THE SCENE WAS like a bizarre remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Psycho, that is, with my wife and me taking over Anthony Perkins’s role and a bulky twenty-three-liter plastic bag of ale wort, the sticky, sweet fluid made by steeping crushed barley, standing in for Janet Leigh. We were supposed to pour the sticky brown fluid into a large plastic bin, which we had put in the old clawfoot bathtub of our Kingston house in case we spilled anything. Grunting and bickering, we had wrestled the bag onto the edge of the tub, pushed aside the shower curtain, and then tipped its spout over the plastic bin. Nothing. The spout would not spout. Grabbing a knife, we quickly poked a hole in the bag. A trickle. At this rate we’d be holding the heavy bag in place for half an hour. So we gave it the full Norman Bates. We stabbed the bag again. And again. And again. Soon the sticky brown liquid was flowing into the bin from half a dozen holes, and into the bathtub and onto us. All that was missing were the screeching violins.
Not the most auspicious start. Here we were, undertaking the brewing equivalent of the bunny hill in skiing — we’d bought a beer kit at our local beer and wine supply place, a bag filled with five-plus gallons of wort and a little packet of yeast. All we had to do was get the wort into the tub, then toss in the yeast. And we were already in way over our heads. Couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery? We couldn’t organize brewing in a brewery.
AFTER MY INITIAL inspiration, I’d left the idea of creating the perfect keg alone. Perhaps I hoped that, undisturbed in the quiet and darkness of my head, my idea would mellow and mature, rather like a fine English ale inside a wooden cask. By late winter, however, it was clear that, left to its own devices, the idea had developed all the richness of Coors Light. I had to get going.
Brewing great beer from scratch was going to mean learning two different jobs. First off, there would be Ian the brewmaster. I hadn’t brewed beer at home in more than thirty years and when I had, the “brewing” hadn’t amounted to much more than dumping a can of syrupy malt extract into a pot of boiling water. Our first recent attempt at brewing — the great bathtub massacre, as I thought of it — had actually worked out quite well, despite the personal hysteria we managed to inject into the process. It would have been quite hard to ruin our brew, working from a kit, of course. Not that I would have minded if we had — if we’d later been able to work out why. This was about learning. (And besides, no one ever died from drinking bad beer.)
This first brew and the several to follow were about learning to brew properly, to go at it in a systematic way. If we could learn to follow the simple steps needed to make beer starting from a kit, we could build on that and make progressively more complex brews, leading up to that final brew. The thing I realized early on about creating my perfect keg was that I didn’t need to wait until I had my raw ingredients before I started brewing. In fact, I shouldn’t. I could buy malt and hops and yeast, and equipment, and start learning to brew before I even had a seed in the ground. While everything was germinating or sprouting, I could get better and better at making beer. When my barley and my hops were ready, I would be, too. It’d be like hitting a baseball over your house, going inside, cutting out the leather and stitching together a glove, walking out the front door — and seeing the ball drop into your hand. Just-in-time brewing.
Before we go any further, I need to digress a little to tell you about the ingredients in beer. This is a simplification, but at heart, beer comes down to four things: water, yeast, barley and hops. Fairly simple. But like the blues, another devilishly simple thing, with various tweaks and additions these base ingredients can give rise to an infinite series of variations.
Given how open-ended beer making is, it’s not surprising that there was plenty about brewing I didn’t know. But in the parlance of Donald Rumsfeld, these gaps were known unknowns — I knew that you had to put some hops into your brew at the beginning and other hops in at the end, I knew that you boiled the wort for an hour when making beer, even if I wasn’t sure what kinds of hops or why exactly you boiled it for an hour.
