8 October 2009

Bok choi, Daikon, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Rutabaga, Sage, Shallots

This weekend the Agricultural Stewardship Association holds its eighth annual art show, Landscapes for Landsake, which features the works of a number of local artists (including one of you). The opening reception will be held this Saturday, October 10^th, from 3 to 6 p.m. at the historic barn at Maple Ridge, 172 State Route 372, in Coila. The $5 admission (students and kids get in free) gets you wine and local cheese as well as a chance to see (and buy) some excellent art, and helps support ASA’s efforts to preserve good soils in Washington and northern Rensselaer Counties for agriculture and help sustain our farming community. For more information about ASA and the show visit agstewardship.org.

I would hope that the chance to drive out to our beautiful landscape on a fine autumn day to see a good art exhibition is enough to entice you in this direction. I would also hope that you consider the chance to support the work of ASA a compelling reason to make this small trip. I know most of you neither live nor farm in Washington or northern Rensselaer County, and I understand that you might therefore conclude that you have no particular reason to support ASA, no matter how admirable you deem its mission. Even if you have your heart set on protecting open space, there’s plenty closer to home.

But ASA’s specific mission to protect farmland (including 120 acres of our farm) in an area with both prime agricultural soils and a longstanding and active farming community makes it worthy of support from people throughout the capital district. A local supply of food—which we ceased to value highly only fairly recently and to our own detriment—will become increasingly important. And for this region that supply will to a significant extent come from the very places ASA works to protect because we have the space, the soil, the infrastructure and the knowledge. Even the farms in the region outside ASA’s area of focus will (and in many cases already do) rely on our farming community because we have a strong enough agricultural base to maintain the necessary support services, such as feed, fertilizer, seed and tractor dealers, mechanics, veterinarians, and livestock auction houses.

Ensuring that the best pieces of ground remain available for agriculture won’t by itself ensure that agriculture survives here. There are numerous other economic, cultural and political issues involved. We need to work on what to grow, how to grow it, who will grow it and how to sell it. While ASA has something to contribute to discussion on all these topics, these are not its area of expertise or effort. That said, it is undeniably true that in the absence of good farmland all the other issues are irrelevant. Without land on which to farm, the perfect farm crew carrying out the perfect growing system for the perfect crop isn’t worth a damn.

Not that I am saying you should sally forth this Saturday on some sort of agricultural crusade, rallying to ASA’s side to beat back the dark forces of development. You should come because you can take a scenic drive to look at attractive pictures in a nice setting while nibbling on tasty cheese. That doing so happens to aid the work of ASA is simply a nice bonus, a reason to feel good about having fun.

I cannot guarantee that if you do go to the show you will find a lot of vegetable paintings. One of the artists did paint some of our produce (painted a picture of it, not applied paint to it), but I don’t know if that made it in. I might just have to start commissioning vegetable portraits. I think kohlrabi, with its dark purple skin and jaunty poof of green leaves, can be quite dashing, and a family grouping of eggplants—stout Italians seated in front of their elegantly slender Asian relatives—would be nice. But if I had to choose right now I think I would have the daikon (the large white root in your bag) pose first. There’s something truly impressive about a plant that can grow a root that size that fast. I only seeded them at the end of August. Consider for comparison’s sake your shallots. They are perfectly nice shallots, but they spent a couple of months in the greenhouse and another 4 or so in the field. If they grew at the same rate as daikon we would never be able to get one in the bag. Of course, some of you may wonder what inspired us to put a daikon in the bag. Well, for a start they are just so much fun to grow. I think we enjoyed harvesting them more than we have enjoyed harvesting any other crop so far this season. And they taste good. You can just slice them up and eat them. Or shred them and mix them with salt and vinegar. Or make a spicy Korean pickle. But what I like best is to julienne a daikon, mix it with a good amount of salt, let it sit in a colander for at least a couple of hours, squeeze out the liquid and mix the daikon with soy sauce (regular and a little dark if you have it), vinegar (Chinese black vinegar works well but red wine vinegar is fine), sesame oil, chili oil, a little sugar and pepper. You could also add some ground Szechuan peppercorn (there’s a decent Asian grocery store on Colvin just off Central Ave. that has all these ingredients). You could also use this mixture, perhaps with some crushed garlic, on steamed bok choi and grilled eggplant. In fact, it would go well on just about everything in this weeks share, maybe even the rutabaga (the big round root).

