The End of Family Gardening
American roots run deep in the family farm. The development of the nation from its original thirteen colonies after their war of independence through the ensuing nineteenth century of westward discovery, settlement and expansion, pretty much took the same path with one territory after another becoming a product of the family farm. The term “family farm” is most often applied to an intergenerational wealth transfer protocol that allows for the passage of a meaningful chunk of agricultural property (the average family farm in the U.S. today is about 450 acres in size) that can be passed from one generation to another without huge tax impediments that make that burdensome or impossible. The dynamic is that farming has increasingly become a business of scale and yet the American way of wealth transfer produces a force for the fractionalization of these farms rather than the accumulation of scale.
We all know that the European heritage of our country was for the landed gentry to pass along their estate to the oldest male child in order to keep it in tact (immortality is a bitch that makes people want to think that their life can and should be maintained and even replicated for generations by their scions). The daughters would be married off (cum dowries) to broaden the reach and power of the elite as far and wide as possible (think about the houses of Windsor, Bourbon, Hannover, Habsburg and such) and assure the dominion of less fortunates for centuries at a time. The younger sons would go to the military or the clergy to solidify the flanks of the central hierarchy. And the less fortunate or more homely daughters were relegated to the convent to be quietly swept aside. I have always loved the imagery of the European landscape with the monastery on one hill, facing the convent on the other, with the ubiquitous and hush-hush orphanage in between and below in the valley to create the surplus and faceless population needed to work the family lands. It all seemed so tidy and well organized to perpetuate the status quo.
But of course, life is never tidy for long and the randomness of human ambition is such that nature forces men and women to break from this mold and seek to elevate them and theirs to higher (or perhaps just different) status. That is the circle of life, with wars and uprisings and all the epic struggles that make history such an interesting subject. But meanwhile, back on the farm or ranch, the core families toil and tend to the soil to raise food needed to support all these goings on. We like to think of our society as having gone through urbanization and that rural life died out long ago in America as agribusiness has chomped forward on the lifestyle of farmers. Sayings like, “How you gonna keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen the city lights” seem to foreshadow and reinforce this trend. Countless stories and movies tell the tale of toil and tribulation that plagues the American farmer. Many have said that what looks like a traditional and conservative lifestyle is really nothing more than another form of reckless gambling. In farming, they say that God is your partner and rarely a dependable one at that.
When I ran the Derivatives Department at Bankers Trust in 1989, one of the smartest guys in the room was a fellow with a chrome front tooth who came from the San Joaquin Valley in north central California, an area known as the breadbasket of America. He had been too smart to stay engaged at Berkeley and had dropped out to grow watermelons with his brother. When a medfly problem caused him to have to dump a full bumper-crop season’s worth of ripe melons by the side of a lonely road in the high dessert thanks to the California Department of Agriculture inspectors, he decided to leave farming for the less risky world of global derivatives trading. That would be the same arena that Warren Buffett famously called the WMD’s of the financial markets.
At the back of my three-car detached garage, I keep my larger gardening equipment. I have a small neat cedar wooden shed in which I keep my assortment of rakes, shovels and hoes, as well as my hush-hush chemical stash of Roundup and deadly varmint pellets. Next to the shed I keep three wheelbarrows, leaned up against the stucco so that they do not accumulate water when and if it ever rains. Two of these are traditional metal wheelbarrows with a single front axel wheel. One has a solid rubber wheel and one, thanks to Handy Brad’s insistence, has an air-filled tire that is somewhat easier to roll over rocks and hard edges. Single wheel wheelbarrows are that way for a reason. That single small wheel takes the bulk of the weight burden off the load, but is much easier to maneuver than two-wheeled carts. I also have a steel framed, plastic bucket Gorilla Cart with two larger wheels. This cart is easier to push or pull (especially up and down hills) and it holds marginally more material like mulch or stones or decomposed granite. I think these three carts are all useful to me and my projects with the single-wheel ones more in service by the hired help and the Gorilla Cart more for my less certain carting needs. I would suggest that I use one or the other every week several times, so they are worth the cost and worth the storage space behind the garage.
None of that stopped me from browsing the internet regularly for some form of automation that would help me in my efforts to move stuff up and down my hillside. The obvious stuff is mulch and stone, but with the planting of probably 500 or so plants across that back hillside over this year, and each one having some form of root-ball with dirt attached in a plastic bucket, there has been lots to lug up and down and up and down…continuously. So, I did not give up until I found something that would fit my needs and work within the constraints of two narrow paths and trellises that define my access to the back hillside. In a perfect world I would take on the role of gentleman farmer and buy a small tractor with the various cart and instrument attachments to do everything from auger holes to digging trenches. But the world is never perfect and those pathways are not only narrow, but they are steep and, in some places, stepped. A ride-on tractor of any kind would either be too wide or too unstable due to the required narrowness to be safe to ride up and down the hills on those twisty loose-footed trails. I can literally visualize myself falling off my tractor and having it fall on top of me the first time I go down the hill. Gravity is a bitch. Getting hurt in your avocation and lying face-down in the mud, checking out the ground critters surrounding you is not a fun thing to contemplate.
So, I have finally taken delivery of my electric power wheelbarrow that weighs 195 pounds dry and empty and is industrial-grade with a steel frame and handlebars to compliment the 10 cubic-foot heavy-grade plastic hopper. It operates like a motorcycle with a twist-grip throttle, but an automatic wheel brake. That means that since it can go 2.4 mph, if you fall and it gets away from you, it brakes itself, subject only to Newton’s basic laws of physics with regard to momentum, inertia and general gravity. In other words, it won’t run amok, but it can easily tip over if loaded and unbalanced on the proverbial slippery slope. I bought it without hydraulic dumper (come on!) and with single Ag (meaning off-road tread) wheels. Double wheels seemed an unnecessary expense for a gentle farmer on 2.5 acres.
Today was trial day since Handy Brad and I went to the nursery in his pickup and bought three Palo Verde trees (two medium, one large), a nice chunk of gnarled driftwood (probably really dried grape root) and 500 pounds of decomposed granite in 50-pound bags. I only wanted Handy Brad to help with the transportation and told him that I would handle the placement of the trees and DG since I now had my very own mechanized cart. I am not going to get into the gory details of how easy or hard it was to make the two downhill and return trips I made with the cart (the DG is still siting in the cart in the garage), let’s just suffice it to say that nothing is ever as easy as one expects. But then again, I don’t think I could have put those trees in place without my mechanical donkey. So, that’s what I will call it, my donkey. What I do know is that on this hillside like in the rest of America on any of those two million remaining family farms, there comes a time when one must declare an end of family gardening and move on into the modern world. That day has come on this Escondido hillside.