With my other job, farming, I was on shakier footing. It’s not that I wasn’t aware that I was ignorant. I knew that. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Well, I did know a couple of things. I knew I was going to need to plant hops and barley. For the hops, I had picked three different varieties out of a nursery catalogue — Cascade, Willamette and Nugget. Hops, for the uninitiated, are what give beer its bitter taste. Generally, that is. There are other factors at play. And with hops, again very generally, the more hops you use, the bitterer your beer will taste. But not all hops are the same; some are naturally more bitter than others. Brewers define hops in terms of their alpha acid content, which is a measure of their bitterness, known as AAUs. Amateur brewers use a slightly different system to describe the same thing — international bittering units, or IBUs.
Hops are about more than bitterness, however; they can also bring specific fragrances to the brew. Cascade hops are characterized by fruity and citrus-like aromas. Cascade is an all-rounder that has become popular in recent years in bitter so-called West Coast–style pale ales. (The Cascade in their name refers to the Cascade Mountains, where they were developed in the 1950s. Most hops grown in North America come from the Pacific Northwest.) In terms of bitterness, Willamette is in the midrange along with Cascade. It is related to the classic British hop with the wonderful name Fuggles. Certain hops work in certain kinds of beer: Willamette would do in a more traditional British-style ale; Nugget might work when you wanted a far more bitter taste.
I chose three kinds of hops in part because I wasn’t sure yet what kind of beer I wanted to brew. I had some ideas, but I didn’t want to be nailed down so early in the project. I had another reason for mixing my hops. What I was doing was the hop grower’s equivalent of laying off side bets. I didn’t know what would work best with my soil and weather conditions. If one strain of hop pooped out completely, the other two might pull through.
The flavors and aromas that hops bring to beer are so taken for granted today that it is sometimes hard to believe beer wasn’t always made with them. Historically, brewers used just water, malt and yeast — although for a good deal of history, people weren’t sure what yeast was. (I’ll return to it later.) This brew was prone to going bad quite quickly, ruined by bacteria called Acetobacter, which turned the beer to vinegar about as fast as the yeast could ferment it. Beer was by turns sickly sweet or sour, so people fooled around with a lot of different “additives” for beer to improve its flavor, including plants such as juniper and heather. At some point in the ninth century, some German monks experimentally added the flowers from a hop plant to one of their brews and made an exciting discovery — as well as giving the beer an interesting bitter flavor, the hop plants stopped the beer from going off. The use of hops in beer spread across Europe, though slowly, reaching England sometime in the fifteenth century. The parts of the hop you use to flavor beer resemble tiny, soft, pale green pine cones (they are in fact called cones). They have a pungent oiliness to them so that, when you encounter it in freshly picked hops, you seem to both smell and taste at the same time. The hop plant is a cousin of marijuana, and like marijuana there are male and female plants. The ones needed for brewing are the females — the males do flower, but they don’t produce the cones.
Not so very long ago, it was hard to order brewing hops from nurseries. Richters, the big herb nursery I ordered from, only started carrying them in the late 1990s. You could get medicinal and ornamental hops — which make a nice trailing vine — but Richters didn’t carry even the more common brewing varieties. Now I had my choice of a number of beer-worthy varieties, a result of the boom in home brewing in the past few years. I ordered three of each of variety that I had selected — which was another nice thing about dealing with Richters. Places catering to commercial growers set minimum orders in the dozens. And they would ship roots, not the more developed plants Richters could supply.
Barley was a little more complicated. I knew there were two varieties of barley generally used in making beer — six row and two row. The rows in this case refer not to how they are planted (my original guess) but to how the barley kernels are arranged on the husk. If you look at stalks from the mature plant, you can readily see the difference.
Until well into the nineteenth century, two row was the typical brewing barley (although one historian told me that in the pioneer areas of North America, brewers probably weren’t picky, using whatever they could get). It was hardier than six row but not as productive. Gradually, as the brewing industry became more industrialized, six-row barley muscled out its less productive relative and has been used pretty much exclusively for most of the last century to brew beer in North America. Another advantage of six row is that it works particularly well in brewing in conjunction with other grains, such as corn or rice, that are cheaper than barley. Beers made with these adjuncts, which is what they are called, revolutionized brewing in North America, giving us many of the dominant beers of the late twentieth century — Budweiser and Labatt Blue, for example. The adjuncts made them — depending on your point of view — either smooth and crisp, or bland and uninteresting.
