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So, we focus instead on growing the vegetables in our little garden beds at the cabin. Our tomatoes are turning yellow, our zucchinis are ready, and our carrots are thinned and growing nicely. The peas are producing in abundance, and day after day I’m able to pick a bowl and have pea pods and bread for dinner. There’s nothing like a vegetable that you have grown, picked fresh, and eaten the same day.
The tomatoes ripen, and they all seem to be ready at once. Scott doesn’t like them raw, but he’ll eat salsa, so I dice the fruit into pico de gallo, and we eat it with organic corn chips from the co-op. Morgen won’t eat tomatoes, but she loves pulling tiny carrots from the ground and nibbling on them as she walks around.
Scott has built a bin out of wood pallets, hidden from view on the other side of the cabin, and there we drop all our compost. Scott turns it, lets it sit, then adds it to the gardens. Morgen helps spread it in around the plants with the child-sized garden tools she got for Christmas.
“Next year I’d love to preserve some of our produce,” I tell Scott as he turns the compost. “I wish we could grow enough food to sustain ourselves for the winter.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. I wish we could buy a house of our own here, so we wouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to have a garden plot.”
“Me too.”
“I wonder if the bank would lend us the money for a little piece of land to farm on.” Scott wonders. “We could build a little cabin on it, like this one.”
He makes an appointment and later that week he goes to talk with the bank. He tells them that we only want to borrow enough for a small plot of land to grow food on. But the county has an ordinance that land parcels must be at least five acres, and the prices are out of our reach, even for raw land. They turn him down.
“What about if we lived on it?” he asks. “If we made it our homestead?”
“No,” they say. “Not while you owe on the house in Duluth.”
The house in Duluth hasn’t sold, and we're several months behind on the mortgage.
“What if we get up to date on our payments?” Scott asks.
“That would be a good thing to do, but you still won't be approved for a new mortgage.”
So Scott feels like giving up on it. The little space we have at our rental is all we'll get. But I keep hoping that something will work out. It’s not like we’re asking for much, after all. I know that if Mrs. McKinley had any open areas, she’d let us garden on her land. Maybe there’s someone else out there who'd be willing to do that. Maybe we just need to ask.
“I’m going to put out an ad," I decide. “We’ll see if the community will help us out.”
“How?”
“By lending us gardening space.”
“Should we wait until spring?”
“No. We should secure something now if we can.”
So I post and ad on Boreal, the local classified website, asking if anyone has a plot of land that they’d be willing to let us use. There’s a lot of land in this area. Surely someone has a spot they’re not using that we can grow some food on.
The next day, we receive a call from a woman named Pam who has a spot on her property that she might be willing to let us rent for next year.
“Rent? For how much?” I ask her.
“It would have to be a hundred dollars a month, at least, to make it worth my while. Otherwise, it’s not worth the hassle.”
I wait for a couple days to see if anyone else responds to my ad, hoping someone will offer it for free, or in exchange for some produce, but no one else calls. So, on Saturday morning I call Pam back.
“Come on over and take a look and see if it’ll be right for you,” she says.
Pam’s paved driveway winds through groves of trees and patches of wildflowers. Her house sits in a clearing with a breathtaking view of the lake. It’s about two thousand square feet, with cedar shake siding and stained glass windows. She comes to the door in jeans and a loose-fitting sweater, and she shakes all of our hands, even Morgen’s. We follow her down a path through the forest and into a clearing about eighty by a hundred, surrounded by cedar trees. Pam walks to the center of the clearing, spins around, and announces that this is it.
Scott and I look around, trying to figure out the logistics.
“You can actually access this directly from the road,” she says. “No need to ever come up to the house. You can just park out there and walk the trail in.”
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