The Wisdom of Tuscany: Simplicity, Security & the Good Life by Ferenc Máté

Author:Ferenc Máté [Máté, Ferenc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Albatross
Published: 2009-11-16T23:00:00+00:00

11 ~ THE TUSCAN FOOD GARDEN

To forget to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

—Mahatma Gandhi

The Tuscan family, in all its complexity and wide-ranging loyalty, is the foundation of Tuscany, but nearly as fundamental is the edible Tuscan garden. Even in our wine-producing zone, where affluent vintners are common, the most constant and beloved area is right around the house: the orchard, the olive grove, an enormous vegetable garden, and of course the barnyard, bristling with life—and it hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

In a not-too-distant past, the same could have been said of many a family home in the western world, but something changed, and even modest vegetable gardens vanished and the fruit trees vanished, replaced by antiseptic lawns and a few shrubs. This is a most curious transition, especially because surveys show that gardening is most people’s favorite pastime. Our friends in big cities, from New York to Milan, concur: their greatest weekend joy involves digging dirt. They seem to have some internal need that makes them go to extreme difficulties to have dirt to dig. A friend in Brooklyn hauled soil in buckets up to rooftop planters, where she planted herbs, tomatoes, radishes, and parsley. Another in Milan had a crane haul soil onto her roof, where, in raised beds of three hundred square feet, she has both summer and winter vegetables, enough to feed the neighbors in her building. And this has nothing to do with saving money on groceries. Two friends, both senior editors in New York City, with sufficient family funds to buy a medium-sized country, spend weekends growing so much food that they often come to work Monday mornings laden with bags of vegetables and pass them to everyone around the office.

I have always loved the idea of growing our own food, and admired Candace and Buster going at it with hoe and shovel, but I never quite understood the great visceral joy until Candace announced one evening that the moon was perfect for planting garlic but, since she was busy in the wine cellar, I had to go do it.

Now why a bloody clove of garlic stuck two inches underground would give a rat’s ass about what the moon is doing ninety thousand miles above, I haven’t a clue, but I’ve learned long ago that in Tuscany you don’t doubt folklore, so out I went. Now, some people love baseball, others adore their cars, I love garlic. It was November, the sky clear, Venus blinding bright, and I quickly hoed and weeded a big patch, crumbled the soil, grooved in the rows, and then split the garlic heads up into cloves—on Candace’s advice keeping only the biggest and the best, for the nourishment of the young plant comes from the clove itself. And pointy end up, she had said with a pained smile, as if she had already written off our garlic for next year.

I spaced them well, all hundred and twenty of them, shoved them an inch deep, and then lovingly covered them with another inch of soil.

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