6 August 2009

Arugula, Basil, Beets, Cucumbers, Frisee endive, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Candy onion, Pepper, Ancho or Anaheim hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

My friend Jim sent me an e-mail in January from Texarkana asking if he could work on the farm this season. It was in many ways an unlikely request. Even healthy, he tended towards a languid Southern pace, his work frequently interrupted by snacks and siestas.

I would have been happy to spend more time with him. We had an easy friendship, in part because of our shared interests but mostly because of his real genius for friendship—his eagerness to know all sorts of different people as they are rather than as reflections of himself. A fundamental, unshakeable optimist, he took pleasure in my misanthropic tendencies, merely laughing off my gloomiest statements. He was excellent company, but I don’t know that I would have chosen him for a farm worker even at his healthiest.

And he was not at his healthiest. He had been dealing with advanced metastatic renal cancer for a couple of years. While a wonder drug (there are moments I have kind thoughts for the pharmaceutical industry)—and a kidney removal—had taken care of the major tumor, he had lesions on his liver, lungs and brain. He had gone home to Texarkana to spend a warm winter with his parents and gain some weight on a steady diet of good Southern home cooking. It was working—chicken-fried steak being every bit the equal of anything out of a drug laboratory—and he had regained his normal weight and his normal optimism.

But I felt pretty certain his optimism had outpaced his physical capacity. He had the energy to stay up all day, to go around town, to write to friends and read. But farming demands more than that. There are, I know, more grueling activities—fire fighting, underwater demolition, alligator wrestling—but the steady grind of farm work places physical demands on the body that will wear down the fittest in the course of a season. Jim, fatter but still seriously depleted by illness and chemotherapy, simply lacked the stamina for day after day of grunt labor. I don’t know that he had the stamina for one day of it.

Jim certainly knew about the physical nature of the job. He had been here often enough, helped out a bit in the fields, heard me talk about it, seen what the job had done to my back. And, at least on some level, he was aware of his own condition, his basic unfitness for the sort of work we do here. And yet he felt a desire to come to the farm and join me in the fields. I cannot say for sure why, but I think he had fallen prey to the notion that farming is good for you—that an agricultural sojourn would aid in his recovery at least as much as fresh biscuits and medicine.

That farming will cure what ails you is a surprisingly common idea, a misguided extension perhaps of that basic parental injunction to go outside and play, the fresh air will do you some good, mixed with a belief in the value of hard work and the spiritual value of communing with nature, plus a feeling that if vegetables are healthy then growing them must be extra healthy. I suppose there’s something to it. Certainly going outside, an increasingly uncommon destination, offers many possible rewards, including, I suppose the chance for some sort of spiritual awakening for those prone to such things. Hard work has its rewards too, and people ought to try doing a little even if they intend to avoid it thereafter so they can at the very least appreciate what they are not doing. As for the health effects of growing vegetables, it does tend to provide you with more vegetables than you might otherwise have and perhaps a greater desire to eat them, so that could do you some good.

None of that, however, makes farming good for you. Keeping warm in the winter is good for you, but that does not mean you should walk into a fire. I cannot imagine prescribing farming as a course of treatment for any malady physical or mental. It makes the feeble feebler, the depressed gloomier. We might well have had a great time out in the fields, Jim and I, talking about books and noshing on beans and lying in the cool grass admiring the golden evening light on the hillside. But he would not have been able to do much farming, and what farming he did would not, I am sorry to say, have made him better.

It is nice though, to imagine he was right, to think of him blossoming as the days passed, each menial tedious task, each tub spinach harvested, each row of carrots weeded, each tray of lettuce seeded restoring his health. We could have sent him off to clean up the onion patch or pick cucumbers and felt no guilt about giving him the worst tasks because they were doing him good. And then when word got out about his farming-induced remission we would have had an army of sickly peons vying to take on all our work, begging for a chance to pound tomato stakes or grease the tractor. We would have wandered among the suddenly immaculate beds of vibrant crops, cool and relaxed and pleased to help others by having them help us.

