8 July 2010

Mei Qing choi, Fordhook or Rhubarb Chard, Lincoln leeks, Purple mizuna, Parsley, Sugar Snap peas, Peppers, Multipik and Cashflow Squash, Hakurei turnips

There may be times when you wonder why you pay someone to grow your vegetables. How hard can it be? It is not like we are doing surgery here on the farm. Or even car repair. Car repair requires training, special tools, a certain mechanical aptitude. Growing vegetables does not require much more than a little time and space and dirt. Just about anyone can grow some crops.

I took over my family’s vegetable garden when I was maybe twelve, and if I did not enjoy complete success with every crop, at the very least I managed to grow a lot of pole beans. Enough one summer to maintain a sort of perpetual green bean salad like a sour dough starter. I had no particular gardening knowledge and no tools other than a fork and spade and my hands. I knew enough to dig up my little patch of the back garden, sow the seeds in rows and pull out the weeds, and that was enough to know.

Sure, I could have done a better job if I had learned more about growing vegetables—if I had known to make compost and add it to the soil, for instance, or built a little hoop house for early and late crops or chosen the varieties that would do best in my climate and dirt. But I had other things to do, I didn’t see the need to increase my bean yield, and it was a lot harder to find good gardening information way back then. These days a kid of any age with a desire to grow some food can get on the internet and get all the knowledge and supplies needed to create a productive garden.

I won’t pretend that if you did it yourself it would turn out to be better or cheaper or easier. Guys who get paid to grow vegetables often have a few advantages, like owning tractors or employing a farm crew or having nothing else to do all day. But that is not the point. It is the fact that you could easily do it yourself that matters. You are unlikely to be able to replace your own hip or even figure out why your check engine light keeps going on. But you could definitely grow some beans.

I recognize that this may be a farmer thing, the idea that because you can do something yourself you should do it yourself. Farmers are an independent, obdurate, cheap bunch. We would gladly sacrifice efficiency and quality and free time in the name of self-sufficiency. People often hope I can offer some tale of spiritual awakening or moral purpose to explain my career choice. But the simple fact is that I started farming because I like eating and figured I might as well grow the food myself—well that and because I am not much good at working for other people.

I would suppose that most normal people do not suffer quite so seriously from this pig-headed desire to make do without help. Indeed, the common idea of luxury is to have other people do just about everything for you. Still, farmers are not the only people with a do it yourself instinct. Even if you don’t actually intend to start a small farm in your yard (and some of you have already done it), you can still from time to time entertain the notion that you could easily do what we do.

Perhaps not so frequently this week, though. This is the sort of weather to make you feel good about having had the sense to leave the pea picking to someone else.

It is also the sort of weather to make you feel good about farming somewhere that rarely gets so beastly hot. We have suffered through a few sultry days, but we have not had a heat wave like this in several years. We could be farming in Rajasthan, where our high would be the average temperature and it would not count as a really hot day until it go up to around 115 degrees. No wonder so many Indians end up working in call centers. As miserable as it must be to spend one’s day talking irate Americans through pointless troubleshooting procedures, it is probably better than being outside in that climate.

I cannot imagine that many of our crops would enjoy that climate either. They all look a bit sulky by the middle of the afternoon, even the allegedly heat-loving ones. Only the weeds thrive in these conditions. They grow like bamboo in this heat.

As you can see, we and the vegetables have not completely given in to the heat yet. And as bad as it is, it is certainly better for the crops than the rain and cold of the past two years. Just for a start, the slugs are gone so we actually have a pepper crop. The chard certainly prefers this weather—we could have picked everyone a second bunch and still not made it all the way down the row—and the squash continues to do its things, its thing being to produce more than we need. Even the leeks have prospered. They are supposed to like moisture but they have sized up far faster this year.

Sized up may seem an odd way to put it given that the leeks are hardly bigger than scallions, but this is their intended size. At least, it is the size we intended. I don’t actually know what the leeks had in mind. They should be tender and tasty—though like leeks of any size, not so tender you would want to eat them raw. You could grill them whole along with slices of squash, toss them with a vinaigrette and chopped parsley and eat them cold. Or chop them up and sauté them slowly in butter with the turnips.

If you are just too hot to think about food you can enjoy the mizuna’s decorative qualities. Or you could use it in a salad.

As for the peas, you don’t have to do anything at all to them—other, that is, than eating them. I do prefer them quickly (and I mean quickly—absolutely no more than two minutes) steamed, but given that we are all being steamed already you might want to skip that. Just sit in front of an air conditioner and munch on them straight from the bag and enjoy the fact someone else picked them.

