Luke Ackroyd wandered his family’s backyard Sunday morning, surveying an expanding vegetable garden. Before him were rising arugula sprouts and the stiff green spikes of young onion plants.
A nurse anesthetist, Ackroyd was due on Monday to start a four-day shift on an airway team at Boston Medical Center, a 514-bed hospital and trauma center in the city’s South End. He expected to spend the week intubating patients suffering respiratory distress from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. For now, his mind was on potatoes — as in, where in his yard might he grow them? And should he plan for one row, or two, or three?
Luke is my neighbor in Wakefield, R.I., a former mill village near the state’s southern coast. He lives three doors up. On Sunday the two of us remained about a dozen feet apart, engaged in the new and awkward dance of the pandemic spring. We walked his yard, talked potatoes and settled on choices. The Ackroyd patch would be two rows, each about 15 feet long, near a stack of firewood and away from the shade of rhododendrons and a small tree. Our street was silent. The town seemed still. Before we parted, Luke said he would ask Sam, his 13-year-old son, to turn over the grass with a shovel while he was at the hospital during the week. Then my sons and I would put seed potatoes into the Ackroyd dirt — just as we had planted the rest of his family’s early vegetable garden in the past weeks.
In the middle of March, as the coronavirus altered life all around us and revealed the fragility of our reliance on distant sources of food, my family was in a position many Americans outside the areas most afflicted came to know, watching with dread and sorrow as Covid-19 began sickening distant co-workers and friends. We entered self-isolation before our nearest hospital announced treating an infection, and we were sheltered outside the areas of gravest risk. An unfamiliar feeling of uselessness descended upon us: Unlike mail carriers, E.M.T.s or supermarket employees — unlike Luke — we were members of a largely idled or remote collective, among the tens of millions without a clear or practical contribution to offer. We were lucky, and we knew it. We also wanted to convert the privilege of our good fortune to service, but we had no idea how.
The mid-March run on beans and meat and pasta at local grocery stores, like the shortages of hand sanitizer and toilet paper, had left people feeling vulnerable. Sparse shelves also coincided with planting time for early spring crops — spinach and peas, arugula and onions, radishes and turnips and the like. Looking into our own yard, we wondered: Could the pandemic spur a shift to greener and more community-based living, in the form of vegetable gardens, and thereby offer solace and sustenance alike? If daily news reports were thick with menace and fear, if news conferences from Washington felt unhelpfully carnivalesque, maybe people’s sense of control, agency and resilience could be nurtured in the soil — as they had been for our forebears.
Simple gardening was something we knew how to do. My father is an accomplished garden- and fruit-tree tender. Throughout my childhood in upstate New York, he summoned baskets of tomatoes and beans from the land around him, along with thick bouquets of dill and basil. Over time, he became, to use the doctrinal term, a muskmelon madman — raising seedlings on the kitchen counter, transferring them first to cold frames and then to gardens rich with horse manure he brought home hot in dented garbage cans in his Volkswagen squareback. As his vines spread, he defended each leaf and flower, stooping among them throughout the summer to remove insects by hand. So prized were the fruits of his labors that an otherwise upstanding neighbor became a cantaloupe thief. One day our dogs flushed her out of the patch red-handed. Her name was Marian. We called her Melanie. My mother said she never knew a dignified woman could scoot like that.
For a dozen years since returning to the United States from Moscow, our family followed my father’s example, trying to coax a significant amount of our food from gardens and other local sources. This was in part tied to the allure of freshness and flavor, but also to a desire to kindle a modicum of tangible self-sufficiency in a world tilting disorientingly toward the virtual. What, in the end, can you eat from an Apple store?
The lifestyle, and its aesthetic, occasioned ribbing and jabs from relatives and friends: Prepper. Hippy. Hayseed. Freak. Keeper of a survivalist compound. But when schools shuttered and all of our worlds grew smaller, we were reasonably well prepared for emptied grocery store shelves and mandatory social distancing. We had large vegetable gardens ready for seed, along with compost pits, a few fruit trees, a root cellar, enough firewood for two winters and a 35-year-old but recently rehabbed commercial fishing skiff on a dock a few miles from the back door. Our freezers held meat from turkeys, sea bass, porgies, ducks and goats that we killed ourselves and processed on a butcher’s table that my oldest son, Jack, and I built in the basement and set up beside the house. Just outside the kitchen windows, opposite from the clam rakes, were nine laying hens in a coop. As panic shoppers picked clean entire sections of grocery stores, these chickens were producing six to nine eggs a day. (The lone rooster, a lame and gentle fellow who rarely crowed, died a few days into our isolation. Was this an omen? Time will tell.)
We also had tools, including my father’s old gas-powered rototiller, with which we could make quick work turning lawns into vegetable patches, and chain saws for clearing trees and their offending shade. The clincher, though, was our number. Five siblings had been reunited, then all but confined, under one roof: a college freshman, a high school senior, a high school sophomore, a middle-schooler and a 10-year-old. Unless one of us became sick, we could muster a local labor pool most any day and offer a free service that might give our neighbors fresh greens in a few weeks — then more diverse harvests throughout summer — by doing for them what we were doing at home anyhow. And we could do it in compliance with social-distance mandates, down to texting instructions to new gardeners after we planted their yards while they remained inside.