Unfortunately, Jim never made it back to the farm to test its healing properties. Doctors and Southern cooking can only do so much. It’s too bad. I could use a dose of his optimism in this strange wet season. He would have known that the weather can only improve, have happily predicted a warm dry fall. And he would have laughed and pointed out that things can hardly be as bad as I suggest when we can fill the bags with fourteen different crops and manage, finally, to coax a reasonable numbers of ripe tomatoes from the reluctant vines. And then, his work done, he would have munched on a cucumber and gone off to nap.

Rest in peace.

30 July 2009

Arugula, Lemon basil, Broccoli, Carrots, Cucumbers, Dill, Eggplant, Escarole, Garlic, Lettuce, Onion, Pepper, Radishes, Squash

They say you are never more than three feet away from a spider. Well, not a spider as in one particular spider. I don’t mean to provoke the paranoid belief that some arachnid doppelganger shadows your every move. Spiders are crafty, but not that crafty. Plus I am pretty sure most of them do not live that long. Actually, I have no idea what the life expectancy is for a spider. They did not say anything about that when they told me about our average proximity to spiders.

Whoever they are. Probably the same they who told us that 90% of people who lose weight on a diet gain it back within a year or that 12% of the population is gay or all those other catchy, media-friendly statistics that turn out to be someone’s best guess and not a statistic of any sort at all.

Obviously they have not come around, yardsticks in hand, and checked on all of us and our spider neighbors. I suppose they base the claim on an estimate of the spider population, though I would guess it is a rough estimate rather than a comprehensive web to web census. I have never tried counting spiders, but I have spent enough time around them (well, I suppose we all have, haven’t we) to recognize that trying to keep track of them for an accurate count would prove frustrating at the least. The ones that just sit on their webs are easy enough, but the world is full of peripatetic spiders, and they don’t show much inclination to sit still while you count them. They have busy lives. They are always hurrying off somewhere.

Still, the three foot rule seems about right to me. I confess that at this moment I can only see one spider and it is 38 inches away (make that about 40 now that I have disturbed it by waving a measuring tape at it). But no doubt if I poked around behind the desk I would find some more even closer. And if I were out in the field (sorry to disturb your image of me, but I do not compose these pieces while ambling amongst the crops) I would be a lot closer to a lot more spiders. A lot of different kinds of spiders too, some of which have specific habitats. There are several kinds, including a small white one and another with a red spot, that I only ever come across on the currants. The big yellow orb weavers with the distinctive lightning bolt pattern in their webs appear in long grass in August. Little hairy black jumping spiders hang out on the empty seedling trays in the greenhouse. The wolf spiders prowl amongst the leafy crops in the field houses. We have at least as wide—and colorful—an array of spiders as of birds.

We always have spiders close at hand here, but I am sure there are less spidery places in the world where one could easily get considerably further than three feet from one. A California strawberry field, for instance. Given what California strawberry farmers do to the soil and spray on the plants I doubt you would find much life at all in one of their fields other than the Mexcans pickings the fruit. Living things, with the possible exception of migrant labor, just complicate farming, and strawberry farmers are looking to make their job as simple and predictable as possible. Better to turn the dirt into a sterile growing medium much like those plastic cubes of Pro-mix at garden centers. For all the good it can do, living soil just carries too many risks.

I recognize that a lot of people feel less than complete affection for spiders. I am not entirely enamored myself. I have never felt the slightest inclination, for instance, to keep a tarantula as a pet, and I can think of many things I prefer to finding a large spider on me. But I’d rather live in a place where I run the risk of discovering spiders on me than in spot that has been rendered spider-free. And anyway, most spiders want to get close to us as little as we want to get close to them. They have much better things to do than hang out with spider squashing giants. Just imagine how disgusted spiders feel when they learn that they are never more than three feet away from us.

