Planting Grapes for the Ages

 

Jon and I bought the ten-acre property in 2013 – not because we really wanted it, but because we didn’t want anyone else to have it.  Its finest attribute was a magical blueberry patch that seemed huge. The bushes were taller than an average human and when the berries were in season, there were billions of them. I always imagined there were about 20 rows of blueberries, but in fact there were 8. 

It was Timothy who planted that blueberry patch, and it was his ten acres. He had bought it from my parents soon after the whole Loudoun property was purchased. My dad was trying to find a way to keep Timothy around, and also trying to find a way to help offset a small portion of the humongous mortgage payment for the other 180 acres.

Timothy’s ten acres was mostly woods and steep slopes, with maybe two acres of open space.  Timothy created a rustic country escape for himself and his wife Claudine. There was no running water, no electricity. He hired a carpenter to build a cabin with a big deck, an outhouse on the edge of the woods that could have been a tiny residence, and a little sleeping cabin in the woods.  He hosted a big blueberry picnic every July and invited all of his friends and associates to come and pick as many blueberries as they wanted.  He made barbecued chicken on a grill and the party went on for hours.  People camped in tents. By the time he sold the property to us, there were about 200 people coming to the Blue-B-Q.

After almost 40 years of blueberries and camping, Timothy and Claudine decided to move to Maine and divest themselves of their various real estate holdings, and leave their hosting duties behind.  They thought about selling the ten acres to the co-op that helped them to maintain the patch. When we heard about these ideas, we were horrified. This ten-acre piece was right in the middle of our farm, with a right of way that was about a half mile long, drawn  legally as a straight line from the highway to the property, not associated with any now-existing farm roads.  A new owner could insist on driving straight through our vegetable fields.

I told Timothy that I wanted to buy his property and asked him not to sell it to anyone else. He was glad to sell it to us. He financed it for us, and we sent him a check every February for 1/10 of the total price.  We were aiming to pay it off in ten years, but we managed to finish our mortgage payments earlier because of some money Jon inherited from his parents.

Now, you might think that we immediately made that property our own, putting our own personal stamp on it.  Really, we did almost nothing.  Timothy had left a fair amount of stuff in the cabin – tools, boxes of blueberry-related equipment.  We just kept it there. When it was time to prune blueberries, we went into the cabin and got the loppers.  We used Timothy’s sewn-together netting to cover the patch when it was time, and we ignored the detritus that was stored underneath the cabin.  We started to sleep out there about once a week, sleeping in the bed that was built tall enough that we could look out the big windows in the morning and see the fields. It was like sleeping outdoors, but much more comfortable.

Because he is a plumber who loves a hot shower, Jon’s first project was to get water to the cabin. He extended the irrigation line from the field to our north, and he buried a line right to Timothy’s cabin.  He used that occasion to bring water to the blueberries at the same time. Then he installed an on-demand water heater.  In all his 40 years there, Timothy had collected water off the roof and hauled water for drinking and never had hot water. That wasn’t his priority.  Then Jon built an outdoor shower off the south side of the cabin. That is the best shower ever.

And that is pretty much the sum total of improvements we have made in the last ten years.  We still don’t have electricity, we have never repaired any of the screens. The siding is a disgrace: pieces of rough cut lumber that are twisting and getting unattached from the building. We do have some nice porch furniture that we inherited from someone. And there is a propane stove with a broken oven, but when would we ever have time to bake? Almost all of our meals are eaten in the half-dark after Jon has cooked them on the grill.

In all the years that we have owned that property, I have never walked down into the woods. Many people have told me how beautiful it is, down by the stream, but they warned me that the path was very steep and I might not be able to get back up, with my bad knee. So I never went. But I plan to walk down to the stream this summer, now that I have a new knee.

But the reason I am writing this long backstory is that last night, for the first time ever, Jon and I planted something with our own hands on our own land.  About a month ago, we went to a place called Edible Landscaping outside of Charlottesville because Jon loves Concord grapes so much. We decided to take a day off and buy some plants. But then we never had time to get them in the ground. Last week, Jon and Michael used a tractor and a big heavy implement that is like a huge tooth and they cut a furrow in the grass, parallel to the orchard that Casey planted almost ten years ago (forgot to mention that one).

We were eating dinner on the deck and it was about 8:00, and I said, “want to plant those grapes? We have to hurry, it’s almost dark.” I zoomed on my golf cart out to the compost pad and filled some buckets with the fancy compost, Jon went to get a tape measure. That amused me – I would never have thought to measure anything.  While he laid out the measuring tape, I started to dig holes. He said I was getting ahead of him, he hadn’t even done the measurements yet. I said it was getting dark.  We mixed compost into the holes and planted ten grapes, about ten feet apart.  Then we planted three kiwi trees in the next row. And it was all the way dark by then. I promised to water them first thing in the morning.

It felt like pioneer work, out in the prairie. We were working in sod, like Pa Ingalls. But we had really fancy compost, we had a golf cart to carry the compost, and the ripper had already made the job so much easier. It wasn’t really pioneer work.  But it still felt momentous because in ten years, we had never got down on our knees and planted one single thing ourselves. We had commissioned others to plant a second blueberry patch, just west of Timothy’s historic patch. And Casey had planted apples and Asian pears and persimmons and figs and pawpaws to the east of the legacy blueberries. We have maintained those trees minimally, and we have eaten fruit from most of them. 

This morning, the first thing I did was fill some buckets at the outdoor sink (which is for the blueberry picnics that have continued, at a more modest level) and – in my nightgown at dawn – I poured water on each of those little grapes and kiwis.  The odds of their survival are not very high as our attention to detail is pretty terrible if it isn’t part of the farm business, but I still think it could work.

I felt like Mika was looking over our shoulder, watching her grandparents digging in the dirt, planting something that might last longer than we do. She might someday eat these grapes. There may be children not born yet who might not ever know how unusual it was for Grana and Papa to be on their hands and knees at dark, fussing at each other but working fast, planting something that could last a long time.