1 October 2009

Eggplant, Garlic, Kohlrabi, Leeks, Lettuce, Purple mizuna, Onions, Peppers, Very hot peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes

This is an American tale. A tale about hopes and dreams and hard work. A tale about adversity and perseverance. A tale about resourcefulness. A tale about redemption. A tale about pie.

I have the sneaking suspicion that many of you mistook my frequent references to the annual pie contest for a sort of running joke, a little dig at Americana, an ironic comment on our insubstantial rural nostalgia. But sometimes a pie contest is just a pie contest. Which is to say, no joke.

This past Sunday we held our fifth annual pie contest and for the fifth time Greg Smith (farm pick up) made a pie to enter in it. I say “made a pie to enter in it” rather than “entered a pie” because serious structural flaws prevented him from actually entering last year’s effort in the contest. Which knocked him out of contention right from the start.

It was a tough year to compete anyway, since he would have been up against the reigning champion, Jan Satin (Delmar), who came to the contest with something of an edge. She grew up on a farm in Indiana and made pies with her mother every morning. While I do not believe she has maintained quite that baking pace in recent years, I get the feeling that pie making still feels as basic to her as tying a shoe lace does to the rest of us. Unsurprisingly, she repeated as pie champion—and then graciously retired from further competitions.

Jan’s retirement and lousy weather this year presented Greg with the opportunity he had been waiting for. Because, you see, despite all that baking over the years, Greg had yet to win the contest. The three pies that had made it to the farm, including a notable rhubarb raisin one two years ago, had failed to impress the august judging panel enough to earn Greg the title he so clearly coveted.

Many bakers would have given up. Not, perhaps, given up baking pies all together. I don’t mean to suggest that the judges took vehemently against Greg’s pies and begged him to desist permanently for the good of America’s culinary reputation. But it would have been understandable if he had decided that three tries were enough and that he didn’t need to suffer another year of disappointment. He could have withdrawn and nobody would have questioned the decision. Even though he had not won, he had certainly demonstrated his pie making mettle.

But Greg refused to quit. He preferred to risk acquiring the status of permanent loser rather than walk away from the challenge. He chose to wade again into the flaky fray, knowing full well—better than anyone else—that to do so was to court defeat, which had proved in the past such a willing sweetheart. He understood right to his buttery fingertips that it is not whether you win or lose, it is whether you win, and by god you cannot win if you don’t play the game. And so he sallied forth once more, pie tin and rolling pin in hand, and made a fifth pie.

This pie held together. Very nicely actually. Flaky crust, well browned, sturdy but not tough, and a fruit filling with just enough substance to ooze slowly even from a thin slice, a filling in that happy place between gelatinous and soupy. But what really got the judges’ notice was the choice of fruit for that filling: Concord grape. And what inspired Greg to make a grape pie? The best of reasons: he had grapes—from his own vines no less (locavores take note). As the saying goes, if god gives you Concord grapes, make grape pie. And so at long last, in a hard fought contest, Greg finally achieved a victory a half decade in the making and became the Alleged Farm pie champion. At least until next year, when you all have the chance to try and unseat him.

You could start practicing right now with a vegetable pie, perhaps onion and tomato or a leek quiche. Or maybe, following Greg’s lead, you feel like making something a little surprising and will whip up a kohlrabi tart (let me know if you do).

Or maybe you will use the hot peppers in a pie, which could give you a surprise because they are quite powerful. The smaller, paler ones, Lemon, create a quick burn of some intensity. The Fatali creates a quick inferno. So why am I handing out these things? Well, for a start you can cut your heating bills by eating them. And they taste good.

The garlic tastes good too, at least the part unaffected by the disease (or diseases—I am not sure what’s wrecking the crop). Which, I am afraid may be a small part of each head. So why am I handing out these things? Well, it’s these or no garlic at all, and I figure even a small amount of garlic is better than none. I apologise if you get a completely useless head. We try to pick ones that look good, but it’s hard to tell for sure without pulling apart the heads and peeling the cloves, which we are not going to do.

