The garden sits on a little plateau, about the size of a decent city playground. There’s a greenhouse at the end banged together from materials scavenged from a few ruins around the Shoals. A few yards beyond that are the solar panel and the pump attached to it that brings in seawater and filters out the salt. An army-green rain barrel punctuates the end of each row of raised beds, all heaving with leaves and vines and flowers.

To my left, at the inland side of the garden, the three blond Swans sit at a table they’ve set up in the shade of a handful of blossoming apple trees. As I approach, I notice their knees are red or smudged with dirt, their faces pink and fixed on fans of playing cards. Their elegant bones pick and rearrange their cards like tidy bouquets.

Grace extends an arm, long and freckled in a yellow sleeveless top, to put down a card. “My zucchinis are unstoppable this year.”

“You deserve a good year,” Ruth says, taking up three cards from the table, “after last year’s massacre.”

Grace flutters her hand of cards in Agata’s direction. “It’s the coffee grounds. Fantastic tip. I mean, they just won’t stop. Joanna thinks I’m unloading so many zucchinis on her as some kind of prurient joke!”

Grace and Joanna are kind of paired in the unwritten buddy system of food production on the island. There are few enough of them that no one has to keep track. Anyone who doesn’t work in the garden has to get their vegetables from someone who does. This means the Wrinklies who can’t will have veggies hand delivered fresh from the garden, almost every day in the summer, and anyone who’s busy with other projects or just can’t be bothered has to hand over cash in Rose’s shop. Rose supposedly calculates the market rate according to how well each crop is doing, but I think she mostly goes by what she knows everyone can afford to pay. It’s different with me because I don’t have the same claim to the land that they do. I didn’t have to do any of the initial heavy work getting it set up, or pay for the desalination system or build the greenhouse. So I pitch in, and Rose charges me next to nothing in the shop, which is a real lifesaver.

Agata plays two cards. “I swear it’s the best thing for keeping slugs away. You know”—she leans her strawberry head toward the others conspiratorially—“this woman told me about using coffee grounds in compost when I was working my community garden project in Detroit. This poor thing, prostitute on crack or meth or God knows what, seven children running around. Well, she knew absolutely all the tricks. Greenest thumbs I’ve ever seen.”