Remarkable Veg

Like your typical Cleveland sports season, we are already thinking about next year before this one is even done.

Running a business, even a small one is hard work.  What to produce, how much to produce, how to produce it, where to sell it, to whom?  These are all questions we spend our evenings thinking about…  before the varmints and bugs change our plans.

The challenge is, we want to produce top-quality vegetables.  We want our friends that visit our farmer’s market stand to eat fresher and tastier veg than any restaurant can offer them.  We want remarkable produce.  It’s not easy to produce remarkable produce.

Maggie pores over seed catalogs for most of the winter.  She selects varieties.  Then, she cross-references the descriptions in the seed-catalog with reviews culled from the Internet.  Then, she orders the seed.

The process has just begun as some varieties don’t germinate well, others, don’t take off after transplant, still others are too tempting for the varmints to pass up.  There’s also bugs and disease that claim some of the less-resistant plants.  So before we can even bring remarkable veg to the market, it has to survive a Darwinian gauntlet of natural selection.

Compounding the challenge has been the weather this year, with two months of cold damp rain in April and May and near-record heat in July.  So, did some of the plants not thrive because of the wet, the heat, the rabbits, the deer, the bugs, or neglect?  That’s a lot of data to gather.  We’re not that scientific.

In the long history of human agriculture, I guess that a similar quasi-scientific process has taken place:

Mesopotamian farmer #1:  “Hmm, that grain tastes good.  I wonder if I can grow more of it.”

Mesopotamian farmer#2:  “I grew one like that last year and it died.”

Mesopotamian farmer #1:  “Did you make the burnt offerings after the Tigris flooded?”

“Yes.”

“Did you spread the goat dung on the field?”

“Some parts of it.”

“How did it do on those parts?”

“Some good, some bad.”

“Didn’t we get a dry spell last year?  Maybe that’s why the tasty wheat didn’t grow?”

“Yeah, but I kept the irrigation ditch full.”

“And you made the burnt offerings?’

“Twice, actually.”

“To Dagon, right?  Not Tammuz, the false god?”

“Yeah, to Dagon.”

“Well, so far this tasty wheat is growing great!  Maybe it’s not exactly the same as the stuff you grew.”

“No, it’s the same.  I’m just sayin’.  Don’t come cryin’ to me when the stalks just bend in half one day and it’s all dead.”

“That would be just like that wild grain I sowed last year that everyone said the chefs in Babylon couldn’t get enough of…”

“We all got burned on that one.”

 

And so it goes through history, man versus nature.  This year, this round, so far, goes to Mother Nature–or, “Mommie Dearest”, as we’ve taken to calling her this year.

Ne’ertheless, Maggie is starting to start seeds for the fall crops.  Maybe we’ll have at least one really productive season.

Start lookin’ up recipes for root-crops!  It’ll be a remarkable rutabaga, turnip, and beet kinda’ October.

 

Justin

Better Ingredients, Better Eats

Ahh, the first sorta’ cool morning in a couple weeks!

This month has been a bit of a challenge as near-record heat scorched lots of our tender greens and tested the limits of our endurance.  Maggie has been working 6 1/2 days a week at this since April 1st, and to watch so much effort wilt, bolt, or start to brown has been “challenging”.

This month, I have been taking an online class for my other job, and while informative, it has required about 3 hours a day for the last couple weeks–3 hours more sitting at a computer, watching a video, following along in a text, and writing lengthy responses.  It’s not terrible, but for someone who looks forward to zen-like hours of mowing grass, pulling weeds, or picking veg, 3 extra hours a day at the computer gets to be tedious.  It has also sapped my creative energies as my best, ahem, “bravo sierra”, was used to answer those essay questions.

We also have seen our old farmhand Jumping Jack deal with some health problems this month.  Jack is long-since retired from his primary duties of chasing rabbits and barking at deer, but he still does his part by dropping “castings” in the backyard to fertilize the lawn.  Jack seems to have rebounded a bit, but even from just a month ago, he seems to have lost a step.  It’s no fun watching an old friend start to decline.

I took a ride to Chicago last weekend with a couple friends to watch the Cubs play at Wrigley Field–a classic ballpark, a lot of ghosts of legends past, a lot of history, a big party in the clubs surrounding the park.

