Columns | Backyard Politics

Turning Our Garden’s Bounty Into Community

Nature is never obedient. It rallies forward. This is the reality on a farm: The bounty comes all at once.

This is Backyard Politics, a column by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee that sees the world through the lens of urban farming and agriculture.

It all started with chickens.

When our flock of chickens came of age on our farm and began laying in earnest, we were inundated with eggs. Chickens ovulate approximately every twenty-five hours (yes, a chicken egg is that kind of an egg). If there is a rooster, the egg is fertilized. If there is no rooster, the egg remains unfertilized. Either way, that means a chicken at peak fertility lays five to six eggs per week. Also, now you know a chicken egg is essentially its period.

We had six chickens, so that meant almost thirty-six eggs per week. I should say: We do not eat anywhere near thirty-six eggs per week.

I was not interested in hearing how raw eggs could be frozen for later use and I was not interested in myriad frittata and quiche recipes. My partner, my housemates, and I had already made a shit-ton of frittata and quiche and omelets and omurice. I wanted to figure out how to deal with all the eggs without eating eggs three times a day. It felt like madness to keep up with the supply on our own.

I had anticipated the potential of dearth (my immigrant parents would be proud), but had not expected surplus. On a personal level, I am very equipped to deal with crisis and scarcity—so much so that, when things go well, I am filled with dread about the other shoe eventually dropping. As a result, I have traditionally been unable to enjoy achievement.

So what would I do in this time of plenty? Would I hoard it all in anticipation of a future dearth? Would I give it away? Would I throw it all in the compost pile?

This is the reality on a farm: The bounty comes all at once.

Tomatoes don’t ripen in steady amounts. They ripen in one big swell. Hundreds of tomatoes in the span of two months. Our one cherry tree alone would yield hundreds of sour cherries in one week. And in glorious bounty, hundreds feel like overwhelming thousands. Every year, I’m excited. Every year, I’m blindsided by the singular plenty.

There is something called succession planting—where you plant radishes and carrots successively, every week or two, in order to ensure an evenly distributed harvest. This is nice. Sometimes it works. But nature is never obedient. It rallies forward.

Because eggs. So many eggs. Multiplying. Ceaseless. Unending. Eggs. Filling up egg skelter. Lined up on countertops.

You cannot keep this bounty all for yourself, because you cannot possibly eat all the produce in such a limited amount of time. I mean, you can preserve all your tomatoes for the winter. There are people who do, sweating over steaming pots of water and scorching Mason jars in August and September. This is the survivalist version of farming. Power to them.

I canned tomatoes once, and I’m glad I did. I also went skydiving once, loved it, and will never do it again. The jars of tomatoes paled in comparison to the fresh summer produce. Why would you eat something months later out of a jar when you can eat it fresh off the vine? It’s gratifying to eat jarred tomatoes that you canned yourself in the middle of winter, but it isn’t the same.

So why shouldn’t other people enjoy what I had? This is when I discovered that I am not a survivalist, but more of a thrive-alist. Sharing is better than hoarding. Sharing, I would discover, would become a core value of my backyard farm.

I shared the eggs. I left eggs on the doorsteps of my neighbors. I put out a call on Facebook for people to come. Take. The eggs. Away. I felt like Oprah: “You get eggs, YOU get eggs! YOU GET EGGS!” (Also, unlike cars, they aren’t taxable income).

Anything that makes me feel like Oprah is a fucking fantastic thing.

If excess begat sharing, sharing begat generosity.

Friends who don’t have gardens, but did have strong cooking game, sent me sous vide eggs in return. Gardener friends gave me bags of avocados for a carton of eggs. I do not have a sous vide machine. I do not have an avocado tree. And yet, we pooled resources without an overt decision to do so.

The farm continued to produce. One year, we had too many eggplants. Another year, blueberries. Last year, I put out a bunch of extra tomato seedlings I’d germinated on the sidewalk next to our little free library and put out a sign welcoming people to take them. In return: thank you notes.