If for some strange reason having us do the work leaves you feeling a little unfulfilled, you can come out to the farm and pick something. No, I am not suggesting that you join us for the next pea picking. But we do have a lot of black currants right now and if you would like to have some you can come out to the farm and pick your own. Just let me know if you are interested (thomastheallegedfarm.com) and we can arrange a time (I would recommend early or late in the day unless you are a mad dog or Englishman).

1 July 2010

Arugula, Basil, Beets or turnips, Dill, Endive (escarole or frisee), Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Radishes, Scallions, Squash

It is fortunate that the World Cup only happens once every four years. It gives me plenty of time from one tournament to the next to forget how much I dislike watching the best soccer players in the world cheat. Not that all the tripping and diving (observe anybody on the Argentine team falling over at the slightest contact, arms raised, back elegantly arched, to see the dive at its operatic best), the pushing and jersey grabbing have destroyed my enjoyment of the game. There is still plenty of spectacular soccer taking place, from some obviously remarkable goals to the subtlest of touches, which comes as no surprise. These are all, even the North Koreans, highly gifted soccer players, men who have dedicated an astounding portion of their lives to the game.

You would think that if you could play a game that well you would not have to cheat at it. Your practiced skills would be your advantage, not a fistful of your opponent’s jersey. And you would think that having given so much of your life to a game—to an endeavor entirely defined by its rules (if you pick up the ball and run around holding it or bouncing it off the ground you are no longer playing soccer)—you would take a keen interest in sticking to its laws.

But I guess rules were made to be broken. Actually, I have never understood what that is really supposed to mean. It sounds less like an acute observation than a piece of self-justification, the sort of thing you would say as you jumped a turnstile or fudged some numbers on your tax return or created a shell company to hide your crippling corporate debt from your shareholders and government regulators. It is true that by their nature rules can be broken. Of course, Ming vases by their nature can also be broken, but nobody says that they were therefore made for that purpose. I cannot help thinking that in fact most rules actually were made to be followed.

It is also true, obviously, that breaking rules gives you an advantage—as long as you are not caught. Some people break rules just for the fun of it—possibly the same sorts of people who fly the Confederate flag to show they are rebels. But most people do it because they gain from cheating. That is certainly the case in the World Cup. The players are looking for any way to win, and if that includes a well placed elbow to an opponents lower back or spending half a minute writhing on the ground clutching an uninjured leg, so be it. It works most of the time, and anyway, as many of the players would be quick to point out, everyone else does it so not doing it puts you at a disadvantage.

I do not mean to single out soccer players in this regard. The best athletes in just about every major sport routinely cheat. I doubt there were many foul-free downs played in the NFL last season. The Tour de France and most track meets would more accurately be called pharmaceutical rather than athletic competitions. Baseball players are busy improving bats and balls and bodies in various banned ways. It would not surprise me at all to learn that ping-pong champions bend the rules at least as skillfully as they do their serves.

Of course the best athletes cheat. They did not become that good at their chosen sport simply for the love of the game. They may well love it (though, as Andre Agassi wants us to know, they may also hate it). But it is competitiveness that keeps them working so hard to be as good as they are. When you are that driven and have given up that much of your life to one thing in order to win at it, it is hardly surprising that you would try for victory any way you can even if that means breaking the rules of the game to which you have dedicated yourself.

So one lesson sports can teach kids—and of course we should all look to sports to inculcate our offspring with moral sensibilities—is that people who strive single-mindedly to succeed will cheat at least a little when the ref is looking the other way if it helps them get ahead. Obviously, a lot of bankers grew up wanting to emulate their sports heroes—and did. Fortunately, there are a few other lessons to go with this one. Such as the fact that an unmediated desire to win warps your sense of fair play. Or the fact that putting a few more referees on the field to keep an eye the players and penalize cheaters would cut down on the misdeeds. Or the fact that a deeply cynical governing body that regards money and popularity as greater goods than governing will help foster a culture of cheating. Or the fact that being good at a game is not the same as being good.

These are all excellent things to teach a kid. Not, I hasten to add, that they apply in any way to the rest of our lives. Goodness no. We are just talking about soccer here. It is only a game, a pastime, a simple amusement, an escape from the real world.