But two-row barley hadn’t been counted out just yet. With the interest in craft brewing that started in the 1980s and has accelerated over the past decade, niche and home beer makers have rediscovered this older grain. Coming full circle, malt made from two row is the preferred choice of most craft brewers today.
This history I knew fairly well. But that was all I knew. Of the actual business of finding and growing two-row barley, I was blissfully ignorant. Not that I was worried: my father once said that the best business to get into was running a hardware store. You bought the store and then your customers taught you what you needed to know. That was pretty much my plan where barley growing was concerned — my ignorance would be my most useful tool. Many people out there like to teach. I planned to give them plenty of opportunities. I started calling seed and feed places, a process I later came to think of as phone farming.
The first thing I learned was that not all two-row barley was malting barley, which was the type I needed. Uh-oh. I wasn’t quite sure what the other kind of two-row barley was used for (people didn’t say exactly), but it wasn’t for malting. I also learned that telling a seed company you wanted two-row barley was about as helpful as walking into a car dealership and announcing that you wanted to buy an American sedan. There was a myriad of varieties. Metcalfe and Kendall, Harrington and Manley. Some grew taller than others, some nurtured faster, some were more resistant to fusarium — whatever that was.
Alas, the second thing I learned was that by waiting until early May 2011, I was starting too late. The bulk of North America’s malting barley is grown out west — North Dakota in the United States, Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada. For a variety of reasons I would learn more about later, very little is grown in the east. In my part of Ontario, the feed suppliers don’t get much call for malting barley. What they do get, they typically have in by February. I should, they told me, have ordered earlier.
I’d thought that, for convenience’s sake, I’d order it from a supplier near our farm in the valley — best not to have to lug it too far. I started with Renfrew — with a population of just over eight thousand, our closest “big town.” No go. Then Pakenham, the next “big” place after Renfrew, home to a five-span stone bridge and about two thousand souls. Same story. After that, farther afield. Perth, about an hour’s drive away. Again, the same story: forget it. I left messages with feedstores across eastern and southern Ontario. Kingston, Belleville, Picton — I phoned myself halfway west along Lake Ontario with no results.
No barley, no beer. As I looked up phone numbers on the Internet, I could hear Catharine’s voice: I told you to order (no); you always put everything off (not true); that means no perfect keg for you (true, alas). I contemplated wading into the St. Lawrence.
Then it hit me: forget stores, try the suppliers. In the course of my research, I came across a type of two-row malting barley called CDC Stratus. The seed company that sold CDC Stratus had a 519 area code — that put it somewhere in southwestern Ontario. I could leave in the morning, pick up the seed and then come back the same day. An eight-hour round-trip, max. I was desperate. I called them.
Only to find out that I had it all wrong. I didn’t want CDC Stratus, the receptionist told me. I want Newdale. That was the standard two-row malting barley. She gave me their sales rep’s phone number. She might — just might — be able to help me. When I hung up, I called the rep on Skype. As I dialed, a call was coming through on my landline. It was someone called Lindsay, calling from the feedstore in Picton. She had become interested in my request and had been asking around there. What I needed, she confirmed, was Newdale. She had a bag. Did I want it?
From absolute ignorance to success in forty-five minutes. I was off to a good start.
“YOU LOOK LIKE barley people.”
I was intrigued by Lindsay’s comment. She seemed like a sensible young woman, plainly dressed and straightforward in manner, and she delivered her message in a straightforward way. She didn’t expand on it, and I didn’t ask her to — I think I understood what she meant.
We were at a feedstore on the outskirts of Picton, an incredibly scenic town in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. “The county,” as it’s universally called, occupies a blocky peninsula almost entirely surrounded by Lake Ontario, scalloped by sandy bays bitten off by the lake on its western edges and slashed through its middle by the huge inverted Z that is the Bay of Quinte. Located at the end of a long reach of the bay, Picton boasts some of the greatest freshwater sailing in the world. But right now, on a hot, humid day in early May, more like July than a central Canadian spring, our minds were focused on land, not sea.
