16 September 2010

Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Mustard mix, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Satina potatoes, Thyme, Tomatoes, Delicata winter squash

I am embarrassed to report that I may be compelled to fill this week’s newsletter with something like actual news—a fact that in and of itself might count as news. I hope you will forgive me for thus misusing this space, which as most of you have probably noticed by now is usually reserved for the sorts of meandering ruminations that take hold of one’s mind during long periods of tedious physical work.

There’s something about repetitive manual labor that provokes this digressive, speculative sort of thinking. Like driving, much farm work requires only a specific, limited kind of attentiveness. If you find yourself, let’s say, weeding a bed of carrots (and if you don’t often find yourself doing that but would like to, do please let me know) you have to concentrate on the task enough to ensure that you remove the weeds and leave the carrots. It’s no good letting your thoughts wander so far that you end up pulling out everything or, more likely, nothing. But those thoughts can roam quite surprisingly far and wide without impinging on your carrot weeding skills (and should you happen to possess carrot weeding skills and lack the proper place in which to employ them do get in touch with me). Apparently the part of your brain that controls fine motor coordination and sight recognition is entirely separate from the piece that takes care of philosophical reflection, and the two can work side by side without affecting one another. Moreover, keeping the motor coordination part busy with the carrots somehow disables or distracts whatever normally reins in our philosophical impulses. I would not be surprised to discover that Plato was an avid vegetable gardener and did his most profound thinking while kneeling amongst his crops plucking out interlopers (and if you would like to have a similar philosophical experience I would be happy to offer you a place to do so).

But I stray. Too much weeding, I guess. Especially for this time of year. By now we should have managed to do in all the weeds. There’s a technique called stale seed bedding in which you get the weed seeds near the surface to germinate and then till the bed shallowly, and if you do that a few times then you should have taken care of all the weeds. It takes a little time, but it ought to work for the vegetables we sow late in the season. This year for some reason many of the beds where we have seeded fall crops are not proving at all stale, and along with the plants we want we are getting lovely stands of pigweed and lamb’s quarters and purslane—all edible, I hasten to note, should any of you want to come out and pick them.

Actually one of you already did, and made a weed quiche, which he might reprise for the pie contest on October 3^rd. It is best, I think, to get in a few practice pies before the competition, something I mention now because with just over two weeks to go you still have plenty of time to refine your recipe. You don’t want to turn up on the 3^rd with an entry only to find that something has gone dreadfully wrong with the crust or realize too late that adding cilantro to the peach filling was a less inspired idea than it seemed at first.

All of which is by way of introducing the first piece of news, namely that our fall harvest festival and annual pie contest takes place on Sunday, October 3^rd. We will have field tours and our traditional potato harvest starting at 3, and a potluck dinner starting at 6. All CSA members can enter a pie (or multiple pies) in the contest to be judged by the farm crew.

We hope you will come out to the farm for this event even if you do not bring a pie. You don’t have to see the farm to enjoy the produce. But it is hard to understand fully the basic connection between your food and a field (a connection that exists no matter where you get your food) if you never see the field. Most Americans, deliberately cut off from any direct knowledge of where and how their food is produced, never get that chance. As a member of our CSA, however, you do. You can come to the farm and see the crops that will turn up in your share the following week and ask us about how we grow them and taste a fresh-dug carrot or scoop up a handful of husk cherries and find out what to do with those really hot peppers. It is a pleasant, tasty, scenic way to add even more value to your share.

We will have one more event at the end of the season. Each year we give extra produce to organizations that use it in local food pantries. While these groups have some ability to harvest the extra crops, they generally cannot pick as much as we have to offer. So we call on you to help glean at the end of the season. It is a chance to get dirty for a good cause. I will let you know the date later on.

There is one other event coming up you should know about. The Agricultural Stewardship Association, our local land trust, puts on an art show, Landscapes for Landsake, every year. This year’s show, featuring 150 works by 36 local artists, takes place on Saturday, October 9^th from 3 to 6 just outside Cambridge. It is a great party and a great show, and the money raised at the event helps ASA in its mission to protect good soil in the region for agricultural use, a mission that benefits all of us wherever in the area we live. You can get more details about the show on ASA’s website, Agstewardship.org, or Facebook.

You should also know that the easiest way to cook a winter squash is to stick it in a 400 degree oven until it is quite soft, about an hour. Then you can cut it open a scoop out the flesh and eat it as it is or puree it with a bit of cream, perhaps a dash of sherry, a sprinkle of paprika and a little thyme (you can also add stock to the puree and make a squash soup). And that the mustard greens are nice steamed, but even better as a salad with dressing of vinegar, cream, mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger.

