The Alleged Farm

4 November 2010

2010-11-04T11:00:00.000-04:00

Bok choi, Carrots, Celery root, Daikon, Garlic, Kale, Kossack kohlrabi, Lemongrass, Lettuce, Onions, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Indigo radicchio, Shallots, Hakurei turnips, Winter squash

These might be the last vegetables you get from us for some time so chew slowly. Fortunately we have put enough of them in this last share to keep you going for a little while. A crew of trapped Chilean miners could probably last for weeks on what you have in the box, especially since many of these vegetables will keep quite nicely for some time, particularly in a cool underground storage area. Not that I am saying you need to go deep underground to enjoy these crops, though I confess I have felt a strong temptation to crawl into my den these past few cold mornings. Nor am I saying you have to hang onto the vegetables for as long as possible. In these frosty temperatures you might feel the need for more sustenance. For a bowl of garlicky potato and kale soup, perhaps, or a spicy broth with lemongrass and bok choi, or a creamy winter squash bisque. You could get an especially large appetite working outside in this weather, digging potatoes for instance. But don’t take my word for it. Come to the farm on Sunday and find out for yourself just how hungry you can get doing manual labor outside in November as you help us pick some of the remaining produce for food pantries in Troy and Glens Falls. And yes there are still a few vegetable left in the field despite how much we have been putting in the boxes recently. We always grow more potatoes than we need. Well almost always. We have had a few terrible potato years when we needed every spud we could find. But like most years, we have gotten to the end of this season with a fair number of potatoes still in the ground, which is what we aim for. We want to have produce to give away. It may not enhance farm profitability (profitability being, in any event, rather too august a term for the net proceeds of this venture). But feeding people is what we do, and I do not think you can be in this business and not set aside at least a little to feed the people who cannot afford your food. By which, of course, I mean not that I think that not doing so is physically impossible, just morally indefensible. I don’t know that this moral obligation extends to you specifically (though the moral obligation to help those in need extends to all of us in one form or another). After all, this is not your business. But we could certainly use your help picking some of those potatoes, and we hope that you feel a strong enough bond both to your needy fellow citizens and to this farm that you will take a little time on Sunday to lend a hand. Well, maybe both hands. You can pick up potatoes using only one hand, which helps keep the other one clean. But it goes a lot faster if you use two, and the faster it goes, the sooner we get to go back to our house and have some hot cider and various potato dishes, some of which I will supply, some of which you might supply if you feel so inclined. And if picking potatoes really does not appeal to you, we do have some other crops to glean, such as turnips and mustard greens and chard, which you can pick without having actually to stick your hands in the dirt. Not that sticking your hands in the dirt is bad. In fact, it is good for you. Dirt has a bad reputation, I know, but an undeserved one. Do away with dirt and we will all be very hungry. Even getting dirty has its benefits. People who are too clean have a harder time fighting off infections. We have gone to considerable effort to get ourselves away from dirt, to sanitize and pave over the gritty parts of life. But we depend on dirt for our existence and ignore it at our peril. We should all go out occasionally and remind ourselves of the existence of dirt and take a good look at what it provides and feel at least a little gratitude and accept at least a little responsibility for looking after it. I am not saying you have to spend as much time with dirt as we do here on the farm. But you should not let us have it all to ourselves. So come out on Sunday and get a little good farm dirt all for yourself. You could bring a pail and fill it up, but I think you will find it easiest to carry it home under your fingernails, on the knees of your pants and on the soles of the sturdy footwear you have put on for this occasion. You could bring home a few vegetables too, if you want—if by some chance you have managed to eat everything in the share by Sunday. I would not, however, recommend that you try carrying home any produce under your fingernails, on your knees or on the soles of your sturdy footwear. And if you don’t run out of vegetables until after Sunday, but do find you want more in the coming weeks, you can order more from us to be delivered on Monday, November 22^nd. You should receive a price list from me in a separate email. If you do not get it and want to place an order just get in touch with me. But first, perhaps you want to think about what to do with the vegetables you already have, such as the smooth, round green Kossack kohlrabi, which like the purple version is best eaten raw in slices or grated into a salad. You could use it combined with grated Daikon (the long white root) and celery root (the knobbly round one) and turnip (the round white ones). As for the kale (the bunched green), if you don’t want to use it in that potato kale soup, you could make it into crispy kale instead. It is easy to do—remove the stems, toss the leaves with a little olive oil and salt, and bake them at 325 for about 20 minutes until they are, well, crispy—and it is a tasty and healthy snack food, and tasty and healthy are not words that apply to most snack foods. If you come to the farm on Sunday I would be happy to show you just how easy it is. And you can return any boxes you might still have too. That is almost too much for one day: dirt, kale and returning boxes. You might have to lie down for a while afterwards. That’s okay. We fully understand. We feel a little like lying down for a while ourselves. Farming can do that to you after eight or nine months. Not that we are complaining. We like farming, especially in a year like this with decent weather. We could just use a little rest right now. Fortunately, other than picking those potatoes, there is not a great deal left to do on the farm. A little clean up, a few repairs, a couple of small construction jobs. But we have time to get our energy back for next season, time to sit by the wood stove and fill seed orders and decide on improvements (I hope to find an affordable cooler) and figure out where to plant everything—everything, anyway, but the garlic, which we finished putting in yesterday afternoon. Of course, in addition to getting back our energy, we hope to get you back for next season too. It would not do us much good to get all revved up and have nobody to grow for. We will offer an extra early sign up discount for returning members. If you join before December 15 you can get a 2011 share at this year’s price (I will send out forms soon). It is one small way we can thank you for helping to support the farm this year. Another small way we can do that, of course, is by thanking you.

Thank you.

28 October 2010

2010-10-28T21:39:00.000-04:00

Beets, Cabbage, Upland cress, Fennel, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Onions, Potatoes, Pie pumpkin, Radishes, Rosemary, Rutabaga

I feel pretty confident the Tea Party folks have failed to interpret their namesake moment entirely accurately. Those earlier angry patriots were not really complaining about government or even taxation, let alone their leader’s putative religious beliefs or unfair regulation of the energy industry or attempts to improve the health care system or immigrants. They got riled up that day about a system of government that seemed to pay no heed to their interests and concerns.

To be fair, a kindred sense of impotence and injustice may well have helped set off our Tea Party. People fear, not unreasonably, that they have lost control of their government. Of course, a fair number of them simply dread the end of their unmerited racial and ethnic advantages, a position anyone with a moral sense might find less than entirely sympathetic. And a rational observer might puzzle over how the longing for a more representative and responsive democracy necessarily leads to a vituperative defense of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. But then rage has a funny way of skidding about and losing track of its target. Anyone who has spent time around small children knows that, knows how even the most justified juvenile outrage can quickly become a randomly destructive tantrum.

Come to think of it, you just need to spend time with people of any age to understand that. There are coherent factions of the Tea Party, but the general mood seems to be that of a person whose car has broken down late at night on a dark stretch of highway, and who in frustration gets a sledgehammer from the trunk and attacks the vehicle before thinking to call a tow truck.

As a mechanically incompetent farmer I understand full well that urge to bang on complicated machinery that won’t do you what you need it to do. I understand too the odd kind of joy one can take in such pointless demolition. But I also understand how short-lived that joy is, how quickly replaced by less captivating feelings. A little banging, carried off with a certain sense of restrain, has its merits. But you have to have a more constructive plan in addition to the hammer, some notion of how you are going to fix things. And coming up with such a plan requires, of course, a calm assessment of what is actually broken. We seem to be a long way off from that at the moment.

Perhaps we should try a different misinterpretation of the Boston Tea Party and see if that leads somewhere better. Instead of seeing the colonists as a bunch of spry Reaganite conservatives out to free the New World from the burdens of effective social programs, we might try imagining them as seriously motivated locavores. They objected not to the tea tax but the tea itself. A mass produced commodity of a multinational corporation with unhealthily close ties to government and a terrible record of worker safety violations, shipped unsustainable distances, dumped on the New England market at prices that put local artisanal beverage producers at a competitive disadvantage, the tea represented everything these 18^th Century food activists objected to. Dumping the tea in the harbor was a blow against the tyranny of a food system designed at the behest of large companies solely for their own benefit and without regard to the welfare of the planet or vast majority of the people on it.

We can carry on the true rebellions these patriots started not by stomping around bitching about how hard it is to be white in this country, but by refusing to eat fast food or drink soda, by demanding that our grocery chains carry local produce, by lobbying Congress to end its ridiculous farm subsidy system, by insisting that we take the alarming rise in childhood diabetes as seriously as the financial interests of Pepsico stockholders, by forcing state and local governments to work to protect farmland, by besieging processors with complaints about the unnecessary and even dangerous ingredients they add to food, and maybe even by tossing a few crates of Lunchables into some nearby body of water.

All right, so that is a bogus version of history used as an excuse to support a wide-ranging program of protest at best only loosely related to it in any logical way. Mea culpa. But at least it would lead to people addressing some legitimate concerns in a direct way calculated to improve our lives, and I have to think the mass protests would not feature too many pointlessly offensive, racist placards. Plus the food at the organizing meetings would be good.

Not that we need the imprimatur of patriotic history to object to the ways food is made in this country. When a company spends millions of dollars to convince kids to eat deep fried chicken-tinged corn mush lightly sprayed with butane we don’t need to know if Madison would have approved to think something is wrong with this. When a meat packing company that abuses workers and produces tainted food because indifference to safety boost its income uses a portion of those profits to purchases the compliance of legislators and regulators, we don’t need to seek historical antecedents for our anger.

Except we aren’t visibly angry. Or not about this. About Socialism, sure, and Islam, and about having to help poor people get something to eat. Even as we learn more and more about the corruption of our food supply we cannot for some reason rouse ourselves to take to the streets. There are changes for the better. You know you are making headway when Walmart promotes local produce. But it’s a quiet movement. There’s no foodie Glen Beck getting people out, no vegetable-obsessed oil billionaire funding it. It mostly just consists of people sitting around the dinner table sharing a good meal. People like you.

You may not have realized that getting a share makes you a foot soldier in a food revolution, but nearly everything about a CSA goes against the dominant corporate food culture. Modern American food is a chemical and geographic mystery hiding behind a tag line, a clever simulacrum of something real designed for quick and thoughtless consumption.

The only real mystery about a CSA share is what on earth some of those crops are, like the weird little white and green root in this week’s box, which is a variety of daikon radish called Green Meat (though the flesh is actually white). Just treat it like a normal radish (i.e., with respect and courtesy). Or like the bag of greens, Upland Cress, closely related to watercress, and like its cousin a nice peppery addition to a salad. Or the big round yellowish root, which any Northern European could tell you is a rutabaga. It is like a bulked up turnip, a good keeper, and tasty cubed, tossed in oil and salt, and roasted with other roots (potatoes, beets, celery root, shallots) and a few sprigs of rosemary, or braised in a little chicken stock, or boiled and mashed.

Every foot soldier needs time out, and your tour of duty is nearly up. You get your last share of the season next week. For those of you who cannot quite break the vegetable eating habit we will offer various crops for sale after the season. We will deliver orders on the Monday before Thanksgiving (November 22^nd). I will send a price sheet separately.

For those of you who need a little more time in the dirt or want to help get food to the hungry, we will have our end of season gleaning day on Sunday, November 7^th, weather permitting. We will spend the morning, starting at 10:00, gathering some of the remaining crops to give to Community Action and Capital District Community Gardens, and then we will have a restorative midday potato repast. Bring sturdy shoes, gloves, kids, friends, and, if you feel so inspired, a potato-based dish.

With only one more week of shares, the time has arrived to return any of those waxed produce boxes you may have been hoarding. We have gone through a significant portion of our two pallets of boxes, meaning that around 500 of them are out there somewhere waiting to come home. We would love to have them back so they don’t go to waste and also because they represent a fairly significant investment for a small farm. So if you have a chance, please get them back to your site (or any of our sites, for that matter) before next Thursday.

21 October 2010

2010-10-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

Bok choi or Chinese cabbage, Chinese broccoli, Carrots, Celery root, Escarole, Lemongrass, Onions, Peppers, Ancho hot pepper, Yellow Finn potatoes, Shallots, Acorn and Butternut winter squash

I recognize that my recipes often leave people feeling frustrated. They lack details. Amounts, times, even ingredients are frequently a little vague, as though cooking were an almost entirely ad hoc undertaking. Some people think I am just being coy, protecting my culinary secrets behind this irritating imprecision. Some people think I am just being irritating. Few people believe me when I say I don’t have recipes for most of what I cook and that I am not entirely sure I can remember everything I put in the dish, let alone exactly how much of any ingredient.

We tend far too often to think of recipes as authoritative texts, as the final word on how make a particular dish. We want to believe in their accuracy, believe that cooking can be made relatively simple and scientific, believe that there truly is one way to make each dish. If that is true then all we have to do to succeed in the kitchen is master reading comprehension and have a decent gourmet shop nearby. We will get predictable, praiseworthy results every time.

And a lot of recipes happily play along, adopting a tone of certainty. If you want to create, let’s say, Gratin Dauphinois or onion tart or celery root remoulade, then these, the recipe dictates, are the ingredients you must have on hand and the precise steps you must take in order to end up with that dish. You only have skim milk for the potatoes? No pastry flour on hand for the tart shell? A bit short of shallots? Oven imperfectly calibrated? Then don’t bother. You simply won’t end up with the dish you desire unless you strictly obey the recipe.

I see people come to a late fall farmer’s market with a list and walk away empty-handed because none of us had cucumbers or basil or lemons (yes, people ask if we have lemons) or whatever it was they needed to make some dish. And clearly they could not amend their plans when confronted by the seasons and a pavilion full of fresh produce. They had chosen what to make and given themselves over to the recipe, and the recipe most definitely did not tell them to go to the market and see what looks good and get that and figure something out from there. Nor did it suggest that in the absence of good fresh basil they might try using some other herb, cilantro perhaps or thyme.

I suppose modern recipes can afford to be dictatorial. They may well suggest you check the local farmer’s market for really fresh ingredients, but they know that you will always find cucumbers and tomatoes at the supermarket. Who needs spontaneity or ingenuity when the modern food distribution system can provide you with a full range of crops year-round.

But a recipe is not an unequivocal solution to a mathematical problem. It is just a set of directions, and like any directions it offers one of multiple possible routes to your destination. The person offering it probably considers it the best—the fastest or shortest or prettiest—way to go and so may present it as the only real choice. But you could take a different path and end up in the same place. Deciding which way to go might depend on all sorts of conditional factors: the time of year, your skills, your esthetic sensibilities, your schedule, other people’s schedules. Even if you trust the person offering the directions enough to choose his route—if you know he has tried all the routes, know him to be sensible, find his relevant opinions sympathetic— you have to be prepared to find an alternate way should you encounter some roadblock.

Produce varies even more than traffic and road conditions. An early October tomato won’t yield the same results as an early August one. If you insist on having a tomato salad in the fall you will be unhappy if you make it just the way you did with summer fruits. You need to use more salt and vinegar and perhaps a little sugar (how much more? Well, how salty and sour and sweet do you like your tomato salad?) to get anything like the flavor the tomatoes gave you two months earlier, and there’s nothing to do about the texture. You would be far better off forgetting about that salad until next summer and trying a celery root (the dense, pale greenish orb) remoulade instead. Obviously it is not the same as a tomato salad. But it is good in its own way, and far better right now than just about any tomato you can get your hands on.

If you don’t believe me, try making it. It is easy. Just peel your celery root and julienne or shred it (why can’t I just say to do one or the other? Because I don’t know if you have an implement that makes julienning vegetables easy and I don’t know which texture you prefer and either works), add a finely sliced shallot or a more or less equivalent amount of onion (or two shallots if you like shallots (or no shallot or onions of you don’t like them)), and mix it with a dressing made of a little oil (I always use olive oil), some heavy cream or sour cream, a dash or so of paprika, lemon juice (the lemoniness of lemons varies enormously, so see how strong your lemon is and add enough juice to give the remoulade a distinct but not overwhelming sourness), a big dollop of Dijon mustard (I think you have to use Dijon mustard to get the right flavor), salt, pepper and finely chopped parsley (or maybe a little marjoram or oregano or perhaps even lemon balm). Exactly how much of each component of the dressing? Enough to make enough dressing to coat your variably sized, variably cut up vegetables well. You can eat the remoulade right away, but the flavors and texture seem to improve if you let it sit for a couple of hours so the dressing can do its work on the celery root. You could use mayonnaise instead of the cream (or sour cream) and vinegar instead of the lemon, and come to think of it you could use kohlrabi or turnip instead of the celery root. Or of course you could make something else entirely with the celery root such as a pureed celery root and apple soup, or a celery root-stuffed baked apple (apple and celery root go together nicely). Or you could make potato and celery root pancakes. Or celery root sorbet (I have actually made it—and more than once).

Is that a recipe? Well, it is a reasonably accurate description of how I make remoulade, though I admit it is probably not the easiest set of directions to follow, especially since it ends up possibly backtracking and taking off in some entirely different direction. But then that is how I think one should go about making food. Open the box, see what you have got, try to figure out what the hell it is (the Chinese broccoli is the bunched green,and just needs to be lightly steamed). Sniff it, especially the lemongrass (the slender stalks), which has a wonderful scent and can be used to particularly good effect in spicy Thai soups and curries (just for flavoring purposes; it has exactly the texture you would expect from something that looks like that). Taste it. Think about what you feel like eating and start cooking, and keep tasting and amending until it tastes good. Now that is a recipe.

14 October 2010

2010-10-15T09:10:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Beets, Chard, Cilantro, Dill, Lettuce, Peppers, Satina potatoes, Pie pumpkin, Radishes, Tomatoes, Winter squash

I think my brain took early retirement. Unfortunately, it did not have the decency to inform me of this before I started trying to write the newsletter. So I have been sitting here for nearly four hours putting down pieces of sentences and shuffling them more or less randomly in the vain hope that somehow meaning will emerge. Occasionally I think of something to say—or think I think of something to say—but when I try put it on the page I find I cannot quite get a hold of it any longer and nothing will coax it near enough for me to grasp it properly. Not that this differs radically from my normal (by which, of course, I mean abnormal) writing process. But something about the complete futility of the effort this evening suggests that whatever cognitive functions I still had a few days ago have now departed.

Perhaps my brain took the frost as a sign that its work was done for the season. Lots of people assume that our season ends with the first frost. Our basil season certainly ended Saturday night. But basil is particularly sensitive. Just saying the word frost to basil can cause it to keel over. Most of the other crops out in the fields did not pay the cold much heed. Even the late tomatoes withstood the frost well enough for us to get another harvest, as you can see, and the pepper patch hardly suffered at all.

Frost is an odd thing. The freezing air flows like water. You can feel it running down along the drainage ditch by our field houses at night, and it does its damage where it pools up and sits long enough to burst the cells in the leaves of tender plants. The peppers were spared because we put them on a slight rise, probably no more than six feet above the early tomatoes, which the frost did in (a mercy killing since those tomato plants had already done all they could and were fading away). The north end of the row of late tomatoes suffered more than the south simply because it is near the ditch where the frost runs.

People also assume that we lament the loss of our summer crops to the frost. Our emotions are mixed. Nobody who likes to eat can entirely celebrate the end of tomato season. Nobody, however, who has spent the summer picking all of those tomatoes can entirely mourn it either. And it is not as though we have time to just sit around and moan because we don’t have zucchini. There are all those crops that don’t mind a frost to distract us from our sorrow, such as arugula and radishes, which grow better at this time of year.

Of course, this time of year does not last very long. At some point soon the weather will get cold and miserable enough to make life hard even for hardy vegetables, not to mention farmers. But I trust (for no particularly good reason) that weather won’t come until next month, so we will deliver shares through the 4^th of November. That means you only have three more weeks to give back all those waxed boxes you have been storing up to return en masse.

Speaking of storing things en masse, we will once again offer you the chance to order various storage crops for delivery on the Monday before Thanksgiving (the 22^nd of November). I will send out a price list next week. In the meantime, you can practice with some of the vegetables in the share. I think you will find that the roots and tubers like to hang out in a cold damp (but not wet) place, while the onions and shallots and winter squash prefer a somewhat warmer and much drier residence (based on that I guess I am more of an onion than a tuber). Or you could eat them.

7 October 2010

2010-10-08T08:47:00.001-04:00

Endive, Lettuce, Purple mizuna, Onions, Peppers, Numex and Burning Bush hot peppers, Potatoes, Radishes, Shallots, Thyme, Hakurei turnips, Butternut winter squash

I hope you will forgive the shortness of this note. Though come to think of it that is a rather presumptuous request. For all I know many of you will welcome, not lament, my rare attempt at brevity. Some of you may not even notice it because you gave up on the newsletter weeks ago, certain that you would never glean enough pertinent information to make wading through the mire of prose worthwhile.

Of course, if you are not reading this then there’s really not reason for me to say anything at all about the length of the newsletter and or how you might feel about it or, well, anything. But as anyone out there who does actually read the newsletter has probably noticed, such a lack of a sensible reason to write would hardly constrain me.

What does constrain me is my annual catering gig for the Agricultural Stewardship Association. Once upon a time I took on the task of making a nice dinner for a few major donors and members of the Board, all in all around 20 people. Somehow over the years that has evolved (perhaps a little like the antlers of the Irish Elk) into appetizers for 250. Putting together half a dozen or more different little dishes for a large crowd takes time and involves a lot of increasingly tedious repetition of small tasks.

Fortunately, I have come to realize that there are better ways to feed the masses than making several thousand individual pastries. Thus the little squash empanadas and onions tarts are off the menu, replaced by polenta cakes with roasted tomatoes, and bread stuffed with greens, and red pepper-walnut dip, and pickled carrots, which we can make in large batches and serve in small pieces. But it still takes time, time I might otherwise spend crafting ornate sentences on who knows what topic for the newsletter.

So I will get straight to the vital information. As a general rule you should approach small, brightly colored hot peppers with caution. As a specific rule, you should approach the small, orange/pink pepper in your share with extreme caution. I don’t mean to frighten you away from going anywhere near it. Just avoid, let’s say, slicing it and then touching your eyes or deciding it looks so delicious you will just pop the whole thing into your mouth. Instead, try putting some portion of one (depending on how much you like hot food) into a blender with some fresh pineapple or mango, garlic, onion, lime juice and salt and making a fresh hot salsa that would be excellent with grilled fish or pork. Or you could use a piece to spice up your chili or you’re a Thai soup.

The Numex peppers, the very smooth pointy ones, do not pose anything like the same threat. I have been roasting and peeling them and pureeing the flesh with garlic, a little vinegar and salt. It makes a great sauce for all sorts of things and you can stir some into an endive and potato soup.

Because they are relatively easy to peel (I just use a vegetable peeler and keep going until I am down to solid orange flesh) and fleshy, I like to cut Butternut squash into cubes and roast the them tossed with butter, maple syrup and paprika until the have started to caramelize. Or you can just bake them whole until soft and then scoop out the flesh use it as a filling for little empanadas.

The mizuna, the frilly purplish leaf, is a Japanese mustard green. You can cook it, but I prefer it in salads. I like the texture as well as the taste. You could add some minced or grated ginger, a little soy sauce and perhaps a splash of heavy cream to your vinaigrette to go with the mizuna.

Thanks to everyone who helped pick potatoes last Sunday. We had an especially enthusiastic crew of child laborers. I trust I will not be held liable if any of them decide to be farmers later in life. For those of you who would like to pick potatoes again or for the first time, we will have a potato day late in the season in order to harvest as many of the remaining potatoes as possible for a local food pantry, and afterwards we will eat potatoes in various forms.

And thanks to the entrants in this year’s pie contest. The judges had a hard time choosing a winner, but after lengthy debate we named Tracey Boyd the 2010 pie champion. She claimed the title with a plum tart that the whole judging panel agreed we would happily eat more of should Tracey ever feel like dropping off another one at the farm.

