees from seed. They can be sold as seedlings for rootstock, or grafted after a year and sold for four times the price. Herbs: mint (there are many varieties), lavender, rosemary, hyssop.

If you’re located within an easy drive of a populated area, and have the space, you could leave some of the bushes to grow fruit and cook it into marmalades, make tea mixtures with the leaves and dried fruit, then invite people to your nursery for tours, or a “you-pick” where they pay you to bring their own baskets and harvest the berries. Once trees/shrubs are established, the main work is harvesting. City people will pay good money to work on a farm for a day picking berries. While they are there, you can sell them plants to take home to their garden, or if they don’t have a garden, the teas and marmalade. Obviously there are endless variables for everyone’s context, but the point I’m trying to make is that a backyard nursery could turn into a full-time business.

There is work upfront in preparing beds and planting the mother bushes. If you’re that kind of person, you could call this ‘exercise’. I prefer to think of it as a day well spent. The bed prep can be as simple as dumping piles of leaves and grass on the ground in long mounds.

Just like growing lettuce as a cash-crop, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Unike lettuce, growing perennials is a long term investment into a landscape that can pay off over a lifetime. I can’t imagine a better retirment plan than for a young person to plant an orchard. By the time you’re fifty, you could be making a living working 50 days a year.

Starting your own nursery business is not an easy way to make a living. But it is a way to make an honest, meaningful living, spend time outside, and work with and increase nature’s gifts. It’s also good to be your own boss. I like the fact that I can speak my mind and don’t have to worry what HR will think, only the Mrs.

So, anyone interested in starting their own nursery business?

Usually, it’s crickets.

If you are interested, here are just a few people who are actually doing it:

Edible Acres: Sean and Sasha have a YouTube channel where they share an incredible wealth of skills and experience; everything from making biochar to planting garlic, and saving seeds. They are a huge inspiration for us in starting our farm, especially in designing the chicken-compsting system.

Twisted Tree Farm: Akiva Silver wrote an excellent book called Trees of Power. In it, he goes into detail on running a small scale nursery, including various propagation techniques.

Stefan Sobkowiak: Converted a monoculture apple orchard to a productive permaculture orchard. Check out his great videos here.

Backyard Berry: A great substack with all kinds of useful information for growing perennials.

Stick around for part two, in which I will detail the various propagation techniques we use on our farm to grow a lot of perennial plants in a very small space.

-BG

I start to turn away from the window when a flash of fur catches my eye. A fox comes trotting through the gate towards the house like she owns the place, crossing the garden with a black chicken clenched between her jaws. She looks like she is smiling. The fox, that is, not the chicken. The chicken looks dead, but I don’t take much time to assess the situation from the window.

Still not fully awake, I say something that sounds like, “What the fox!” Take one step one way for my pants, decide I don’t have time, and spin around towards the door.

Lucie is sitting up in bed, back against the window, baby on her breast. She cranes her neck to look out the window, and our three-year-old jumps on the bed to see what is happening.

I stumble out the door in my underwear and slippers, and all I can think to do is yell, “Hey!”

The fox turns her head mid-trot, sees me, drops the chicken, starts to run, then turns back, hesitating for a moment with her paw in the air, not wanting to give up her prize. As I jump off the porch, she takes off across the yard through a gap in the fence, up the hill, and into the forest. I hurry over to the chicken, my feet crunching on the frozen grass. Her eyes were open, but I know she is dead when she starts flopping around like a hooked fish on a boat deck. I watch her for a moment, recalling the time I killed a feisty young cock who was too aggressive with his ladies. I laid his neck under a shovel handle, thanked him, put both boots on the wooden handle, and pulled on his legs till his neck broke. When I put my hand atop his wings to hold him still, a shock of pain shot up my arm, like touching an electrical socket. I still don’t know what that was.

A sinking feeling of dread takes hold as I think about the rest of the flock. Rarely has a fox come and killed only one chicken. On the few occasions it’s happened, it was usually a massacre. Foxes are sadists. They kill everything they can, seemingly just for the fun of it, and then ferry the dead, trotting on the sticks, one by one to their den until the sun comes up.

I don’t want the blood to settle in the meat, so I lift the still flopping hen by the legs and lay her across the raised flower bed next to the outdoor kitchen, pluck a knife off the magnet, hold her skin tight down her neck, and draw the knife below the bow of her jaw. Blood lets down the side of the empty flower bed, staining the wood dark red.

I turn and hurry to the chicken run, expecting the worst–dead bodies strewn everywhere, feathers, and blood. How could this happen!? Did she get in the coop last night? I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that automatic door on the coop! Damn Chinese-made garbage.

I am soon apologizing to the Chinese when I find an otherwise unharmed flock. They don’t even seem nervous or afraid, as you might expect when you see one of your family members get carried off by something with canines. Maybe they didn’t like that one, wanted to get rid of her, talked her over the electric fence? The fence. Was it on? Where did the fox get in?

Following the mobile fence line around the forest, I came to a sagging corner. The pole was bent within a few inches of the ground. The freeze-thaw cycle had worked the metal spike loose. Like a Comanche, I bend low to the ground, raking the dried leaves around with my hand, looking for tracks, but don’t find any. Though that doesn’t mean much, I’m no tracker.

I complete the loop along the perimeter of the fence and conclude that I had found the point of entry, and likely, exit. Though, strangely, it wasn’t the usual crime scene of feathers strewn around. This was premeditated, a clean hit job with a bungled escape route past the house.

The electricity is on. I discover that when I hastily try to set the fence back up, and receive a jolt that makes me yelp. Turn it off, set up the fence, flip it back on, the entire time tripping over the flock of chickens that were eagerly following me, letting me know in clear terms that they are very hungry.

Toss one bucket of wheat on the first pile of compost, steaming despite the cold. Much of the grain gets kicked into the decomposing materials, where it absorbs the water and heat, causing it to sprout within a day. The chickens eat it dry, but they like it better sprouted. It’s better for them, too, more digestible, more nutritious.

Empty a bucket and a half of their mixed feed into an old gutter suspended from the ground a few inches by wires. If they try to jump on the gutter, it swings, and they fall off. This way they can’t kick the feed around where much of it would get wasted. A friend of mine puts it in a gutter on the other side of a fence, so they have to lean through it like cows in their stalls.

Open the spigot, what Czechs call the “kohout,’ or rooster, and nothing happens. It’s frozen. I let out a breath and follow the vapor up to the canopy of hundred-foot-tall alders gently swinging in the light breeze. I hadn’t noticed they were planted in straight rows until our neighbor thinned out the understory last winter. This bothered me at first. I guess it was because it didn’t seem natural, a forest in straight lines. But then I met the owners, well into their nineties. The lady told me her grandfather planted the trees to be cut continuously to fuel their tractor.

“Your tractor ran off of wood?” I asked.

“Lots of machines ran on wood before and during the War. I knew how to drive it when I was twelve. Neighbors used to ask me to come plough their gardens in Spring. They’d pay me, too, which I found so funny. I would’ve done it for free. I liked driving that thing around so much.

“Why were these trees left to grow so big? You got a diesel tractor?”

“No. The communists came and took everything.”

The land was returned when the regime ended, yet in this time of freedom, they aren’t allowed to cut the trees on the land they own. They’re so old and big, they’re protected by the State.

I’m glad they’re here, and I hope they remain. They make me feel small, like a squirrel, and they shade the garden from the hard western sun during the summer. I think the chickens like them too. Those little jungle birds from Southeast Asia, they feel right at home under a tall canopy.

A few carrots left in that bed, nice bunches of celery and parsley there, I take stock of what I’ll harvest as I walk through the garden to the stream, two water jugs in hand. Step carefully on the woven carpet roots of an alder, dip the jugs into the stream, examining the little icicles forming on the roots right above the surface of the flowing water.

Pour the water into the big plastic tub, then back the wheelbarrow to the gate of the chicken’s run as they close in around me. They know what the wheelbarrow means. I kick the gate open, and it slams back, thumping me in the back. The ground swelled in the cold. I wiggle my way through the narrow opening and go up the hill to the main gate. My key won’t turn the lock, so I remove my glove and cup the lock in my hand. The metal burns as it sucks the warmth of my body. It thaws enough that I can turn it. Cold tax paid, I head up to the brewery.

As I cross the little wooden bridge to the brewery, I call a greeting out to the owner, who’s supervising his two goats grazing on the low-hanging branches along the quiet road. We live in a hollow, what Appalachian people call a “holler.” No cars come down this hill unless they’re coming to the farm, the brewery, or the neighbor who lives between us.

I empty the trash can full of potato peels, dumplings soaked in gravy, and bits of meat, and wheel it back to the chicken run. They attack it like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Someone left a bag of eggshells at the gate. I empty them along the fence, and some of the hens immediately start devouring them. A few chickens in everyone’s backyard, and there would be no wasted food.

I watch them eat for a moment. What if the fox returns for her chicken? Our chicken. I hurry back through the alder forest to the outdoor kitchen, and there she is, just where I left her. I fill the big glazed pot I found at the dump with water, turn the knob on the gas stove and light it, then head inside.