Anyway, right now I am a good deal less worried about the ubiquity of arachnids, who after all do useful things like eat bugs, than about that of gastropods, who do unhelpful things like eat eggplants. I would feel pretty excited this summer if I could find a spot in the fields where I could get as much as three feet away from a slug.

Fortunately, they have not quite achieved Biblical plague levels yet so we still have some vegetables. Quite an array this week actually. I had not expected to find so many eggplants, but the plants have recovered admirably from their early season tribulations. The pepper plants, I am afraid, remain less promising, but we will get some fruits. Fortunately I had the foresight to plant the garlic in raised beds last fall, so it has done remarkably well in tough conditions. We have about 9,000 heads spread out on the upper floor of the barn to dry. I don’t have high expectations for summer broccoli—it disappoints more often than not—but our first planting has succeeded well enough. I am not going to show it at the County Fair, but I am happy to get broccoli for all of you. I may be happier to have escarole for everyone than everyone is to have escarole, but I hope you will give it a chance. It is my favorite cooking green. Arugula is Liz’s favorite salad green. If I am not careful, she can do more damage to a bed of arugula than the slugs will. Lemon basil, as you may recall, plays a central role in the official farm cocktail. But you can use it for other things. Chop up some lemon basil and garlic and put it grilled vegetables. Last year we had a disastrously bad carrot crop. The weather has not really been any better this year, but so far the carrots are. I am glad to have them back. And I am always happy to have onions—in part because I like onions, in part because we put a lot of work into the onion patch. We hoed and hand weeded it three times this spring, which kept it clean long enough to give the plants a chance to grow. And now Sam and Will have undertaken the task—not entirely by their choice—of weeding the patch one last time, a slow and tedious job as I am sure they would be happy to tell you. But probably easier than carrying out a spider census, though I suspect they would rather give that a try. Perhaps they can count the spiders in the onion patch as they weed. It would give them something other than weeding to think about, and it is vital to think about something other than weeding when you are weeding.

23 July 2009

Basil, Beets, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Dill, Garlic, Lettuce, Peas, Hot pepper, Scallions, Squash

I am a little worried about our St. Bernard puppy. He seems to have a nice disposition and a real social instinct. Yes, he is still a little nippy, but he has gotten much better and even learned to obey a few simple commands, at least when he has nothing better to do or knows for sure that heeding us will get him a treat. He is attractive and fuzzy and has an endearing ability to chase his tail for quite a long time before getting dizzy and falling over. I think he will make a fine pet.

Which is all well and good, but does he meet the breed standard? It is probably a little early to say. He is all of three months old and roughly a fifth of his adult size. Still, it is best to start assessing his conformation as soon as possible so we know whether or not we are dealing with a worthy representative of the breed. And frankly there is some cause for concern. I cannot help noting a slightly deficient supra-orbital ridge and perhaps some slightly imperfect upper jaw flews. I hate to say it but the way they curve into the lower edge is not as pretty as one might hope. All of which would not be so bad if his tail were more pleasing. I hesitate to speak harshly of one so young and agreeable, but there is no denying that his tail is a smidgen or two—oh well, let’s be honest, three smidgens—shorter than ideal and has a tip that could not really be described accurately as powerful. Mildly vigorous, perhaps, but certainly not powerful. I am sure we will find some way to feel affection for him in the long run, but I fear it will always be tempered by his glaring imperfections.

The fact that those monks up in the Alps never worried about breeding dogs that conformed to some ideal doesn’t matter. Sure they interbred their dogs with Newfoundlands to get long coats and mixed in the genes of various local mutts as needed. But what did they know? They were just trying to come up with animals that could carry out mountain rescues and make good companions during the long winters. That might be good enough for monks, but it is not the sort of behavior that wins you best in show trophies.

