The New Pioneers
(Page 5 of 8)
September/October 1971
By David Gumpert
APPLES FOR BREAKFAST
RELATED CONTENT
The milk is mostly for Melissa and is stored under the house in a narrow cellar that serves as a refrigerator with a temperature between 37 and 47 degrees. The cellar also is used to store root vegetables like potatoes, carrots, beets and turnips, which are kept in shallow boxes of sand to retain freshness and which are eaten throughout the winter.
Breakfast is extremely simple—apples dipped in ground sesame seeds, which look like a gray paste but have a sweet, candy-like taste, and ground oats with raisins and goat's milk. Until a year ago, the Colemans had about a dozen chickens, which they used for eggs, but they gave the chickens away when they decided they didn't care all that much for eggs.
After eating, Eliot pulls out a black three-ring notebook in which he records such things as the daily weather, the date certain crops start growing and how well they grow. He also charts the chores that remain to be done.
"I think we ought to start the parsnips now," he tells Sue. "Last year I think we started a little late. This way they should have better roots," he says. Sue agrees, and he makes a notation in the notebook.
The rest of the morning Eliot spends pulling stumps out of the ground and Sue divides her time between making chapatis and pulling weeds in the garden. Melissa occupies herself playing with pots and pans or wood sticks or simply wandering around the garden, chattering contentedly.
Lunch, served at about noon, consists of potato and onion soup and fresh chapatis. Dessert is chapatis spread with peanut butter and honey, both store-bought.
AVOIDING A "COST-PRICE SQUEEZE"
After lunch Sue walks through the woods, with Melissa following, to their three-foot-wide brook. There she fills two containers with three gallons of water each, enough to last for two days, and carries them on her shoulder-yoke back to the house.
For washing and bathing water, they use a well near the garden (it hasn't been tested for pollution as the spring water has, so they don't use it for drinking). They heat the water on the stove. An oval threefoot-long metal tub serves for both bathing and clothes-washing. For soap, the Colemans use store-bought Ivory bars and flakes.
The afternoon finds Eliot turning over a patch of the garden to prepare it for the planting of parsnips and carrots. An important part of the preparation involves mixing compost, or fertilizer, into the soil. The compost is a mixture of seaweed the Colemans get at the nearby seashore and horse manure and leftover hay from a local horse farm as well as remnants from their meals, all of which has decomposed for months. "If I had to buy all sorts of chemicals and fertilizer as most farmers think they have to do, I really would be in a cost-price squeeze," says Eliot.
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