The Quarter-Acre Farm

When I first began the Quarter-Acre Farm experiment, I expected that at the end of the first year I would do something big to honor the endeavor. Maybe I would have a wild bash to celebrate my freedom from the onerous grow-your-own route I had taken. Certainly, when I first started digging out the lawn, digging in seedlings, and digging zucchini for dinner day in and day out, I had envisioned such a party. After all, I figured if I made it through the year, it would be an occasion akin to landing on the moon.

At year’s end, I did, with great delight, take the kitchen scale off the counter and put it in the lowest drawer next to all the plastics in my Rubbermaid purgatory; I also removed the notebook in which I’d written down everything I’d eaten and how much it weighed for an entire year. That first night, I giddily wolfed down my favorite Mexican take-out food—a meal that I wouldn’t have to balance with two cucumbers, three tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and half a dozen figs. And I once again relished eating cherries I didn’t need to weigh first.

In general, however, the end of that seminal year had a genuinely anticlimactic feeling to it. Growing our own food no longer felt Apollo 12-big. Instead it was just something we did. It was a little different, but so was the fact that I’d made a lot of the furniture in our house. Different, but hardly noteworthy.

The more I thought about our Quarter-Acre Farm habit itself, the more I started thinking that of all the things I did on the farm, making a habit out of growing our own food was the biggest thing I had done. Especially considering that I was a person woefully deficient in willpower. Heck, most of my farming was done in my tatty but cozy twenty-year-old robe, because I knew if I went inside to change I’d find an excuse to eat something, call someone, or work on that novel before attending to the plethora of weeds choking the eggplants to death.

Habit. The feeling of having it integrated into my life was akin to how I felt when I bowled a strike: I had no idea how I’d done it. So I did a little research on the science of habit.

It is an accepted rule of thumb that a habit takes thirty days to make or to break. Actually, it is more a rule of limb. In the 1960s, a surgeon by the name of Dr. Maxwell Maltz observed that it took around a month for a person to adjust to the loss of a limb, and he extrapolated that thirty days was therefore the time it took to make any practice into a habit. This thirty-day theory remains widely believed and is one of the reasons that various industries yet announce “Free 30-day trial offers” in hopes of snaring customers into long-term use.

Thirty days seemed pretty optimistic to me, a one-time thumb sucker who remembers to this day the long torment (the shaming, the scolding, the lead-based merthiolate that likely lost me all those brain cells I could really use right now) of breaking that habit. As it happens, I guessed right. There have been further studies into the science of habit in the last fifty years. European researcher Phillippa Lally found that on average it took sixty-six days for an action to be carried to what she called “automaticity.” (She also found, understandably, that a plateau was reached more quickly when one was trying to make a habit out of something more pleasant, like drinking a glass of water with a meal versus trying to do fifty sit-ups a day, or perhaps even giving up the tender solace of the thumb.)

I tried to remember when growing, preparing, and eating our homegrown food became automatic for our family. It certainly wasn’t within the thirty-day trial offer period. At thirty days in I was still eating zucchini—morning, noon, and night—and Louis and Sam were understandably refusing to take part in the experiment at all.

I knew the Quarter-Acre Farm was a habit for me before it had become habit for Louis, however. I knew this because of the canned tomato incident the winter of that first year.

I had a particularly long day, and Louis offered to make dinner. He makes a great marinara sauce. When I came home, I found cans of tomato sauce and cans of diced tomatoes on our counter—store-bought cans, when we had a freezer full of homegrown tomatoes and homemade tomato sauce in the garage!

After I shook bags of icy tomatoes at him with the zeal of a flamenco dancer, I had a feeling that now it might not occur to him to make dinner for me again, at all. Further, there was likely a better way to help make Quarter-Acre Farm produce as much of a habit for him as it seemed canned tomatoes were.

Scientists advise it helps to fit a new habit inside of an already established pattern (rather than performing a punitive tomato fandango, say). As the cook in the family, I’d become used to wandering out into the garden and looking to see what was ripe, then picking what I needed either from the beds or from the freezer. This new habit of “garden shopping” was sandwiched between the hungry howls of the family, “What’s for dinner?!” and the actual cooking of that dinner. Of course, Louis and Sam were only doing the howling and eating (and the dishes), and so, though by winter they were happily eating Quarter-Acre produce as most of their diet, it was a passive practice.