I apologise too if your potatoes are not keeping. We cull every bad one we find, but I fear that the late blight got into potato the patch (it has been a rough year for the vegetables). Infected tubers rot in storage, especially if they are wet, and they can cause their uninfected neighbors to rot too. We try to get them as dry as possible before we hand them out and they seem to hold much better if you keep them in a spot where they get good air circulation. An even more effective technique is to eat them soon—in a pie, for instance.

24 September 2009

Arugula, Eggplants, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Hakurei turnip, Acorn winter squash

You will have to forgive me if this newsletter occasionally lapses into complete (rather than its normal partial) incomprehensibility. At the same time I am writing this a small, insane kitten is using my desk and various parts of my body as a jungle gym. Despite being no larger than a completely unremarkable adult rat and weighing less than a pint of peas, it already possesses impressive speed and agility. I am full of admiration for its budding feline grace and overexuberant confidence. But it’s a little hard to keep your mind fully on your prose when at any moment a 1/10 scale cat might sprint up your legs and pounce on the keyboard (not to mention the fact that in so doing it add its own enigmatic comments to my writing, such as its most recent offering, eeeeeeeeeeeel.f,mas (which, coincidentally bears an uncanny resemblance to the noise I made as it ascended my leg on the way to typing that)).

Add to that the usual late season fatigue, and even without the kitten’s assistance I might not make sense. I don’t mean to make any special claims about how hard we work here on the farm. We are not, I like to think, slackers. But we do not meet the standards for real hard work set by our dairy farming neighbors. True, a fair amount of what they do takes place in the cab of some machine, but driving deafeningly loud piece of equipment with no real suspension system for hours at a time takes its toll. And that’s the relaxing part of their 16 hour day.

So we don’t work like dairy farmers. We still do enough in the course of a season, however, that towards the end we start to move a little slower. Fortunately, we have less to do. We seeded the last trays of lettuce two weeks ago and only have a few trays left to transplant. We brought in all the onions and winter squash, sowed the falls greens and roots, and have hardly any weeds in the late broccoli and carrot rows to deal with. There’s still enough work—pulling tomato stakes, spreading compost, sowing winter rye, cleaning the seedling house, plus of course picking and packing the shares—to keep us busy for the next month, but busy at our October speed. If we were still moving at a May pace we might run out of things to do.

Actually, you never run out of things to do on a farm. You might get through everything you absolutely have to do to keep the farm going, or everything that you want to do. But we have a long list of projects—redoing the floor in the hay mow, painting the shed, fixing the deer fence—waiting for those moments, should they ever occur, when we cannot think of anything else to do. Not that they often do occur because just when we think they might something breaks and we have to repair it. Which always takes at least an hour, no matter how minor, and requires at least two tools we cannot find. Tools everywhere tend to wander, and on a farm they have further to wander and better places to hide. Sometimes we discover them lurking in the oddest spots—though not of course when we need them.

Perhaps on Sunday we could have a tool finding competition, with a special prize to the person who can recover all the ¾” sockets that have taken off for various parts of the farm. Perhaps I can train Winston to be a tool retriever. If dogs can sniff out plastic explosives, surely they can track the scent of a crescent wrench. Or maybe I would have better luck using Mickey Boy. A tool pig rather than a truffle pig. He could learn to root for lost pruners. I guess we could also try being more organized, but it is probably easier to teach a pig to hunt down missing drill bits than to teach farmers to be more organized.

Of course, if we all managed to hang onto our tools, whether through our own efforts or with the aid of specially trained animals, we would destroy the tool business. When they sell you those sockets sets they count on the fact that within a matter of months you will be back for more, having misplaced all but the most obscure ones, the sizes you’d only ever need if you rebuilt Bulgarian self-propelled howitzers as a hobby. When you think of it that way you realize that losing tools is a small but important form of economic development—an obligation really. Instead of finding the tools we have lost, perhaps you would prefer to bring some of your own to the farm on Sunday to mislay. Maybe you have something you are having trouble losing track of—a neon green box cutter say, or a crowbar. Well, we have the space to lose it. That’s a promise. I’ve tested it. Oh, and if you happen upon my box cutter, you could just put it back on the bench in the shop.