9 September 2010

Arugula, Basil, Lavender, Lettuce, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Hot pepper, Radishes, Shallot, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

We dropped off Sam at boarding school on Saturday. We had been told he would have a roommate, but we knew nothing about the kid. When we got to Sam’s room the roommate had already moved in, but he was not there. So we spent some time trying to guess what he would be like based on the few clues his belonging offered. He had a New Orleans Saints pennant, a snowboarding picture, a Jamaican flag on the little table by his bed, a calendar from some boat club, and his name, Quint, was on the door. We came up with a number of interesting and unusual profiles.

But I had to remind the others that it is always safest to go with the base rate. Thus I predicted that he would turn out to be not some snow-loving Caribbean or boating Cajun, but a rich kid from a wealthy old New England town, with a summer house on the Cape and well-dressed, well mannered parents. As we discovered when we finally met Quint and his father, however, I was wrong. Their summer place is on Fisher’s Island.

I got the rest right. Quint (a nickname based on the fact that he is the fifth in line to have his name) lives in a historic village in Connecticut. His parents have a wonderfully easy social manner that comes from good schooling, broad experience and generations of wealth. Quint’s father looked liked he had been dressed for the part by a detailed-obsessed costume director, everything perfect right down the soft leather pseudo-yachting shoes and the nonexistent socks. I had forgotten how small a part socks play in this culture, and spent a lot of time looking at other fathers’ feet to see just how many of them had gone without socks for this occasion. A lot of them. It must have something to do with sailing, which was a frequent topic of conversation amongst this not overwhelmingly diverse group of parents. I got the feeling that given a couple more hours they would find they had all already met at some regatta or other.

Perhaps when we get together again at parents’ weekend we can have a good chat about the pros and cons of socks. After all, I have a job that’s probably even less sock friendly than sailing and fully appreciate just how unpleasant wet socks are. Granted, mine get wet from working in muddy fields, not taking waves over the port side, but surely that is a minor distinction. Wet socks are wet socks, and a shared antipathy to them can bring together people from all walks of life.

It is always possible, though, that I won’t fit in. Maybe because my socks get not just wet but filthy. Maybe because I don’t have much of an idea of how to sail close to the wind. Maybe because I am a vegetable farmer in a small rural community in northern New York and the work I do sets me apart from the world most prep school parents inhabit. And it is not just that they might consider my work a little odd, a little grubby. In fact, they are probably not seriously trouble by farming at all, and anyway they are far too polite to show it if they are.

But farmers have an odd sense of defensive pride. So many people in this country gave up farming for something “better.” Farmers became the dumb hicks left behind, about as unchic as you could get. There’s a sentimental strain in our national culture that looks back at our (real or imagined) agrarian past fondly, but even that veers towards the patronizing, imagining farming as the lost simple life, the antithesis of sophisticated, fast-paced, successful urban existence. In response, farmers tend to regard city dwelling, book learning, office work, conspicuous success and just about any activity that does not involve oil stains with a certain quiet scorn. Many of my neighbors have funny stories about rich folk coming out to the country and humiliating themselves trying to do things that any farmer handle with little effort: hauling feed sacks, shooting geese, fixing engines. As a newcomer to farming (16 years does not count for much), as a former inhabitant of that other world—I went to the school Sam now attends—as a spindly guy with bad aim and meager mechanical skills, I cannot entirely share in my neighbors sense of amusement over such tales. Nor, however, can I entirely resist the attraction of this pigheaded disdain for self-assured, neatly coifed, pointlessly sockless, nautical types.

I hope that farm life has not completely infected Sam with this point of view. We did not send him to this school to learn to be one of those people, but he does have to live amongst them for four years. He will be a lot happier if he finds a way, however cynically, to fit in. I worry, of course, that he may not, that he is not ready, that we have sent him to the wrong place, that they won’t know what to do with him, they won’t like him—all standard parental concerns that set in more or less as soon as we started to drive away from his dorm.

Of course, I have many of the same concerns about the vegetables each week. I don’t worry so much about their social and academic prospects. But I feel a little anxious about their virtues, about how they will be received (and if they will be received) and what will become of them. Don’t worry, I do not actually think of the vegetables as my children. But like Sam, they are to some extent the product of my efforts on their behalf and I want them to do well and be liked.

Fortunately, most of the things in this box are pretty easy to get along with. They don’t demand special treatment. You can pamper them if you want, but you need do little more than slice the tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt, or steam the potatoes and put a little butter on them, or toss the greens in a salad. There are, however, a couple of crops that might require a little more explanations for you to enjoy them, such as the small hot peppers. Especially the crinkly red or pink one, which can be quite hot and should be used with a little caution. Or the shallot (the smallish, reddish, onionish fellow), which you could use like an onion, but is particularly good in a salad dressing (slice it thinly and let it sit in the dressing for a couple of hours to bring out the flavor) or sauce. And then there’s the lavender, which people tend not to think of as a culinary herb. You could just hang onto it for the scent. But you can also use it in just about any recipe that calls for rosemary (such as sautéed peppers and onions or roast potatoes). I recently had a tasty drink made of lemonade, gin and lavender, and I have had lavender crème brule. You want to keep the lavender flavor in any dish at a restrained level unless you like eating things that taste like soap, but a little lavender can add a pleasant perfumy quality to food.

Obviously, I have spent a lot of time with these crops and know a fair amount about their culture. But just as there’s no one right way to raise a kid, there’s no one right way to prepare a vegetable. Certainly there are things to avoid in either case (I trust you are not kicking your share down the stairs or locking it away in a closet for weeks at a time), but there is considerable latitude in how to approach the task, and methods that might sound completely wacky can have excellent results. If you have good vegetable recipes, however unusual, I hope you will send them to me so I can add them to the ones already on the web site. We all tend to have our way of doing things, our particular sense of taste. It is refreshing, sometimes, to encounter other, alien ways—whether by discovering someone else’s recipe for tomatoes or spending a little time with people who have a lot more to say about tacking than plowing.

2 September 2010

Basil, Nectar carrots, Eros escarole, Husk cherries, Onions, Peppers, Hot pepper, Sage, Spinach, Squash, Thyme, Tomatoes

As I have noted from time to time, we grow so many different crops in part as a sort of insurance plan. Each season some things thrive and some fail, and we don’t know which will do what beforehand—in large part because we have no idea what the weather will do more than a day or two in advance. By growing a wide range of crops with different needs and preferences we can increase the chances that each year at least some of the things we plant will produce in abundance. Of course, we also increase the chances that each year at least some of the things we plant will come to nothing at all, rendering our efforts on their behalf a total waste. But we consider that a reasonable risk.

Not that we simply leave the crops to the mercy of the weather and hope they can figure out how to deal with whatever comes their way. While we do not know what the weather will be like beforehand—if I had known I would have spent a lot more on irrigation and a lot less on drain tile this year—we can do something to modify the effects of the weather as it occurs to make the plants as comfortable as possible. By which, of course, I do not mean as comfortable as absolutely possible. I am not even sure what that would involve. Some sort of carefully controlled biodome, I suppose, though no doubt if I actually constructed one for the vegetables, stocked with just the right biota, things would run amok and angry watermelon-sized blobs of mold would chase us about demanding that we think about their feelings and humming 80s eurotrash rock loudly and off key whenever anyone else tried to have a conversation.

You can see why we have not bothered to construct the biosphere. We prefer to keep our efforts at a modest level to avoid provoking any life form too much. Growing some of the tomatoes in a field tunnel gives them extra early warmth, protects them from diseases and severe weather and allows us to control soil moisture so the fruit does not crack. Raised beds covered with black mulch provide the winter squash with warm, well drained soil, and row covers on hoops over the young vines modulate the night temperatures and keep some of the cucumber beetles at bay until the plants are big enough to fend for themselves. We add dump truck loads of organic matter to the soil to increase its water-holding capacity to help plants survive dry spells and improve the drainage system every year to get rid of persistent wet spots.

We could do more. Everyone could always do more. With another 10 field houses, another five miles of tiling and a million gallon pond feeding sprinklers in all the fields we would do an even better job of tending to our crops. The farm would be bankrupt, naturally, but the crops would prosper. So we do what makes sense on a farm this size. We focus our efforts on the valuable crops—valuable for their culinary as well as their retail worth. That’s why the tomatoes, not the kale, get that space in the field house.

In addition to giving the valuable crops more protection from the weather, we also plant them in larger quantities than we would ever need in a good year as extra insurance against a bad year. If things go wrong and we get terrible yields, as we did, for instance, last year from the sweet peppers, at least we still have something to hand out. And in a good year we just have a lot of peppers.