Therefore, though I remained the main cook and the main farmer, I began asking the guys to please go out and pick the elements of dinner. At first they weren’t really sure which plants were spinach and which were chard. But they were experts in no time.

Sometime later, I asked them both if they would still grow their own food if I weren’t around. (Jesse, of course, does grow his vegetables, but at his own place.) Both Louis and Sam failed to say they’d find it impossible to ever eat again if something happened to me, and instead they gave me a cheerfully certain reply that yes, they would grow their own food.

Sam said he would especially grow his own tomatoes. He’d noticed that the ones we purchased at the grocery store were not nearly as good as the home-grown variety, and further, were very expensive. He pointed out that a small box of organic cherry tomatoes cost “over four dollars,” no doubt tallying up just how many hundreds of dollars of tomatoes he consumed in one tomato season.

Another way I tried to habituate the guys to growing and eating our own food was to borrow from the National War Gardening Commission, circa 1917. The commission was the brainchild of Charles Lathrop Pack to bring together national and local resources for home gardeners. The first order of business was to make a patriotic call to arms to American citizens, asking them to build a garden. The commission printed posters, including one depicting a raven-haired beauty courting melanoma by desultorily sowing seeds into tilled land while wearing a halter dress fashioned out of the American Flag. (Try wearing that now and see if you don’t catch it for abusing the flag.) The credo was “Will you have a part in Victory?” and the slightly alarming, “Every garden a munitions plant.”

But I think the most alarming poster was the one that stated, “You can can fruits, vegetables, and the Kaiser, too!” There is a bizarre (and not a little gruesome) image of two wholesome-looking mason jars filled with tomatoes and peas, and another jar as well—one that has the head of Kaiser Wilhelm II (and perhaps some of his more nutritious organs) stuffed into it. Wow.

The commission also stirred the nation to put idle ground to use (“slacker lands,” as they were called), and used a children’s rhyme to illustrate that all the small plots could make a huge difference. “Little drops of water, little grains of sand / Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.”

“Tender little carrots, juicy clumps of grapes, make a healthy body in a better shape.”

“Every time you pick some fruit and every time you eat them, you’re saving quarts of ugly crude from contaminatin’ Eden.”

The War Garden Commission did more than make up creative posters and ditties, however. They taught citizens how to garden, guiding urban farmers with the most basic information, from planting seeds all the way through to how they could utilize and conserve the food they grew.

The commission also helped organize neighborhood and citywide support groups so that gardeners could consult each other about their problems and solutions. Victory gardeners did not feel alone in their efforts.

A year gone by in the Quarter-Acre Farm and I wondered if my family felt alone in the Quarter-Acre Farm life. I remembered a friend’s story about being a child in the sixties and thinking her family members were the only ones eating weird food like millet pancakes.

Did my family feel like lonely millet eaters? I decided to ask them a few questions now that the first year of the Quarter-Acre Farm was over, a sort of benign exit interview . . . without the exit, of course.

Not only did I want to know if they felt that living off the farm was alienating but also what they considered good or bad about the experience. I assured them there didn’t have to be anything bad. I was very open to their opinion that it was all an exhilarating, life-changing experience that they’d like to thank me for.

On the plus side, neither of the guys felt it was alienating. Sam did say his friends thought it novel that he showed up with snails for lunch one day, and Louis indicated that some might think that he was married to a “crazy hippy woman” . . . but generally they considered the farm an experience that had enlarged their lives.

We had all noticed that food and gardening people seemed to automatically draw toward each other. So much so that I started wondering if maybe it was the shared activity of composting that was responsible for a wafting pheromonic call to other gardeners. In any case, between slow food events, neighborhood gardeners, and introductions made on the basis of our Quarter-Acre Farm experience (these usually began with “Listen to what she’s doing. . . .”) we met many people we would not have met otherwise.

Even though meeting people was great, the best thing about the farm was the food. Sam and Louis said our homegrown food tasted better. Sam, a kid who can be found on most summer days grazing on fruit and vegetables in the yard, said he now felt a little trepidation when he looked at grocery-chain food: “I don’t know what’s on it, or what’s been done to it.”

