3 September 2009

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.