The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (19 page)

Before we left for the train the next day, we’d divvied up what the account executives in my office would call “next steps.” John would contact someone about building the beds and see if he could borrow a bulldozer to completely level the area. Brent would finalize the seed list and place the order. I’d research and buy the growing lights, seed pots, and warming trays to start the various tomato, melon, and pepper seeds.

As we climbed back into the truck to leave for the station, Brent turned to me and asked if I really thought we could build and install such an ambitious garden in just a few weeks.

“Well, it’s too late now,” I said, patting my bag containing my laptop. “I’ve already announced it to our readers.”

Chapter Nineteen

A rusty light brown sedan of early-1990s origin pulled into the Beekman driveway and around to the side of the barnyard where John, Dan (the neighbor helping us construct the beds), and I were working. The driver, a woman who looked to be about sixty, dressed in church clothes, leaned over the front seat to manually roll down the passenger-side window.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if she was actually pissed or simply kidding.

“We’re putting in our garden.”

“Oh,” she said, puzzled. “I thought you were turning the place into a cemetery.” Then, without another word, she rolled the window back up, reversed out of the driveway, and roared back down Route 10 from the direction she came from.

The three of us had to chuckle at the absurd interaction, but quickly got back to work piecing together the collection of fifty-two four-by-six-foot plain wood boxes that would soon become the Beekman 1802 Historic Heirloom Kitchen Garden.

Drop-in visits by strangers were becoming almost commonplace. The previous weekend, Brent and I walked into the barn to find a middle-aged couple chatting happily away with John. We joined the conversation, and it wasn’t until they’d departed that the three of us realized that we had no idea who the couple was. “They called me Farmer John,” John explained, “but I’d never met them.”

We figured out that they knew his name from Brent’s mention of it on the
Martha
show and from our weekly blog entries on the Beekman 1802 Web site. They simply looked up our address on the Web site and drove on over. From where, we had no idea. Along with the Beekman, Farmer John was becoming famous. While he might have been a little surprised at his new celebrity, he didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

Starting with the
Martha
show, we’d begun referring to him publicly as “Farmer John.” We’d never asked him if that was okay. It just seemed colloquial. I’d learned after publishing my first book that in the media, all introductions are reduced to their simplest form: Farmer John, Former Drag Queen, Martha Stewart’s Dr. Brent. There is never any time to go into further detail. A lot has to be crammed in between commercial breaks.

So, without asking or desiring, John had become the famous Farmer John. Even his goats were celebrities. People dropped by specifically to see the ones we’d brought to the show. Normally, Trent, Terrence, and Troy—the males of the bunch—would have gone off to “finishing school” by this time of year. But because of their newfound fame, John wound up selling the three male kids to a hobby farmer who wanted to attract visitors with the “goats who’d been on
Martha
.” They’d become a tourist attraction. As seen on TV.

As soon as we finished installing our massive historical garden, I planned to put the map of it online. It would probably become a tourist attraction as well. But even without the constant interruptions, the garden was turning out to be an almost overwhelming undertaking, just as Brent had predicted. In addition to leveling the ground with the ’dozer, we had to lay the boxes out in a precise grid, with weed-preventing landscape fabric underneath every aisleway between them. John sat by on the tractor, scooping up dirt to fill each one as we laid them out. Then we planned on carting in wheelbarrows full of gravel to line the paths.

Barb, our neighbor and seed proprietress, had come up with the ingenious idea of dividing our garden up into three different “eras.” We’d have seed varieties that would have been planted in the original Beekman garden (1802–1850), seeds that would have been grown in a midlife Beekman garden (1850–1900), and finally, varieties that would have been planted from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. From the comments on our Web site, people seemed to love the idea of such a historical garden.

The progress had been slowed a little because Brent was needed elsewhere. The soap orders were still coming in steadily, so Brent was spending nearly every waking hour of the weekends with Deb. Together they were making batch after batch of soap, wrapping them individually in brown tissue paper, tying them with string, and packaging them for mailing. The publicity we received after the show brought additional editorial coverage on everything from individual blogs to radio shows to e-mail shopping newsletters.

