27 August 2009

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.