Daniel wasn't allowed to come over much anymore, and once we moved, I wondered whether he would be able to find us at all. He mentioned this situation to me several times via the letter he wrote. He thought that maybe he'd kept us up too late and disturbed Dad's sleep. Or maybe Dad was jealous of the attention we all paid to a guest. In any case, he asked me to forgive Eliyah, not to get mad at him. This was hard for me to do, because I knew perfectly well why Dad didn't want Daniel around. Daniel didn't have a lot of money to pay for me, and besides, he was another male threatening Dad's hold over a fmaily of women.

I started another garden and wrote Daniel often about what I was growing and how it was doing. He sent me an ear of blue and yellow flour corn. I wanted to plant it, but since it was the only thing he'd ever given me other than his letters, I hated to pick the kernels off in order to plant them. For my second garden, I made French biointensive garden beds, digging them all by hand and did a lot of companion planting, where you combine plants in a garden bed. Rather than having a bed or row of all broccoli, for example, I would combine broccoli and lettuce. The idea is that by not having a monoculture, there is a reduced risk of disease and insect problems. I planted the red kernels of corn I'd spent months saving, planted some of the few giant pumpkin seeds we'd salvaged from the raid of the pack rats.

Getting manure for my garden was a problem. Raphah had a garden too, and unlike me, he owned one of the two goats that produced the manure in the goat pen. We fought over who got to clean that pen and who got the manure. Fox didn't have a pen; he was tied to a tree at night with a long soft rope and pastured during the day, so his manure was sort of scattered and hard to collect. Water was an even more serious issue. There was only a spring for the garden's water, and the spring needed to be cleaned, which nobody in our family knew how to do. I had walked up and looked at the spring, and it was full of water, but in the process of getting it from there to the garden, it lost pressure and was a mere trickle. Mom laid down strict rules for using the spring water, and then things got worse when she got a rototiller and dug up a section of the garden for herself. Rather, we tilled it for her with the tiller. I hated that machine. It bucked and lurched and made an awful lot of noise, and only dug down a couple of inches. But the garden was growing, my citrus trees were thriving in the windowsill, and so were the apple seedlings.