Hollering on the Hill

Not long ago, I was standing at the top of our hill, hollering. I could see the long stretch of hayfield, just beginning to think of greening up. I could see the stream rushing at the bottom of the hill, still flush with snowmelt. I could see our barn, and the four shaggy horses, shedding for the spring, and I could see our greenhouse, burgeoning with vegetable seedlings. I could see our house, too, and the New Hampshire hills, and the Vermont mountains beyond that, and then the blue blue sky.

I could have been hollering happily for any of those things: Spring! Fields! Horses! Seedlings! Home! 

But what I was hollering for was our dear friend, SuSu, who died unexpectedly this past January.

“Hey, SuSu,” I belted out, “How are you doing?” Three times I called for her, because I wanted her; because we didn’t expect to lose her so soon; because we are all grieving, from so many losses: pandemics, wars, poverty, racism, environmental devastation, to name a few.

Up on the hill, I remembered the first time SuSu came to our farm, years ago now. She wore bright red stiletto heels, and walked around laughing, as her heels sank into the garden ground. The last time she was here, she wore a handmade, matching headscarf and pandemic mask, and she walked around laughing.

She was a great laugher, despite struggling with chronic health troubles. She was a great whooper too, because when that first ripe tomato appeared in the shed, she couldn’t help herself. She was our most avid heirloom tomato lover, the person that always wanted to have a tomato parade for us, with acrobats and music and tomato costumes.

As a friend, long-time CSA member, and auntie of our daughter’s school classmate, SuSu has been a steady presence in our lives, and we didn’t realize how much we counted on her until now. I want to wish her light and love, and also I want to hear her laugh and whoop.

But all I can do is holler, it seems like. (Well, I pray and chant for SuSu too, as she always did for us, and also we have established the Susan Gadbois Memorial CSA Garden Scholarship Fund, and we feel honored that her family has asked to have SuSu’s ashes here. Plus we really want to develop a tomato variety for her, and call it the SuSu!) 

If you'd like to donate to the SuSu Farm Fund, please send a check payable to Hillside Springs Farm, with "SuSu" in the notation, to Hillside Springs Farm, PO Box 233, Westmoreland NH 03467.

Meanwhile, here is another holler, for our dear SuSu, along with a hope that all of us have a chance to holler, and laugh, and whoop.

Baby Arm

In memoriam Susan Gadbois, 1966-2022

My baby arm, you said,
stroking the tiny arm
stunted by childhood cancer.
You were a fierce mother,
working that arm,
wrenching your body to shift gears
in your race-red car.
Ten years, fifteen, we knew you,
and never heard you complain, 
never knew what it cost
to coax that arm into picking beans, 
peeling tomatoes, sewing clothes,
knocking on doors in the toughest 
of neighborhoods, offering all you could,
nursing, teaching, floristing-- 
all those wedding flowers, funeral flowers,
dazzling arrangements, ahead of your time-- 
oh, such tending of altars,
prayer and chanting,
and the feeding of us all:
roasted red peppers, mango ice cream,
a tomato sauce so lush
it brought tears to the eyes.
From that baby arm 
came an exquisite hand, 
a vigorous swirling penmanship, 
and from that baby arm
came your love for all the babies – 
flowers, nephews, nieces, the children 
trailing after you like ducklings, 
following that bright energy born out in 
the work of your life: felted tapestries, 
green fields blooming sheep,
blue skies bouncing clouds,
gravity and levity tenderly balanced:
felted tomatoes with propellers, 
felted jumping tomatoes, 
felted farmers dancing, tomatoes aloft, 
and the merpeople, mermothers, 
fathers, merbabies in merlaps, 
loving this watery and earthy world.
Then the severe and beautiful labyrinth-
those muted colors, stark, stunning,
working the maze of your life, of all our lives,
finding yourself at the periphery 
over and over again,
yet returning, returning,
daunted and dauntless,
to loss, to fierce, fiery love.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, April 6-12, 2022

The Reusable, Indelible Tomato (Tag)

August on the farm: tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes!

Of course, tomato-growing starts much earlier than August, with sowing in late February, grafting in March, transplanting in April, clipping up and pruning in May and June, and our first ripe tomatoes in early July.

This year in July, along with ripe tomatoes, we had a late Father's Day surprise. The surprise had been percolating for some years, and involved those very tomatoes.

When we sow our seeds, we label each variety with wooden tags and an indelible marker, but between the mighty sun, the water in the irrigation system, and the soil itself, the marker becomes entirely delible (look that word up!). Thus, just about the time when my tomato-loving fellow is ready to compare varieties for taste, texture, productivity, size, and resistance to troubles, he can't read the tags anymore.

But this year, thanks to a whole other interesting farm project, I had a brilliant idea. The idea came from the mushroom yard, a lovely little patch in the woods where my fellow grows shiitake and oyster mushrooms inoculated on logs. This year we are getting a good flush of shiitake mushrooms, and it's easy to tell the history of each mushroom log, because, yes! there are clever little metal mushroom tags. The tags are bits of cardboard, wrapped in thin metal. Writing on the tag with a ballpoint pen leaves an indentation in the metal, and voila! a truly indelible label, impervious to sun and rain.

One Saturday morning in July, while my fellow was busy selling tomatoes and mushrooms (and other produce too) at the Farmers' Market in Keene, I took the mushroom technology to the tomato greenhouse. I also brought along the daughter who makes the Father's Day possible, and we spent the morning ignoring all other urgent farm projects. Instead we labeled tomatoes, tying the new tags at eye-level, cross-referencing with the still-legible tags in the soil and with the scribbled chart I make when we transplant.

Like pretty much every farm project, this one took a lot longer than expected, and it was a lot hotter in the greenhouse than we would have liked. But we accomplished it, and gee, was it fun to show my fellow the surprise! He marveled in a most satisfactory manner.

Once the tags were in place, my fellow could easily tell which variety was which. In fact, it was so easy that he soon reported that Great White, a pale yellow tomato, was turning red. Huh. We did some more chart and wooden tag cross-referencing. Seems one plant had died, which made for a glitch in the system. But it was easy to fix, and now Great White is its proper pale yellow.

Another day my fellow discovered a heart-shaped tomato labeled as a regular old round tomato. That was easy to fix too. Then there was the time when it appeared that Chef's Choice Bicolor and Vintage Wine were the same tomato, despite being planted in two different greenhouses, and bearing two different labels. (Gosh, we were getting awfully hot and hungry on labeling day, but I didn't think our efforts were that far off. Our tomato tags were turning into playing tag with tomatoes!)

That puzzle we didn't solve until we had one tomato ripe from each plant on the same harvest day. Both varieties are beautifully striped in green and red, but one is green and reddish-orange striped, and the other is green and reddish-pink striped. Whew. The labeling system held up.

By far the most satisfying moment was when my fellow discovered that one of the new standard varieties we were trialing seemed to be looking particularly fine in the leaf department. Normally, by August, we see quite a bit of leaf-yellowing in our greenhouse tomatoes, but the Caiman variety is still nice and green. Well! Perhaps we'll grow more of this variety next year, thanks to our wonderful new labeling system, and our reusable, indelible, mushroom-tomato Father's Day tags.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 25- Aug 31, 2021

Tomato Pandemic Poem

People dealt with the pandemic in all kinds of ways. My fellow farmer seems to have coped with tomatoes.

Normally tomato-besotted, my fellow got even more crazy last winter at seed-ordering time, browsing through various catalogs: Johnny's, Fedco, Turtle Tree Seed, Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds,Totally Tomatoes, Victory Seeds, and the “Sometimes Nice People Give Us Samples from Their Travels” collection, which we store in our backroom.

We plant nearly all our tomatoes in our greenhouses, where we have room for 300 or so standard and heirloom slicers. Standard varieties are the round, red, regular ol' tomatoes. We always plant a lot of our stand-by, Jetstar, plus maybe one or two other varieties we are trialling.

This year, though, we have Jetstar, Super Fantastic, Caiman, Big Juicy, Rockingham, Galahad, Momotaro, Damsel, Arbason, Fenda, Bay State, and Buffalo Steak.

When it came to heirloom (and heirloom-standard cross) tomatoes, in all their shades of red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, black, green, white, rainbow; and all their shapes, round, oval, heart, pear, wrinkly, folded, lumpy, bumpy; and all their sizes, from giant to tiny, my fellow outdid himself. He ordered so many interesting kinds that we could only plant one or two seeds of each variety.

Now most farmers would classify all these tomatoes by type, color, variety, place of origin, size, etc., falling back perhaps on alphabetical order. However, this farmer is also a writer, and thus here is my heirloom tomato list, organized by the nice sounds of their names.

In fact, this list could be, according to my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, and published in 1993), a found poem. A found poem “is the presentation of something 'found' in the environment – a piece of expository prose, a snatch of poetry or dramatic dialogue, a newspaper page, document, map, painting, photograph, etc. – as a lineated text and hence a poem,” or the “verbal equivalent of a collage” (423).

(Oh, hee hee, I never thought I could work that fine book into my farming and sustainability column! Ah, poetry . . . another good way to deal with the pandemic.)

Here is my found poem (which technically isn't just heirloom varieties, as my farmer fellow will be sure to point out when he reads this, but also includes some of those heirloom-standard crosses, those heirloomish hybrids):

Tiffin Mennonite, Thorburn's Terra-Cotta, Oxheart, Linnie's Oxheart,
Fanto Rommo, Cosmonaut Volkov, Cour di Bue, Zapotec,
Anais Noire, Giroc, Jerusalem, Danko, Carmello, Marmara,
Summer Sweetheart, Stump of the World, Grandma's Pick, Gold Medal, Country Taste,
Mushroom Basket (my fellow's goal is to put some of our exciting new crop of log-growm shiitake and oyster mushrooms inside one of these tomatoes!),
Polish Giant, Podor, Prue, Pantono Romanesco, Pomodoro, Santo Palo, Portuguese Ibrido,
Precious, Honey, Kimberton Yellow (maybe you remember our “Kimberton Black,” our scratchy-bitey precious-honey black kitty?),
Chef's Choice Yellow, Chef's Choice Bi-Color, Chef's Choice Black, Chef's Choice Pink,
Tasty Pink, Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye, Pink Accordion (it's all folded up!),
Pink Brandywine, Yellow Brandywine, Purple Brandy, Big Brandy, Brandywise, Black Brandywine,
Vintage Wine, Genuwine, (for my brother-in-law who owns a wine shop, plus my fellow is making wine for the first time this summer),
Fried Green, Aunt Ruby's German Green,
Cherokee Green, Cherokee Carbon, Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Purple Heart,
Pruden's Purple, Paul Robeson, Black Prince, African Queen, Great White, White Tomesol, White Beauty, Black Beauty,
Black Pear, Italian Red Pear, Italian Heirloom,
Red Rose, Red Sausage (weird, huh?),
Flamme, Sart Roloise (”stunning color of a stained glass masterpiece” says the seed packet),
and Believe it or Not.

Let us not forget our 50 paste/plum tomatoes: Juliet, Large Oval, Giant Garden Paste, Golden Rave, Mr Fumarole, Cuore de Toro.

Or our 100 to 150 cherry tomatoes: we have almost all Sungold, except for a few Isis and Unicorn, which came as free packets from the seed catalogs. Plus we have one more cherry tomato plant: I have a fondness for Sunpeach, a pink variety, and when I looked in last year's old packet, I found a single seed. I planted my one seed. It sprouted! I planted the seedling in the greenhouse. It lived! Now it's bearing fruit (and I must admit to eating them all myself!).

Soon all these tomatoes will be bearing fruit, we hope. We surely won't eat them all ourselves, and my fellow farmer might even be able to tell you which variety is which!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, July 28 - Aug 3, 2021

Tomato Time: Swooning on the Farm

August, on our CSA farm, is the month of tomato. 

Of course, we’ve been harvesting tomatoes from the greenhouses for weeks now, but August is True Tomato Time.

