25 September 2008

Bok choi, Carrots, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho and Roberto’s Cuban Seasoning hot peppers, Fingerling potatoes, Tomatoes

I have been reminded this week why I should stick to gloomy news here.  I forgot myself last week and dared to suggest that despite a parade of incompetence (or incompetents), I had finally ended up with a few decent, happy workers and that together we would go forth in the golden autumnal sunlight to work vegetable wonders with the help of fecund mother nature, coaxing from the deep loam a parade of fall crops to delight and amaze you.  Or something roughly like that.  I might, in my giddy state, have gotten more carried away than that.

And now I must pay the price for this moment of uncharacteristic exuberance.  True, the weather has not turned abominable.  Yet.  But it will if it has to.  A little sleet or perhaps a good nor’easter.  There’s nothing quite like working in cold mud. 

That may not, however, be necessary.  The pests have already arrived.  I just tossed out trays of aphid-infested lettuce seedlings and the slugs have come out from wherever it is slugs spend time when not chewing up bok choi and Chinese cabbage.  The deer have found the celery root—and found it to their liking.  Apparently it makes a nice change from shell beans, of which they have not left themselves many to graze on. 

And that crew of workers?  Well, does one worker count as a crew?  I knew I would be down to two workers this week.  At least, I thought I knew.  But what I did not know was that Mike #2 would have to stay home with his kids because the day care provider had an accident.  I knew too that Mike #1 would not be in until Tuesday afternoon.  But I did not know that he would get stuck on the Deegan Expressway for three hours and not make it to work until Wednesday.

I have no particular objections to working alone.  In fact, sometimes I like having the farm to myself, like not having to think about what anyone else is doing or ought to be doing or ought not to be doing.  The pleasures of solitude notwithstanding, however, it is hard to avoid noting after a morning picking up two rows of fingerling potatoes how much quicker the job would have gone had four people been doing it instead of one.  I suppose it is nice to discover that I can pick just about all the vegetables for the share myself if I have to.  But I would have liked to get a few other tasks done and perhaps to have spent a little less of the past few days in various postures that while suitable to carrot pulling or pepper harvesting probably do not come highly recommended for people with back problems. 

 At least I found a few carrots to pull.  Or rather, to keep.  I must have pulled thousands of carrots from the bed I dug, but most of them were hardly large enough to get the attention of a starving rabbit.  I do not fully understand why it is such a bad year for carrots.  All that rain in July has something to do with it.  But they have had weeks to get over that and they are still sulking.  Maybe it is just their turn to slack off.  Last year the potatoes performed inexplicably poorly.  Whatever is irking the carrots, though, has nothing to do with them turning those odd colors.  The white and yellow ones are supposed to be white and yellow.

The eggplants did not have a much more spectacular year than the carrots, but that comes as less of a surprise.  I am well aware that they do not like this odd northern climate, especially the cold nights which leave them pining for their warmer native habitats.  Given how the plants look, I figured I should go ahead and pick every usable eggplant I could find.  They are hardly prize winners (whatever prize it is that eggplants win), but they will do as part of what is more or less a farewell to summer share.  The peppers and greenhouse tomatoes will still produce some fruit for another week or two (though now that I have said that they will probably be trampled by a herd of irritable giraffes or confiscated by Homeland Security personnel as part of an ongoing investigation into antipatriotic activities in the organic community).  But they too have begun to notice a slight arctic aspect to the weather, or perhaps they just see the leaves starting to turn and know the time has come to cede their place in the bags to hardier crops, to leeks and rutabagas and those odd Asian greens so attractive to slugs and even the occasional human (not that I have had a lot of problems yet with people attacking them—though now that I have said that I will probably find that some vegetarian collective has wreaked havoc on the tatsoi in the night). 

I don’t think the slugs—or many humans, come to think of it—pose a serious threat to the hot pepper crop.  But some sort of rodent does eat them.  Some sort of Mexican or Thai rodent, no doubt.  It cannot be anything native to this part of the world, where eating a hot pepper is considered about as foolish as voting for Democrats or trying to farm without pesticides.  I don’t know that I can say much to change your mind if you subscribe more to the local than the rodential view of hot peppers.  But I will try.  They taste good.  At least, the good ones do, and I think both of the varieties this week are good.  I am particularly pleased with these seasoning peppers (the tiny wrinkled red pepper), which I have not grown before.  The other seasoning pepper varieties I have grown just tasted like sweet peppers, but these taste like Habaneros—which is to say intriguingly, tropically fruity—without the scarring heat.  You could slice up and fry your fingerlings (they are especially good fried) and toss in some garlic and the seasoning pepper, finely chopped, a minute or two before taking the potatoes off the heat.  Or you could mix the garlic and seasoning pepper and some soy sauce with steamed bok choi.  Or use the pepper in salsa.  Or just follow the lead of those alien rodents and nibble on it.