For the past decade or so, the county — not much more than two hours’ drive from Toronto — has been experiencing what can best be termed “rural gentrification.” It’s not just that bed and breakfasts have set up in old farmhouses and that tired general stores have given way to art galleries and scratch-made ice cream parlors. The very crops in the ground have changed to reflect an affluent urban sensibility of the sort exhibited by people who want the artisanal or the local and are willing to pay through the nose. Vineyards, in other words, have been taking the place of tomato farms.
The feedstore straddled these two worlds. The parking lot was a mix of Ford F-150s and Range Rovers. In the main store, horse-related tack, a sure sign of rural upward mobility, seemed to be edging out more traditional feed shovels and electric fence kits. The annex where they kept seed and feed, on the far side of the parking lot, was planted firmly in the past, however — right down to a trio of elderly male locals seated on a bench inside the door indulging in that old rural tradition of hanging out at the feedstore. Our request for Newdale two-row barley identified us, however tenuously, as part of the newer world. Barley people.
This was ironic. The county had once been at the center of the North American barley trade, sending schooners laden with the stuff across Lake Ontario to Oswego, New York, from where it headed by barge through the state’s canal system to the Hudson, bound ultimately for New York City. In the 1880s, you could make a lot of money growing barley. The proceeds from just one year in the business were enough to buy you one of the large brick farmhouses that still dot the county. Then in the early 1890s, the American government introduced the so-called McKinley Tariff, designed to protect American manufacturing and agriculture, and the industry — and the county — collapsed.
Again ironically, the county was never really suited for producing barley — it’s too hot in the summer and, thanks to being nearly surrounded by water, too wet. These conditions are ideal for the growth of ergot, a mold that is the distant, naturally occurring cousin of LSD. Ergot was blamed for outbreaks of St. Vitus’ dance in the Middle Ages. This was when the peasants would go crazy from eating bread made with ergot-infested barley and begin dancing manically, fornicating publicly and so on. Sounds like fun, actually. Indeed, it may explain why the county’s barley was so popular back in the day. I once had a chat just outside a venerable local pub with a sales rep for a county-based craft brewery who tried to tell me, smiling but completely sincere, that ergot was the precise reason why people liked beer made with Prince Edward County barley — it was like drinking liquid LSD. Today’s world, however, takes a rather more jaundiced view of psychotropic additives. A few years ago, some boutique growers in Prince Edward tried to revive the county’s barley industry — only to have their crop rejected because of ergot.
Musing on the possibility of creating my own beer with a special buzz, I handed over the $18.95 for my fifty-pound bag of Newdale. So taken with Millie was the man who fetched it for us that he insisted on carrying it for us across the parking to our waiting Honda Fit. I didn’t complain. Fifty pounds isn’t all that much weight, but the bulk of the bag surprised me. Made of some sort of tightly woven plastic material, it was much bigger than a bag of cement but loose and floppy. I’d never given much thought before to what fifty pounds of barley seed would look like. It took up most of the hatch of our Fit. A big jump from those little packets of carrot seeds you buy at the supermarket.
