I WAS AT BEST a sometime farmer. That couldn’t be helped. My field of barley lay almost two hours away from our Kingston house, up twisty and in places badly surfaced two-lane highways. To complicate matters further, this was the summer we decided, after years of renting it out, to sell our Toronto house. The housing market there was going insane, we heard, and it seemed foolish not to take advantage of it before the bubble burst and people came back to their senses. We had been in our house there for more than thirty years, and although we hadn’t exactly kept coal in our bathtub, I do remember our daughter returning from university in Montreal and declaring that the house looked as if “it had been torn apart by drunken monkeys.” We knew that we had to do a lot of work to get it ready to sell in an exacting market.
So at the beginning of July, we moved back to the city. For the next two months, we shuttled from Toronto to Kingston to the farm and then back again, often twice in the same week, in a motorized version of the old Battle of the Atlantic New York–Halifax–St. John’s triangle run. This wasn’t even part-time farming; it was more like farming snapshots, one brief exposure after another.
THEY TELL YOU to trail your hop vines up their lines clockwise. Mine did it of their own free will, circularly twining their way up the strings I had run from stakes to the eaves of the chicken coop. The Nugget hops were far and away doing the best, with the Willamette coming second and the Cascade bringing up the rear. I wasn’t quite sure why. It might be that the Nugget had the best location, but given that all the plants were up against a white wall with a southern exposure, I don’t think there could have been that much difference. Maybe Nugget was just the hardiest. Or maybe in two months they’d all be doing well.
“Are you sure it’s barley?” Catharine asked, as we trudged up the driveway to check out my field on a mid-June Saturday. This had become her recurring question. And, I suppose, a legitimate one. By this point, the growth was six inches high, but there was really nothing to differentiate it from a shaggy, neglected lawn. It was completely possible that what we were looking at was whatever particular crop had been planted there before Harold had plowed the field for me. Had I tossed all that seed around for nothing?
I didn’t really think so. I could see, as we walked around my field, that the growth had continued in erratic patches, only now more evident — a tuft here, a bald spot there. Rather like the hair on my own head, in fact. This suggested that it had been seeded by me, not by the hand of God.
I was worried about weeds, though. Among the patches and clumps of barley, a lot of milkweed and pigweed was coming up. In some places, the weeds were doing better than the barley. The expert opinion on barley (well, according to the book by two hippie brothers I bought about the care and maintenance of the brewer’s garden) was that you don’t need to weed it, because the plants grow so close together. (This was all part of the great “simplicity” myth surrounding barley.) Now, I can understand that if you were growing ten thousand acres of barley, you’d be happy to go with this assertion, but given that I had such a (relatively) small patch, I thought I might as well do some weeding. And although there was some question about whether the green, grass-like plant I had in my field was barley, there was no mistaking the weeds. They looked like weeds.
In some ways, what I was doing was closer to lawn care than farming. Equipped with one of those short little tools you use to dig weeds out of a lawn and a green plastic milk crate, I got to work. Taking pains not to step on the barley (stupid, if in the process of saving it, I destroyed it), I began working through the field width-wise. I’d shift my milk crate, bend, push the forked tip of the weeder deep into the soil and lever out a weed, or more often weeds, and drop it in my carton. I’d straighten up, spot the next weed and move my carton. As I rooted out the weeds, I noticed that although the surface of the field may have been drier than before, four or five inches down it was still damp. Over the weekend, from my three thousand square feet of barley, I dug out five milk crates full of compacted weeds. I could have taken out a few more, but my enthusiasm ran out well before the weeds did. Some of the weeds seemed to be invading from the edges; but I suspected that others had been in the manure I used. Too bad, I remember thinking, I can’t make weed beer. I’d dominate the market.