The moment I enter, Marie is at my feet, asking every question you could imagine a three-year-old would have about what’s happened. “Daddy, where do foxes live? Do they bite? Is the chicken hurt? Why are there foxes?”

I try to answer as best I can as I wash my hands and look up into the mirror to find a big grin across my face. I pick her up, recruiting her to help me make breakfast. We cut up a couple apples, throw them in the pot, add butter, cinnamon, honey, raisins, peanut butter, oats, and raw milk. The entire time I stir, then serve, and then eat, we talk about the fox and the chicken, detailing the events, forming it into a story, until, by the end of breakfast, Marie is the one running outside, yelling, “Hey!” to the fox. Lucie rocks the baby, thoroughly amused.

After breakfast, I check the water in the pot on the outdoor stove by dipping my pinkie in it. Very hot, not yet boiling. Perfect. I dunk the hen into the scalding water, holding her like Achilles’ mother, plunging her up and down so the water finds its way under her plumage. About a half minute of this, and I set her on the table. I test the wing feathers first. If those pluck out easily, no need to dunk her anymore. They do, so the plucking begins, no doubt the most time-consuming part of butchering a bird.

Within five minutes, she’s naked. Drag a knife along a sharpener a few times, then make a small cut above the cloaca. A chicken’s only got one hole down there. When laying an egg, the vagina flips inside out over the tract of the cloaca so that the egg never comes in contact with the feces. If that’s not intelligent design, then I don’t know what is.

There’s more tearing than cutting in cleaning a bird. From the small cut above the vent, I pull down on the pelvis and up on the ribcage until I can stick my hand inside the still-warm cavity. The first thing I feel is smooth and hard, a fully formed egg. The oviduct is full of them, each smaller than the next, like Matryoshka dolls, all eggs we will never eat. I set the fully formed one aside. We will eat that one.

In one handful, I pull out the insides so that everything hangs over the table, cut off the liver, heart, and gizzard, and put them into a boil for the soup. Make a ‘V’ shaped cut from the vent to the tailbone, and everything else falls out into a bucket with the feathers and apple cores from breakfast. All this will be fed back to the flock.

Roll the knife along the knee joints, stick the tip in the middle to sever the tendon, and they each pop off smoothly. I cut the head off with strong scissors. Butchered pig is called pork, and cow is beef. Chicken is just chicken. This hen is scrawny, like the whole flock. Meat birds, or broilers, are an entirely different breed. Most chickens eaten nowadays are less than eight weeks old. They convert all of their food into mass. Our chickens convert their food into eggs, not meat. Hence, why this hen is scrawny, and why egg layers are always destined to be a pot of broth, not a baked bird. Czechs say that the best chicken soup for recovering from an illness should be an old egg layer, not a broiler.

I stick the dismembered bird into the fridge to make sure the cats don’t steal anything, empty the bucket in the chicken run, and go to the stream to wash my hands. I find a garden fork and pry up the rest of the carrots at the end of a bed, then cut the parsley and celery, and find some forgotten parsnips in another bed.

It’s almost ten by the time everything is washed, chopped, and salted. The cast-iron pot is placed on the wood stove, where it will humidify our home with the lovely aroma of chicken broth as we settle into our new life as a family of four.

In the evening, we call Aunt Kerri in America, and Marie puts on a theatrical performance telling my sister all about the fox and the chicken and how she ran outside, stomping one foot, yelling, “Hey!” to the fox, “That’s our chicken!”

When we sit down to eat, we thank the fox for bringing us dinner and, more importantly, a story that will be remembered and told in the family lore for a long, long time. And my, was that soup good.

We ended up starting the main garden in the adjoining plot of land next to the meadow. When looking into how to rent the land that would become our garden, farm, livelihood, and home, we discovered that the meadow was actually two plots of land, one-third owned by Prague, the rest, by the mill, which had been sold to developers the year before we arrived. The garden land was bigger, and we liked how it was hidden, shady, and set apart from the walking path by a small brook.

We call it the meadow, but when we arrived it was just one big patch of stinging nettles with small saplings of willow, maple, and ash, starting the never-ending process of cleared land returning to forest. After three years of cutting it, mostly by scythe, the stinging nettle began to recede, grass took over, and dandelions floated in from the sky. No one paid us to do this work, nor did we ever think to ask. I enjoyed it, and moreover, I’m from the US, what would the neighbors think if we didn’t keep the front yard under control?

Since we began to care for the meadow, we gradually began to stake our claim to it. We planted our first flag when our friend Pavel showed up with a couple bee hives one day, and they’ve been there ever since. The bees all died last year, and I’m not sure why. I’m told it happens sometimes.

About four years ago, while scything the grass, I met one of the new owners of the old mill, one of the ‘developers’, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind if some chickens cut the grass, mostly to, you know, keep things tidy. He didn’t care and sped off in his sports car. That was the last I saw of him until this past March.

My dad came to Prague on a visit in the Spring following the meeting with the owner, so naturally, I put him to work. Over the course of a week, we built the chickshaw. It was designed to be easily moveable by hand. I did not, however, account for the weight of fifty-five chickens and a cock. When the meadow was soaked and the wheels would sink into the soft ground, I was kicking myself. What worked well, though, was to get help rolling it to the top of the meadow, and then when it was time to move it, drag it down the slope.

The first flock of hens we bought as adolescents, raised them until they started laying, and then one evening in June, I went to close the door to the chickshaw and there was one last hen taking her time going in for the night. I considered chasing her in, thought better of it, and decided I’d come back in a quarter of an hour. I forgot to come back. That night a fox murdered them all. I arrived the next morning with dead bodies strewn around the entire meadow. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”

In need of chickens that would lay right away, I bought cheap ‘spent hens’ from the egg factory, who were bound to be sold for cat food. They arrived naked, haggard, and smelled like a portable toilet. When I tossed them into their new home, they huddled together, visibly shocked. A slight breeze rolled in, and they freaked out, flapping everywhere. I realized they’d never felt the wind. They’d never been outside. After two months on the meadow, they were ladies again, with a new coat of feathers, dressed to impress.

For two seasons, a harem of around fifty chickens grazed the meadow, moved to fresh grass every week or two. The diversity of species on the meadow began to increase. I began to see clover, plantain, comfrey, poppies, and thistle, in which the bees enjoyed. Tiny hills of earthworm dropping appeared everywhere, and moles’ mounds dotted the meadow like freckles.

On the way to take the eggs one clear, perfectly still summer afternoon, I crossed the bridge from the garden to the meadow and witnessed a hundred-year-old willow fall to the ground. It cracked like lightning, splitting down the middle, one side swung down across the stream, forming a bridge, nearly crushing the bee hives. I walked to the middle of my new bridge and looked down at the clear water flowing under me. A branch was in my way, so I broke it off and stuck it in the ground between the mulberries and the pecans we planted along the brook. It’s now taller than our house.

Mid-season two years ago, without any sort of papers or stamps, we began making garden beds on the meadow. It started, as it always does, rudimentarily, with no straight lines, using whatever materials we had lying around, a little compost, and some old seeds. A couple young guys volunteering for a few days in the summer wheeled in compost from the chicken run, and planted the three sisters, corn, beans, and pumpkins. Only the pumpkins grew, but they grew well.

The rest of the season, no one said anything about our foray into the meadow. Emboldened, I started planning the invasion and occupation.

Many days that winter I walked the meadow. I climbed up the willow tree and watched how the sun moved across the sky, followed the arch of the shadows, the dips in the ground, where the snow and frost melted last. I dug holes and squeezed the soil into an oval that rested in my hand like a plum. Then I pointed my thumb up and my fingers down and watched it crumble back to the ground. By Spring, I was ready.

During the winter, the chickshaw was empty. The whole flock had found its way to freezers and soup pots the previous November. We bought a new flock and put them to work. We kept them fenced on the land where the new beds would be longer than usual to do what any flock will do if left on the same piece of ground for too long, scratch it down to dirt while dropping steaming piles of fertility. In April, the ground was bare. We brought in a few trucks of horse manure and let the hens do the work of spreading it for us. They even picked out all the germinating weed seeds.

The hens then moved on to the next area, where beds would be made in phase two, to begin the process of clearing and fertilizer again. A friend who owns a landscape company dropped off a pile of compost. I tried to tip the driver, but he just smiled, shook his head, and told me we’re not in America. He took the eggs.

The beds were transplanted to kohlrabi, cabbage, zucchini, and lettuce right away. As soon as they were off and running, we turned our attention to the upper beds. Due to spring rains, we weren’t able to pick up manure. No matter, we had a mushroom connection. Viktor, who works on the farm, sold mushrooms on weekends at farmers market and arranged for the shroom growers to drop the bags of spent substrate on the meadow. We broke the woven blocks of mycelium apart and spread them out where the beds would be, and then brought spoiled hay, bought for pennies, and unrolled them down the slope of the meadow, covering the entire space for the new beds, added compost, and planted them out. After the first heavy rains came in June, the pathways under the zucchinis were full of pink oyster mushrooms, feeding on and digesting the hay. They tasted like bacon, which is to say, they were exquisite.