Long, long ago, in early July, we yearned for the first ripe tomato.  We checked the top contenders daily: growing bigger and bigger, changing from firm, certain green to paler and paler to almost white-green.  And then at last the first blush.  The deepening of the blush.  And then: the swoon.

We pick our very first fresh tomato of the year, round, ripe, red, juicy.  We consider bearing it to the kitchen on a silver platter, but compromise by bringing it in with calloused farmer hands.  We inhale its spicy-sweet aroma deeply, set it on the cutting board, admire its perfection.

Then we take the special tomato knife—the-do-not-use-this-for-anything-else-no-matter-how-much-it-resembles-a-ripe-tomato-or-there-will-be-big- trouble-knife—and we cut thick slices. 

The first tomato.  We eat.  We swoon.

But all that happened in July.  Now it’s August, and we’re harvesting 500 or more tomatoes a week, both standard red greenhouse varieties and heirloom tomatoes.  The standard varieties are the sturdy, dependable, delicious hybrids that caused the earlier swoon. 

In August, we’re way beyond hybrids. 

Now we are eating Big Rainbow, a yellow beauty delicately streaked with pink.  We’re eating Black Brandywine and Paul Robeson, two purply-black tomatoes that are a current favorite, lush and full, almost salty.  We’re eating Hungarian Heart, rich, sweet, smooth.

We’re also considering becoming wine tasters, as we string out our adjectives over supper: “A complex, full flavored tomato, with a hint of dried peach and cinnamon, wouldn’t you say?” I ask my fellow.

“Oh yes,” he replies,  “and with the slightest undertone of bologna.”  We snort and giggle.  We decide to stick to tomato tasting rather than wine tasting, as we revel in the tomato abundance of August.

Our CSA members revel too.

In the harvest shed, a member exclaims: “Beautiful!”

“They’re like jewels!” says another, admiring the perfect red globes of the standard tomatoes, in orderly rows, against the dark green tomato trays.

“Yes, yes,” we say, “but look at these!” and we proudly show the heirlooms.

“Wow,” the members say, noting the strange colors and sizes and shapes.  There are no tidy rows here.  There are single tomatoes that could make a potluck dish for ten; there are petite tomatoes that are perfect for a single sandwich. There are pink, purple, black, brown, green, yellow, orange, white, and yes! even red! tomatoes.  There are cracks and crevices and odd lumps and bulges. 

“Wow,” say the members, and then turn ever so slightly back to the symmetry and familiarity of the red jewels.  We heave a little heirloom tomato farmer sigh, but are reassured by the clever heirloom distribution system we’ve developed over the years.

When we first started farming, we used to mix the standards and heirlooms in the trays, thinking the heirlooms would disappear in a flash.  But at the end of the day, any lone tomato left would always be an heirloom.  We learned to divide up the standards and heirlooms, and on our harvest chalkboard, we write “Tomatoes: Standard- eight, Heirloom- two.” 

The harvest chalkboard is mighty and indisputable, and people comply: they go home with eight standards, and two heirlooms, tucked in their bags.  They come back raving: “It’s the best tomato I ever had!”  “It tasted just like the tomatoes my grandmother grew!” 

We beam.

The tenderness and flavor of the heirlooms quickly convince CSA members to look for more, but we farmers never have to worry about not getting enough for the farm kitchen.  Along with the fantastic taste and colors, heirlooms are also very thin skinned, prone to cracking and other troubles.  There are always some heirlooms that don’t make the CSA grade, and we have to make the sacrifice of not only eating exclusively heirlooms, but also of making all heirloom salsas and all heirloom tomato sauces. 

Of course, our near-constant August tomato swoon makes it a little tricky to get any farm work done, but who better than a sustainable farmer to model the beauties of eating locally and seasonally?  Not to mention celebrating the beauties of diversity, of sizes, shapes, colors, flavors? 

And by golly, it is abundance time, cup running over time, go a little heirloom wild time, swooning time: it’s Tomato Time! 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 7 – Aug 13, 2013