My barley was weed-infested, but it seemed to be doing fine overall. The hops, however, had wilt. Wilt is one of those things that can survive for years in the soil, and some strains of hop are particularly susceptible to it. It can completely destroy German Hallertauer, a popular hop used to make lager. I noticed that my middle guys, the Cascade, really seemed to be struggling. I could see the progressive march of the disease up the vines — the leaves at the bottom were yellowy brown, dry and dead; those a foot or so up were drooping, their robust green color draining away; those higher up again were beginning to shrivel at the edges. One of the keys to getting a lot of hop growth is to trim any extra shoots and to cut away a lot of the bottom leaves. This technique helps with wilt, too. I pinched off the affected leaves, and a few more healthy ones while I was at it, as a sort of insurance policy, and tossed them far, far away from my plants. After that, I sprayed the leaves with a baking soda mixture and “manure tea” — what you get if you leave manure to steep in a bucket of water, then siphon off the all-too-evocative yellowish-brown liquid. These old-time remedies also fight wilt. The manure tea, alas, led to pointed questions around the farm’s dining room table when I fail to remove the bucket from the coopio, which is not well ventilated.
As I worked, I conceded that even without wilt, the hops were going to be a particular challenge. If I really was going to brew beer completely from scratch over the winter, I needed enough hops of my own. Given ideal climate, soil and other conditions, a single plant can produce up to two and a half pounds of cones, while they lose a fair bit of weight when you dry them, a single plant should produce enough hops for several batches of beer. But my problem was that hops really only get going in their third year. In their first year, the plants concentrate on putting down strong root systems. They do produce cones, just not a lot. For my scheme to work, I needed almost all the plants to pull through.
And wilt aside, I could see that some of the plants were doing fairly well. My star, Nugget, was six feet high by this point. Others were well up over the two-foot-high chicken-wire cages I had built around them to keep out pests. But two of them looked dead. I decided to clip these right down. If they were dead, they would still be dead. If there was some life left, they might bounce back.
BY MID-JULY, the barley was doing well, a lovely field of light blue-green grain that shimmered in the wind and stood out in a nice contrast to the stubbly brown grasses around it. The barley was sprouting its trademark “beard”— the fringy bit at the top that you always see featured on beer labels or boxes of cereal. There would be no more questions about whether I was growing barley or grass. The beards clinched it.
There were plenty of weeds mixed in with the barley, but I decided not to bother with them. Over the past few weeks, since the first time I had ventured into the fields with weeding implement in hand, I had taken out several additional milk cartons stuffed with weeds, but I am not sure that it made much difference. The weeds came back, but the barley kept growing. Ecological equilibrium, I guess.
The hops that I had trimmed right back had survived and were sending out new sprouts, though they probably wouldn’t end up producing much. The ones that had been badly hit with wilt seemed to have benefited from the baking powder and manure tea sprays, and were sprouting healthy, attractive leaves and tendrils. So attractive that I now faced another problem: Japanese beetles. One of the hardest hop pests to deal with, these compact green beetles had chewed great holes in the hop leaves and were getting busy on my nascent cones, too. Trundling out the extension ladder once again, I quickly disposed of these guys by flicking them with my thumb and forefinger into a jar filled with soapy water.
Afterward, while rummaging around in the chicken coop, I noticed a plastic bottle full of murky red fluid. Two of the other farm members — I’ll call them the lawyer and the chef — had a vegetable garden going, and I had seen them using this organic insecticide, which they had made themselves. I sprayed it on the leaves of my hops to stop the beetles from coming back. The next morning when I checked them, I almost had a heart attack. The plants were drooping badly. I noticed that the afflicted areas seemed to correspond exactly with where I had sprayed. It was my turn for pointed questions. It turned out that one of the ingredients in the spray was supposed to be crushed chilies. They had used commercial chili pepper, which contains salt. I had covered the leaves of my precious hops in a fine film of salt, and the sun had done the rest.
I snipped away the damaged leaves and the plants shook it off. But I felt like the disasters never stopped. If the hops weren’t wilting, they were being eaten by beetles. Kill the beetles and the next thing you knew the leaves were covered with tiny caterpillars. I got rid of them, only to turn a leaf over one morning and be confronted by a creature the size and shape of a scrubbing brush — a red, black and yellow upside-down scrubbing brush.
Whenever you read about Buddha or St. Francis of Assisi, people always go on about their respect for every living thing. This, it seems to me, is the attitude of someone who never had to deal personally with goutweed or an aphid infestation. Those problems were “out there” for them, a question of attitude, not reality. For those of us on the front lines of gardening and farming, reality is very different. That bright, gaudy caterpillar on the underside of a hop leaf is your archenemy, a selfish freeloader who is robbing you blind. Sacred? Yeah, pal, I got your sacred. (Fires away with organic bug spray.) Right here.
