Made by Hand (6 page)

That afternoon I was ready to get started, but then I remembered Gerischer had advised pouring full-strength vinegar on the lawn before laying down the newspaper as another good way, along with the gypsum, to jumpstart the lawn-killing process. I drove to Costco and bought four one-gallon jugs of vinegar. I also grabbed as much cardboard from the free bin at Costco as I could fit into my VW Beetle.

When I returned home, I broke open the bag of gypsum and sprinkled it on the lawn. It turns out that fifty pounds of powder makes for a very light dusting when spread over as much lawn as we had. The vinegar went even faster. I had to dilute it with a lot of water to stretch it out. The entire lawn ended up with a light drizzling of a liquid that was about 25 percent vinegar. (When I went back and reviewed my notes from the class I took, I read that Gerischer had said to drench the grass with about an inch and a half of vinegar, measured in the way that rainfall is determined. That would have been about thirteen gallons.)

Already I’d learned two things about lawn killing: Don’t order mulch unless you inspect it for cleanliness first (I’ve heard reports of mulch contaminated with broken glass and dog shit), and buy plenty of vinegar. This is the problem with DIY projects. You end up learning a lot when you do something the first time, but unless you want to tear it down and start over, you have to live with the mistakes you make. I guess I could have bought more vinegar, but I thought I should get started before the mulch thief returned for another load.

I began covering the lawn with layers of newspaper. The slightest breeze would send the sheets flying from where I’d placed them, so I carried a watering can with me to wet down the paper as I worked. After I’d laid down a couple of rows, I’d fill the wheelbarrow with mulch and spread it over the papers.

During one of my wheelbarrow trips to the mulch pile, a middle-aged woman in a purple sweat suit, thick red hair spilling out from under a cap, introduced herself as the house sitter from next door. Smiling artificially, she told me the owners were selling the house and had moved out; she was watching it for them.

“Look at all that mulch,” she remarked.

“Yes, I’m using it to cover my front lawn,” I said.

“I need some of it for a garden I’m growing,” she said. “I’ll come get it later.”

“Well,” I muttered, “if it’s just a little.”

“I’m not sure if there’s a wheelbarrow at the house, though,” she said. “Can I come over later and borrow yours? ”

“I guess so.”

She walked away.

I told Carla about the strange encounter, and she told me to stop what I was doing and spend the rest of the evening moving the pile of mulch behind the gate, where no one could get their hands on it. It took me a couple of hours to transfer the entire pile, one wheelbarrow at a time. I had to wear a painter’s mask so I wouldn’t inhale the dust, which covered my clothes in a dark red-brown layer. (Fortunately, our next-door neighbor never came back. Maybe my unenthusiastic response turned her off.)

The next day, Carla helped me lay down newspapers and spread mulch. I think she felt sorry for me, having watched me move a mountain of mulch from one place to another. I was happy that she was pitching in. But her mood was skeptical. “I really don’t think this is going to work,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked her.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, that’s why.”

“But I took that class!” I said.

“We’ll see.”

But as she worked her attitude improved. The fact that she was helping—and therefore had some skin in the game—made her more hopeful that it would work.

By the end of the second day, we had succeeded in covering about a third of the lawn with mulch. I was bored. I enjoyed the physical exertion of pitchforking the mulch into the garden cart and dumping it, but the tedium of laying down the newspaper was getting to me. I didn’t like crawling on my hands and knees and constantly pouring water onto the sheets of paper to keep them from blowing away. It took about twenty minutes to do a row. When I estimated that I had about thirty more rows to go, I sighed.

After a week or so I was about 75 percent done. At this point I had fallen into a routine that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I’d learned to work in the morning, when it was cooler (110-degree afternoons were the norm for Tarzana in August) and there was less of a breeze (so the papers would stay put). I’d found a way to lay down the newspapers more efficiently and without having to get on my knees, and I was using a hose with a mist nozzle to wet the papers instead of a watering can that needed frequent refilling. When I dumped a cartload of mulch onto the papers, I was able to expertly kick the pile around to get an even layer onto the lawn. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a professional mulch spreader, but I now had the skills to make it easier if I wanted to mulch another section of my lawn or to help a friend do it.

