The Tomato Grafting Revolution

One day several years ago my farming fellow came back from his seed-saving group, saying, “Yeah, it was great! There were all these people growing their great great great grandmothers' heirloom open pollinated really rare varieties of corn and beans!”

“What did you say you were growing?” I asked him.

“I said I was grafting tomatoes! They all looked at me like I'm nuts!”

I thought my fellow was a little nuts myself, when he first talked about grafting tomatoes. People graft fruit trees, I said knowingly, not tomatoes.

“Look at this! It's fantastic!” was his answer. He showed a me a video clip of a hand, a razor blade, and two innocent tomato plants, each being sliced in half. Then the bottom of one was stuck to the top of the other, with the help of a silicone clip.

“Isn't that great?” he said. “I can't wait to try this!”

“But why?” I said. “It's so artificial, it's so forced, it's so not sustainable. And it's so not groovy!”

“I know,” he said enthusiastically, “but it doubles production, and the whole greenhouse is full of propane heaters and miles of plastic and irrigation and fans and everything else. It's all crazy and non-groovy. But since we have all these resources concentrated in this one area, we might as well get good production. That's a kind of sustainibility, too. And it's fantaaaastic production! Look at this! The plants are twice as big! Twice as many tomatoes!”

“But do we want twice as many tomatoes?”

“Yes!” said my fellow farmer.

Oh, he does love tomatoes, my fellow. Every year he grows a trillion different varieties, pink, yellow, white, purple, green, black, orange, and even red. He was ecstatic the year we were finally able to put all our tomatoes under cover, thanks to the addition of two new hoophouses. The outside, or “field” tomatoes, tasted mighty good, but they didn't always look so pretty. Now our tomatoes taste and look good, in the highly protected hoophouse environment.

The next big tomato step, after the hoophouse revolution, was the grafting revolution. My fellow plunged in, armed with a razor blade and a little pair of scissors. He sliced and trimmed and clipped, joining a sturdy Central American tomato root, highly tolerant of greenhouse conditions, to whatever heirloom or hybrid variety he was most enamored with at the moment. He tucked the tender grafties into the hospital, a darkened area under one of our propagation tables, for three days, misting them carefully twice a day. Then voila! There emerged the first batch of grafted tomatoes, each little plant either thoroughly dead or amazingly alive.

We transplanted the grafties carefully into our hoophouse beds, and soon they took off, and off, and off. They burst out of their silicone clips and grew and grew, twice the size of their non-grafted neighbors. We were in awe. We gazed high, at the hoophouse trusses, where the tomatoes were curling their leaves and twining their stems. That year was the first that my fellow had to start climbing a ladder to harvest tomatoes.

Ever since, my fellow has grafted, gazed in awe, and climbed the ladder. Over the years, he's worked his way through various grafting errors: plants too little, plants too big, plants in hospital too long, plants in hospital not long enough, plants too wet, plants too dry. Then one year my fellow had another brilliant idea: “Hey! How about grafting some cherry tomatoes?”

“Gee, I don't know,” I answered. “We've got an awful lot of cherry tomatoes already. It takes us three hours at a time, the two of us, just to pick them.”

“I'm going to try, just a couple. It'll be great. The plants will be huge!”

My fellow was right again. The plants were huge. They were monstrous. They were impenetrable. We would tunnel in, trying to reach the trillion before the overripening, the splitting, and then the rotting. We would tunnel in, and come out gasping for air.

“Never again,” I said. “Never again.”

“Never again,” agreed my fellow, “Never again.”

Now we laugh about it, as we spend our companionable three hours picking the lovely non-grafted cherry tomatoes twice a week together.

“Remember that year you grafted the cherry tomatoes?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hee hee hee. That was a big mistake.”

“Hee hee hee,” I say. “That was funny. Remember how mad I used to get? I'd come out of there with all these leaves and cherry tomatoes caught on my head. I hated wasting all those tomatoes we couldn't reach.”

“Yeah,” he says again. “That makes this kind of picking seem easy, doesn't it?”

“It sure does,” I say.

“But it's a good thing I graft the big tomatoes,” he adds quickly. “Don't you think?”