One takeaway this small town guy got from a weekend in the big city is how much I love being on Wood Road.  I think once getting back on Sunday evening, Maggie and I left on Tuesday evening to visit friends, but I spent the rest of the week at home–taking online classes, pulling weeds, doing my chores.

The other takeaway is a big city does not necessarily guarantee a great meal.  Aside from a an Eggs Benny breakfast with Chorizo and Chiptole Sauce and topped with cilantro (but not quite enough cilantro), aside from that tasty breakfast at a downtown place called Yolk, the rest of the food was substandard.  The prices were big city, but the quality was decidedly truck-stop.

When discussing it with my personal chef (and wife!), I think we agreed the difference is almost always INGREDIENTS.  I am admittedly not much of a cook, but I know what tastes good.  Even the simple salads and sandwiches I throw together in the kitchen are more palate-pleasing than the $15 “meals” I ate solely because I needed some sustenance.  Why?  Because my greens are super fresh, my tomatoes are picked when they’re ripe, not when they’re green.  My veg is not a week-old in a supermarket–but just minutes or hours out of the garden.  I don’t chintz on the olive oil or the basil or the parmesan, either.  We don’t buy bland, tasteless bread, either.

Why is it that restaurants are so stingy with the herbs, the spices, the sauces?  Why don’t they insist on the freshest bread and an extra splash of olive oil?  Are margins that slim that an extra dash of oregano, an extra teaspoon of marinade, or an extra a pinch of spice can’t be spared?  If so, serve me LESS food with MORE flavor.  Great food sates the appetite, bad food leaves you looking for more.

Or.. Raise your prices!  Charge me an extra dollar for the flavor!  I’ll pay it!

I can’t believe I ordered fish tacos for $17, and they were dry and mostly tasteless–I had to resort to some salt and pepper and some mustard and Tabasco that were on the table to add some complexity.  Again, I can’t cook much of anything, but what restaurant owner, what chef, who in the business of providing people with a good meal would eat that meal and say, “That’s really good!”?  I get better tasting eats at most backyard potlucks from people with no culinary training!

I’m spoiled.  I know.  Not only do I have a personal chef (Maggie) who deserves at least 2 Michelin stars, but we also have access to the best ingredients: those often grown a few dozen feet from our table.

The other night, we went out to a restaurant serving grilled corn on the cob.  The husk looked to have the appropriate level of browning from the grill, but the corn was essentially tasteless–clearly it wasn’t picked that day or the day before or the day before, but very likely a week before and shipped hundred of miles–all the while the sugars in the corn are turning to starch so that Maggie and I could eat a starchy, not sweet, ear of corn.  That restaurant needs better INGREDIENTS, not a new chef.  Gordon Ramsey himself  couldn’t save that corn–it should end up in a slop bucket.

Well, the heat has been getting to me and poor restaurant meals have been on my mind.  I guess we’ll stay home even more.  Suits me fine.  We’ll enjoy our great veg and hope the always-challenging weather doesn’t completely discourage us.

Stay cool.  Eat fresh and local.

Justin

 

Independence Day

We are now deep in another summer.

Our corn ain’t knee-high today.  Our beans have mostly been pruned back by voracious hares, and our zesty greens crops have been blighted in succession by too much heat, too much water and now too many bugs.  Our peas didn’t do so well either–too slow to germinate (those that bothered germinating).  We quit on most of the peas while our time and material losses were minimal.

And yet, despite our ever-growing list of things that aren’t working, this is another great summer.  Today, I am celebrating the independent spirit of other small American farmers.  They are people like us that know what it’s like to fail.  Independence means the freedom to make your own decisions and the freedom to fail, and failure can be a great teacher.

Our failures this season are to be expected–the specific crops, the specific problems are not predictable, but failure is part of the bargain.  We plant everything with the hope and the dream that in so many days a rich and bountiful harvest will come in, but experience has taught us not everything works as planned.  It’s no different than life: if everything worked exactly the way we planned all the time, success would not be worth celebrating.  Sports and games are interesting to play and watch, because the outcome is unknown.  In nearly every part of our lives, it seems, the element of uncertainty adds the spice or zest.