We were swamped and tired. The Beekman 1802 beast needed to be fed constantly. Brent and I blogged about every move we made, and followed each other around with cameras to record every minor accomplishment during the weekend.

But we were also thrilled. Beekman 1802 had become a reality, and my plan to retire early to the country was falling into place quicker than I’d ever imagined. Oprah would be proud of me. Which reminded me, I needed to follow through on a PR contact about an article about the soap with
O
magazine.

“Should we lay out the last row, or do you want to call it a day?” Dan asked me. I must have looked as exhausted as I felt. I’d been working at least sixty hours a week at the ad agency. The relaunching of the airline account had worked even better than expected, so we were getting inquiries from several potential new clients each week. Between advertising, the farm, my magazine columns, and the new business, there wasn’t a moment left for beauty sleep.

“Let’s finish it up,” I said. “Gotta get the peas in.”

We worked another hour and a half laying the final eight beds into place. After Dan went home for supper, and John left to start his evening chores, I stayed behind to cart in the final loads of gravel. As I was raking level the last pile of rocks, Brent pulled in the driveway. He parked over by the house and was heading up the porch when I shouted for him to come over to inspect all that we’d accomplished.

“Look!” I said excitedly. “Just about done!”

He looked even more tired than I did. At least I’d been out in the springtime sun all day. He’d been hunched over indoors wrapping and filling soap orders.

“You’re done?” he said. “This is it?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. All of the boxes were in place and filled with soil, and the aisles were covered with neatly raked gravel.

“Yeah,” I answered tentatively. “All put together.”

“You’re not going to level the boxes anymore?” he asked, nudging one with his knee.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not all the same height.” He squatted down and peered over the edge of one like a surveyor.

“Well, they
are
sitting on the ground,” I replied, getting defensive. “The earth isn’t completely flat, Columbus.”

“I think you mean Magellan.”

“I think you mean ‘Great job, Josh. Good work.’”

“No, it’s fine. It looks…
fine
,” Brent said, wearily turning to head back toward the house.

I looked back over the 7,500 square feet that I’d spent four weeks planning, building, and laying into place. “Fine.”

I knew what he really meant: “It doesn’t look like something Martha would put in her magazine.”

Ever since Martha mentioned that she’d like to visit the farm, Brent had been seeing everything through her eyes. And when one peers through Martha glasses, the world isn’t rose colored. It’s a great big collection of disappointing imperfections.

I’d thought the garden beds looked more than fine—pretty great, actually. Dan, John, and I had put the entire garden together in an amazingly short time period. But now that Brent had pointed out its imperfections, I too couldn’t help viewing it as a ragtag collection of wooden boxes laid out in rows, just like the woman driving by who mistook it for a cemetery.

And if
I
thought it looked like a cemetery, I could only imagine what Martha would think of it. Martha had recently asked Brent again about visiting the farm during an editorial meeting. Her assistant followed up with Brent to schedule two possible free summer weekends for Martha to come. Martha was curious how we traveled to the Beekman, and she’d decided that she’d probably take the train up with us on a Friday and return with a driver on Saturday evening. The thought of driving Martha from the Albany Amtrak station to the farm in the backseat of our pickup seemed like a scene from a Samuel Beckett adaptation of
Driving Miss Daisy
.

And even though we hadn’t mentioned the possibility to anyone in Sharon Springs, the buzz about a possible Martha visit had grown exponentially since the spot on her show. We’d even had to enlist Doug, Garth, and George to squelch any rumors they overheard at the hotel bar—the epicenter of the town’s gossip orbit. They’d become our own personal Homeland Security team, monitoring “chatter levels” about possible Martha attacks.