No digging, no tilling, no tractors or roto-tillers. Just shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes, and people, and a lot of ‘waste’. It’s common that newly formed no-dig gardens take a season or two to really get going. I was very pleased by how well everything grew that first year, despite the still undecomposed manure and hay as a base layer. The only real weed issue we had was from the weeds in the compost from the landscape company. The grass and nettles on the meadow never grew through it, but it takes a lot of material. The most common mistake in this style of growing is to add too little. When you think it’s enough, and you’ve got the manure, leaves, hay, wood chips, go ahead and double it.

Last fall, we made a deal with our neighbors to rent the small forest between our home and the garden. It would be easier to consolidate the chickens into one flock, rather than managing two, and with this new area, we had enough space to do it and still have enough eggs for our CSA. The chickshaw was retired. The full invasion was planned.

Up until now, most of the beds on the meadow were on the city’s side. We needed more space for our growing farm, so we moved in. I organized a school day for the Czech Farm School, and twenty people showed up to double the beds on the meadow. We wheeled on a couple truck loads of leaves, then manure, then compost from our chicken run, nothing bought-in this time. All last winter the beds sat there in neat rows, stored potential energy awaiting Spring.

In February, the counter-attack began without any warning. After seven years of letting trees grow through the roof, the reconstruction of the mill into seven family flats began. Within a few weeks a mountain of dirt, concrete, stone, and rubbish was hauled onto the meadow. I seethed in the spring rains watching the enormous excavator cut tracks deeper than the brook into the ground where we had scythed, where the chickens had grazed. Our quiet valley was transformed overnight into a beeping, humming, clapping construction zone. Worse still, was the feeling of uncertainty about the future of the meadow. Would we be thrown off? Would it become a parking lot, or playground?

Despite my best efforts, I grew to like the crew of Ukrainian guys working on the mill. They’d set aside old wood, windows, stone, and brick for me, and would even drop it off in our driveway. I’d give them eggs, or homegrown tobacco. The only Czech on site, the foreman, Pavel, walked over one day early on as we were planting spring vegetables and stood there watching us for a while. I waved, and he waved back. The next day, he came over and asked if he could buy some eggs. I gave him a dozen. A few weeks later, I asked him if he could jump my car when the battery died. As we attached the cables to the batteries, he told me that the salesman of the future apartments are including our farm in their promotions to potential buyers. I don’t trust salesman. I used to be one. The first job I paid taxes on my wages was selling women’s shoes at a department store. It paid comission. Ladies used to ask me how they looked. What do you think I said? But this news calmed my fears, at least a little bit. It meant they saw value in what we were doing, if only for their own interests.

There’s been no formal agreement. They never asked for payment, or gave us a deadline. In fact, they’ve never even acknowledged that we’re squatting on their land, and so far they’re respecting our claim to it.

And that’s why, about a month ago, I called up a bunch of Farm School students, and we added 9 feet to each bed.

Garden first, ask questions later.

-BG

Chesterton’s Fence

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’” - G.K. Chesterton

In our case, we can forgo the limitations of imagination needed to comprehend any metaphor, and instead examine the metaphor enacted in real life.

You walk this path often. You’ve grown accustomed to it, and then one day, a fence stands in your way. How could they!? You say. The injustice. With all the forceful indignation of a cop enforcing the law, you tore it down. By the looks of it, you even gave a few swings of an axe to the posts. I’d advise you to sharpen it next time.

I invite you to have a seat for a moment, and let me tell you a quick tale of how it came to be that there is a path where there once was a tilled field, and why, after five years, there is now a fence blocking your path. Excuse me, there was a fence, you tore it down, and I haven’t the time or motivation to try to fix it.

When we signed an agreement with the city of Prague to pay rent and care for this ‘field’ in 2020, it was just that - a tilled two-dimensional moonscape, void of any life, beaten to rock and clay. This piece of land, now part of our farm, is actually two plots of land, each with different allowed uses. The larger unfenced area is designated ‘agricultural land’, the second, in the shape of a triangle is designated an orchard, because at one time in the distant past, it was.

The path you are walking on exists because we chose to not fence the top corner of the triangle of the orchard so that there would be a public pathway. Did you notice the row of walnuts trees along the pathway, and the wide strip of flowering meadow? We planted those outside the fence of our young orchard for you, and anyone else, to one day harvest the nuts, or take shelter in the shade of the trees, and hear the bees, to see the beautiful colors, to smell and pick some flowers.

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The fire cracks like an old man’s joints. Its flames, the only light at night, project orange shadows that dance on the walls of our little home. I open the glass door of the wood stove and place a split log angled towards the corner, sit back on my heels, and watch it catch. I nudge the damper closed and go back to bed.

Awake in the morning, my bare feet rest on the cool wooden floor. I knock the ash through the grill to the tray below, place a log on the left side of the cavity, crumble a scrap of paper next to it, and lean several small pieces of tinder against the log. Drag a match, flash of light, fumes of phosphorous - like fourth of July.

Fire is stored sunlight. This is true of wood, coal, gas, and oil. In each case, what is burning were once living beings that grew from the energy of the sun. There’s been much debate of late about energy sources. At the core of this debate is how old and what kind of dead creatures we’re burning to heat our homes, cook our food, drive our cars, and run the whole global Machine. In every case, something is being burned somewhere. Make no mistake about it, all this so called “green, renewable energy” is burning a lot of those dead creatures to be mined, made, moved, mounted, and after two decades, mashed, and put back in the ground somewhere.

I close the glass door and open the latch to the ash tray below to create a draft. There are a few precarious moments when the paper can burn to ash without catching the tinder, leaving a smokey mess. The smaller the tinder, the less paper needed and the greater the chance of success.

Fire requires fuel, heat, and oxygen. The art of making a fire is finding the right balance of the three. In a wood fire, the wood itself doesn’t burn. The gases and charcoal burn, but the wood does not. The process is similar to how a candle’s wick doesn’t burn, except slowly on its tip. The heat from the flame creates a draft of vapor wind that prevents the in-rushing air from consuming the wick. Try to light any stick thicker than your thumb, and the surface area of the kindling won’t produce enough heat to burn the gasses in the wood and create the rising vapors needed to maintain the flame. I learned this from Neil Soderstrom’s, Heating Your Home with Wood, a guide to everything you could ever need to know on the subject.

I hear the fire catch. The flames begin a soft roar, gasping in oxygen like a drowning man. And then the old man’s creaky joints go snapping away. Fire tells stories and we tell stories around it. Here’s one.

The only source of heat we have in our home is a wood stove. The wood we burn to keep ourselves warm in the winter grew right out of the ground of our quarter acre property and a small forest the size of a football field next to a tram stop up the hill. Almost all the wood is from pine trees about the thickness of a telephone pole that are dead, but still standing.

A family who’s lived in Klukovice, our valley village surrounded by Prague, for over three hundred years owns the little forest near the tram stop. One of the owners met us there in the morning the other week to show us which trees to cut - those that pose a danger of falling on someone as they wind through the forest to catch the tram.

The owner ended up joining us - me, Pavel, Marek, and Marek’s Dad, who’s almost eighty. We’d gather around a dead pine, Pavel grinning, chainsaw in hand, head turned towards the sky, sizing up the tree, determining its lean and guiding its return to the earth by cutting a notch on the side he wants it to fall. Sometimes the other’s put in their two cents, “Bring him this way. It’d be a shame to damage that young cherry.”

I strike up a conversation with the owner while hauling the logs to the truck parked nearby. He tells me that his grandfather used to grow wheat on this land and that this forest was planted when he was a child. I’d guess he’s in his early fifties. The rings of the pines confirm his story.

So does having a look around. Forests follow a succession, a cycle of birth, maturity, death, and rebirth. Disturbance - either from fire, humans or animals, or the uprooting of a tree when it falls, is needed to restart this cycle. Nature abhors a vacuum. Disturbed ground invites pioneering plants, i.e. “weeds.” They are the wound healers, sending long tap roots into the ground, mining nutrients from below, and holding the topsoil in place. Organic matter accumulates, shrubby plants begin to grow offering more niches for life, increasing the flow of nutrients.

By thinning the dead pines, more light comes through the canopy. Shade tolerant grasses and forest flowers find their way, pollinating insects arrive, followed by birds to eat the insects. Small oaks, cherries, and iron wood see their chance and reach for the sun – in time becoming the overstory.

Healthy forests, like healthy communities, are multi-generational. Different stages of succession foster a greater diversity of species. Death brings life. Old forests grow on dead forests. Not all dead wood and stumps should be removed, for these provide homes for creatures and feed the spiderwebs of mycelium that are the greatest of recyclers. Most of the coal we’re now blowing the tops of mountains off to get, that powers much of our industry, comes from ancient peat bogs that existed during a geological epoch before mycelium developed a taste for lignin.

Indian nations east of the Mississippi carefully managed their forests. Oaks, hickories, and chestnuts were selected to form a broad canopy of trees that rained down food every year without any tillage or irrigation. The brush in the understory was regularly cleared by fire to allow grasses to provide pasture to deer, bears, and turkeys and allow an easier path for their arrows. The first descriptions of Europeans described a vast park, not a wilderness. I doubt the Indians called this system, “agroforestry.” For them, it was simply life.