So, we’ve failed at some things already.  Yes, failed.  Failure has such a negative odor.  Nobody wants to associated with failure.  Maybe, it’s actually too soon for me to accurately describe our less-than-desirable outcomes as failures.  Whatever we call it, we’re still optimistic about potatoes and tomatoes, root crops and flowers.  Maggie’s already planning the fall planting schedule.

For the next 4 months of markets, we’ll have more things that don’t work.  More failures.

But today is Independence Day: a day on which we honor the willingness of British subjects to try to start their own country.  They risked failure.  In fact, after the Revolution, they created a government under the Articles of Confederation that they decided they didn’t like.  So they tried again.

Thomas Jefferson hoped for a nation of small farmers, believing that a dispersed population and self-sufficient populace was more likely to reject the authoritarian impulse.  Maybe Jefferson, a tinkerer, a plantsman, and a thinker, knew that trial-and-error, a familiarity with failure, was a humbling force.  When your best-laid plans don’t work out perfectly every summer, maybe Jefferson knew you’d resist the impulse to make plans for other people.

So it’s still early this July 4th, but I’m going to get on the tractor and think of how lucky we are to live in a place in which we are free to try and fail, try and fail, and try, try again.

Justin

Laissez Faire

I was using the scuffle hoe last week and thinking about disturbing the soil.

If you want plants to grow, you have to leave them alone–laissez faire.   If you don’t want plants to grow, you agitiate the soil they live in to such a degree that their roots are all messed up and they wither and die.  Like the origin of the term itself: when asked a couple centuries ago what would help them thrive, French farmers replied, “Laissez faire“–”leave us alone”.

Every year I make the same old tired joke encouraging Maggie to “Go pull on the plants to make ‘em grow faster.”  This is, of course, absurd as pulling on your vegetable plants is not good for them.  They need a certain stillness to establish a root system that will sustain them throughout the growing season.

I think we all need a certain stillness to let our own roots grow.

A list of suggestions for “The Good Life” I once read reminded readers to “Spend some time alone each day.”  The idea is that being away from other people allows your brain to reflect in tranquility on the goings on of the day or the week or the month or the life you’re in the midst of.  A mind that is constantly engaged is like a tiller running full throttle–effective while it’s running, but likely to run out of gas sooner.

When my mind is engaged on “serious” thinking stuff, I like for it to run full throttle, just not for extended periods.  Thinking takes a lot of energy, and I’m trying to do my part to conserve energy as much as possible.

I find being around people takes a lot out of me.  I say that not in a misanthropic way, but just as a statement of fact.  To listen and to be really present to people runs contrary to my own egocentric nature.  It’s tiring.  Even when gathering with friends for a few hours on a Saturday evening, I find myself by the end of the night talked out, listened out, (mostly the former) or both and needing a few days of quiet time to “recover”.

Lest you think I’m completely self-absorbed, I do have a solid precedent for the merits of solitary time (though, certainly, the comparison stops there).  After healing people, Jesus of Nazareth often went off to the desert to be alone.  Apparently, healing people took something out of him, and time alone “recharged” him.

That’s what I like best about growing vegetables, the amount of time I can spend alone.  I may have a story on the MP3 player rattling in my ears, but most of the time my mind is free of the 10,000 things and is instead just focused on knocking down some weeds, turning over some soil, or configuring a watering system.  While “multi-tasking” is seen as some great virtue these days, thinking of and doing only one thing at a time all by myself is still very rewarding.  At the end of the work day, I find a refreshing 12-ounce and a solitary walk around the property to be my just reward.

I’m not into woodworking or fixing old cars or needlepoint or scrapbooking, but I’m guessing these hobbies provide the same experience for their practitioners.  After a day at work of solving people’s problems, answering questions, repeating yourself, dealing with busybody co-workers, whiny kids or whatever, there’s something therapeutic about spending some time doing just one thing–alone.

Now that our vegetables are mostly in the ground, we have to give them some time alone.  I asked Maggie, “When did we plant those cherry tomatoes? Last week or the week before?”

I’m anxious for them to start growing and then yielding their tasty fruits.