I MAY NOT have known anything about farming, but I had the one indispensable accessory that any would-be agrarian needs: a farm. Two hundred acres or so in the Ottawa Valley. My wife and a group of people she has known since university bought it in the mid-1970s. They’d realized the dream that a lot of people had in the tail end of the back-to-the-land era. When they talk about the acreage, it is invariably referred to as “the farm.” When I describe it to people, they often say, “Oh, it’s just like The Big Chill.” And I tell them, “Yes, but only if The Big Chill had been written by Harold Pinter.” Sometimes I think it’s what life would have been like in one of those minor European courts in the eighteenth century — generally pleasant and undemanding but requiring one to keep an eye on shifting alliances and intrigues. Seemingly trivial facts and events — which way the door should open on the new refrigerator, for example — can be freighted with subtext and the ghosts of grievances past. Factions quickly emerge and heated arguments erupt. The surroundings, however, make these odd blowups easy to stomach — over the years, the farm has morphed from an Insulbrick-covered box with a sagging enclosed porch into a gray clapboard palace — nine bedrooms, a glass-doored fireplace in the living room, an Italian-tiled sunroom and a long veranda that wouldn’t look out of place on a Sri Lankan tea plantation. And like a plantation, others do all the work. Harold, the tenant farmer, keeps cattle on the land and cuts the hay. Two bearded beekeeping brothers — fundamentalist francophones, in fact, just to keep the alliteration rolling — keep a collection of hives at the bottom of one field. (I often wonder how the nudist colony located on the next farm over feels about that.)
Writing these last sentences, I am aware of just how odd they sound. You need to understand them in their proper context. You need to understand the Ottawa Valley.
How to describe the valley? Well, it is a valley, yes, the watershed of the Ottawa River. Near the river it looks pretty much as you might expect — a flat alluvial plain. Move inland from that, and the landscape changes dramatically — to steep, rocky, heavily forested hills, the valleys between them marked by lakes and fast-running rivers flecked with rapids. There are farms tucked here and there, usually in the rare pockets of soil between the hills. Many of them still boast rail fences and their original log houses. A few have been in the same family since the land was cleared in the 1860s. The height of land to the west, where Algonquin Park lies, empties most of the clouds formed over the Great Lakes. As a result, the valley is one of the driest farming areas in Ontario. This would, in theory, make it good for growing barley. So would the long, cold winters that linger on into what other regions call spring. This year, on a weekend in early May, looking from the highest spot at our farm, we could see snow on the top of the long stretch of high hills a few miles away known as the Madawaska Highlands. The upside was that snowmelt had been locked into the ground, offsetting what was likely to be summer drought, and the cold had killed off molds and pests a warmer climate might harbor. Again, that was the theory.
Standing there looking over the hills, the fields just starting to show the pale yellow-green of spring, I thought about how the valley’s geography — isolating, yes, but with fast-running rivers that allowed lumbering to flourish over the centuries — had shaped a unique way of life. It’s entirely appropriate that our highlands are the northernmost limit of a long chain of old mountains that run down through the eastern United States, culminating in the Appalachians, a thousand miles south of our farm. Valley folks and hill people have a lot in common. A strong dose of Scots-Irish blood, mingled in the valley with French-Canadian and Polish. Economies based on seasonal work and small-scale farming. Deep distrust of revenuers and other forms of officialdom (signs proclaiming “Government back off — This land is ours” dot the region). Distinctive ways of speaking. Their own dances and music — as one smart aleck put it, people in the valley don’t eat with spoons; they play them. But they also play the fiddle and the accordion, weaving jigs and reels and pumping out polkas. Hillbillies and valley people share some of the same hobbies, too — bootlegging, dynamite fishing and jacklighting, a highly illegal form of nighttime deer hunting using a headlight and a car battery.
They’re not entirely the same people, of course. I get the feeling that life in Appalachia is grim; that people there are just scraping along. By contrast, life in the valley seems joyfully, effortlessly absurd. A sign in the local supermarket announces, completely deadpan, “Ice — Regular or Diet.” The anecdote that for me best sums up the valley came from a doctor friend of ours. One night she was working the emergency room at Renfrew when an ambulance brought in a local farmer. He’d been run over by a pickup truck. His own, he claimed. His dog had been at the wheel.
So if I sometimes felt a little self-conscious about my brewing project, about just how ignorant I was about what I was trying to do, I didn’t have to worry. No one in a place like this was going to pay much attention to some smart-ass city fellow sowing and reaping a crop by hand.
