Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes: Recently we mailed off our very ambitious vegetable seed order to Fedco and expect to wait the usual two weeks or so for delivery. Unbelievably, it is almost time to begin planting again. Certainly time to start leeks, scallions, and lettuces in the greenhouse. When, several years ago, we were lucky enough to have inherited a greenhouse, we began starting our own seedlings, thus gaining more control over the varieties of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, etc. we grow. We prefer to try heirloom varieties (the plant counterpart of our heritage animals) but are not averse to also, now and then, trying a new variety that seems to have a lot going for it.
We have also extended our season by wintering over a vegetable garden in the greenhouse. In late fall, we move in lettuces, Swiss Chard, herbs, and artichokes to supply our table during the winter. Artichokes, you say? Yes, last spring we ate artichokes regularly from the plants we moved in the previous fall and hope to do so this spring. Delicious artichokes, far superior to what passes in the supermarket as such from California. Now that we have the farm and the greenhouse set up, it would seem we have no choice but to grow things. But where, I have been thinking lately, did this original urge to grow things come from? My family, puzzled by my enthusiasms, has often questioned the origin of my green thumb, something they do not share. Certainly, my desire to grow things was not hereditary or because of family influence. The two branches of my family I know best have no farmers in their background: one branch going back to the seventeenth century, possibly beyond, with a fairly continuous line of master mariners and an occasional artisan in the jet-stone trade; the other line, barristers back to the eighteenth century. And it was certainly not my immediate environment, first, a terrace house in urban Cardiff in Wales, followed by suburban houses in northern Illinois.
My earliest memory of plants and planting is from when I was around five or six. Our tiny walled garden in Cardiff did not have much space for planting since it was dominated by our Andersen air raid shelter, a corrugated domed structure half buried in the ground. But in a tiny strip along the garden wall, there were some plants—freesias, I think—that I took to caring for since no one else did. I cared for them in a very loving way. Other than the bay tree in the back corner, they were the only green, living things in the yard. My next foray into caring for plants, this one an unsuccessful one, came when we got our first Christmas tree. I was seven. During the privations of the war years in Britain, there were no Christmas trees available. The only one I had ever seen, other than in pictures, was being carried into an orphanage nearby on Cowbridge Road. Someone obviously had bequeathed an annual tree to the orphanage, and not even the Nazis could prevent that bequest. Seeing the tree go in the door was the only time I envied the orphans.
But with the end of the war, grocers at Christmas began hanging rows of tiny cut Christmas trees on the fronts of their shops. And we got one. But since our family ornaments had been destroyed in a bombing raid that took the roof off the house, and since there was nothing like ornaments available yet in the shops. I set to work and, using tin foil wrappers, painted paper, and wads of cotton wool, cobbled together enough creations to decorate the tree. I was very involved with this tree so that when it was time to take it down, I could not let it go. “It will never grow. It has no roots,” my mother and aunts said, as I dug a deep hole and carefully planted the tree next to the bomb shelter. I was absolutely convinced it would grow; no one could convince me otherwise. I watered it faithfully every day. But in spite of my will to have it live, this was not to be, and it soon, to my great sadness, turned brown. It was not until after trying to plant the next Christmas tree a year later, with the same sad results, that I finally, reluctantly accepted failure. But the impulse to grow things survived and has continued to the present, finding its way over the years into perennial flower gardens, roof gardens, vegetable gardens, and now Turkana Farms. It is a mysterious impulse that seems to have grown, rather than waned, over the years. —Peter Davies
