The Half-hearted Homesteader

There is a certain conflict, if you’re living on the Maine Coast, which revolves around the following conundrum: Not much happens in the winter, unless you are a ski bum/hockey jock, so that’s a good time to sleep and read. But then in summer, everything must happen: gardening/farming/building/waterborne activities, etc.

So from my particular vantage point the choice is to sail or to garden. One can do a little of both, perhaps, but inevitably something suffers from innattention.

In a perfect world one would have a boat with decks wide enough to support a vegetable garden. You could string hanging tomato plants from the cross trees, grow lettuce on the transom. Or even tow a floating raft behind the boat with a raised bed on it. Obviously root vegetables could be problematic.

One of my ideas for a book is to persuade my family to sail south in the winter and rent a patch of land from a Rastafarian. There we can spend a couple of weeks cultivating vegetables, then sail around for a few more weeks, every so often coming back to weed and tend. When the season is done, head north in the summer, and do the same thing in Maine. This would be the story of the sailing farmer, or the farming sailor.

But in reality these activities are not natural allies. Sailing is too purely pleasure-oriented (I’ve yet to find a homesteaderish function for it, failing to find any relationship between it and self-sufficiency). That is why sailing belongs in the “Half-hearted” column of this blog as it relates to homesteading, it is the natural ally of the weed, and the antagonist of the cultivated plant.

Having said that, it allows me to appreciate the garden in a whole new way. Sailing, or any other activity on the water, gives you a new perspective on land, and therefore on our land-based existence, so that invariably when  I return from a sail to be confronted with the late summer garden (at this point fairly sorry) I marvel at the wonderful contrast between sea and land-scape.

All this to say, yes, I haven’t done much here in the last month or two.

Anyway, all my tomatoes were lost to blight. Rest of the summer veg score card? Potatoes good; Onions good; carrots  excellent; garlic excellent; cucs excellent; basil, what can I say?  As for Corn, cabbage, broccoli, they all sucked.

This link shows what I’ve really been doing most of the summer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwmyKFBbErc