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