30 September 2010

2010-09-30T09:31:00.000-04:00

Tongues of Flame shell beans, Cabbage, Carrots, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho hot pepper, Nicola potatoes, Sage, Tomatoes, Acorn and Carnival winter squash

What is a pie? This is not merely an academic question. With the pie contest only a few days away, you have surely spent some time contemplating this very issue while choosing exactly what to enter in competition. You could stick with the obvious sorts of pies—fruit and sugar and maybe a little spice backed in a crust. There’s nothing wrong with that. The most basic berry pie, well executed, is one of the great foods of the world.

And apparently one of the hardest to make given how many awful berries pies there are on the loose. The blame for this tragic situation lies mostly with commercial pie makers. I cannot absolve home bakers entirely. It is certainly possible to make terrible pie at home. The vast majority of bad pies, however, are made not in homes but in commercial kitchens, and made not with taste but cost in mind. With as little cost as possible, to be more precise.

There are many ways to make pie cheaply—to stint on the quality of the ingredients or take shortcuts to reduce the time needed—and just about every one of them is also a way to make pie badly. The average commercial fruit pie has a pasty, insipid crust made with nasty shortening and a glutinous filling that tastes of little more than corn syrup and thickener. You might not notice if they skipped the fruit—if in fact that is fruit in there and not some sort fruit substitute composed largely of paper manufacturing byproducts.

We have to take some responsibility for this sorry state of affairs because we keep buying these pies. Presumably if we refused to have anything to do with them nobody would make them. But as with so much of what we eat these days, we put up with bad commercial pies because they don’t cost much and someone else did the work. I think we must also have started to forget what real pie tastes like even as we cling to a nostalgic fondness for it, and so we keep buying pies the quality of which we are no longer equipped to assess accurately.

Of course, our pie nostalgia is precisely a longing for homemade food. It’s a nostalgia for moms in aprons rolling out dough on the kitchen table, a nostalgia for picking sweet berries on a perfect summer day, a nostalgia for the aroma of baking pies wafting from the oven, a nostalgia for families gathered at the table finishing a good meal with a slice of fresh pie. Even a good commercial pie, if such a thing exists, cannot possibly satisfy us the way a proper one does.

To be honest, I doubt even an excellent homemade pie could fulfill that sort of longing. We are not going to make the modern world, with all its hurry and alienation and commercialization and complication, disappear simply by working a bit of fat into a nice pile of flour with our fingertips, or rolling out a silky disk of pale dough, or cutting the peel from a crisp apple in one long aromatic curl, or smelling the oozing fruit juice caramelizing onto the bottom of the oven, or watching the motley brown crust shatter beneath the fork.

So what. We would probably find we do not like that lost world as much as we think anyway, and at least if you make a pie have a pie. You can take pleasure in a good homemade pie no matter what has happened to life.

Whatever a pie is. It could be the classic apple version, but it could also be a quiche with a layer of caramelized onions under the cheesy custard filling or a savory winter squash pie with sage and paprika or a chicken pot pie with tender cubes of potato and carrot and little kick from diced ancho or a tomato and onion pie with parmesan and garlic and lots of black pepper or a ground beef and cabbage pie or, well, just about anything you think would taste good baked in a crust. Maybe even shell beans (those red and white pods, which you want to split open to get at the speckled beans within, which can be boiled about half an hour until tender and eaten hot or cold (I like them cold with olive oil, garlic and sliced onion)). It does not matter. Pie is forgiving, open-minded, inclusive. As long as you put in a little effort, show a little care, it will reward you.

If you bring a pie to the farm this Sunday and impress the pie contest judges with your effort and care (well, actually we tend to judge the pies on taste and texture, but I don’t want to spoil the mood) more than any of the other competitors we will reward you with an Alleged Farm t-shirt.

Not that you have to bring a pie in order to come to the farm this Sunday. The pieless are welcome too. In addition to the pie contest we will tour the fields, harvest potatoes, make hot sauce. You can gather some husk cherries, meet other members, swap recipes, commiserate with one another about having to eat all those vegetables. And, of course, eat some real pie. The farm crew gets to judge the pies, but everyone gets to eat them.

23 September 2010

2010-09-23T12:00:00.001-04:00

Cilantro, Rhodos endive, Lincoln leeks, Lettuce, Red onion, Peppers, Numex hot pepper, Romanze potatoes, Tomatoes, Acorn and Delicata, winter squash

Somewhere around 8,00 years ago the last Irish Elk expired. Nobody knows why this huge Eurasian deer died out then. It might have had something to do with the up and coming homo sapiens, a species that towards the end of the last ice age seems to have worked up both a serious appetite and some nifty new hunting techniques. This combination of skill and desire certainly appears to have had a devastating effect on the megafauna of the time. The ground sloth, the mastodon, the wooly rhinoceros, the cave bear, the giant wombat, they all disappeared as man extended his range and his reach across the planet.

Not that we deserve all the blame. Hardly anyone ever deserves all the blame. Being chased around by cavemen with ever sharper and more accurate projectiles was probably just one of several serious problems the megafauna faced as the ice sheets retreated. Climate change and disease may have played as large a part in their extinction as we did.

As for the Irish Elk, it may have faced a special problem. Irish Elk were large, perhaps the largest deer ever, but it was the size of their antlers more than their bodies that was truly remarkable. Male Irish Elk carried around antlers so huge and ornate they would make the most impressive Bull Moose weep with shame over his own pathetic display. And that, in effect, was the point. Irish Elk stags wore their antlers sticking straight out from the sides of their heads—as much as six feet in either direction—a position that made the antlers more or less useless for combat and defense, but much easier to admire. The were meant to impress potential mates and to cow rivals.

History has not recorded precisely what led female Irish Elk to believe that a guy with absurdly large bony protuberances jutting from his brow would make a better catch, but if that was indeed the commonly held view it would have placed evolutionary pressure on the stags to have ever larger antlers. Unfortunately, growing antlers that size each year places a serious strain on even the stoutest elk. It is entirely possible that in this case evolution, which we tend to think of as a process leading to ever more sophisticated and useful adaptation, led the Irish Elk astray.

I wonder if some day after we too have died out another species will look back and wonder if perhaps evolution played the same trick on us. Learning to work with stone and bone to fashion killing points and to work cooperatively with the guys in the nearby caves to bring down a ground sloth gave us a huge advantage. Just ask the ground sloths. We have thrived because of our remarkable ability to take what we want from our environment, something we have gotten stunningly good at. We can literally move mountains to get at whatever lies beneath. But what has looked like an asset for so long is starting to seem like something of a liability as rapaciousness empties the seas, levels the forests, paves over the plains, sucks the rivers dry and fills the air with a heat-trapping haze. And we continue on our merry way, convinced that the intelligence that got us in this mess will get us out of it—convinced that when things get bad enough we will simply change our ways.

Given our history, though, it is not clear that we have another way. We evolved to exploit nature in every way we can think of, and just because that might be a bad idea in the long run does not necessarily mean that we can simply switch to some more sustainable lifestyle to save ourselves any more than the Irish Elk could suddenly have decided to go anterless and try flowers and poetry instead.

Sure, we are more self-aware than the elk probably were. I don’t suppose any Al Gore elk offered urgent warnings in An Inconvenient Antler. But just because we are smart enough to know what is happening (and smart enough too, it must be pointed out, to come up with clever denials) does not mean that we can easily overcome 100,000-year-old habits. At the very least, we need to come to terms with our nature—with the way we have been shaped by the world and its processes. Simply recognizing that we are just another species on this planet would be a good way to start thinking seriously about how we plan to stick around on it for much longer.

Switching to a diet that contains a lot more fresh, local produce would probably be another small step in the right direction. No matter how we go about it, feeding all six billion of ourselves will places strains on vital resources (water in particular). But we don’t need to clear the rain forests for ever more space on which to graze carrots, and unlike a can of soda a simple tomato salad contains all sorts of thing that are actually good for us. At the very least, a diet heavy on vegetables would give us something healthy to chew on while we contemplate our fate. There’s nothing like a good salad to help you through an existential crisis. Well except maybe salsa or a nice bowl of leek and potato soup or baked squash.

16 September 2010

2010-09-17T09:13:00.000-04:00

Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Mustard mix, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Satina potatoes, Thyme, Tomatoes, Delicata winter squash

I am embarrassed to report that I may be compelled to fill this week’s newsletter with something like actual news—a fact that in and of itself might count as news. I hope you will forgive me for thus misusing this space, which as most of you have probably noticed by now is usually reserved for the sorts of meandering ruminations that take hold of one’s mind during long periods of tedious physical work.

There’s something about repetitive manual labor that provokes this digressive, speculative sort of thinking. Like driving, much farm work requires only a specific, limited kind of attentiveness. If you find yourself, let’s say, weeding a bed of carrots (and if you don’t often find yourself doing that but would like to, do please let me know) you have to concentrate on the task enough to ensure that you remove the weeds and leave the carrots. It’s no good letting your thoughts wander so far that you end up pulling out everything or, more likely, nothing. But those thoughts can roam quite surprisingly far and wide without impinging on your carrot weeding skills (and should you happen to possess carrot weeding skills and lack the proper place in which to employ them do get in touch with me). Apparently the part of your brain that controls fine motor coordination and sight recognition is entirely separate from the piece that takes care of philosophical reflection, and the two can work side by side without affecting one another. Moreover, keeping the motor coordination part busy with the carrots somehow disables or distracts whatever normally reins in our philosophical impulses. I would not be surprised to discover that Plato was an avid vegetable gardener and did his most profound thinking while kneeling amongst his crops plucking out interlopers (and if you would like to have a similar philosophical experience I would be happy to offer you a place to do so).

But I stray. Too much weeding, I guess. Especially for this time of year. By now we should have managed to do in all the weeds. There’s a technique called stale seed bedding in which you get the weed seeds near the surface to germinate and then till the bed shallowly, and if you do that a few times then you should have taken care of all the weeds. It takes a little time, but it ought to work for the vegetables we sow late in the season. This year for some reason many of the beds where we have seeded fall crops are not proving at all stale, and along with the plants we want we are getting lovely stands of pigweed and lamb’s quarters and purslane—all edible, I hasten to note, should any of you want to come out and pick them.

Actually one of you already did, and made a weed quiche, which he might reprise for the pie contest on October 3^rd. It is best, I think, to get in a few practice pies before the competition, something I mention now because with just over two weeks to go you still have plenty of time to refine your recipe. You don’t want to turn up on the 3^rd with an entry only to find that something has gone dreadfully wrong with the crust or realize too late that adding cilantro to the peach filling was a less inspired idea than it seemed at first.

All of which is by way of introducing the first piece of news, namely that our fall harvest festival and annual pie contest takes place on Sunday, October 3^rd. We will have field tours and our traditional potato harvest starting at 3, and a potluck dinner starting at 6. All CSA members can enter a pie (or multiple pies) in the contest to be judged by the farm crew.

We hope you will come out to the farm for this event even if you do not bring a pie. You don’t have to see the farm to enjoy the produce. But it is hard to understand fully the basic connection between your food and a field (a connection that exists no matter where you get your food) if you never see the field. Most Americans, deliberately cut off from any direct knowledge of where and how their food is produced, never get that chance. As a member of our CSA, however, you do. You can come to the farm and see the crops that will turn up in your share the following week and ask us about how we grow them and taste a fresh-dug carrot or scoop up a handful of husk cherries and find out what to do with those really hot peppers. It is a pleasant, tasty, scenic way to add even more value to your share.

We will have one more event at the end of the season. Each year we give extra produce to organizations that use it in local food pantries. While these groups have some ability to harvest the extra crops, they generally cannot pick as much as we have to offer. So we call on you to help glean at the end of the season. It is a chance to get dirty for a good cause. I will let you know the date later on.

There is one other event coming up you should know about. The Agricultural Stewardship Association, our local land trust, puts on an art show, Landscapes for Landsake, every year. This year’s show, featuring 150 works by 36 local artists, takes place on Saturday, October 9^th from 3 to 6 just outside Cambridge. It is a great party and a great show, and the money raised at the event helps ASA in its mission to protect good soil in the region for agricultural use, a mission that benefits all of us wherever in the area we live. You can get more details about the show on ASA’s website, Agstewardship.org, or Facebook.

You should also know that the easiest way to cook a winter squash is to stick it in a 400 degree oven until it is quite soft, about an hour. Then you can cut it open a scoop out the flesh and eat it as it is or puree it with a bit of cream, perhaps a dash of sherry, a sprinkle of paprika and a little thyme (you can also add stock to the puree and make a squash soup). And that the mustard greens are nice steamed, but even better as a salad with dressing of vinegar, cream, mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger.

9 September 2010

2010-09-10T09:14:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Basil, Lavender, Lettuce, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Hot pepper, Radishes, Shallot, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

We dropped off Sam at boarding school on Saturday. We had been told he would have a roommate, but we knew nothing about the kid. When we got to Sam’s room the roommate had already moved in, but he was not there. So we spent some time trying to guess what he would be like based on the few clues his belonging offered. He had a New Orleans Saints pennant, a snowboarding picture, a Jamaican flag on the little table by his bed, a calendar from some boat club, and his name, Quint, was on the door. We came up with a number of interesting and unusual profiles.

But I had to remind the others that it is always safest to go with the base rate. Thus I predicted that he would turn out to be not some snow-loving Caribbean or boating Cajun, but a rich kid from a wealthy old New England town, with a summer house on the Cape and well-dressed, well mannered parents. As we discovered when we finally met Quint and his father, however, I was wrong. Their summer place is on Fisher’s Island.

I got the rest right. Quint (a nickname based on the fact that he is the fifth in line to have his name) lives in a historic village in Connecticut. His parents have a wonderfully easy social manner that comes from good schooling, broad experience and generations of wealth. Quint’s father looked liked he had been dressed for the part by a detailed-obsessed costume director, everything perfect right down the soft leather pseudo-yachting shoes and the nonexistent socks. I had forgotten how small a part socks play in this culture, and spent a lot of time looking at other fathers’ feet to see just how many of them had gone without socks for this occasion. A lot of them. It must have something to do with sailing, which was a frequent topic of conversation amongst this not overwhelmingly diverse group of parents. I got the feeling that given a couple more hours they would find they had all already met at some regatta or other.

Perhaps when we get together again at parents’ weekend we can have a good chat about the pros and cons of socks. After all, I have a job that’s probably even less sock friendly than sailing and fully appreciate just how unpleasant wet socks are. Granted, mine get wet from working in muddy fields, not taking waves over the port side, but surely that is a minor distinction. Wet socks are wet socks, and a shared antipathy to them can bring together people from all walks of life.

It is always possible, though, that I won’t fit in. Maybe because my socks get not just wet but filthy. Maybe because I don’t have much of an idea of how to sail close to the wind. Maybe because I am a vegetable farmer in a small rural community in northern New York and the work I do sets me apart from the world most prep school parents inhabit. And it is not just that they might consider my work a little odd, a little grubby. In fact, they are probably not seriously trouble by farming at all, and anyway they are far too polite to show it if they are.

But farmers have an odd sense of defensive pride. So many people in this country gave up farming for something “better.” Farmers became the dumb hicks left behind, about as unchic as you could get. There’s a sentimental strain in our national culture that looks back at our (real or imagined) agrarian past fondly, but even that veers towards the patronizing, imagining farming as the lost simple life, the antithesis of sophisticated, fast-paced, successful urban existence. In response, farmers tend to regard city dwelling, book learning, office work, conspicuous success and just about any activity that does not involve oil stains with a certain quiet scorn. Many of my neighbors have funny stories about rich folk coming out to the country and humiliating themselves trying to do things that any farmer handle with little effort: hauling feed sacks, shooting geese, fixing engines. As a newcomer to farming (16 years does not count for much), as a former inhabitant of that other world—I went to the school Sam now attends—as a spindly guy with bad aim and meager mechanical skills, I cannot entirely share in my neighbors sense of amusement over such tales. Nor, however, can I entirely resist the attraction of this pigheaded disdain for self-assured, neatly coifed, pointlessly sockless, nautical types.

I hope that farm life has not completely infected Sam with this point of view. We did not send him to this school to learn to be one of those people, but he does have to live amongst them for four years. He will be a lot happier if he finds a way, however cynically, to fit in. I worry, of course, that he may not, that he is not ready, that we have sent him to the wrong place, that they won’t know what to do with him, they won’t like him—all standard parental concerns that set in more or less as soon as we started to drive away from his dorm.

Of course, I have many of the same concerns about the vegetables each week. I don’t worry so much about their social and academic prospects. But I feel a little anxious about their virtues, about how they will be received (and if they will be received) and what will become of them. Don’t worry, I do not actually think of the vegetables as my children. But like Sam, they are to some extent the product of my efforts on their behalf and I want them to do well and be liked.

Fortunately, most of the things in this box are pretty easy to get along with. They don’t demand special treatment. You can pamper them if you want, but you need do little more than slice the tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt, or steam the potatoes and put a little butter on them, or toss the greens in a salad. There are, however, a couple of crops that might require a little more explanations for you to enjoy them, such as the small hot peppers. Especially the crinkly red or pink one, which can be quite hot and should be used with a little caution. Or the shallot (the smallish, reddish, onionish fellow), which you could use like an onion, but is particularly good in a salad dressing (slice it thinly and let it sit in the dressing for a couple of hours to bring out the flavor) or sauce. And then there’s the lavender, which people tend not to think of as a culinary herb. You could just hang onto it for the scent. But you can also use it in just about any recipe that calls for rosemary (such as sautéed peppers and onions or roast potatoes). I recently had a tasty drink made of lemonade, gin and lavender, and I have had lavender crème brule. You want to keep the lavender flavor in any dish at a restrained level unless you like eating things that taste like soap, but a little lavender can add a pleasant perfumy quality to food.

Obviously, I have spent a lot of time with these crops and know a fair amount about their culture. But just as there’s no one right way to raise a kid, there’s no one right way to prepare a vegetable. Certainly there are things to avoid in either case (I trust you are not kicking your share down the stairs or locking it away in a closet for weeks at a time), but there is considerable latitude in how to approach the task, and methods that might sound completely wacky can have excellent results. If you have good vegetable recipes, however unusual, I hope you will send them to me so I can add them to the ones already on the web site. We all tend to have our way of doing things, our particular sense of taste. It is refreshing, sometimes, to encounter other, alien ways—whether by discovering someone else’s recipe for tomatoes or spending a little time with people who have a lot more to say about tacking than plowing.

2 September 2010

2010-09-02T09:07:00.000-04:00

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.

26 August 2010

2010-09-02T09:05:00.001-04:00

Basil, Beans, Lettuce, Garlic, Candy onions, Peppers, Numex hot pepper, Red Norland potatoes, Spinach, Tomatoes

Before “I” start the newsletter this week I will let everyone know that this is not Thomas behind these words (though I am sure you would have figured it out quickly). My name is Jan and this is my second season working with Thomas on the Alleged Farm. I have had the opportunity to meet some of you at the farm days we have held and maybe others briefly at a drop site. In any case I get the opportunity to write the newsletter this week. Although I get a little flustered when faced with the task of writing this, I also know that I think, talk, and often dream about the farm, veggies and work that needs to be done here—especially in the middle of august.

I feel like this season has been a little different then last and often find myself looking and comparing how wet last year was to how dry this year has been and then finding myself looking at a wet field all week wishing I could go do some field work. It may not seem immediately funny, but when I think about how absurd it is to look for patterns in one farming season that I somehow can expect to occur again in another season, I often laugh. In my short (compared to many farmers’ farming lives) 7 years of farming I have yet to find one season that mimics itself the next. I guess farming in California seemed the closest to “controlled” organic farming as one can get; seeing as it is hot and dry most of the time, you water when the plants need it, you establish some beneficial insect habitat, find some reliable cover crops, plant a hedge of bee attractive flowers, pick the beautiful produce and head to market…Okay, so that isn’t as easy as it sounds. But the hot, dry and water when the plants need it part is true.

I guess the best thing to do is talk about the veggies you are getting this week and try not to ramble too much about how last year isn’t this year out there in the fields.

“Cucumbers…where are they?” I often ask while walking in the cucurbit patch (you may have been thinking the same thing if you have been part of Thomas’ CSA in past years). Last year the squash and cucumber picking was a full afternoon adventure. This year the squash have proven their abundance and consistence with plenty of squash, as you know, but the cucumbers have not fared so well. They wanted more water when we went through that dry spell so many of the fruits became misshapen and bitter, and the cucumber beetles went in full attack mode…sorry to say because that is one of my favorite summer vegetables. But not to worry, we are hoping the second planting will prove to produce many hours of picking here on the farm (okay maybe I may be the only one willing to pick 3 hours worth of cukes, but they are just so good). In any case, you are sure to find some great squash in your box this week and I hope you haven’t run out of recipes.

On the other hand the peppers you are getting in your boxes are looking greener, fuller and more productive then they did last year. After finally picking most of the weeds out from between the rows so that we can actually see the plants, they look BEAUTIFUL!! No really, that is not because I am bias and think that horrible looking plants look great just because I might have planted them…really you should come check them out. We have even talked about staking them because they are so laden with fruit and for once they are actually turning the color they look in the catalogue. You may get a bell type in your box or an elongated type that is green to red color. which is an Italian variety that is thick skinned and very sweet. Both varieties have proven impressive this year and made me think that great sweet peppers can be grown on the east (I was a little unsure about this east coast growing thing at the beginning). You should also find another pepper that is great for grilling, stuffing or roasting and is mildly hot (used for Chile rellenos), which is a Numex Anaheim pepper.

Beans, beans the magical fruit…okay well the beans you are getting are the fresh green or yellow type and much more crisp then the dried kind. I made sure to test more then a hundred out in the field and they may look big but they were still crunchy and addictive. No matter how hard you try, you can never quite stay on top of all the beans in the field. It will bring out the musical side of any farmer, whether they admit it or not; even if the song that he/she are thinking of stays in his/her head it is hard not to pass the time singing some old tune or telling stories to fellow pickers of times past. I have to say though, I have been having fresh steamed beans everyday for a while now and still find no complaints about the picking…steamed with some salt, cold or hot, in a boat with a goat they are too good to pass up during the summer harvest. As compared to last years crop I would have to say the dry season has held back the slugs, which loved the wet bean field last year, and the deer are some how leaving enough to make the planting worth while.

So you may have noticed that the amount of tomatoes you are getting has increased greatly over the past couple weeks…it’s because the plants are going CRAZY! I thought staying on top of beans was hard, but then I realized you plant a couple hundred tomatoes and look out and see red, green, rainbow, small, big and medium fruits everywhere you look. It is actually great to see healthy plants this year since last year the blight hit early and hard across the country and locally. I hope all of you got a nice variety of red and heirloom tomatoes in your box and that they made it safely to your table…we do like to pick as ripe as we can. I am sure Thomas has told you before but if you ever want to make your way to the farm and pick a few extra cherry tomatoes the invitation is there as long as they are still in the fields, just let us know.

And then of course there is the basil…what else can I say. We try to give a reasonable amount so that your flower vases don’t get to stuffed with herbs (though my friend just used basil in her wedding and it was a perfect addition to the bouquets), but hopefully you are finding ways to incorporate basil as often as possible into your pesto, stir-frys, sauces or salsas. We have three plantings this year and all are looking great; which again last year was hard to say…the wetness challenged the outside basil relentlessly and we relied on the indoor planting more. If you are not getting enough basil to make that batch of pesto to get you through the winter, again, let us know and you are more then welcome to order extra while the summer months are here and the basil is looking good.

