A House Full of Garden

Things get a little crazy on our vegetable farm in November. We are so close to the end of the high season that we can taste it. But we don't want to just taste it. We want to gobble it up.

Thus, after a season of my reading material consisting mainly of the Sunday comics my sister saves for me, the Monadnock Shopper News, and overdue bills, I have recently checked out four picture books, two young adult fantasy novels, two adult novels, one spiritual autobiography, a book on pottery, two books of poetry, and a non-fiction book by Terry Tempest Williams, all from three different libraries, one of which is the bookshelf at my new friend's house. 

My new friend, who has many many wonderful books, including a whole section entirely devoted to contemporary poetry, and who is not farming this season, which she both regrets and does not regret, recently invited us to supper in order to “feed the farmers,” as she so nicely put it. She served us a feast of chickpea vegetable casserole, roasted peppers, salad with two choices of dressing, homemade applesauce, and chocolate cake and whipped cream. This after our high garden season of meals consisting mainly of popcorn, salad turnips, pieces of cheese, and in the fall, apples, with the occasional spoonful of peanut butter. (At least we grow two of these!)

In the music department, our high garden season consists mainly of birdsong (beautiful), the horses' harness jingling (beautiful), and in July, the rain, rain rain (a little too much to be beautiful). There were also the sounds of our nightmares: the chewing, chewing, chewing of rodents in the garden and greenhouses. But now, in November, my fellow farmer has just gotten tickets for one, two, three, four live concerts, two of which are happening on the same day. 

“How are you going to swing that?” I ask him.

“Oops,” he says, and looks a little further into his ticket details.

“Yes!” he whoops. “Yes! One is at four! One is at eight! Two concerts on the same day!”

I have also begun to imagine other winter delights. Massages. Making holiday presents. Taking the big pile of donations, gathered last winter, and gathering dust all garden season, to the thrift store. A clean kitchen, regular meals, and, yes, changing the sheets on the bed, so that they aren't nearly as full of dirt as the garden beds.

In other words, we are really, really, ready for the end of the growing season.

But the growing season is not quite ready for the end of us. Though it was a very late first frost  this year, when it came, it came, and we were deluged by the last hoorah of the garden season. Suddenly everything that was in the garden seemed to be in our house. 

In the kitchen we have 200 heads of cabbage, 300 leeks, four trays of troubled vegetables, and eight five gallon buckets of apples. 

In the living room, cozy with the thrift store donations and the house plants, we have 23 trays and six buckets of green and ripening tomatoes.

In the front room, we have five crates of frantically dug ginger and turmeric plants, two crates of peppers, a bushel and two more buckets of apples, five bags of garlic, three buckets of fingerling and yellow potatoes, four bushel baskets of onions, a mess of chard, two trays of hot peppers, a bucket of tiny side shoots of broccoli, and three buckets of tomatillos.

Happily, most of this will clear out in the last two weeks of our CSA distribution season. Less happily, all these baskets and crates and buckets surround our wood stove, and we can't even get close to it, let alone start a fire. 

Ah, well … soon vegetables will turn into feasts, and fires, and music, and books.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Nov 17 - Nov 23, 2021

The Three-Quarters Blues

Maybe you know that feeling: the three-quarters done feeling, the three-quarters blues. The wow, I've been doing this thing for a long time, and I'm kind of tired of it, and I'm getting grumpier and grumpier just thinking how I have to keep on.

Such as when you're washing a mountain of dishes, and you're almost to the top but not quite, and you really hate all these cruddy dishes, and your hands are all soggy, and you know if you leave the last quarter instead of finishing, the dishes will seemingly overnight become a mountain again. You keep on washing.

Or maybe you've been picking millions of cherry tomatoes for months and you really want to be done picking them, but you were a responsible farmer, and covered the row when the early frost came, and now you've still got cherry tomatoes to pick. And you think, huh, how come the flowers and beans and squash all died, but you didn't, you cherry tomatoes? But you keep on picking.

Or maybe you spent so many hours weeding this season that you think there can't possibly be any more weeds, and even though you mostly love weeding, now you can't stand it, it's been too much, too long, but your outside carrots didn't germinate well, so you tried planting some in the greenhouse, and of course, in the nice warm greenhouse, the weeds are still growing. Geez, why did you ever think you loved weeding? But you keep on weeding.