I believe at this point I am supposed to offer some nifty segue from soccer to farming—perhaps offer up agriculture as a shining counter example of ethical behavior or provide recipes from each of the quarter final countries. Unfortunately, farmers are people too, and if Ghanaians have wonderful ways of preparing kohlrabi I am sadly ignorant of them. I have nothing for you. Well, nothing but some vegetables, a familiar cast of characters. Consider the squash a sort of early warning, a reminder of what could be headed your way. Start looking for squash recipes.

The squash is also, I hope, a more positive omen, a harbinger of summer crops to come. So far the cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, onions and beans show real potential. The weather has been decent to us. The equipment has worked. The deer have exercised some restraint (mostly because we have used a lot of deer repellent). It is an oddly, almost unnervingly promising year.

That is not to say that everything will go as planned from here on out. The weather, pests and diseases all play dirty no matter how close an eye you keep on them. Just when you think you have reached your goal they will catch you unaware and drive you to your knees. You just have to learn to expect that sort of behavior, anticipate and sidestep it the best you can, strive to maintain your balance when they hit you, keep moving forward. And kick them in the shins when nobody is watching.

24 June 2010

Beets or turnips, Cilantro, Frisee, Garlic scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Mustard greens, Radishes, Scallions

I bought a button down shirt a few weeks ago. I don’t buy real shirts often, for obvious reasons. When—infrequently—I do put on clothes free of oil stains, paint splotches, frayed collars and holes people tend to remark on it. Perhaps if I did more clothes shopping I would not have paid as much attention to all the extra stuff I got with my shirt.

Useless extra stuff I hasten to add. I don’t want any of you feeling bad about missing out on some fabulous exclusive shirt emporium offering enticing perks to its customers. There was no excellent cup of espresso offered while I contemplated my purchase, no coupon for dry cleaning, not even any obsequious admiration of my remarkable physique and obviously impeccable taste in shirts. No, I got none of that. But I did get a plastic bag, cardboard, tissue paper, stiff plastic collar inserts, plastic ties for the labels and some pins in addition to the cotton material and thread, dye and plastic buttons that were actually needed to make the shirt.

To be fair, I could find uses for some of the extras. Pins are obviously reusable (not that I ever use them), and I suppose I could come up with some other purpose for a plastic bag or a piece tissue paper. Perhaps I could nestle a delicate, ripe heirloom tomato in the paper and slip it into the bag for transport. Then if I bought lots of shirts I could package the whole tomato crop for free. At least I can recycle the cardboard. And if plastics manufacturers took their social responsibilities more seriously (by which, of course, I mean if they were compelled by law to do so) I would probably be able to recycle all the plastic too or put it in the compost pile. Well, I could have put the plastic that came with the shirt in the compost pile. I mean put it in the compost pile and have it break back down into non-toxic organic matter.

I admit that all the plastic and paper and pins made the shirt look good in the store, all neatly folded and flat, with the collar held perfectly in place. I understand the point of presentation. I just think we may be overdoing it a bit. I do not wish to suggest that we create a totally utilitarian world in which everything must serve a sober function in order to justify its existence. Aside from the fact that such world is entirely unachievable—when was the last time we managed to agree on what is absolutely necessary?—it would also be intensely boring. If I were trying to live a rigidly frugal life I would not be out buying a white button down shirt with blue stripes when I already have a drawer full of t-shirts that do an entirely (or almost entirely in certain cases) adequate job even if they are a little grubby and worn. In fact, it is not entirely clear that I could justify having the t-shirts either since an old potato sack might do much the same thing (though in defense of my t-shirts they are rather less itchy than potato sacks).

Given the drilling, timbering, mining, refining, smelting, pulping, molding and god knows what else required to produce the objects intended solely to display my shirt attractively to potential buyers, it is hard not to think we could do with a lot less presentation. Surely we can find better things to do with our time than ripping up the earth in order to potentially increase the sales of consumer goods. I feel confident I would have been able to assess the merits of my shirt at least as effectively if it had merely been neatly folded and put in a pile on a crate. Of course, that would leave a lot of drillers, lumberjacks, miners, smelters, etc. out of work. But if we are willing to cover their wages every time we buy a shirt then surely we would also be willing to use the money we would save on buying more simply merchandised apparel to give them jobs restoring forests and mountains, cleaning up toxic waste sites, and building renewable energy infrastructure. Instead of making my shirt look good they could make my planet more presentable.

