August 7 2008

Beans, Cabbage, Carrots, Cucumbers, Garlic, Onions, Peppers, Potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes, Basil, Cilantro, Dill

  Here’s a bag of standard summer vegetables. Nothing weird or unrecognizable or unheard of.  True, a few of the tomatoes are odd colors (there are even some white tomatoes in a couple of shares) and there are round zucchini.  But I doubt that sort of thing even gets your attention at this point.  Whatever the color or shape, it is still a familiar vegetable at heart. 

I mean to suggest neither that these familiar crops are better than some of the odder things we grow nor that you are unable to handle the occasional kohlrabi or dandelion green.  Nor, on the other hand, do I mean to derogate these vegetables by suggesting they are common.  I like growing radicchio and parsley root, husk cherries and tatsoi, lemon grass and celeriac.  But I am no vegetable snob, turning my nose up at the hoi polloi’s produce.  I get as much pleasure from harvesting a nice long carrot or hefty onion as I do from picking a bunch of Chinese broccoli. 

There is much to be said for the more popular crops.  In most cases there are good reasons they are more popular.  We had the radio on in the packing room and the station played an obscure Procul Harum song—by obscure I mean not one of the two Procul Harum songs anyone but a fanatic has ever heard.  It sounded like those two songs, but a lot worse.  It was a useful reminder that whatever one thinks of modern marketed culture, sometimes things—songs or vegetables—deserve their reputation.  Tomatoes, for instance.  I have met one or two sane people who object to tomatoes, but for the vast majority of us the tomato’s (by which I mean the real, vine ripened summer tomato) renown comes as no surprise.

Unfortunately, what does come as a surprise is how few ripe tomatoes we still have.  I keep thinking that this week they will really start to produce and then not much happens.  Not much except more rain and more disease.  So at this point I won’t, in this (I hope) nonstandard summer, promise that you will see huge quantities of tomatoes.  But I remain vaguely optimistic.

Beans also merit praise.  At least, good ones do.  Unfortunately, too many farmers wait too long to pick their beans and then those beans take too long to get to eaters.  They are limp and seedy and fibrous and you have to overcook them to have any chance of getting them down.  It is hard to love a bean like that (unless you are a farmer, in which case you love the fact that you get a bigger yield from bigger beans).  But then it is hard to love cheap ice cream too. 

I have to confess (all right, I don’t have to, but I do it anyway) that I have gotten slightly sick of eating plain carrots.  It is one of the hazards of farming.  You end up snacking on a lot of raw vegetables and sometimes you grow tired of them.  I could happily go a long time without chomping up another carrot.  I have not, however, lost my taste for shredded carrot in all sorts of dishes such as cole slaw, and I am particularly fond of carrot salad—of shredded raw carrot with a strong, mustardy vinaigrette perhaps with a pinch of ground cumin and a little paprika.

Perhaps because I do not snack on them out in the field or in the packing room, I have not grown tired of onions.  Life without onions would be a sad, sad thing.  Raw, fried, grilled, baked, cooked down to mush, pickled, made into chutney or jam, it does not matter.  The only onions I have any reservations at all about are those huge bland ones you can “eat just like an apple.”  Why would you eat an onion just like an apple?  Has anyone ever done this?  Why not just have an apple?  Onions are not supposed to be bland, and it takes a real marketing genius to turn such an obvious shortcoming into a selling point.  It ranks up there with the no heat jalapeno, which as far as I can tell is just a very small green pepper.  It allows people who do not like spicy food to eat “spicy” food.  I am not sure I understand the point.

But then I doubt most modern marketing gurus have me in mind as they craft new products and sales pitches.  I am too cheap, too grouchy, too poorly paid, too rural and way too old.  I guess I could feel sore about that.  But it is kind of nice to belong to an extraneous demographic.  I don’t have to waste my time watching the special cable channel, reading the lifestyle magazine, eating the cereal.  It leaves me with a lot of free time to grow vegetables.

I am going to need all that time soon.  By the end of the month I will have one worker, and he will be away on a Mediterranean cruise (it is what all farm workers do on their time off).  So if you happen to know of people looking for a farm job through the middle of November, please send them my way.  In addition to hourly pay, they get to snack on as many carrots as they can.  Or onions.