15 October 2009

Chinese broccoli, Chinese cabbage, Celery root, Endive (radicchio or escarole), Garlic, Onions, Anaheim hot pepper, Potatoes, Turnips, Carnival winter Squash

Everyone’s a winner. That, in any event, is what we seem to want to teach our kids. Intent on boosting their (allegedly) fragile self-esteem, we do all we can to provide them with opportunities for success. This includes, of course, rigging events so that they cannot fail to achieve victory or simply redefining success to include any number of lesser achievements—such as failure. We have them play sports—activities defined in part by their measurable outcomes—and pretend that nobody is keeping score (the kids always know what the score is). We award medals for participation. We celebrate kindergarten “graduation.” We even make sure that every kid at a birthday party gets some sort of present, on the assumption I suppose that they cannot handle the fact that somebody else’s birthday is, well, somebody else’s birthday.
There’s nothing wrong with ensuring that kids develop some self-confidence, at least not in moderation and preferably honestly come by. But I do not understand what we hope to achieve by shielding kids from loss. Loss is unavoidable. We don’t get every job we apply for, every promotion we hope for, every recognition we think we deserve. We fail drivers’ tests and bar exams. We get rejected by colleges and people we ask on dates. Computer files and car keys vanish without a trace. We lose games. We lose friends. We lose money. We lose hair. We lose our youth.
Kids will lose. Probably a lot more than they win. They had better develop some productive ways of dealing with it. Being a good winner is easy. Winning simply confirms what we know to be true about ourselves. Being a good loser takes practice. Not round the clock practice. Everyone deserves at least a little time off from losing. But enough practice so that they can learn to overcome the natural human tendencies when confronted with loss: sulking, avoiding blame and quitting.
Losing may not be easy, but it’s normal, common and survivable. To teach kids that it is something to be rigorously avoided by any means is to mislead them dangerously. To believe that they cannot take losing is to seriously underestimate their fortitude.
The kids Will plays soccer with this fall lost all their games last year and may well lose them all this year. And yet they turn up week after week, smiling and joking and hopeful. Sam and Will’s team last spring lost all its games. It was the worst U14 team in the league—by far (it can be taken as a sign of the state of soccer in Cambridge that they continue to let me coach). But most of those kids now make up a school team that has only lost once and I expect to they will turn up for the spring season again.
I do not mean to glorify this record of soccer futility. We would all have liked to win at least a few of those games, and I do not mean to suggest that doing so would have caused any harm. Winning is more fun that losing. But all that losing has not destroyed any of the kids. There were times, unsurprisingly, they became sullen and lazy and timid. But to the extent they recognized that losing a bunch of soccer games is a minor disappointment and that the frustration of losing can be a spur to greater effort they got at least as much out of the season as any of the players on the teams that beat them.
At the very least, they will be well prepared for a life in farming, where there is no sure way to guarantee success. If vegetable growers simply gave up on every crop they lost to weather, disease, insects, animals, lack of labor or their own ineptitude, they would soon have nothing to grow. I have never had a season where at least one crop did not fail entirely. I have learned to do some things differently—to plant less broccoli early, to hide lettuce from deer, to grow cucumbers and squash in plastic on raised bed. I have also learned that next season I will get different results even when I do the same things and that some crops, such as this year’s eggplant, will thrive in spite of the growing conditions. I have learned not to despair over hail, drought, floods. And I know that a killing frost is not, as the weather forecasters would have it, the end of the growing season. These cold nights did in lots of crops, but we still have enough out there that shrug off a hard freeze or even taste better after one to keep the bags filled for these last three weeks of the season (the last delivery will be on the 29th).
Of course, you may be puzzled by who these hardy vegetables are. Such as the Chinese broccoli, the bunched greens, which with their delightfully crunchy stems and far less bitter flavor are a superior form, I think, of broccoli raab. Or the head of Chinese cabbage, whose tender leaves, slightly more pungent than those of a regular (to us) cabbage are excellent raw or cooked. Or the odd, warty celery root, which has the taste of celery and the texture of kohlrabi and makes a tasty salad (see the recipe section of the web site). Or the Carnival squash, which looks like a table decoration and tastes like an Acorn squash.
Or the garlic, which looks like garlic but may, as I have previously mentioned, turn out to be a head of penicillin. I could easily have become discouraged by this outcome—by the effort (field preparation, planting, mulching, weeding, fertilizing, weeding, more weeding, picking, bunching, curing) gone to waste, the lost revenue at farmers market and the cost (about a thousand dollars) of replacement seed stock—and decided that you and I could do without garlic in the future. Why risk the loss of next season’s crop? But who can do without garlic? So we will go out when the snow stops and plant 130 pounds of garlic. If you would like to join us for that and to glean the remaining potatoes for various food pantries and to share soup and hot cider, we will (weather permitting) host one last farm day on Sunday, the 25th in the afternoon.