But it is not just the shirt that has me thinking about sensible packaging. It’s your vegetables too. I have been contemplating other ways to pack the shares for some time, ways that might help ensure they still look presentable when you get them. In an ideal world (my ideal world) you would all come to farm to get your produce and see how nice it looks straight from the field. But since for most of you neither your actual nor, most likely, ideal world involves making that weekly trip we need a good, practical way to get your share to you. A waxed cardboard box seems like it would do the trick, and we have 1100 of them sitting in the barn now. Sturdy and reusable, they should afford your vegetables greater protection than the bags. The question is whether or not I can afford them. At $1.28 apiece, the cost adds up fast. If I used them every week and never got any back I would have to spend nearly $5000 a year on boxes. That I cannot afford. In order to make this work I need to get a substantial number of the boxes back in a usable condition. I recognize that this would require a small extra effort on your part and may present logistical challenges at some sites. So we will try using the boxes soon and see what happens. If they come back to the farm we will keep using them. If not we will either have to go back to the bags or, if you think the boxes are worth it, ask for a box deposit to cover the extra cost. If you have any opinions about this or ideas about how to make it work well please share them with me.

A weekly trip to the farm may not work for you, but I hope the occasional one does. This Saturday, for instance, when we have our first farm day of the season from 10:00 to 2:00. You can see how good the crops look when they are still in the field, meet us and other members, get a sneak preview of those boxes and try a simple farm task to reconfirm your decision to let us do the work for you. As part of a season-long effort to offer you more information about what we are up to on the farm, we will focus on cover cropping for this farm day: on what that means, how we do it, and why we make the effort to grow acres of inedible crops that we just plow under. We will also provide drinks and snacks. Feel free to bring a picnic and friends (but please leave your dogs at home).

In anticipation of visiting the crops in their native habitat, you can eat some in your native habitat. Such as some mustard greens, which you could use in a salad with a dressing of oil, vinegar, Dijon mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil, mirin, chopped scallion, sugar, salt and pepper. Or turnips sautéed slowly in butter. Or frisee in a salad with roasted beets.

However you prepare the vegetables in your share this week, do not forget to spend some time on their presentation. While I do not have any specific recommendations, you might want to consider an arrangement involving a certain amount of plastic and tissue paper, which can really show things off to advantage. You might, however, want to avoid using any pins just to be safe.

17 June 2010

Arugula, Basil, Beet greens, Bok choi, Garlic Scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Parsley

Here is a bit of the farm, literally.

When you signed up for our CSA you signed up for a share of our farm. You probably had in mind receiving a portion of the harvest, a weekly delivery during the season of a range of vegetables and herbs, some completely familiar, some in unexpected hues and shapes, some less common, and some deeply mysterious. And you will get that.

Take this week’s bag, for instance. There’s nothing particularly odd about the lettuce—except, of course, that it was picked yesterday just for you from a farm you are encouraged to visit by people you can talk to about how they grew it. That’s pretty odd these days when much of what people eat has traveled far from the deliberately anonymous field, often making several stops along the way in industrial facilities so that by the time it arrives at the consumer’s mouth it has taken the form of a Hot Pocket or a Lunchable.

There’s nothing particularly odd about beet greens and bok choi either. What is odd is that more people don’t eat them and eat them more frequently. I suppose I should not be surprised given the minor role any vegetables other than the (fried) potato and tomato (sauce) play in the average American diet. In fact, I am not surprised. That was just a rhetorical device. But I can lament how unappreciated these greens are nonetheless. They are tasty, full of nutrients and easy to cook. You could do nothing more than steam them and sprinkle them with salt and perhaps a little vinegar to make a good dish.

Of course, you can do more with these greens than that if you want. You can top your steamed bok choi with a mixture of soy sauce, Chinese vinegar, sesame oil, chili-bean paste, sugar and ground pepper. You can add your beet greens to a salad along with some goat cheese, toasted walnuts and a good balsamic vinaigrette. Or you could sauté them in olive oil with some garlic (note to new members: you will quickly come to recognize that I think nearly everything should be sautéed in olive oil with garlic, a fixation for which I feel no need to apologize). Fortunately, we have included some garlic in your bag. You just may not recognize it as such since it is in the form of scapes: the curlicue flower stems of hard neck garlic. Fun to play with, it also has an excellent mild garlic flavor. Cut it into pieces and cook it slowly until tender before adding the greens. You could also puree it with the basil and parsley (and arugula), olive oil, some parmesan, a healthy dose of salt and pepper and, if you like, a bit of crushed red pepper and lemon juice, and you will have an excellent sauce for pasta, meat, fish or vegetables. You could peel and slice your kohlrabi (the purple orb that looks like something from outer space) and dip it in the sauce.

