As we explore different things in life, most of us find people who have gone before us, people who inspire us and whose expertise guides us as we move towards our own expertise. I discovered Joan Dye Gussow relatively late in my progression as an urban farmer.
By the time I read her first book This Organic Life, Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader I had already experimented with growing six colors of Hopi corn and I was already canning and putting up 60 jars of tomato sauce and 30 jars of pesto every year. So what attracted me to her and inspired me was not the mere growing of food in quantity, but rather the lifestyle she and her family built around the food they grew.
What for Joan began out of the necessity of raising two boys on a modest income became for her and her husband Alan a challenge to life mostly on the food they could produce in their own suburban yard. They would grow 100 lbs of potatoes, 100 lbs of sweet potatoes, apples, onions, garlic, carrots, beets etc and store them in a cold cellar, can hundreds of jars of tomatoes, pesto etc and live through a New York winter what they had successfully produced the previous summer. If a crop failed, then they had none of it that winter.
It was this dedication to producing such a large amount of their own food and to live by what you had – or had not – successfully produced that inspired me the most. After all, if they could do it in New York, then surely I should be able to live from what I produced in three coastal California gardens, shouldn’t I? After that, I really changed my focus, adding a lot more storage crops like dried beans and corn, carrots and fruits to increase my self-sufficiency.
I was fortunate enough to meet Joan at a speaking event in San Francisco in 2012 and tell her how much she had inspired me. We clasped hands for the entire exchange, looking into each other’s eyes and – I hope – recognizing in one another kindred spirits.
