Chapter One

A Farm Grows in Brooklyn

An unsustainable writer’s life–hunkered down at a desk on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone–proved to be the soil in which the farmer within me took root. Out in the street one wintry March evening, pacing and frothing over poverty, injustice, and those politely worded impersonal rejection letters quarterlies dispense the way banks hand out toasters, I came upon a trash bin loaded with basement scraps: water pipes, furring strips, two- by- fours studded with nails that could be straightened out and reused. From these scraps, I saw in a flash of insight, I could construct a seed germination rack. In the gardening catalogs, a deluxe seed starting kit, complete with full- spectrum light and soil heating mats, cost about eight hundred dollars. Which I didn’t have.

What I did possess–or so I fancied–was a farmer’s resourcefulness. Four years earlier, I had started a vegetable garden on the land I had grown up on in Pennsylvania. Road trips in a battered Toyota pickup kept me and my landlord seasonally flush in tomatoes and pesto. I had never given serious thought, until this moment, to expanding into a truck patch. It was an idea so impractical it bordered on fantasy. Most everything I planted–peas, lettuce, carrots, beans, sweet potatoes, beets–got chewed down to nubs by deer and groundhogs. Whether these fur- bearing gourmands were susceptible to primitive superstitions about nightshades, I don’t know, but come August, you’d look at my garden and think the only thing I’d planted was tomatoes. The vines strafed the basil and thyme, shaded the sun- loving peppers, and strangle