Sure, we’ll water them as needed, maybe give ‘em a splash of the fish/seaweed eau de toilette that Maggie sprays on everything, and we’ll still cultivate the rows, but it’ll take some time alone in the ground for the plants to establish more roots and then start growing into the abundant producers we hope they will be.  We have to be patient with these plants, give them their space, and leave ‘em alone.

Having been married for what seems like forever (really closer to just a decade), I’m grateful Farmer Maggie gives me enough time alone to recharge and to grow (and to talk to myself).  It can’t be easy for her to resist the impulse to prune my annoying habits or to splash me with the fish/seaweed spray, but resist she does.  While she’s preparing dinner, I’m off alone wandering in circles out back.  And I think she’s OK with that.

Hopefully, the alone time has allowed me to grow into a better, more fruitful person…

Justin

Salad Days

So my curious better-half looked up the origins of the term “salad days” recently…

If I was listening closely, I think “salad days” appeared originally in Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (yeah, a quick Google search could confirm, but I’m just repeatin’ what I remember and not lookin’ to start a one-hour web-adventure in which I learn dozens of interesting factoids about Shakespeare and gardens and mention of salad in Chaucer and Boccaccio,too, and later, Edmund Spenser and The Fairie Queen and still have nothing written… and the fact that I was listening and remembering anything the wife tells me puts me miles ahead of most husbands, right?).

Maggie tells me salad days then connoted (and possibly still does) “a time of youth and innocence”.  I like to think “hope and possibility” are part of “youth and innocence”, but those with teenagers may think “sarcasm and defiance” may more accurately correlate with youth.  I’ll cling to “hope and possibility”.  (None of this is to be confused with my favorite farming metaphor, high cotton, which suggests “a very profitable time”.)

But “a time of youth and innocence….”

What exactly does lettuce have to do with youth or inexperience?

Maggie had this idea nearly a decade ago that we (maybe just “she” to start with…) could make extra money growing lettuce in the backyard.  Initially, that’s all we (again, mainly Mag) grew.  We enjoyed great salads, took some lettuce to market in Painesville and were thrilled to have earned just about enough to enjoy some adult refreshments after that first market.

We have expanded the operation over the decade since then and gone far beyond just the lettuce that started our “salad farm”, but I like to think these are still our salad days.

In the early days of this farming experiment, we both had other jobs, and the lettuce growing and harvesting was not a full-time job.  We used to go for regular Sunday rides or walks in the MetroParks, but as the salad farm grew, our activities away from home have trailed off.

We don’t often spend long days off Wood Road in the summer, because there are seedlings that need water, salad starts just-planted that need water, and weeds and grass ever on the ingress.  Maggie basically cares for a few thousand “infants” in trays and containers and raised beds and long rows.  They are demanding and a lapse of just one day–sometimes a lapse of a few hours–could see a month’s worth of effort go all for naught.

So, we don’t get out much these days.  Our primary social outlet seems to be going to market.  We’re generally tired on Friday evenings, have an early start on Saturday, and find calling it an early night on Saturday very appealing.  Sunday is not often a day of rest–not a full day, anyway.

In short, this growing-for-market lifestyle is just that, a lifestyle.

It’s all-consuming, tiring, sometimes frustrating, often rewarding, and, in short, our “time of youth and innocence” is past–if by “time of youth and innocence”, you mean “coming and going freely”.

Yet, I don’t get nostalgic for the old days.  These, too, are salad days.  In another decade, we may be growing much more, maybe less, maybe something completely different, maybe nothing at all.  Whatever the future brings, this summer, with it’s cold, damp spring and come-what-may rest of the season will seem like a time of “youth and innocence”.  I will recall having more energy and vigor to put in the long days.  I may wonder how and why we used handtools when some motorized implement accomplishes the same task in a fraction of the time.  I will wish I had used more sunscreen.

As this is high school graduation season, I am reminded of the expression often used around high school and college students: the best years of your life.  I remember hearing those words when I was in high school (“These are the best years of your life, so make the most of them!”), and again at college orientation.  (Funny, I never heard those words used by any employer I’ve worked for…)  I didn’t like the sound of that exhortation then, and I like it even less now.