If, that is, I got the chance. Spring had arrived very late this year. The ground was still very wet, which meant farmers couldn’t get out to the fields on their tractors. A few weeks before, I’d spoken vaguely to Harold about plowing an area for me to plant barley in, but at that point, I hadn’t even figured out where exactly I wanted my crop to go. Last week I found out that he was going into the hospital on May 10 for a hip replacement. He would be out of commission for weeks.
A cheerful, ruddy-faced man in his sixties, Harold is part of the local gentry in this part of the valley. He and various members of his extended clan own or rent farms all around our area. For many years, he drove the township snowplow (a hereditary sinecure that has since been passed on to his brother); now in his “retirement,” he works the farm. Only once have I seen Harold without a flannel shirt and a baseball cap, even in the height of summer. On that occasion, I had dropped by his house, notable for the three pickup trucks parked outside, and he had answered the door garbed in what I thought of as his leisure wear — pilled polyester sweatpants and a T-shirt bearing the words “Las Vegas: Sin City since 1905.” Harold boasts one of the purest — and least penetrable — Ottawa Valley accents I have ever heard: “Da’ rain was comin’ down ticker dan da hair on a hound’s back.” He always seems to be smiling, too — I suspect that he finds the farm members’ requests (“Could you move your cows? There are flies” or “Do you have to spread manure on the fields?”) to be a source of amusement. His eyes certainly twinkled the first time I told him about my barley scheme.
I’d been phoning Harold for about a week to see if he’d be able to plow my field, but I hadn’t been able to reach him. I’d hoped that he would drop by the farm sometime during the weekend, but he hadn’t. That meant I was going to have to seek him out. I don’t know why, but I felt odd about doing this. Part of me worried that it was somehow patronizing, like I was the dowager duchess descending on a humble tenant’s cottage. Downton Abbey played out among the pines and the rock piles. Another part of me was aware of how tenuous my position was. Harold doesn’t have a deal with me; I am strictly the “spouse of.” We’d never talked money — how much or indeed any.
ONE OF MY biggest challenges had been to figure out exactly how big an area I needed to plant. Mentally I said to myself that what I needed was “Oh, about an acre.” I didn’t really know how large that was. But the thing about nature is you always seem to need a hell of a lot of something — two tons of krill to feed a whale for a day, for example. Assuming all nature followed similar laws, an acre would be good for a couple of barrels of beer.
I felt real delight when I learned from the barley page on the University of North Dakota’s website that one acre in that state produced enough barley to make 28,800 bottles of beer. Even if one of those bottles should happen to fall, that was still a hell of a lot of beer on the wall. I did some calculating. If I drank two a day, I would be drinking the same beer for the next thirty-seven years. Even if I had a friend visit, it would take me close to two decades to get rid of it all. I’d probably be pretty tired of it by then.
Instead, I decided that I needed a far more modest strip, about thirty feet by one hundred. Three thousand square feet, 7 percent of an acre or thereabouts. I understood that I wouldn’t get the yields of a real farmer in North Dakota (which would have worked out to more than two thousand bottles), but this would still, I reckoned, give me enough barley to make several brews. On balance it would have been nice to have more barley than I could possible use, but if I planned to fertilize, weed and harvest my patch by hand — and I had no equipment so that was pretty much understood — it was smartest to go with the smallest patch of barley possible. I’d spent some time talking to Peter Johnson, the barley expert with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food. Peter told me that there wasn’t much malting barley grown in Ontario, though some farmers do plant it in cooler and drier parts of the province. Planting is a bit of a balancing act — barley doesn’t, as he put it, “like to get its feet wet.” But you also don’t want it to be too dry.
The area I picked out fit these categories, generally. It was a sloping bit of hill, just inside our gate, with a southern exposure and good drainage. I’d also had a chance to look at a soil map for Renfrew County, a wild swirling mass of color that looked like a cross between a Rorschach test and a Jackson Pollock painting. This tiny little patch was sandier than anywhere else on the farm, which made it our best potential barley patch. Water can trickle down to the roots in sandy soils; clay soils tend to hold it. I’d marked out the area with small metal stakes and pieces of fluorescent tape so that even if I were not around, Harold would know where I wanted him to plow.