First we ordered seed. My second-oldest son, Mick, browsed the catalogs. Our initial focus was on crops that would germinate and thrive in New England’s cool spring weather. We settled on spinach and arugula, in sacks by the pound, and beanbag-size pouches of seed for cilantro, parsley, turnips, radishes and peas. Then we placed orders for bundles of onion plants and sacks of eyed potatoes. Our onion order was 10,000 plants strong.
We extended offers. On St. Patrick’s Day I texted our former next-door neighbors, Bob and Susie Clendenen, who had moved to a smaller house two blocks away, asking them if they would like a garden at their home, starting with seed potatoes, peas and greens. “Then you guys would have some healthy supplemental food five paces from your porch,” I wrote.
Within a minute, Susie replied. “Really?” she texted, followed by a thumbs-up emoji. “YES.”
A few days later she stood on her back porch and directed Jack and me as we tore up the lawn around a stone birdbath. Promising soil emerged, dark and free of clay and rock. Soon Jack was planting, making rows and marking each with a pair of quahog shells. He set aside areas for onions and potatoes to be planted later, then returned home to split firewood and prepare for his online college class.
The following day Susie texted that she had been looking out at her new garden all day.
By then, Mick was raking and seeding the Ackroyds’ three raised beds.
Word spread. More requests for gardens came in. We offered help, but proposed conditions. Anyone who accepted labor or seed had to agree to do the work that vegetable gardens require — the inevitable weeding and thinning, the likely watering, the sometimes comically hapless thwarting of pests. And if the crops thrived, the families agreed, they would share their bounties around town.
Soon we had more takers than we had time. Within a week, my kids and I had cut fresh plots into several other neighbors’ lawns, built and filled more raised beds in our own gardens and left rough-cut oak planks for Luke and Sam to assemble into another trio of beds in their yard. In one lot we felled five trees, opening a shaded patch to the warming sun and sky.
The work did not go smoothly in each place, much less every day. Weather has been mostly chilly, windy and dreary, and the gardens have been drenched in downpours heavy enough to wash away or redistribute seed. The spinach proved slow to germinate. Where it did emerge, it has barely grown. Some lots were rocky. One turned out to be clay two inches down; without a dump truck’s worth of compost, its potential yield is roughly that of a sidewalk. Our house cats — mousers we keep as wardens against rodent vectors of Lyme disease (an illness one of my sons and I have caught) — have tried commandeering one raised bed as a litter box. They bolt when we hiss at them. Like Melanie, they return.
There have also been near-instant successes. The arugula blinked to life everywhere seed fell. The early vigor of the turnips and radishes have been of similar order. Our onion plants arrived lush and healthy; soaking rains helped them establish roots with speed. New gardeners whose yards are frequented by deer or rabbits have agreed to forgo planting crops these animals will eat in favor of growing potatoes and onions, which the animals avoid, to exchange with households that will grow extra greens. Openness to collaboration, eagerness for labor, expressions of good will — sentiments in our neighbors that hint at mutual reliance are as bright as any bloom.
There has also been the reward of seeing children participate as the world reels. About a week after Mick raked and seeded the Ackroyds’ older beds, my youngest son, Joe, returned to their yard with the onion plants. Sam Ackroyd had worked with Luke to make three fresh beds and fill them with topsoil and compost. Their additions were ready for seeds or plants.
Luke was away at work. To avoid contact with anyone else, we texted ahead and asked everyone to remain inside.
Dena, his wife, arrived in her minivan. She is a physician assistant. To the swarm of children who roam the street, she often serves as a village healer, treating their cuts and scrapes and insect bites, sometimes alerting other parents of the earaches and fevers that spring up in the pack.
She had news. Her father, she said, had Covid-19. His home was about two miles away. She had spent the night evaluating whether he should go to the emergency room. He had not.
Joe, my 10-year-old, was planting her onions. He listened quietly. Having been in Dena’s care repeatedly, including once for a broken wrist and another time for slicing open the cartilage of his left ear, he seemed relieved that she was on her father’s case.
The back door opened. Lucy, Luke and Dena’s 10-year-old daughter, stepped into the morning. She and Joe had been inseparable until social distancing pulled them apart.
“Hi,” she said, from about 30 feet away.
“Hi,” he answered.
They made hesitant steps toward each other, until about 20 feet apart. Joe showed her the garden, and what he had done. Then they sat on the lawn, and talked softly about what a drag online school is, and of the miracle of internet orders and curbside pickup from Brickley’s Ice Cream, a pandemic-inspired service on Main Street that they hoped to persuade their parents to try. Soon Joe and I were walking home, bucket of seed in hand, headed back to quieted, less certain lives, and the haltingly hopeful chores of our own dirt.