17 September 2009

Eggplants, Garlic, Melon, Mustard greens, Onions, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

Here are some things you might see if you come to the farm open house on the 27^th: a barn full of onions (we dry them in the hay mow), donkeys (the semi-feral Franklin and Eleanor), sunflowers (pick your own), beds of broccoli (we have three plantings out in the field for fall harvest), pheasants (six of them keep turning up around the farm), deer (a lot more than six of them turn up around the farm), potatoes (if the weather is nice we will harvest some), snails (see note about deer above), hot peppers (you can learn how to make hot sauce with them), frogs (we have three ponds full of them), trees (you can go for a walk in our woods), a hyperactive puppy (we hope he calms down before he outweighs us), celery root (it will turn up in your bag in October—or in a deer, see note above), migrating geese (though I cannot help noticing that they are headed south only about a quarter of the time), the famous eggplant patch (also, perhaps, known to some of you as the infamous eggplant patch), field houses full of fall crops (we are filling them up so we can keep picking right greens right to the end of the season), late blight (though this dry weather seems to have slowed it down; hence the tomatoes in the share), late carrots (let’s hope the deer develop a preference for weeds), pies (including, perhaps, your own triumphing over all the others in the contest), blue herons (three ponds full of frogs are an irresistible attraction for blue herons), red efts (Mike found one hanging out under a husk cherry plant the other day), Mike (the farm’s official red eft spotter), husk cherries (not just tasty, but also a great red eft habitat), mold board plows (just back from the repair shop), the brush cutter (just back from the repair shop), a Kubota tractor (just back from the repair shop), a farmer (back from the back repair shop), leeks (in the field across the road), leaks (in the drip tape), the muscovy duck, Terry (short for terrine), the chickens (soon to be in a terrine if they go after the tomatoes one more time), other CSA members (your pie contest competition), Sam and Will (members of the pie judging panel), dinner (I guess we should not just eat pie so there’s a potluck dinner before the pie contest; we supply drinks, plates, utensils), stars (sorry to raise your hopes, but no celebrities, just an amazing starlit night sky), your breath (it’s starting to get cold; we’re putting rows covers out again), orb weavers (big yellow spiders that make webs with a lightning bolt pattern), brussels sprouts (we might even get a crop this year), Jan (who would eat all the kohlrabi if we let her), kohlrabi (if Jan hasn’t finished it off), Mickey Boy, the large pig (who doesn’t like kohlrabi, but will eat all the squishy tomatoes and melons we care to give him), Adrienne (who is less excited than Jan about kohlrabi, and way less excited than Mickey Boy about squishy tomatoes and melons), winter squash (we have a big pile upstairs in the barn), the seed drill (we will use it to plant oats and winter rye in parts of the field where we have removed crops, such as the winter squash patch), the sunset, the moonrise, the sunrise (all right, probably not the latter, but maybe we’ll stay through the night eating pie and looking at the stars), dirt (we have lots so feel free to take some home with you).

I hope something on that lists appeals to you enough to convince you to come to the farm on the 27^th and see where those bags of produce come from and meet the people who fill them up and at least some of the other people who empty them out. The open house starts at 3, dinner around 6, and the pie contest whenever the judging panel can’t resist trying all the pies.

10 September 2009

Eggplants, Leeks, Lettuce, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tatsoi, Tomatoes

I chatted with a dairy farmer the other night about growing vegetables. He thinks he might have to find a new way to make money from farming. He has no intention of giving up. He and his family have conserved all 800 acres of their ground—and it’s good ground. They plan to keep using it. But unless the dairy industry changes significantly and soon, they may not be able to afford to milk cows any more.

This farmer could find all sorts of ways to make a living off the land. But as a conventional dairy farmer, he understands one basic way to do it: get the land to produce as much as possible and sell it in bulk. There are some incentives in the dairy industry to produce higher quality (that is higher fat) milk, and some strict guidelines for cleanliness on the macro- and microscopic level. But basically the industry pays farmers to produce more. The standard by which these farmers are judged is yield—bushels of corn or tons of silage an acre, pounds of milk per cow.

In pursuit of the best yields possible, dairy farmers have changed cows’ diets, employed an array of potent chemicals, invested in more and more specialized equipment, reduced the number of crops they grow and committed their animals to life in a harsh concrete environment. And they have had enormous success. The average modern American dairy cow produces about four times as much milk as its counterpart did 60 years ago. Harald and Hilding Pearson, the twins who were the last people to run our farm as a dairy, never contemplated getting anything like as much corn or hay from this ground or as much milk from their herd as the Wolffs, who rent much of our land now, succeed in doing.