“These are the best years of my life,” I’d tell the young adults.  Each and every one of them.  Each year, I find a new challenge.  Each year, something disappoints me greatly.  Each year, something surprises me so completely, I wonder how I got by for my preceding years.  The journey continues to be new and exciting–not always enjoyable–no chapter of life ever is.

No, I don’t enjoy the same activities I did a decade ago.  No, my weekends aren’t free and unstructured like they used to be.  Yes, having a business at home means the work never ends until it’s time to start planning for next year.  But a decade from now, these days will seem like a simpler, happier time, and a decade after that, we’ll reflect fondly on what is presently only a dream.

Right now, I want to reflect fondly on the present. 

These are the salad days–days of youth and innocence and endless possibility.  And next year will be, too.  And the year after.  And all the decades hence…

And it wouldn’t hurt if a few of those years were years of high cotton, too!

Justin

Keep on the Grass

Maggie identifies a “weed” as “any plant you don’t want growing in a certain spot”.

Using this definition, we’ve had cilantro, sunflower, sweet annie, lettuce, tomato, horseradish, chive,  and, of course, mint, among many, growing in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They are not pernicious “weeds”, not like the vile and despised thistle, poison ivy,  or purslane.

Sometimes, particularly in the case of a fast-growing sunflower, we’ve just let the thing grow.  “A volunteer harvest”, you might call it.  “If that dang plant wants to grow so vigorously right there”,  I think, “maybe it’s a sign that I should let it do just that.”  It gives the place a folksy charm–that joy of the unexpected around every turn.  But very few weeds are adopted and encouraged to thrive here.

The most ubiquitous weed we have on Wood Road is grass.  A freshly mowed patch is a thing of beauty, a living carpet of uniform height and hue.  A clump of grass growing alongside a tomato plant is a scourge, an ugly thing, a thief of valuable nutrients and water.  Grassy weeds, once established, are difficult to eradicate–they hold fast to the soil and pulling up a clump may uproot the vegetables growing close by.  Grassy weeds resist the scuffle hoe, bending forward and back, protecting their roots from the severing blade of the hoe.  We hates dem grassy weeds.

But our old  friend Andy claims that grass is the stuff of life.  “Most people don’t know…”, his lecture begins, “that topsoil (emphasis his) is created in meadows and grasslands.  You need plenty of decaying vegetative matter to create topsoil, and grasslands create that.  Many people mistakenly believe topsoil comes from the forest.”

Yes, Andy, but what about the forest?  Leaf humus is good, right?

“If you dig a hole in the woods, you’ll find very little topsoil unless it was at one time a field.  Any plant detritus on the forest floor is soon decomposed and re-consumed by the trees.  All of the nutrients of the forest are suspended in air, not in the soil.”

I’ll take Andy’s word on the subject–I remember hearing stories of the settling of the Great Plains.  The most memorable detail, whether true or just figurative, was the description of the sound of a zipper being pulled as plows first cut through the thick root systems of the Midwest’s great grasslands.  I think Bill Bryson claimed in his book, A Brief History of Everything, that a volcanic eruption of the Yellowstone cauldera millenia ago blanketed the Midwest in 6 feet of ash.  On top of that residue came a great expanse of weeds–grasses mainly–that season after season, decade after decade, for thousands of years built up three feet of top soil.

Maggie tells me a yard of top soil covers 300 square feet 1 inch deep.  Covering an acre one inch deep would require almost 150 yards of topsoil.  Covering an acre with three feet of top soil would take over 5,000 yards of topsoil.  At $20 a yard, that’s $100,000 per acre just for the soil.  All those weeds produced some valuable soil.  When you consider that millions of acres were covered with three feet of topsoil, that’s a staggeringly valuable resource just laying exposed on the surface of the earth.

Alas, poor land management practices over the last couple hundred years saw millions of tons of valuable soil erode into streams, rivers, and end up deposited in the Gulf of Mexico.  During the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s, thousands of tons of this valuable resource took flight and finally landed in the Atlantic Ocean, lost forever.  The lives and deaths of trillions of grasses over the millenia, all in vain, as the three feet of topsoil washed away, blew away, or was just used up too rapidly.  We need new, magic grasses that can produce great bio-mass, not for energy, but for soil re-juvenation.  Of course, such an Uber-grass would likely invade every cultivated space in America.  Good for the soil, bad for aesthetics and bad for the rest of agriculture.

So, grass is the source of great soil health, and the source of great farming frustration.  Tightly packed and uniformly kept in a lawn, especially when just freshly mowed, grass is pleasing to the senses.  Spreading through our salad beds, grass is a mortal enemy that must be hoed, hacked, or tilled deep to eliminate.

There’s a fine line between love and hate, they say.  Why does it seem the things that bring us the most good can cause us the most grief?

That’s something for me ponder while I mow the grass later….

Justin

On My Solar Return

Mother Nature has relented, I think.

We went from cool and damp on Friday to brutally humid on Monday to chilly Thursday night.

Mother Nature can be a vexatious little shrew, can’t she?

An old-timer once told me before the lottery that farming was the only legal form of gambling in Ohio, and I politely laughed when I heard it.  Now I get the joke.  After a cold, damp spring and then some blistering hot days and then a full day of stalk-bending winds, I can see why many folks sloughed off the yolk and plow and went to work indoors–there are no sure things in growing food.  Yet, Maggie’s will to create, to grow, and to succeed means we won’t be sloughing off anything.  We will grow great vegetables even if it means twice the work for half the returns.  It is our destiny.

Speaking of destiny, I was thinking earlier this week when I was tilling up some soil for our tater bed about a horseshoe I found when tilling a few years ago.  What made me me think of that rusty, brittle old thing isn’t clear, but I was thinkin’ ’bout that old horseshoe.  It occurred to me as we try to make up for lost time that the five acres we call home have been around a lot longer than we have.  We’ve added some trees and shrubs and a couple holes we call ponds and a house and pole barn, but the soil has been there, waiting for us, for decades, centuries, millenia.

We are stardust, we are golden, my brothers and sisters.  The soil we’re working today has been on an amazingly long journey from the depths of outer space, coalescing into a planet billions of years ago, burning, freezing, thawing, flooding, and drying.  Today, it looks like “dirt” but it took thousands, nay, millions of years for the exact combination of sand and loam and stones to come together to form the plot we call ours.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, the small piece that’s “ours” doesn’t seem like much, but a topo map of the area reveals how 10,000 years ago–in anticipation of a hair-brained scheme by a couple wannabe farmers–our land and that around us was covered in ice, then water, then dried out.  Then, thousands of years sun and wind and rain turned the sandy, rocky remnants of the glacier into soil.  Trillions of weeds have lived and died on our land.  Trillions of bugs, worms, bacteria, fungi, and other living things I don’t know how to classify have come and gone on “our” land.   Immediately before it was a “salad farm”, our five acres was also part of a hundred-acre farm and saw millions of ears of corn and blades of grass come and go.   I don’t know how many other owners preceded us on Wood Road, but I don’t figure there have been too many.  I spent a few summers mowing grass in the local cemeteries over a decade ago–no doubt, I passed the marker of that farmer whose horse lost that rusty old shoe in our soil.  Both man and horse are part of the soil, now, too…

We’re not the first farmers, I’m sure, to walk the property and see standing water and think, “This is never going to dry out!”  or “I guess we’re not going to work this section this year.”  No, we’re just the present occupants of the land–like the weeds and the bugs and the varmints.  Someday, someone else will look out our windows and see the the water flowing across the driveway and pooling a couple inches deep along its edges.  The next farmers will likewise, wonder, “How is this ever going to be plantable?”  Like the weeds, the bugs and the varmints, I hope we leave the place more fertile than we found it, and I hope, in spite of all our grumbling, the love we have for this place carries through for ages after us.

So on this, my solar return, and now the tenth year since Maggie turned the key and entered what was then just a house in the middle of a hay field, I reflect on that horseshoe, an artifact of a farmer and his horse long gone,  I hope he enjoyed the sunny days and the rainy days, the hot days and the cold days, the wet days and the dry days, because, altogether, it doesn’t seem like we have enough days.

I’m looking forward to another growing season, come what may…

 

Justin