Okay, well I see the bottom of the page coming fast so I will bring my ramble to a close. I didn’t give many recipes, but if you look on the website you are sure to find some that are better then I could ever come up with. Thanks for listening to me this week and maybe I will get a chance to meet more of you at the next farm day or pie contest/ pot luck the farm has every year. Hope you find fun and exciting things to do with your box this week, and thanks again to everyone for returning them so we can keep using them, keep costs down, and ideally get you the produce in better condition then the bags offered.

19 August 2010

2010-08-20T17:29:00.000-04:00

Basil, Beans, Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho pepper, Radicchio, Squash, Tomatoes

I shot my pig. Last fall I took down a piece of the fence around his pen and lured him out with food. While he munched contentedly on his last meal I retrieved my rifle, put in a round, and when he glanced up at me offered a brief apology and shot him between the eyes at point blank range. And then in the head a second time. And finally in the heart. Killing a big old pig is hard. Harder than makes sense when you stop and think about our relationship.

Eleven years ago Alan Brown gave us an eight-week-old piglet called Mickey Boy’s Goody Wagon. Alan brought him over to the farm in a small cat carrier and I quickly discovered that he could squeeze between the bars of the metal gate in his pen. He was black with a sporty white stripe around his chest and he made happy little grunting noises when we fed him. We fed him a lot. He got the piles of weeds I hauled out of the vegetable rows. He got oversized zucchini and wilted greens and kitchen scraps and, to his great delight, overripe tomatoes and melons. He spent that summer eating and grunting, and quite soon he did not fit through the gate.

I don’t know if Alan thought we would eat Mickey Boy. I suppose he did. Why else would you fatten up a castrated boar? As a pet? Of course, Alan knew Mickey Boy was our first pig ever, and delivering him already named--allbeit after the least appetizing lunch wagon ever seen—may have been Alan’s way of acknowledging the possibility that we had not lived in the country long enough to get over urban prohibitions against eating one’s animals.

We probably should have eaten him. We have raised 24 pigs since we got Mickey Boy (named One, Two, Three, Four, Five and so on in recognition of their fate). None of them have grown like Mickey Boy grew that first summer. By late fall, when he should have been headed to the slaughterhouse, he probably weighed around 400 pounds, and not because he was fat. I would not describe him as having been svelte. He was a pig, after all. But he was not a fat pig, just a big one. More or less the size of a dining room table by the time he was full grown.

Of course we could not bring ourselves to eat Mickey Boy. It was not precisely a matter of our being overly fond of him. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he wanted affection. He certainly offered none himself. He enjoyed a good scratch and responded to every meal he ever had with some enthusiasm (one might even have described his mood as elated when we gave him melons), but gratitude was beyond him. If someone else or one of the dogs or the duck had put the food in his pen it would have made no difference to him. An emperor could hardly have shown greater indifference towards his servants.

It would have been nice to have an affectionate pig—well, up to a point; there’s a limit to how much affection you want from an extraordinarily large pig. It would have been nice, anyway, to have the effort—taking out buckets of water all winter, tossing in piles of hay for his bedding, providing all that food—acknowledged. We don’t generally keep pets purely for their own sake. That is what animals in zoos are for. You don’t need the hippos to pay any attention to you, to thank you for coming. They just have to be hippos.

Of course, once you have admired the hippos you get to head for the gift shop, not clean up after them. If you had to muck out the hippo stall you might decide they weren’t really worth seeing after all. You would just stay home, sitting in a comfortable chair with a soft, warm, purring cat curled up on your lap. But our hippo-sized pig needed tending, and on a cold January day it was all too easy to wonder what the point was of having this pointless beast on the farm. Sure, people liked to see him when they visited the farm, and it was mildly amusing to tell stories about our giant pig. Mostly, though, we seemed simply, like some ancient Greek lord, to have taken on a sacred obligation to provide hospitality to any peaceful traveler seeking shelter, no matter how inconvenient or irritating that might prove. Someone had to look after Mickey Boy, and the job and fallen to us like some monstrous test imposed by one of the more vindictive gods.

I thought about shooting him many times: on the various occasions he got out and tipped over all the feed barrels, when he bit Liz, each time he flipped over his freshly filled water bucket without even taking a drink, when he destroyed his shed. But for ten year I resisted the urge. And in the end I finished him off not out of frustration or anger, but because he had gone lame and could not stand up any longer. Even then I waited weeks, hoping for some reason that he might recover, unwilling to do him in though I had a perfectly good excuse and, as One through Twenty-four would testify, no qualms about killing pigs. And when it was clear he would not get better and could not go on pulling himself pathetically through the mud with his front hooves, even then and with no evidence to the last that our years together had made any impression on him at all, it was still hard to kill him. I guess I have not gotten rid of all my urban ways yet.

Fortunately, doing in the crops causes me no such angst. We have been tending those onions diligently since early March, giving them shelter, feeding them, cleaning up around them. Yet I feel no distress ripping them from their life-sustaining soil. I might if they had not grown so well, but I enjoy pulling a good crop of onions. If their vigor is not actually a sign of their appreciation for our work, it is at least a sort of testament to it. Sometimes (far more often than I would like), even when we have done our work, a crop does not prosper. The deer prove too voracious, the bugs too numerous, the rain storms too far apart, the weeds too relentless. You look at the crop and you see your efforts wasted. You cannot rewrite a patch of arugula destroyed by flea beetles or find another use for blighted cucumber vines. So it is particularly satisfying when crops succeed and you can pick tubs of verdant basil and flat after flat of ripe tomatoes and a pile of shiny Ancho peppers. And if the thought of all this produce slaughter causes you distress, take comfort from the fact that we do in the vegetables as quickly and humanely as possible and only when their time has come.

Well, from that and the fact that they taste good. I don’t know that there is a better summer meal than a tomato salad and some good bread. I could eat that every day. In fact, I think I do. But if you have started to tire of it you could use the same ingredients in a salsa and spice it up with the Ancho (the dark green, slightly pointed, thin walled pepper). Just how much you will spice it up is hard to say. The hotness varies pretty significantly from one Ancho to the next. Some are barely hotter than a sweet pepper, some as spicy as a Jalapeno. However hot yours is, I strongly recommend you roast and peel it before using it. It improves the texture and the flavor, and it will keep in the refrigerator for days. Not that there is any good reason to keep it for long. It has too many uses. If you don’t put it in a salsa you could puree it with sour cream, onion, basil, salt, pepper and a little lime juice and put the resulting sauce on grilled meat and fish or chili, or use it as a dip, or swirl it into a gazpacho, or add a little to salad dressing (it would be good on coleslaw), or spread it on a sandwich.

12 August 2010

2010-08-12T17:50:00.000-04:00

Lemon basil, Rhodos frisee endive, Lincoln leeks, Lettuce, Varsity onion, Peppers, Nicola potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

I have long been puzzled by an oddity of human development. Small children generally lack the capacity to figure out and communicate their basic needs. They know when something is bothering them. Apparently, however, deciding exactly what is causing the unhappiness or how to deal with the problem is someone else’s task. The child’s job is simply to make a big fuss until an adult can guess what he wants and give it to him, though sometimes by then he has gone far enough into a fit that satisfying the need no longer satisfies.

You might think that learning as fast as possible not only to assess your basic desires, but also to make them clear to those who could satisfy them might convey an advantage. The hungry kid who quickly realizes he needs food and asks for it clearly ought to survive best. Making an unpleasant racket that could equally signify hunger, sleepiness, gas, boredom, pain, itchiness, frustration, fear or a powerful dislike of peas seems like a bad strategy. And yet it is the human way, and you have to exert considerable effort to break kids of the habit.

I’d like to think that growing up consists to a large extent of getting over undifferentiated helplessness. Having two kids, however, has made clear to me just how thin a veneer of adulthood we have. Sure, we don’t generally bawl every time we feel a pang of hunger or the need to urinate—and most of us can reasonably reliably tell the difference between those two sensations. But we get irritable when we need food or sleep or cannot figure out how to assemble a stupid pair of training wheels. And if we can by and large rein in the yen to have a tantrum over simple things well within our power to solve, we seem far less capable of doing so in the face of larger problems.

The top 0.1% of Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million and we have a fit about illegal immigrants. Given the chance to improve a health care system that routinely fails us, we take to the streets in Minuteman costumes to insist the President is actually Kenyan. Corporate America, in its eternal quest for productivity and profits, places ever greater strains on our private lives and we rally to outlaw gay marriage. Bankers pillage the economy and we grouse about excessive regulation destroying private enterprise. After 234 years of lording it over everyone else, white guys sulk about the terrible racist oppression they face every day. We commit torture, wage preemptive war, alter the climate, sell our political system to the highest bidder, let our bridges fall apart, ignore the needs of the neediest, let the government infringe on our basic rights, and we are up in arms about sexual predators, teenage drinking, the temporary discomfort of airline passengers and mosques in Manhattan.

I admit that reducing income inequality or funding urgent infrastructure projects presents more of a challenge than getting a snack or lying down for a nap. But that hardly justifies our petulance, our aimless outbursts, our juvenile desire to make someone else pay for our pain. We are in a bad mood with good reason. But having a fit instead of figuring out and facing up to what’s wrong does not appear to be solving anything. There are no caring grownups standing by to patiently assess our actual wants and provide what we need—and at this point no reason to believe that even if there were we would pay them any heed. We are beyond reason, longing, it turns out, to do nothing more than curse, grab a beer and take the inflatable slide to celebrity.

Before going any further, I recommend we all sit down, shut up and have a tasty, nutritious snack. There’s nothing like a ripe tomato to soothe frayed nerves. Well, maybe a good salad or some crunchy roast potatoes or grilled squash and leeks with a roast pepper and cherry tomato salsa or a stiff bourbon and lemon basil syrup cocktail. That’s right, a cocktail. Not part of your average fractious kid’s reviving snack, but then we aren’t kids anymore. And if adulthood turns out to be more enervating than we expected, at least it gives us the right to have a drink.

Once we are feeling calm again we will be ready to tackle important questions, such as which tomato variety tastes best. We planted 30 kinds this year. This Saturday around noon we will find ripe examples of as many as possible—I am hoping at least a few of the small fuzzy Wapsipinicon Peaches are ready by then—and have a tomato tasting. All you have to do is come to the farm and decide which tomato you like the most. And while you are here you can also pick a few sunflowers, try a husk cherry, dig potatoes, check on the progress of the winter squash, pull onions, look for frogs in the ponds, go for a walk in the woods, meet the farm crew, swap recipes with other members, and of course have a snack—and a nap too if you want.

Coming to the farm also gives you the chance to return your empty box in person and receive our gratitude for that directly. Of course, you can also just take the box back to your site so we can pick it up on the next delivery day. Either way is fine with us. As long as the boxes keep coming back we are happy.

5 August 2010

2010-08-05T17:37:00.000-04:00

Basil, Tendersweet cabbage, Eggplant, Orion fennel, Lettuce, Onion, Parsley, Pears, Purple Viking potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes

Earlier this week a reporter for a Russian language broadcast interviewed me. I have done nothing newsworthy recently here or in Russia—or anywhere else that I am aware of. Apparently, that was sort of the point. The reporter, Vlad (like Count Dracula he said when he called to arrange the interview, which must puzzle a lot of people since I suspect most Americans don’t associate the familiar vampire with the somewhat more obscure15^th Century Transylvanian ruler of the same name), has been producing a series of stories about the sorts of Americans that Russians do not usually hear about. They just know about celebrities and President Obama, just know what appears on the first page of the New York Times, Vlad told me. Meaning, in other words, that his audience members are at least as well informed about America as the average American.

But not well enough informed, according to Vlad. I think he worries that the information they do get gives them if not an incorrect then at least a far from complete view of what this country is really like. It is hard to disagree with that. I would certainly like to think that the Russians who listen to his radio reports about obscure American priests and former prostitutes and vegetable farmers begin to get some idea of the range of experiences in this country.

Of course, I have no idea what Vlad says in his stories since I have never heard one—and would not even if I had since I don’t speak any Russian (sadly I have already forgotten the all-purpose rude phrase Vlad taught me at the end of the interview). He might be using us as examples of the depravity of American life or to prove that our culture has used up its core energy and like a star is about to fade away or explode spectacularly. The whole thing could turn out to be a hoax and we will all appear as earnest laughable dupes in his movie. To think that anyone would give a damn about a small-scale vegetable farmer in the boondocks. What a joke.

Well, it would probably be a joke in this country. It is just possible that Russian radio audiences actually take an interest in the lives of random, ordinary Americans (I use the word ordinary here in its broadest sense, particularly as it applies to me). Americans prefer to know about “real” Americans, which is to say shallow personality types pushed towards juvenile hysteria in entirely manufactured situations. I am talking, of course, of Sarah Palin. No, no, to be fair I am really thinking of reality television—and Sarah Palin.

To be fair to American radio, there are a few excellent programs dedicated to covering aspects of our country—ordinary, quirky and downright weird aspects—that generally receive no coverage at all. You can find stories about people who, while interesting, are not in some way elected, whether by voters, money, family, looks or possibly even talent.

By and large, though, we only ever hear about and from people with something to sell—even if what they have to sell is nothing more than their naked desire to sell themselves. No doubt learning about such people can tell one a great deal about this country. But it is far from clear that we derive much benefit from showing ourselves almost exclusively to be like this, especially since we aren’t. The rest of the world seems increasingly unimpressed, and we seem increasingly uninterested in dealing with the nuances—with the fact, for instance, that a town of real Americans such as Wasilla might be home both to can-do hockey moms and fiercely independent moose hunters, and to a lot of chain stores and methamphetamine dealers, plus, presumably, a fair number of people just getting on with their lives.

Given that it is never easy to take a dispassionate look at yourself, it seems to me that Vlad might do at least as much good sharing his stories with us as with Russians. It might help us gain a little perspective. Not that I am suggesting that having people hear about me on the radio will make the world a better place. Vlad and I had a pleasant chat for a couple of hours, but I cannot imagine how he will make an instructive or even coherent story out of it. I would, however, be interested to know what he has to say about the former prostitute.

Perhaps the former prostitute would be interested in what I have to say. Such as that the potatoes came out of the hard, dry ground pretty roughed up so we went ahead and washed them. I recommend you not wait too long to eat them.

Or that you can cut your fennel bulb (the thing that smells like licorice) into thin slices and add it to a salad.

Or that we hope to have a tomato tasting at our next farm day (Saturday, August 14^th) to see which variety people like the most—assuming we can find the little wooden tags in the rows and figure which variety is which.

Or that there is nothing better to do with tomatoes than make a simple salad with basil, a little sliced onion, olive oil, a splash of vinegar, pepper and a lot of salt. Well, nothing better than to make the tomato salad and then eat it.

Or that, speaking of loosing track of varieties, I do not remember what kind of pears these are, but they taste good and the tree is remarkably productive (we go enough pears for everyone off of one tree). You could slice them up and add them to the salad with the fennel, and toss in a little blue cheese too.

Or that we continue to hope that you return empty boxes to your pick up site so that we can bring them back to the farm. Half of the boxes from the first week have already been returned, which is good news.

29 July 2010

2010-07-29T11:56:00.000-04:00

Basil, Merlin and Chioggia beets, Fordhook, Magenta Sunset and Rhubarb chard, Cucumber, Lettuce, Onion, Carmen, Islander and Flavorburst Peppers, Red Norland potatoes, Squash

Several towns in Washington County, including Easton, have recently taken on the pressing matter of defending the English language. Sadly, not from misuse by native speakers. There will be no fines levied against those who make egregious grammatical errors, repeatedly misuse words or generally demonstrate a poor sense of style. No, what our language needs to be saved from, it turns out, is other languages—evil, rapacious languages lurking out there just waiting to pounce on some defenseless, innocent one sweetly minding its own business. Given its modest standing in the world and its obvious desire to carry on quietly without bothering anyone else, English is a tempting prey.

The Easton Town Board, ever a leading light in civic matters, wishes to be clear that while it fears for the safety of English, it has no particular language in mind as the enemy. Who knows, Basque or Swahili or Turkish might force itself upon us. And by force itself upon us I mean, if I understand the concerns of our Town Board correctly, that some day a speaker of some unspecified foreign tongue might have the gall to request a copy of our Comprehensive Plan translated into their language. I know, it shocks one even to contemplate such an entirely hypothetical event. Actually, it would be surprising enough if anyone ever asked for a copy of the Comprehensive Plan in its current English version, let alone demanded a translation. But one must be vigilant again all possible attacks.

They do, of course, have a specific language in mind even though they lack the courage to own up to their pathetic little anti-immigrant sentiments. They, like so many of their fellow citizens, fear that Hispanic immigrants will come to our community to change our way of life. The fact that we already have a fair number of Mexican and Central American workers on our dairy farms—their labor and low wages helping our one major industry to survive—and that these people have shown no sign of trying to change anything hardly seems to matter. In fact, our immigrant population remains almost entirely invisible. You would have to go into the barns and milking parlors of Easton to find them.

Oddly, that probably makes things worse. Though they remain out of sight for the most part because they are here illegally—not that anyone has tried to make them feel welcome—it is taken as further evidence of their unwillingness to integrate. This is a key charge against them since just about everyone making it is an immigrant, many of them from some ethnic group at one time viewed as a threat to our way life. To finesse this seemingly sticky point, anti-immigrant folks have come up with (well, revived—but they don’t know that because they ignore history) the argument that Hispanics differ from previous immigrants because they refuse to assimilate and so will by sheer force of numbers overwhelm us and leave us strangers in our native (so to speak) land. If they really meant to fit in they would speak English like all the other immigrant do.

Take me, for instance. My great grandmother came to this country from Eastern Europe and yet I speak English more or less fluently, whereas the Mexicans who did the milking for the Allens can barely speak any English. Sure, when my grandmother arrived there were whole Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods in New York with Yiddish newspapers and Yiddish theaters and restaurants serving weird bread rolls with holes in them, just as there were—and in some cases still are—Italian and German and Chinese and Norwegian and Polish and Czech and West Indian neighborhoods where newly arrived immigrants spoke their own language and followed their own customs—and there were real Americans warning about the terrible threat this all posed to our superior WASP culture. But let’s not get hung up on the past.

Imagine what will happen if we let this new wave of immigrants settle here and infect our culture. Not only will our language suffer, but we might end up eating their food. We have to protect our American culinary heritage from unwanted outside influences too. We cannot let these folks from south of the border mess with the potato. All right, maybe that is not the best example. Okay, but what about bagels, pizza, egg rolls, wieners, sauerkraut, spaghetti, Budweiser? Everyone else who came to this country adapted to eating just like we do. But these Hispanics, I just know they are going to try to slip some of their dishes into our diet. No thanks, I say. Get your hands off my American food, Mexicans (except, of course, when you are picking it). I am sticking with Taco Bell and Chipotle.

I suggest anyone who believes there is some sort of coherent, untainted, fundamentally Anglo-saxon American culture to defend take a walk around a farm field. If they walked through ours they would find crops that have traveled from all over the world—not just obvious immigrants like bok choi and cilantro, but peppers and eggplants and beets and onions and tomatoes and turnips and melons and cucumbers and beans and peas. In fact they would find few crops native to this or any other Anglo-saxon country. Thomas Jefferson may have grown many of these crops at Monticello, but they were available to him because people have always moved around the world for all sorts of reasons, and they have carried with them not just their language and beliefs and history, but also their food. Newcomers and natives (people and plants) have mingled in their own frequently hostile fashion. Picking out one moment in this ebb and flow and setting it apart as an inviolable institution worthy of defense is silly and pointless. 75 years from now during hard times the grandchildren of Mexican migrant pickers will join their fellow Americans to decry the influx of Estonians and warn everyone of the danger these strange newcomers pose to our Spanish-inflected language, our beloved barbecued goat tacos and the all American Quinceanera.

Speaking of the unwashed coming to our shores, you may be wondering why the potatoes did not take a bath before settling in your neighborhood. Since these are new potatoes—dug while the plants are still alive—they are surprisingly fragile. We have found in past years that washing them on the farm not only strips off their skins, but also causes them to go bad quickly. We though you would rather wash a few potatoes than get some mushy ones.

One you have scrubbed the potatoes you might want to mix them with some olive oil, salt, a few dried herbs (rosemary or thyme, for instance) and a dash of smoked paprika if you happen to have it (and you should have it), and pop them in a 425 degree oven until they are crunchy on the outside and creamy within, which takes somewhere around an hour. You could cut an onion into eights and roast it with the potatoes. They go very well with sautéed chard. Or you could boil them and the beets and make a cold salad with sliced onion and basil. You can also eat the beets raw. Peel them, slice them as thinly as possible (a mandoline makes that much easier as long as you don’t jam your finger into the lethally sharp blade (and yes, that is the voice of experience)) and dress them with some olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

I strongly recommend roasting and peeling the peppers. They taste fine as they are, but better roasted and peeled. I put them on a burner to char the skin all over (the pepper’s skin that is), put them in a brown paper bag or piece of paper towel for at least ten minutes (where they steam themselves, which loosens the skin) and then wash the skin off. You could add some slices to your roasted potatoes or a grilled squash and mozzarella sandwich or puree them with oil, vinegar (sherry vinegar would be good), mustard, salt and pepper to make a red pepper vinaigrette. Or if you happen to be in an ornery mood you could reprimand them for coming to our country without proper papers and have them deported back to their native Mexico.

I do hope that you will send your boxes back to where they came from. You can return the empty, flattened box (please try to preserve the tabs on the bottom when you flatten the box) to your site. It is fine to bring it back when you pick up the next share. We have enough boxes to deal with the time lag. We do not, however, have enough boxes to deal with getting them back many weeks later or not getting them back at all, so we ask that you try to remember to return them reasonably promptly. Thanks.

22 July 2010

2010-07-22T22:01:00.000-04:00

Jade or Carson beans, Farao cabbage, Olympian cucumber, Hercules dill, Eggplant, Lettuce, Pepper, Indigo radicchio, Squash

I am thrilled to report that the raised bed maker I purchased this spring is working like a charm. Literally like a charm. Not that it does not also function perfectly well mechanically—perfectly well, of course not meaning literally perfectly, merely as well as one might reasonably hope a new piece of equipment would work. One, in this case, being a farmer who has bought a number of pieces of equipment over the years with increasingly modest hopes for them. In other words, the new bed shaper functions roughly as advertised with a few minor glitches, irritations, and the occasional breakdown.

It certainly works better than the old bed shaper, which required multiple passes to make anything resembling a usable bed, resulting in terrible soil structure in the beds and some pretty terrible language on the tractor. And no doubt some of the new bed shaper’s failings, such as they are, are entirely due to operator error—to my inability, for instance, to drive a tractor in a perfectly straight line while look back over my shoulder, or my failure to buy a farm with acres and acres of rock-free, dead flat, well drained, deep loam. And I certainly cannot blame the bed shaper for my decision to unhook it—well, almost completely unhook it—from the tractor and drive off with the electric cable still attached to the tractor battery—or at least attached until it snapped in half. Though come to think of it, I could blame the bed shaper. It is unlikely to declare its innocence so nobody will know I caused the damage.

Whatever its and my shortcomings may be, working together we can fairly reliably produce a good looking raised bed half a foot tall with a firm, level planting surface. Sometimes the beds even come out straight and parallel—or close enough to it that someone driving by and not paying much attention would hardly notice the difference.

But we don’t just make these attractive raised beds to impress passing motorists. They also happen to serve a purpose. Planting our vegetables on these beds keeps them warm and dry—and vegetables tend to appreciate that. Especially in cold wet growing seasons such as we have had the past two years. The rain washes away nutrients, the cold soil slows down germination and growth, the constant moisture creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of diseases. If the soil stays fully saturated—meaning all the spaces between the soil particles are filled with water—for long enough, the plants drown.