A visit from Martha would probably mean another round of publicity for Beekman 1802. She would no doubt blog about it, and her words and pictures about us would reach another million or so readers. What if we could get another appearance on her show? Maybe a summer gardening segment? Now that I too had basked in the glow of Martha’s approval, I could feel my own addiction to perfection setting in.

But the cost of perfection is steep, and can only be paid for in elbow grease.

I grabbed my shovel.

Those garden beds weren’t going to level themselves.

Chapter Twenty

“Where are all these orders coming from?” I finally reached Brent in his office on a Friday. Lately it felt like if I didn’t make an appointment to get on to his calendar, we’d never speak during the week. As if our day jobs weren’t busy enough, we found ourselves staying in our offices, working late into the evening catching up with Beekman 1802 business. Whoever came home to the apartment last quietly slipped into bed trying not to wake the other.

“DailyCandy picked up the soap,” Brent answered.

“We’re getting, like, five orders every minute,” I said. “I can’t even set my BlackBerry down or it vibrates off my desk.”

“I know. Terrific, right?”

It
was
terrific. Beekman 1802 continued to explode. At this rate it was looking like we’d have to leave our jobs sooner than either of us expected just to keep up with it.

“When are we going to get all these orders out?”

“We’ll have to do it this weekend, I guess,” Brent said.

“But I’m three weeks behind on the gardening.”

“Soon to be four,” Brent said. “Oh, and on your way home from work tonight, I need you to transfer 10K into the Beekman account.”

“Ten thousand dollars?”

“Yeah. We need to order more packaging, and Deb wants us to get another five hundred soap molds. She can’t keep up production with the few she has. And we have to pay Deb’s mother-in-law for all the wrapping she’s been doing.”

“Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money,” I said. “Can’t we just pay Rose at the end of the month after we’ve got the cash from these orders?”

“You want to give an IOU to a ninety-year-old woman?”

“Seems like a shrewd business gamble to me,” I said. “Okay, gotta go. Someone’s at my door. See you at the train?”

“Four forty-five. Be on time,” Brent answered.

Jess, the head account person on the airline account, came in and sat in the chair next to my desk.

“You’re not going to like this,” she said.

“I already don’t.”

“We have to come up with a national fare sale ad to run on Monday.”

“Monday?!”

“They just called.”

“Why didn’t you tell them it was impossible?” I already knew the answer, of course. If our largest client asked us to clean the bathrooms on every one of its planes, we’d print up celebratory T-shirts and use our own toothbrushes. It was the element of advertising that I’d miss the least. As a farmer, I’d be beholden to things like weather and goat whims—no more jumping through hoops for marketing departments to earn my paycheck.

“We have to have eight variations for twelve different papers,” Jess said. “They’ll look at them Saturday night, and we can make revisions overnight to send to the printers on Sunday morning.”

“I’ve got a lot to do at the farm this weekend.”

“So write a few headlines in between mucking or whatever. Just don’t let on that you’re not slaving away in the office.”

I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage getting out all of the orders coming in from DailyCandy, plus update the Web site, plus do the regular spring chores,
and
crank out dozens of headlines.

I couldn’t wait until the day I never again had to write a line like: “You Toucan Save on Flights to the Caribbean.”

The 4:45 was packed, and Brent and I had to take aisle seats across from each other. We hated when that happened as it made it harder to catch up on all the Beekman tasks we saved to discuss on the train ride.

As soon as we sat down, I began complaining about all the work that needed to be done over the weekend—including the airline ads.

“Remember,” Brent reminded me for the hundredth time since January, “this was your resolution.”

“I know, I know.”

“And also remember—”

“Stop lecturing me,”
I said, interrupting.

“I just wanted to remind you that we have that photo shoot you arranged this weekend.”

“Oh Christ,” I said. “I forgot all about that.”

We’d become so busy that I was no longer forgetting things as simple as car keys and phone numbers. I was forgetting high-fashion photo shoots in our backyard. A month or so ago I’d agreed to let
Out
magazine use the Beekman as a location for a shoot by a famous photographer.