Europeans have a long history of coppicing – meaning cutting certain species of trees at their base and letting them regrow in several year cycles. The multiple smaller trunks meant less sawing and splitting. Much of this coppiced wood came from hedge rows that separated fields, sheltered crops, providing habitat, fencing and fuel. In Britain alone, over half of all hedge rows have been lost since WWII, mostly to bend the landscape to fit the ever-larger tractors that have replaced the farmers and herdsman of old.

I cut the dropped trees into five-foot lengths with a chainsaw and Marek’s dad and I ferry them out of the forest to the truck. Marek’s dad is here, apparently, just for fun. He’s already cut and stacked his wood – in fact, he thinks he’s set for the rest of his life. He tells me he met some Germans not long ago who were complaining about their neighbors burning wood to stay warm in their mountain town. They said it stinks up the whole valley at night when it’s cold. He asked the Germans how they heat their apartment. They didn’t know. Some kind of oil truck shows up and refills a tank.

Pavel often joins me splitting logs on Saturday mornings – Sundays he’s ringing church bells. He likes to go for a swim in the Vlatava river, even when the pond’s frozen. He then rides his bike over and splits a few months’ worth of logs all while sipping his lager. Pavel likes to remind me that if you heat with wood, you get warm six times - sawing the tree down, hauling it out of the forest, cutting trunks into pieces, splitting the logs, stacking the split wood, and finally, burning it. I’ll add one more to the list, eating food cooked with it.

A few days of work and less than a gallon of gas between the truck and chainsaw and we have a winter’s worth of heat stacked and covered along our fence line.

If you spend the time and energy to get warm six times in heating your house, you’d better be sure that your house is buttoned up properly. There’s a lot more sweat invested than turning a knob to the right and auto-paying a few more increasingly imaginary digits each month. What heat is produced, must be captured, and held onto as long as possible. When we reconstructed our home last season, we added three layers of sheep wool like a giant sweater around the ceiling and walls.

Heat can be stored in batteries of mass - clay, stone, bricks, and cob. This mass warms up while the wood burns, then radiates heat long after the fire dies. We keep a stack of bricks behind our stove for now, and next year we will encase it in cob – a mixture of clay, sand, and straw.

My Grandma was a child during the great depression. She used to tell us a story of how her father would throw a few bricks into their fireplace in the evening. When grandma and her five brothers and sisters would go to their cold beds for the night, he’d pull the bricks out of the fire, wrap them in a towel, and place them under the covers by their feet to keep them warm.

Lucie’s grandfather has what Czech’s call a pec, a large oven he made himself from bricks. It’s the focal point of his house – which is appropriate, “focus” in Latin means hearth. The fire burns in a stove and the heat and smoke wind through a canal of bricks, which absorb the heat before leaving through the chimney. On top of the stove in the corning of the dining room, there is a small platform with pillows and a blanket. A little staircase takes you to a warm loft – perfect for naps after grandma’s duck and dumplings. The stored heat from a day’s fire keeps the center of the home warm all night and into the following day.

A tightly insulated house and a pile of stacked and covered wood allows good sleep. Firstly, from the physical work involved, but more importantly, the peace of mind. We don’t need to watch the news or pay any bills - we can look out our window each day and know we’ll be warm.

Open fireplaces are romantic, sure, but convey only 10% of heat into the house, the rest goes up in smoke, and smoke is waste. Good stoves can convert 50-70% of the heat energy contained in the wood into the house. Some newer models even have a secondary chamber where the smoke and gases are consumed. Burning dry wood, hot, makes for clean combustion. Wet wood gives off less heat because more energy is used to burn out the water vapor than to radiate heat. To gain the most heat from the wood, it should be split and stacked for at least half a year, with dense wood like oak, a year is better.

All the ashes collected from our stove are sprinkled around the fruit trees of our orchard to give them essential nutrients and minerals, or added to the chickens’ dust baths where it acts as a natural disinfectant and anti-parasitic. Ash contains lye. Boil it out, mix it with fat, and you have soap.

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Oh, green and glorious! Oh Herbaceous treat! ‘Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat; Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul, And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl! Serenely full, the epicure would say, Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.”

-Sydney Smith

The main part of our farm, what we call ‘The Garden’, lies on a north facing slope at the bottom of a steep valley surrounded by hundred foot tall alders and spruce. All the cold air slides down the hills and settles right on top of us, creating a perfect frost pocket that shortens our growing season by at least three weeks, compared to our neighbors just a few hundred yards away. Our garden is the definition of ‘marginal agricultural land’. You’d have a tough time growing tomatoes or peppers here, but for leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, and arugula, it’s Eden. And price per pound, there are few plants you can grow legally that rival greens. We prioritize growing food for our community, but we also grow a lot of lettuce as a cash crop because the hardware store and gas station aren’t yet accepting eggs. They’ll come around.

Let me be clear from the start, this is not a get rich quick scheme. That said, you can make money growing greens on a small piece of (rented) land using hand tools, and without irrigation, fancy equipment, chemicals, or technical skills.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Seeds are cheap, buy organic open-pollinated varieties. Better yet, let a few of your lettuce shoot up like Christmas trees, make flowers, and collect the seeds. By saving seed, you are becoming a link in a chain that goes back thousands of years. It’s also one less expense, and your saved seed will begin to better adapt to your growing conditions of your garden within a few seasons.

We’ve grown around twenty varieties of lettuce and have narrowed down our now sought after salad mix to five varieties. The top criteria for growing any vegetable should always be taste. If it doesn’t taste good, why grow it? The second most important factor for the lettuce is ease of harvest.

Most large farms harvest lettuce in the style of the French at the end of the 18th century - they cut off the whole head. We prefer the English method, popularized by Mr. Charles Dowding; only the outer leaves of the plant are removed, leaving the crown in the ground to regrow, which it does in spring at astonishing speed. As Mr. Dowding explains, most of the photosynthesis of the plant is occurring on the new leaves, so harvesting the bigger, older ones does not stunt the regrowth of the plant. The first round of picking from a bed is slow. Once the lower leaves are picked, and your knuckles aren’t dragging on the ground, one of our beds can be harvested in twenty minutes.

Come late February, we start seeding lettuce in our greenhouse heated with horse manure. The manure decomposes to a beautiful compost by fall. There is no such thing as waste on any good farm. We mix the composted horse manure with an organic substrate we buy, toss it in trays, drop seeds on top and place it directly on the horse manure hotbed where it germinates within a few days. Don’t have a greenhouse? Make a box from scrap wood and put a window on top, or bend some thick gauge wire into an arch and make a tunnel by putting a transparent piece of plastic over it.

With a little watering, in three to four weeks you’re ready to transplant. I made a tool I call the ‘Trident’ out of a board, old banister pole, and two branches of a hazelnut tree. It’s one of the biggest time saving devices on the farm, which makes it high-tech. Rake a bed to level it and remove debris, then walk backwards, punching evenly spaced holes down the length of the bed. This allows even growth, and simplifies weeding, as you can just drag a stirrup hoe between the rows rather than have to weed by hand.

The only vegetables we don’t transplant are root vegetables. We save a lot of time and space by allowing plants to spend the first three to four weeks of their life in high concentration in a controlled environment. Those are three weeks to a month that we can be growing something else on a bed, which is how we are able to grow two to four different crops on the same piece of ground each season. Young starts are also better able to withstand slug damage, where spouts don’t stand a chance.

Until the last extremely dry season, we didn’t have sprinklers, or even watered much by hand. Every time we transplant something, we water the hole. This trains the roots of the young start to follow the water down into the soil rather than stay near the surface from shallow watering. Because the roots go deep, the lettuce suffers much less in dry spells, and you’re not stuck having to water every other day just to keep them alive.

Our farm is built by and for people, not machines. Our beds are 30 inches (75cm) which is the perfect size to straddle. It’s much more comfortable to harvest standing over the bed than squatting awkwardly at the sides. The pathways are 45 cm, the exact size of a harvest crate that gets dragged along the paths as we work our way down, twisting off the outer leaves. Harvest crate stays on the right, a bucket for weeds, eaten leaves, and slugs on the left; this goes to the chickens.

We transplant baby lettuce and spinach by mid to late March and are harvesting by the third week of April. The growth from greens in spring follows an exponential rise until the summer Solstice, and then they begin to slow down. Once the hot days of summer arrive, they start bolting (going to flower) and taste bitter. Each year, we try to time it that later planting are just beginning to mature as the first planting are finishing. Subsequent plantings in summer have a shorter harvest window because lettuce is not a heat loving plant, so we are usually seeding new rounds of lettuce every three weeks.

Harvesting is best done first thing in the morning, before the sun hits the plants. Otherwise, you’re loosing quality, and money. Lettuce is 90-95% water. The moment they’re in the sun, they start loosing moisture and wilt quickly after picking. In stressed states, and when going to flower, they produce a bitter white sap that is soporific, producing a narcotic effect similar to that of opium. It was prescribed by doctors for centuries, for coughs, bronchitis, and asthma. It was said as well to be an anaphrodisiac, reducing sexual desire1. This sleepy sap is where lettuce derives its name, from Latin lactuca (lactate), or “milky.” Salad comes from “salted.”

All the following data is relative and will entirely depend on your context. There can be a wide swing in how much we harvest from year to year, or even week to week. A lot depends on the weather, which is as dependable as a drug dealer2.