I PULLED THE thick black hose over my shoulder and coiled it once around me. Leaning into the hose with my shoulder, I began tugging its long, trailing length behind me, up the sloping hill, past our pond and between two small clumps of willowy trees, in the direction of my barley.
It’s odd about weather. If you live in a city, and I have lived in cities my whole life, the definition of good weather, especially in the summer, is dry and hot. The lack of rain only becomes an issue when the city starts telling people to stop watering their lawns. Get out in the countryside, though, and everything changes. If you are trying to grow something, rainy days are suddenly important and a long, unbroken string of hot, sunny days, an alarming prospect. I could imagine a farmer looking out of his window at a succession of such days and slipping ever deeper into a gloomy personal depression. More bad weather, he’d think. You don’t want to keep on the sunny side. You want to keep on the rainy side.
We’d been blessed with a wet spring — almost too wet, in fact. The wet weather had dragged on. June 22, I wrote in my journal, it is raining, a nice, slow steady rain . . . June 23, rained again in the night — an inundation that had me convinced in my sleepy state that the hose to the dishwasher had burst . . . July 18, rained while I was barbecuing, of course, and then during the night twice. Dumped a lot.
Late in July, the weather began to change. It simply got too damn hot. At the end of one particularly brutal week, when the temperatures at the farm had hit thirty-five degrees, I could feel, almost see, the heat radiating up at me from the dry, hard soil. I had planted my field so that it sloped slightly downhill — actually, in two directions, lengthwise from right to left and widthwise from back to front. I hoped the slope would help it to drain. But now I saw that the gently sloping hill’s southern orientation had the particularly nasty effect of tipping my barley to take the fullest brunt of the sun’s rays. Some of the shoots planted in the lowest part of my field had died. In other surviving patches, I could see brown creeping up the stalks. Certain doubters thought I wouldn’t have enough.
Now, of course, from what I’d read, barley doesn’t need to be watered. Any more than it needs to be weeded. But I had to get water to it. Exactly how I wasn’t sure. We have a very nice pond between my field and the farmhouse, and I thought maybe that would be a source. But it was just Catharine and I on the farm that weekend, and a two-person bucket brigade, where you’re looking at carrying each pail seventy-five or more feet, isn’t all that effective.
Not for the first time, I found myself in that netherworld between agriculture and lawn maintenance. The farmhouse is surrounded by fairly large lawns. On either side of the building sits one of those reels on wheels that hold about fifty feet of hose. If I could hook them together, I might be able to reach the barley. I took the hoses off the two reels, found a third in the basement and a fourth hanging coiled on a nail on a wall of the henhouse. Screwing them all together gave me about two hundred feet of hose, to which I attached a lawn sprinkler. With this I could pretty much water all my barley.
Our biggest concern was the pump that brings water up to the house from the well. Another two hundred feet uphill was a hell of distance for it to pump. When I opened the outside tap for the first time, I could hear the pump straining away in the cellar. To make sure we didn’t burn it out, we agreed I should turn it off every half hour or so. So I’d turn on the hose, then trot up the path to my field and pull the spraying sprinkler into place, taking care not to crush too much of my barley. Then I set the timer on my watch for twenty minutes. I had estimated that if I wanted to water the whole patch before the day’s end, that was how often I would have to shift the sprinkler, given the radius it covered. Back in the house, I set the timer on the stove for thirty minutes. At my watch’s beep at the twenty-minute mark, I ran up the hill and dragged the sprinkler to a new spot. By the time I was back in the farmhouse, the thirty-minute warning was sounding on the stove timer, so I thumped down the basement stairs, turned off the pump at the circuit breaker and waited a minute or two. After I flicked the breaker back on, I ran up the stairs and reset the stove timer. Then it was out the front door, down the steps and back to the barley. Planting, weeding, watering — there is a lot of repetition in farming. When it’s going well, I think it becomes rhythmic — you get into a groove and zone out a little. Often, though, it’s just assembly-line work — only in nicer surroundings.
It took all afternoon, but I managed to water every part of my barley patch. I didn’t know if it would help. It needed a serious soaking rain. But if frenetic energy combined with personal anxiety could make the difference, my crop had nothing to worry about.