When I got home on the night of May 8, I had a call from Harold on my voice mail: “I’ve dug your garden for you.”
BARLEY GENERALLY TAKES about ninety days to mature. In most parts of the province, they tell you not to plant much later than mid-May. In cooler areas, and I think that includes mine, you can push it to the end of May. But no later, Peter told me. After that, you can’t get crop insurance (not that I could have anyway, but I took it as a marker of risk) — as far as the insurers are concerned, the danger of failure is already too high.
Time was getting tight. We’d had a wet spring — too wet. We’d been lucky that Harold had been able to plow my little hillside at all before he checked into hospital. The flat bottom land was still so sodden that if he had tried to disk it, his tractor would have sunk in. Now we were into late May. If we didn’t get the barley in soon, we might find ourselves in trouble at the opposite end of the growing season, hit with a frost before we’d had time to harvest.
Before we could even think about planting, I had to make sure the ground was ready. Peter from the Ministry of Agriculture had given me an easy test. Dig out a lump of dirt the size of a golf ball from your field. Take it from about three inches down, he told me. Hold it in your hand and jam your thumb into it. If it breaks into big chunks, the soil isn’t ready. If it crumbles, it is. Don’t even think about trying to plant if it’s just mud. I dug out a lump and pushed my thumb into it; the ball crumbled into nice flakes. It was the crack of nine thirty on Saturday, May 21, and I had a full day ahead of me.
Barley needs nitrogen. From my research, I knew that the usual amount worked out to about fifty pounds an acre. Nicely seasoned manure is about 2 percent nitrogen. So for my plot, I estimated I would have to dump about three hundred pounds of manure before I could start seeding.
You could think of fertilizing, at least the way I did it, as a programming loop: take one late-model Honda Fit. Put down back seat, cover with plastic, add a shovel and two large plastic tubs. Back car down the narrow lane between a collapsing log piggery and the sagging gray plank outbuilding where Harold stashes his manure. (Well, his cows’ manure, actually.) Drag tubs and shovel inside. Find oldest, driest manure, take shovel and load into plastic tub until about half-full. Lift into previously positioned wheelbarrow then wheel to waiting Honda Fit. Fill and load second tub. Drive Fit two-thirds of the way up the hill, stop. Set hand brake and get out. Remove tubs. Lift tub into second previously positioned wheelbarrow. Push off driveway into tall grass. Curse wheelbarrow’s flat tire. Struggle across rough ground, turn right into future field of barley, tip barrow and dump manure. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
In all, I made ten trips up the hill. I’d planned six, but three hundred pounds of manure didn’t seem to go very far. In the end, I had loaded and dumped more than five hundred pounds. Catharine helped me rake in the first two loads, but for most of the day I was on my own. Raking in wasn’t particularly difficult — you’re just dragging the rake through the top couple of inches of dirt, making sure the manure gets broken up and nicely mixed in. Shoveling and lifting and struggling with the wheelbarrow were all harder. But raking in was the most time-consuming. I remember walking down to the farmhouse for water when I was about halfway done, and the clock said two thirty. I finished fertilizing just before six.
I had given a lot of thought to seeding. But, admittedly, this was mostly from a presentation point of view. At first, I had envisioned myself with a bag over one shoulder, tossing seed casually with one hand as I strode across the field — a bit like the logo of Simon and Schuster, I think, or some sort of folkloric figure — Johnny Barleyseed, say. And I thought I could give it a sort of ironic take by using my old newspaper delivery bag. But one of the other farm members came up with what proved to be a much better idea — one of those little contraptions that people use to seed their lawns. You know them — a little red hopper with two wheels and a long handle, and a switch to control the rate of distribution. You set it, load it, and then you push it merrily along the ground, scattering seed before you, all thanks to a mini mechanical Onan. The mainstay of every suburban dad.