If we get the succession timing right, we can count on harvesting 3-6 kg per week on an 11-meter bed. Last year we had 6-8 beds planted to greens at any given time and were charging about $16 a kg ($8 per pound). That’s over $800 worth of greens on a good week, on a growing space of about one fourth of a tennis court, in a country where the median salary is less than $30,000. When you consider that the average lawn size in the United States (and Missouri, my home state) is 12,600 ft (1,170 m), or 4.5 tennis courts, and the average monthly mortgage payment is $2,300 (a 21% increase from 2023!), you could conclude that it would be feasible for the average household to have enough ground to pay for their mortgage payment, plus grow enough food to feed themselves, and therefore reduce another already large and growing expense - food. If one person in a couple were to take on the market gardener/ homestead role, they could forgo another car payment, insurance, supplements, gym membership, therapist, and if there are young children involved, possibly daycare. What better way to raise your kids than have them run around your backyard, digging up worms, making flower bouquets, and pulling carrots out of the ground?

Of course, not all weeks of greens harvest in the example above are like that throughout the season, which only lasts 6 months of the year. There are costs in time to seed the trays, transplant, make the compost that provides the fertility to the beds, as well weekly slug patrols at night with a headlamp slaying slugs with scissors by the dozen. You might say making a living off of your land sounds nice but wouldn’t be easy. You would be right. Freedom isn’t free.

There are a couple of reasons we are able to charge such a premium for our greens. Primarily, because the quality is top-notch. I’ve never tasted better lettuce, spinach, or arugula - on second thought I could say that about all of our vegetables, and eggs. Secondly, we invited people and chefs to our garden for tours and tastes. We have our own farmers market on our farm every Tuesday, when many of the same loyal customers stop by each week. Thirdly, Lucie’s really cute and charming.

Sales to restaurants the last two years accounts for about 10% of our farm income. We could make a lot more money by specializing in selling lettuce mixes to fancy restaurants. This, however, would be very impractical, and risky. If the economy finally implodes, or if people aren’t allowed to eat in restaurants again (remember that!?), we’d be left with a lot of greens, that, to be completely honest, are quite useless. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy our salad, especially in spring after a whole winter void of any greens - I crave it even. But unlike potatoes, you can’t live off of lettuce, and unlike cabbage, you can’t store it either. The most damning reason we don’t just grow greens is that it would be boring and soul crushing. You’ve got to love the work you do.

I’ve gotten on just fine with the chefs we do business with, and I’m glad they seek out the highest quality ingredients for their meals. And it’s great to have extra cash flow, especially towards the beginning of the season when we don’t yet have the variety of vegetables we can offer for sale at the market on the farm. But these restaurants aren’t places we could eat at more than a couple birthdays each year.

I find much more meaning and pleasure in growing food for our family, friends, and neighbors, which is why most of our farm income comes from our CSA (community supported agriculture), in which, this year, fifty families, who mostly live within biking distance, subscribed to pick up a mixed box of vegetables and eggs each week from May through October.

Each Tuesday we harvest, wash, divide, and prepare the CSA shares for that week. What we have extra, we sell at the farm stand. Many of the people that stop by for shopping come specifically for the greens. We used to sell it all by requested weight. We realized this season that people don’t know the difference between 100 grams or 300 grams so they don’t know what to order. We started pre-bagging the mix into 300 gram bags and doubled our sales.

For CSA customers, we ‘bag’ our lettuce mix in little square pieces of fabric. Wash it, let the water drip out, weigh it, place it on an open square, and fold the corners in. If you keep the textile moist and in the fridge, the salad will store for over a week just fine, far longer than in a plastic bag. When the customers return the next week, they bring back the textile.

Depending on where you live, selling to restaurants could be difficult because of regulations (tyranny). There are little to no regulations in selling vegetables directly to people - your neighbors, for instance. Forget the money all together and start trading for baby clothes, bacon, help, or rides, and you’re on your way to starting a little community.

Happy growing,

Brett

It could be awhile before she’s able to tell it, as she could give birth to our second child any minute now, and for once, I’m ready. Mentally, perhaps not, but materially, yes. We have a roof, insulated walls, a wood stove and chords of wood, a well stocked pantry, and the baseline for civilization itself - hot running water. The cobwebbed cottage with sagging floors that smelled like gasoline and sweaty socks has been gutted, rebuilt and added onto, until it now resembles a cozy little home.

The last few springs we labored to run the farm and build the house, a wren built his dwelling under the eave above the porch. I noticed another one in the wood shed, and a third in the outdoor kitchen. I wondered as to how many wrens could claim one little garden, until I read that the male builds three to ten nests, and the females pick the one she fancies most. Upon learning this, I felt a sense of comradery with the king of the birds, no bigger than a walnut, as we are not, it seems, so different in our endeavors. Since finding my mate, most of my time and energy has been spent building a series of more sophisticated nests.

I first met Lucie in the summer of 2014 while in Prague for a one-month study abroad trip; we were in the same class together. My bicycle was my checked bag and I planned to ride it from Prague to Athens as soon as the program ended. After meeting in class, I did a rooster’s dance by telling her of my upcoming adventure, and she asked to join me. I was thrilled, because as the day had neared to embark on my own, I was getting nervous - though, I didn’t tell her that. She was a bit nervous too, especially when I let her know that I hadn’t planned a route, that I was just going to wing it. I tried to ease her fears by letting her know that my hammock was in fact a double hammock. She told me that I had already told her that.

We took a train to Austria and cycled south on side roads that squiggled back and forth on the map like a river. They led us through beautiful forests and mountains and along the sea. We would stop and pick berries, steal a watermelon off a field, swim in a lake, or just lie in the cool shade of a tree.

The journey was a great deal of fun. And the people we met and places we went, opened our eyes to new possibilities, ways of life and living that were unknown to us then, and those experiences shaped us and the life we would eventually choose.

Tears were shed in Dubrovnik when we parted ways, Lucie returning for school, and I continued on to Athens, then back to Missouri for my last year of school. When forced to grapple with the end of college and “my future”, the only thing I could think to do was come back to Prague and to Lucie. I sent her a letter for her birthday and with it, I included a picture of our new nest, the tent I bought for our next cycling trip. I suggested we start in Romania and ride South to Greece the following summer. She was in.

For five years we lived in a studio apartment Lucie’s dad owned next to his own family flat; a bed, couch, kitchenette, bathroom and balcony. Lucie isn’t one for decorating, so I set about making the place homey with a collection of furniture taken and pieced together out of dumpsters. We started a compost pile in a hidden spot in the shared backyard. We could never have imagined what would grow out of that pile of rotting food.

The compost led us to start gardening on our balcony in boxes and thrown-away pots. I started a guerilla garden in an abandoned lot across the stream. Looking back, those few years of doing my masters were my real education. Not in school, but in building furniture out of scrap wood, composting, growing mushrooms, planting fruit trees around the neighborhood, and container gardening. We owned none of it, yet we made that little place our own. My daughter can now climb up the first tree we planted, an apple tree thrown away outside the hardware store, planted in a little no-man’s land of gravel between the house, stream, and parking lot.

Through a series of events that makes me believe in Fate, or Providence, or what have you, Lucie went for a run, and ended up on the large outcrop of rock that overlooks the garden, about two miles upstream from the apartment. She discovered that the city owns it, and when asked, they rented it to us, surely glad that it was someone else’s responsibility to clean it up.

A few weeks later, I proposed on that hill. A year later we were married in the garden.

Have you ever seen footage of a bird of paradise performing his mating ritual? He cleans up a large area of the forest, every leaf swept away, and builds an elaborate nest full of shiny things and a stage to perform his dance. That was me from September 2018 to September 2019.

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“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil.” -Ecclesiastes

Mr. Freedom was some kind of sociology professor. I don’t know how he ended up at the farmers’ conference giving a talk. It was interesting. So I was told.

His name was actually Mr. Svoboda, which means ‘freedom’ in Czech. I was having a hard time following his talk about personality types. He had us make a quadrant on a page and asked questions until everyone had securely put themselves into boxes. It’s not that I didn’t like the guy, he seemed nice, but I zoned out. I don’t put much weight in these tests. I think they tell you what kind of person you want to be rather than who you are. If I wanted an honest assessment, I’d have to have my wife do it for me.

She did. We had a long drive home afterward, and she told me all about the test. She said one of the goals of the boxes and questions was to discover what your biggest fear is. She listed the half dozen categories of fears and asked which one I had. I don’t remember what the options were, but I didn’t think about it too hard and picked one. She gave me a sideways look like a magician doing a card trick, and asked me to pick again. I thought about it another mile or two, and then I knew.

Charcoal can last ten thousand years in the ground. People who lived in what we now call the Amazon forest made charcoal from animal bones and brush and mixed it into their gardens and fields. They’ve been doing this for at least 5,000 years, probably far longer. The first Spanish pirates that paddled up the Amazonian rivers found heavily populated cities of enormous wealth. By some recent estimates, these cities would have been some of the largest in the world at the time. The diseases they carried killed almost everyone within a few years, and by the time the next expedition went up the river, all those temples, houses, and bones had been swallowed whole by the jungle, only crazed fantasies of those that went before.

