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.

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.

20 August 2009

Beet greens, Carrots, Eggplant, Garlic, Onion, Anaheim or Ancho hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes, Turnips or beets

The Washington County Fair, which starts this coming Monday, features a lot of cows. 10 barns full of cows. Stall after stall of Holsteins and Jerseys and Brown Swiss and Herefords and Ayershires and Dexters and Charolais. More cows than all the other animals—goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigs and a horses and oxen and a few reindeer—put together. And way way more cows than pies. There’s not even one barn full of pies. In fact, all the baked and canned goods take up a small section of a small barn, about as much space as is given to the table setting competition.

I do understand that the cow business plays a significant role in the economy of this county. Dairy products, cattle and calves account for 85% of the county’s agricultural sales (vegetables account for 5%), and agriculture is far and away the biggest business in the county. So it is no surprise then that the County Fair, that annual showcase of our bounty, puts on such a bovicentric celebration.

Pies, on the other hand, constitute an immeasurably small sector of the economy. Well, not immeasurably small. I don’t doubt that a sufficiently motivated researcher, someone with a real passion for economic statistics and baked goods, could come up with a reasonably accurate assessment of pie’s role in the county’s economy. But certainly unmeasured. If you look through the county’s economic development plan or scan federal census data for our area you will see no mention of pie at all.

But just because it is not a major player in the economy hardly seems like a good reason to shortchange pie at the Fair. The fair is not about the economy. If it were it would be something of a bummer this time around—a weeklong carnival of gloom to mark the dire financial situation in the dairy business. We could hand out special awards to the farms with the biggest debt and greatest negative cash flow and put up an electronic sign in the milking parlor keeping a running total of the milk’s negative worth (farmers get about $6 a hundred weight less for their milk than they spend to produce it). Any cows shown in the judging ring that failed to impress could be sent off immediately for slaughter as part of a herd reduction program and the tractor dealers could offer displays of used equipment. Instead of the usual (and bizarre) cooking utensil demonstrations in the midway, bankruptcy attorneys could offer enthralling spiels touting their services to rapt audiences.

Of course, nothing of the sort will happen at the Fair. The mood and the tractor displays may be a little more subdued than usual, but the celebration will go on. Serious farm kids in clean white shirts will bring their cows and rabbits before soberly attentive judges. Teenagers will flock to nauseating rides. Countless slices of terrible pizza will be eaten. The toy farm dioramas will be put on display and the Argyle firemen will barbeque vast flocks of chickens.

It will go on because the Fair is about not the actual state of farming but the essence of it: the ideal udder (there’s a prize for best udder), the best duck, the most powerful tractor, the perfectly trimmed sheep, the well set table, the latest forage harvester technology, the tallest stalk of corn. It will go on because going on is precisely what farmers do, even if it makes no sense (they talk of people who have gone out of the business in a tone that’s equal parts pity and scorn).

In this context it seems to me that the well-crafted pie has as important a role to play as anything else. Its ingredients—wheat, egg, milk, fruit—are basic farm products. The recipe is so simple a kid can do it, but to do it properly requires effort and hands-on experience best passed down from one generation to the next. It’s modest but a source of quiet pride when done well. It’s always better homemade than store bought. It is made to share. And while pie baking won’t make you rich it will keep you well fed. In other words, it is a rather more appropriate symbol of farming than any cow, and it smells a lot better.

I doubt it would pass muster with your average Washington County farm wife, but you can make a tasty pie (well, a tart, but let’s not quibble) with tomatoes, squash and onion (you can find the recipe on the web site). You could use the spinach or beet greens in an egg and cheese pie (which you can call a quiche if you are determinedly effete) quiche), or put your pepper, roasted and peeled, in a cheddar pie if you want something more American. In fact, you can put just about anything in a pie. Pie is highly adaptable, a quality the dairy industry might want to consider learning from it in order to survive. A quality the industry would be a great deal more likely to grasp if only they let me run the Fair and give pie its proper place.

Since that’s not likely to happen any time soon (the folks on the Fair Board are good eggs, but perhaps a little lacking in whimsy), I just have to put on my own pie celebration. Hence the annual Alleged Farm pie contest (and farm open house), this year on Sunday, September 27^th. I realize this only gives you five weeks to hone your pie making skills and a really good crust takes about three generations to perfect. I feel confident, however, given your obvious commitment to sustainable local farming and ready supply of fresh produce, that you will create something inspired, something surprising, something that in its blend of simple ingredients, hard work and fresh thinking captures the spirit of American agriculture. Or at least tastes good.

