OCTOBER 5TH, 2010
—
Earlier this September, I visited Monticello with two fellow farmhands from the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm. The visit came after many years of reading, admiring and wondering about the development of Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable gardens. Not lightly undertaken, the pilgrimage to the plot of land grown by the hand that wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the greatest service a civilian could do for their country is to cultivate a new crop, suitable to its climate, culture and economics. I paraphrase, but when we work to seed save rooftop seed stock here in New York City, I think often of how lost that sentiment is in the current thrust of agriculture: to produce, to feed in such a narrow way, and to think less of the culture and cultivation of food than food as something to be rather blindly produced. When food becomes a calorie-based commodity, we lose track of its roots: as a source of nectar for insects, a habitat for animals, and yes, eventually something incredible and delicious on our plates.
Wandering around Jefferson’s grounds, I was struck by a few details the gloss of history rarely tells. For one, the man had over a hundred slaves and staff to help him take care of his mountaintop grounds. Two, he wasn’t there for much of its cultivation, what with running the country in one form or another for most of his life. Three, the mountaintop he chose was totally far away from a good water source, and for many of the veggie-gardening years, the soil sat red and dry underneath rows of newly introduced peppers, tomatoes, asparagus, figs, pecans, and grapes. As we slyly picked dried seed pods from Jefferson’s Asparagus Bean plants, I thought about how like his garden is the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, on land way too high and in soil way too dry, we’re trying to make vegetables grow. What came of Jefferson’s land was strange innovation–for example, he was the first man to grow white eggplants on American soil. I hope our efforts, however counter-intuitive, might provide a few little innovations, too.