Several weeks after I had laid the mulch down, the Bermuda grass underneath it started sprouting through. Carla noticed the patches one morning as she was loading the kids into the car for school.

“That looks awful,” she said. “We should have used Roundup.”

“I’ve been pulling up the grass a little every day,” I replied. This was more or less true. Most days, I’d spend a few minutes yanking up the grass whenever I happened to walk by to collect the mail or water the garden. Once in a while, I’d get more ambitious and crawl across the lawn, pulling out clumps at a time.

“It looks like you’re fighting a losing battle,” she said.

The Bermuda grass
was
a challenging opponent. If it had a credo, it might be Matthew’s line from the Bible “He that endures to the end shall be saved.”

Also known as devil grass, wire grass, and dogtooth grass, Bermuda grass was brought to the United States in the mid-eighteenth century from Africa (although it probably originated in India, where is was fed to sacred cows) and spread quickly through the South and to the rest of the country. This fast-growing, tenacious plant has outwitted hungry animals and punishing climate swings, sinking its fibrous, six-foot-long roots into the ground and evolving segmented blades that break off like a lizard’s tail at the slightest tug, growing back with a vengeance. Bermuda grass flourishes in both acidic and alkaline soil and can even tolerate salty water. During periods of severe drought, it goes into a semidormant state, patiently biding its time until the rain returns. It’s the first plant to grow back when an African savannah burns.

Steve Gerischer had warned me that Bermuda grass was the lawn killer’s biggest obstacle. Unless you adopt a scorched-earth policy, dousing your lawn with herbicide, Bermuda grass will spring back. The only solution for those who insist on going the organic route is to pull up the grass as soon as it pokes out of the mulch. “If you keep at it, you will eventually exhaust the roots,” Steve said.

I took the eradication of the Bermuda grass as a challenge. If I couldn’t beat a weed, how would Carla ever consent to my planting an orchard or keeping bees? I just couldn’t allow grass to outwit me.

Bermuda grass does possess a certain kind of vegetable intelligence that has allowed it to survive in the harshest of conditions. Its long shoots, called rhizomes, creep along horizontally between the ground and the layer of newspapers and mulch, feeling their way for weak spots. When they find one, they make a right-angle turn, shoot up, and start converting sunlight into chemical energy, which they send to the roots. The replenished roots use this energy to send out new rhizomes to find more weak spots in the mulch barrier. I knew that I had to stay on top of this problem or else it would quickly grow out of control.

As the weeks went by the Bermuda grass and I entered a battle of wills. Once, when I slacked off for three days, a bumper crop broke through the mulch, prompting Carla to ask, “Can you work on that grass after dinner? It’s getting really big and bushy out there.” I fantasized about buying a hundred gallons of vinegar and drenching the mulch with it. That would teach the grass not to mess with me. But I resorted to hours of hands-and-knees work, and by fall the Bermuda grass cried uncle. I had conquered the weed.

3

GROWING FOOD

In September, as my battle with the Bermuda grass was winding down, I turned my attention to my vegetables. A few weeks earlier, I’d germinated about forty different kinds of vegetable seeds in a starter kit on the counter of our kitchen’s bay window. Unfortunately, the light from the window was weak, and as a result, the stems grew long and spindly and were pinched in spots like a kinked garden hose. They’d exhausted themselves in a mad search for sunshine. Eventually, all but five plants died. I was left with three Japanese cantaloupes and two Moon and Stars watermelons. Even these survivors had skinny, floppy stems. I didn’t have high hopes for their survival.

I had four types of tomatoes already growing in the small garden next to the driveway, as well as peppers, cucumbers, and a variety of squash. The Roma tomatoes were ripe and ready to harvest. I picked one from the vine and bit off a big chunk. It was mealy, spongy, thick skinned, and devoid of flavor. I spat it out and threw it onto the compost pile. I tried another, and another. They all tasted like lousy grocery-store tomatoes. I blamed this on Home Depot, where I’d bought the seedlings.