I could keep on listing things you could do with your share and offering more of my cryptic recipes. But I am not sure it would be a good use of paper. In any event, you can find useful recipes for many of the vegetables you will receive on the website (theallegedfarm.com). And you may well have better ways to prepare the produce than I do. If so, I hope you will send me your recipes so that I can add them to the ones already on the website and share them with your fellow CSA members.

Plus I have that odd first sentence hanging out there unexplained. It would be nice to get around to saying what I mean before I reach the second page.

Oops.

When I say you are literally getting a share of the farm many of you may think I am referring to the small amounts of organic matter that turn up clinging to your produce—the bit of dirt in the scallions’ roots, the odd piece of straw mulch clinging to the beet greens. Well, that is a bit of the farm, I suppose, a small reminder that your vegetables come out of our dirt. But I was thinking of the vegetables themselves as a part of the farm.

All the vegetable seeds we plant in the course of the year (excluding seed potatoes, of which we planted 1200 pounds this spring) would fill about two of the brown paper bags in which we send out the shares. But with those seeds we will grow enough vegetables to fill 3800 of those bags, keep our market stall stocked for the season, feed ourselves (and people who do farm work eat a lot) and give away a few tons of extra produce to Community Action. Where does all that mass come from? It comes out of our dirt—out of the sunlight and rain that falls on it, the water than flows beneath it, the minerals and nutrients and organic compounds in it. The dirt is at the heart of what we do. It makes farming possible. It is the farm. And the vegetables are just the dirt—the farm—transformed. So when we pack your share we are not just assembling a part of the harvest for you—a head of lettuce, a bunch of greens, a sprig of basil—we are sending you a little bit of the farm itself (happily an edible bit).

CSA farmers like to talk about creating direct connections between consumers and the source of their food. We create these connections most obviously by offering seasonal produce from a single source, but also by sharing news about what is happening on the farm and by having members come and see the farm for themselves (as you can do on Saturday, June 26^th). But for better or worse we all have a direction connection to the sources of all our food. Food is not just from but of a place, whether that place is a processing plant in the Midwest, a plantation in Honduras or the field behind my house. Wherever your food comes from, you are eating a bit of that place, and that is a pretty direct connection.

What a CSA farmer tries to do is make that connection as simple and clear and healthy as possible. For consumers, understanding how a Hot Pocket comes be would require degrees in chemical and industrial engineering, a solid grasp of marketing and economics, and a fistful of subpoenas. The food in your CSA share is a lot easier to understand, even if you do not recognize it. It all comes from the dirt on our farm, dirt you can come and stick your hands in—and I hope you will. We would love to show you where the different crops are growing, answer your questions about what we do, listen to your suggestions, let you pitch in with a simple farm chore to get a sense of how we spend our days growing your food. You have every reason to want to know about the farm. After all, you are going to be eating a share of it.

29 October 2009

Arugula, Brussels sprouts, Carrots, Celery root, Cress, Endive (radicchio or escarole), Lettuce, Onions, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Sage, Shallots, Winter Squash

This is the end. Not of the world. Not yet anyway, though that will come too. Give it a little time. No, it’s just the end of the CSA season. No more weekly deliveries of farm fresh, occasionally identifiable crops. No more odd ramblings of an exhausted farmer. No more hours pondering what exactly to do with a giant daikon or a fistful of hot peppers. Sure it will be tough going on without all these things. But it’s not like it’s the end of the world. Not yet anyway, though that will come too. Give it a… oh wait I already wrote that.

Not only is this not the end of the world, it does not even have to be the end of deliveries of vegetables from the farm. You won’t get another weekly share from us this year, but you can get more of our produce. We have a number of crops available still, which I have listed below. You can place an order with us, preferably via email (Thomas@theallegedfarm.com), and we will deliver it to you on November 20^th. If we still have vegetables available after that we will offer you another chance to order them in December.

Plus, of course, this is merely the last delivery of this season. You can sign up again (I will send out an early sign up form soon) and get another season of produce starting next June. Maybe even better produce. Not that I am apologizing for this season’s vegetables. We had our share of difficulties—infected garlic, rotting carrots, blighted tomatoes and potatoes, planting and cultivating schedules thrown off by wet weather, crops set back by the cold, a ridiculously late spring frost, poor germination for a number of seeds. But then we always have difficulties. And in spite of the diseases and far from ideal weather we managed to hand out a lot of vegetables—both a lot of different kinds, and a large quantity. I won’t go so far as to say you got your money’s worth since money’s worth is a subjective matter and I am not in a position to dictate what it is worth to you. But I will say that you could not have bought all those vegetables from a store (assuming you could find a store that offered everything we grow) for anything like as little as you paid for your share. You could not even have bought those vegetables from us for that price if you had not been a CSA member.