Louis said he now also thought more about the residual impurities in produce and also felt less tolerant of it. “There are complex natural systems out there, but very simple ways to utilize them, such as line catching wild salmon, or growing vegetables using mulch and beneficial insects rather than insecticides and herbicides. Now I think there’s less reason to put up with toxic methods.”

By now I was feeling pretty good, understanding that the Quarter-Acre Farm was a great experience for my family, right up there with winning the lottery (had we only won the lottery, of course). But I was yet worried about the other shoe falling. I knew growing our own food had its, lets say difficult, days and I had just read an article about a family who decided they’d rather eat Big Mac’s every day for the rest of their lives than hoe another row. I did sympathize. (I still have dreams of Ho Hos wrapped in their beautiful silver wrappings, so easily available it was as if the Gods on Olympus had tossed them down in a box to reward me for good behavior.) Therefore, I knew I had to ask, but I thought I’d frame the question in a positive way. “So . . . nothing negative to say about The Quarter-Acre Farm experience, I take it?”

As Sam does the dishes at our house, he pointed out, “The kitchen was messier. There was dirt attached to everything you dug up, where store-bought food comes with the mud washed off.”

I asked Louis the next morning if he had anything bad to say about the farm. He said the worst was the water bill before I figured out the watering system and put timers on everything. “We’re paying a residential water rate for agricultural use.” Then he amended, “But we’re spending less on groceries now as well, and we used a lot of water on our lawn.” He mused, “The lawn didn’t look so good when we had it either. It was a lot of work, and we didn’t get to eat it at the end.”

“All?” he hedged, then admitted, “Yes, you were right about the Quarter-Acre Farm. We not only didn’t starve, we ate great food, and I do think the yard is more beautiful than it’s ever been.”

As I searched for the ripe berries, I thought about the day a small neighbor came by, one of the three-foot-tall, four-year-old variety. We were picking strawberries together and after he plucked a berry from its tether and ate it, he asked, “Did you get these from the grocery store?” I said, “No, sweetie, they just grow that way.” He was floored. I understood completely how much more amazing it was to have something like a strawberry just materialize than it would be to buy strawberries and somehow affix the fruit to a strawberry plant.

I thought of the scene at the end of The Great Gatsby, when narrator Nick Carraway imagines that the Dutch sailors who first sailed into the Hudson River and saw the “fresh green breast of the new world” were gazing upon the last thing left in the world “commensurate to [their] capacity for wonder.” I believe, however, that our capacity for wonder is proportional to our capacity for taking care of and paying attention to new worlds that might just wait at the toe of our own front steps.

Breakfast berries now in hand, I looked around the tiny patch of dirt we call the Quarter-Acre Farm. I breathed the scent of tomato, new garlic, and the cool smell of rain-soaked soil. An albatross mosquito-hawk bounced through the air, all filament legs and mica wings. Jewel-bright ladybird beetles hunted aphids alongside thrillingly fast praying mantises. I reached down and tossed a meandering snail to the highly excitable and appreciative ducks and thought about all the things that hum and crawl and fly in the Quarter-Acre Farm. The cats kept me company too, watching our domesticated flock through narrowed eyes as they did the many wild birds—jays, magpies, juncos, hawks, egrets, wrens, brilliant little canaries, and big-breasted mourning doves—who jockeyed for their piece of the farm’s wealth as well.

As I watched the mockingbirds perform a fan dance between the rows of tomatoes and beans, I wondered again why I didn’t have a party at the end of my year. I pondered this, as I observed a carpenter bee rumbling by like a tiny dirigible and a scrub jay tapping a peanut into the mulch. In the mud beside the pond I saw a fresh opossum print, then noticed that the overhanging apples in the tree alongside were almost ripe. A squirrel scolded, the hens announced an egg, and that’s when it hit me: After more than a year of eating out of my yard, in awe of the amount of life abounding in this small garden, I knew why I hadn’t had a party. I didn’t feel like the Quarter-Acre Farm experiment was ending. I’d barely scratched its heavily mulched surface—there was much more to do, so much more to learn! The Quarter Acre Farm had just begun.