I’d never given much thought to vegetable seeds before, but once I started to take gardening seriously, I realized how important seed selection is. Seed DNA plays a big role in the taste, hardiness, and appearance of the plants. Hybrid seeds, which come from artificially cross-pollinated plants, have been bred for high yields, disease resistance, and long shelf life. The seeds hybrid plants produce aren’t identical to the ones they grew from, and the vegetables they produce are usually inferior in taste or size. In other words, you have to buy new hybrid seeds every year.

On the other hand, heirloom seeds (the term
heirloom
was popularized in 1981 by Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange) produce fruit with seeds that are just like the seeds that grew them. As the name suggests, heirloom seeds have been passed from generation to generation, farmer to farmer, and gardener to gardener, because they’re tasty or have other desirable traits.

The Seed Savers Exchange sells seeds for vegetables I’ve never seen. If a grocery store is a suburban-mall pet shop, the Seed Savers Exchange is an exotic-animal bazaar. The melons shown on its Web site look like alien food props from an episode of the original
Star Trek
. I ordered a packet of Banana Melon seeds (twenty-five for $2.75) based on the fruit’s unusual shape and color. From the catalogue description:

In addition to the Banana Melons, I bought seeds for several kinds of tomatoes—Cream Sausage, Bloody Butcher, Hillbilly Potato Leaf, Cherokee Purple, Crnkovic Yugoslavian—plus Miniature Chocolate bell peppers, sunberries, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries, summer crookneck squash, A & C pickling cucumbers, Chioggia beets, Dragon carrots, Empress beans. I also bought a mixture of lettuces: Amish Deer Tongue, Australian Yellow-leaf, Bronze Arrowhead, Forellenschuss, Lolla Rossa, Pablo, Red Velvet, and Reine des Glaces. (I confess, I bought most of these seeds based more on their whimsical names than on their physical attributes.)

Even though the Home Depot tomatoes had been a bust, other vegetable plants (from seeds bought at the supermarket) were supplying us with a tidy harvest of cayenne peppers, figs, basil, squash, tomatoes, and watermelon. By midsummer, the average weekly haul was about ten or fifteen pounds of produce (not including oranges and grapefruits).

My garden produce looked so good that I often picked it and ate it without first going inside to wash it off. One afternoon I ate several figs, tomatoes, and basil leaves right off the plants, cleaning them by wiping them on my T-shirt.

That evening, as we were getting ready for bed, my stomach was feeling bloated and rumbly. I asked Carla how she felt, and she said she was fine. I figured my stomach discomfort was from eating three large bowls of the delicious homegrown-squash soup I’d made that afternoon. After falling into a light, restless sleep, I woke up at one-thirty in the morning with a sharp pain that started in the pit of my stomach and went all the way up to my esophagus. The pain rose and fell in waves, never going away completely, just cycling between “bad” and “excruciating.” I felt hot and nauseated, and my abdomen was swollen. I got up and started walking around the house to alleviate my suffering (moving around felt better than lying in bed). I stayed up most of the night.

At around 5 a.m. I crawled into bed, feeling more miserable than before. For the entire day, I lay motionless, not eating or drinking, getting out of bed only to throw up or deal with a bout of diarrhea. I’d been cocky about the recent
E. coli
and salmonella breakouts in commercially grown produce, boasting to everyone within earshot that homegrown produce wasn’t contaminated with pathogens. But my pesticide-free produce was undoubtedly crawling with microbes.

Fortunately it was just a twenty-four-hour bug, and by that evening the gastrointestinal distress had passed. But it had lasted long enough to teach me to always wash my produce before eating it.

When I related my experience to a coworker via e-mail, she told me about a friend, an industrial hygienist who diagnoses “sick buildings” for fungus infestation and has become something of a germophobe: