9 October 2008

Eggplant, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Mustard greens, Peppers, Kennebec potatoes, Hot peppers, Rosemary, Tatsoi, Tomatoes

It is time again for my once a year stint as a caterer for the local land trust’s landscape exhibit preview party.  Consequently, instead of writing a normal newsletter tonight, I need instead to make venison pate, cook down some onions, roast tomatoes, make a spicy marinade for pork cubes and possibly start on some puff pastry.

I am afraid I cannot invite you to the preview party, at least not unless you express a sincere and credible desire to make a major donation to the land trust or to purchase a few pieces of art (those wishing to express either desire should get in touch with me as soon as possible).  I can, however, invite you to the opening party the next day, and you are free to attend (and attend for free) without giving or buying anything—though I would encourage you to do either or both.  Your donation and a portion of the price of your art would support the work of the Agricultural Stewardship Association, which works (successfully) to protect farmland and ensure the viability of farming in Washington and Rensslaer counties.  ASA holds a conservation easement on a portion of our farm (including the fields where some of you weeded carrots, peppers, eggplants and onions), meaning that nobody can ever build on that land.  Everybody in the region benefits from such easements, which help a vital part of the economy, encourage the local production of food, protect natural resources and preserve a beautiful landscape. 

If you want to know more about the art exhibit or ASA, go to agstewardship.org.  I strongly encourage you to come to the show and to take a look around the area.  I would encourage you to drop in at the farm too, but I won’t be there.  I won’t be at the art show either.  Greg and Andrea, who worked here in 2006 and 2007 are getting married on Saturday so we will be at their wedding. 

Before returning to my cooking tasks I offer a few notes about the vegetables in your bag.  Your eggplant is, I know, rather small.  Consider it a final adieu to summer.  We stripped down the plants just before the first frost.  Fortunately the tatsoi (the head of dark green spoon shaped leaves) could care less about frost.  In fact, it may taste better after one.  It definitely tastes better after you steam if and top with soy sauce, vinegar, garlic and hot sauce (though it is tasty raw).  You can have the mustard greens (in the bag) raw or cooked.  I like to put some in a salad (or have a purely mustard salad).  At this point in the season, the tomatoes might taste better cooked.  The weakening sun has lost much of its power to produce sugar in fruits.  The potatoes definitely taste better cooked than raw.  The real question with potato varieties is which cooking method suits them best. I am told Kennebecs make fine baked potatoes, but they are considered general purpose spuds so you can do with them what you want, such as making a leek and potato soup with rosemary or a garlic-infused gratin.

16 October 2008

Arugula, Carrots, Garlic, Kohlrabi, Lemon grass, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Anaheim peppers, Potatoes, Radishes (red) or turnips (white), Shallots, Winter squash

I thought I would write about presidential debates, about how with their array of highly stylized tradition costumes, scripts, gestures and intonations they remind me not so much of keen intellectual combat as of Javanese shadow puppet theater.  Except that we sit and listen raptly to these often tedious political theatrics, while the Javanese understand that such shows only require intermittent and often half-hearted attention because surely they will occur again in much the same form the next time you go to pick up some fish.   

            But then I got a cold and my brain turned to mush, precluding any possibility of extended, grumpy comparative ethnographic commentary.  Though come to think of it the mushy brain syndrome could have set in when in a moment of weakness I turned on the debate and caught a couple of minutes of the two candidates arguing over which one of them is less faithful to his party’s principles, such unpredictability apparently being considered an asset.  I should have stuck to baseball.

            Whatever the cause, at present my brain can barely distinguish between a radish and a turnip.  Those of you better equipped to do so my be interested to note that to some extent it does not matter if you mix them since you can eat both raw or cooked and both have edible greens.  Madhur Jaffrey has a recipe from Uttar Pradesh for radishes cooked with their leaves in A Taste of India (and I would guess you could substitute turnips for radishes and end up with much the same dish).

            You may be thinking, depending on what is in your bag, that I have had similar trouble telling the difference between a winter squash and a pumpkin.  In fact, however, there is not really any difference.  The various sorts of winter squash and pumpkins all belong to a small number of Cucurbita species.  As it happens, pie pumpkins and Acorn squash are both Cucurbita Pepos and thus more closely related to one another then they are to, say, a Butternut (cucurbita moschata).  In any event, you cook them in exactly the same ways, my preferred method being to place the whole squash in the oven and bake it until it goes soft, then scoop out the flesh and puree it with a little cream and butter, a bit of nutmeg, a dash of paprika and perhaps a little sherry.  You can use the puree to make soup, eat it just like that, or mix in an egg and bake it until it sets slightly.

