We turn off the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road and take two rights down a paved road to find Ann and Karl Nelson’s Cape-style home. It is early May. We spot Karl standing in the bed of his pickup, shoveling manure from an Island farm into a wheelbarrow. His daughter Britta, a first-grade classmate of my son’s, is in the garden, where her eight-year-old brother Anders is cutting asparagus for dinner.

“Make sure you cut low, Anders,” Karl reminds him. The salad for dinner, with greens picked from another garden to the left of the house, is already made. Even though they’ve just passed through a chilly spring night, the spinach and salad greens are in good shape; they come from heat-preserving solar “pods” – four-by-eight-foot wooden rectangles covered with fiberglass – where they’ve been growing all winter. Almost everything the Nelsons eat for dinner throughout the year comes from their own property, the Island’s ocean waters, or its interior woodlands.

Following Karl through his edible yard – a little over half an acre – you get quick lessons in high-density planting, soil composition, pruning, and the benefits of growing fruit trees with Vineyard root stock. I pass by the healthiest looking rhubarb plant I’ve ever seen.

Karl is a seventh-grade science teacher in West Tisbury, one of a team of science teachers in a school where the eighth-grade class last year scored top in the state on the MCAS science exam.

“I can grow on this land everything we need as far as vegetables year-round,” Karl says. He harvests broccoli until mid-December and carrots until spring. “If you put a foot of mulch around the carrots, you don’t have to store them; they store right in the ground.” Kale and Brussels sprouts keep producing, and like broccoli, taste even better after a frost. Under the four pods, spinach, beet greens, and salad greens grow while snow falls around them. “No one ever thinks about fall gardening,” he says.

Among other vegetables, the family grows fifty to seventy pounds of broccoli and sixty to seventy pounds of asparagus each year. What they don’t eat fresh, they freeze and eat later.    

Soon the strawberry section will start producing, followed by blueberries, peaches, watermelon, and apples. Six blueberry plants, in one small row in their front yard, typically yield twenty-five pounds of blueberries. “We each eat a pint a day,” says Karl. “We don’t buy any fruit in the market for a few months, which is a big savings.”

A few feet away from the bushes, four grapevines curl around a wire trellis, and are expected to produce twenty to thirty pounds of seedless grapes, in three varieties, in the coming summer. Two apple trees, a golden delicious and gala, stand around the corner, as well as a nice peach tree expected to produce three to four bushels, judging from the buds. Karl points out a fledgling white peach tree. “I got turned onto white peaches in Colorado,” he says. Ann and Karl moved to the Island thirteen years ago from Colorado, Ann’s home state, where the two met in a linear algebra class at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Both were teaching in schools just outside Denver – Karl in science, Ann in math, home economics, and French – when they decided to leave the city for a good place to raise a family. They ended up on the Vineyard, where Karl’s cousin lived and where he had sailed as a youth.    

Growing up in Squantum, a small peninsula off Quincy, Karl was the family gardener, and always had an affinity for planting and growing things. “But anyone can do it. I don’t believe in green thumbs. It doesn’t take much time, once you learn little tricks.”  

Once on the Vineyard, Karl moved outward from gardening to fishing, diving for shellfish, and hunting deer (and mushrooms along the way). Family meals include venison, lobster, striped bass, bluefish, and scallops paired with garden-fresh vegetables. “I have a permit, and you can get lobsters for the family in a one-hour dive,” Karl says. He also fishes at least once a week, and the Nelsons have fish all summer and into the fall. “Martha’s Vineyard is an easier place to live off the land,” he says. “There are more options.” The family occasionally buys chicken. They would raise roaster chickens if they could, but their neighborhood doesn’t allow it.

“It saves money, but that’s not why we do it,” says Karl. “It’s mainly for our kids to have as healthy a diet as possible and for them to learn to appreciate good food. They like the flavor and they eat it – you don’t have to coax them. Part of it is selfish: You get spoiled by the flavor. You don’t want to give that up because you can’t substitute it in the market. You just can’t.”

With the asparagus cooking, and the green salad and hollandaise sauce ready, Karl begins cooking venison steaks, which look like pieces of beef tenderloin. There’s little fat on the meat and the taste is amazing, as juicy and flavorful as any great steak. Karl bow hunts during fall season, typically getting two to three deer. He butchers the meat himself, filling the freezer with venison steaks, roasts, and burgers. “You couldn’t tell the difference between venison burger and cow burger,” he says. “We usually tell people, but sometimes we forget and then they find out and ask, ‘This is venison?’”

