My Permaculture Mistake, Pt 2: Gender Roles on the Farm
This is the second installment of three about my nine-day, $3,000 permaculture course in Vermont. Read the first installment here, in which I describe what led me to do this.
And before I get into it, I wanted to let you know that the author Carolyn Gregoire and I have a couple of spots available for at our August women's writing retreat at her beautiful home in Maine. This is for women who have a seed or seedling of a book idea, and need guidance in nurturing it to full bloom. All the info is here.
The packing and reading list for the permaculture course is extensive – I could easily spend another thousand dollars buying the recommended text books and tools. I don’t have to buy everything, but I do want to practice splitting wood (axes are scary!) and grafting (I dream of apple trees), and I’ve always been the kind of student who sharpens her pencils the day before class. So I buy secondhand steel-toe boots, a scythe, and hand pruners.
I go through the required readings and watch the required videos (well, those that aren’t broken links; it seems the course packet hasn’t been updated in a few years). I watch an old lecture from the permaculture course Founder and read the updated 2023 edition of his book.
His philosophy is thus: peak oil, climate change, and water scarcity means that we can’t keep farming in such an extractive way. Permaculture is a way to minimize input of petroleum and imported products, while maximizing output of food and other necessary natural products, like wood and medicine. In a 2014 interview, he estimated that with 20 hours of work a week, you could get most of what you need from the land.
I want this to be the answer to my climate anxiety. Perhaps I can tend to my plot of land in a way that has a positive impact on my little corner of the world, on my health, on my neighborhood, on the climate. And maybe I can do it in a way that doesn’t consume my life.
I have visions of being a part-time gardener: planting trees and perennials that need no irrigation or fertilizer to produce luscious fruits, and doing a couple hours of weeding after I finish writing for the day. During long weekends, I’ll release a passel of kids and wine-drunk adults carrying baskets into an idyllic backyard where they will pick berries and herbs for dinner.
A more hazy vision is one of resiliency. I want to believe that if the supply chains are disrupted, I’m able to feed myself and my loved ones fresh food, while even having moments of joy and comfort, right in my backyard.
At the beginning of August, I pack up my camping and farming gear, and drive up through Vermont’s verdant valleys. At the foot of the long gravel driveway leading into the farm is an RFK sign. (It’s a couple weeks before he will join Trump’s campaign.")
The driveway curves up a hill past a farmhouse, where I pause to get directions to park from the course’s co-instructor (who I will now call Co-instructor), a forty-something man with short, salt and pepper hair, glasses perched on his weathered face, Crocs on his feet, and hiking shorts on his bowed legs. He’s like a warm, academic farmer. He tells me to continue past a shed with heavy equipment and park behind a grand, newly constructed, three-story barn that looks east over the rolling hills. I grab my stuff out of my car and hike down a hill with my overstuffed backpack past apple trees, berry shrubs, small patches of field with a half dozen grazing cows, through a sparse forest to the camping area, choosing a pond-side spot. I set up my tent and rush back up the hill to the barn for the opening circle. I’m the last one to arrive and find a seat on a bench.
The Founder, who owns this farm, is tan and lean, with black, short curly hair and the air of a cocksure pirate. His wife, with her pale, rosy skin and long brown hair, will teach the lesson on herbalism. Their seven-year-old son squirms and scowls during the introductions and then wanders away while all forty of us introduce ourselves and why we’re here.
Some people have flown in all the way from California, Oregon, and South Carolina for this. There are singles, couples, and two mother-daughter pairs. There are landowners, food entrepreneurs, and lots of aspiring farmers who dream of having their own land someday. Most people have tanned skin and lean muscles, cotton t-shirts and Keen sandals. Some people are looking to top off their education and upskill, others have only read about permaculture in books.
I tell the group that I’m doing this instead of Burning Man this year — it’s about the same time off from work and cost. From the looks on their faces, I get the sense I have committed a faux pas by revealing that I have partied in the desert with the help of generators, even if I’ve publicly declared I’m over it.
It’s also weird that I’m here by myself, instead of with my partner. I’ve been spending more and more time alone in Vermont, while my husband stays in New York, working at his day job designing luxury hotels for Middle Eastern princes and DJing at night.
Truth be told, my marriage is in its last gasps. My naive purchase of an old farmhouse in desperate need of repair isn’t the reason, but it certainly hasn’t helped bring us together. He doesn’t like working with his hands, and every time I present him with ideas for what shrubs to put in or how I want to renovate a room, he finds things to criticize, but never offers solutions. I’m the only one using the chainsaw and Multitool. When I got a concrete outdoor coffee table for free, he threw out his back trying to lift it. He didn’t blame me, but that was the last time I asked him to help me shoulder a physical load. I’m used to carrying the financial, logistical, creative, and physical labor of our marriage. But with this house added in, the imbalance is impossible to ignore.