Notes from Zendik Farm
A Passion for Farming
by Arol Zendik
A Passion for Farming is a chapter from Arol Wulf's beautiful, lyrical book, Notes from Zendik Farm, written in 1989 when our farm was in the mountains along the California/Mexico border. (Available upon request)


Dear Readers,

The essays in this book, Notes from Zendik Farm, were written as a paean, a prose love poem to our Earth, specifically the part of the Earth where Zendik Farm is located. However, my love of this rough western country always brings me back to my love, really, of Everywhere—to Earth itself—to the forests, seashores, deserts, mountains and the creatures and plants that live here.

Countries mean nothing to me, they are merely artificial lines divvying up the Earth to serve the needs of greed and the lust for ownership of that which cannot be owned: the land, waters and the elements themselves. Sad, distorted beings, aligned to nothing Real, nothing Cozmik, confused and dazed by their own rush for control of elements, goods and one another.

My love for our Earth has been called “unrealistic,” “mystical and religious.” And I agree, yes, “mystical and religious,” but no, never “unrealistic.” The Ultimate Realism is practiced by this Lover of Earth. The stuff of Life is being bought and sold for a pittance on this planet, people are enslaved to a monstrous irreligiousity that has ruled for thousands of years and calls the love for Earth “unrealistic.” So, understand please, as you read my words, I am not a soft-headed romantic, but rather part of a hard-core propaganda-slinging band of religious shaman-warrior Zendiks, dedicated to Saving it All...

This is a photo of our organic wheat field when our farm was on the central plains outside of Austin, TX. We grew over 100,000 pounds of wheat that year without the use of any pesticide. We had the largest organic farm in central Texas. T.V. stations did a story on our bumper crop of corn one summer during a terrible drought where Texas farmers lost millions in crop failures.

He used to wake me at dawn to watch the morning glories open—they grew where no one believed anything could grow except perhaps some tufts of salt grass that grow in beach sand. But we had a green lawn and masses of morning glories and roses along our fence. Often I've wondered where I had gotten this passion of mine to farm—gardening just isn't enough—I must farm. I would think of him and the morning glories many times through the years, and then I finally put it together, remembered where I got this passion, he had shown me the essence of farming, he had shown me how to build soil.

I was nine or ten years old and I helped him do it there on the bluffs overlooking the beautiful sea—the Long Island Sound, the Sound where I swam in icy, clear water, bravely walking the stony beach that always hurt my feet, swimming out to the larger rocks to dive and watch the dolphins play. He used to show them to me from the bluff where he had built our house, calling for me to come see them, those charismatic characters of the sea, glistening up out of the water, arching, diving and back again into the glassy calm Sound, schools of them, lovely gliding, almost slow motion moving through the water; and sometimes he would awaken me in the middle of the night, quietly, not waking the other children, beckoning softly and excitedly to come with him, steal out the house to the lookout he built halfway up the cliff from the beach, to watch the bright orange meteors shower the blackened sky and fall into the blacker sea and other times to sit and watch the stars or marvel at the bright white moon and the phosphorous sea. We loved it when we were kids,in the water at night, making waves with our hands, watching the silvery bubbles round our bodies.

He, my Uncle Simon, was a farmer's son and when his father died and his mother, penniless and slightly mad, was locked away, they sent the daughters to rich relatives as servants and the boys to the orphanage. He was 14 and ran away back to the farm and worked it himself till it, too, was taken from him. But he would remain a farm boy, even after he was a big city flashy bootlegger with motorcycles, cars, women, leatherbound books and a classic westside enormous apartment in New York City, even then a Scout Leader—so really always a dedicated naturalist. That is why after he had built us a summer house where we city kids could escape slum summers, he decided to put in soil and plant trees and grass and morning glories there on the barren bluffs above the sea.

We went into the woods day after day. He had the energy of lean, wiry men—a kind of enduring strength that could go morning till night and we hauled truckloads of soil and leaves out of the woods and he taught me as he built his layers on top of the beach sand—teaching me farming—bring in good rich black soil if you don't have any to start with, bring in lots of organic matter whether you have soil to begin with or not, and create soil, build it into the natural combination of carbon and nitrogen, encourage the worms, give it water, plant greens, turn them under and plant again. When he was done enriching and building his layers, mixing the different parts into one soil, his grass shone emerald, his morning glories glowed the deepest purples and palest blues and his calendulas burned the most blazing orange. It was a job of intense love, concentration and sweat and to further show me how it worked, we went into the woods and he'd scoop a handful of soil naturally mixed and have me sniff it, ?delicious? he said; and he went to his friend's potato farm and he showed me the cycle of the plant from its root to its flower.

