Made by Hand (9 page)

I shepherded my kids outside to find Julia and Lynette bringing out lunch, a smorgasbord of homemade dishes prepared from produce grown on the property. Julia had baked bread, and Sarina helped herself to two pieces. Erik and Kelly had brought humongous pink and yellow tomatoes, sliced into discs roughly the size of 45 rpm records.

Jane wasn’t hungry, so she and Emmet climbed in a tree while the adults ate and talked about everything from the recent presidential-election results to homesteading tips. I asked Erik and Julia what vegetables were good to grow in the winter and when I could expect my hens (which were about four or five weeks old) to start laying eggs and how long they’d reliably lay them.

When I mentioned that I’d planted garlic earlier in the morning, Kelly said she usually waits until Thanksgiving to plant hers but that it was probably fine to plant the cloves now.

“You can plant individual garlic
cloves
?” I asked. “I planted the whole bulb.”

Kelly explained that you were supposed to break apart a bulb and plant the cloves. What’s more, she told me, I could have used inexpensive garlic from the grocery store or farmers’ market instead of buying the bulbs from a nursery. I told them how the instructions clearly showed and stated that the entire bulb should be planted. Mister Jalopy got a good chuckle out of that.

“You plant three bulbs and you get three bulbs,” he observed.

After lunch, we took a look at the shack Eric and Phoenix had built on the side of the hill. They’d based the design on a photo I’d come across online a few months earlier of architect Jeffery Broadhurst’s shack, a little getaway retreat he’d built in the hills of West Virginia. Erected on stilts, with a single sloped tin roof and wide doors opening onto a small deck, the simple structure was cheerful and airy. I could imagine myself spending hours of every day in a shack like this one.

Julia told me that they’d been thinking of building a zip line that would go from the shack all the way to the garden down at the bottom of the property, but now the trailer was blocking the route.

When we got home from our day at the Ramshackle compound, I made dinner with more of our garden’s vegetables. I crushed the shells of the eggs we’d eaten earlier to feed to the chickens, then I chopped up a head of cabbage, added salt, and put it in a quart-sized mason jar to turn into sauerkraut. Sarina told me she liked the Ramshackle shack and said she had been scoping out the trees in our yard for zip lines and treehouses. When we were finished eating, she led me around the yard, explaining the pros and cons of the different trees. That evening Jane, Sarina, and I sat down and went through several treehouse books written by David Stiles, regarded by many as the king of treehouse architecture. We highlighted our favorites with Post-it notes.

I was just a few months into my DIY life experiment, and already I felt more connected to what I ate, the property around my house, the cycles of the seasons, the neighbors who shared my interests, and best of all my kids.

It wasn’t always so blissfully DIY at our place. Many a day would pass when my family would eat fast food and watch lots of DVDs and play hours of video games, or I’d sit in front of my computer all day, working to the exclusion of everything else. I started to feel guilty about not doing enough on my DIY to-do list. Sometimes I’d rush things, like preparing a bowl of persimmons for drying or tending to the chickens. Hurrying took all the fun out of it. So I came up with a plan to schedule a little time every day to work on a project and made a promise to myself to slow down and remain mindful of the task for twenty minutes. I’d use that bit of time to accomplish a small project, like pulling weeds in the garden or making a new batch of kombucha tea (a fizzy, tangy, fermented brew made from water, sugar, and black tea), or to complete one step in a larger project, like sawing fret grooves in the neck of a cigar-box guitar or building a miniature guitar amplifier.

These DIY mini-sessions were refreshing breaks from blogging, editing, and writing, and the twenty-minute sessions really added up! I made my fifth cigar-box guitar this way, in twenty-minute increments. I was reminded of the seventeenth-century French chancellor Henri-François d’Aguesseau, who wrote a best-selling, three-volume book ten minutes at a time while waiting for his habitually late wife to join him at the dinner table.