Of course, anyone truly concerned with maintaining breed purity would not have time for dogs. Surely we should all be working to raise ideally formed wolves, eschewing the tragic aberrations of wolfness that abound today. Once you accept the idea of different breeds of dogs you accept the idea that living things can change their form. Those monks concocted St. Bernards in relatively short order from locally available mutts and then altered them in various ways a number of times. And then breeders made further alterations, with the result that English St. Bernards have different standards from American ones (for a start, they have to possess a well formed sense of self-deprecating irony).

We seem to understand that things don’t always come true to type. If they did dog shows would be rather pointless affairs (rather than the profoundly meaningful events they are). But we have trouble accepting that this variation is a good thing, a natural force to celebrate rather than a challenge to be overcome. We prefer to know exactly what we are getting—even if what we are getting is reliably bad. Hence, at least in part, the success of McDonalds (it is possible the billions of dollars of advertising and large quantities of fat and salt also contribute to that success).

I don’t mean to deny the value of reliability. I count on the seeds I plant to produce the promised crops. I was less than entirely amused by a batch of Sugar Snap seeds I planted several years ago that produced significant numbers of bad snow pea vines, and I nearly gave up on growing radicchio because the results were so unpredictable.

But it was people playing around with variability who came up with Sugar Snap peas in the first place and developed the new varieties of radicchio that produce a significant percentage of relatively uniform heads. And if that batch of pea seeds had produced vines with positive new traits, such the ability to grow clusters of peas that turn red when ripe, I would have been a fool to ask for my money back because I didn’t get precisely the pea variety I anticipated.

Given what we are doing to the climate, we had better learn to appreciate the ability of living things to vary. If, for instance, this summer’s weather were to become the norm we would either have to give up on all sorts of crops (the eggplants, peppers and tomatoes appear to be completely baffled by the conditions), go to enormous lengths to modify conditions (by, for instance, installing a retractable dome over the farm), or work to develop crops with better tolerance for wet soil and cold nights and an ability to fend off armies of slugs (which are out there right mounting a sluggish blitzkrieg on our bean rows).

I suspect that in the end farmers will have to use all three methods to deal with climate change. But the availability of new varieties suited to whatever weather we end up with will be essential to farm viability. Neither jettisoning products nor making massive investments in infrastructure is by itself—or in combination with the other—feasible unless farm economics change as radically as the climate threatens to. Which seems unlikely. I don’t see any sign of us giving up on our belief in the sacred right to cheap food.

In which case farmers had better have a range of varieties that can thrive with relatively minimal, relatively inexpensive assistance. And that may require some strange alterations to vegetables as we know them right now. But then we have already made pretty significant changes to just about every crop we eat. You don’t find a lot of cauliflowers growing in the wild.

Fortunately, some of our existing crops are finding ways to deal with this odd season. The peas, for instance, apparently like it, the garlic has done quite nicely this year, and we have more cucumbers than we need. So enjoy them while you still recognize them, but try not to get too obsessively attached to their current form. And who knows, maybe that kale-tomato cross and those eggdives will be so delicious that you won’t believe you could ever have eaten anything else.

16 July 2009

Arugula, Cucumbers, Black currants, Dill, Lettuce, Sugar snap peas, Scallions, Squash, Oasis turnips

Just about any grocery store in New York has tomatoes for sale year round. Oddly enough, the quality never seems to fluctuate that much. You’ll get the same unsatisfying tomatoes with an eating quality somewhere between that of a fruit and a packing material when the world is buried in feet of snow and when local farmers’ fields are full of tasty fresh produce.

I understand the appeal of finding produce available months out of season, the appeal of not having to wait for those too brief weeks when we can enjoy the bounty of our farms, the appeal of being able to get whatever you want when you want it.

But I also understand the differences between truly fresh produce and most of what passes for “fresh”. Just because something has not been frozen or processed does not make it fresh. The average vegetable we encounter grew who knows where who knows when who knows how.

Now, it is true you don’t have to know all about your turnips. You can go ahead and pop them in your mouth completely ignorant of their history. On the other hand, once you have put them in your mouth you probably are planning on swallowing them. Wouldn’t you prefer to know just a little more about your food before it gets to your stomach? Such as when it was picked, or what it was sprayed with. Or maybe even what variety it is and who picked it and which field it grew in.