None of which has really been an issue this year. Our raised beds have stayed remarkably warm and dry right from the start of the growing season, and we have the bed shaper to thank for that. But not because of the beds it has shaped, which have of course proved more or less beside the point. It is the mere fact of its existence on the farm that caused these conditions. Given the weather’s deep sense of irony, on which I have remarked often, it was more or less inevitable that any serious effort on my part to counteract the effects of the cold and wet we have battled the past two years would result in a year like this. You might think that knowing this I would have spent my money instead on an irrigation system, but of course that would only have prompted an epic flood. And if I had tried to be especially crafty and get the irrigation system and the bed shaper at the same time, in addition to bankruptcy this would surely have called down upon me climactic catastrophe.

To be fair, the weather could be treating us worse—and probably would be if I had had Herbie put in a lot more drain tile this spring. The lack of consistent water has stressed some of the crops—especially the cucumbers and beans and broccoli—and made it a bit harder to get some direct seeded crops to germinate consistently. But the cabbage certainly does not seem to have minded too much, and the eggplants seem to be having a fine old time out there in the dust. Plus if we had more water we would just have more squash. Not that I think of having a lot of squash as such a bad thing. I cut up a pile of them into stick the other night and sautéed them in olive oil with some cubes of spicy sausage. They were good hot and cold. You could add some eggplant too, though I still think it is best grilled—or turned into eggplant mush (see the recipe on the web site). You can also grill radicchio, though it is probably just easier to have it in a salad with the lettuce or shred it with the cabbage for coleslaw, for which you could make a dressing with some of the dill.

The crops may not mind growing in this weather, but they enjoy it less after they have been picked. We hope they feel better in a box. We hope you like the box too. In fact, we hope you like it enough to look after it and make sure it gets back home safe and sound. To increase the chances of that happening, we ask that after you have removed the share you pull the bottom apart carefully, making sure not to rip off the tabs that hold it together, and flatten the box. To get the box back to us you could return it to the site if possible and leave it for us to retrieve (we will see if can figure out places at the various sites to leave boxes) or of course come out to the farm and drop it off in person. This Sunday would be a good opportunity to do that since we are having our second Farm Day of the season from 10 to 2, meaning that in addition to shepherding the box back to its pasture, you can also meet the people who grew the vegetables that were in it and see the crops in the fields that will turn up in future shares. In addition, you could join us in harvesting some garlic and hanging it to dry in the barn, except for a few heads that I might use while showing you how I make a dishes, such as that eggplant mush or marinated grilled vegetables. Feel free to bring along a picnic, including any vegetable dishes you would like to show off. We will provide drinks and snacks. We hope we will see—with or without a box—this Sunday.

15 July 2010

2010-07-17T09:43:00.000-04:00

Basil, Chioggia or Merlin beets, Blue Wind broccoli, Minuet Chinese cabbage, Olympian cucumber, Cilantro, Lettuce, Sugar Snap peas, Scallions, Squash

Sometimes I wonder why I continue to grow broccoli. It is the Goldilocks of vegetables: this spring is too cold and this spring is too hot. Theoretically our spring is just right. On average we have the sort of climate to make a picky crucifer happy. But when did we last have an average spring?

I am not complaining about the weather so far this season (I was just starting to think yesterday that we really needed some rain and then it rained). But the broccoli is. The heat and lack of water stressed it out, leaving it cranky and pale and unwilling to make a serious effort to do its job properly (fortunately the farm crew responded differently to the weather). The past two year it sulked in the rain and cold and did an even worse job.

Some of the best spring broccoli we have ever had got thrashed by hail at a tender age. Even since then I have considered whipping it into shape. I figure I could approximate the hail damage by going at the young broccoli with a weed whacker. But something (the voice of reason?) tells me my experiment would fail—plus I would turn up in a video on the web site of some group dedicated to fighting cruelty to vegetables and I am not willing to put up with the shame and protests just to get early broccoli.

Especially since I don’t like broccoli all that much. It is fine, but if it knew better it would be cauliflower. I have never understood why so many picky kids consider it one of the few acceptable vegetables. If I were going to be a picky child I would definitely not include broccoli on my list of vegetables I would deign to eat without throwing a fit. Cauliflower might make it. Lettuce certainly would, and onions and garlic and tomatoes and beets and eggplant and escarole and arugula and zucchini and chard and turnips and...

All right, so that is not the list of a picky eater. I am afraid I don’t have much experience being picky. My mother is English and grew up during World War Two. We ate what we were served. You never knew when the next convoy would make it past the U boats. It helped that most of her cooking lessons took place in the south of France rather than the suburbs of Birmingham. Otherwise I might have made it to adulthood without tasting garlic.

I don’t know if they eat a lot of broccoli in the south of France, but if they do they almost certainly douse it in garlic. That sounds like a good idea for a number of reasons. Aside from tasting good, it might help to keep at bay some of the creatures that want to eat the broccoli. And I am not talking about picky kids, though garlic probably would deter them. We don’t have a real problem with picky kids going after the broccoli out in the field. We do have a problem with flea beetles and cabbage loopers and deer. Not that the deer are serious about eating broccoli. They just browse on a few plants as they pass by and quickly decide they would rather go and destroy the beets and beans. But the other two can’t think of anything nicer to nibble on. A floating row cover helps keep them off the broccoli, but it also helps keep the heat on the broccoli. When it is ninety degrees out you have to choose between heat and bug damage.

We have an organic spray, DiPel (Bt. Kurstaki)_for the loopers that is pretty effective if you can get it on the stuff they are eating, but that is tough to do when they are in a head of broccoli. You cannot get a sprayer nozzle into a head of broccoli still attached to a broccoli plant. As for flea beetles, I don’t know of any spray that stops them. Conventional farmers must have some toxin that works, but I cannot imagine you would want to eat a crop sprayed with a chemical strong enough to do in flea beetles. Whatever it is, I doubt it is as good for you as garlic.

On top of all that, broccoli demands a lot of space and nutrients. Each plant takes up about two square feet of field and a lot of nitrogen in order to—if we are lucky—make one head of broccoli. The Chinese cabbage occupied less that half that space while producing something far bigger. The three rows of snap peas take up only a bit more space than a single planting of broccoli and they actually make nitrogen in the soil.

Despite all this I keep on planting broccoli. We will put in six plantings during the season, and we will fertilize and weed and spray and cover them in the hope that at some point—or maybe even several points—we get a good crop. It is kind of a pain, but it is our job. We are not just going to stick to things that are easy to grow, and anyway lots of crops require some special effort. We have to trellis the tomatoes and keep them on a regular dose of fungicide. The cucumbers are on raised beds covered in biodegradable plastic mulch and need a lot of help to survive the striped cucumber beetles. We have to hill the potatoes twice and check them weekly for outbreaks of Colorado potato beetles. The onions don’t respond well to competition; we have weeded the patch four times so far.

I sometimes think of the vegetables as my employees. I bring them to the farm to do a job, try my best to nurture them and to create a healthy working environment. But they can be a difficult bunch to manage. They make constant demands, object to my suggestions, take time off without asking, get sick frequently, and often have substandard work product. Sometimes I feel like getting rid of the bunch of them. But I need them to do the work so I put up with their foibles, even when, like broccoli, they are apt to produce inferior results when things don’t go exactly their way.

8 July 2010

2010-07-08T13:27:00.001-04:00

Mei Qing choi, Fordhook or Rhubarb Chard, Lincoln leeks, Purple mizuna, Parsley, Sugar Snap peas, Peppers, Multipik and Cashflow Squash, Hakurei turnips

There may be times when you wonder why you pay someone to grow your vegetables. How hard can it be? It is not like we are doing surgery here on the farm. Or even car repair. Car repair requires training, special tools, a certain mechanical aptitude. Growing vegetables does not require much more than a little time and space and dirt. Just about anyone can grow some crops.

I took over my family’s vegetable garden when I was maybe twelve, and if I did not enjoy complete success with every crop, at the very least I managed to grow a lot of pole beans. Enough one summer to maintain a sort of perpetual green bean salad like a sour dough starter. I had no particular gardening knowledge and no tools other than a fork and spade and my hands. I knew enough to dig up my little patch of the back garden, sow the seeds in rows and pull out the weeds, and that was enough to know.

Sure, I could have done a better job if I had learned more about growing vegetables—if I had known to make compost and add it to the soil, for instance, or built a little hoop house for early and late crops or chosen the varieties that would do best in my climate and dirt. But I had other things to do, I didn’t see the need to increase my bean yield, and it was a lot harder to find good gardening information way back then. These days a kid of any age with a desire to grow some food can get on the internet and get all the knowledge and supplies needed to create a productive garden.

I won’t pretend that if you did it yourself it would turn out to be better or cheaper or easier. Guys who get paid to grow vegetables often have a few advantages, like owning tractors or employing a farm crew or having nothing else to do all day. But that is not the point. It is the fact that you could easily do it yourself that matters. You are unlikely to be able to replace your own hip or even figure out why your check engine light keeps going on. But you could definitely grow some beans.

I recognize that this may be a farmer thing, the idea that because you can do something yourself you should do it yourself. Farmers are an independent, obdurate, cheap bunch. We would gladly sacrifice efficiency and quality and free time in the name of self-sufficiency. People often hope I can offer some tale of spiritual awakening or moral purpose to explain my career choice. But the simple fact is that I started farming because I like eating and figured I might as well grow the food myself—well that and because I am not much good at working for other people.

I would suppose that most normal people do not suffer quite so seriously from this pig-headed desire to make do without help. Indeed, the common idea of luxury is to have other people do just about everything for you. Still, farmers are not the only people with a do it yourself instinct. Even if you don’t actually intend to start a small farm in your yard (and some of you have already done it), you can still from time to time entertain the notion that you could easily do what we do.

Perhaps not so frequently this week, though. This is the sort of weather to make you feel good about having had the sense to leave the pea picking to someone else.

It is also the sort of weather to make you feel good about farming somewhere that rarely gets so beastly hot. We have suffered through a few sultry days, but we have not had a heat wave like this in several years. We could be farming in Rajasthan, where our high would be the average temperature and it would not count as a really hot day until it go up to around 115 degrees. No wonder so many Indians end up working in call centers. As miserable as it must be to spend one’s day talking irate Americans through pointless troubleshooting procedures, it is probably better than being outside in that climate.

I cannot imagine that many of our crops would enjoy that climate either. They all look a bit sulky by the middle of the afternoon, even the allegedly heat-loving ones. Only the weeds thrive in these conditions. They grow like bamboo in this heat.

As you can see, we and the vegetables have not completely given in to the heat yet. And as bad as it is, it is certainly better for the crops than the rain and cold of the past two years. Just for a start, the slugs are gone so we actually have a pepper crop. The chard certainly prefers this weather—we could have picked everyone a second bunch and still not made it all the way down the row—and the squash continues to do its things, its thing being to produce more than we need. Even the leeks have prospered. They are supposed to like moisture but they have sized up far faster this year.

Sized up may seem an odd way to put it given that the leeks are hardly bigger than scallions, but this is their intended size. At least, it is the size we intended. I don’t actually know what the leeks had in mind. They should be tender and tasty—though like leeks of any size, not so tender you would want to eat them raw. You could grill them whole along with slices of squash, toss them with a vinaigrette and chopped parsley and eat them cold. Or chop them up and sauté them slowly in butter with the turnips.

If you are just too hot to think about food you can enjoy the mizuna’s decorative qualities. Or you could use it in a salad.

As for the peas, you don’t have to do anything at all to them—other, that is, than eating them. I do prefer them quickly (and I mean quickly—absolutely no more than two minutes) steamed, but given that we are all being steamed already you might want to skip that. Just sit in front of an air conditioner and munch on them straight from the bag and enjoy the fact someone else picked them.

If for some strange reason having us do the work leaves you feeling a little unfulfilled, you can come out to the farm and pick something. No, I am not suggesting that you join us for the next pea picking. But we do have a lot of black currants right now and if you would like to have some you can come out to the farm and pick your own. Just let me know if you are interested (thomastheallegedfarm.com) and we can arrange a time (I would recommend early or late in the day unless you are a mad dog or Englishman).

1 July 2010

2010-07-02T22:37:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Basil, Beets or turnips, Dill, Endive (escarole or frisee), Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Radishes, Scallions, Squash

It is fortunate that the World Cup only happens once every four years. It gives me plenty of time from one tournament to the next to forget how much I dislike watching the best soccer players in the world cheat. Not that all the tripping and diving (observe anybody on the Argentine team falling over at the slightest contact, arms raised, back elegantly arched, to see the dive at its operatic best), the pushing and jersey grabbing have destroyed my enjoyment of the game. There is still plenty of spectacular soccer taking place, from some obviously remarkable goals to the subtlest of touches, which comes as no surprise. These are all, even the North Koreans, highly gifted soccer players, men who have dedicated an astounding portion of their lives to the game.

You would think that if you could play a game that well you would not have to cheat at it. Your practiced skills would be your advantage, not a fistful of your opponent’s jersey. And you would think that having given so much of your life to a game—to an endeavor entirely defined by its rules (if you pick up the ball and run around holding it or bouncing it off the ground you are no longer playing soccer)—you would take a keen interest in sticking to its laws.

But I guess rules were made to be broken. Actually, I have never understood what that is really supposed to mean. It sounds less like an acute observation than a piece of self-justification, the sort of thing you would say as you jumped a turnstile or fudged some numbers on your tax return or created a shell company to hide your crippling corporate debt from your shareholders and government regulators. It is true that by their nature rules can be broken. Of course, Ming vases by their nature can also be broken, but nobody says that they were therefore made for that purpose. I cannot help thinking that in fact most rules actually were made to be followed.

It is also true, obviously, that breaking rules gives you an advantage—as long as you are not caught. Some people break rules just for the fun of it—possibly the same sorts of people who fly the Confederate flag to show they are rebels. But most people do it because they gain from cheating. That is certainly the case in the World Cup. The players are looking for any way to win, and if that includes a well placed elbow to an opponents lower back or spending half a minute writhing on the ground clutching an uninjured leg, so be it. It works most of the time, and anyway, as many of the players would be quick to point out, everyone else does it so not doing it puts you at a disadvantage.

I do not mean to single out soccer players in this regard. The best athletes in just about every major sport routinely cheat. I doubt there were many foul-free downs played in the NFL last season. The Tour de France and most track meets would more accurately be called pharmaceutical rather than athletic competitions. Baseball players are busy improving bats and balls and bodies in various banned ways. It would not surprise me at all to learn that ping-pong champions bend the rules at least as skillfully as they do their serves.

Of course the best athletes cheat. They did not become that good at their chosen sport simply for the love of the game. They may well love it (though, as Andre Agassi wants us to know, they may also hate it). But it is competitiveness that keeps them working so hard to be as good as they are. When you are that driven and have given up that much of your life to one thing in order to win at it, it is hardly surprising that you would try for victory any way you can even if that means breaking the rules of the game to which you have dedicated yourself.

So one lesson sports can teach kids—and of course we should all look to sports to inculcate our offspring with moral sensibilities—is that people who strive single-mindedly to succeed will cheat at least a little when the ref is looking the other way if it helps them get ahead. Obviously, a lot of bankers grew up wanting to emulate their sports heroes—and did. Fortunately, there are a few other lessons to go with this one. Such as the fact that an unmediated desire to win warps your sense of fair play. Or the fact that putting a few more referees on the field to keep an eye the players and penalize cheaters would cut down on the misdeeds. Or the fact that a deeply cynical governing body that regards money and popularity as greater goods than governing will help foster a culture of cheating. Or the fact that being good at a game is not the same as being good.

These are all excellent things to teach a kid. Not, I hasten to add, that they apply in any way to the rest of our lives. Goodness no. We are just talking about soccer here. It is only a game, a pastime, a simple amusement, an escape from the real world.

I believe at this point I am supposed to offer some nifty segue from soccer to farming—perhaps offer up agriculture as a shining counter example of ethical behavior or provide recipes from each of the quarter final countries. Unfortunately, farmers are people too, and if Ghanaians have wonderful ways of preparing kohlrabi I am sadly ignorant of them. I have nothing for you. Well, nothing but some vegetables, a familiar cast of characters. Consider the squash a sort of early warning, a reminder of what could be headed your way. Start looking for squash recipes.

The squash is also, I hope, a more positive omen, a harbinger of summer crops to come. So far the cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, onions and beans show real potential. The weather has been decent to us. The equipment has worked. The deer have exercised some restraint (mostly because we have used a lot of deer repellent). It is an oddly, almost unnervingly promising year.

That is not to say that everything will go as planned from here on out. The weather, pests and diseases all play dirty no matter how close an eye you keep on them. Just when you think you have reached your goal they will catch you unaware and drive you to your knees. You just have to learn to expect that sort of behavior, anticipate and sidestep it the best you can, strive to maintain your balance when they hit you, keep moving forward. And kick them in the shins when nobody is watching.

24 June 2010

2010-06-25T09:22:00.001-04:00

Beets or turnips, Cilantro, Frisee, Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Mustard greens, Radishes, Scallions

I bought a button down shirt a few weeks ago. I don’t buy real shirts often, for obvious reasons. When—infrequently—I do put on clothes free of oil stains, paint splotches, frayed collars and holes people tend to remark on it. Perhaps if I did more clothes shopping I would not have paid as much attention to all the extra stuff I got with my shirt.

Useless extra stuff I hasten to add. I don’t want any of you feeling bad about missing out on some fabulous exclusive shirt emporium offering enticing perks to its customers. There was no excellent cup of espresso offered while I contemplated my purchase, no coupon for dry cleaning, not even any obsequious admiration of my remarkable physique and obviously impeccable taste in shirts. No, I got none of that. But I did get a plastic bag, cardboard, tissue paper, stiff plastic collar inserts, plastic ties for the labels and some pins in addition to the cotton material and thread, dye and plastic buttons that were actually needed to make the shirt.

To be fair, I could find uses for some of the extras. Pins are obviously reusable (not that I ever use them), and I suppose I could come up with some other purpose for a plastic bag or a piece tissue paper. Perhaps I could nestle a delicate, ripe heirloom tomato in the paper and slip it into the bag for transport. Then if I bought lots of shirts I could package the whole tomato crop for free. At least I can recycle the cardboard. And if plastics manufacturers took their social responsibilities more seriously (by which, of course, I mean if they were compelled by law to do so) I would probably be able to recycle all the plastic too or put it in the compost pile. Well, I could have put the plastic that came with the shirt in the compost pile. I mean put it in the compost pile and have it break back down into non-toxic organic matter.

I admit that all the plastic and paper and pins made the shirt look good in the store, all neatly folded and flat, with the collar held perfectly in place. I understand the point of presentation. I just think we may be overdoing it a bit. I do not wish to suggest that we create a totally utilitarian world in which everything must serve a sober function in order to justify its existence. Aside from the fact that such world is entirely unachievable—when was the last time we managed to agree on what is absolutely necessary?—it would also be intensely boring. If I were trying to live a rigidly frugal life I would not be out buying a white button down shirt with blue stripes when I already have a drawer full of t-shirts that do an entirely (or almost entirely in certain cases) adequate job even if they are a little grubby and worn. In fact, it is not entirely clear that I could justify having the t-shirts either since an old potato sack might do much the same thing (though in defense of my t-shirts they are rather less itchy than potato sacks).

Given the drilling, timbering, mining, refining, smelting, pulping, molding and god knows what else required to produce the objects intended solely to display my shirt attractively to potential buyers, it is hard not to think we could do with a lot less presentation. Surely we can find better things to do with our time than ripping up the earth in order to potentially increase the sales of consumer goods. I feel confident I would have been able to assess the merits of my shirt at least as effectively if it had merely been neatly folded and put in a pile on a crate. Of course, that would leave a lot of drillers, lumberjacks, miners, smelters, etc. out of work. But if we are willing to cover their wages every time we buy a shirt then surely we would also be willing to use the money we would save on buying more simply merchandised apparel to give them jobs restoring forests and mountains, cleaning up toxic waste sites, and building renewable energy infrastructure. Instead of making my shirt look good they could make my planet more presentable.

But it is not just the shirt that has me thinking about sensible packaging. It’s your vegetables too. I have been contemplating other ways to pack the shares for some time, ways that might help ensure they still look presentable when you get them. In an ideal world (my ideal world) you would all come to farm to get your produce and see how nice it looks straight from the field. But since for most of you neither your actual nor, most likely, ideal world involves making that weekly trip we need a good, practical way to get your share to you. A waxed cardboard box seems like it would do the trick, and we have 1100 of them sitting in the barn now. Sturdy and reusable, they should afford your vegetables greater protection than the bags. The question is whether or not I can afford them. At $1.28 apiece, the cost adds up fast. If I used them every week and never got any back I would have to spend nearly $5000 a year on boxes. That I cannot afford. In order to make this work I need to get a substantial number of the boxes back in a usable condition. I recognize that this would require a small extra effort on your part and may present logistical challenges at some sites. So we will try using the boxes soon and see what happens. If they come back to the farm we will keep using them. If not we will either have to go back to the bags or, if you think the boxes are worth it, ask for a box deposit to cover the extra cost. If you have any opinions about this or ideas about how to make it work well please share them with me.

A weekly trip to the farm may not work for you, but I hope the occasional one does. This Saturday, for instance, when we have our first farm day of the season from 10:00 to 2:00. You can see how good the crops look when they are still in the field, meet us and other members, get a sneak preview of those boxes and try a simple farm task to reconfirm your decision to let us do the work for you. As part of a season-long effort to offer you more information about what we are up to on the farm, we will focus on cover cropping for this farm day: on what that means, how we do it, and why we make the effort to grow acres of inedible crops that we just plow under. We will also provide drinks and snacks. Feel free to bring a picnic and friends (but please leave your dogs at home).

In anticipation of visiting the crops in their native habitat, you can eat some in your native habitat. Such as some mustard greens, which you could use in a salad with a dressing of oil, vinegar, Dijon mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil, mirin, chopped scallion, sugar, salt and pepper. Or turnips sautéed slowly in butter. Or frisee in a salad with roasted beets.

However you prepare the vegetables in your share this week, do not forget to spend some time on their presentation. While I do not have any specific recommendations, you might want to consider an arrangement involving a certain amount of plastic and tissue paper, which can really show things off to advantage. You might, however, want to avoid using any pins just to be safe.

17 June 2010

2010-06-17T17:10:00.001-04:00

Arugula, Basil, Beet greens, Bok choi, Garlic Scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Parsley

Here is a bit of the farm, literally.

When you signed up for our CSA you signed up for a share of our farm. You probably had in mind receiving a portion of the harvest, a weekly delivery during the season of a range of vegetables and herbs, some completely familiar, some in unexpected hues and shapes, some less common, and some deeply mysterious. And you will get that.

Take this week’s bag, for instance. There’s nothing particularly odd about the lettuce—except, of course, that it was picked yesterday just for you from a farm you are encouraged to visit by people you can talk to about how they grew it. That’s pretty odd these days when much of what people eat has traveled far from the deliberately anonymous field, often making several stops along the way in industrial facilities so that by the time it arrives at the consumer’s mouth it has taken the form of a Hot Pocket or a Lunchable.

There’s nothing particularly odd about beet greens and bok choi either. What is odd is that more people don’t eat them and eat them more frequently. I suppose I should not be surprised given the minor role any vegetables other than the (fried) potato and tomato (sauce) play in the average American diet. In fact, I am not surprised. That was just a rhetorical device. But I can lament how unappreciated these greens are nonetheless. They are tasty, full of nutrients and easy to cook. You could do nothing more than steam them and sprinkle them with salt and perhaps a little vinegar to make a good dish.