            Many of you, finding a couple of grassy stalks in the bag, may have come to the reasonable conclusion that I have also failed to tell the difference between weeds and edible crops.  As it happens, those are grassy stalks, they are not edible and we put them in your bag on purpose.  No, we are not getting a little punchy at the end of the season.  While you would not want to eat lemon grass, you would want to use it in soup for its excellent flavor (one of the basic flavors of Thai cooking).  Snip it into smaller pieces and throw it in some stock with a fair amount of garlic, simmer for a while, add onion, carrots, pepper (sweet and of Anaheim), perhaps some potato cubes, maybe even a couple of radishes or turnips.  When the vegetables have cooked, add thinly sliced beef, fried shallots, some lime juice, fish sauce and perhaps some arugula and serve.

2 October 2008

Arugula, Shell beans, Garlic, Lettuce, Mizuna, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Radicchio or escarole, Shallots, Tomatoes

         I would love to tell you all about how exactly to deal with those odd, seedy red beans or why I have included a couple of bunches of weeds in your share, but I am afraid I just don’t have time for that.  I must instead address an issue of some considerable urgency.  I cannot put it off or another week, but must bring it to your immediate attention.

            I am talking, of course, about the annual pie contest, which as you are all no doubt aware takes place this Sunday on the farm.  Obviously, none of you have actually made a pie yet.  Pies don’t keep well.  You are not going to win with a two day old entry.  But I feel sure that you have been giving your pie considerable thought.  You have been sifting through recipes, contemplating exciting new fruit combinations, going over in your mind just which subtle refinement will create the perfect flaky crust. 

I don’t mean to complicate this creative process, but I thought I should point out that while this is a pie contest, it is not necessarily a dessert pie contest.  Nobody has yet entered anything but a fruit pie (with apple, pumpkin and three berry winning).  But there’s no reason you could not.  For the purposes of the contest, a pie is a filling in a crust.  So you could enter a quiche or a tomato onion tart or even a spicy beef empanada. 

A greater range of pies would certainly provide the judges with a greater challenge.  It is far easier to assess the relative merits of two apple pies than of a lemon meringue pie and bacon leek quiche.  But please don’t limit your pie imagination for our sake.  Trust me, no matter what you bake, we will judge it. 

And oh yes, there’s also a fall open house the same day as the pie contest.  It is a chance for you to look around the fields, help pick potatoes or clean onions, meet the farm crew and other CSA members, share a potluck dinner and eat some pies.  We would love to see lots of you here on what’s forecast to be a lovely autumn day, and not just because we could use some help with the potatoes and onions.  We like to meet the people we grow this food for, to hear about what you do with it, to show you where it comes from, to answer your questions about it, to get your suggestions.  So we hope you will take this chance to visit the farm.  The farm tasks and tours start at 3 pm, with the potluck dinner around 6.  I would recommend warm clothes and sturdy footwear.

For those of you who cannot wait to come out to farm to learn about those beans, they are shell beans, more or less the fresh equivalent of dry beans.  Take the beans out of the pods and boil them for about 30 minutes until soft.  You can eat them hot or cold (they would be excellent in a salad with the weeds—arugula and mizuna—and a lemon garlic dressing, perhaps with a little shaved parmesan).

 

25 September 2008

Bok choi, Carrots, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho and Roberto’s Cuban Seasoning hot peppers, Fingerling potatoes, Tomatoes

I have been reminded this week why I should stick to gloomy news here.  I forgot myself last week and dared to suggest that despite a parade of incompetence (or incompetents), I had finally ended up with a few decent, happy workers and that together we would go forth in the golden autumnal sunlight to work vegetable wonders with the help of fecund mother nature, coaxing from the deep loam a parade of fall crops to delight and amaze you.  Or something roughly like that.  I might, in my giddy state, have gotten more carried away than that.

And now I must pay the price for this moment of uncharacteristic exuberance.  True, the weather has not turned abominable.  Yet.  But it will if it has to.  A little sleet or perhaps a good nor’easter.  There’s nothing quite like working in cold mud. 

That may not, however, be necessary.  The pests have already arrived.  I just tossed out trays of aphid-infested lettuce seedlings and the slugs have come out from wherever it is slugs spend time when not chewing up bok choi and Chinese cabbage.  The deer have found the celery root—and found it to their liking.  Apparently it makes a nice change from shell beans, of which they have not left themselves many to graze on. 

And that crew of workers?  Well, does one worker count as a crew?  I knew I would be down to two workers this week.  At least, I thought I knew.  But what I did not know was that Mike #2 would have to stay home with his kids because the day care provider had an accident.  I knew too that Mike #1 would not be in until Tuesday afternoon.  But I did not know that he would get stuck on the Deegan Expressway for three hours and not make it to work until Wednesday.

I have no particular objections to working alone.  In fact, sometimes I like having the farm to myself, like not having to think about what anyone else is doing or ought to be doing or ought not to be doing.  The pleasures of solitude notwithstanding, however, it is hard to avoid noting after a morning picking up two rows of fingerling potatoes how much quicker the job would have gone had four people been doing it instead of one.  I suppose it is nice to discover that I can pick just about all the vegetables for the share myself if I have to.  But I would have liked to get a few other tasks done and perhaps to have spent a little less of the past few days in various postures that while suitable to carrot pulling or pepper harvesting probably do not come highly recommended for people with back problems. 

 At least I found a few carrots to pull.  Or rather, to keep.  I must have pulled thousands of carrots from the bed I dug, but most of them were hardly large enough to get the attention of a starving rabbit.  I do not fully understand why it is such a bad year for carrots.  All that rain in July has something to do with it.  But they have had weeks to get over that and they are still sulking.  Maybe it is just their turn to slack off.  Last year the potatoes performed inexplicably poorly.  Whatever is irking the carrots, though, has nothing to do with them turning those odd colors.  The white and yellow ones are supposed to be white and yellow.

The eggplants did not have a much more spectacular year than the carrots, but that comes as less of a surprise.  I am well aware that they do not like this odd northern climate, especially the cold nights which leave them pining for their warmer native habitats.  Given how the plants look, I figured I should go ahead and pick every usable eggplant I could find.  They are hardly prize winners (whatever prize it is that eggplants win), but they will do as part of what is more or less a farewell to summer share.  The peppers and greenhouse tomatoes will still produce some fruit for another week or two (though now that I have said that they will probably be trampled by a herd of irritable giraffes or confiscated by Homeland Security personnel as part of an ongoing investigation into antipatriotic activities in the organic community).  But they too have begun to notice a slight arctic aspect to the weather, or perhaps they just see the leaves starting to turn and know the time has come to cede their place in the bags to hardier crops, to leeks and rutabagas and those odd Asian greens so attractive to slugs and even the occasional human (not that I have had a lot of problems yet with people attacking them—though now that I have said that I will probably find that some vegetarian collective has wreaked havoc on the tatsoi in the night). 

I don’t think the slugs—or many humans, come to think of it—pose a serious threat to the hot pepper crop.  But some sort of rodent does eat them.  Some sort of Mexican or Thai rodent, no doubt.  It cannot be anything native to this part of the world, where eating a hot pepper is considered about as foolish as voting for Democrats or trying to farm without pesticides.  I don’t know that I can say much to change your mind if you subscribe more to the local than the rodential view of hot peppers.  But I will try.  They taste good.  At least, the good ones do, and I think both of the varieties this week are good.  I am particularly pleased with these seasoning peppers (the tiny wrinkled red pepper), which I have not grown before.  The other seasoning pepper varieties I have grown just tasted like sweet peppers, but these taste like Habaneros—which is to say intriguingly, tropically fruity—without the scarring heat.  You could slice up and fry your fingerlings (they are especially good fried) and toss in some garlic and the seasoning pepper, finely chopped, a minute or two before taking the potatoes off the heat.  Or you could mix the garlic and seasoning pepper and some soy sauce with steamed bok choi.  Or use the pepper in salsa.  Or just follow the lead of those alien rodents and nibble on it.

18 September 2008

Endive, Fennel, Garlic, Lettuce, Melon, Onions, Peppers, Jalapeno or Cherry Bomb hot pepper, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes, Dill or thyme

I understand that some of you mistook last week’s update for a letter of resignation.  A Letter of Resignation of the formal sort, that is.  Most of my newsletters express a certain degree of informal resignation—of rueful despair, fatalistic anguish, gloomy acceptance of the imperfect nature of things.  But I have yet to send out a note saying I quit.

I confess I thought of quitting on several occasions this season.  Particularly, early on when it seemed I might never find any workers.  For a number of years now I have found workers—and mostly remarkably good ones—by posting a listing on a national database run by the USDA.  This year the listing elicited a single enquiry about the job—from a guy in his 50s who has been on something of a search for himself the past few decades.  It seemed unlikely to me he would find himself here among the weeds so he didn’t. 

The national listing having failed, I posted the job locally everywhere I could think of and did get responses. I arranged an interview with a guy from Glens Falls who e-mailed that morning to say he was running 45 minutes late.  It has been a long 45 minutes.  I got an e-mail from a woman in Albany who was very interested until she remembered that she didn’t have any way of getting here.  An RPI graduate student almost came for an interview, but got tired on the way to the car and canceled (I’m serious).  I got an e-mail from a man who needed farming experience for his upcoming Peace Corps stint, which sounded promising until he got around to mentioning that he works nights so he would not want to get to the farm before 4 pm.  I interviewed a woman who had worked on farms before and wants to grow her own food.  She was so promising I hired her, and I bet she would have been great.  But a week later she discovered, to her surprise that she was pregnant with twins and could not farm.  I hired a Skidmore student who had done landscaping and seemed pleasantly enthusiastic about farm work.  She would probably have been good too, but she took another job—a small detail I had to coax from her the day she was supposed to start.  She really did mean to tell me, but she had been so busy.

I took out an ad in the local Free Press, which resulted almost immediately in lots of messages from potential workers.  I got the feeling most of them had called from a pay phone in a bar.  I set up interviews with the ones who displayed some level competence—such as remembering to leave their names on the answering machine.  The first six never showed up.  I was so grateful to the seventh for actually making it to the farm I almost hired him.  He seemed like a nice guy.  A nice round guy.  Spherical, actually. It was not clear that he would survive farm work.  

It was not clear that I would survive farm work—not if I failed to find workers.  I was just looking for a few able bodied people with an interest in agriculture and some sense of responsibility.  I was getting an extended lesson in the rate of incompetence.  I get the feeling it is rising.  I am not which depressed me more: the applicants who lacked all job seeking (let alone job holding) skills or the ones who had every reason to know better and still could not be bothered to do the simplest of tasks correctly.  

Not that I was going to give up on the season just because we have a permanent underclass or an unsatisfactory notion of how to behave.  The fact that a lot of necessary tasks were not getting done had more to do with.  I knew that at some point I would fall so far behind I could never catch up.  But the thought that I would have, every year, to look for workers from amongst this pool of unsatisfactory candidates did not encourage me. 

However, I did not quit then and I did not quit last week.  It has been, for me, a notably unsatisfactory season, and not simply because I spent much of July on my back waiting for the pain to subside.  We had more rain in the middle of the summer than this farm, with its heavy soil and high water table, can bear.  We lost a lot of vegetables to that weather, including at least half the winter squash and untold numbers of carrots.  Most of the workers I finally found never seemed particularly engaged by the work and did it in almost total silence.  A good conversation can make nearly any farm task easier; the mute company of people counting the minutes until quitting time does not.   

But here we are in September, with decent weather, three happy workers (though one will leave, regretfully, this Friday for a job with benefits; when will we get national health care?) and some pretty well weeded fall crops (just avert your gaze from the parsnip beds).  We have piles of onions drying in the barn, 22 more rows of potatoes to dig and three rows of greenhouse tomatoes that show no sign of giving up yet (almost all of this week’s tomatoes came off those rows).  It is hardly the moment to give up.  Finishing up the season will require a lot of work (such as digging those 22 rows of potatoes), more work, given the beginning of the season and the nature of things, than I would have hoped.  But after fourteen years of farming I am, not too unhappily, resigned to that.

 

 

 

11 September 2008

Beans, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Melon, Onions, Peppers, Anaheim peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

  Getting through a farming season is not unlike running a race.  A long race.  A very long race.  Uphill.  In the mud.  And rain.  And thistles.  With wet socks.  And pests.  And an aching back. 

If you are not careful you will find yourself spending most of the race, after than pain has settled in, asking yourself why you keep going.  Why not stop for a while and find a comfortable spot to sit down and stretch your legs out and enjoy the sight of all the other racers wheezing past.  Just get a little rest, catch your breath, let the pain subside, and then you can run some more. 

But if you have ever been in a race you know that stopping in the middle is a big mistake.  At least, if you are planning on finishing.  Obviously, if you have truly had enough, then stopping makes sense.  There’s no good reason to inflict more pain on yourself once you have decided you don’t need to get to the end. 

If you are a pigheaded farmer, however, you don’t like to quit, even if you no longer have any idea what made you start in the first place, if that lunatic moment has faded from memory. So you answer that voice, telling yourself you will go a little further, a little further before you rest.  And bit by bit you go on. 

You go on because, as much as it hurts to continue, you know it will only hurt more to stop and rest and start again.  Bodies and minds just don’t seem to take well to that.  Once at rest they wish to stay at rest.  I am not sure it is true that once in motion they wish to stay in motion—hence that pleading, wheedling voice in your head reminding you this could be your last step.  At best, they stay in motion grudgingly.  So if you give in to that voice and take a break, which is frighteningly easy to do, and then announce that it is time to set out again, your body and mind will put up strenuous objections. 

You can, with a sufficient degree of stubbornness and pain tolerance (two specialties of farmers), drag yourself back into action, overcoming all your body and mind’s considerable and ingenious efforts to root you to the spot.  But it never feels the same.  You cannot find your rhythm and you are constantly and painfully aware of the effort.

Unfortunately, that is the point at which I find myself this season.  Not that I took a break from farming just because it seemed like a good idea.  It was not so much some querulous inner voice as a shooting pain down my right leg that convinced me to pull over and lie down.  But the effect is much the same.  I thought that having the pain go away would give me such a sense of relief that I would launch myself back into farming with renewed vigor and enthusiasm.  And anyway I had things to do.  But I find I have even more tasks to do than I realized  (though I suspect that is a universal condition) and less energy to do them than I hoped (quite possibly another universal condition). 

In other words, things are a bit of a mess on the farm right now.  We brought in the last of the onions this week but have not found time to pick a single winter squash.  The greenhouse tomatoes have long since grown over the top of their trellis but the outside tomatoes are dead.  We are getting a second crop of green beans off the first planting but the deer are mowing down the shell beans.  We have a lot of rows of potatoes left but the yield is below average. 

Of somewhat more concern, though, is the fact that I did not get a chance to plant many of the fall crops until quite recently.  I sowed radishes and turnips over the weekend and we were still transplanting broccoli this Monday.  If we have decent fall weather most of things I have gotten in the ground the past few weeks will have enough time.  But they still won’t be ready to pick until some time in October, and with most of the summer crops petering out we could use a few other vegetables sooner.

Or maybe not.  Perhaps eating a CSA share is like a race too and your head is telling you you could  use a break from fresh vegetables just about now.  Nothing permanent.  Just a week or two of Big Macs and Pepsi to get your energy back for those odd late season root crops.

In case you are too stubborn to give in to that siren song, here are some more vegetables.  Mostly more tomatoes, which I don’t ever consider a bad thing.  I have not had many tomato-free meals for well over a month and I am not sick of them yet.  They will be gone soon enough and we will be left to stare disconsolately at the sad, spongy tomatoish objects in the grocery store.

If you have had enough of tomato salad—though who has?—you could make some salsa this week.  Those Anaheim peppers (which are straighter and smoother than the pointy sweet peppers) would work well roasted, peeled and chopped up with onion, tomatoes, garlic and lime juice.  Or you could roast and mash the eggplant with lots of garlic and lemon juice and add the chopped peppers (and some diced tomato) to that.  Or you could try making a melon salsa with the peppers, grilled onions and lime juice.  I say try making in this case because I have never made a melon salsa myself.  I just invented it on the spur or the moment (though I would guess I am not the first person to think of it).  There’s a small chance it would not be any good.  But somebody ought to give it a try.   And if it proves inedible, well then you have a good reason to skip the fresh stuff—just for a meal or two, of course—and head out for fast food all the sooner.   