It was not until recently that we in the modern age learned that the Amazon jungle is not a jungle at all, but an edible and medicinal forest. Despite the vigorous vegetation, the oxisol soils of tropical climates are poor. The rain and humidity causes rapid decay of leaf, root, and flesh, and the nutrients and soluble minerals are leached quickly away. The ancient peoples of the Amazon knew that by mixing charcoal with their manures and organic debris, the earth would become dark and rich. They created many square miles of this man-made soil, mostly along the river basins surrounding their cities. Since the rediscovery of this soil, it’s been termed, ‘terra preta’, Portuguese for ‘dark earth’.

I wrote a master’s thesis on biochar, which is what someone decided to call charcoal that was intended for use in the soil. Aside from the distinction of use, biochar and charcoal are the same thing. They gave me an award for my ‘research’, which, by the time I got my degree, I found funny. This is how I got it.

I dug a hole in the ground and started a fire. Once it got going, I fed it brush at a steady rate. Not too much as to make it smoke, not too slow that the burning embers turned to ash. The speed at which you can feed a fire properly ablaze to make char is about the same speed you can feed a wood chipper. Wood chips are great, but last for a season. Biochar is pyrolysized carbon that will still be young when Las Vegas is buried in sand some day.

Charcoal under a microscope looks like lungs with uncountable capillaries. Crush it up and take a spoonful, and you’re holding the surface area of a football field. All those tiny pores are homes for unimaginable amounts of tiny creatures and fungi that maintain the life and fertility of the soil. The porosity acts as a sponge which absorbs and stores water, releasing it in drier times.

While the brush burned, I poked it until it was broken into little pieces that didn’t flame but pulsed like a beating heart and warmed my face in the cool winter night. Splitting wood or digging a trench with a pickaxe is without a doubt a form of therapy. But thrusting a thick hazelnut branch into red coals, circling a fire at night, is medicine for your soul. It’s an ancient practice. How else could our ancestors melt metal without charcoal?

I poured water on it until I thought it was out. When I came back the next day, it was a pile of ash, so I did it again. I mixed the resulting charcoal with dead leaves and fresh cut grass and waited until trillions of tiny bugs ate and pooped it out until it was compost. I mixed the compost with soil that I took from a field that was downwind of a lead smelter that had been spewing smoke since the 1700s, when there was still silver in the hills. It was so full of microscopic pieces of lead, cadmium, and zinc, that in all the holes I dug I never found a worm, or any living being.

I took this soil back to the university’s greenhouse where I mixed it with the compost from the leaves, grass, and charcoal in various ratios and I grew grass and arugula in it. I grew some marijuana seeds too, but that wasn’t part of the thesis. After a month, I cut and weighed the plant matter and observed the root systems. The results were obvious in the growth of the plants.

As expected, most of the heavy metals had been adsorbed, or ‘locked up’ in the charcoal where they were no longer able to be taken up through the plant’s roots into their leaves. This amazing ability to remove metals and pollutants is why we filter the rainwater we use to wash our dishes and clothes with a charcoal filter in our house. It’s also why people suffering from radiation poisoning are given tablets of charcoal to eat.

When I asked my professor how it’s possible that wheat could be grown in the surrounding fields that are so heavily polluted with metals, he cracked a grin, threw his shoulders up, and said “the solution to pollution is dilution”. They mix it with less contaminated grain until it meets EU regulations. I told him I didn’t know there were safe levels of lead you can eat. All he said was, “There aren’t.”

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I had this idea for a video in mind for several years, back in those romantic days when it was just Lucie and I living off-grid in a shack next to the garden. The farm has grown in the last few years, and so has our family. We now have a small team of dedicated people that pull a lot of weight, without whom, we would be drowning. I don’t want this silly video to make it look like it’s a one-man-show. It’s not.

I hope you get a sense of just how compact our farm is, and that with this space, plus our young orchard, we run a 50 member Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). This is marginal agricultural land, rented from the city of Prague. We found a jungle of blackberries and stinging nettles and made it into a beautiful and productive place.

I wrote a few years ago about building our farm:

Let’s not forget, our origin story tells us we come from a garden. If you can find a little patch of earth, you can head on home.

Sincere thanks for reading,

-BG

P.S. If you happen to be in or around Prague and want to visit sometime, please get in touch!

"Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world." - Henry Kissinger

I stopped by Country Life Farm the other day to buy potatoes from Tomaš. We haven’t harvested many yet, but it looks like we’ll be short this year. As Viktor and I emptied the spuds from his crates to ours, I told him we would save some of his variety, Anuschka, to plant next spring. He informed me through a crooked grin that we’d be breaking European law. Potatoes, you see, can only legally be saved for two years. I’ve since learned that there are all sorts of laws and regulations here in Europe that make selling seeds and cuttings difficult, expensive, and often, illegal.

When I was younger, I used to think it was kind of cool to judiciously break laws. I’ve since matured and adopted the view that the seed restrictions are tyrannical. Only truly sick people, likely under the grips of some form of demonic possession, would threaten punishment, financial or otherwise, for exchanging seeds. I can think of no more prudent course of action than to openly snub these laws, and no fairer fate to those who would write and enforce them, than to be ceaselessly pelted about the head with rotten onions the rest of their waking lives.

The reason these prohibitions on seed exchange exist, and that more regulations are soon to be spit out of Brussels, is that seeds are food (i.e. corn, wheat, beans), stored energy (feel the weight of an eight-foot tall sunflower), and an excellent form of money, a direct competition to the paper dished out by governments, and the casino-banks that run them.

Perhaps more threatening to those in power is that seeds represent a form of cultural heritage, a sacred bond between growers and the earth, a tradition and history of a place that cannot be commodified. In a world where worth is reduced to dollars, anything held above and beyond their reach must be destroyed.

Without the ability to freely save and trade seeds, any hope of self-sufficiency, and Hope itself, will be lost. When I say self-sufficiency, I don’t mean producing all your food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, etc by yourself. I mean the ability for cooperating families and neighbors, you know, communities, to meet their basic needs. This, as opposed to corporations and governments increasingly pushing us towards passivity and dependence in the name of safety and convenience.

They can dress it up in whatever costume they like, but control is the goal. Local Czech seed grower, Marek Kvapil, who grows a large selection of old, rare, and resilient varieties of vegetable seeds, could not get them registered for some time, as they were deemed “too heterogenous”, lacking complete conformity in shape and size. Marek wrote an essay in Czech, titled, Seed Underground (link translated to English), in which he notes several of the lawsuits brought against small seed producers throughout Europe in the last decade, some of which have been forced to pay thousands of euros in fines, or shut down. He describes the constant fear and ongoing battles he wages just to run his seed farm, Permaseminka.

Selling seed could be a very profitable small business, with an enormous potential for filling niche markets. Seeds, by weight, are much higher value than vegetables. You can grow a lot of seed in a very small space. Our small farm is also a nursery. We propagate hundreds of currants, gooseberries, seaberry, raspberry, blackberry, and elderberry bushes each winter. One mature bush can provide perhaps 40 cuttings that will each root and form a clone of the original within a season. You can fit hundreds of cutting in the space of a parking spot and sell them for $10-15 dollars a piece. Rent a bit of land, buy a shovel and shears, make compost, and a nice website, and you’ve got a business. That is, after you spend thousands of dollars and days of time registering, labeling, and shipping you products off for laboratory testing before they can enter ‘the market’ legally.

As it stands, there are gray areas in the laws for schools, libraries, or initiatives that distribute seeds for biodiversity conservation or education purposes. But it looks as if that’s all about to change. Even small initiatives, like Seminkovna, that organize seed saving workshops, and free seed exchanges in public libraries, will have to register as a ‘professional operator’, which is defined as anyone who “produces, processes, stores or distributes seeds and seedlings, tree cuttings, tubers and other plant reproductive material1 (PRM)”. As Klára Hrdá of Seminkovna reports, this includes gifting seeds of small amounts or trading seeds and plants in any way. If they don’t comply, they will be breaking the law. Klára advises everyone to spread the word, get informed, contact your representatives. That’s great, and should be done. But better still, is for everyone to join the Seed Underground, and start growing and sharing seeds.

I often carry my entire livelihood around the farm in a crate, and threaten farm students with flogging for leaving the tubs of seed open while seeding. A few drops of rain, and there goes thousands of dollars of seed, tens of thousands of dollars of crops, but most importantly, there goes our business, our community, our pantry full of Lucie’s tomato sauce, pickled vegetables, sauerkraut, and my sanity.

I’m never without a full season’s worth of seed at any point of the year. In March 2020, a letter arrived from one of the biggest organic seed companies in Europe saying that we could order from them only because we ordered the year before, due to increase in demand over fears around the self-inflicted wound we call ‘coronavirus’. What law of nature says that you will always be able to buy seed (or food, for that matter) when you need it? If cash is taken away, as it seems it will be, there will still be seeds.

Unlike cash, seeds’ source of value is clear; as is the return on investment. There’s inherent value in the potential energy of the seed to grow, fruit, and reproduce seed exponentially - plant one and save dozens.

