22 October 2009

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.