Try asking a produce manager to tell about the turnips on his shelves. Then try asking your farmer about the turnips in your share. I like Hakurei best, but the seed costs a lot—$45 for the four ounce packet I bought this year—and sometimes the tops are a little paltry and fragile. So this year we also tried Oasis, and the bed Jan sowed in the patch between the field houses and the strawberries has done well though we never sprayed it with anything (we used a row cover to keep off the flea beetles). Jan, Mike and Adrienne picked the turnips on Tuesday, ran them through the barrel washer and put them in the cooler.

That may well satisfy your curiosity about your turnips. But maybe you wonder where exactly this turnip bed is on the farm and what we used for fertilizer and who these people picking your turnips are and you have lost track of whether Oasis is a worker or a turnip. Well, if you are the sort of person who wants to know more you might consider coming out to the farm this season.

I won’t claim that seeing the farm and meeting the farm crew will necessarily makes the turnips or any of the other produce taste better. But the taste of food depends to a significant extent on its context, on how and where and when one encounters it. My workers and I once had a miraculously good lunch at the Cambridge diner. I doubt we would have enjoyed it so much if we had not just spent the morning picking and washing hundred of pounds of carrots in the snow. Sitting in a warm dry place with a mug of hot coffee was enough to make the meal remarkable—and to be fair they had good blackberry pie back then.

I don’t mean to suggest that you need to come to the farm and get soaking wet and bitterly cold so you can truly appreciate root vegetables. But I would like to think that walking through the (I hope dry) fields and talking with the crew and learning a bit about what we do might add some element to your enjoyment of what you get from us each week.

9 July 2009

Basil, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Green garlic, Lettuce, Marjoram or summer savory, Sugar Snap peas, Radicchio, Squash

For years I have been telling potential workers that my health plan consists of a steady supply of fresh produce. Which is and is not a joke because it really is the best health care plan I can offer my workers.

Well, that is not entirely true. I could buy health insurance for them. I could provide a masseur and a well equipped coffee bar too while I was at it, both of which would also enhance the work experience. I would just have to go into debt to do so. At least the masseur and the coffee bar are conceivably affordable. Health insurance, on the other hand, would probably finish off the farm.

Not that a steady supply of fresh produce is just a joke of a health plan. We could come up with a lot worse ways in this country to improve our health than large doses of produce. In fact, we have. Fruits and vegetables have a number of things in their favor. Aside from being good for us—especially compared to what we eat much of the time—they are widely available and cheap. They are also generally safe to use and made right here in the U.S. (often by foreigners, of course), and they come in a remarkable array of colors, shapes and textures to match just about any décor.

I don’t mean to suggest that produce would cure all our ills. I am unaware, for instance, of a good vegetative fix for a broken arm, though I suppose you could work up some sort of sling using various greens if you had to. But getting a lot more people to eat a lot more vegetables would significantly reduce the incidence of any number of medical problems—diabetes and heart disease just for a start. Simply getting people to eat kale or bok choi once a week would probably save us a few billions dollars in health care costs each year.

Unfortunately, I have not the vaguest idea how you would get most Americans to eat kale regularly. People will, at enormous expense, ingest vast arrays of pills and undergo all sorts of dangerous procedures in a quest for good health. But I suspect they would consider a weekly dose of kale rather too high a price to pay. Perhaps if we improved the packaging, added an X or two to the name and put a hundred million dollars into the promotional effort…

My workers eat plenty of dark leafy greens. They even like them. And so far I guess it has been working. No serious diseases I know of. In fact, so far nobody has had to go to the hospital.

Well, except me. Eating kale may be good for you, but fifteen years of bending over or crouching to pick it takes a toll. Hence the screws in my spine. Fortunately, I have health insurance thanks to Liz’s job off the farm. Forty thousands dollars of transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion cost me $18.