13 August 2009

Basil, Beans, Cabbage or radicchio Cucumber, Eggplant, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Pepper, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tomatoes

Several organizations in Western Massachusetts recently received a little Federal stimulus money to fund summer youth employment programs. These programs, which aim to instill life skills in kids, will be great for the region, according to the people involved, because teenagers who get their hands on money tend to spend it quickly. Thus these government-funded wastrels will give the local economy a small infusion of cash right away. Bravo, a life skill well taught. After all, how are we going to have a strong economy if we don’t teach yet another generation of Americans to spend everything they have—and then some—as fast as they can. A strong Chinese economy, that is.

I cannot help thinking there was a time in this country’s history when people would not—or at least not so blatantly—have celebrated a fellow citizen’s inclination to spend all his money as fast as he earned it. While it is true that in an earlier draft Franklin wrote “a penny saved is a penny pointlessly kept out of the local economy,” his friends, sensing the tenor of the times and afraid that such a saying might harm Franklin’s potential endorsement deals, prevailed upon him to alter it to something more marketable.

Perhaps we lost our taste for thriftiness when we ceased to be a significantly agrarian society. There’s something about farming that makes you a little slow to get your money out of your pocket. It could be the joint pain and muscle fatigue, of course, which leave farmers slow to do much of anything. It could have something to do with the large number of pockets farmers tend to have on their clothes, causing them to have to hunt around for a while to find their wallets. It could also be the perennially meager profits, which tend to reinforce any miserly tendencies. Or the traditional need to set aside some of each year’s harvest to plant the next year’s crops. And it is possible that having all your efforts at the mercy (such as it is) of the weather teaches you to set something aside just in case.

There are drawbacks to such a cautious approach to spending. Farmers tend to avoid investing in new techniques, preferring the safety of the familiar. Risk outweighs potential. This slows the spread of innovations that might well make farming easier, more profitable, safer and less polluting.

The culture of saving also helps breed an ethos of self-reliance that makes effective communal activity difficult. If dairy farmers in this country had agreed to a milk quota system they might have avoided a lot of the financial hardships of the past thirty years. But there was no way they were going to agree to impose limits on themselves for the general good.

Fiscal conservatism has also tended to translate into political conservatism, though the two need not go together. It is hard, in light of our current farm subsidy program, to say that farmers have exactly suffered politically for this. But it has led the farming community to adopt a number of positions—many of them at best tenuously related to agriculture—that alienate many people who would otherwise be disposed to support its interests, and to stick to a system that fails to serve the needs of many farmers. I would be happy to trade those subsidies, which of course don’t go to farmers like me, for programs offering serious support for things such as farmland conservation, habitat protection, regional planning, education and marketing. Instead of paying a relatively small number of farms to grow more corn, we could be giving grants to lots of farmers to make capital improvements, develop new products, control fertilizer runoff, build worker housing and place easements on the best pieces of ground.

Still, even if we farmers are a bit tight fisted and stodgy and Luddite and too proud for our own good, I cannot help thinking we might find better life skills to teach kids than how to dispose of disposable income. Such as how to deal with adversity, stick with a hard job or enjoy simple pleasures like a dry day or the flight of a blue heron or a ripe tomato.

Actually, given the way things are going this season, I don’t know if a ripe tomato counts as a simple pleasure. It is turning out to be a bit more complicated to come by them than usual. For instance, we (by which I mean Jan) have had to spray the plants weekly with copper to ward off late blight and try to control the bacterial disease that has run amok in the greenhouse. Obviously, our efforts are paying off. I do, however, given the amount of spraying we have done, have to warn you to wash the tomatoes in your share. It is worth the effort. I have eaten tomato salad several times in the past week and don’t show any signs of getting tired of it yet.

I have also been eating a fair amount of coleslaw happily. I have been making a dressing with oil, vinegar, a little cream, a lot of mustard and a bit of soy sauce, sesame oil and chile oil. You could use some finely diced hot pepper instead of the chile oil.

As for the other 12 crops in the share, if you are not sure what to do with them come out to the farm this Sunday between 10 and 2 and I (and perhaps some other members) can offer suggestions. Plus you can see the farm (including the giant pig), check up on vegetables you will get in future shares, have a picnic, ask the farmer questions, look for newts (we dug one up in the potato patch), and pitch in with a small farming task to find out what life lessons weeding can teach you. I hope I will see you here.

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.