Of course, you can do more with these greens than that if you want. You can top your steamed bok choi with a mixture of soy sauce, Chinese vinegar, sesame oil, chili-bean paste, sugar and ground pepper. You can add your beet greens to a salad along with some goat cheese, toasted walnuts and a good balsamic vinaigrette. Or you could sauté them in olive oil with some garlic (note to new members: you will quickly come to recognize that I think nearly everything should be sautéed in olive oil with garlic, a fixation for which I feel no need to apologize). Fortunately, we have included some garlic in your bag. You just may not recognize it as such since it is in the form of scapes: the curlicue flower stems of hard neck garlic. Fun to play with, it also has an excellent mild garlic flavor. Cut it into pieces and cook it slowly until tender before adding the greens. You could also puree it with the basil and parsley (and arugula), olive oil, some parmesan, a healthy dose of salt and pepper and, if you like, a bit of crushed red pepper and lemon juice, and you will have an excellent sauce for pasta, meat, fish or vegetables. You could peel and slice your kohlrabi (the purple orb that looks like something from outer space) and dip it in the sauce.

I could keep on listing things you could do with your share and offering more of my cryptic recipes. But I am not sure it would be a good use of paper. In any event, you can find useful recipes for many of the vegetables you will receive on the website (theallegedfarm.com). And you may well have better ways to prepare the produce than I do. If so, I hope you will send me your recipes so that I can add them to the ones already on the website and share them with your fellow CSA members.

Plus I have that odd first sentence hanging out there unexplained. It would be nice to get around to saying what I mean before I reach the second page.

Oops.

When I say you are literally getting a share of the farm many of you may think I am referring to the small amounts of organic matter that turn up clinging to your produce—the bit of dirt in the scallions’ roots, the odd piece of straw mulch clinging to the beet greens. Well, that is a bit of the farm, I suppose, a small reminder that your vegetables come out of our dirt. But I was thinking of the vegetables themselves as a part of the farm.

All the vegetable seeds we plant in the course of the year (excluding seed potatoes, of which we planted 1200 pounds this spring) would fill about two of the brown paper bags in which we send out the shares. But with those seeds we will grow enough vegetables to fill 3800 of those bags, keep our market stall stocked for the season, feed ourselves (and people who do farm work eat a lot) and give away a few tons of extra produce to Community Action. Where does all that mass come from? It comes out of our dirt—out of the sunlight and rain that falls on it, the water than flows beneath it, the minerals and nutrients and organic compounds in it. The dirt is at the heart of what we do. It makes farming possible. It is the farm. And the vegetables are just the dirt—the farm—transformed. So when we pack your share we are not just assembling a part of the harvest for you—a head of lettuce, a bunch of greens, a sprig of basil—we are sending you a little bit of the farm itself (happily an edible bit).

CSA farmers like to talk about creating direct connections between consumers and the source of their food. We create these connections most obviously by offering seasonal produce from a single source, but also by sharing news about what is happening on the farm and by having members come and see the farm for themselves (as you can do on Saturday, June 26^th). But for better or worse we all have a direction connection to the sources of all our food. Food is not just from but of a place, whether that place is a processing plant in the Midwest, a plantation in Honduras or the field behind my house. Wherever your food comes from, you are eating a bit of that place, and that is a pretty direct connection.

What a CSA farmer tries to do is make that connection as simple and clear and healthy as possible. For consumers, understanding how a Hot Pocket comes be would require degrees in chemical and industrial engineering, a solid grasp of marketing and economics, and a fistful of subpoenas. The food in your CSA share is a lot easier to understand, even if you do not recognize it. It all comes from the dirt on our farm, dirt you can come and stick your hands in—and I hope you will. We would love to show you where the different crops are growing, answer your questions about what we do, listen to your suggestions, let you pitch in with a simple farm chore to get a sense of how we spend our days growing your food. You have every reason to want to know about the farm. After all, you are going to be eating a share of it.

29 October 2009

2009-10-30T08:45:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Brussels sprouts, Carrots, Celery root, Cress, Endive (radicchio or escarole), Lettuce, Onions, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Sage, Shallots, Winter Squash

This is the end. Not of the world. Not yet anyway, though that will come too. Give it a little time. No, it’s just the end of the CSA season. No more weekly deliveries of farm fresh, occasionally identifiable crops. No more odd ramblings of an exhausted farmer. No more hours pondering what exactly to do with a giant daikon or a fistful of hot peppers. Sure it will be tough going on without all these things. But it’s not like it’s the end of the world. Not yet anyway, though that will come too. Give it a… oh wait I already wrote that.

Not only is this not the end of the world, it does not even have to be the end of deliveries of vegetables from the farm. You won’t get another weekly share from us this year, but you can get more of our produce. We have a number of crops available still, which I have listed below. You can place an order with us, preferably via email (Thomas@theallegedfarm.com), and we will deliver it to you on November 20^th. If we still have vegetables available after that we will offer you another chance to order them in December.

Plus, of course, this is merely the last delivery of this season. You can sign up again (I will send out an early sign up form soon) and get another season of produce starting next June. Maybe even better produce. Not that I am apologizing for this season’s vegetables. We had our share of difficulties—infected garlic, rotting carrots, blighted tomatoes and potatoes, planting and cultivating schedules thrown off by wet weather, crops set back by the cold, a ridiculously late spring frost, poor germination for a number of seeds. But then we always have difficulties. And in spite of the diseases and far from ideal weather we managed to hand out a lot of vegetables—both a lot of different kinds, and a large quantity. I won’t go so far as to say you got your money’s worth since money’s worth is a subjective matter and I am not in a position to dictate what it is worth to you. But I will say that you could not have bought all those vegetables from a store (assuming you could find a store that offered everything we grow) for anything like as little as you paid for your share. You could not even have bought those vegetables from us for that price if you had not been a CSA member.

So why do I suggest you might get even better produce next season? Well, there’s always room for improvement. The best growers I know are still far from perfect. And I can always hope that we will get better weather and fewer diseases. We have to have a warmer, drier summer again one of these years. And I can do some things to improve the produce, such as packing shares in boxes, and getting a real cooler to keep the produce in peak shape until we send it out, and buying a bed shaper/mulch layer in order to keep more crops high and dry, and finding a second tractor so we can do more field work when the conditions are right.

You might notice that each of these improvements involves an investment (yes, even the boxes; a season’s worth costs several thousand dollars). You might also have heard that farming is not a high profit business. If so, you heard correctly. Which means I am unlikely to make all of these improvements at once unless I put up the price of a share significantly, and I do not plan to do that. But I will invest in at least one of these things, and though there’s no guarantee it will make as much of a difference as I hope (in fact, there’s something close to a cosmic guarantee it won’t) it ought to make some difference. Plus I would like to think I learn a little bit from my mistakes (more because the alternative is unattractive than because of any solid evidence) and might be able to avoid one or two of them next season—without simply replacing them with one or two new mistakes.

Who knows, I might even figure out how to grow large Brussels sprouts. At least we got some sprouts. I had given up on growing them at all for a while because the results were generally so disappointing. This is the best crop I have had in years.

It is far from the best potato crop ever. They have not particularly enjoyed the rain, and the blight got into one of the patches. Nonetheless, we have a certain number of extra potatoes, and thanks to the efforts of those of you who came to the farm on Sunday and of the Robert C. Parker School 8^th grade, we should have somewhere around a ton of them to donate to Community Action. That strikes me as a good way to end the season. So thank you potato pickers.

And thank you everyone for helping to support the farm this year. Jan and Mike and Adrienne and I hope you enjoyed the food we grew for you and that you ate well.

Crops available for delivery on 11/20. Please specify quantity and type (if applicable).

Onions $1.75/lb (yellow or red)

Shallots $5.00/lb

Leeks $4.00/lb

Garlic* $5.00

Potatoes $1.50/lb (red, white or yellow)

Carrots $2.50/lb (orange or mixed colors)

Turnips $2.00/lb

Celery Root $3.50/lb

Daikon $2.50/lb

Kale $2.50/lb

Lettuce $1.75 each

Endive $3,00 each (frisee, escarole or radicchio)

Bok choi $2.50 each

Tatsoi $2.50 each

Winter Squash $1.75/lb (Butternut or Acorn)

Hot peppers $5.00/lb (Jalapeno, Cherry bomb, Lemon, Fatali)

Fennel bulb $2.00 each

We do not have unlimited quantities of these vegetables. They are first come first served. We will let you know if we are unable to supply something you ordered.

We may also have small quantities of other crops we have grown this season. If you are interested in getting something you do no see on the list, let us know and we will tell you if it is available.

*We have picked through the garlic as carefully as we can, but I cannot guarantee it is uninfected so I am selling it at half price.

22 October 2009

2009-10-23T21:00:00.000-04:00

Cabbage, Daikon, Dill, Frisee endive, Garlic, Kale, Leek, Lettuce, Mustard, Onions, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Butternut winter squash

In an ideal agricultural world we would grow exactly what we needed each week. To fill this week’s bag we would, the appropriate number of weeks ago, have started 165 lettuce, endive, leek and cabbage seedlings in the greenhouse and sowed 165 daikon seeds in the field next to precisely the right number of feet of mustard and dill to make 165 bunches. We would have accurately predicted the yield of squash, hot peppers, kale and potatoes and the number of times we would hand them out and planted accordingly and figured out just how many onions and heads of garlic we needed for the season and grown just that many and no more. Thus we would never expend our efforts on crops that come to naught or that we do not need, never find at the end of the season we could have been doing something far more useful than weeding cabbages for which we have no purpose or cauliflower that would not head up in time.

Of course, ideal and agriculture are not words that go together often. This is an imperfect world, and farming testifies to that imperfection as clearly as anything. In an attempt to produce the crops we need when we need them we make more or less educated guesses about all sorts of things partially in our control or well beyond it, and in many cases we make those guesses months in advance.

Take that garlic, for instance. To get a good crop next year we need to plant garlic now, some eight months before we harvest it. I would have a much better idea of where to plant it, how thoroughly to mulch it, when to fertilize it, how much will survive the winter and how well it will size up if someone were kind enough to give me a rough idea of what the weather will be like between then and now—or even better, give me some say over the weather during those months. That won’t happen. So I have to rely on what I have learned from previous years of growing garlic—some successful, some less so—and what I know about my fields and some estimate of how many customers I will have next year and how often I think we should hand out garlic and add it all together to arrive at an idea of how big a patch of garlic to plant this week.

Because of its long season, garlic forces you to make rough guesses about events far off. But you harvest the whole crop at once and can store it for months—or hope you can—handing it out as needed from your supply. You don’t have that option with a crop like lettuce. Plant too much and it may well have bolted before you can find a use for the extra heads. Plant too little and you have to go without or steal small heads from a later planting. Plus it grows at different rates at different times of the year. Put in two successions a week apart in late April and they may well be ready the same week in June. Put in two a week apart in June and one may bolt early in a July heat wave. Put in two a week apart in September and one may never size up in a cold rainy autumn.

You don’t have to farm for long to figure out that it is best to err on the generous side when guessing how much of something to plant. It is not much fun to have one’s crops—and one’s work—go to waste because you have more of something than you can use. But it is less fun to ponder going out and scrounging up weeds from the hedgerows to fill up the shares (and no, in case you are wondering, how ever odd some of the crops may have appeared, we have not given you any hedgerow weeds this year). So we plant 80 extra cabbage seeds each time we start another batch of cabbage, knowing some may not come up, some may not grow well enough to be worth transplanting, some may be lost in the field to insects or deer and some may not size up in time. And we put in 900 kale plants because the weather may turn cold early and slow them down just when we need them to grow. And we plant a hundred bed feet of daikon because some will split or be too ugly or just snap in half when we pull them up. And we start far more lettuce than we need in an effort to have it as often as possible throughout the season.

As a result of this and the occasional surprise success (such as the eggplant) and the natural tendency of crops like cucumbers and squash to have spurts of overproduction we often have extra vegetables. Fortunately, we often have good uses for them. We eat a lot (you work up an appetite when you do manual labor all the time). We have a pig who does not mind dining on blemished produce (especially tomatoes; he could care less if a tomato is split or soft of hideously ugly). And when we have large quantities left over the folks from Community Action come and get them and distribute them to food pantries in the area.

We often have a lot left over at the end of the season. This is partly by design. We plant more potatoes than we need with the aim of having extra for Community Action. It’s partly because of our tendency to plant a bit extra of everything as an insurance policy. And it’s partly because we put in late plantings of a number of things on the off chance that we will have one of those approximately once a decade warm dry autumns when late plantings thrive. Plus at this time of year extra things we leave in the field tend to hold well for quite some time so we end up with a lot of beds we picked through as much as a month ago that still have usable crops in them. The problem is that Community Action has a hard time these days finding people to come and glean and we don’t have time to pick everything out there before it freezes (we still have to plant that garlic and spread manure and clean up the field houses and roll up irrigation lines and wash trays and put everything back into some sort of order).

In order to make sure this extra produce does not go to waste and that we can share our food with those who cannot afford it, we need help. That, I hope, is where at least some of you come in. Literally. As in come in to the fields to help us pick these crops for Community Action. If you are interested in helping out you can come to the farm this Sunday between 2 and 6 and lend a hand, or even two hands. We will provide warm cider and soup and suggestions for what to do with kale and daikon and maybe some of the magical donuts from Cambridge, which are worth the drive themselves. As is, I would like to think, the chance to see the farm and feed the hungry and play in the dirt on a sunny mild October afternoon.

Assuming it is, as the weather forecasters currently predict, a warm mild afternoon. Events, of course, could prove them wrong (that has been know to happen). Rather than going out in the mud and cold we would try again on another day (probably the next Sunday). Just give us a call (692-9065) if the weather seems lousy to find out if we have postponed the gleaning.

15 October 2009

2009-10-17T21:13:00.000-04:00

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.

8 October 2009

2009-10-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

Bok choi, Daikon, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Rutabaga, Sage, Shallots

This weekend the Agricultural Stewardship Association holds its eighth annual art show, Landscapes for Landsake, which features the works of a number of local artists (including one of you). The opening reception will be held this Saturday, October 10^th, from 3 to 6 p.m. at the historic barn at Maple Ridge, 172 State Route 372, in Coila. The $5 admission (students and kids get in free) gets you wine and local cheese as well as a chance to see (and buy) some excellent art, and helps support ASA’s efforts to preserve good soils in Washington and northern Rensselaer Counties for agriculture and help sustain our farming community. For more information about ASA and the show visit agstewardship.org.

I would hope that the chance to drive out to our beautiful landscape on a fine autumn day to see a good art exhibition is enough to entice you in this direction. I would also hope that you consider the chance to support the work of ASA a compelling reason to make this small trip. I know most of you neither live nor farm in Washington or northern Rensselaer County, and I understand that you might therefore conclude that you have no particular reason to support ASA, no matter how admirable you deem its mission. Even if you have your heart set on protecting open space, there’s plenty closer to home.

But ASA’s specific mission to protect farmland (including 120 acres of our farm) in an area with both prime agricultural soils and a longstanding and active farming community makes it worthy of support from people throughout the capital district. A local supply of food—which we ceased to value highly only fairly recently and to our own detriment—will become increasingly important. And for this region that supply will to a significant extent come from the very places ASA works to protect because we have the space, the soil, the infrastructure and the knowledge. Even the farms in the region outside ASA’s area of focus will (and in many cases already do) rely on our farming community because we have a strong enough agricultural base to maintain the necessary support services, such as feed, fertilizer, seed and tractor dealers, mechanics, veterinarians, and livestock auction houses.

Ensuring that the best pieces of ground remain available for agriculture won’t by itself ensure that agriculture survives here. There are numerous other economic, cultural and political issues involved. We need to work on what to grow, how to grow it, who will grow it and how to sell it. While ASA has something to contribute to discussion on all these topics, these are not its area of expertise or effort. That said, it is undeniably true that in the absence of good farmland all the other issues are irrelevant. Without land on which to farm, the perfect farm crew carrying out the perfect growing system for the perfect crop isn’t worth a damn.

Not that I am saying you should sally forth this Saturday on some sort of agricultural crusade, rallying to ASA’s side to beat back the dark forces of development. You should come because you can take a scenic drive to look at attractive pictures in a nice setting while nibbling on tasty cheese. That doing so happens to aid the work of ASA is simply a nice bonus, a reason to feel good about having fun.

I cannot guarantee that if you do go to the show you will find a lot of vegetable paintings. One of the artists did paint some of our produce (painted a picture of it, not applied paint to it), but I don’t know if that made it in. I might just have to start commissioning vegetable portraits. I think kohlrabi, with its dark purple skin and jaunty poof of green leaves, can be quite dashing, and a family grouping of eggplants—stout Italians seated in front of their elegantly slender Asian relatives—would be nice. But if I had to choose right now I think I would have the daikon (the large white root in your bag) pose first. There’s something truly impressive about a plant that can grow a root that size that fast. I only seeded them at the end of August. Consider for comparison’s sake your shallots. They are perfectly nice shallots, but they spent a couple of months in the greenhouse and another 4 or so in the field. If they grew at the same rate as daikon we would never be able to get one in the bag. Of course, some of you may wonder what inspired us to put a daikon in the bag. Well, for a start they are just so much fun to grow. I think we enjoyed harvesting them more than we have enjoyed harvesting any other crop so far this season. And they taste good. You can just slice them up and eat them. Or shred them and mix them with salt and vinegar. Or make a spicy Korean pickle. But what I like best is to julienne a daikon, mix it with a good amount of salt, let it sit in a colander for at least a couple of hours, squeeze out the liquid and mix the daikon with soy sauce (regular and a little dark if you have it), vinegar (Chinese black vinegar works well but red wine vinegar is fine), sesame oil, chili oil, a little sugar and pepper. You could also add some ground Szechuan peppercorn (there’s a decent Asian grocery store on Colvin just off Central Ave. that has all these ingredients). You could also use this mixture, perhaps with some crushed garlic, on steamed bok choi and grilled eggplant. In fact, it would go well on just about everything in this weeks share, maybe even the rutabaga (the big round root).

1 October 2009

2009-10-02T09:30:00.000-04:00

Eggplant, Garlic, Kohlrabi, Leeks, Lettuce, Purple mizuna, Onions, Peppers, Very hot peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes

This is an American tale. A tale about hopes and dreams and hard work. A tale about adversity and perseverance. A tale about resourcefulness. A tale about redemption. A tale about pie.

I have the sneaking suspicion that many of you mistook my frequent references to the annual pie contest for a sort of running joke, a little dig at Americana, an ironic comment on our insubstantial rural nostalgia. But sometimes a pie contest is just a pie contest. Which is to say, no joke.

This past Sunday we held our fifth annual pie contest and for the fifth time Greg Smith (farm pick up) made a pie to enter in it. I say “made a pie to enter in it” rather than “entered a pie” because serious structural flaws prevented him from actually entering last year’s effort in the contest. Which knocked him out of contention right from the start.

It was a tough year to compete anyway, since he would have been up against the reigning champion, Jan Satin (Delmar), who came to the contest with something of an edge. She grew up on a farm in Indiana and made pies with her mother every morning. While I do not believe she has maintained quite that baking pace in recent years, I get the feeling that pie making still feels as basic to her as tying a shoe lace does to the rest of us. Unsurprisingly, she repeated as pie champion—and then graciously retired from further competitions.

Jan’s retirement and lousy weather this year presented Greg with the opportunity he had been waiting for. Because, you see, despite all that baking over the years, Greg had yet to win the contest. The three pies that had made it to the farm, including a notable rhubarb raisin one two years ago, had failed to impress the august judging panel enough to earn Greg the title he so clearly coveted.

Many bakers would have given up. Not, perhaps, given up baking pies all together. I don’t mean to suggest that the judges took vehemently against Greg’s pies and begged him to desist permanently for the good of America’s culinary reputation. But it would have been understandable if he had decided that three tries were enough and that he didn’t need to suffer another year of disappointment. He could have withdrawn and nobody would have questioned the decision. Even though he had not won, he had certainly demonstrated his pie making mettle.

But Greg refused to quit. He preferred to risk acquiring the status of permanent loser rather than walk away from the challenge. He chose to wade again into the flaky fray, knowing full well—better than anyone else—that to do so was to court defeat, which had proved in the past such a willing sweetheart. He understood right to his buttery fingertips that it is not whether you win or lose, it is whether you win, and by god you cannot win if you don’t play the game. And so he sallied forth once more, pie tin and rolling pin in hand, and made a fifth pie.

This pie held together. Very nicely actually. Flaky crust, well browned, sturdy but not tough, and a fruit filling with just enough substance to ooze slowly even from a thin slice, a filling in that happy place between gelatinous and soupy. But what really got the judges’ notice was the choice of fruit for that filling: Concord grape. And what inspired Greg to make a grape pie? The best of reasons: he had grapes—from his own vines no less (locavores take note). As the saying goes, if god gives you Concord grapes, make grape pie. And so at long last, in a hard fought contest, Greg finally achieved a victory a half decade in the making and became the Alleged Farm pie champion. At least until next year, when you all have the chance to try and unseat him.

You could start practicing right now with a vegetable pie, perhaps onion and tomato or a leek quiche. Or maybe, following Greg’s lead, you feel like making something a little surprising and will whip up a kohlrabi tart (let me know if you do).

Or maybe you will use the hot peppers in a pie, which could give you a surprise because they are quite powerful. The smaller, paler ones, Lemon, create a quick burn of some intensity. The Fatali creates a quick inferno. So why am I handing out these things? Well, for a start you can cut your heating bills by eating them. And they taste good.

The garlic tastes good too, at least the part unaffected by the disease (or diseases—I am not sure what’s wrecking the crop). Which, I am afraid may be a small part of each head. So why am I handing out these things? Well, it’s these or no garlic at all, and I figure even a small amount of garlic is better than none. I apologise if you get a completely useless head. We try to pick ones that look good, but it’s hard to tell for sure without pulling apart the heads and peeling the cloves, which we are not going to do.

I apologise too if your potatoes are not keeping. We cull every bad one we find, but I fear that the late blight got into potato the patch (it has been a rough year for the vegetables). Infected tubers rot in storage, especially if they are wet, and they can cause their uninfected neighbors to rot too. We try to get them as dry as possible before we hand them out and they seem to hold much better if you keep them in a spot where they get good air circulation. An even more effective technique is to eat them soon—in a pie, for instance.

24 September 2009

2009-09-28T20:23:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Eggplants, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Hakurei turnip, Acorn winter squash

You will have to forgive me if this newsletter occasionally lapses into complete (rather than its normal partial) incomprehensibility. At the same time I am writing this a small, insane kitten is using my desk and various parts of my body as a jungle gym. Despite being no larger than a completely unremarkable adult rat and weighing less than a pint of peas, it already possesses impressive speed and agility. I am full of admiration for its budding feline grace and overexuberant confidence. But it’s a little hard to keep your mind fully on your prose when at any moment a 1/10 scale cat might sprint up your legs and pounce on the keyboard (not to mention the fact that in so doing it add its own enigmatic comments to my writing, such as its most recent offering, eeeeeeeeeeeel.f,mas (which, coincidentally bears an uncanny resemblance to the noise I made as it ascended my leg on the way to typing that)).

Add to that the usual late season fatigue, and even without the kitten’s assistance I might not make sense. I don’t mean to make any special claims about how hard we work here on the farm. We are not, I like to think, slackers. But we do not meet the standards for real hard work set by our dairy farming neighbors. True, a fair amount of what they do takes place in the cab of some machine, but driving deafeningly loud piece of equipment with no real suspension system for hours at a time takes its toll. And that’s the relaxing part of their 16 hour day.

So we don’t work like dairy farmers. We still do enough in the course of a season, however, that towards the end we start to move a little slower. Fortunately, we have less to do. We seeded the last trays of lettuce two weeks ago and only have a few trays left to transplant. We brought in all the onions and winter squash, sowed the falls greens and roots, and have hardly any weeds in the late broccoli and carrot rows to deal with. There’s still enough work—pulling tomato stakes, spreading compost, sowing winter rye, cleaning the seedling house, plus of course picking and packing the shares—to keep us busy for the next month, but busy at our October speed. If we were still moving at a May pace we might run out of things to do.

