2 September 2010

Basil, Nectar carrots, Eros escarole, Husk cherries, Onions, Peppers, Hot pepper, Sage, Spinach, Squash, Thyme, Tomatoes

As I have noted from time to time, we grow so many different crops in part as a sort of insurance plan. Each season some things thrive and some fail, and we don’t know which will do what beforehand—in large part because we have no idea what the weather will do more than a day or two in advance. By growing a wide range of crops with different needs and preferences we can increase the chances that each year at least some of the things we plant will produce in abundance. Of course, we also increase the chances that each year at least some of the things we plant will come to nothing at all, rendering our efforts on their behalf a total waste. But we consider that a reasonable risk.

Not that we simply leave the crops to the mercy of the weather and hope they can figure out how to deal with whatever comes their way. While we do not know what the weather will be like beforehand—if I had known I would have spent a lot more on irrigation and a lot less on drain tile this year—we can do something to modify the effects of the weather as it occurs to make the plants as comfortable as possible. By which, of course, I do not mean as comfortable as absolutely possible. I am not even sure what that would involve. Some sort of carefully controlled biodome, I suppose, though no doubt if I actually constructed one for the vegetables, stocked with just the right biota, things would run amok and angry watermelon-sized blobs of mold would chase us about demanding that we think about their feelings and humming 80s eurotrash rock loudly and off key whenever anyone else tried to have a conversation.

You can see why we have not bothered to construct the biosphere. We prefer to keep our efforts at a modest level to avoid provoking any life form too much. Growing some of the tomatoes in a field tunnel gives them extra early warmth, protects them from diseases and severe weather and allows us to control soil moisture so the fruit does not crack. Raised beds covered with black mulch provide the winter squash with warm, well drained soil, and row covers on hoops over the young vines modulate the night temperatures and keep some of the cucumber beetles at bay until the plants are big enough to fend for themselves. We add dump truck loads of organic matter to the soil to increase its water-holding capacity to help plants survive dry spells and improve the drainage system every year to get rid of persistent wet spots.

We could do more. Everyone could always do more. With another 10 field houses, another five miles of tiling and a million gallon pond feeding sprinklers in all the fields we would do an even better job of tending to our crops. The farm would be bankrupt, naturally, but the crops would prosper. So we do what makes sense on a farm this size. We focus our efforts on the valuable crops—valuable for their culinary as well as their retail worth. That’s why the tomatoes, not the kale, get that space in the field house.

In addition to giving the valuable crops more protection from the weather, we also plant them in larger quantities than we would ever need in a good year as extra insurance against a bad year. If things go wrong and we get terrible yields, as we did, for instance, last year from the sweet peppers, at least we still have something to hand out. And in a good year we just have a lot of peppers.

This is a particularly good year for peppers. We gave them a dry spot up a small slope and added lime and a lot of organic matter to the soil before putting the seedlings in mulch on raised beds. The weather has cooperated, at least from the perspective of a pepper plant. The broccoli and beans might disagree, but peppers like a hot, dry growing season. Unlike beans, they have big enough root systems to find all the water they need. The flea beetles and cabbage loopers that thrive in this weather and plague broccoli don’t have a taste for peppers, and the swarms of slugs that wreaked havoc in our wet pepper patch last year abhor these conditions. Not only have the plants borne a lot of fruit, but the fruit is actually ripening. We have had plenty of years with barely a red pepper to pick. We harvested 1200 on Tuesday (well, to be fair some of them were yellow, not red). I could feel a little peeved about that. If we had known how well they would do we could have planted half as many peppers and had an entirely adequate harvest and saved ourselves a lot of time. But it is hard to feel grumpy when you see the back of a pickup filled with tubs of beautiful peppers. I trust you don’t feel put out by getting a nice pile of them in your box. If you are wondering what to do with them you might want to look at the recipe for red pepper soup on the web site.

And what of the crops that don’t get as much care, such as the husk cherries? Well, in a cold, wet year the plants grow poorly and produce a meager crop and we don’t put husk cherries in the shares. It is a shame, but we are not going to take time away from weeding onions or hilling potatoes or cultivating carrots or trellising tomatoes to tend to the husk cherries’ needs. We put in 50 seedlings a year, usually at the end of a pepper or eggplant row, where ever we have a little mulch available, and then we more or less forget about them. Fortunately, in a year like this they do not require much attention. They have grown perfectly happily without any help from us, happily enough that we were able to pick (or to be more accurate, pick up since the fruit falls off the plant when it is ripe) a couple of bushels and put some in everyone’s box. Coming across the odd little fruits in their papery husks, you may wonder why precisely we would do such a thing, but I hope you enjoy them. You can just pop them out of their husks and eat them or toss them in a salad or use the in a salsa (as you would tomatillos). I would offer those of you who have not had them before a description of their taste, but they don’t taste precisely like anything else.

I have yet to figure out what spinach likes. Whatever it is, it is in short supply on this farm. We have not had a decent bed of spinach out in a field for years. Fortunately, we can occasionally get it to grow—a trifle grudgingly—in a field house. Unfortunately, we often don’t have a lot of extra space in the field houses for a bed of spinach. We really need a whole separate enclosed space just for spinach, a spinach haven with just the right sandy loam, just the right amount of water, an constant cool temperature, lots of light, protection from the slugs and caterpillars and microbes that harm it, a gentle breeze to keep the leaves dry. In other words, , a spinach biodome in which it would get everything it wants and suffer no harm—except, of course, when we turned up and cut all its leaves off. Or when the horrid mold blobs drove it crazy their emotional neediness.