Or maybe it is like when your kitchen is full of seconds: eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, zucchini yellow squash cucumbers broccoli tomatillos kale chard spinach, the list is endless, and it all needs to be put by for the winter. You know that in a month or six weeks your kitchen will no longer have trays full of slowly getting limper and limper vegetables, and you will be very glad for all that preserved food, but it is hard to keep that in mind when you are ¾ of the way through it all. But you keep on slicing and canning and freezing.

Or maybe it is like when you had a friend's small boy visit. Now the friend loves the farm, and she loves the boy, who is the son of her own dear friend, and the small boy immediately loves the farm. He is maybe eight years old, and this farm is the best thing he's ever seen. Then we do a little project, because this is a working visit. You decide on a fun kind of working visit job, clearing little rocks out of the greenhouse bed. The small boy thinks this is great. For quite a while.

Then, ¾ of the way through the job, he says “This is the worst day of my life! I'm going to call my mother! I'm going back home!” Back home happens to be on the West Coast, which is not too near NH. Your friend is gasping in shock at the boy hating the farm, and worried the farmer will be insulted. But you, the farmer, just laugh. You know those ¾ blues. And hey, if this is the worst day of this small boy's life, things are going pretty well. (And hey, likewise for the farmer.) With a little encouragement, we all keep on picking up those little rocks.

Of course, you'd much rather spend all afternoon in the warm sun on a blanket reading a book, especially the wonderful Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer weaves together traditional indigenous teaching and Western science, and tells of making maple syrup, both the gift of the sap, and the work of the syrup. She writes: “[the] teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness” (69).

Oh all right, maybe I can be a little grateful in my grump. Because I sure do love this book, and highly recommend it, whether you are reading half the day in your backyard, or for two minutes before you fall asleep. Maybe it will even turn a ¾ grump into a full-on gratitude.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Oct 21 – Oct 27, 2020

Then Again . . . July on the Farm

Oh, July. Is it even possible to write about July on a vegetable farm in New Hampshire?

I could write about harvesting, which took a few hours on CSA harvest day in early June, and now takes four days of every week, shoehorned on top of all the other work. Peas and raspberries, broccoli and cabbage and beans, beets and cherry and paste and slicing tomatoes, kale and chard and lettuce and zucchini and yellow squash and cucumbers. In fact, a week or two ago, we spent 10 plus hours times three farmers (30 plus hours that would be, total) picking 104 quarts of raspberries. That's a lot of hours, and a lot of berries.

Then again, I could write how wonderful it is to have all these delicious berries and vegetables, and to have the garden producing well, and remind myself, that harvest is, after all, pretty much the point of all this farming.

Or I could write about weeds, how our garden was looking so grand in the dry days of June, because we could irrigate exactly where we wanted to, i.e. the vegetables, and very few weeds germinated.

Then again, I could write about how grateful we were for the recent rain, because the pastures for the draft horses were getting mighty short, and the hay crop was looking weak, and the pond was slowly sinking from all our irrigation. Even though weeds love rain, and our garden is now a big weedy mess, so do vegetables love rain, and they are big and bountiful.

I could write about woodchucks, who have risen to new heights this year, chomping at the garden from three different directions, harvesting happily away, evading our Havahart traps, baited with the most tasty of peanut butters, plum jams of our own making, and stale bread. I could write how we are frantically covering all the woodchuck delights, especially the brassicas, with row cover, and I could write about our great state of dismay when we found that at least one chuck is now chewing through the brand new row cover to get at the almost brand new kale, and completely ignoring our bait.

Then again, I could write how woodchucks are part of the marvelous diversity of our world, and how very much I want to affirm that there is food enough for all. (Of course, I think the chucks ought to be eating that nice grass and other wild vegetation we leave as borders, and not our crops, but hey, who am I to say?)

I could write about making hay, another kind of harvest, which is always pressing in July, and we've got all this bothersome garden work to do, which doesn't allow us to hay easily. I could grouse about the weather and the hay: too dry to grow hay, then too wet to make hay, now too hot to think about hay. (Would that "too hot" was a reasonable excuse for not making hay! Alas, it is not.)

Then again, I could write about the bobolinks in the hayfield, and the brown-eyed susans, and how lovely it feels when all the hay forces coalesce, and we are coming down the hill at nine o'clock with the last load of the day, the horses as eager as we are for a rest, and the fireflies and a big orange moon rising.

I could write about Clyde, our new horse, who is very steady with the machinery, in fact so steady that he is nearly asleep in the harness. We need to use a “tickler,” as our wise horse friends say, a long stick to scratch at the root of Clyde's tail to wake him up a little and join his teammate in the work. “Step up, Clyde,” we say, “Step up!” Also I might mention that Clyde is an excellent harvester himself, very eager to eat grass at every opportunity, whether that is grazing in the pasture, or more problematically, grazing as he is supposed to be cultivating pathways. (Plus he's happier to mow the hay with his teeth than with the sickle bar.)