Seeds are durable, portable, easily hidden, and untraceable. Unlike cash, they lack complete fungibility because certain varieties are more resilient, or more tasty than others, which is great, because this incentivizes diversity. Experienced varieties of old seed, along with new or rare varieties, are much sought after, and therefore highly valuable. If stored in a cool, dry place, most seed will last over a decade. The fact that their viability fades after some time reduces the benefits of hoarding, and ensures a velocity of exchange and continuous planting.

There’s value too in the act of saving seed. Whether it’s a tomato or potato, you’re stewarding along an unbroken chain of human selection from their time as wild vines in Central America. That flower lives on from your hands and sweat. Look no further for meaning and a cure of melancholy and hopelessness than to perpetuate life.

There is a machine, not just in Brussels, but around the world, that has manufactured robbery and oppression and wants to control you and me. I say to hell with that machine, and tell it that it’s welcome to go ye forth alone and multiply2. Seeds are a common good, just like air and water. This has been understood for thousands of years. Leave it to me to quote the Good Book, as mine’s quite dusty, but I recall a passage in Genesis, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” The “you” means us, not Dupont or Bayer-Monsanto.

In his essay, Civil Disobedience, Thoreau said, “I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.” These laws are only as effective as they are enforced within each country. I have hope in the fact that the Czech people as a nation are incredibly adept at ignoring and side-stepping regulations deemed excessive, or even mildly inconvenient. Their national hero is soldier Švejk, after all. The fact that these laws exist, however, is a direct threat to sovereignty, freedom, and human life.

My not quite three-year-old daughter and I spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon sitting in the shade of a grape vine, twisting dried sunflowers, marigolds, and marrow heads off their stems, plucking out their seeds, and pouring them into paper bags. I marked them with the variety and the year, Marie added some squiggles of her own. We’ll be saving thousands of tomato, lettuce, herbs, and tree seeds, and propagating hundreds of cuttings of edible bushes and whatever else I can get my hands on this fall. So come by the farm sometime and I’ll show you what we’ve got. Make sure to bring your own seeds (BYOS).

I’ll end with Marek’s final words of his essay,

See you underground.

-BG

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” – Hippocrates

Imagine this. You are a peasant farmer in Ancient Greece with a worn-out work-horse. He’s tilled one too many steep, rocky fields, and his coat is looking shabby. You know it’s time to end his career, but just can’t bring yourself to do the dirty deed. So you lead him out of his overgrazed pasture through the mountains to the sea. You say your goodbyes, give him one more scratch between his ears, he always liked that, then you give him a hard smack in the rump to send him on his way to the wolves. He hobbles off into thorny bushes lined with little orange berries.

A week later you’re sitting under your pergola drinking a jug of wine and far off in the distance you see a lone horse clopping his way down the mountain. You recognize the color and gait of him, but it can’t be! He looks like a young stud with a shiny new coat.

You stand up to greet him as he nears, mouth agape in disbelief. He struts forward, then rears back on his hind legs, snorting like a war horse. Mother of Zeus! Turn around for me, old boy, let me get a look at you. The horse obliges, turns around, raises his tail and drops a load of half digested (horses are lazy chewers) orange berries and olive-like leaves. Hey there, you old grimy good for nothing, not in the pergola - eh, but what’s this? Your disgust turns to curiosity. You bend over to examine turds, and he kicks you in the head.

The Latin name for Seaberry (or, Seabuckthorn) is, Hippophae, derived from ancient Greek, literally, ‘Shining horse’. Its healing powers have been well known in cultures throughout the old world for many thousands of years, being carefully studied and recorded in ancient Persia, Greece, China, Tibet, and Rome. Alexander the Great directed his soldiers to eat the berries and feed the leaves to their horses before battle on his campaign to the East. Genghis Khan did the same on his little escapade to Europe.

More recently, Russian cosmonauts and the victims of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl treated their exposure to radiation by drinking seaberry juice and applying its oil to their skin. In the US, by contrast, an orange powdered sugar drink called Tang was sold to the public, that, in the words of Buzz Aldrin, “sucked.”

If you check Wikipedia, it’ll tell you there is “no high-quality clinical evidence that sea buckthorn lowers the risk of human disease”. The chatbot Google garbage says much the same thing. Medicine is made in laboratories by smart people in white coats and comes in a pill or vile. This is what my culture taught me most of my life. I rolled my eyes at folk medicine and herbal remedies even when we started farming. It wasn’t until I burnt the hell out of my fingers and then applied cream from the root of comfrey given to me by Pavel, the beekeeping, scythe wielding, church bell ringing, medicine man, that I glimpsed the power of plants. The next day, the pain and blisters were gone. Like it never happened.

Since then, I’m a believer that plants are food and medicine1, though some plants are much superior to others. We grow raspberries for fun. Seaberries are serious business, packed with more vitamin C than lemons, filled with antioxidants, and anticarcinogenic properties.

On more than a handful of occasions, Lucie and I have all together avoided, or greatly diminished, winter colds by twisting open a bottle of bright orange seaberry nectar the moment we get that back-of-the-throat feeling that always signals the arrival of sickness. That’s no clinical trial, but it’s good enough for me.

Four years ago, we planted around 25 seaberry bushes, mostly as a hedgerow on the big field/young orchard, with a few planted within three feet of a fruit tree, the idea being that the seaberry will feed the tree. The shrub, like the bean and pea family, has the miraculous ability to make friends with a specific kind of bacteria in the soil. This friendship results in taking the nitrogen from the air we breathe and introducing it to the roots of plants in a form that it is able to digest.

The common name seaberry (or sea buckthorn) comes from the fact that they grow prolifically along coastlines, in harsh conditions. They are a pioneering plant, thriving in full sun, on poor soils, holding the ground in place on steep slopes and colonizing damaged ground from abandoned industrial activities. They spread through seed, strewn around by birds, and also through suckering roots that can reach out a dozen feet from the main trunk in a few years. For this reason, they are considered by some to be invasive. As someone who can think of very few things more worth doing than planting more seaberry, this is fantastic. They spread to fill gaps in our hedge without any effort on my part. I don’t worry about them taking over the field, because as long as I cut the path along the hedge twice a year, they won’t. If any establish in a place I don’t want them to, I’ll just dig them out and move it, or give it away, or sell it to make a few bucks. Most cases of plants becoming invasive are due to human neglect and mismanagement of the land.

I’m sometimes accused of being anti-technology, so I’d like to set the record straight. I’m a fast adopter of technology when I see it can do some real good, and doesn’t listen and record everything I do, or try to manipulate me. I prefer the type of technology that can be birthed from a stick, or an old wire and pliers. Up until yesterday, we harvested seaberries by hand, a painful ordeal of plucking off berries a few at a time, often getting jabbed by thorns in the hands and other uncomfortable places. In the evening I did my own research and came across a real piece of technical beauty. Wire tongs with a hook on the end, made by wrapping the wire around a thin pole twice, and bending the ends.

Yesterday evening, after the CSA, I drove up to the orchard with my new tong tool and a bucket wired to my belt. This incredibly simple device helped me harvest about 20 pounds of berries in an hour and a half, which normally would have taken three people three hours. I also avoided most of the thorns, and the berries stay intact because they are scrapped off at the stem rather than tugged on with fingers. The hardest part of harvesting this way was to resist grabbing handfuls from the bucket and sticking them in my mouth.

I took them back to the outdoor kitchen and rinsed them, then let them soak in spring water outside for a day to let them begin to ferment. Something similar is done in wine making to reduce the tartness and brings out the full depth of flavor.

My part was now finished and Lucie arrived on the scene. She blends them, strains out the skins and seeds, and adds it to a large pot, three parts juice, one part honey or organic sugar. The juice is warmed to dissolve the sugar, but never brought to a boil, as that would cook away much of what makes it medicine. Lucie then pours them into bottles and they go into the fridge. We’ll save many bottles in our fridge to drink throughout the winter. A mixed drink of elderberry and seaberry juice go a long way in preventing and shortening colds. They also just taste great. And that alone is a good enough reason for me to drink them.

My mom told me as a kid it was rude to talk about money with strangers. I don’t want to be crass, but let’s talk brass tacks for a moment. The most common questions we get from people interesting in what we do hinge around making a living from farming. Small farms are really a wide array of enterprises, some bigger, some smaller, some seasonal, some not. Selling seaberry juice is just one little side hustle throughout the season We sold 200 ml bottles for 300 Kc last year (about $12 a pop). By the end of this year’s harvest we will have 150 bottles for sale. Subtract out the money for the bottles, the sugar, and paid help and you will see that this is not a get rich quick scheme, but it’s not bad money either for a day of picking berries and bottling.

Of course, it’s also not just about money. We have potent medicine in the fridge and valuable gifts for friends and neighbors that are worth far more than a paper bill. At the moment, the only sensible thing to do with the profits this year is to buy more seaberry varieties.

Until next time,

BG

About 25 kilos of garlic heads, broken apart into cloves, and poked into the ground last fall yielded 222.2 kilos (490 lb) in the first week of July. How’s that for return on investment? I could sell it all for paper, but then I’d have no garlic, and the only sensible thing to do with those bills would be to buy more garlic. I’ll hoard the heads, thank you.