So why do I suggest you might get even better produce next season? Well, there’s always room for improvement. The best growers I know are still far from perfect. And I can always hope that we will get better weather and fewer diseases. We have to have a warmer, drier summer again one of these years. And I can do some things to improve the produce, such as packing shares in boxes, and getting a real cooler to keep the produce in peak shape until we send it out, and buying a bed shaper/mulch layer in order to keep more crops high and dry, and finding a second tractor so we can do more field work when the conditions are right.

You might notice that each of these improvements involves an investment (yes, even the boxes; a season’s worth costs several thousand dollars). You might also have heard that farming is not a high profit business. If so, you heard correctly. Which means I am unlikely to make all of these improvements at once unless I put up the price of a share significantly, and I do not plan to do that. But I will invest in at least one of these things, and though there’s no guarantee it will make as much of a difference as I hope (in fact, there’s something close to a cosmic guarantee it won’t) it ought to make some difference. Plus I would like to think I learn a little bit from my mistakes (more because the alternative is unattractive than because of any solid evidence) and might be able to avoid one or two of them next season—without simply replacing them with one or two new mistakes.

Who knows, I might even figure out how to grow large Brussels sprouts. At least we got some sprouts. I had given up on growing them at all for a while because the results were generally so disappointing. This is the best crop I have had in years.

It is far from the best potato crop ever. They have not particularly enjoyed the rain, and the blight got into one of the patches. Nonetheless, we have a certain number of extra potatoes, and thanks to the efforts of those of you who came to the farm on Sunday and of the Robert C. Parker School 8^th grade, we should have somewhere around a ton of them to donate to Community Action. That strikes me as a good way to end the season. So thank you potato pickers.

And thank you everyone for helping to support the farm this year. Jan and Mike and Adrienne and I hope you enjoyed the food we grew for you and that you ate well.

Crops available for delivery on 11/20. Please specify quantity and type (if applicable).

Onions $1.75/lb (yellow or red)

Shallots $5.00/lb

Leeks $4.00/lb

Garlic* $5.00

Potatoes $1.50/lb (red, white or yellow)

Carrots $2.50/lb (orange or mixed colors)

Turnips $2.00/lb

Celery Root $3.50/lb

Daikon $2.50/lb

Kale $2.50/lb

Lettuce $1.75 each

Endive $3,00 each (frisee, escarole or radicchio)

Bok choi $2.50 each

Tatsoi $2.50 each

Winter Squash $1.75/lb (Butternut or Acorn)

Hot peppers $5.00/lb (Jalapeno, Cherry bomb, Lemon, Fatali)

Fennel bulb $2.00 each

We do not have unlimited quantities of these vegetables. They are first come first served. We will let you know if we are unable to supply something you ordered.

We may also have small quantities of other crops we have grown this season. If you are interested in getting something you do no see on the list, let us know and we will tell you if it is available.

*We have picked through the garlic as carefully as we can, but I cannot guarantee it is uninfected so I am selling it at half price.

22 October 2009

Cabbage, Daikon, Dill, Frisee endive, Garlic, Kale, Leek, Lettuce, Mustard, Onions, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Butternut winter squash

In an ideal agricultural world we would grow exactly what we needed each week. To fill this week’s bag we would, the appropriate number of weeks ago, have started 165 lettuce, endive, leek and cabbage seedlings in the greenhouse and sowed 165 daikon seeds in the field next to precisely the right number of feet of mustard and dill to make 165 bunches. We would have accurately predicted the yield of squash, hot peppers, kale and potatoes and the number of times we would hand them out and planted accordingly and figured out just how many onions and heads of garlic we needed for the season and grown just that many and no more. Thus we would never expend our efforts on crops that come to naught or that we do not need, never find at the end of the season we could have been doing something far more useful than weeding cabbages for which we have no purpose or cauliflower that would not head up in time.

Of course, ideal and agriculture are not words that go together often. This is an imperfect world, and farming testifies to that imperfection as clearly as anything. In an attempt to produce the crops we need when we need them we make more or less educated guesses about all sorts of things partially in our control or well beyond it, and in many cases we make those guesses months in advance.

