Growing up, my family never had a garden. We ate canned goods, beans, cornbread, mashed potatoes, spaghetti, sandwiches, Ramen Noodles, biscuits and gravy—you know the usual. My Grandmother had a pear tree on her property in Georgia that I was very curious about. I just never knew when to pick them, so I always ended up biting into a tart fruit that never grew more than the size of a plum. The pears were puny because the tree was overgrown and never tended to—it was just another tree on my Grandma’s land, that’s all. As a girl, I always had an affinity of mixing up odds and ends in my mother’s soup pots out on our back doorstep. I would mix endless herbs and spices like paprika and pepper in a pot of water and pretend I was cooking. Food has always been a deep interest of mine.
Throughout my childhood, my curiosity of food sort of withered a bit. There was nothing special to be learned, it felt. My Mother and Grandmother’s recipes repeated and I was never invited to see how the sausage was made, “get out of the kitchen” was the message. And, I can’t say I blame anyone for that. Cooking—for my single mother, was a chore that she had to accomplish to keep her four hungry children satisfied after a long day’s work. My grandmother was a child of ten, who’s mother lived through the Great Depression. So, her outlook was all about eating every bit of food that was put in front of you because if you didn’t—you would starve to death. So, I get it. Times were tough and those ideas imbedded themselves in my grandmother and they were passed down, and traditional sometimes runs deep.
Throughout my teenage years I cooked here and there, but really I had no cooking skills. My mother stopped cooking altogether when I was in high school. That meant I had to ‘fend for myself’, which meant that I would stay many-a-night at my friends’ house who’s mom still cooked. I love food, so I was glad my friends’ parents and my friends were so generous with me. In college, I saw my peers eating pizza nightly and just eating random junk, I can’t pretend I didn’t indulge too. I guess they saw this time of our lives to indulge in foods that they weren’t accustomed to eating because we were used to home-cooked meals. After a while, I decided to seek a different approach. I sought out the most wholesome food stand in my university to try and eat as best as I could. As an experiment, I became vegetarian. The ideal originally came to me when I was seven-years-old and our neighborhood pals were raised vegetarian. I thought back then, ‘how cruel your mom must be!’ But of course, I didn’t understand it, that was just my way of making sense of it all. Anyway, being vegetarian in Missouri had its challenges. The wholesome food place that I went to all the time at school had options for me to choose from, so that’s where I mostly frequented. I also had access to a rice cooker in my dorm room, so there was lots of rice and beans to be had.
At some point during a summer in college, I was working in Yellowstone National Park, preparing to study abroad in France. On a camping with some friends the main food source was meat—ribs, actually. I had to either eat that or go hungry—I choose the ribs. From that point forward, I just said to heck with it and started eating meat again. It was just too hard, I had found, so long as I had no cooking skills, not too much interest in picking them up and yea, I mean, I was a twenty-year-old kid, so, there ya go. In France I ate rabbit for the first time—my attempt at being open-minded. I was in a whole other part of the world, so it behest me to try new things.
After France, I moved to Ecuador to live with my husband and his family, and for a few years I stuck to eating meat still. I was uncomplicated, really. The good thing is that after Jose’s brother went to a vegan community-living retreat in Brazil, he came back vegetarian. soon after Jose’s mom and then little by little, his sister too. It wasn’t too long after that Jose and I joined. With the whole family being vegetarian we could all enjoy the same meals, that was so much better—not to mention many of Jose’s cousins were also vegetarian which meant we had more options at family gatherings. It was awesome—the only thing was…I still didn’t really have lots of cooking experience.
Jose and I did lots of baking, though. We made breads and cakes and pies and on and on and on. We made everything you could possibly imagine, but cooking special plates rested in the very qualified hands of Mami (Jose’s mother, who I call Mom too, because I love her). Many meals were shared as a family at her house and when I had to cook at our apartment, I made what I knew from my childhood. Being that we had a large back garden at our apartment we tried our hand at gardening. We tried composting, but didn’t know how it worked, so after some time we gave up. Instead, we threw potatoes that were past their prime from our third floor window down into the compost box, and to our amazement things grew! With the fertile volcanic soils of Ecuador, we could literally plant anything and it would grow. Didn’t matter what it was or if you planted it intentionally or not, it would grow. The land there was so abundant and giving.
We moved out of that apartment and into an adobe house in a nearby valley outside of Quito.We didn’t have an abundant source of water, really and the soil was as hard as they come. It was a pretty dry valley, but ornamental plants grew very well there, so we stuck to that kind of thing. We planed Jacarandas, Acacia Moradas and Hibiscus trees. Everything you can think of that was pretty—we planted it. After a few months of living there, we moved back to the US and landed in Portland, Oregon where we lived in apartment complexes for two years. Our gardening was limited to indoor potted plants and some tomatoes that we planted out in pots where the land was barren. At one point, I found some old popcorn kernels in my cupboard that I did what I always did, throw them about to see what would happen—much like we threw stuff from our windows in Quito—and wouldn’t you know, corn stalks started to grow where the land laid barren from the years of Roundup they endured.