Take away that insurance, though, and I would be facing some tough choices, trying to find a balance between pain and debt I could live with. That’s a form of health care rationing that critics of a national plan tend not to talk about so much. But it is the form our system forces on people without insurance, people like my farm workers—and most other farm workers in this country too. Socialized medicine, like kale, is no panacea. Neither, however, is to be feared any more than our socialized street lights or socialized Coast Guard. If we are going to have to make choices about how we dole out health care, we can find a better way to allocate it than basing on the patient’s net assets.

For instance, we could make it contingent upon patients having eaten all their vegetables. We make kids finish their vegetables in order to get the stuff they want. I don’t see why the rest of us cannot live by the same rule. Want an appointment with your dermatologist? Have some radicchio first. You can eat it in your salad or cut it into quarters, dunk it in water, brush it with olive oil and grill it. Need a new pair of glasses? Then get to work on that head of cabbage, perhaps in a slaw or sautéed with bacon and scallions. Hoping for a refill on that prescription? Eat some squash—sliced and sautéed with green garlic and herbs—and then ask for more pills. Eager to talk with a doctor about the pain in your back? Why not snack on some snap peas (boiled in salted water for no more than a couple of minutes) or cucumber salad before you start that conversation. Back operation? Salad, then surgery.

Imagine if we actually go with this system. We will be helping you to get to the head of the line every week. And suddenly my produced-based health care plan for my workers will make real sense. No joke.

2 July 2009

Basil, Beets or turnips, Frisee endive , Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Parsley, Scallions, Squash

As a man of faith in myself deeply cognizant of my many and various duties, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. I have let down my farm, my workers, CSA members, farmers, vegetables eaters, citizens of this great nation, people of the world and several rows of eggplants. I am deeply humbled by how many people, significant and powerful and hungry people, I have let down—more people, I dare say, than anyone else has previously let down. And I have been able to let down so many so quickly, let me note for slower members of the audience, because so many looked to me for guidance on a whole host of topics, topics I often knew nothing about but spoke of in a quiet and dignified and authoritative way nonetheless.

I don’t expect everyone I have let down to forgive me right away, though that would make my life a whole lot easier. Forgiveness, like a good chicken stock, is a thing that can take time, especially when you don’t deserve it. But I am willing to spend as much time as it takes compelling people to forgive me so I can get myself out of this mess, even if that means going on Oprah and abasing myself for the pleasure of her audience. Since earning all that forgiveness will be so time consuming, and as an act of contrition, I herewith resign from all boring committee work and any charitable activities so that I can dedicate myself more fully to clearing my name.

When I spoke to my workers the other day and told them I could not help weed the carrots because I had to let the puppy out, I was telling them something true. We do have a puppy, a ten-week-old St. Bernard, and he most certainly has to be taken outside pretty regularly, even if that means I have to miss out on some carrot weeding.

But that was not the whole truth. While it was true that our actual puppy actually needed to go outside, I may have misled my workers concerning my whereabouts since I was in fact not with the puppy but in North Dakota seeing another farm. I am not proud of this and it is hard to admit since it makes me seem like such a creep and nobody likes looking like a creep. I am, however, compelled to admit the truth now because I have been caught and my public relations people say it is better to deal with the scandal than sit around doing nothing and hoping it will go away. Which is why I am standing here now accepting responsibility for my actions and asking that they be forgiven without really admitting to anything specific.

I don’t particularly mind that politicians across this great nation have entered into a spirited competition to make complete asses of themselves. If that is what keeps them amused, fine. But maybe they should have told us first so that we could more fully appreciate their efforts and aims. The unpleasantness that has arisen recently stems from our failure to recognize that they are attempting not so much to govern as to embarrass themselves.

Now that we understand the game we can feel a real sense of pride as New Yorkers in our State Senate, which has shown remarkable dedication in striving for victory. Lesser legislatures would have balked by now. But not our fearless representatives, who forge ahead blindly into uncharted realms of self-serving incompetence, determined to spare us no expense in their pursuit of power.