This is a particularly good year for peppers. We gave them a dry spot up a small slope and added lime and a lot of organic matter to the soil before putting the seedlings in mulch on raised beds. The weather has cooperated, at least from the perspective of a pepper plant. The broccoli and beans might disagree, but peppers like a hot, dry growing season. Unlike beans, they have big enough root systems to find all the water they need. The flea beetles and cabbage loopers that thrive in this weather and plague broccoli don’t have a taste for peppers, and the swarms of slugs that wreaked havoc in our wet pepper patch last year abhor these conditions. Not only have the plants borne a lot of fruit, but the fruit is actually ripening. We have had plenty of years with barely a red pepper to pick. We harvested 1200 on Tuesday (well, to be fair some of them were yellow, not red). I could feel a little peeved about that. If we had known how well they would do we could have planted half as many peppers and had an entirely adequate harvest and saved ourselves a lot of time. But it is hard to feel grumpy when you see the back of a pickup filled with tubs of beautiful peppers. I trust you don’t feel put out by getting a nice pile of them in your box. If you are wondering what to do with them you might want to look at the recipe for red pepper soup on the web site.

And what of the crops that don’t get as much care, such as the husk cherries? Well, in a cold, wet year the plants grow poorly and produce a meager crop and we don’t put husk cherries in the shares. It is a shame, but we are not going to take time away from weeding onions or hilling potatoes or cultivating carrots or trellising tomatoes to tend to the husk cherries’ needs. We put in 50 seedlings a year, usually at the end of a pepper or eggplant row, where ever we have a little mulch available, and then we more or less forget about them. Fortunately, in a year like this they do not require much attention. They have grown perfectly happily without any help from us, happily enough that we were able to pick (or to be more accurate, pick up since the fruit falls off the plant when it is ripe) a couple of bushels and put some in everyone’s box. Coming across the odd little fruits in their papery husks, you may wonder why precisely we would do such a thing, but I hope you enjoy them. You can just pop them out of their husks and eat them or toss them in a salad or use the in a salsa (as you would tomatillos). I would offer those of you who have not had them before a description of their taste, but they don’t taste precisely like anything else.

I have yet to figure out what spinach likes. Whatever it is, it is in short supply on this farm. We have not had a decent bed of spinach out in a field for years. Fortunately, we can occasionally get it to grow—a trifle grudgingly—in a field house. Unfortunately, we often don’t have a lot of extra space in the field houses for a bed of spinach. We really need a whole separate enclosed space just for spinach, a spinach haven with just the right sandy loam, just the right amount of water, an constant cool temperature, lots of light, protection from the slugs and caterpillars and microbes that harm it, a gentle breeze to keep the leaves dry. In other words, , a spinach biodome in which it would get everything it wants and suffer no harm—except, of course, when we turned up and cut all its leaves off. Or when the horrid mold blobs drove it crazy their emotional neediness.

26 August 2010

Basil, Beans, Lettuce, Garlic, Candy onions, Peppers, Numex hot pepper, Red Norland potatoes, Spinach, Tomatoes

Before “I” start the newsletter this week I will let everyone know that this is not Thomas behind these words (though I am sure you would have figured it out quickly). My name is Jan and this is my second season working with Thomas on the Alleged Farm. I have had the opportunity to meet some of you at the farm days we have held and maybe others briefly at a drop site. In any case I get the opportunity to write the newsletter this week. Although I get a little flustered when faced with the task of writing this, I also know that I think, talk, and often dream about the farm, veggies and work that needs to be done here—especially in the middle of august.

I feel like this season has been a little different then last and often find myself looking and comparing how wet last year was to how dry this year has been and then finding myself looking at a wet field all week wishing I could go do some field work. It may not seem immediately funny, but when I think about how absurd it is to look for patterns in one farming season that I somehow can expect to occur again in another season, I often laugh. In my short (compared to many farmers’ farming lives) 7 years of farming I have yet to find one season that mimics itself the next. I guess farming in California seemed the closest to “controlled” organic farming as one can get; seeing as it is hot and dry most of the time, you water when the plants need it, you establish some beneficial insect habitat, find some reliable cover crops, plant a hedge of bee attractive flowers, pick the beautiful produce and head to market…Okay, so that isn’t as easy as it sounds. But the hot, dry and water when the plants need it part is true.

I guess the best thing to do is talk about the veggies you are getting this week and try not to ramble too much about how last year isn’t this year out there in the fields.

“Cucumbers…where are they?” I often ask while walking in the cucurbit patch (you may have been thinking the same thing if you have been part of Thomas’ CSA in past years). Last year the squash and cucumber picking was a full afternoon adventure. This year the squash have proven their abundance and consistence with plenty of squash, as you know, but the cucumbers have not fared so well. They wanted more water when we went through that dry spell so many of the fruits became misshapen and bitter, and the cucumber beetles went in full attack mode…sorry to say because that is one of my favorite summer vegetables. But not to worry, we are hoping the second planting will prove to produce many hours of picking here on the farm (okay maybe I may be the only one willing to pick 3 hours worth of cukes, but they are just so good). In any case, you are sure to find some great squash in your box this week and I hope you haven’t run out of recipes.

On the other hand the peppers you are getting in your boxes are looking greener, fuller and more productive then they did last year. After finally picking most of the weeds out from between the rows so that we can actually see the plants, they look BEAUTIFUL!! No really, that is not because I am bias and think that horrible looking plants look great just because I might have planted them…really you should come check them out. We have even talked about staking them because they are so laden with fruit and for once they are actually turning the color they look in the catalogue. You may get a bell type in your box or an elongated type that is green to red color. which is an Italian variety that is thick skinned and very sweet. Both varieties have proven impressive this year and made me think that great sweet peppers can be grown on the east (I was a little unsure about this east coast growing thing at the beginning). You should also find another pepper that is great for grilling, stuffing or roasting and is mildly hot (used for Chile rellenos), which is a Numex Anaheim pepper.

Beans, beans the magical fruit…okay well the beans you are getting are the fresh green or yellow type and much more crisp then the dried kind. I made sure to test more then a hundred out in the field and they may look big but they were still crunchy and addictive. No matter how hard you try, you can never quite stay on top of all the beans in the field. It will bring out the musical side of any farmer, whether they admit it or not; even if the song that he/she are thinking of stays in his/her head it is hard not to pass the time singing some old tune or telling stories to fellow pickers of times past. I have to say though, I have been having fresh steamed beans everyday for a while now and still find no complaints about the picking…steamed with some salt, cold or hot, in a boat with a goat they are too good to pass up during the summer harvest. As compared to last years crop I would have to say the dry season has held back the slugs, which loved the wet bean field last year, and the deer are some how leaving enough to make the planting worth while.

So you may have noticed that the amount of tomatoes you are getting has increased greatly over the past couple weeks…it’s because the plants are going CRAZY! I thought staying on top of beans was hard, but then I realized you plant a couple hundred tomatoes and look out and see red, green, rainbow, small, big and medium fruits everywhere you look. It is actually great to see healthy plants this year since last year the blight hit early and hard across the country and locally. I hope all of you got a nice variety of red and heirloom tomatoes in your box and that they made it safely to your table…we do like to pick as ripe as we can. I am sure Thomas has told you before but if you ever want to make your way to the farm and pick a few extra cherry tomatoes the invitation is there as long as they are still in the fields, just let us know.

And then of course there is the basil…what else can I say. We try to give a reasonable amount so that your flower vases don’t get to stuffed with herbs (though my friend just used basil in her wedding and it was a perfect addition to the bouquets), but hopefully you are finding ways to incorporate basil as often as possible into your pesto, stir-frys, sauces or salsas. We have three plantings this year and all are looking great; which again last year was hard to say…the wetness challenged the outside basil relentlessly and we relied on the indoor planting more. If you are not getting enough basil to make that batch of pesto to get you through the winter, again, let us know and you are more then welcome to order extra while the summer months are here and the basil is looking good.

Okay, well I see the bottom of the page coming fast so I will bring my ramble to a close. I didn’t give many recipes, but if you look on the website you are sure to find some that are better then I could ever come up with. Thanks for listening to me this week and maybe I will get a chance to meet more of you at the next farm day or pie contest/ pot luck the farm has every year. Hope you find fun and exciting things to do with your box this week, and thanks again to everyone for returning them so we can keep using them, keep costs down, and ideally get you the produce in better condition then the bags offered.

19 August 2010

Basil, Beans, Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho pepper, Radicchio, Squash, Tomatoes

I shot my pig. Last fall I took down a piece of the fence around his pen and lured him out with food. While he munched contentedly on his last meal I retrieved my rifle, put in a round, and when he glanced up at me offered a brief apology and shot him between the eyes at point blank range. And then in the head a second time. And finally in the heart. Killing a big old pig is hard. Harder than makes sense when you stop and think about our relationship.

Eleven years ago Alan Brown gave us an eight-week-old piglet called Mickey Boy’s Goody Wagon. Alan brought him over to the farm in a small cat carrier and I quickly discovered that he could squeeze between the bars of the metal gate in his pen. He was black with a sporty white stripe around his chest and he made happy little grunting noises when we fed him. We fed him a lot. He got the piles of weeds I hauled out of the vegetable rows. He got oversized zucchini and wilted greens and kitchen scraps and, to his great delight, overripe tomatoes and melons. He spent that summer eating and grunting, and quite soon he did not fit through the gate.

