I’ve been reading two books by Colemans: Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest and his daughter Melissa’s memoir This Life Is in Your Hands. I wish I could recommend them both, but unfortunately the daughter’s memoir is as poorly written as the father’s book is well written.
Eliot Coleman and his first wife Sue were among the earliest “back-to-the-landers” in the 1960s. They followed Helen and Scott Nearing, who began homesteading in the 1930s and wrote a book called Living the Good Life in 1954 that inspired many people in the 1960s. The Colemans were among those inspired and moved to Cape Rosier in Maine, onto land the Nearings sold them from their 100-acre parcel, where they settled in to a life of hard manual labor creating a homestead.
Melissa’s memoir is about growing up on this homestead and her sister’s drowning death at age 3, when Melissa was 7, in 1976. After the drowning, the family completley fell apart. Eliot and Sue left Maine (and each other). For years, Eliot worked on other people’s farms. He eventually returned and now lives on the homestead and farm in Maine with his third wife, garden/food writer, Barbara Damrosch. He’s managed to live through both cycles of back-to-the-landers in the United States and see people become re-energized away from factory farming and toward organic and local farming.
The Four Season Harvest is full of extremely helpful and good advice as well as a chronicle of a trip he made (with which wife isn’t clear, but certainly not the first) through France, at the 44th parallel, same as Maine, to discover European winter growing and harvesting practices. One of his premises is that Europe has a four-season eating / gardening/ harvesting/ grazing culture, whereas the United States has been trapped in its love of the summer garden. Americans therefore see gardening as consisting of a short season of glamorous, warm-weather crops like tomatoes, zucchini and green beans. Because we think plants need heat, we don’t realize germination and growth are actually about light. We also don’t realize that most plants we eat– all greens, including lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, and onions, broccoli, asparagus, beets, etc., etc.– are cool-weather plants.
I’ll attest to this as a friend had to point out three years ago that I didn’t have to wait until May 15, the last frost, to start planting. What? I didn’t have my peas and lettuce in yet? What is more, I can have food, regularly available, not just July through September? And it doesn’t have to be about canning and freezing to have food at other times?
The Colemans don’t even can (though they definitely did in their 1960s incarnation). They dry tomatoes that can be rehydrated in stews and soups, but that’s it. They don’t like frozen beans and peas, so just eat them when they’re available and eat cool-weather crops the rest of the year, including salads from their cold frames and greenhouse all winter, supplemented by roots from their cellar.
If you want to give Melissa’s prose a try, you’ll learn a few more interesting things about life on the homestead in Maine. The children were mostly naked and feral, even defacating in the garden until their parents made them stop. The parents worked insanely hard (they didn’t believe in any motorized tools, nor could they afford them: think scythes and shovels). At one point Eliot decides to hire a backhoe to excavate some irrigation pathways for them after a drought. It’s a huge issue, as Scott Nearing would have dug the trench by hand– though it would have taken years and was not at all reasonable to expect of a man trying to carve a living for a family of four.
Now and then you get a glimpse of the hippie apprentices, who are also often naked and feral, playing guitar in the campground at night, coupling and uncoupling, all beautiful and bronzed and looking for the good life. It’s continually hinted that Eliot is having affairs with the apprentices, and also that this might just be wife Sue’s imagination. Melissa also attributes her father’s temper and ill humor to overwork and bad nutrition, which causes him to have serious thyroid trouble and aggravates the marriage with her mother.
The actual drowning incident is not a matter of neglect, as one might think given the situation. The kids don’t have many boundaries (which Melissa laments) but they are not allowed to go to the beach alone and presumably not to the pond either. Heidi, the younger sister, is adventurous and can’t be kept out of things. There are tons of people looking after the kids, it seems, between the apprentices, neighbors (the Nearings included) and parents. Although Melissa feels abandoned and neglected by her busy parents, she doesn’t lack for playmates, play and interaction with adults. She even has a job selling potted plants at the family farm stand by the time she’s six. She takes the bus to school (where she learns about toilet paper and that her lunches are weird).
Like most of us, Melissa seems to suffer from not knowing what we who didn’t grow up this way might find interesting. She doesn’t describe the people or life very well, so that often we’ll get a glimpse that seems shocking– the description of the outhouse hole and peeing in winter, for example– and disorienting. She tends to wax poetic about nature in a way that is so trite as to be unhelpful. She’s got a great story to tell, but she isn’t a very good storyteller. It’s not her fault. This is her life and she was busy living it, not making stories of it.
Eliot Coleman, on the other hand, is a born writer. His sentences are wonderful and he knows exactly what we need to know. It helps that his book is a how-to book, guided by advice-giving chapters on soil, protection, crop selection, etc. But the narrative about the trip through France reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in its engagement with the material and delight in description. The writing makes the experience immediate and accessible.
For me, of course, this is all about connecting with my new life on the farm. I’m pleased when Melissa gives warnings against too much hard work and no meat, because I don’t want to work that hard and I love meat. I’m also planning my winter cold frame already, looking around on Fedco Seeds’ website for the unusual winter greens Coleman recommends that seem standard recommendations now.
Turtles are a major part of our ecosystem out here. I’ve always been a big fan of turtles. Back when I lived in Chicago, I’d often walk the few blocks to Rosehill Cemetery and the pond there to see the turtles. They don’t do much, but they’re peaceful and prehistoric and it was lovely to regularly see such a display of nature in the city– along with a blue heron that frequented the large pond, which was otherwise quite funereal with its lovely weeping willows.
The fourth is a small pond behind our house (seen here today in photo taken from front door). It is a hundred feet or so higher than the large pond. It also has a dock, and a gorgeous large oak next to it. In years past I’ve used it to water my garden, which is to the west, until it gets overgrown with weeds midsummer. That pond is where we have the log that is usually lined with turtles, though they sometimes have to share the space with teals or ducks.