Then again, I could write what a funny sweet horse Clyde is, with his good disposition and his droopy lip and his big head and his beautiful kind eye and lovely coloring, reddish-brown with black points, and how he has a gorgeous floating trot, and how we are looking forward to riding him (when this bothersome garden harvest settles down).

Or I could write about the farm kitchen, with its dishes so long dirty that the spiders and spider webs have moved in, or its fridge so bursting full that things fall out when you open the door. Oops, there comes that cabbage again! Bump, bump, bump!

Then again, I could write about all the delicious food that we're eating, so delicious that you wonder why we are so lucky, and that brings me right back to my starting point, which is, of course, harvesting. Which is, yes, July.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, July 29 - Aug 4, 2020

Figuring It All Out on the Farm

My fellow farmer and I like vegetables better than we like numbers. We rely heavily on our fingers, our chalk, and our calculators when it comes to all the counting we need to do on our vegetable farm.

The counting starts right away, with the spring sowing. How many cabbage seeds should we sow in order to put out transplants at 16 inch spacing to fit a 3 foot wide, 200 foot long bed? This would be an easy calculation, one would think, except that the bed is really only more or less 3 feet wide and more or less 200 feet long, depending on the workhorses and the teamster and the lay of the land.

Then, of course, we always plant a few extra seeds of each crop, just in case some don't germinate. Occasionally all the seeds sprout, including the extra ones, and then we have too many plants. But we can't bear to throw any nice cabbage starts in the compost, so we try to fit all of them in the more or less 200 foot bed, which means the spacing is down to 12 inches by the end of the row, or it might mean that we put some cabbage in the next more or less 200 foot bed, which was meant for kale and chard, say, at 12 inch spacing, in staggered double rows in the bed. Then some of the kale and chard might get pushed over, too, into the broccoli, and then what? And where we will find the 20 feet for the dill that we usually tuck in at the end of a more or less bed?

We farmers look at each other, and the garden beds, numbers whirling in our heads.

Once we get the plants in the ground, we have a little rest from these difficult calculations. But it is not long before harvesting begins, and we take up the numbers again. From June through November, every Tuesday and Friday, we calculate and recalculate. Some things are easy: for example, on a June harvest day we have 17 members coming, so we pick 17 heads of bok choy, along with the other crops that are ready. But things get more tricky: one day in early July we have 64 tomatoes for 24 members, but some tomatoes are small and some are large. Then we have to make some decisions indeed.

How do we make the CSA shares as equitable as possible? Some variety in size is desirable, since one person might like a nice little head of cabbage, and another person might like a nice big head of cabbage. But when it comes to tomatoes, there are not many people who would pick a nice little tomato over a nice big one. Thus we sort our tomatoes into big and little, which further complicates our numbers.

Then, suppose, late in August, that we have 29 members coming to pick up vegetables on a Tuesday afternoon, and we have 152 cucumbers, 131 yellow squash, and 78 zucchini. This is when the calculator, or a grade schooler who needs to practice her multiplication and division during the summer months, comes in handy. We end up with 5 cucumbers, 4 yellow squash, and 2 zucchini per share. But what to do with the remaining?

Well, we make up a choice tray, where CSA members can pick either one more zucchini or one more yellow squash, and then we farmers will make a batch of pickles with the rest of cucumbers. Except that we are just finishing up harvesting the first planting of cucumbers and starting the second one, and the second planting cucumbers look beautiful and the first planting cucumbers are in funny shapes, so the counting farmer takes several funny-shaped cucumbers out of the crate to put in the surplus and sharing tray, except she forgets that she has done this in the fever of trying to count way too many vegetables at once, and we end up short of cucumbers by the end of the day, so that our pickling cucumbers turn back into CSA cucumbers. Ah, well. At least there are plenty of cucumbers.

And now, in September, we have the counting challenge of slowly moving from summerish crops to fallish crops. Of course, there are still lots of tomatoes and yellow squash, but now the onions are coming in, and soon we will be digging potatoes, and picking winter squash. We will need to count and balance those too. But all of this figuring is nothing when we compare it to the figuring that has to happen in the farm budget. Now there are some difficult jugglings and jigglings and wigglings and wagglings. As I say, we two farmers like vegetables, much more than we like numbers.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Sept 26 - Oct 2, 2018