Of course, these seeders are designed for relatively small, relatively smooth lawns, not farmers’ fields. As I pushed it along, the hopper bucked and jumped, bumping up-down-down-right-left-even — hunh! — stopped dead by a large rock or clod of dirt, jamming the handle into my stomach. Maybe, I thought, sowing by hand was the way to go. I picked up the seeder, tucked it under my arm and began scooping out handfuls of barley and scattering them around, a technique that left large areas of my plot bald and others heaped with seed. Even worse. So back I went to the thump, jump, bump of pushing the seeder through the field. The interesting thing was, it worked. I had determined how much seed I was going to need to cover my patch, and the machine ran out precisely at the end.
This spring had been great for blackflies, and I had a cloud of them around my head as I toiled — happily, I swallowed a mere three. But they worked on me around my sock line, where my arms stuck out of my shirt and, worst of all, along my hat line — someone later remarked that I looked like a man who had been wearing a crown of thorns. I felt like one, too. They got worse as the day went along, and by the time I had finished seeding, they were at their height. Now I had to rake in the barley seed, which meant going over my field once more.
I’d started the day wearing my smart straw fedora, but because I had been sweating so profusely, by noon it had the look and some of the consistency of wet shredded wheat. I had switched to a baseball cap in the afternoon, and as I bent over to rake, I could see sweat dripping off the bill. I learned later that, below me, as I worked, the others had sat in the farmhouse’s sunroom discussing whether I would make it or not. Not “make it,” I fear, in the sense of finish the job, but in the sense of survive. I suspect that, to interested observers of my day’s activities, the idea of me facedown in a field and quite, quite dead, seemed all too plausible.
It was not to be. I finished up that evening at eight. Exhausted, dehydrated and covered in bloody bites. I had been at it for ten hours, more or less.
I SPENT A fair bit of time lying in bed the next morning, trying to decide whether I could walk. What didn’t hurt, itched. I could walk, as it turned out, which was good, because Sunday was hop planting day. Apart from the area where I had planted my barley, the farm’s soil is made up of a lot of clay (not counting the considerable stretches of rock, that is), and clay isn’t ideal for hops. They like it a bit sandier. Fortunately, the township was doing some work on the road, so we were able to borrow sand from the big pile they had dumped nearby. We mixed this with rotted manure, and then I created three small beds, one for each variety of hop, with three plants in each bed, the beds dotted along the south side of the henhouse. (That’s what Harold, who built it when he lived here as a boy, long before the city folk bought the farm, calls it. The farm members now refer to it as the “coopio,” having turned it into an artists’ studio of sorts.) Working on an extension ladder, I screwed eye hooks into the fascia of the henhouse and we ran long lines of jute twine down and anchored them in the soil for the hops to climb. That Sunday, May 22, was not a good day to plant — too clear and sunny. Transplant anything in those conditions and it’s going to wilt. We’d have to head home after planting, so if the weather stayed that way, the hops might just expire before we got back. But we had no choice. The plants had to go in — otherwise, they might not set cones before the first frost. Happily, as we left the farm a few hours later, it started to rain.
Even with the rain, though, I realized that this first week would be key for getting the hops to settle in and the barley to sprout. If things hadn’t worked out by the time we returned, I could probably save the hops — the garden hose would easily reach. But given the size of my field and its location up the hill from the house, there would be much less I could do about the barley.
This was something I was beginning to understand about rural life: the lack of control. If you’re a farmer, you’re at the mercy of the elements. You may need to plant by such and such a date; if it doesn’t stop raining, too bad. And if it doesn’t start raining? That’s too bad, too. In other jobs, you can work around these problems: decide to work on the weekend instead of the week, reschedule tasks, pay extra for express delivery, whatever. Farming doesn’t allow for that.
One good thing I had found out from my reading about barley: it was a very simple crop to grow. You don’t need to water it, the books and websites told me, and you don’t have to worry about weeds. A simple crop for a simple man. It seemed a good fit.