I cannot help getting the feeling that some institution very like the New York State Senate has control of the weather at the moment. Unwilling to agree on which way to move the low pressure system plaguing us this week, they leave it in place, subjecting us every day to further afflictions. And just when you think that surely the consequences of inaction have caused enough havoc that they will feel compelled to act, something worse comes along. Something like the storm yesterday afternoon, an evil monsoon wandering far from its native clime. By my rough estimate it dropped around three million cubic feet of water on the farm in the course of an hour. On the bright side, I have a pretty good idea now of precisely where ditches are prone to overflow into fields, and we won’t have to water the greenhouses for quite some time. And if I failed yesterday to note some of the spots prone to flooding, well maybe I will get another chance today. Or tomorrow.

It is too soon to say precisely what effect this deluge and all the other relentless wet weather will have on the crops, though I can pretty well guarantee that it is not doing them any good. Plants like to breathe and don’t find doing so underwater much easier than we do. Even the weeds look a trifle piqued. I am seriously contemplating moving the whole farm to a sandy hilltop, but I have not worked out the details of the move yet. Perhaps I will refer the matter to the State Senate for action.

In the meantime, we managed to find a few less than completely saturated vegetables for you this week, most of them familiar, though I trust still welcome. The squash (by which I mean both summer squash and zucchini) have kindly added their modest efforts to the offering. It is hard, I admit, to get too excited by a squash—they would have to have a lot more flavor to merit excitement—but I like them sliced and grilled and dressed with a little vinaigrette and basil—particularly cold on a sandwich, perhaps with some garlic scape pesto and cheese.

Endives, I know, often meet with a less than enthusiastic response. But I think frisee (the head of frilly leaves) deserves attention, even from people who shy away from bitter greens. Not only do the leaves look pretty in a salad, but they also add a note—well, let’s be honest, a bitter note—that highlights—to good effect in my opinion—the lettuce’s sweetness. Or you can cook your frisee and mix it with sautéed scapes to make nice garlicky greens. If that’s not compelling enough, bear in mind that it is good for you. You can also use it as a pompom and possibly do a little light dusting with it.

Or use it to threaten your Senator. Perhaps the threat of bitter greens is just the thing to get the Senate back to work. It is worth a try. Obviously a sense of public duty, wide spread derision, the need to pass legislation and a judge’s order don’t have any effect. And if endive fails too, why not bean them with a big kohlrabi.

25 June 2009

Basil, Beets or turnips, Chard, Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Oregano, Scallions

  This past winter it snowed heavily in London.  Heavily by London’s standards.  Six inches.  Enough to turn the morning commute, a messy affair at the best of times, into a complete disaster.  Mass transit came to a halt.  There was a fifty mile traffic jam heading into the city.  Even the trains stopped running.  A complete cockup.  And people were mad.  

            The government, they pointed out, had had several days warning of the impending storm.  Indeed, the government itself had spent several days warning everyone else to prepare for what would prove to be the worst winter storm in 18 years.  And yet when the snow arrived the government proved unprepared.  Streets went unplowed.  Schools closed.  Trains—yes, British trains—stopped running.  Shocking and inexcusable.  If a London financier cannot count on making his daily fifty mile commute into the city in a snow storm without facing serious delays, what has the country come to?  Even the French could have done a better job.  Well, maybe not the French, but the Swiss certainly.

            What has England come to indeed?  This stiff upper lipped, nature worshipping, world conquering nation of ironists thrown into a petulant fit because the government cannot maintain suitable control of the weather in order to allow people to drive themselves ridiculous distances to get to work on a day any sensible person would have settled down by the fire with a mug of tea, a wheaty biscuit and a Thomas Hardy novel.

