Chapter 3

Comfrey—a plant your great-grandfather grew in the corner of the yard, roots ten feet deep, pulling minerals up out of subsoil into leaves you cut three times a season and laid down as mulch. The chicken tractor moves the flock over the garden bed, and they fertilize as they scratch. Between the two, Eli’s kitchen garden never took a bag of fertilizer in eighty years. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer was a wartime explosive redirected to farm sales starting in 1947, and by 1960 the American farmer was hooked on a bag that cost him thirty dollars for what a comfrey patch did free. Rodale Institute has documented it since the 1940s. One comfrey crown plants a corner. Never fertilize the garden by check again.

Your great-grandmother’s herb bed had thyme, sage, rosemary, oregano, mint, chamomile, and lemon balm growing along the kitchen door, and she cooked out of it every night for forty years. The grocery aisle now charges you three dollars for a plastic clamshell of six leaves of basil that lasts three days. Home economics taught the herb garden until the classes got cut in the 1970s. Grow the bed, dry the leaves, fill a jar. It is flavor. It is kitchen dignity. It is a bill the store wants you paying and does not need to. Cornell Extension still teaches it. A packet of seed, a sunny corner, herbs for a decade.

A hundred-foot row of Kennebec potatoes gives a family two hundred pounds of potatoes for the winter out of ground you were not using, off seed potatoes you saved from this year’s harvest. The Irish and the American colonists both fed themselves off the potato, and your great-grandfather’s cellar stored six bushels every November. Then in the mid-1970s home economics and agriculture classes got cut from the public schools and a whole generation lost how to hill a potato. Maine Potato Lady and Fedco still sell the old varieties. The store now charges you four dollars for a five-pound bag. Twenty dollars of seed potato in the spring gives you the whole winter’s starch. Grow the row. Save the best tubers. Plant again.

Skirret. Say it. Skirret. A perennial root vegetable your great-great-grandmother grew in kitchen gardens from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. When you pull it out of the ground in October and eat it raw, it tastes like an apple and a spoonful of honey mixed together. No exaggeration. No sales pitch. That is the flavor. Sium sisarum. The Pennsylvania Dutch grew rows of it. It was in Ferry-Morse’s catalog until around 1902 and then it was quietly dropped because it was perennial. You planted it once and dug divisions off the same crown for the rest of your life, and there was no money in a root you only ever bought seed for one time. The federal National Plant Germplasm System still keeps the seed. Baker Creek carries it again. It grows wild without care in ordinary garden soil with no fertilizer, no spray, and no fuss. Sweetens porridge, sweetens tea, sweetens a child’s mouth when they are standing next to you at the row. One planting, seed forever, never a bill. That is the root off the top of the list.

Number one is not a plant. It is not an animal and it is not a skill. Number one is every plant, every animal, and every skill above it standing in one yard at the same time feeding one family. The self-fed homestead. The row of skirret by the kitchen door and the sorghum out back. The eight hens in a coop that shuts at dusk and the goat on the lot line. The comfrey crown pulling minerals up. The bean row saving itself. The cellar under the porch. The crock of kraut on the shelf. The pawpaw tree at the edge of the woods and the box elder tapped in February. The seed jar in the pantry. The hive in the corner. That is not a hobby. That is not a lifestyle. That is what your great-grandfather was. He was not poor. He was fed, free, and beholden to no store.

Jacob Herzler on that 1897 Lancaster County farm lived to eighty-nine on ground his son and his son’s son kept working, off a table that never once needed a sugar bowl from a store. The record reversed itself because the plant kept its promise. The seed vault kept the seed. The knowledge only ever waited on somebody to come get it back. Now you know. That is the whole list. Every one of them a bill you had forgotten you could stop paying. Every one of them a piece of your grandfather’s ground you can walk back onto this year. Every one of them yours again.