I've Turned Into My Mother
And I'm not sure that is a good thing. I'm a writer, not a farmer.
The nights are cool here at the end of September. We eat outside as much as possible to take advantage of the beautiful breeze, knowing that we will soon return to Miami and its heat and humidity. The animals are happier now that the heat has subsided, and all are healthy. We have rearranged next year’s travel schedule to avoid the massive number of tourists flocking to places we haven't seen, and we will be on the water in the months when we want to avoid the heat.
We are also planning next spring’s garden. (Don’t say a word about my tomato bowl. We have growing puppies, remember?)
When we first talked about living here, our land was an oddish-triangular plot with soil so depleted it wouldn't grow anything. It had literally been farmed to death. Even though I grew up on what was initially a 100-acre farm and know a bit about farming life, nothing I had experienced matched my husband’s need to get the land back into shape as quickly as possible. What should have taken a decade he did in less than three years. And we were totally off-grid while doing this.
My hat is off to him.
If you compare that first year with our farm today, three years later, you’d understand what a miracle this is. He added dozens of truckloads of topsoil, goat poop, wood chips, and anything else that looked like it would help the land. He had the soil tested at a lab in Ankara (it had zero nutrients), and was told almost anything would help. So that’s what he did. On just one day, I watched a line of dump trucks, one after another, systematically unload beautiful black soil. As a big tractor operator spread it, I could see my husband’s vision begin to materialize.
After year one, there were DOZENS of fruit trees, and he added more; those initial trees are now bearing fruit. Next year we will have more than we can handle. We also have a full vineyard with seven types of grapes, most for wine, but some for the table. He labeled, tagged, and organized them to help me when I finally decide to make wine.
(Unfortunately, the Turkish gardener promptly removed every tag at the first pruning. One step forward, as the saying goes, and two steps back.)
So next spring when the pruning is done, we’ll need to hire the vineyard expert to help us re-label them all. This year, after one of our relatives takes what she needs to make pekmez (grape molasses), the remaining grapes will dry for snacks—both for us and the horses.
The gardener planted what he wanted last year and again this year, experimenting with different varieties and locations. Remember all of that dirt, poop, compost, and anything else he added? It has produced enough food for four big families, not two people. We’ve been picking, sharing, and begging people to come get anything they want, but when most people in the area already have gardens of their own...
Yes, I’ve turned into my mother.
She taught me how to freeze, can, and otherwise use the garden's bounty when I was a child. So far this year, we’ve made pepper paste and tomato sauce, and I’ve frozen beans, peas, tomatoes, etc. (FYI, my husband’s pasta sauce with these fresh tomatoes is literally to die for.) We are eating the melons as fast as we can before they end up with the chickens.
The gardening, because our gardener is in poor health, now falls to me starting next spring. And this is where I actually do morph into my mother.
“Ok, this all sounds great! Fresh food, being outdoors. What is the problem?” you ask.
Well, wait just a damn minute. I’m a retired lawyer who only wants to write. In the past I failed miserably at gardening. If I could find a one-room cottage somewhere in Scotland, I’d stay there for the next thirty years and churn out the words. But that isn’t my life. I agreed to this traveling, sailing, and, uhm…farming life.
(And yeah, if I holed up in a writing shack somewhere, I’d miss my spousal unit.)
But internally, it’s more than that. This whole gardening thing has opened an emotional landslide that I never expected. It took me weeks of staring at this essay to finally understand what is wrong.
I know how this is really going to go. I watched it happen as a child. From March through November every year, until the farm was sold after my father died, my mother was a study in lived exhaustion. Up early every morning and up late at night, Mother ran the farm while my dad worked during the day. The hard work took its toll.
I don’t want to be like that. Just looking at the greenhouse down the hill makes me nervous. Gardening isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s hard work, even on a small scale, and I’m having trouble convincing myself this isn’t such a big deal because—
I don’t want to be my mother.
Have we bitten off more than we can chew? Possibly. I’ve stacked up books and articles to read, and my husband has already agreed that I will start small and work my way up, planting much less than we’ve had up to now.
“I’ll have a plan,” I tell myself. “It won’t be chaos.”
There are good parts of this, of course. As a child, I watched my father experiment with our farm and saw the benefits of a no-till garden. My husband leans toward the traditional farming method most Turks use and wants his tractor heavily involved. This first year, I’ll have to compromise a bit until I can show him the benefits. I’m always ready to learn new things.
Is this how I wanted my retirement to go?
No, of course not. I grew up weeding the garden every summer morning during elementary and middle school, and watering it in the evenings. My thumbs were perpetually green from the beans, and I still have a small aversion to green beans because of it.
But knowing how to grow our own food is seriously important. I’ve forgotten a lot and will have to relearn it. My son has been here for the summer, and he has learned a great deal about farming life. The next time he returns, he’ll learn a bit more from the garden perspective. My daughter will arrive next year, and even though she will be on vacation, she’ll learn the basics of planting in the spring, companion plants, and anything else I can teach her.
We have to know these things. Our food distribution system in the United States is not doing well. I need a baseline understanding of what grows in this Turkish climate so I can adjust as the world gets hotter. Except for two weeks this summer, we had beautiful weather and avoided the European heat waves. Will that continue? Who knows.
I love it here. I love how the food has changed me. I can eat my way across this country and still lose three pounds. We know exactly how our food is grown and do not have to worry about pesticides or forever chemicals because we don’t use them.
So I will be my mother, only with significant improvements—I hope. We’ll all see next May when I begin planting.
But there is one thing I will NOT do. Those six-foot tomato plants crowding out everything else in the greenhouse with only four hard-as-a-baseball tomatoes on them? They have to go.