OUR SUN-HEATED GREENHOUSE

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It was on a chill day in the autumn of 1932 that Helen and Scott Nearing turned their backs on New York City and signed an agreement to buy a run-down farm in Vermont's Green Mountains. And there they lived for the next 20 years ... clearing brush, building honest stone structures, and raising most of their own food in gardens that were unbelievably vigorous and productive for New England.

It was a Good Life. So good that when "developers" began turning the slopes around them into a ski resort ... the Nearings pulled up stakes, moved to a rocky inlet on the coast of Maine, and started all over again.

And that's where you'll find Helen (74) and Scott (94) today ... still clearing brush, building honest stone structures, and raising most of what they eat in gardens that are unbelievably vigorous and productive for New England.

Two of MOTHER's people were fortunate enough to spend a day with the Nearings this past fall and, as some of the photos accompanying this article attest, they had more than a little difficulty just keeping up with Helen and Scott as they followed the two legendary homesteaders around.

In the first place, MOTHER's editor and photographer couldn't have slept late if they'd wanted to. Why? Because Scott was up at dawn and spent the next hour (right outside their bedroom window) splitting wood for the Nearing's two wood-burning stoves.

Then, after a simple but hearty breakfast, both Helen and Scott put in a few hours mixing concrete and setting flagstones into the floor of the combination storeroom/garage ,that they're currently building. This, of course, was just a little light limbering-up exercise to give them an appetite for their lunch (again simple ... but monstrous!). After the midday meal, of course, the Nearings slowed down considerably ... for them.

Which is to say that Helen only picked a couple of bushels of late beans from their garden, went to town for the mail, rummaged through a small storehouse of the books they've written and hauled several boxes of the titles back to their house, took care of other business, ran errands over what seemed to be half of Maine, and—finally—delivered MOTHERS representatives to a distant airport.

And Scott? With a little help from two or three assistants approximately 70 years his junior, Scott idly whiled away the afternoon digging a couple of hundred buckets of grass and weeds from the Nearings' blueberry patch, oversaw the transplanting of lettuce and other vegetable sets into their sun-heated greenhouse, explained the finer points of wholistic gardening to a few people, and otherwise kept the homestead under control. (That's the trouble with these vegetarians. They can still do so damn much at 94 that they make this generation's 20-year-old fast food munchers look positively sickly and infirm.)