One early December afternoon in 2008, while I was working in my office in the guesthouse, I heard a car honking loudly outside. I knew it wasn’t the UPS guy, because he always announced his arrival with two polite taps on his truck horn. This honking sounded urgent. I hurried out of the cottage and saw a dust-covered brown 1980s Crown Victoria in the driveway. When I got closer, I recognized the driver. It was Alfie.

Alfie’s a short, sturdy man who looks like Picasso. He’s about eighty years old. We first met one morning about four years ago, when I went outside to pick figs from our tree. Alfie was already there, picking figs and putting them into a paper bag. He saw me, said hello, and kept picking. His audaciousness irked me. I curtly told him to save some of the figs for me; I was the tree’s owner, after all.

“But they’re rotting!” he exclaimed. I saw that one of his eyes was bright blue, the other milky white.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t want you to take any more.”

He grumbled and got into his car and drove off, taking several pounds of my figs with him. I picked the remaining ripe figs off the tree and brought them into the house. I had just started to tell Carla what had happened when we heard an insistent series of honks outside. I looked out the window.

“That’s him!” I told Carla. “He came back!”

“Go out and see what he wants.”

I met Alfie as he was getting out of his car. In his hands were a plastic bag and a small knife with an orange handle.

“I want to give you this,” he said, handing the bag to me. It was filled with garden-grown peppers, parsley, and basil. “And look at this,” he said. He leaned into the open window of his car and grabbed a page from an Arabic newspaper. “Now, watch.” He held a corner of the sheet of newspaper in one hand and, with the orange-handled knife in his other hand, began slicing strips from the newspaper, letting them fall to the ground.

“These are my knives,” he said. “They can slice anything—except
raw meat
. Cooked meat, OK, raw meat—don’t do it. My knives are in all the Subways. They all know me! Tell them you know Alfie. This knife is for you.” He held the knife out to me, handle side first.

Sheepishly I took the knife and introduced myself. I apologized for getting crabby with him about the figs. He explained that the previous owners of our house had given him permission to harvest figs and persimmons from the property, and he hadn’t realized they’d moved. I told him he was welcome to take our figs anytime, and he thanked me.

“Follow me,” he said. He got in his car and started driving away very slowly. I walked quickly behind the car to keep up. I wondered how long I was going to have to follow him down the street, and where we were going.

Alfie turned the corner and drove very slowly for another half a block, stopping in front of a vacant lot barricaded by a metal fence. He got out and unlocked the gate. The lot was about a half acre and was filled with black five-gallon plastic containers holding pepper bushes, citrus trees, and more. There were numerous other vegetables growing in the ground, along with dozens of trees sagging with fruit.

“This was my house,” he said. “It was destroyed in the earthquake.” (He was referring to the Northridge earthquake of 1994, which killed fifty-seven people, injured at least nine thousand people, and caused between $20 billion to $40 billion in damage.) Alfie’s house had been beyond repair, so he’d torn it down and turned it into a very large garden. He lived with his wife in a condominium a couple of miles away.

I wasn’t as interested in gardening then as I am now, so I didn’t give too much thought to his garden, nor did I ask many questions about his methods for producing such bumper crops.

As the months passed, Alfie’s honks (and gifts of knives) became a welcome and almost regular occurrence. I started paying more attention to the tips he offered. He told me I should collect fallen leaves and lawn clippings into a pile near my garden to make compost. He explained how to prune away the branches from the fig tree once growing season was over to ensure a good harvest the following year. Usually he offered this advice while helping himself to our persimmons, loquats, and feijoas, always without asking. By this time, I liked Alfie too much to care about this quirk of his. He never went into much detail about himself, but I learned that he was from Iran and that, besides being a knife salesman, he had also been in the book-distribution business.

I hadn’t seen Alfie for a few months, and I was happy to see him that day in December. He’d brought his wife along, a pretty, well-dressed woman who looked to be ten or fifteen years his junior.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Of course I do, Alfie!” I said, opening the gate to let them in.

“Good!” he replied. “I’ve been trying to come here for persimmons, but you aren’t home.”