Actually, you never run out of things to do on a farm. You might get through everything you absolutely have to do to keep the farm going, or everything that you want to do. But we have a long list of projects—redoing the floor in the hay mow, painting the shed, fixing the deer fence—waiting for those moments, should they ever occur, when we cannot think of anything else to do. Not that they often do occur because just when we think they might something breaks and we have to repair it. Which always takes at least an hour, no matter how minor, and requires at least two tools we cannot find. Tools everywhere tend to wander, and on a farm they have further to wander and better places to hide. Sometimes we discover them lurking in the oddest spots—though not of course when we need them.

Perhaps on Sunday we could have a tool finding competition, with a special prize to the person who can recover all the ¾” sockets that have taken off for various parts of the farm. Perhaps I can train Winston to be a tool retriever. If dogs can sniff out plastic explosives, surely they can track the scent of a crescent wrench. Or maybe I would have better luck using Mickey Boy. A tool pig rather than a truffle pig. He could learn to root for lost pruners. I guess we could also try being more organized, but it is probably easier to teach a pig to hunt down missing drill bits than to teach farmers to be more organized.

Of course, if we all managed to hang onto our tools, whether through our own efforts or with the aid of specially trained animals, we would destroy the tool business. When they sell you those sockets sets they count on the fact that within a matter of months you will be back for more, having misplaced all but the most obscure ones, the sizes you’d only ever need if you rebuilt Bulgarian self-propelled howitzers as a hobby. When you think of it that way you realize that losing tools is a small but important form of economic development—an obligation really. Instead of finding the tools we have lost, perhaps you would prefer to bring some of your own to the farm on Sunday to mislay. Maybe you have something you are having trouble losing track of—a neon green box cutter say, or a crowbar. Well, we have the space to lose it. That’s a promise. I’ve tested it. Oh, and if you happen upon my box cutter, you could just put it back on the bench in the shop.

17 September 2009

2009-09-17T21:26:00.000-04:00

Eggplants, Garlic, Melon, Mustard greens, Onions, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

Here are some things you might see if you come to the farm open house on the 27^th: a barn full of onions (we dry them in the hay mow), donkeys (the semi-feral Franklin and Eleanor), sunflowers (pick your own), beds of broccoli (we have three plantings out in the field for fall harvest), pheasants (six of them keep turning up around the farm), deer (a lot more than six of them turn up around the farm), potatoes (if the weather is nice we will harvest some), snails (see note about deer above), hot peppers (you can learn how to make hot sauce with them), frogs (we have three ponds full of them), trees (you can go for a walk in our woods), a hyperactive puppy (we hope he calms down before he outweighs us), celery root (it will turn up in your bag in October—or in a deer, see note above), migrating geese (though I cannot help noticing that they are headed south only about a quarter of the time), the famous eggplant patch (also, perhaps, known to some of you as the infamous eggplant patch), field houses full of fall crops (we are filling them up so we can keep picking right greens right to the end of the season), late blight (though this dry weather seems to have slowed it down; hence the tomatoes in the share), late carrots (let’s hope the deer develop a preference for weeds), pies (including, perhaps, your own triumphing over all the others in the contest), blue herons (three ponds full of frogs are an irresistible attraction for blue herons), red efts (Mike found one hanging out under a husk cherry plant the other day), Mike (the farm’s official red eft spotter), husk cherries (not just tasty, but also a great red eft habitat), mold board plows (just back from the repair shop), the brush cutter (just back from the repair shop), a Kubota tractor (just back from the repair shop), a farmer (back from the back repair shop), leeks (in the field across the road), leaks (in the drip tape), the muscovy duck, Terry (short for terrine), the chickens (soon to be in a terrine if they go after the tomatoes one more time), other CSA members (your pie contest competition), Sam and Will (members of the pie judging panel), dinner (I guess we should not just eat pie so there’s a potluck dinner before the pie contest; we supply drinks, plates, utensils), stars (sorry to raise your hopes, but no celebrities, just an amazing starlit night sky), your breath (it’s starting to get cold; we’re putting rows covers out again), orb weavers (big yellow spiders that make webs with a lightning bolt pattern), brussels sprouts (we might even get a crop this year), Jan (who would eat all the kohlrabi if we let her), kohlrabi (if Jan hasn’t finished it off), Mickey Boy, the large pig (who doesn’t like kohlrabi, but will eat all the squishy tomatoes and melons we care to give him), Adrienne (who is less excited than Jan about kohlrabi, and way less excited than Mickey Boy about squishy tomatoes and melons), winter squash (we have a big pile upstairs in the barn), the seed drill (we will use it to plant oats and winter rye in parts of the field where we have removed crops, such as the winter squash patch), the sunset, the moonrise, the sunrise (all right, probably not the latter, but maybe we’ll stay through the night eating pie and looking at the stars), dirt (we have lots so feel free to take some home with you).

I hope something on that lists appeals to you enough to convince you to come to the farm on the 27^th and see where those bags of produce come from and meet the people who fill them up and at least some of the other people who empty them out. The open house starts at 3, dinner around 6, and the pie contest whenever the judging panel can’t resist trying all the pies.

10 September 2009

2009-09-10T09:42:00.000-04:00

Eggplants, Leeks, Lettuce, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tatsoi, Tomatoes

I chatted with a dairy farmer the other night about growing vegetables. He thinks he might have to find a new way to make money from farming. He has no intention of giving up. He and his family have conserved all 800 acres of their ground—and it’s good ground. They plan to keep using it. But unless the dairy industry changes significantly and soon, they may not be able to afford to milk cows any more.

This farmer could find all sorts of ways to make a living off the land. But as a conventional dairy farmer, he understands one basic way to do it: get the land to produce as much as possible and sell it in bulk. There are some incentives in the dairy industry to produce higher quality (that is higher fat) milk, and some strict guidelines for cleanliness on the macro- and microscopic level. But basically the industry pays farmers to produce more. The standard by which these farmers are judged is yield—bushels of corn or tons of silage an acre, pounds of milk per cow.

In pursuit of the best yields possible, dairy farmers have changed cows’ diets, employed an array of potent chemicals, invested in more and more specialized equipment, reduced the number of crops they grow and committed their animals to life in a harsh concrete environment. And they have had enormous success. The average modern American dairy cow produces about four times as much milk as its counterpart did 60 years ago. Harald and Hilding Pearson, the twins who were the last people to run our farm as a dairy, never contemplated getting anything like as much corn or hay from this ground or as much milk from their herd as the Wolffs, who rent much of our land now, succeed in doing.

In the course of a single day, with the aid of a self-propelled mower, merger, four hundred horsepower forage harvester, three dump trucks and an articulated tractor with a massive silage blade, the Wolffs can easily bring in hay from every one of their alfalfa fields on our farm and our neighbor’s, and fill a significant portion of one of their trench silos with high protein silage. It would have taken the twins a good stretch of dry days to mow and ted and rake and bale and put away the hay from one of those fields. Of course, the Wolffs will need every bit of that silage to feed their voracious Holstein herd if they want to keep those cows producing milk at the same rate (around 20,000 pounds a year per cow).

Not that all that hay will do them much good this year. It turns out dairy farmers may have succeeded too well. With more milk floating around than we know what do with, the price has collapsed. The Wolffs lose about $5 a day per cow right now and they have 300 (for those of you without a calculator handy, that comes to something over half a million dollars a year). Unfortunately, most of these farmers have invested so heavily in farming this way (the equipment the Wolff use to bring in that hay would cost a couple of million dollars bought new) that they have to keep doing the same thing—trying to squeeze as many pounds of milk as possible out of their cows for every pound of feed they put in—which won’t do anything, at least in the short run, to bring up the price of milk. A few farmers have sold their herds, hoping the resulting drastic reduction in costs will see them through, but they’re left with the same debt and a drastic reduction in income that seems to leave them in a slightly worse position.

It’s no wonder, then, that the dairy farmer I was talking to is thinking about trying something different. Well, sort of something different. On the face of it, trading in the dairy cows for a vegetable crop would be a major change. He would be dealing with new challenges—with unfamiliar nutrient requirements, spray regimens, harvesting equipment and storage need. But in effect he imagines continuing to farm much as he does now. He would chose one or two crops easily grown on a vast scale and sold wholesale and use every chemical and mechanical advantage available to maximize yield so he could find a little profit in a high volume, low margin business. He imagines farming like a guy he met at a conference, growing dump truck loads of peas for the Beech-Nut plant in Canajoharie, or like Albert Sheldon, who farms acres of potatoes along the Battenkill in Salem.

But he should take a closer look at Albert’s operation. Albert used to grow something like a hundred acres of standard potato varieties for the wholesale market. He’d pack them in 50 pound sacks and ship them off by the truckload. But the wholesale price collapsed, and now Albert and his wife grow a wide variety crops to market at their farm stand along with a range of local products. Albert recognized that in order to keep farming he needed not just to find a new crop, but also a new way of growing and selling. He still grows a lot of potatoes, still wholesales some, but he knows that that’s never going to be enough again. And now he grows all sort of potatoes, including fingerlings, which he always complains about because he cannot harvest them mechanically. The thought of digging potatoes by hand still irks him. It’s hard to set aside all your old habits.

I don’t object at all to getting a good yield. I have been enjoying the abundance of eggplant—not just because I like eggplant, but also because I remember more vividly than I’d like to all the years we have had a miserable eggplant crop. We’re giving away more eggplant to Community Action than we’ve picked in bad years. Some of you may be starting to wish we would give Community Action even more, but I hope you are not totally sick of eggplant. There are plenty of things to do with—grill, fry, stuff, mash. You’ll find excellent eggplant recipes from France, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, India, China, Italy, Georgia. There’s even a tasty eggplant and garlic chutney (I’ll give you the recipe if you are interested).

Unfortunately, our garlic is affording me less joy than the eggplant. We have a lot of it and it sized up nicely. But it seems the majority of it has been infected with penicillin mold and, as you may have noticed, the cloves are starting to break down—though so far you cannot tell that just by looking at the heads. Which is why we did not put any in the bags this week. We need to figure out what (if any) is good so we don’t end up handing out a lot of garlic flavored antibiotic—though if that is all we end up with it could prove a useful marketing strategy for an otherwise worthless crop. Sustainably grown local medicine. Now there’s something I have not seen a lot of farmers around here working on. Maybe I should mention it to that dairy farmer.

I should mention to you that you will find a few unlisted crops in your share this week, possibly including arugula (bunched greens), broccoli, husk cherries (little berries in papery wrappers), fennel and/or melon.

I should also mention—again—that our annual open house/pot luck dinner/pie contest happens on Sunday, September 27, and that I hope we will see then.

3 September 2009

2009-09-04T09:01:00.000-04:00

Basil, Beans, Beets or turnips, Cucumber, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Melon, Onion, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes

On Monday afternoon we went out and destroyed a large section of the tomato patch. We chose the part with the biggest plants, the vines as tall as us and loaded with fruit, and killed everything with a flame weeder.

It might be fair to assume that after yet another arduous morning of tomato harvesting, we just could not take it any more and decided to cut our work load. But that is not why we were out there killing tomatoes. You might think we were finding filling out the shares just too easy what with all those tomatoes and felt we needed to give ourselves more of a challenge. But that was not the reason for our tomatocidal endeavors either. You could come to the conclusion that we have it in for our members and, overcome by a desire to deny you such a tasty crop, chose to destroy it and spend the rest of the season stuffing the bags full of obscure root vegetables instead. But that did not drive us to this desperate measure either. Late blight did.

We managed somehow, mostly I think through pure luck, to hold the epidemic at bay for weeks and weeks. As other farmers’ tomatoes succumbed, ours thrived. In fact, I have never had such a healthy outdoor planting of tomatoes. In a few of the low spots the persistent moisture had stunted the vines, though not enough to stop them from bearing quite heavily. Elsewhere along the rows the tomatoes had grown over the tops of the stakes, the foliage dense and dark green, the fruit remarkably clean and large and plentiful. The field has good soil, and it had been planted to alfalfa the past three years. In addition, we were spraying fungicide earlier and more often than other years in an effort to ward off late blight, which helped prevent many of the other usual tomato diseases.

Obviously the health of the vines did not result in early ripening. In fact, we only started picking outdoor tomatoes a couple of week ago (about three weeks later than normal). But given how good the planting looked and the quantity of fruit, we were looking forward to a good crop right through the rest of the month. At which point we might well have had enough of tomato picking and started killing the plants if a frost did not do it for us.

So much for our plans. But then plans tend not to last too long out in the field. There’s always a temptation to lay out the season on spread sheets during the slow winter months as though doing so will somehow impose order on what is really an ad hoc undertaking. You can organize planting dates, draw up field maps, figure out just how much of each crop to sow and when to put on row covers, put in trellises, spread fertilizer. And the plan usually holds together for several weeks, at least until you start working outside and find that your early carrot beds have not thawed and that, no matter what other tasks you have put on the schedule, you need to replace the greenhouse plastic and fix the deer fence. From there it only gets more chaotic, with more and more fields and crops subject to more and more uncontrollable events.

You don’t have to farm long to lose faith in things working out as planned. In fact, plans go awry so reliably that you start to believe that the very act of planning itself invites catastrophe—that some malevolent entropic force takes your attempts to create order personally and cannot resist the challenge. Which is to say that even as you accept their inevitability, you start to take the setbacks personally. If we had not been so happy with our tomatoes, so confident in their ability to produce another month’s worth of fruit because of our well planned field preparation and spraying, they might have remained uninfected. And it can hardly be a coincidence that this stunningly virulent pathogen specializes in our most valuable crop. There’s no particular reason, other than a desire to cause maximum harm, phytophthora infestans couldn’t have developed a taste instead for rutabagas or marjoram.

This is of course nonsense. That tomatoes can get a nasty disease is just the nature of things. And anyway rutabagas and marjoram have their share of problems. They just don’t bother me as much. I’d hardly get excited about putting a 200,000 btu torch to the rutabaga bed, but it would not pain me as much as burning up hundred of pounds of tomatoes does. I doubt many of you would grieve either if I told you not to expect to see a lot more rutabagas this season.

Indeed, it is the impersonal nature of these assaults that makes them so trying. It is one thing to do battle with an implacable foe. It is quite another to be at war with an enemy that not only has no feelings about you but does not even know you exist. I played a role in this disaster by planting the host plants, but a role that anyone could fill.

I don’t mean to say that human beings have no real part in this contest between plant and fungus. By cultivating so many acres of tomatoes and potatoes, by taking control to some extent of the destiny of these crops, by developing such an arsenal of chemicals to combat late blight, we have inserted ourselves in the midst of this ancient conflict. But if we think this actually has to do essentially with us, if we come to believe that we are the central characters rather than actors taking our turn in a long running drama, we are fooling ourselves.

But enough of these metaphors, which threaten like a bad fungal infection to run amok. At least I can put an end to them—though I think it is worth noting I could also put an end to the late blight on the farm if I were willing to use the conventional farmer’s chemical cocktail; the choice to do without these miracles of modern agriculture comes with its costs as well as its benefits. I am afraid I probably won’t be able to put a stop to the late blight and all our tomatoes will likely be dead in a week or two from fungus or flame. So enjoy them while you have them. Anyway, seasonality is one of the points and pleasures of a CSA share. That our tomato season will be cut short by late blight is part of farming, and thus something to be if not celebrated then at least understood and accepted. That, anyway, is what I tried telling myself as I pulled the trigger on that flame weeder and committed the tomatoes to the fire.

27 August 2009

2009-08-30T21:11:00.000-04:00

Basil, Dill, Eggplant, Escarole, Garlic, Lettuce, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Shallots, Squash, Tomatoes

Lots of people think there’s something special about growing up on a farm. I am not in a position to comment on the truth of this first hand. My best friend in middle school, Andy, lived in an apple orchard. I spent a lot of time there. We ate huge numbers of apples and roamed around the place with various weapons and flammable liquids, amusing ourselves and causing minor mayhem (I only recall one trip to the emergency room). Apart from visiting Andy, though, I spent little of my childhood on farms. I lived in Poughkeepsie and come from a pretty thoroughly nonagrarian family. My grandfather had a remarkably lovely garden, including a little vegetable patch at the back by his woodworking shop where he grew vegetable marrow and runner beans, and my great uncle Basil wanted to be a pig farmer, or so he said, though he was in fact a doctor and had never, as far as I know, made any attempt to tend swine. And that’s about the extent of my family’s farming endeavors going back any number of generations.

Based on the time I spent at Andy’s house, I certainly thought being a kid on a farm was great. But I was only a visitor running amok, and anyway Andy’s family didn’t manage the orchard. They rented it to their neighbor. There was never any danger that I would be forced to spend my time there picking or pruning or slaving in a packing barn.

I am fairly sure that the putative positive effects of a farm childhood derive not just from the setting, but also—and more importantly—from participation in the work of farming. Without the work you are just growing up in the country, which can be fine (though there’s always the suspicion that it leads to a certain slowness of intellect). But it lacks the moral uplift and insight that honest agricultural toil provides. Something, I suppose, about laboring in concert with nature, about doing work with palpable results, about the determined effort required, about the element of self-sufficiency and the shared familial burden makes a real farm childhood valuable. That, at least, is the theory.

While I did not have a farm childhood, I do have two children and a farm. The least I can do is make sure that Sam and Will have every opportunity to reap the benefits of their agricultural upbringing. To that end, I have had them help with a number of jobs on the farm this month, including weeding the shallots, red cabbage, beans and chard, helping to pack the bags, picking carrots and potatoes, and helping me at market. I should probably have worked them from dawn to dusk in order to give them every possible advantage, but doing so would have meant that I had to rise at dawn too, and there are limits to what I will do for my children.

And has it proved special? While Sam and Will have more or less (with perhaps a tad more emphasis on the less than the more) willingly participated in this experiment, I doubt that special is precisely the word they would use. Will enjoys going to market—he’s a persuasive vegetable salesman—and they don’t mind bagging produce, but I would say they like serious weeding about as much as anyone. I have not heard them begging to be allowed to turn off the Wii and go weed.

Of course, it is much to early to say if their farm childhood will prove useful. I suspect shallot weeding falls into the “you may not like it now, but some day you will thank me” category of activities. Given an appropriate opportunity to engage in mature introspection, they may find that those hours pulling crab grass offered them all sorts of heretofore unappreciated advantages. Such as what, other that the certainty at an early age that they did not want to be farmers, I am not qualified to say. I came to farming way too late to gain any profound developmental edge from weeding.

Or maybe they won’t get anything from this farm life. Maybe growing up on a farm offers no more benefits than growing up on a cul de sac or in a co-op. But at least they weeded the shallots, and I am pretty sure the shallots benefited from that.

There is one farm task that Sam and Will do like: running the root vegetable washer. One look at your potatoes, however, will show that I have denied them that pleasure this week. I did so not for my kids benefit (delay of gratification has wonderful effects on children), but for the potatoes’. Washing did not do the previous batch of potatoes we handed out any good. Their hard farm childhood—they are growing in a poorly drained field—did not do them much good, and they don’t seem to have the fortitude to withstand a trip through the washer. I figured you would probably prefer dirty potatoes in good condition to clean ones going soft. Plus, for those of you have cannot make it out to the farm this season, it is a chance to get your hands dirty in our soil.

The eggplants had at least as trying a farm childhood as the potatoes. They got frosted in late May, flooded in June, and assaulted by slugs and snails in July. Apparently, though, something about what they went through did make them stronger. I have never had such a prolific eggplant patch before. I wish I knew what part of their upbringing had this effect on them so I could get these results every season—and maybe try leaving Sam and Will out in the cold or covering them with tiny snails. But it is rarely possible to say what exactly from our youth made us who we are as adults. The peppers, which grew up right next to the eggplants and endured the same trials, are an almost total failure. I could raise the peppers and eggplants the same way next year and get the opposite results, and still not have the vaguest idea of how to explain it.

It is possible the only lesson here is that it is fun to visit a farm occasionally. I can certainly recommend it based on my own childhood, and I urge you to try it yourself—for instance on September 27^th, when we have our open house and pie contest.

20 August 2009

2009-08-20T10:17:00.001-04:00

Beet greens, Carrots, Eggplant, Garlic, Onion, Anaheim or Ancho hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes, Turnips or beets

The Washington County Fair, which starts this coming Monday, features a lot of cows. 10 barns full of cows. Stall after stall of Holsteins and Jerseys and Brown Swiss and Herefords and Ayershires and Dexters and Charolais. More cows than all the other animals—goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigs and a horses and oxen and a few reindeer—put together. And way way more cows than pies. There’s not even one barn full of pies. In fact, all the baked and canned goods take up a small section of a small barn, about as much space as is given to the table setting competition.

I do understand that the cow business plays a significant role in the economy of this county. Dairy products, cattle and calves account for 85% of the county’s agricultural sales (vegetables account for 5%), and agriculture is far and away the biggest business in the county. So it is no surprise then that the County Fair, that annual showcase of our bounty, puts on such a bovicentric celebration.

Pies, on the other hand, constitute an immeasurably small sector of the economy. Well, not immeasurably small. I don’t doubt that a sufficiently motivated researcher, someone with a real passion for economic statistics and baked goods, could come up with a reasonably accurate assessment of pie’s role in the county’s economy. But certainly unmeasured. If you look through the county’s economic development plan or scan federal census data for our area you will see no mention of pie at all.

But just because it is not a major player in the economy hardly seems like a good reason to shortchange pie at the Fair. The fair is not about the economy. If it were it would be something of a bummer this time around—a weeklong carnival of gloom to mark the dire financial situation in the dairy business. We could hand out special awards to the farms with the biggest debt and greatest negative cash flow and put up an electronic sign in the milking parlor keeping a running total of the milk’s negative worth (farmers get about $6 a hundred weight less for their milk than they spend to produce it). Any cows shown in the judging ring that failed to impress could be sent off immediately for slaughter as part of a herd reduction program and the tractor dealers could offer displays of used equipment. Instead of the usual (and bizarre) cooking utensil demonstrations in the midway, bankruptcy attorneys could offer enthralling spiels touting their services to rapt audiences.

Of course, nothing of the sort will happen at the Fair. The mood and the tractor displays may be a little more subdued than usual, but the celebration will go on. Serious farm kids in clean white shirts will bring their cows and rabbits before soberly attentive judges. Teenagers will flock to nauseating rides. Countless slices of terrible pizza will be eaten. The toy farm dioramas will be put on display and the Argyle firemen will barbeque vast flocks of chickens.

It will go on because the Fair is about not the actual state of farming but the essence of it: the ideal udder (there’s a prize for best udder), the best duck, the most powerful tractor, the perfectly trimmed sheep, the well set table, the latest forage harvester technology, the tallest stalk of corn. It will go on because going on is precisely what farmers do, even if it makes no sense (they talk of people who have gone out of the business in a tone that’s equal parts pity and scorn).

In this context it seems to me that the well-crafted pie has as important a role to play as anything else. Its ingredients—wheat, egg, milk, fruit—are basic farm products. The recipe is so simple a kid can do it, but to do it properly requires effort and hands-on experience best passed down from one generation to the next. It’s modest but a source of quiet pride when done well. It’s always better homemade than store bought. It is made to share. And while pie baking won’t make you rich it will keep you well fed. In other words, it is a rather more appropriate symbol of farming than any cow, and it smells a lot better.

I doubt it would pass muster with your average Washington County farm wife, but you can make a tasty pie (well, a tart, but let’s not quibble) with tomatoes, squash and onion (you can find the recipe on the web site). You could use the spinach or beet greens in an egg and cheese pie (which you can call a quiche if you are determinedly effete) quiche), or put your pepper, roasted and peeled, in a cheddar pie if you want something more American. In fact, you can put just about anything in a pie. Pie is highly adaptable, a quality the dairy industry might want to consider learning from it in order to survive. A quality the industry would be a great deal more likely to grasp if only they let me run the Fair and give pie its proper place.

