Shovellin' Out the Money? Day 2

 

Free fence posts!

As I work the first quadrant of my pocket farm shovelful by shovelful, a song from the Little House books (you guessed it - they're high on my list of things admired) runs through my mind. Its last verse is, There's gold enough on the farm, boys / If only you'll shovel it out. Even Almanzo Wilder, the song's vocalist and a born farmer, recognized the irony in his tune. Farming and money are uneasy bedfellows. Farming is a gamble, and which way the balance sheet will tend is ultimately dependent as much on chance as it is on skill.
   Money—making it, losing it, spending it— isn't fun. In my family, money has always been something that is best 1: not discussed and, 2: not spent. The more emotionally influential side of my family, my mother's, was comprised of midwestern German shopkeepers and Scotch midwestern potato farmers. I was raised to understand that "if you can't pay in cash, you shouldn't buy it"—whatever "it" might be. You shouldn't even want "it." Besides, Something Might Happen (I'm still not sure what, but it's a powerful boogeyman): when It did, you better have a rainy day fund.
   My parents were ingenious and inventive when it came to raising children and a farm on a shoestring during an economic recession and in a poor area of the country. My father taught himself every handyman skill possible, from repairing the well pump and keeping the old lawn tractor running, to jacking up a barn and repairing the foundation, building several outbuildings sturdier than our jury-built house, and pretty much repairing everything that could be repaired. Once, rather than drive the half hour to a car parts store, he machined me a new washer for my car's oil pan plug! My mother made our best clothes herself, restored the sandblows on our eroded 80 acres with salvaged materials, and partnered with the Soil and Water Conservation District to get all the plants for hedgerows, ornamental plantings and soil stabilization projects as cheaply as possible. Making do and making from scratch have always seemed like normal things to me, not some new-found ethic of the Salvage-chic era. My house—and this pocket farm— was paid for on the backs of generations of this self-imposed scrimp-and-save ethos. It is a great gift, and a good ethos. It also makes me fearful as anything when it comes to spending my savings.
     Scotsmen and storekeepers do not quit their paying jobs. They certainly do not do so, and then go on to write big checks for infrastructure on a new enterprise for which there may or may not be a market. So it is a gut-wrenching thing for me, this waking up in the morning with the intention of spending money and not making any. My patient spouse says, "You have to spend money to make money." It is a scary thought for me in so many ways.
     So, says I, I'll set a limit. A week before the farm idea arose, my parents sent me a $500 check. They claimed it was money they "forgot" to give me for my (already lavish) birthday. $500 of "free money." Well. There's the budget for starting my farm.

The Garden Shed

     This is personal info, but it is also a good thing to keep in mind as you follow me through this adventure. Being a tightwad is stressful and a downer, yes. But it is also a delightful prompt to  ingenuity, and it heightens my awareness of the generosity of those known and unknown who contribute all the time as I take this leap. For example, check out my free fenceposts. Whoever kept a garden or livestock on this property left them behind for me to discover - at least $12 worth of materials I won't have to buy. Ditto the locust poles harvested from my husband's family property, where like many good farmers, someone once started a "fence grove" to supply free rot-proof posts for generations to come. My "border patrol", an attempt to keep goutweed away from the fence line, is a layer of cardboard freely and cheerfully provided by the local bike shop. Then there is my "rototiller" and "garden shed." A huge tip-of-the-pen here  to "Whizzbang Gardener" Herrick Kimball, who has solved so many tiny but crucial gardening dilemmas beautifully and cheaply, he has written a book on the subject. (Check out his ingenious blog!)  His "Whizzbang wheel hoe" was my big splurge last year. Now I get to use it in place of the gas-guzzling, noise-making, weed-seed-replanting, burn-causing rototiller I don't own, to keep garden paths in trim. It is the world's best tool! More on that in future. Meantime, above is his design for a "Whizzbang Garden Shed," which looks deceptively like my brother-in-law's unwanted mailbox set atop two chunks of a blue spruce tree dying in our yard which were too big to burn in this spring's heap. Voila: A place to put my camera, notebook, permanent markers, scissors, and anything else  I brought to the garden and don't want to leave on the ground.
     Then there is the support of friends, neighbors and family—no dollar figure can ever express how much this generosity of spirit and these gifts of confidence bolster my shoestring endeavor as no equity loan could. Add to that birdsong, the play of light and shadow, the incredible healing capacity of getting hands in dirt, and the sparkle of the Housatonic River visible from my garden only just at this time of year between thaw and leaf-out. It is a generous budget indeed. Almanzo would agree, I think. Bloom where you are planted.