Chapter 2

The Java hen and the Buckeye—dual-purpose American breeds bred in the 1800s to forage their own feed off a yard, lay two hundred eggs a year, and dress out big enough for the Sunday table. Then in 1948, the Chicken of Tomorrow contest picked a Cornish Cross bird that grew twice as fast on a bag of feed, and the whole heritage flock got walked to the back of the barn. The Livestock Conservancy in Pittsboro lists the Java as critically endangered. A few hundred breeding birds left in the whole country. Your grandmother’s hen worked for her feed. The industrial bird cannot. A Buckeye on your scraps and yard bugs lays through the year and costs you nothing after the chicks. Set eight hens. Never buy an egg again.

Eight hens on a quarter acre give your family a dozen eggs a day in season if you manage them the old way—a coop shut tight at dusk, a run rotated across grass, kitchen scraps every evening, and a handful of cracked corn in the morning. Penn State Extension trials show a heritage bird will forage sixty to seventy percent of her own feed off good pasture. The store charges you four dollars fifty a dozen. You will lose birds. Everybody does. Kill the egg bill. Never buy a dozen again.

A single beehive gives a family fifty pounds of honey a year, and Eli’s grandfather kept three colonies in log gums behind the smokehouse from 1890 until the day he died. The A&P grocery chain started stocking cheap imported honey in the 1930s, and by the 1970s nobody kept a home hive. The store now charges you eight dollars a pound for honey that traveled six thousand miles. A top-bar hive you build yourself off scrap lumber runs a family in sweetener for the year and pollinates every fruit tree in the yard. The Federal Agriculture Department still lists beekeeping among its most recommended backyard operations. Set one hive this spring. Check your county for hive registration. Bees feed themselves. You just keep the box.

Everybody thinks maple. Nobody remembers that box elder, black walnut, and river birch all give a sap you can boil down into syrup. Every one of them grows across the Appalachian and Midwest ranges wild on land you do not own. Native and settler families in Vermont tapped birch as often as maple. The commercial syrup industry standardized on sugar maple and the other three quietly dropped off the map. Cornell and University of Vermont maple programs both publish on the alternate trees. Now the store charges you eighteen dollars a quart for maple. A single mature black walnut tapped in February gives you two gallons of sap a day for two weeks. Boil it down forty to one. Free sugar off a tree you did not plant.

The pawpaw is the largest native fruit in North America—a tree that grows wild from Kansas to the Atlantic, and its fruit tastes like a mango and a banana had a cousin who grew up in Ohio. Your great-grandfather ate them by the bagful every September. The commercial fruit industry could not ship them. They bruise inside a day. So they never made it to the grocery aisle and a generation forgot the tree existed. Kentucky State University runs the country’s only full pawpaw breeding program. The store now sells you an imported mango for three dollars each. A pawpaw tree in your yard gives you fifty pounds of fruit a year for forty years. Do not eat the skin or the seeds—just the flesh.

Every farm your great-grandfather visited had a root cellar dug into the north slope—a stone-walled room forty degrees year-round, no electricity, that kept potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, apples, and squash from October until April with no bill and no compressor. Then in 1947 rural electrification finished, and by the 1960s the freezer replaced the cellar. Now the store charges you a hundred dollars a month to run a chest freezer full of food that spoils the day the power drops. Rodale still publishes plans. Dig into a bank, ventilate it. The one part you do not skip is airflow, because a sealed cellar rots the crop. A cellar keeps your winter on. No electric bill at all.

Before pressure canners took over American kitchens in the 1950s, your great-grandmother put up a year of cabbage, cucumbers, and beans in stoneware crocks with salt and water and nothing else. Lacto-fermentation. The store charges you nine dollars a jar for artisan sauerkraut. Home economics classes taught fermentation into the 1960s. Then those classes were cut from public schools between 1968 and 1978 and a generation lost it. Cornell and the agriculture department both publish safe fermentation guides now. Cabbage, salt, crock, wait three weeks in the cellar. That is the whole method. Brine covers the vegetable or mold gets in. Every jar the store sells you, you can put up yourself for pennies. Never buy a jar of kraut again.

They did not outlaw it. They engineered it out. The hybrid seed on the rack will not come true from its own saved seed. So you buy it again every spring forever. An open-pollinated bean saves itself off a single packet. Dry the pod, shell it, keep it in a jar in the cellar, plant it next April. Same with tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, corn, squash. Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa keeps the varieties alive. The seed rack at the big-box store sells you seed the seed rack designed you to buy again next year. One packet of Cherokee Trail of Tears bean saved out every fall feeds a family for a lifetime and never costs you a dollar again.

In 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act let seed companies patent varieties. By the late 1970s, a farmer saving certain seeds could get sued. The heritage beans—Cherokee Trail of Tears, Rattlesnake, Turkey Craw, Mostoller Wild Goose—slipped through because they belong to families, not corporations. Your great-grandmother grew a fifty-foot row and put up thirty pounds of dry beans in a jar. The store charges you three dollars a pound for the exact same bean. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Seed Savers still list every one. One packet plants a row. One row feeds a family a winter of soup. Saved seed at the end plants next year. They tried to make you rent your food. The bean said no.
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