Since that’s not likely to happen any time soon (the folks on the Fair Board are good eggs, but perhaps a little lacking in whimsy), I just have to put on my own pie celebration. Hence the annual Alleged Farm pie contest (and farm open house), this year on Sunday, September 27^th. I realize this only gives you five weeks to hone your pie making skills and a really good crust takes about three generations to perfect. I feel confident, however, given your obvious commitment to sustainable local farming and ready supply of fresh produce, that you will create something inspired, something surprising, something that in its blend of simple ingredients, hard work and fresh thinking captures the spirit of American agriculture. Or at least tastes good.

13 August 2009

2009-08-13T09:34:00.000-04:00

Basil, Beans, Cabbage or radicchio Cucumber, Eggplant, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Pepper, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tomatoes

Several organizations in Western Massachusetts recently received a little Federal stimulus money to fund summer youth employment programs. These programs, which aim to instill life skills in kids, will be great for the region, according to the people involved, because teenagers who get their hands on money tend to spend it quickly. Thus these government-funded wastrels will give the local economy a small infusion of cash right away. Bravo, a life skill well taught. After all, how are we going to have a strong economy if we don’t teach yet another generation of Americans to spend everything they have—and then some—as fast as they can. A strong Chinese economy, that is.

I cannot help thinking there was a time in this country’s history when people would not—or at least not so blatantly—have celebrated a fellow citizen’s inclination to spend all his money as fast as he earned it. While it is true that in an earlier draft Franklin wrote “a penny saved is a penny pointlessly kept out of the local economy,” his friends, sensing the tenor of the times and afraid that such a saying might harm Franklin’s potential endorsement deals, prevailed upon him to alter it to something more marketable.

Perhaps we lost our taste for thriftiness when we ceased to be a significantly agrarian society. There’s something about farming that makes you a little slow to get your money out of your pocket. It could be the joint pain and muscle fatigue, of course, which leave farmers slow to do much of anything. It could have something to do with the large number of pockets farmers tend to have on their clothes, causing them to have to hunt around for a while to find their wallets. It could also be the perennially meager profits, which tend to reinforce any miserly tendencies. Or the traditional need to set aside some of each year’s harvest to plant the next year’s crops. And it is possible that having all your efforts at the mercy (such as it is) of the weather teaches you to set something aside just in case.

There are drawbacks to such a cautious approach to spending. Farmers tend to avoid investing in new techniques, preferring the safety of the familiar. Risk outweighs potential. This slows the spread of innovations that might well make farming easier, more profitable, safer and less polluting.

The culture of saving also helps breed an ethos of self-reliance that makes effective communal activity difficult. If dairy farmers in this country had agreed to a milk quota system they might have avoided a lot of the financial hardships of the past thirty years. But there was no way they were going to agree to impose limits on themselves for the general good.

Fiscal conservatism has also tended to translate into political conservatism, though the two need not go together. It is hard, in light of our current farm subsidy program, to say that farmers have exactly suffered politically for this. But it has led the farming community to adopt a number of positions—many of them at best tenuously related to agriculture—that alienate many people who would otherwise be disposed to support its interests, and to stick to a system that fails to serve the needs of many farmers. I would be happy to trade those subsidies, which of course don’t go to farmers like me, for programs offering serious support for things such as farmland conservation, habitat protection, regional planning, education and marketing. Instead of paying a relatively small number of farms to grow more corn, we could be giving grants to lots of farmers to make capital improvements, develop new products, control fertilizer runoff, build worker housing and place easements on the best pieces of ground.

Still, even if we farmers are a bit tight fisted and stodgy and Luddite and too proud for our own good, I cannot help thinking we might find better life skills to teach kids than how to dispose of disposable income. Such as how to deal with adversity, stick with a hard job or enjoy simple pleasures like a dry day or the flight of a blue heron or a ripe tomato.

Actually, given the way things are going this season, I don’t know if a ripe tomato counts as a simple pleasure. It is turning out to be a bit more complicated to come by them than usual. For instance, we (by which I mean Jan) have had to spray the plants weekly with copper to ward off late blight and try to control the bacterial disease that has run amok in the greenhouse. Obviously, our efforts are paying off. I do, however, given the amount of spraying we have done, have to warn you to wash the tomatoes in your share. It is worth the effort. I have eaten tomato salad several times in the past week and don’t show any signs of getting tired of it yet.

I have also been eating a fair amount of coleslaw happily. I have been making a dressing with oil, vinegar, a little cream, a lot of mustard and a bit of soy sauce, sesame oil and chile oil. You could use some finely diced hot pepper instead of the chile oil.

As for the other 12 crops in the share, if you are not sure what to do with them come out to the farm this Sunday between 10 and 2 and I (and perhaps some other members) can offer suggestions. Plus you can see the farm (including the giant pig), check up on vegetables you will get in future shares, have a picnic, ask the farmer questions, look for newts (we dug one up in the potato patch), and pitch in with a small farming task to find out what life lessons weeding can teach you. I hope I will see you here.

6 August 2009

2009-08-07T10:12:00.002-04:00

Arugula, Basil, Beets, Cucumbers, Frisee endive, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Candy onion, Pepper, Ancho or Anaheim hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

My friend Jim sent me an e-mail in January from Texarkana asking if he could work on the farm this season. It was in many ways an unlikely request. Even healthy, he tended towards a languid Southern pace, his work frequently interrupted by snacks and siestas.

I would have been happy to spend more time with him. We had an easy friendship, in part because of our shared interests but mostly because of his real genius for friendship—his eagerness to know all sorts of different people as they are rather than as reflections of himself. A fundamental, unshakeable optimist, he took pleasure in my misanthropic tendencies, merely laughing off my gloomiest statements. He was excellent company, but I don’t know that I would have chosen him for a farm worker even at his healthiest.

And he was not at his healthiest. He had been dealing with advanced metastatic renal cancer for a couple of years. While a wonder drug (there are moments I have kind thoughts for the pharmaceutical industry)—and a kidney removal—had taken care of the major tumor, he had lesions on his liver, lungs and brain. He had gone home to Texarkana to spend a warm winter with his parents and gain some weight on a steady diet of good Southern home cooking. It was working—chicken-fried steak being every bit the equal of anything out of a drug laboratory—and he had regained his normal weight and his normal optimism.

But I felt pretty certain his optimism had outpaced his physical capacity. He had the energy to stay up all day, to go around town, to write to friends and read. But farming demands more than that. There are, I know, more grueling activities—fire fighting, underwater demolition, alligator wrestling—but the steady grind of farm work places physical demands on the body that will wear down the fittest in the course of a season. Jim, fatter but still seriously depleted by illness and chemotherapy, simply lacked the stamina for day after day of grunt labor. I don’t know that he had the stamina for one day of it.

Jim certainly knew about the physical nature of the job. He had been here often enough, helped out a bit in the fields, heard me talk about it, seen what the job had done to my back. And, at least on some level, he was aware of his own condition, his basic unfitness for the sort of work we do here. And yet he felt a desire to come to the farm and join me in the fields. I cannot say for sure why, but I think he had fallen prey to the notion that farming is good for you—that an agricultural sojourn would aid in his recovery at least as much as fresh biscuits and medicine.

That farming will cure what ails you is a surprisingly common idea, a misguided extension perhaps of that basic parental injunction to go outside and play, the fresh air will do you some good, mixed with a belief in the value of hard work and the spiritual value of communing with nature, plus a feeling that if vegetables are healthy then growing them must be extra healthy. I suppose there’s something to it. Certainly going outside, an increasingly uncommon destination, offers many possible rewards, including, I suppose the chance for some sort of spiritual awakening for those prone to such things. Hard work has its rewards too, and people ought to try doing a little even if they intend to avoid it thereafter so they can at the very least appreciate what they are not doing. As for the health effects of growing vegetables, it does tend to provide you with more vegetables than you might otherwise have and perhaps a greater desire to eat them, so that could do you some good.

None of that, however, makes farming good for you. Keeping warm in the winter is good for you, but that does not mean you should walk into a fire. I cannot imagine prescribing farming as a course of treatment for any malady physical or mental. It makes the feeble feebler, the depressed gloomier. We might well have had a great time out in the fields, Jim and I, talking about books and noshing on beans and lying in the cool grass admiring the golden evening light on the hillside. But he would not have been able to do much farming, and what farming he did would not, I am sorry to say, have made him better.

It is nice though, to imagine he was right, to think of him blossoming as the days passed, each menial tedious task, each tub spinach harvested, each row of carrots weeded, each tray of lettuce seeded restoring his health. We could have sent him off to clean up the onion patch or pick cucumbers and felt no guilt about giving him the worst tasks because they were doing him good. And then when word got out about his farming-induced remission we would have had an army of sickly peons vying to take on all our work, begging for a chance to pound tomato stakes or grease the tractor. We would have wandered among the suddenly immaculate beds of vibrant crops, cool and relaxed and pleased to help others by having them help us.

Unfortunately, Jim never made it back to the farm to test its healing properties. Doctors and Southern cooking can only do so much. It’s too bad. I could use a dose of his optimism in this strange wet season. He would have known that the weather can only improve, have happily predicted a warm dry fall. And he would have laughed and pointed out that things can hardly be as bad as I suggest when we can fill the bags with fourteen different crops and manage, finally, to coax a reasonable numbers of ripe tomatoes from the reluctant vines. And then, his work done, he would have munched on a cucumber and gone off to nap.

Rest in peace.

30 July 2009

2009-07-30T22:59:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Lemon basil, Broccoli, Carrots, Cucumbers, Dill, Eggplant, Escarole, Garlic, Lettuce, Onion, Pepper, Radishes, Squash

They say you are never more than three feet away from a spider. Well, not a spider as in one particular spider. I don’t mean to provoke the paranoid belief that some arachnid doppelganger shadows your every move. Spiders are crafty, but not that crafty. Plus I am pretty sure most of them do not live that long. Actually, I have no idea what the life expectancy is for a spider. They did not say anything about that when they told me about our average proximity to spiders.

Whoever they are. Probably the same they who told us that 90% of people who lose weight on a diet gain it back within a year or that 12% of the population is gay or all those other catchy, media-friendly statistics that turn out to be someone’s best guess and not a statistic of any sort at all.

Obviously they have not come around, yardsticks in hand, and checked on all of us and our spider neighbors. I suppose they base the claim on an estimate of the spider population, though I would guess it is a rough estimate rather than a comprehensive web to web census. I have never tried counting spiders, but I have spent enough time around them (well, I suppose we all have, haven’t we) to recognize that trying to keep track of them for an accurate count would prove frustrating at the least. The ones that just sit on their webs are easy enough, but the world is full of peripatetic spiders, and they don’t show much inclination to sit still while you count them. They have busy lives. They are always hurrying off somewhere.

Still, the three foot rule seems about right to me. I confess that at this moment I can only see one spider and it is 38 inches away (make that about 40 now that I have disturbed it by waving a measuring tape at it). But no doubt if I poked around behind the desk I would find some more even closer. And if I were out in the field (sorry to disturb your image of me, but I do not compose these pieces while ambling amongst the crops) I would be a lot closer to a lot more spiders. A lot of different kinds of spiders too, some of which have specific habitats. There are several kinds, including a small white one and another with a red spot, that I only ever come across on the currants. The big yellow orb weavers with the distinctive lightning bolt pattern in their webs appear in long grass in August. Little hairy black jumping spiders hang out on the empty seedling trays in the greenhouse. The wolf spiders prowl amongst the leafy crops in the field houses. We have at least as wide—and colorful—an array of spiders as of birds.

We always have spiders close at hand here, but I am sure there are less spidery places in the world where one could easily get considerably further than three feet from one. A California strawberry field, for instance. Given what California strawberry farmers do to the soil and spray on the plants I doubt you would find much life at all in one of their fields other than the Mexcans pickings the fruit. Living things, with the possible exception of migrant labor, just complicate farming, and strawberry farmers are looking to make their job as simple and predictable as possible. Better to turn the dirt into a sterile growing medium much like those plastic cubes of Pro-mix at garden centers. For all the good it can do, living soil just carries too many risks.

I recognize that a lot of people feel less than complete affection for spiders. I am not entirely enamored myself. I have never felt the slightest inclination, for instance, to keep a tarantula as a pet, and I can think of many things I prefer to finding a large spider on me. But I’d rather live in a place where I run the risk of discovering spiders on me than in spot that has been rendered spider-free. And anyway, most spiders want to get close to us as little as we want to get close to them. They have much better things to do than hang out with spider squashing giants. Just imagine how disgusted spiders feel when they learn that they are never more than three feet away from us.

Anyway, right now I am a good deal less worried about the ubiquity of arachnids, who after all do useful things like eat bugs, than about that of gastropods, who do unhelpful things like eat eggplants. I would feel pretty excited this summer if I could find a spot in the fields where I could get as much as three feet away from a slug.

Fortunately, they have not quite achieved Biblical plague levels yet so we still have some vegetables. Quite an array this week actually. I had not expected to find so many eggplants, but the plants have recovered admirably from their early season tribulations. The pepper plants, I am afraid, remain less promising, but we will get some fruits. Fortunately I had the foresight to plant the garlic in raised beds last fall, so it has done remarkably well in tough conditions. We have about 9,000 heads spread out on the upper floor of the barn to dry. I don’t have high expectations for summer broccoli—it disappoints more often than not—but our first planting has succeeded well enough. I am not going to show it at the County Fair, but I am happy to get broccoli for all of you. I may be happier to have escarole for everyone than everyone is to have escarole, but I hope you will give it a chance. It is my favorite cooking green. Arugula is Liz’s favorite salad green. If I am not careful, she can do more damage to a bed of arugula than the slugs will. Lemon basil, as you may recall, plays a central role in the official farm cocktail. But you can use it for other things. Chop up some lemon basil and garlic and put it grilled vegetables. Last year we had a disastrously bad carrot crop. The weather has not really been any better this year, but so far the carrots are. I am glad to have them back. And I am always happy to have onions—in part because I like onions, in part because we put a lot of work into the onion patch. We hoed and hand weeded it three times this spring, which kept it clean long enough to give the plants a chance to grow. And now Sam and Will have undertaken the task—not entirely by their choice—of weeding the patch one last time, a slow and tedious job as I am sure they would be happy to tell you. But probably easier than carrying out a spider census, though I suspect they would rather give that a try. Perhaps they can count the spiders in the onion patch as they weed. It would give them something other than weeding to think about, and it is vital to think about something other than weeding when you are weeding.

23 July 2009

2009-07-24T10:35:00.000-04:00

Basil, Beets, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Dill, Garlic, Lettuce, Peas, Hot pepper, Scallions, Squash

I am a little worried about our St. Bernard puppy. He seems to have a nice disposition and a real social instinct. Yes, he is still a little nippy, but he has gotten much better and even learned to obey a few simple commands, at least when he has nothing better to do or knows for sure that heeding us will get him a treat. He is attractive and fuzzy and has an endearing ability to chase his tail for quite a long time before getting dizzy and falling over. I think he will make a fine pet.

Which is all well and good, but does he meet the breed standard? It is probably a little early to say. He is all of three months old and roughly a fifth of his adult size. Still, it is best to start assessing his conformation as soon as possible so we know whether or not we are dealing with a worthy representative of the breed. And frankly there is some cause for concern. I cannot help noting a slightly deficient supra-orbital ridge and perhaps some slightly imperfect upper jaw flews. I hate to say it but the way they curve into the lower edge is not as pretty as one might hope. All of which would not be so bad if his tail were more pleasing. I hesitate to speak harshly of one so young and agreeable, but there is no denying that his tail is a smidgen or two—oh well, let’s be honest, three smidgens—shorter than ideal and has a tip that could not really be described accurately as powerful. Mildly vigorous, perhaps, but certainly not powerful. I am sure we will find some way to feel affection for him in the long run, but I fear it will always be tempered by his glaring imperfections.

The fact that those monks up in the Alps never worried about breeding dogs that conformed to some ideal doesn’t matter. Sure they interbred their dogs with Newfoundlands to get long coats and mixed in the genes of various local mutts as needed. But what did they know? They were just trying to come up with animals that could carry out mountain rescues and make good companions during the long winters. That might be good enough for monks, but it is not the sort of behavior that wins you best in show trophies.

Of course, anyone truly concerned with maintaining breed purity would not have time for dogs. Surely we should all be working to raise ideally formed wolves, eschewing the tragic aberrations of wolfness that abound today. Once you accept the idea of different breeds of dogs you accept the idea that living things can change their form. Those monks concocted St. Bernards in relatively short order from locally available mutts and then altered them in various ways a number of times. And then breeders made further alterations, with the result that English St. Bernards have different standards from American ones (for a start, they have to possess a well formed sense of self-deprecating irony).

We seem to understand that things don’t always come true to type. If they did dog shows would be rather pointless affairs (rather than the profoundly meaningful events they are). But we have trouble accepting that this variation is a good thing, a natural force to celebrate rather than a challenge to be overcome. We prefer to know exactly what we are getting—even if what we are getting is reliably bad. Hence, at least in part, the success of McDonalds (it is possible the billions of dollars of advertising and large quantities of fat and salt also contribute to that success).

I don’t mean to deny the value of reliability. I count on the seeds I plant to produce the promised crops. I was less than entirely amused by a batch of Sugar Snap seeds I planted several years ago that produced significant numbers of bad snow pea vines, and I nearly gave up on growing radicchio because the results were so unpredictable.

But it was people playing around with variability who came up with Sugar Snap peas in the first place and developed the new varieties of radicchio that produce a significant percentage of relatively uniform heads. And if that batch of pea seeds had produced vines with positive new traits, such the ability to grow clusters of peas that turn red when ripe, I would have been a fool to ask for my money back because I didn’t get precisely the pea variety I anticipated.

Given what we are doing to the climate, we had better learn to appreciate the ability of living things to vary. If, for instance, this summer’s weather were to become the norm we would either have to give up on all sorts of crops (the eggplants, peppers and tomatoes appear to be completely baffled by the conditions), go to enormous lengths to modify conditions (by, for instance, installing a retractable dome over the farm), or work to develop crops with better tolerance for wet soil and cold nights and an ability to fend off armies of slugs (which are out there right mounting a sluggish blitzkrieg on our bean rows).

I suspect that in the end farmers will have to use all three methods to deal with climate change. But the availability of new varieties suited to whatever weather we end up with will be essential to farm viability. Neither jettisoning products nor making massive investments in infrastructure is by itself—or in combination with the other—feasible unless farm economics change as radically as the climate threatens to. Which seems unlikely. I don’t see any sign of us giving up on our belief in the sacred right to cheap food.

In which case farmers had better have a range of varieties that can thrive with relatively minimal, relatively inexpensive assistance. And that may require some strange alterations to vegetables as we know them right now. But then we have already made pretty significant changes to just about every crop we eat. You don’t find a lot of cauliflowers growing in the wild.

Fortunately, some of our existing crops are finding ways to deal with this odd season. The peas, for instance, apparently like it, the garlic has done quite nicely this year, and we have more cucumbers than we need. So enjoy them while you still recognize them, but try not to get too obsessively attached to their current form. And who knows, maybe that kale-tomato cross and those eggdives will be so delicious that you won’t believe you could ever have eaten anything else.

16 July 2009

2009-07-18T21:33:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Cucumbers, Black currants, Dill, Lettuce, Sugar snap peas, Scallions, Squash, Oasis turnips

Just about any grocery store in New York has tomatoes for sale year round. Oddly enough, the quality never seems to fluctuate that much. You’ll get the same unsatisfying tomatoes with an eating quality somewhere between that of a fruit and a packing material when the world is buried in feet of snow and when local farmers’ fields are full of tasty fresh produce.

I understand the appeal of finding produce available months out of season, the appeal of not having to wait for those too brief weeks when we can enjoy the bounty of our farms, the appeal of being able to get whatever you want when you want it.

But I also understand the differences between truly fresh produce and most of what passes for “fresh”. Just because something has not been frozen or processed does not make it fresh. The average vegetable we encounter grew who knows where who knows when who knows how.

Now, it is true you don’t have to know all about your turnips. You can go ahead and pop them in your mouth completely ignorant of their history. On the other hand, once you have put them in your mouth you probably are planning on swallowing them. Wouldn’t you prefer to know just a little more about your food before it gets to your stomach? Such as when it was picked, or what it was sprayed with. Or maybe even what variety it is and who picked it and which field it grew in.

Try asking a produce manager to tell about the turnips on his shelves. Then try asking your farmer about the turnips in your share. I like Hakurei best, but the seed costs a lot—$45 for the four ounce packet I bought this year—and sometimes the tops are a little paltry and fragile. So this year we also tried Oasis, and the bed Jan sowed in the patch between the field houses and the strawberries has done well though we never sprayed it with anything (we used a row cover to keep off the flea beetles). Jan, Mike and Adrienne picked the turnips on Tuesday, ran them through the barrel washer and put them in the cooler.

That may well satisfy your curiosity about your turnips. But maybe you wonder where exactly this turnip bed is on the farm and what we used for fertilizer and who these people picking your turnips are and you have lost track of whether Oasis is a worker or a turnip. Well, if you are the sort of person who wants to know more you might consider coming out to the farm this season.

I won’t claim that seeing the farm and meeting the farm crew will necessarily makes the turnips or any of the other produce taste better. But the taste of food depends to a significant extent on its context, on how and where and when one encounters it. My workers and I once had a miraculously good lunch at the Cambridge diner. I doubt we would have enjoyed it so much if we had not just spent the morning picking and washing hundred of pounds of carrots in the snow. Sitting in a warm dry place with a mug of hot coffee was enough to make the meal remarkable—and to be fair they had good blackberry pie back then.

I don’t mean to suggest that you need to come to the farm and get soaking wet and bitterly cold so you can truly appreciate root vegetables. But I would like to think that walking through the (I hope dry) fields and talking with the crew and learning a bit about what we do might add some element to your enjoyment of what you get from us each week.

9 July 2009

2009-07-09T09:54:00.000-04:00

Basil, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Green garlic, Lettuce, Marjoram or summer savory, Sugar Snap peas, Radicchio, Squash

For years I have been telling potential workers that my health plan consists of a steady supply of fresh produce. Which is and is not a joke because it really is the best health care plan I can offer my workers.

Well, that is not entirely true. I could buy health insurance for them. I could provide a masseur and a well equipped coffee bar too while I was at it, both of which would also enhance the work experience. I would just have to go into debt to do so. At least the masseur and the coffee bar are conceivably affordable. Health insurance, on the other hand, would probably finish off the farm.

Not that a steady supply of fresh produce is just a joke of a health plan. We could come up with a lot worse ways in this country to improve our health than large doses of produce. In fact, we have. Fruits and vegetables have a number of things in their favor. Aside from being good for us—especially compared to what we eat much of the time—they are widely available and cheap. They are also generally safe to use and made right here in the U.S. (often by foreigners, of course), and they come in a remarkable array of colors, shapes and textures to match just about any décor.

I don’t mean to suggest that produce would cure all our ills. I am unaware, for instance, of a good vegetative fix for a broken arm, though I suppose you could work up some sort of sling using various greens if you had to. But getting a lot more people to eat a lot more vegetables would significantly reduce the incidence of any number of medical problems—diabetes and heart disease just for a start. Simply getting people to eat kale or bok choi once a week would probably save us a few billions dollars in health care costs each year.

Unfortunately, I have not the vaguest idea how you would get most Americans to eat kale regularly. People will, at enormous expense, ingest vast arrays of pills and undergo all sorts of dangerous procedures in a quest for good health. But I suspect they would consider a weekly dose of kale rather too high a price to pay. Perhaps if we improved the packaging, added an X or two to the name and put a hundred million dollars into the promotional effort…

My workers eat plenty of dark leafy greens. They even like them. And so far I guess it has been working. No serious diseases I know of. In fact, so far nobody has had to go to the hospital.