“I guess we just missed each other.” I told him that all the persimmons were already off the tree but that I’d dried a bunch. I went in the house to get some for him. When I stepped back outside, Alfie was shaking the branches of the feijoa tree to make the fruits drop to the ground. He had about six of them in his hands, so I went back inside to get a bag for him, for which he thanked me. He filled the bag with fruit, went to his car, and gave me another knife, demonstrating its sharpness on a sheet of newspaper.

“Do you want to come with me now?” he asked. “I have things to give you.” I was interested to find out how his garden was coming along in the late fall. I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled behind his car.

Once we had arrived at the yard, Alfie and his wife got out of the car, and Alfie’s wife settled in one of the plastic lawn chairs under a large tree.

“One day, I come over, I give your wife recipes,” said Alfie. “If you eat, you go crazy. You say, ‘I live so long, I never tasted this food?’ Something out of this world. You’re going to thank me all your life.”

Alfie’s wife told me to bring my bike into the lot so no one would take it.

“Good idea,” I said, then brought it into the yard and leaned it against a tree.

“Where did you learn to cook?” I asked Alfie.

“Oh, I know a lot of good recipes,” he said, leading me through the rain-soaked garden. “I know Israeli food, I know Iraqi food, I know Persian food. I know things you could not even imagine.”

Birds squawked at us from the trees.

“Everything is mutual,” he said. “If you’re nice to me, I’m nice to you. I like you. The first time I met you I thought you were a good person.” (I wondered how he could think that after I’d acted so peevish about his fig pilfering.)

He led me to the back of the lot. There were so many trees and tall plants around that I felt like I was in another country, not a mere block away from my house. A rooster crowed off in the distance.

“I will show you something,” he said.

Alfie stopped in front of a plant loaded with chubby little green peppers. He picked one and handed it to me. “Eat this. It’s clean. Eat this pepper. It’s sweet.” I popped it into my mouth. He was right. It was sweet and crunchy. “It’s like cucumber,” he said.

“What kind of pepper is it? What’s it called?”

Ignoring my question, he said, “I show you here.” He picked up a one-gallon plastic container with a pepper plant, pulled a few of the brown leaves, and handed the pot to me. “Here. I give you this one.”

I thanked him and asked him again what kind of pepper it was.

“No, no. This is different. You don’t find this in America.”

“Where did you get them?”

He turned away from me. “From Middle East, I get.” He started picking peppers from the larger bushes and handing them to me. I had no bag, so I stuffed them in my pockets. “They usually sweet at this stage, but be careful, because the weather is changing.”

I tried one. “They’re sweet,” I said.

“If you pick them small, they are sweet,” he said. “And I give you some recipes how you can use.” He started off in a new direction. I followed.

I noticed a run-down chicken coop along a fence near the back. “Did you keep chickens here?”

“I did keep, but a dog came and killed them.” He stopped in front of a large pile of black compost, surrounded by ten or twelve five-gallon plastic pots full of the stuff in various stages of decomposition.

“This is the best compost in the world, because this has worms.”

“Did you put worms in it?” I asked, looking at the pink and red earthworms wriggling in the soil he was upturning in one of the containers.

“They create worms!” he said. I asked him what he meant by “create worms.” He explained that crushed old fruit will spontaneously generate worms.

I had no desire to argue with him. I was more interested in finding out how he made this loamy compost.

“The scientists,” he continued, “they even don’t know how this worms eat the leaf and the shit that comes out of them—it’s the best fertilizer in the world. Oh, my God, everything grow like you can’t even imagine.”

It was hard getting a straight answer out of Alfie, because he was always on to the next thing, walking away before I had a chance to fully understand something. But I told him I really wanted to know how he made the compost.

“I put leaves in a pile, and I put ammonium sulfate—you know ammonium sulfate? It looks like sugar. A bag twenty pounds for three dollars at Home Depot. Or horse manure. I mix and put water, and they will rot. They will be best fertilizer in the world. And something else—you know what is elephant garlic?”

“The giant garlic bulbs?”