Take that garlic, for instance. To get a good crop next year we need to plant garlic now, some eight months before we harvest it. I would have a much better idea of where to plant it, how thoroughly to mulch it, when to fertilize it, how much will survive the winter and how well it will size up if someone were kind enough to give me a rough idea of what the weather will be like between then and now—or even better, give me some say over the weather during those months. That won’t happen. So I have to rely on what I have learned from previous years of growing garlic—some successful, some less so—and what I know about my fields and some estimate of how many customers I will have next year and how often I think we should hand out garlic and add it all together to arrive at an idea of how big a patch of garlic to plant this week.

Because of its long season, garlic forces you to make rough guesses about events far off. But you harvest the whole crop at once and can store it for months—or hope you can—handing it out as needed from your supply. You don’t have that option with a crop like lettuce. Plant too much and it may well have bolted before you can find a use for the extra heads. Plant too little and you have to go without or steal small heads from a later planting. Plus it grows at different rates at different times of the year. Put in two successions a week apart in late April and they may well be ready the same week in June. Put in two a week apart in June and one may bolt early in a July heat wave. Put in two a week apart in September and one may never size up in a cold rainy autumn.

You don’t have to farm for long to figure out that it is best to err on the generous side when guessing how much of something to plant. It is not much fun to have one’s crops—and one’s work—go to waste because you have more of something than you can use. But it is less fun to ponder going out and scrounging up weeds from the hedgerows to fill up the shares (and no, in case you are wondering, how ever odd some of the crops may have appeared, we have not given you any hedgerow weeds this year). So we plant 80 extra cabbage seeds each time we start another batch of cabbage, knowing some may not come up, some may not grow well enough to be worth transplanting, some may be lost in the field to insects or deer and some may not size up in time. And we put in 900 kale plants because the weather may turn cold early and slow them down just when we need them to grow. And we plant a hundred bed feet of daikon because some will split or be too ugly or just snap in half when we pull them up. And we start far more lettuce than we need in an effort to have it as often as possible throughout the season.

As a result of this and the occasional surprise success (such as the eggplant) and the natural tendency of crops like cucumbers and squash to have spurts of overproduction we often have extra vegetables. Fortunately, we often have good uses for them. We eat a lot (you work up an appetite when you do manual labor all the time). We have a pig who does not mind dining on blemished produce (especially tomatoes; he could care less if a tomato is split or soft of hideously ugly). And when we have large quantities left over the folks from Community Action come and get them and distribute them to food pantries in the area.

We often have a lot left over at the end of the season. This is partly by design. We plant more potatoes than we need with the aim of having extra for Community Action. It’s partly because of our tendency to plant a bit extra of everything as an insurance policy. And it’s partly because we put in late plantings of a number of things on the off chance that we will have one of those approximately once a decade warm dry autumns when late plantings thrive. Plus at this time of year extra things we leave in the field tend to hold well for quite some time so we end up with a lot of beds we picked through as much as a month ago that still have usable crops in them. The problem is that Community Action has a hard time these days finding people to come and glean and we don’t have time to pick everything out there before it freezes (we still have to plant that garlic and spread manure and clean up the field houses and roll up irrigation lines and wash trays and put everything back into some sort of order).

In order to make sure this extra produce does not go to waste and that we can share our food with those who cannot afford it, we need help. That, I hope, is where at least some of you come in. Literally. As in come in to the fields to help us pick these crops for Community Action. If you are interested in helping out you can come to the farm this Sunday between 2 and 6 and lend a hand, or even two hands. We will provide warm cider and soup and suggestions for what to do with kale and daikon and maybe some of the magical donuts from Cambridge, which are worth the drive themselves. As is, I would like to think, the chance to see the farm and feed the hungry and play in the dirt on a sunny mild October afternoon.

Assuming it is, as the weather forecasters currently predict, a warm mild afternoon. Events, of course, could prove them wrong (that has been know to happen). Rather than going out in the mud and cold we would try again on another day (probably the next Sunday). Just give us a call (692-9065) if the weather seems lousy to find out if we have postponed the gleaning.