 

September 4 2008

Eggplant, Escarole, Garlic, Leeks, Melon, Oregano, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

One of the advantages, allegedly, of belonging to a CSA is the bond it affords you with your farmer.  Whether or not this actually constitutes a benefit is debatable.  Certainly, most Americans have little interest in any sort of relationship at all with farmers.  And that includes the most basic one: eating the stuff farmers grow.  Knowing where your food comes from and who bears responsibility for it is somehow less enticing when you consume the sorts of things many people do.  Only a gung-ho industrial chemist could get truly excited about the provenance of a frozen microwaveable pepperoni hot pocket.

But what if you actually enjoy dining on fresh produce and take an interest in what it was up to before it got to your house?  Well, for a start you will probably end up in some NSA database and notice an odd little clicking noise when you pick up the phone and the occasional resealed envelope.  Real patriots insist on high fructose corn syrup in everything they swallow.  Apart from the loving attention of your government, however, you might also get a hankering to know something about the person who grew your meal.  You might even go so far as to join a CSA and get your produce from a particular farmer working a particular piece of ground. 

There’s a big difference, though, between eating the tomatoes some guy grew and knowing anything about the tomato grower.  Perhaps a vegetable intuitive could develop ideas about the grower based on such factors as variety selection, ripeness or packaging.  But you might be surprised by how many different sorts of farmers will for different sorts of reasons grow the same sorts of tomatoes.  I don’t know that anyone could really gain more insight into your nature from your tomatoes than from your palm or your aura or even your bank account.

So how do you get to know anything about your farmer?  Well, you could come out to the farm and meet him (coming out to the farm being one of the prerogatives of CSA membership).  But I suspect that even some of you who have tried that remain a little puzzled.  He is not the most effusive or confessional guy—even by farmer standards.   To help you out, I offer the following clues.

Judging by his appearance, he escaped from an asylum a few years back and has been living in a ditch ever since.  It seems he gets his clothes from the Salvation Army’s reject pile, has his hair done by a drunk car mechanic and is not on good terms with his razor. Most days you could scrape enough dirt off him to fill a good sized planter box and enterprising birds could scavenge quantities of nesting material from his head. He often fails to notice if he is bleeding, which he often is.  He mumbles in conversation, speaks to cats, yells at broken equipment and avoids the telephone when possible.  His tone of voice suggests irony or scorn even when he is reading a shopping list.  He will eat large quantities of whatever food you put in front of him at an indelicate speed and finish just about any meal with considerably more stains on his clothes, not that you would necessarily notice given the state of his clothes.  He is incapable of baking the simplest cookies and has odd ideas about the appropriate amount of garlic in any dish.  He thinks a chainsaw makes a fine birthday present. 

He also happens to have three tuxedo jackets (including a natty red one), an Italian ice cream maker, the complete works of Thomas Hardy, an eight burner stove, a penchant for growing esoteric crops, and a M.A. in English and Comparative literature.  He makes vegetable sorbets, writes absurdly complicated sentences (often stuffed with odd parenthetical asides), likes kohlrabi, and is proud to have cultivated his sons’ affection for Monty Python and good cheese. 

So there you have it; he’s just your average insane epicurean unwashed overeducated incomprehensible irascible vagabond red sorrel grower.  Of course, now that you understand what he is like you’re probably thinking you don’t really need that tight a bond with your farmer after all.  In fact, all of a sudden those hot pockets are sounding pretty tempting.  

Well, there’s nothing wrong with a hot pocket.  If you make your own.  You just need some bread dough, some decent mozzarella, a little grated Parmesan, a bit of minced oregano and garlicky sautéed eggplant and cherry tomatoes or some cooked escarole and hot pepper.  You could even make the hot pockets, freeze them and then heat them up again in a microwave.  Not that you would want to eat them after that.  Microwaves have a strange and unfortunate effect on bread, an effect that food scientists overcome only with the help of a battery of unappetizing additives.  The sorts of things that make you think putting up with a weird farmer might just be worth it if that is what it takes to get a steady supply of unadulterated food.  And maybe that’s enough of a bond, the food itself, the potato that is just a potato, a little of the field clinging to its skin.

And anyway, if you want to know more about your farmer you can always find clues to his character in those tomatoes.  White Tomesol?  Black Prince?  Rose de Berne?  Green Zebra?  Brown Berry?  Solid Gold?  Enough said.