            Actually, it sounds like they have come to the same place the rest of us inhabit.  The place where we don’t have to think about the weather much any more because we have created all sorts of ways to go on without or in spite of it.  We have turned the weather from a major force into a minor irritation.  And we have been able to do that in large part because we don’t have to produce our own food any more.

            When you have a well stocked grocery store with food from all over the planet, suddenly those rainy spells or gusts of wind or bursts of hail, all that weather well short of newsworthy that can nonetheless have a real effect on how your garden grows, they don’t matter so much any more.  Sure, there are still ways the weather can mess with your life even if you don’t grow your own supper.  You can be carried off in a flood or hit by lightning or have your golf tournament delayed (and maybe even all three at once).  But if you only pay attention to those moments you understand the weather about as well as you would understand soccer by watching a highlight reel. 

            Not that having some protection from the normal vagaries of the weather is a bad thing.  I do not wish to suggest that we should go back to some authentic lifestyle of deprivation.  Getting through the winter on decreasing quantities of increasingly moldy root vegetables does not ennoble anybody.  We spend considerable amounts of effort and money on the farm trying to fend off the effects of ordinary weather.  We put up high tunnels and put on row covers and put in drain tile and turn on irrigation and build up raised beds and lay down biodegradable black plastic mulch. And just about every day something about the weather makes us wish we could do more.

            But there’s a big difference between combating the weather and ignoring it—or at least ignoring it until it forces you to pay attention.  Farmers may not like the weather—I have yet to meet one who has anything really nice to say about it—but like the participants in any great war, we have a serious respect for our foe.  We know what it can do in ways both violent and subtle.  Those whiny British commuters, on the other hand, seem to have come to regard the weather as just another social problem to be managed into submission.  If the government could only do its job properly we would not have to worry about being assaulted by panhandlers, hooligans, inflation, labor unions or snow storms. 

“Make it go away,” however, is not a reasonable request.  We may be well on our way to proving that we can change the weather in profound ways, but not in profound ways that inspire confidence in our ability to tame it.  The weather remains, as always, quite distinctly both a part of our lives and beyond our control.  As such, it deserves attention, no matter where you get your food.  You don’t have to like it, but you do have to find a way to live with it.

For the moment we are living with the weather by picking a significant portion of your share—basil, beets, scallions, lettuce, kohlrabi, turnips—in the high tunnels.  Those tunnels make a huge difference.  We spent an hour yesterday afternoon trellising the greenhouse tomatoes, some of which have already grown over the tops of their stakes.  We even found three ripe cherry tomatoes.  I wish we had space inside for the eggplants and sweet peppers, which are just starting to recover from the shock of a last late frost now that the nights have finally warmed up.  Those warm nights have also allowed us to take the covers of the squash and cucumbers and at the moment they look content.  Fortunately, the peas and potatoes and onions don’t mind the cold nearly as much and appear to be thriving. 

If I sound a little like I am hedging my bets, like I am unwilling to declare that we are well on our way to a glorious season, well that is because I am.  Things could be in far worse shape, but the rain already has us behind schedule on weeding (to be fair, we are always at least a little behind schedule on weeding; unlike people, weeds have clearly learned to live with the weather) and direct seeding and there are spots that have been constantly wet now for long enough to effect the crops there.  Plus I have no idea what plans the weather has for us.  I would happily offer up suggestions—near drought conditions would suit this farm fine—but I have yet to figure out an effective way to deliver them.  Muttering under my breath and staring hostilely at the sky, which I have been trying on and off for fifteen years, does not appear to work.  Likewise, I think I can rule out sarcasm, voluble swearing and various rude hand gestures.  It is possible that certain traditional dances or animal sacrifices might get the message through, but opportunities for embarrassment and mess seem perhaps a little too high to risk.  Which leaves me with no alternative but to contact my elected representatives and get the government to take care of this issue.  I have no illusions.  It won’t be easy.  I don’t expect immediate result.  But compared, say, to saving the American automobile industry, surely reining in the weather will seem like a manageable undertaking.