In the course of a single day, with the aid of a self-propelled mower, merger, four hundred horsepower forage harvester, three dump trucks and an articulated tractor with a massive silage blade, the Wolffs can easily bring in hay from every one of their alfalfa fields on our farm and our neighbor’s, and fill a significant portion of one of their trench silos with high protein silage. It would have taken the twins a good stretch of dry days to mow and ted and rake and bale and put away the hay from one of those fields. Of course, the Wolffs will need every bit of that silage to feed their voracious Holstein herd if they want to keep those cows producing milk at the same rate (around 20,000 pounds a year per cow).

Not that all that hay will do them much good this year. It turns out dairy farmers may have succeeded too well. With more milk floating around than we know what do with, the price has collapsed. The Wolffs lose about $5 a day per cow right now and they have 300 (for those of you without a calculator handy, that comes to something over half a million dollars a year). Unfortunately, most of these farmers have invested so heavily in farming this way (the equipment the Wolff use to bring in that hay would cost a couple of million dollars bought new) that they have to keep doing the same thing—trying to squeeze as many pounds of milk as possible out of their cows for every pound of feed they put in—which won’t do anything, at least in the short run, to bring up the price of milk. A few farmers have sold their herds, hoping the resulting drastic reduction in costs will see them through, but they’re left with the same debt and a drastic reduction in income that seems to leave them in a slightly worse position.

It’s no wonder, then, that the dairy farmer I was talking to is thinking about trying something different. Well, sort of something different. On the face of it, trading in the dairy cows for a vegetable crop would be a major change. He would be dealing with new challenges—with unfamiliar nutrient requirements, spray regimens, harvesting equipment and storage need. But in effect he imagines continuing to farm much as he does now. He would chose one or two crops easily grown on a vast scale and sold wholesale and use every chemical and mechanical advantage available to maximize yield so he could find a little profit in a high volume, low margin business. He imagines farming like a guy he met at a conference, growing dump truck loads of peas for the Beech-Nut plant in Canajoharie, or like Albert Sheldon, who farms acres of potatoes along the Battenkill in Salem.

But he should take a closer look at Albert’s operation. Albert used to grow something like a hundred acres of standard potato varieties for the wholesale market. He’d pack them in 50 pound sacks and ship them off by the truckload. But the wholesale price collapsed, and now Albert and his wife grow a wide variety crops to market at their farm stand along with a range of local products. Albert recognized that in order to keep farming he needed not just to find a new crop, but also a new way of growing and selling. He still grows a lot of potatoes, still wholesales some, but he knows that that’s never going to be enough again. And now he grows all sort of potatoes, including fingerlings, which he always complains about because he cannot harvest them mechanically. The thought of digging potatoes by hand still irks him. It’s hard to set aside all your old habits.

I don’t object at all to getting a good yield. I have been enjoying the abundance of eggplant—not just because I like eggplant, but also because I remember more vividly than I’d like to all the years we have had a miserable eggplant crop. We’re giving away more eggplant to Community Action than we’ve picked in bad years. Some of you may be starting to wish we would give Community Action even more, but I hope you are not totally sick of eggplant. There are plenty of things to do with—grill, fry, stuff, mash. You’ll find excellent eggplant recipes from France, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, India, China, Italy, Georgia. There’s even a tasty eggplant and garlic chutney (I’ll give you the recipe if you are interested).

Unfortunately, our garlic is affording me less joy than the eggplant. We have a lot of it and it sized up nicely. But it seems the majority of it has been infected with penicillin mold and, as you may have noticed, the cloves are starting to break down—though so far you cannot tell that just by looking at the heads. Which is why we did not put any in the bags this week. We need to figure out what (if any) is good so we don’t end up handing out a lot of garlic flavored antibiotic—though if that is all we end up with it could prove a useful marketing strategy for an otherwise worthless crop. Sustainably grown local medicine. Now there’s something I have not seen a lot of farmers around here working on. Maybe I should mention it to that dairy farmer.

I should mention to you that you will find a few unlisted crops in your share this week, possibly including arugula (bunched greens), broccoli, husk cherries (little berries in papery wrappers), fennel and/or melon.

I should also mention—again—that our annual open house/pot luck dinner/pie contest happens on Sunday, September 27, and that I hope we will see then.

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.