15 October 2009

Chinese broccoli, Chinese cabbage, Celery root, Endive (radicchio or escarole), Garlic, Onions, Anaheim hot pepper, Potatoes, Turnips, Carnival winter Squash

Everyone’s a winner. That, in any event, is what we seem to want to teach our kids. Intent on boosting their (allegedly) fragile self-esteem, we do all we can to provide them with opportunities for success. This includes, of course, rigging events so that they cannot fail to achieve victory or simply redefining success to include any number of lesser achievements—such as failure. We have them play sports—activities defined in part by their measurable outcomes—and pretend that nobody is keeping score (the kids always know what the score is). We award medals for participation. We celebrate kindergarten “graduation.” We even make sure that every kid at a birthday party gets some sort of present, on the assumption I suppose that they cannot handle the fact that somebody else’s birthday is, well, somebody else’s birthday.
There’s nothing wrong with ensuring that kids develop some self-confidence, at least not in moderation and preferably honestly come by. But I do not understand what we hope to achieve by shielding kids from loss. Loss is unavoidable. We don’t get every job we apply for, every promotion we hope for, every recognition we think we deserve. We fail drivers’ tests and bar exams. We get rejected by colleges and people we ask on dates. Computer files and car keys vanish without a trace. We lose games. We lose friends. We lose money. We lose hair. We lose our youth.
Kids will lose. Probably a lot more than they win. They had better develop some productive ways of dealing with it. Being a good winner is easy. Winning simply confirms what we know to be true about ourselves. Being a good loser takes practice. Not round the clock practice. Everyone deserves at least a little time off from losing. But enough practice so that they can learn to overcome the natural human tendencies when confronted with loss: sulking, avoiding blame and quitting.
Losing may not be easy, but it’s normal, common and survivable. To teach kids that it is something to be rigorously avoided by any means is to mislead them dangerously. To believe that they cannot take losing is to seriously underestimate their fortitude.
The kids Will plays soccer with this fall lost all their games last year and may well lose them all this year. And yet they turn up week after week, smiling and joking and hopeful. Sam and Will’s team last spring lost all its games. It was the worst U14 team in the league—by far (it can be taken as a sign of the state of soccer in Cambridge that they continue to let me coach). But most of those kids now make up a school team that has only lost once and I expect to they will turn up for the spring season again.
I do not mean to glorify this record of soccer futility. We would all have liked to win at least a few of those games, and I do not mean to suggest that doing so would have caused any harm. Winning is more fun that losing. But all that losing has not destroyed any of the kids. There were times, unsurprisingly, they became sullen and lazy and timid. But to the extent they recognized that losing a bunch of soccer games is a minor disappointment and that the frustration of losing can be a spur to greater effort they got at least as much out of the season as any of the players on the teams that beat them.
At the very least, they will be well prepared for a life in farming, where there is no sure way to guarantee success. If vegetable growers simply gave up on every crop they lost to weather, disease, insects, animals, lack of labor or their own ineptitude, they would soon have nothing to grow. I have never had a season where at least one crop did not fail entirely. I have learned to do some things differently—to plant less broccoli early, to hide lettuce from deer, to grow cucumbers and squash in plastic on raised bed. I have also learned that next season I will get different results even when I do the same things and that some crops, such as this year’s eggplant, will thrive in spite of the growing conditions. I have learned not to despair over hail, drought, floods. And I know that a killing frost is not, as the weather forecasters would have it, the end of the growing season. These cold nights did in lots of crops, but we still have enough out there that shrug off a hard freeze or even taste better after one to keep the bags filled for these last three weeks of the season (the last delivery will be on the 29th).
Of course, you may be puzzled by who these hardy vegetables are. Such as the Chinese broccoli, the bunched greens, which with their delightfully crunchy stems and far less bitter flavor are a superior form, I think, of broccoli raab. Or the head of Chinese cabbage, whose tender leaves, slightly more pungent than those of a regular (to us) cabbage are excellent raw or cooked. Or the odd, warty celery root, which has the taste of celery and the texture of kohlrabi and makes a tasty salad (see the recipe section of the web site). Or the Carnival squash, which looks like a table decoration and tastes like an Acorn squash.
Or the garlic, which looks like garlic but may, as I have previously mentioned, turn out to be a head of penicillin. I could easily have become discouraged by this outcome—by the effort (field preparation, planting, mulching, weeding, fertilizing, weeding, more weeding, picking, bunching, curing) gone to waste, the lost revenue at farmers market and the cost (about a thousand dollars) of replacement seed stock—and decided that you and I could do without garlic in the future. Why risk the loss of next season’s crop? But who can do without garlic? So we will go out when the snow stops and plant 130 pounds of garlic. If you would like to join us for that and to glean the remaining potatoes for various food pantries and to share soup and hot cider, we will (weather permitting) host one last farm day on Sunday, the 25th in the afternoon.