Back then you could reach your hands into Long Island farm soil; the chemicals hadn't gotten there yet, the groundwater was still safe to drink, you could still pick wild berries in the hot summer sun and buy the bushels of fantastically large juicy peaches from Hulse's Orchard, unsprayed, still safe to eat—we'd get them home, he and us kids, slice them, powder them with sugar and let them set a few hours, add some real cream and go to it. Yes, he caught me, and unknowingly, turned me into a farmer and a lover of things natural. Those mole hills we followed in the woods as we talked of Thoreau and Stendahl and Dostoyevsky and his childhood and my coming womanhood and we talked these same topics as we built and tasted soil, planting for beauty and food.

Many years later, when he was in his seventies in Florida, I visited him and told him of our farm, our first one, and my love of planting, my passion for the soil itself and he told me that I was like his father, who had felt the same as I about the land, but that he, my uncle, didn't feel that way and didn't garden anymore. But when I was leaving, there he was, my uncle, hauling in soil from the woods near his property onto a garden plot around the house. He knew that Florida has no soil and that you literally have to build every bit you can get—the thin earthen layer of Florida sits on the porous limestone having receded from the sea only a short time ago geologically, so young compared to the rest of the continent, and I saw he was again setting about the same process he began so long ago at the Long Island Sound, building soil to plant food and flowers and fruit trees.

We here at the Farm, planted our oats and barley again this year and we hope for rain, pray for it, to grow the grain and recharge our aquifer and last week at the clouds lowered grey over the land, a flock of crows noisily descended to feast on the seeds not quite planted deep enough to be out of their reach and one of our guys tells me to shoot a gun in the air and they'll disappear, but my friend doesn't know crows, those wonderful corvids. I have seen them at other places scatter to the nearest electric line and sit watching me, waiting for the noise to be over then go back to feeding. Anyway, there's enough seed for us and them and I love their large black bodies striding upon the land, black against the just turned browns of the field. So I say ?no? to scaring them off and explain why, and then yesterday after the rain, I see the field subtly covered with green blades of sprouted seeds; there's plenty, the crows only took the extra. That same day as I pass the garden, I see the lovely Oregon juncos. Flocks of them have returned to our area feeding on seeds in the mostly dormant garden. These lovely little bright orange-beaked creatures are having a grand time and then there are the White-Crowned Sparrows. When I didn't know birds, I thought that they and the Juncos were exotically, strangely beautiful birds and when I learned they were fairly common and a specie ordinary, I was a bit shocked and even disappointed.

My uncle was born in a house made of soil—a sod hut on the prairie in the early 1900's, 650 acres on the Nebraska plains and the soil never got out of his soul, never really got out of his instincts and in fact, deprived of this, he got meaner every year, angrier and sadder. Truly my uncle could not evade farming, could not long tolerate being reduced to a ?bird watcher.? I know his anger and bitterness were because of his isolation from the land, from the earth. The bootlegging days over, he had become a printer locked in dust and ink five, six days a week, trapped in the city, a bird watcher, when once he had watched the birds as a farmer does, a mixture of love for their beauty and nerve, and anxiety for the seeds and crops they'd destroy. He was trapped as he sniffed and sought after air and sky and earth—he gave it to us, his own kids, my brother and I, but he had lost his roots and his anger was to the soul, in fact it was to the bone marrow which became cancerous and killed him. But in my mind and forever into the essence of myself, his love of things natural has come to reside in me, the fun of following a mole's tunnel in the woods, the loveliness of birds, the unimaginable glory of stars, meteors, moon phases and the ever-changing sea and then the passion to farm that he brought to me down through the generations from the cold wastes of Scandanavia and the steppes of Russia.

They've never farmed here on the Divide except for some dryland grain for cattle or pasture for horses, but we grow all year using cold frames, greenhouses, fields, gardens, and soon orchards, enriching the coarse porous chapparal earth as visitors from the plains, the ?Breadbasket? of America and Canada laugh at our lack of loam, our lack of richness, but here we are building soil, adding nutrients, tending, turning, planting with love, concern and caring for the nurturer of all Life, the Earth itSelf and this, a gift from my Uncle Si, farmer.