I don’t know if Alan thought we would eat Mickey Boy. I suppose he did. Why else would you fatten up a castrated boar? As a pet? Of course, Alan knew Mickey Boy was our first pig ever, and delivering him already named--allbeit after the least appetizing lunch wagon ever seen—may have been Alan’s way of acknowledging the possibility that we had not lived in the country long enough to get over urban prohibitions against eating one’s animals.

We probably should have eaten him. We have raised 24 pigs since we got Mickey Boy (named One, Two, Three, Four, Five and so on in recognition of their fate). None of them have grown like Mickey Boy grew that first summer. By late fall, when he should have been headed to the slaughterhouse, he probably weighed around 400 pounds, and not because he was fat. I would not describe him as having been svelte. He was a pig, after all. But he was not a fat pig, just a big one. More or less the size of a dining room table by the time he was full grown.

Of course we could not bring ourselves to eat Mickey Boy. It was not precisely a matter of our being overly fond of him. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he wanted affection. He certainly offered none himself. He enjoyed a good scratch and responded to every meal he ever had with some enthusiasm (one might even have described his mood as elated when we gave him melons), but gratitude was beyond him. If someone else or one of the dogs or the duck had put the food in his pen it would have made no difference to him. An emperor could hardly have shown greater indifference towards his servants.

It would have been nice to have an affectionate pig—well, up to a point; there’s a limit to how much affection you want from an extraordinarily large pig. It would have been nice, anyway, to have the effort—taking out buckets of water all winter, tossing in piles of hay for his bedding, providing all that food—acknowledged. We don’t generally keep pets purely for their own sake. That is what animals in zoos are for. You don’t need the hippos to pay any attention to you, to thank you for coming. They just have to be hippos.

Of course, once you have admired the hippos you get to head for the gift shop, not clean up after them. If you had to muck out the hippo stall you might decide they weren’t really worth seeing after all. You would just stay home, sitting in a comfortable chair with a soft, warm, purring cat curled up on your lap. But our hippo-sized pig needed tending, and on a cold January day it was all too easy to wonder what the point was of having this pointless beast on the farm. Sure, people liked to see him when they visited the farm, and it was mildly amusing to tell stories about our giant pig. Mostly, though, we seemed simply, like some ancient Greek lord, to have taken on a sacred obligation to provide hospitality to any peaceful traveler seeking shelter, no matter how inconvenient or irritating that might prove. Someone had to look after Mickey Boy, and the job and fallen to us like some monstrous test imposed by one of the more vindictive gods.

I thought about shooting him many times: on the various occasions he got out and tipped over all the feed barrels, when he bit Liz, each time he flipped over his freshly filled water bucket without even taking a drink, when he destroyed his shed. But for ten year I resisted the urge. And in the end I finished him off not out of frustration or anger, but because he had gone lame and could not stand up any longer. Even then I waited weeks, hoping for some reason that he might recover, unwilling to do him in though I had a perfectly good excuse and, as One through Twenty-four would testify, no qualms about killing pigs. And when it was clear he would not get better and could not go on pulling himself pathetically through the mud with his front hooves, even then and with no evidence to the last that our years together had made any impression on him at all, it was still hard to kill him. I guess I have not gotten rid of all my urban ways yet.

Fortunately, doing in the crops causes me no such angst. We have been tending those onions diligently since early March, giving them shelter, feeding them, cleaning up around them. Yet I feel no distress ripping them from their life-sustaining soil. I might if they had not grown so well, but I enjoy pulling a good crop of onions. If their vigor is not actually a sign of their appreciation for our work, it is at least a sort of testament to it. Sometimes (far more often than I would like), even when we have done our work, a crop does not prosper. The deer prove too voracious, the bugs too numerous, the rain storms too far apart, the weeds too relentless. You look at the crop and you see your efforts wasted. You cannot rewrite a patch of arugula destroyed by flea beetles or find another use for blighted cucumber vines. So it is particularly satisfying when crops succeed and you can pick tubs of verdant basil and flat after flat of ripe tomatoes and a pile of shiny Ancho peppers. And if the thought of all this produce slaughter causes you distress, take comfort from the fact that we do in the vegetables as quickly and humanely as possible and only when their time has come.

Well, from that and the fact that they taste good. I don’t know that there is a better summer meal than a tomato salad and some good bread. I could eat that every day. In fact, I think I do. But if you have started to tire of it you could use the same ingredients in a salsa and spice it up with the Ancho (the dark green, slightly pointed, thin walled pepper). Just how much you will spice it up is hard to say. The hotness varies pretty significantly from one Ancho to the next. Some are barely hotter than a sweet pepper, some as spicy as a Jalapeno. However hot yours is, I strongly recommend you roast and peel it before using it. It improves the texture and the flavor, and it will keep in the refrigerator for days. Not that there is any good reason to keep it for long. It has too many uses. If you don’t put it in a salsa you could puree it with sour cream, onion, basil, salt, pepper and a little lime juice and put the resulting sauce on grilled meat and fish or chili, or use it as a dip, or swirl it into a gazpacho, or add a little to salad dressing (it would be good on coleslaw), or spread it on a sandwich.

12 August 2010

Lemon basil, Rhodos frisee endive, Lincoln leeks, Lettuce, Varsity onion, Peppers, Nicola potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

I have long been puzzled by an oddity of human development. Small children generally lack the capacity to figure out and communicate their basic needs. They know when something is bothering them. Apparently, however, deciding exactly what is causing the unhappiness or how to deal with the problem is someone else’s task. The child’s job is simply to make a big fuss until an adult can guess what he wants and give it to him, though sometimes by then he has gone far enough into a fit that satisfying the need no longer satisfies.

You might think that learning as fast as possible not only to assess your basic desires, but also to make them clear to those who could satisfy them might convey an advantage. The hungry kid who quickly realizes he needs food and asks for it clearly ought to survive best. Making an unpleasant racket that could equally signify hunger, sleepiness, gas, boredom, pain, itchiness, frustration, fear or a powerful dislike of peas seems like a bad strategy. And yet it is the human way, and you have to exert considerable effort to break kids of the habit.

I’d like to think that growing up consists to a large extent of getting over undifferentiated helplessness. Having two kids, however, has made clear to me just how thin a veneer of adulthood we have. Sure, we don’t generally bawl every time we feel a pang of hunger or the need to urinate—and most of us can reasonably reliably tell the difference between those two sensations. But we get irritable when we need food or sleep or cannot figure out how to assemble a stupid pair of training wheels. And if we can by and large rein in the yen to have a tantrum over simple things well within our power to solve, we seem far less capable of doing so in the face of larger problems.

The top 0.1% of Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million and we have a fit about illegal immigrants. Given the chance to improve a health care system that routinely fails us, we take to the streets in Minuteman costumes to insist the President is actually Kenyan. Corporate America, in its eternal quest for productivity and profits, places ever greater strains on our private lives and we rally to outlaw gay marriage. Bankers pillage the economy and we grouse about excessive regulation destroying private enterprise. After 234 years of lording it over everyone else, white guys sulk about the terrible racist oppression they face every day. We commit torture, wage preemptive war, alter the climate, sell our political system to the highest bidder, let our bridges fall apart, ignore the needs of the neediest, let the government infringe on our basic rights, and we are up in arms about sexual predators, teenage drinking, the temporary discomfort of airline passengers and mosques in Manhattan.

I admit that reducing income inequality or funding urgent infrastructure projects presents more of a challenge than getting a snack or lying down for a nap. But that hardly justifies our petulance, our aimless outbursts, our juvenile desire to make someone else pay for our pain. We are in a bad mood with good reason. But having a fit instead of figuring out and facing up to what’s wrong does not appear to be solving anything. There are no caring grownups standing by to patiently assess our actual wants and provide what we need—and at this point no reason to believe that even if there were we would pay them any heed. We are beyond reason, longing, it turns out, to do nothing more than curse, grab a beer and take the inflatable slide to celebrity.

Before going any further, I recommend we all sit down, shut up and have a tasty, nutritious snack. There’s nothing like a ripe tomato to soothe frayed nerves. Well, maybe a good salad or some crunchy roast potatoes or grilled squash and leeks with a roast pepper and cherry tomato salsa or a stiff bourbon and lemon basil syrup cocktail. That’s right, a cocktail. Not part of your average fractious kid’s reviving snack, but then we aren’t kids anymore. And if adulthood turns out to be more enervating than we expected, at least it gives us the right to have a drink.

Once we are feeling calm again we will be ready to tackle important questions, such as which tomato variety tastes best. We planted 30 kinds this year. This Saturday around noon we will find ripe examples of as many as possible—I am hoping at least a few of the small fuzzy Wapsipinicon Peaches are ready by then—and have a tomato tasting. All you have to do is come to the farm and decide which tomato you like the most. And while you are here you can also pick a few sunflowers, try a husk cherry, dig potatoes, check on the progress of the winter squash, pull onions, look for frogs in the ponds, go for a walk in the woods, meet the farm crew, swap recipes with other members, and of course have a snack—and a nap too if you want.