If excess begat sharing, sharing begat generosity.

A friend visited from out of town and I sent her home with bags of Meyer lemons. A few months later, I got a surprise letter from her containing various northern climate watermelon seeds. The husband of a gardener friend once discovered us in the midst of an impromptu exchange. I had a bag full of succulent cuttings. And she had strawberry baskets of cucamelons from my garden.

He noted, “I haven’t observed such generosity in other hobbies. I’m an art collector, and we share nothing.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Can I borrow your Van Gogh?”

“We share nothing,” he said.

And we laughed. Because it was true. There is no amount of produce from my backyard farm that can equal what the world has decided a Van Gogh is worth. (So I guess we don’t have that many eggs.)

Generosity begat community. Community begat tenderness.

This sharing and exchange of the fruits of my labor changed my outlook. It made me trust again, after I’d been crushed and left to fend for things on my own. That if I put out goodness into the universe, people would help me out in kind. In kind. In kindness.

I was not alone in the universe. Just as many plants are pollinated, whether via wind or insects, we also need each other to thrive.

As someone who finds it hard—so so so hard—to ask for help, because it makes me feel vulnerable, weak, and in debt, which in turn has historically led to being abused, bartering is a safe exchange. Bartering equalizes exchange. There is no counting the change, because there is no change to give. Bartering involves consent; the exchange of two items must be deemed acceptable by agreement between two traders. You need. I have. You have, I need. You want. I want. We both want.

Here’s the thing: I thought the farm would yield fruit and produce and some time with fresh air.

But nature is never obedient. It spills over.

The bartering and consent and ensuing community became a part of my life. I thought the farm would be a place to sequester myself and lick my wounds—recover from a divorce, recover from postpartum depression, and spend time in new motherhood with a backdrop of fruit and vegetables.

But what it did was bring community to me. A community I didn’t think I wanted or needed. But I did want it. I did need it. The community helped me recover—more than recover; it brought me a whole new model for living.

Knowing that people cared, that people were generous, that there was safety in community as opposed to isolation. Well, shit. I had room to be tender.

I’m a tough broad. That’s how my dad raised me. But toughness aside, I still have sadness. Still need a place to be vulnerable. To cry, you know, on the rare occasion that I do. And when I do, it’s a complete breakdown. It’s sobbing for hours on end. It’s an ugly cry. It’s wailing for the world.

My farm is sanctuary—and I’m not alone, there. And the tenderness it brought me helped me go to, what I call as an editor, The Honest Place.

The Honest Place is from where the best and most powerful stories come.

It is no wonder that I began writing in earnest under this umbrella of safety and community where value cannot be quantified. Where kindness is reciprocated without prompting.

I am grateful. I am indeed, more porous and more vulnerable as a result of exchange.

My tenderness frightens me every damn day. My tenderness makes me admit my own pain. Makes me feel it. Makes me have to see myself. Makes me admit my own limitations. And it makes me see stories in a way other exchange does not.

Money is an anesthetic. It deadens pain and it deadens discomfort. It can hold so much of the world at bay. It can shore up insecurity with Ferraris and Chanel. It can buy you a house on a hilltop that makes the entire world look like fake toy figurines. It can buy you a gate for that house. It can buy you a plane so you are not subject to security lines or schedules. It can buy enough so you don’t even have to share space, share anything at all.

Money dulls pain—and without pain, you cannot have stories.

*

Here’s another story.

In my first years of urban farming, I became friends with someone who had goats. Her name is Allison. She asked me to milk her goats while she took a three-week trip to Standing Rock. (I had, to my own delight, a preternatural skill at milking—make all the jokes here you want.) And with glee, I milked those goats. Sometimes I milked in the pouring rain, the frigid rain pouring off my forehead into my eyes, the goat kicking at my icy hands on their warm udder.