It took two trips with the truck to bring it off the field, many trips more with a wheelbarrow to haul it in to the outdoor kitchen, where I’ve done nothing but grope garlic for the last six evenings. It’s nice work. Repetitive. It’s a job that calls for a systematic approach, one that evolves and improves each night.

There’s the chair, low and padded. My feet straddle the crate of offcuts. As I trim the roots and tops, everything drops into this crate that then goes to a wheelbarrow and eventually into the chicken-compost run. The crate of field garlic is above that one, bulbs all in one direction so they slide out without getting tangled. I grade it on size and quality - is the top split? Are there sign of disease, or pests?

The smallest go into a small crate. We’ll bake, fry, or pickle those. Most of the medium heads are trimmed top and bottom. These, we’ll sell by the pound, or add to the CSA shares. The biggest bulbs had their roots trimmed and the lowest dead leaves stripped down to clean the necks for Lucie to braid, or to be hung to dry for planting in autumn. Always best to get them in the ground before Christmas, but they can be planted anytime between September and February around here (middle Bohemia).

This year’s crop was planted where pumpkins, and then beans, grew last year, where potatoes spread vines the year before that. The potatoes were planted in loads of hay. When we harvested, we forked it up, mixing the rotting hay into the top layer of compact, clay-laden soil. The worms made this job easier, and then happily turned the hay into hummus. The pumpkins made fine work of suppressing weeds last summerand the beans kept it covered and productive into the fall. Last November the team, aided by a few dedicated volunteers raked off the weeds and debris, and wheeled in a few tons of bought compost - branches, leaves, bark, and grass, all cooked down to black earth.

There’s no water on the field, just what falls from the sky. According to some, the Czech Republic is experiencing one of the worst droughts in 64 to 500 years, depending on your source. I can speak only from the last six years of farming, but yes, it’s the driest I’ve seen. Not enough snow to ride a sled in all winter, and the spring rains never came, nor the summer, for that matter.

Throughout the last five season on the big field/young orchard, we’ve invested mountains of wood chips, leaves, hay, compost, cow, horse and sheep manure into this land and it’s times like these that it shows. Our berries only suffered because they have fruited so prolifically. Some of the outer fruiting currants, seaberries, and gooseberries have shriveled like raisins, but the rest are a dark, tart delight, and there are few tastes more exquisite than overripe, half dried, slightly alcoholic raspberries. People stopped by this weekend while me, Marek and Ondra worked on the shed to pick the ripened josta berries that are now bending branches. Lucie and her mom have been busy restocking the pantry with crates of raspberry and apricot jam, grown on our young trees, and making sauerkraut that makes my jaws salivate just thinking of it.

The tomatoes have leaf-curl from thirst, but they’re growing taller each day, the welcomed rain the other day helped. These maters were planted into pockets of compost in beds of hay, and cow manure. We dug out a few dead tomatoes after the first frost last fall, and the length of the roots from the base of the stem outwards was taller than I am.

The roots went out, not down, into the pathways. The calf-high layer of hay on the paths was an aquifer, acting has a giant sponge to soak up the rain and keep it available for the plants to use in dry times. No doubt, we harvest smaller tomatoes than if we had irrigation. But the stress of fending for themselves on an open field with little water makes them uncomparable to any tomato I’ve had the pleasure (in the case of supermarkets, displeasure) of tasting. That said, if the drought gets too bad, I might start carrying rainwater from our tank now catching rain off the shed. In the meantime, it’s tough love.

The garlic’s never done better. We planted five rows in an 85 cm bed, one more row than we usually do. Many of the bulbs are as big as my fist. I attribute this to the compost. Where there are cracks in the open field, bury your fingers to the first knuckle and you can feel the moisture. Take a handful and you’ll find a worm. What we often deemed ‘waste’, provides water and food for tiny creatures that gives birth to the eternal cycle of death, resurrection, and new life.

And that’s great and all. But it also makes us rich. I’m dealing with the burdens of someone who has won the lottery. A flood of wealth can ruin any man, or woman. And come July, I am crippled by miserly greed. I sat in illuminated darkness for a week, supposedly working hard peeling and trimming their heads, but really I was a dragon in his den, running his claws through mounds of gold, and sparkling jewels. I’m petrified to admit that on several occasions I found myself stroking a mammoth head and mumbling something that sounded like ‘precious’. From greed grew pride - I hung the biggest heads, ten at a time, above our front porch to display our wealth like others, of lesser refinement, display their sports cars.

As the good book says, with pride comes the fall. That’s when we break the heads into cloves, and pant them all over again, and even more this time. My Uncle Jim, with his red bandana around his head, stirring red wine into his famous spaghetti sauce, made sure all us kids knew, or any passerby for that matter, that “There is no such thing - as too much garlic.” Amen.

We’ll sell some, sure. Got to pay the bills and all that. But I’m not happy about it. And Lucie’s braided beauties? I’d sooner shovel out the pig’s pen.

P.S.

Last week’s CSA share that went out to 46 neighbors.

This is what historic drought looks like on our farm.

It gets worse.

-BG

Our peaceful hollow has become a place of noise, full of bulldozers and jackhammers, and planes overhead, as the ruined mill next to us and the airport far away, undergo reconstruction. My wife wondered aloud at breakfast the other day if the baby currently growing in her belly will remember me with brown hair.

In February it began. After seven years of sitting silently and letting the trees grow through the walls, the developers who bought old Hora’s Mill paid a group of Ukrainians to begin the process of building luxury apartments.

I seethed for a few weeks as they drove bulldozers over the meadow our chickens created that had once been a patch of stinging nettles, turning the whole place into a small mountain of dirt, rocks, and broken concrete . What could I do? It’s their land, we were just squatting on it.

One day one of them walked over, he shook my hand and said his name was Vasili. He asked in broken Czech if we had any eggs. Never one to miss an opportunity to support the eggonomy, I handed him a few boxes and told him to let me know if they had any wood lying around. About three minutes later I was whistled to the back of the mill. Some more broken Czech, pointing, smiles, and handshakes, greased with dark yellow yokes. The next morning there was a delivery in the driveway.

Then came the plague, a series of sicknesses, not just us, but all over. Maybe you noticed? The chickens were sick too. We drank lots of homegrown herbal tea, elderberry and sea buckthorn syrup, and broth from last year’s hens, and soon recovered. I gave the chickens comfrey and dandelion greens, added apple cider vinegar to their water, cleaned out the coop, added saw dust and dried clay to their baths and they were back to behaving like little dinosaurs after two days.

The falcon attacks introduced us to another neighbor, a young falconer, who despite the fact that his bird is currently terrorizing our flock, I feel that a friendship is forming. He’s stopped by several times a day this last week, green hunter’s fedora on his head, with a young, feeding a young, still-feathering eagle in his lap with bits of meat, “Still nothing?”

She was circling overhead an hour ago.

He asks me what he owns me. I think about the cost of feed per chicken for two months to start laying, than another two months of laying, plus two to three years worth of eggs (600-900 eggs), and no skinned bird in the pot. I tell him to give me what it costs to buy two new ones.

He checks the traps on the ground of the chicken’s run, first baited with the dead hens, and after a day, live pigeons, one of which I inadvertently helped escape. I was just about to toss the dead hens into the woods, when I thought of my cousin John’s tattoo, “Do the next good thing.” So I chopped them to pieces on a big slab of willow, and the surviving hens went to work.

The frozen nightshades was a heart jerker. One big sunk cost in energy: seeds, potting mix, greenhouse space, our time and muscles. As we planted on the field, a friend asked me if I was worried they could freeze. I told him that it would have to be a real historical anomaly for that to happen. That anomaly arrived, and during the course of one chilly night we lost everything. But, all the work invested in preparing the beds is not lost. All we have to do is do is plant them again, and better.

But that’s easier to say than to do. All this was weighing me down when I discovered a drowned chick in the water bowl, my own fault for not securing the ramp of wood with a brick. I buried her in the compost.

I walked out of the chicken run and stood there, watching our cat, Cuketa (Zucchini) stare at a mound of throbbing dirt in the pathway. She followed my arms as I raised them above my head, took one quite step forward and pounded the ground in anger, reaching into its tunnel and pulled a mole’s lifeless body out of the earth. When I embarrassingly placed the corpse in front of Cuketa, she looked up at me, as if to say, “What the hell is wrong with you?” And walked away, tail straight up in the air.

I then did the only thing that made sense in a situation like that. I placed it’s silky fur-covered-body on the slap of willow and brought the ax down. The evidence of that sour deed was gone in seconds, but the memory remains.

The following evening, I walked up to the field to inspect the damage. Hundreds of limp, burnt tomatoes stood in rows like crosses in a cemetery. I faced west and witnessed one of the most magnificent sunsets I’ve ever seen. Shades of pink and orange with rays of light that appeared to be shooting up from the earth in a crown-like halo. In the middle of the crown, our neighbors cows grazed lazily in the lush meadow. I laughed, and muttered aloud, “My God”. I turned back to the dead tomatoes and laughed again. I saw in their lifeless forms the fragility of life, and how nothing is permanent, that my life or the lives of my loved ones could be lost at any moment. There is only so much I can control, and the rest is no concern of mine.

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