Well, except me. Eating kale may be good for you, but fifteen years of bending over or crouching to pick it takes a toll. Hence the screws in my spine. Fortunately, I have health insurance thanks to Liz’s job off the farm. Forty thousands dollars of transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion cost me $18.

Take away that insurance, though, and I would be facing some tough choices, trying to find a balance between pain and debt I could live with. That’s a form of health care rationing that critics of a national plan tend not to talk about so much. But it is the form our system forces on people without insurance, people like my farm workers—and most other farm workers in this country too. Socialized medicine, like kale, is no panacea. Neither, however, is to be feared any more than our socialized street lights or socialized Coast Guard. If we are going to have to make choices about how we dole out health care, we can find a better way to allocate it than basing on the patient’s net assets.

For instance, we could make it contingent upon patients having eaten all their vegetables. We make kids finish their vegetables in order to get the stuff they want. I don’t see why the rest of us cannot live by the same rule. Want an appointment with your dermatologist? Have some radicchio first. You can eat it in your salad or cut it into quarters, dunk it in water, brush it with olive oil and grill it. Need a new pair of glasses? Then get to work on that head of cabbage, perhaps in a slaw or sautéed with bacon and scallions. Hoping for a refill on that prescription? Eat some squash—sliced and sautéed with green garlic and herbs—and then ask for more pills. Eager to talk with a doctor about the pain in your back? Why not snack on some snap peas (boiled in salted water for no more than a couple of minutes) or cucumber salad before you start that conversation. Back operation? Salad, then surgery.

Imagine if we actually go with this system. We will be helping you to get to the head of the line every week. And suddenly my produced-based health care plan for my workers will make real sense. No joke.

2 July 2009

2009-07-05T06:09:00.000-04:00

Basil, Beets or turnips, Frisee endive , Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Parsley, Scallions, Squash

As a man of faith in myself deeply cognizant of my many and various duties, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. I have let down my farm, my workers, CSA members, farmers, vegetables eaters, citizens of this great nation, people of the world and several rows of eggplants. I am deeply humbled by how many people, significant and powerful and hungry people, I have let down—more people, I dare say, than anyone else has previously let down. And I have been able to let down so many so quickly, let me note for slower members of the audience, because so many looked to me for guidance on a whole host of topics, topics I often knew nothing about but spoke of in a quiet and dignified and authoritative way nonetheless.

I don’t expect everyone I have let down to forgive me right away, though that would make my life a whole lot easier. Forgiveness, like a good chicken stock, is a thing that can take time, especially when you don’t deserve it. But I am willing to spend as much time as it takes compelling people to forgive me so I can get myself out of this mess, even if that means going on Oprah and abasing myself for the pleasure of her audience. Since earning all that forgiveness will be so time consuming, and as an act of contrition, I herewith resign from all boring committee work and any charitable activities so that I can dedicate myself more fully to clearing my name.

When I spoke to my workers the other day and told them I could not help weed the carrots because I had to let the puppy out, I was telling them something true. We do have a puppy, a ten-week-old St. Bernard, and he most certainly has to be taken outside pretty regularly, even if that means I have to miss out on some carrot weeding.

But that was not the whole truth. While it was true that our actual puppy actually needed to go outside, I may have misled my workers concerning my whereabouts since I was in fact not with the puppy but in North Dakota seeing another farm. I am not proud of this and it is hard to admit since it makes me seem like such a creep and nobody likes looking like a creep. I am, however, compelled to admit the truth now because I have been caught and my public relations people say it is better to deal with the scandal than sit around doing nothing and hoping it will go away. Which is why I am standing here now accepting responsibility for my actions and asking that they be forgiven without really admitting to anything specific.

I don’t particularly mind that politicians across this great nation have entered into a spirited competition to make complete asses of themselves. If that is what keeps them amused, fine. But maybe they should have told us first so that we could more fully appreciate their efforts and aims. The unpleasantness that has arisen recently stems from our failure to recognize that they are attempting not so much to govern as to embarrass themselves.

Now that we understand the game we can feel a real sense of pride as New Yorkers in our State Senate, which has shown remarkable dedication in striving for victory. Lesser legislatures would have balked by now. But not our fearless representatives, who forge ahead blindly into uncharted realms of self-serving incompetence, determined to spare us no expense in their pursuit of power.

I cannot help getting the feeling that some institution very like the New York State Senate has control of the weather at the moment. Unwilling to agree on which way to move the low pressure system plaguing us this week, they leave it in place, subjecting us every day to further afflictions. And just when you think that surely the consequences of inaction have caused enough havoc that they will feel compelled to act, something worse comes along. Something like the storm yesterday afternoon, an evil monsoon wandering far from its native clime. By my rough estimate it dropped around three million cubic feet of water on the farm in the course of an hour. On the bright side, I have a pretty good idea now of precisely where ditches are prone to overflow into fields, and we won’t have to water the greenhouses for quite some time. And if I failed yesterday to note some of the spots prone to flooding, well maybe I will get another chance today. Or tomorrow.

It is too soon to say precisely what effect this deluge and all the other relentless wet weather will have on the crops, though I can pretty well guarantee that it is not doing them any good. Plants like to breathe and don’t find doing so underwater much easier than we do. Even the weeds look a trifle piqued. I am seriously contemplating moving the whole farm to a sandy hilltop, but I have not worked out the details of the move yet. Perhaps I will refer the matter to the State Senate for action.

In the meantime, we managed to find a few less than completely saturated vegetables for you this week, most of them familiar, though I trust still welcome. The squash (by which I mean both summer squash and zucchini) have kindly added their modest efforts to the offering. It is hard, I admit, to get too excited by a squash—they would have to have a lot more flavor to merit excitement—but I like them sliced and grilled and dressed with a little vinaigrette and basil—particularly cold on a sandwich, perhaps with some garlic scape pesto and cheese.

Endives, I know, often meet with a less than enthusiastic response. But I think frisee (the head of frilly leaves) deserves attention, even from people who shy away from bitter greens. Not only do the leaves look pretty in a salad, but they also add a note—well, let’s be honest, a bitter note—that highlights—to good effect in my opinion—the lettuce’s sweetness. Or you can cook your frisee and mix it with sautéed scapes to make nice garlicky greens. If that’s not compelling enough, bear in mind that it is good for you. You can also use it as a pompom and possibly do a little light dusting with it.

Or use it to threaten your Senator. Perhaps the threat of bitter greens is just the thing to get the Senate back to work. It is worth a try. Obviously a sense of public duty, wide spread derision, the need to pass legislation and a judge’s order don’t have any effect. And if endive fails too, why not bean them with a big kohlrabi.

25 June 2009

2009-06-26T21:23:00.000-04:00

Basil, Beets or turnips, Chard, Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Oregano, Scallions

This past winter it snowed heavily in London. Heavily by London’s standards. Six inches. Enough to turn the morning commute, a messy affair at the best of times, into a complete disaster. Mass transit came to a halt. There was a fifty mile traffic jam heading into the city. Even the trains stopped running. A complete cockup. And people were mad.

The government, they pointed out, had had several days warning of the impending storm. Indeed, the government itself had spent several days warning everyone else to prepare for what would prove to be the worst winter storm in 18 years. And yet when the snow arrived the government proved unprepared. Streets went unplowed. Schools closed. Trains—yes, British trains—stopped running. Shocking and inexcusable. If a London financier cannot count on making his daily fifty mile commute into the city in a snow storm without facing serious delays, what has the country come to? Even the French could have done a better job. Well, maybe not the French, but the Swiss certainly.

What has England come to indeed? This stiff upper lipped, nature worshipping, world conquering nation of ironists thrown into a petulant fit because the government cannot maintain suitable control of the weather in order to allow people to drive themselves ridiculous distances to get to work on a day any sensible person would have settled down by the fire with a mug of tea, a wheaty biscuit and a Thomas Hardy novel.

Actually, it sounds like they have come to the same place the rest of us inhabit. The place where we don’t have to think about the weather much any more because we have created all sorts of ways to go on without or in spite of it. We have turned the weather from a major force into a minor irritation. And we have been able to do that in large part because we don’t have to produce our own food any more.

When you have a well stocked grocery store with food from all over the planet, suddenly those rainy spells or gusts of wind or bursts of hail, all that weather well short of newsworthy that can nonetheless have a real effect on how your garden grows, they don’t matter so much any more. Sure, there are still ways the weather can mess with your life even if you don’t grow your own supper. You can be carried off in a flood or hit by lightning or have your golf tournament delayed (and maybe even all three at once). But if you only pay attention to those moments you understand the weather about as well as you would understand soccer by watching a highlight reel.

Not that having some protection from the normal vagaries of the weather is a bad thing. I do not wish to suggest that we should go back to some authentic lifestyle of deprivation. Getting through the winter on decreasing quantities of increasingly moldy root vegetables does not ennoble anybody. We spend considerable amounts of effort and money on the farm trying to fend off the effects of ordinary weather. We put up high tunnels and put on row covers and put in drain tile and turn on irrigation and build up raised beds and lay down biodegradable black plastic mulch. And just about every day something about the weather makes us wish we could do more.

But there’s a big difference between combating the weather and ignoring it—or at least ignoring it until it forces you to pay attention. Farmers may not like the weather—I have yet to meet one who has anything really nice to say about it—but like the participants in any great war, we have a serious respect for our foe. We know what it can do in ways both violent and subtle. Those whiny British commuters, on the other hand, seem to have come to regard the weather as just another social problem to be managed into submission. If the government could only do its job properly we would not have to worry about being assaulted by panhandlers, hooligans, inflation, labor unions or snow storms.

“Make it go away,” however, is not a reasonable request. We may be well on our way to proving that we can change the weather in profound ways, but not in profound ways that inspire confidence in our ability to tame it. The weather remains, as always, quite distinctly both a part of our lives and beyond our control. As such, it deserves attention, no matter where you get your food. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to find a way to live with it.

For the moment we are living with the weather by picking a significant portion of your share—basil, beets, scallions, lettuce, kohlrabi, turnips—in the high tunnels. Those tunnels make a huge difference. We spent an hour yesterday afternoon trellising the greenhouse tomatoes, some of which have already grown over the tops of their stakes. We even found three ripe cherry tomatoes. I wish we had space inside for the eggplants and sweet peppers, which are just starting to recover from the shock of a last late frost now that the nights have finally warmed up. Those warm nights have also allowed us to take the covers of the squash and cucumbers and at the moment they look content. Fortunately, the peas and potatoes and onions don’t mind the cold nearly as much and appear to be thriving.

If I sound a little like I am hedging my bets, like I am unwilling to declare that we are well on our way to a glorious season, well that is because I am. Things could be in far worse shape, but the rain already has us behind schedule on weeding (to be fair, we are always at least a little behind schedule on weeding; unlike people, weeds have clearly learned to live with the weather) and direct seeding and there are spots that have been constantly wet now for long enough to effect the crops there. Plus I have no idea what plans the weather has for us. I would happily offer up suggestions—near drought conditions would suit this farm fine—but I have yet to figure out an effective way to deliver them. Muttering under my breath and staring hostilely at the sky, which I have been trying on and off for fifteen years, does not appear to work. Likewise, I think I can rule out sarcasm, voluble swearing and various rude hand gestures. It is possible that certain traditional dances or animal sacrifices might get the message through, but opportunities for embarrassment and mess seem perhaps a little too high to risk. Which leaves me with no alternative but to contact my elected representatives and get the government to take care of this issue. I have no illusions. It won’t be easy. I don’t expect immediate result. But compared, say, to saving the American automobile industry, surely reining in the weather will seem like a manageable undertaking.

18 June 2009

2009-06-19T20:55:00.001-04:00

Arugula, Beets or Hakurei turnips, Bok choi, Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Mustard greens, Scallions, Basil, Mint

Hi there folks! How are you doing this evening? My name’s Thomas, and I will be your farmer tonight. Can I start you off with something to drink? Perhaps a mint/basil syrup and bourbon cocktail garnished with a slice of kohlrabi? Some water? Tap or rain?

Let me tell you about tonight’s specials. This week the farm is offering a very fresh, very tender kohlrabi. It is presented with a few kohlrabi leaves, kohlrabi skin, and just a touch of greenhouse dirt enriched with compost.

We also have some very nice garlic scapes, hand harvested from the tops of garlic plants and arranged in curlicues for no obvious reason. You will find they have a flavor very reminiscent of garlic, with a not so subtle garlic aroma and a garlicky finish.

Our mustard greens of the day are mustard greens. They are being served in an assortment of shapes and colors.

For lettuce we have either red oakleaf, red leaf or green boston. The farm chooses the one it thinks will suit you best. They are all being done en tete this evening.

There’s a lovely arugula with rubber band, which I think is just terrific. I could eat it all the time.

If you are in the mood for roots, perhaps you would enjoy beets or turnips with their greens.

The scallions are just in. I have not had a chance to try them yet, but they look absolutely terrific.

For an Asian twist, we have a hefty artisanal bok choi with contrasting leaf and stem textures.

And finally, for herbivores we have mint and basil.

Unless somebody already drank them.

But enough silliness. You don’t want a joke; you want a recipe. Fair enough. So take equal parts sugar and water and stir together in a pot. Put over medium heat and slowly bring to a boil, stirring until all the sugar has dissolved. As soon as the mix comes to a boil, turn the heat all the way down and simmer for five minutes. Take the syrup off the heat and add basil and mint leaves. Let the herbs steep until the mixture has cooled and then strain them out. Put roughly equal quantities of good bourbon and syrup in a glass, add ice, stir and sip. A few of those and I think you will find all your worries about how to prepare bok choi ebbing away.

And if that does not work you can try going to the farm website, theallegedfarm.com, and checking the recipe section to see if there are any good ideas there. Or try adding more bourbon to your next drink.

Perhaps, though, you already have a good bok choi (or mustard green or garlic scape or kohlrabi or cocktail (or kohlrabi cocktail)) recipe, something you think other members might appreciate as they nurse a drink and mull over the array of vegetables on their kitchen counter. If you send it to me I will add it to the recipe collection on the website.

In addition to recipes, you will also be able to get newsletters from the website and information about farm events, such as our farm days and fall open house/pie contest. I am still figuring out the dates for most of these, but I can say that the first farm day will be on Sunday, July 19^th. It will be a chance for you to come and see where those kohlrabis come from and meet the farm crew (well, not Josh; he’s off to Alaska in a couple of days to fish for salmon) and maybe find out just how much fun you can have while weeding onions. I will remind you of the date and offer further details in future newsletters.

In the meantime, in this newsletter I will offer further details about those garlic scapes since I know I have not put a recipe for them on the website and I recognize that it might not be immediately apparent what you should do with them other use them in some sort of children’s game. While they make fine toys, they make a better sauce. Just cut them into 2 inches pieces and put them in a blender with about ¼ cup olive oil, ¼ cup grated parmesan, salt, pepper, a few hot pepper flakes, a splash of vinegar and some basil leaves and puree until you have a smooth sauce. You can use it on pasta or grilled meat and fish or as a dip for vegetables, such as slices of kohlrabi. You can also just cut them into pieces and sauté them in olive oil over medium low heat with a generous amount of salt until they have started to go a little brown in spots and are somewhat tender. They have the texture of good green beans and a sweet garlic flavor. Some of those, perhaps a few sautéed turnips and scallions or some steamed bok choi, a nice green salad with arugula; sounds like a good meal to me.

Are you ready to order?

30 October 2008

2008-10-30T10:20:00.000-04:00

Arugula, Carrots, Cress, Escarole or radicchio, Garlic, Kale, Onions, Parsnips, Potatoes, Sage, Shallots, Turnips, Winter squash

This is the way the season ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

Me and Mike whimpering, that is.

Not that a bang would necessarily have provided a better ending to the season. I guess it would depend on what went off. Most of the time, though, when things around here end with a bang it is not so good.

Given the choice, I would have ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with a stretch of warm, dry weather. It would not even have had to be all that warm to satisfy me. Merely average temperatures would have sufficed. That and a little less snow.

On the other hand, this weather leaves little doubt in one’s mind (in mine, anyway) that the farming season has come to a close. On the few occasions in recent years when we have had really terrific fall weather it has been harder to call a halt to farming. The remaining crops in the field (and we always have things left out there in various states of development) all seem to have real potential. This is largely an illusion. By this point in the year, with short days and cold nights, most crops cannot do anything more than hang on. If they have not gotten big enough to pick by the end of October they probably won’t ever, no matter how delightful the weather. I am fully aware of this, but it still feels like one is giving up on the vegetables.

I don’t have to worry about that feeling bothering me this time. We may not have stripped the fields clean of every harvestable vegetable and there are rows of crops that just did not have time to grow. But many of them will not have survived this weather and those that have will feel disinclined to put much further effort into sticking around. In other words, there won’t be much left to give up on.

That does not mean I end this season without regrets. I doubt I will ever have a season good enough to leave me fully satisfied (or expectations modest enough that I could satisfy them). Certainly this was not that season. I never had the workers, weather or back to do nearly all I meant to accomplish. At some point it became clear that getting done what absolutely had to be done would be work enough. Planting cover crops, repairing greenhouses, beefing up deer fence, installing drain tile, building a potato hiller, redoing the hay mow floor; I don’t even remember all the tasks I had in mind that we never got to. And then there were the crops that disappointed, the carrots perhaps foremost among them, but rutabagas, broccoli, cabbage, eggplant, cucumbers and winter squash also certainly worthy (or do I mean unworthy?) of mention. Something always does poorly (hard to avoid when you grow this many crops), but the bizarrely cold June nights and relentless rain in July put extra strain on any number of crops. I don’t know that I have ever seen eggplants look as seriously aggrieved as ours did by the end of June and the carrots never got over the rain.

That said, I hardly think we need apologize for this season. If we were not brilliant we were at least good enough. We delivered a lot of vegetables over the course of the twenty weeks, including some very fine beans, piles of tomatoes, a steady supply of potatoes and enough garlic to keep flocks of vampires at bay. Not to mention the occasional kohlrabi (oops, I just mentioned it). Not being on the receiving end, I am unqualified to say how good it all looked coming out of the bag, but I think most of it looked fairly good going in, though I confess I may have exercised less that ideal oversight for much of July and early August. I hope we, unlike the carrots, did not disappoint.

Perhaps, though, despite everything you already got, you feel the need for a few more vegetables. Well, we happen to have a few crops for sale. In addition to the ones listed below, we may have some other, such as beets and kale. Let us know if you are interested in an unlisted crop (and in what quantity) and I will let you know if we can supply it. Please send orders via e-mail (Thomas@theallegedfarm.com) by November 20^th for delivery on the 24^th (or you can pick up your order from the farm). Orders of $75 or more get a 10% discount.

Onions $1.50/lb

Shallots $5.00/lb

Garlic $8.00/lb

Potatoes $1.50/lb

Parsnips $2.75/lb

Rutabagas* $2.00/lb

Carrots, mixed colors* $2.25/lb

Celeriac* $3.00/lb

*modest quantities available

In addition to the crops for sale, we also have a few out in the field that we would like to send to Community Action for distribution through their food pantry and various soup kitchens. If you would like to help pick these crops please let me know. You will be getting dirty for a good cause, and as thanks from me you will get a 5% discount on your storage crop order.

Speaking of thanks from me, I am as always grateful for your commitment to this unlikely enterprise. I trust that you have found your support for local sustainable agriculture as rewarding as we have and that you have eaten well. Thank you.

23 October 2008

2008-10-26T20:16:00.000-04:00

Red bok choi, Cabbage, Daikon, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Onions, Poblano pepper, Potatoes, Rutabaga

We have spent a lot of money looking for life in the universe. Or, to be more precise, intelligent life. Sure it is kind of exciting to discover a drip of water on some other planet’s surface or possibly even traces of ancient bacteria on a rock from space. But exciting in a slight dry academic sort of way, like when someone finds more digits of psi or a really big prime number. You can appreciate the work that went into it, the hard science, the theoretical ramifications. But it doesn’t really make you want get a new outfit and throw a party. It doesn’t really change anything. We are not sending all those probes out into deep space just to find we share the universe with interstellar mold.

We want friends. Smart friends. Cool friends. Aliens with great ideas about stuff that matters, like how to pull off nuclear fusion, how to save the panda, how to eat cheese without getting fat. We are willing to put up with some pretty strange stuff like extra arms or eyes on stalks just as long as we can have a new pal in the neighborhood, someone to hang out with who will understand how tough it is for a sensitive person to put up with a galaxy like this.

It is unclear what makes us think we will run into creatures like this out there. Even if they have existed on some other planet, there’s no particular reason to believe they will be around when we make contact. We have had life of one sort or another on this planet for around three billion years and, unless we have seriously underestimated dinosaurs, the possibility (and I stress the word possibility) of good conversation for all of ten thousand of those years. Given our current behavior, it will be something of a miracle if that possibility lasts another hundred centuries, and it is hard to say how long it will be before it appears again. Meaning the chances of coming across intelligent life on our own planet at a randomly chosen moment in its history are pretty lousy.

But let’s say we get lucky, run into someone out there with something to say. Given our own experiences with social interaction, why on earth would we think they will want to have anything to do with us. Oh sure, they’ll be polite, express the usual pro forma delight over running into us, what a pleasant surprise, so nice to see us, gosh we’re looking well, have we lost some weight, love what we’ve done with the planet. But when we, needy little creatures, press them about getting together again for dinner they’ll get that evasive look, say it sounds great, they’ll have to check with the wife, things are really busy right now, you know how it is, let’s get in touch, and they’ll still be making that universal hand to ear (or whatever it is they have that pass for hands and ears) I’ll phone you gesture as they hop into the spaceship and rush off.

Why even bother? Who needs to be humiliated by a bunch of snooty aliens too cool to hang out with us? Let’s forget the whole thing, spend that money on our own planet. God knows it could use some help. With that kind of money, even without the help of extraterrestrials, we could find better ways to generate electricity, clean up rivers, provide basic health care for kids, build schools, teach people to farm properly, all of which would help us here and now. Plus if any aliens every do drop in they are a hell of a lot more likely to stick around and share their ideas with us if we have kept the place looking decent.

Perhaps when they get here they will be able to tell me how to get reliable crops of rutabagas. Some years rutabagas work (too well, even), some they don’t work at all (I once harvest a grand total of two rutabagas from four hundred bed feet of perfectly healthy plants). They are somewhere in between this season, but definitely on the less productive end of the scale. Which I know comes as a great disappointment to you. You’ve been waiting all season for a really big rutabaga and all you get is this runt of a root. Hardly enough to go around if the aliens decide to stay for dinner (I have a strange feeling aliens would like rutabagas). I trust the daikon will help to ease the pain.

Plus you have that red bok choi. I know it is not a big rutabaga, but it looks good and probably even tastes good too. I don’t know for sure. I have never eaten one. It is unusual for me to hand out something I have never tried (yes, I have actually eaten rutabagas and daikon). But they were a total failure last year—the whole bed bolted before they sized up—and we only just picked these. At least I know now to wait and grow them in the fall (figured that out all by myself, no help from aliens).

We still have one or two other crops that seem to do well in this weather, a couple of greens, some parsnips, a last bed of carrots. Enough, together with the storage crops in the barn, to do one more week of the share. Next Thursday’s delivery will be the last of the season. We will have some storage crops for sale after the season (mostly onions, shallots, garlic and potatoes). I will send out a price list next week and if we get a reasonable number of orders we will do a delivery shortly before Thanksgiving. Or you can come out to the farm to get your order.

We also have several rows of potatoes that need to be harvested for Community Action’s food pantry. Anyone interested in helping with that project should get in touch with me about coming out to dig potatoes. And if you have any aliens staying with you feel free to bring them along. Since they’re so smart maybe they will know how to get potatoes out of the ground without getting themselves dirty.