Here’s the context of what was happening during that time. During this time of goat milking, I was destroyed. I was still building up my life. I was in the first year of my farm, moving forward week by week, unable to see a big picture in the throes of new motherhood and an imploded marriage.

I remember sitting with the mama goats and feeling their pain, their swollen udders. I remembered sitting with my own engorged and swollen breasts with a newborn, wanting relief. The goats’ bleats were songs of relief as I began milking them. A release. Tenderness. That I could achieve a small feat like milking felt like victory.

I got to take home some of the goat milk. A trade.

I made goat cheese with the milk. It’s remarkably simple to do, I discovered. I heated up the raw goat milk to just below boiling. Added a squeeze of lemon. Watched the milk curdle. And scooped up the milk solids into a cheesecloth, which I hung from the faucet to drain. In a couple of hours, I had farmer’s cheese that I could salt and flavor, whether with zest from a Meyer lemon (yes, that same lemon I squeezed) or with fresh herbs.

We slathered the cheese on bread. I gave Allison some of the goat cheese and, in exchange, she gave me homemade soap made with goat milk. In another exchange, I gave her tomatoes from my garden, because hers was overrun with gophers. It was sustaining—what I didn’t have, she could have; what she had, she also offered.

Money doesn’t engender such continuity. You pay, then you walk away. It’s impersonal. There is a lack of narrative to money compared to a basket of ripe tomatoes.

Knowing that people cared, that people were generous, that there was safety in community as opposed to isolation.

Money creates distance, just as politeness creates distance. But bartering is contact. In making the agreement to trade, you share the story behind your tomatoes. That they’re heirloom. That they were seeds brought back from near extinction. That they’re dry farmed in your own backyard. That they made it through summer fog.

When I give you the tomatoes, you know their story. You ingest that story into your body. You are part of the terroir. You are part of my terroir. I am part of yours, now.

Think, think, think of how money creates a hierarchy. Rich, middle class, poor. Affordable and unaffordable. The haves and the haves nots.

Money disguises dependency. Money makes a rich person feel like they have all the power. That they don’t have to depend on anyone, for anything. What do we do in the face of this power? What can we do, other than protect ourselves from each other?

Think of how money makes it so the story ends—there is very little narrative behind the thing you bought—what do you know about its life? What do you know about mine? And do you see me?

I thought urban farming was a form of self-reliance. My backyard farm is—was, continues to be—a series of experiments. And like with all laboratories, hypotheses are dashed or proven, and discoveries realized.

My hypothesis: My farm would sequester me away from the world.

What it did was help me connect with other people, even while licking my wounds.

Hypothesis disproved.

My new hypothesis: My farm connects me to the world, the ground, its air, its water, its fauna, and people. In an introvert-kind-of-way. Which is to say, my-kind-of-way.

Hypothesis proven.

You see, back in the days when I worked in tech, I built a wall around my tenderness. I started dating my current partner (who has happened to know me since those days) and he told me to please not do that to myself again. To not put up a wall.

How else can I protect myself, I asked.

Still, put down the wall I did. And I stayed at home, keeping my tender self protected.

Walls are not great things. Robert Frost wrote a poem about Mending Walls. Walls can’t keep everything out. Also, what are you keeping in? Also, there are some people out there who need to read poems about walls. #shade

But here, in this garden, my tenderness had a place—among the eggs and the cherries and the lemons and the tomatoes and the produce and the plenty. On this land, I produced through my story, about being destroyed and tough and tender, and began to tell it in safety. Plants have cell walls—made stronger in the wind. Plants are also tender. Plants need an ecosystem. They need other plants.

So do I.

I wrote a book about some of this recovery while farming. This column is a continuation of that story. What happens after a stroke? What happens after divorce? What happens after postpartum depression? What happens after loss? What does this life look like? Feel like?

Seek safety. Seek love. Seed nourishment. These are the basic needs of humans, the basis from which stories come.

My tenderness has a fucking story.

And stories are made for sharing.