In preparation for winter, the freezer  gets filled with bags of frozen vegetables and fruit. During asparagus season, Ann blanches bunches of the sweet green spears, boiling for one and a half to two minutes and cooling quickly in ice water. She packs them in freezer bags, portioned for a dinner for four. She does the same with broccoli and other vegetables. During a visit this past September, there were bags of frozen blueberries and elderberries, said to have medicinal benefits for colds, among other things.

The Nelsons make an occasional off-Island run for flour, dressings, and olive oil. In winter, Ann shops once a week on-Island for perishable basics such as milk and fruit. “Shopping and meal-planning is quite easy,” she says. The goal of the couple is to save time and spend as much of it as possible with their children.     

“We pick our vegetables carefully, so we don’t spend hours and hours harvesting food,” says Ann. The family sticks to nutrient-dense vegetables. Green beans, they say, are almost a little too much work. Peas, which have to be shelled, fell by the wayside some time ago. Outside in the garden, Karl talks about the shortcuts he’s picked up over the years from reading, and of course, trial and error. “I don’t spend more than two hours in the garden a week, three hours tops, that’s it. But again, there are tricks. I learned all my tricks before I had kids,” he laughs.

Karl doesn’t scallop as much anymore. “It’s time-consuming; you have to shuck them. I’d love to have the time to do them, but I have to make a living.” When school lets out, Karl turns his attention to MV Tree, Lawn and Gardens, a side business he launched a few years ago.

Any excess wood collected from his tree work is hauled home, processed, and used to heat the whole house. Eliminating a heating bill and lowering food bills are not the primary reasons why the Nelsons live as they do, but saving money in these ways helps to allow Ann to stay home while the kids are young.

“It’s more manageable than people think,” says Ann. “Stepping back a bit in time seems saner than the modern rat race. While I’m not working, I can keep a balance in the family. We can eat healthier, be together more, enjoy each other’s company.

“It’s a good way to care for the earth,” she adds. “You’re living off of it, but you’re also caring for it. Kids understand where food comes from, and their work is intricately connected to how we feed ourselves.”

Their gardens depend on good soil. As a foundation, Karl uses as many loads of Island manure as he can. (“I can’t reveal sources,” he says.) The family composts everything. Food goes into two buckets with screw-on lids and sits outside the kitchen door. Every two weeks, Karl transfers kitchen scraps to the compost pile and layers the mix with straw and manure. The piles compost and break down into soil over the winter.

In this enriched soil, plants grow faster and with fewer insect problems. The soil also allows for multiple plantings. In April, Karl starts spring broccoli plants from seeds he planted in the pods. He spaces them a foot apart instead of sixteen to eighteen inches and harvests his nine-to-twelve-inch heads in mid June. “The day after I finish harvesting, I’ll plant a double row of high-density green beans. The soil is used constantly. I can plant at least two crops of green beans in the summer. There’s always something growing from the end of March to mid-November.

“You don’t need acres to feed your family. If you want to make a living out of it that’s different. I can really respect people that keep their farms, like Arnie Fischer at Flat Point, or Jim Athearn. They keep the land going, because [farming is] going by and by.”  

A half an hour each week is devoted to weeding. With one of two hoes, including a favorite circle hoe, he speedily knocks down weeds and lets them just lie on the surface. Weeds are also kept at bay by mulching. In some spots he uses aged compost, as well as bedding from sheep and cows. “Asparagus and melons love manure that’s aged,” he says.

While some areas rest, he plants an annual cover crop of ogle oats. They grow about one foot high, and he will sow them in early September. The oats die during the winter, and he uses them to cover and protect the ground all around the garden. The oats look like hay and serve as mulch. In the spring, he pushes aside the covering to make room for plant seedlings. Karl avoids tilling. Tilling upsets the soil environment and takes time. “But you have to keep your organic matter up,” he says.

When Ann was teaching in Colorado, she took a survey of kids’ dinner habits and found fewer than half ate with their family. A majority ate in front of the TV, with meals from the microwave. The Nelsons make a point of eating together every night. “Dinner is a time when a family can come together and enjoy each other’s company,” she says. “It’s a time when parents can share with children and children can share with parents. That’s less common in our culture now.”

At the table, before biting into some very sweet asparagus and tender salad greens, the family takes a moment to say a prayer. “We thank God for all that we have and for what we believe he created,” says Ann.