“NOW ON TO Essex County. Ralph, apologies for last week. Yes, I did fail to mention that a copper solution used on winter alfalfa can also boost productivity . . .”
I was lying on the carpeted floor of my office in our Toronto house, listening on my phone to the recorded weekly update by Peter Johnson, the cereal guy with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture. I generally work standing up, but if I have to sit on hold or listen to a long recorded message, I find it’s often more comfortable to just lie down and let it wash over me. I was playing hooky from installing a shelving unit in the walk-in closet, all part of the presale house fluffing.
I was worried about when my barley would finally be ready to harvest. It looked like it might be right around the week when I was supposed to be working at Lake of Bays Brewing. The previous fall, I had spent part of the Thanksgiving weekend signing books at Lake of Bays, a craft brewery that had opened only months before in the Muskoka hamlet of Baysville. The young founder, Darren Smith, had given Catharine and me a tour of his brewery, and I had been impressed by his enthusiasm and, even more, his knowledge. A subsequent encounter with him and some of his crew at a pub in Bracebridge had planted the idea that he might be someone to spend time with. We’d fixed it up so that I could work at his brewery while staying at my sisters’ nearby cottage.
But if harvest time coincided with my Lake of Bays week, it would mean a hasty three-hour drive through Algonquin Park to the farm. I knew about how long the barley was supposed to take to mature — ninety days. But that is very approximate — the weather, the soil and the climate play their parts. What’s true for North Dakota isn’t true for eastern Ontario. My hope was that I’d be able to let the barley go a bit longer than ninety days, to give me a little slack time. But I quickly learned that no online source, including agricultural colleges and government entities, would come out and say whether I could take that gamble. The Ontario agriculture ministry site alluded to a slack time — but totally relationally: Newdale barley took two days longer than (oh, I don’t know) Bentley, which in turn took less time than Bornholm, which took a week longer than HY 435-2R. Following this reasoning, your only hope would be to drive around until you saw someone harvesting a field planted with the barley that matured just before yours.
That’s why I had called Peter. He was out in the field — literally, I mean — but after listening to the message he’d left on his machine, I phoned in to the province’s crop hotline. This service consisted of him reporting on all the grains right across the province, based on people’s first-person reports to him. It had an incredibly intimate feel to it, like listening in on a party line, with plenty of shout-outs (if an ag rep can shout out) to people across the province. On and on it went, crop after crop, county by county. But nothing about Newdale. I hung up when he got to dwarf bunt.
I decided to check the seed company’s website for information on Newdale’s maturation. There it was: “mid.” Mid what? The woman who answered the phone when I called referred me to the eastern Ontario rep. I had, he told me, at least three weeks to go.
“Don’t rush it,” he said.
“YOU’D BETTER HEAD over to Grey County.”
Catharine and I were on the road, again, heading north to the farm on a Saturday morning in early August. We’d taken off early, if not bright.
We had the radio tuned to the local community station, to the Polish show to be exact, which featured performers from the western edge of the valley. I liked it, though I have to admit that apart from the performers’ names (including the memorable Donny “Fiddle Fingers” Palubeskie), it sounded just like the Scottish, Irish and French shows: rapid-fire jigs and polkas sawed out on violins.
We were sharing the car that morning with an elephant. A blue-green, bearded, two-rowed elephant that had been dogging me, unacknowledged, for a few weeks. My barley had been doing well until the great blast of heat hit us in late July. Catharine believed, and I was willing, grudgingly, to accept that she might be right, that I would need to find barley from somewhere else.
Grey County was her idea. That’s where they grow most of the barley in Ontario. “See if you can figure out who can get it for you there,” she suggested.
“There are people who grow it in Prince Edward,” I said. “I’ve got the name of a guy down there.”
“If you go to Grey you can stay with your cousin.”
“Prince Edward is closer.” Grey County lies south of Georgian Bay and west of Algonquin Park, a good four-hour drive from home.
“It’s too hot and humid for barley in Prince Edward. You said so yourself.”
“Yes, but not everywhere. This guy does it successfully.”
“But if you —” and then she stopped. “This,” she said, “is an argument only a married couple could have.”
I agreed, for the public record, to go to Grey. Secretly, however, I believed my barley won’t fail me.