It was like the universe was saying to me, ‘with little effort, the land will give you anything you wish to grow’. I was absolutely amazed by the generosity of the earth. I didn’t even try to plant any corn. I thought I was feeding the birds, but little did I know kernels sprouted and that turned to full stalks. It was an absolute miracle that anything would even grow there—I guess it was just a matter of trying.
We finally said goodbye to the city life and moved down to where we live now. Here, we live in a townhouse and have a humble garden that we’ve completely flipped. As soon as we moved in here I restructured the rock wall in the back yard and got busy planting perennial bulbs the likes of tulips, all kinds of lilies, lavender, rosemary, a red wood tree, some native plants, a jasmine bush and so on. Since we arrived in late fall, we didn’t plant any food or anything.
That following summer we planted some tomatoes and squash, but nothing fancy. We don’t have too much space here, and our front garden has a fully planted road verge and maintain the grass. Mostly we have stuck to the side garden and plant out garlic, squash, hops. The neighbor in the duplex next door has let us plant out her plot this year because she’s too busy to look after it, so we planted a number of things to see how they would do. Right now it’s 1/4 planted out with strawberries, which have been an absolute treasure to snack on daily. I have it planned to get some starts from a friend’s garden and I’ll turn that bed into a berry patch. Last year I took over the neighboring vacant lot to plant a small guerilla garden. I planted some onions that sprouted, potatoes, squash and cucumbers there too. None of it did too well because it was hard to take care of without a direct water source.
This year I am tending to both of my neighbors’ gardens on either side of me, our own gardens surrounding our house and we got a small 10x30 plot on a friend’s flower farm where we have planted even more garlic and even more potatoes. I swear, you’d think that’s all we eat! I assure you, we eat a bit of everything—it’s just that to be totally honest with you I bought 25 pounds of potatoes last fall from a nearby farm and we just couldn’t get through them fast enough. By February this year they were sprouting and ready to be planted—mother nature has her ways of telling you it’s time, now doesn’t she? And the garlic, well, we love garlic and we share a lot of it, so it works out in the end. Later in the season we’ll plant some bush beans, basil and peppers. I’m hoping to try my hand a larger batch of fermented hot sauce this year.
I no longer take gardening to be a pastime, or just do it to see what will grow or not. It’s become a part of something I really enjoy doing. It’s been gaining steam over the years, and has lead me to where I am today. I now see a path carved out for myself—one that will bring me the joys that I get from gardening, from baking, from making soap and from canning food—it’s becoming a full-time farming family with the goal in mind to share our knowledge and experiences with others. I look around and find those who are my role models now—they are farmers, homesteaders and makers, that have turned back to the land. I want to be one of those people. I am one of those people in the making—a pioneer back to what makes us all human—community, food, family, God and country.
The joy that my ‘hobbies’ bring me are the joys I’d rather spend the rest of my life doing. Preserving my own jams and sauces makes me feel alive. It makes me feel like I have a purpose, and that I’m finally doing what I was meant to do with my life. I feel like after all this time, I’m finally allowing myself to be what I was always meant to become. Someone who just is. A being that looks after themselves and takes full responsibility of their life, who is actively inching towards my dreams of owning and operating a farm someday—a dream I have mostly been unaware of since I was a child eating unripe fruit and making concoctions on our back steps. Who would have thought that throwing potatoes from a third story window would lead me to this conclusion, or throwing popcorn kernels to the wind would bring me some sort of enlightenment?
Life is so interesting. You never know what it’s gonna bring you—where the twists and turns will show you the power you have inside of you, or what your life’s purpose could be. Now that purpose is loud and clear to me.
I hope that if you’re still trying to figure things out and are interested in farming or taking up an agrarian lifestyle or even a hobby, that you take the message from God and act upon it. I hope that you will find the courage to say to yourself, “I can too”, even if you don’t have any background in your family at all. You can change the course of history by taking on the impossible and the unknown. Your willingness to take on a whole new path for you and your family could mean the knowledge that you learn gets shared with others and can make a positive impact for generations to come.
I know that this post was a bit all over the place, so I appreciate you getting through it with me. I know if you’re like me, you wanna know where the starting point was. It’s cool to see sweet videos on the internet where people seem to have it all together, but the truth is, life is messy and there’s not a clear path to your final destination. We go through so many facets and phases of who we are and we can’t even tell you what we ate for dinner last night. There’s really so much more to a person than what’s posted online, but I hope that this can give you a glimpse into who I am and hopefully where I’m going. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll look back on this and re-read it and I too will be in shock at how far we’ve come—that’s the plan anyway. So, if you’ve got some homesteading or farming dreams, I encourage you to start where you are. There’s going to be doors that swing open for you when you’re good and ready for them to. But, until then, get out there, make new friends, grow some food, take over your neighbors’ gardens (politely and ever-so-lovingly) and get something in the ground. You too will look back someday and smile when you think of your humble beginnings.
Until next time,
-Amy