Coming to the farm also gives you the chance to return your empty box in person and receive our gratitude for that directly. Of course, you can also just take the box back to your site so we can pick it up on the next delivery day. Either way is fine with us. As long as the boxes keep coming back we are happy.

5 August 2010

Basil, Tendersweet cabbage, Eggplant, Orion fennel, Lettuce, Onion, Parsley, Pears, Purple Viking potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes

Earlier this week a reporter for a Russian language broadcast interviewed me. I have done nothing newsworthy recently here or in Russia—or anywhere else that I am aware of. Apparently, that was sort of the point. The reporter, Vlad (like Count Dracula he said when he called to arrange the interview, which must puzzle a lot of people since I suspect most Americans don’t associate the familiar vampire with the somewhat more obscure15^th Century Transylvanian ruler of the same name), has been producing a series of stories about the sorts of Americans that Russians do not usually hear about. They just know about celebrities and President Obama, just know what appears on the first page of the New York Times, Vlad told me. Meaning, in other words, that his audience members are at least as well informed about America as the average American.

But not well enough informed, according to Vlad. I think he worries that the information they do get gives them if not an incorrect then at least a far from complete view of what this country is really like. It is hard to disagree with that. I would certainly like to think that the Russians who listen to his radio reports about obscure American priests and former prostitutes and vegetable farmers begin to get some idea of the range of experiences in this country.

Of course, I have no idea what Vlad says in his stories since I have never heard one—and would not even if I had since I don’t speak any Russian (sadly I have already forgotten the all-purpose rude phrase Vlad taught me at the end of the interview). He might be using us as examples of the depravity of American life or to prove that our culture has used up its core energy and like a star is about to fade away or explode spectacularly. The whole thing could turn out to be a hoax and we will all appear as earnest laughable dupes in his movie. To think that anyone would give a damn about a small-scale vegetable farmer in the boondocks. What a joke.

Well, it would probably be a joke in this country. It is just possible that Russian radio audiences actually take an interest in the lives of random, ordinary Americans (I use the word ordinary here in its broadest sense, particularly as it applies to me). Americans prefer to know about “real” Americans, which is to say shallow personality types pushed towards juvenile hysteria in entirely manufactured situations. I am talking, of course, of Sarah Palin. No, no, to be fair I am really thinking of reality television—and Sarah Palin.

To be fair to American radio, there are a few excellent programs dedicated to covering aspects of our country—ordinary, quirky and downright weird aspects—that generally receive no coverage at all. You can find stories about people who, while interesting, are not in some way elected, whether by voters, money, family, looks or possibly even talent.

By and large, though, we only ever hear about and from people with something to sell—even if what they have to sell is nothing more than their naked desire to sell themselves. No doubt learning about such people can tell one a great deal about this country. But it is far from clear that we derive much benefit from showing ourselves almost exclusively to be like this, especially since we aren’t. The rest of the world seems increasingly unimpressed, and we seem increasingly uninterested in dealing with the nuances—with the fact, for instance, that a town of real Americans such as Wasilla might be home both to can-do hockey moms and fiercely independent moose hunters, and to a lot of chain stores and methamphetamine dealers, plus, presumably, a fair number of people just getting on with their lives.

Given that it is never easy to take a dispassionate look at yourself, it seems to me that Vlad might do at least as much good sharing his stories with us as with Russians. It might help us gain a little perspective. Not that I am suggesting that having people hear about me on the radio will make the world a better place. Vlad and I had a pleasant chat for a couple of hours, but I cannot imagine how he will make an instructive or even coherent story out of it. I would, however, be interested to know what he has to say about the former prostitute.

Perhaps the former prostitute would be interested in what I have to say. Such as that the potatoes came out of the hard, dry ground pretty roughed up so we went ahead and washed them. I recommend you not wait too long to eat them.

Or that you can cut your fennel bulb (the thing that smells like licorice) into thin slices and add it to a salad.

Or that we hope to have a tomato tasting at our next farm day (Saturday, August 14^th) to see which variety people like the most—assuming we can find the little wooden tags in the rows and figure which variety is which.

Or that there is nothing better to do with tomatoes than make a simple salad with basil, a little sliced onion, olive oil, a splash of vinegar, pepper and a lot of salt. Well, nothing better than to make the tomato salad and then eat it.

Or that, speaking of loosing track of varieties, I do not remember what kind of pears these are, but they taste good and the tree is remarkably productive (we go enough pears for everyone off of one tree). You could slice them up and add them to the salad with the fennel, and toss in a little blue cheese too.

Or that we continue to hope that you return empty boxes to your pick up site so that we can bring them back to the farm. Half of the boxes from the first week have already been returned, which is good news.