“I sure do, “ I say. “I guess you're not completely nuts after all. You're more like completely tomatoes!”
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 31 -- Sept 6, 2016

Words for the Workhorse

Here on our New Hampshire vegetable farm, we've been farming with draft horses since the beginning. We've worked with several teams, in various combinations, and each team, and each horse, has its own charms and quirks. Mostly we say nice things to our charming, quirky horses. Sometimes we say other things.  Take Ben, for example, one of our black Percherons, who is our biggest, youngest, goofiest horse, born here on the farm in 2002. He likes to drink from the end of the water hose, and he likes to flip the hose right out of the trough. “Oh, Benny!” we moan, “For crying out loud, how are you going to get water to drink if it's all running down the driveway?” We might also say to Benny, on a fine spring morning,“Oh, you big, beautiful shiny horse, I bet you're ready to plow!” And he is. He is a fine, strong, steady horse, and we tell him so. He is also a fine, strong, steady horse with mighty big feet. When it's time to cultivate the narrow pathways of the garden, we are more likely to say, “Gees, Benny, every time you wiggle your big fat foot, you step on a plant!” Benny is pretty unconcerned about our little lettuce or broccoli transplants; in fact, he has finally trained the people around here to choose a different horse to cultivate, a horse with nice little feet. A horse with nice little feet comes walking right over in the barnyard. It is Molly, our lovebug, a sweet Belgian looking for someone to scratch her chin. She is a dear to work around in the stable, and we croon in her ears: “What a good horse, oh, what a nice good lovey-dovey horse.” Molly is also a hard worker. She is quite the peppy stepper in harness, instantly ready for anything, quite often more than even the teamster is ready for. “Easy, Molly,” we say. “Walk. Easy. Walk. Easy,” in slighter louder and more convincing tones each repetition. Molly is also not fond of big branches catching on the machinery she's hauling, which puts even more spring into her step. “Holy smokes,” we might say, “What are you trying to do, Molly? Win the race? Or just lose the hayloader, haywagon, and haypeople?” Molly likes to work best with her Belgian brother Moon, though we sometimes wonder why this is so. Moon has learned all the tricks of the draft horse trade, including lagging behind when there's a hard pull up a slope, and tucking ahead when there's a long downhill, which is the very time he's supposed to be helping hold the machinery from careening forward. “Step up, Moon, step up!” we encourage. Moon flicks his ears at us, and sometimes his tail: oh these pesky humans, always yakking about something. Moon is our most elegant horse, with his flowing blonde mane and tail, and his long neck. He also has the unusual and marvelous habit of stopping short when he is alarmed in harness, rather than galloping away. “Good boy,” we say, “Good good good wonderful marvelous fantastic horse,” we say, as we work out whatever noisy machinery disaster has befallen. Betsy, our other black Percheron, is our retired mare, and was known in her younger years for her snorting, wiggling ways, which occasionally actively contributed to one of those machinery disasters. We said a few stern words to her in her time, such as, “Betsey! What the heck are you doing! Whoa means Whoa! Not lurch ahead and break the mowing machine on a big rock!” Now Betsy has mellowed into the unflappable auntie. Mostly these days we say “Wow, Betsey!” instead of “Whoa, Betsey!” Two by fours falling from a great height directly in front of her? No worries. Betsey keeps drinking from the trough. Sapling catches under the saddle as we take a little ride through the woods? No problem. She keeps trotting along as the sapling rips out from under the saddle. Other three horses racing around the paddock in horror at an approaching front-end loader? No big deal. Betsy chews hay, unperturbed, at the manger. “Wow, Betsey,” we say. “You are some horse.” Betsy nods her head agreeably as she chews. She is some horse. And so are the rest of' 'em. We sure like to tell 'em so.   Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 3-9, 2016

The Month Of Sighs

July is the month of sighs on our New Hampshire vegetable farm.

Sigh. Spring is over. Spring, when everything is fresh and new and possible, when no big farm disasters have happened yet, when it only takes a warm day after a long winter to have us feeling peppy and excited about a new farming season.

In July, however, we are hot. Very hot. Hot in the greenhouse, hot in the gardens, hot in the hayfield. It is hard to muster up peppy with all that hot, and it's hard to muster up excitement about anything but ice cream and swimming holes, neither of which pursuits seem to get the work done.

Sigh. There sure is a lot of work to do in July. We always say July is the month that crams every farming thing into it. A lot of harvesting. A lot of weeding. A lot of fall planting. A lot of haying. Did I mention a lot of weeding?

As one of our farmer friends said recently, about conversations between farmer-spouses, “In July, we can't talk about whether we'll be farming next year.” He paused. “And we can't talk about divorce, either.” We two farmer-spouses laughed a lot, and knowingly. (At least we were laughing.)

Sigh. The July sigh followed is most often followed by the July phrase: “Gee, I wish we had done that last week.”

Those beets looked pretty good last week. Now they're overrun by weeds. Those tomato plants looked pretty good last week too, and now they're in full flop, desperate for their next clipping up. Those draft horses also looked pretty good in their pasture last week. Now they're looking pretty naughty in a new pasture, otherwise known as our tolerant and forgiving neighbors' lawn, which the horses have taken upon themselves to enjoy, by busting through the pasture fence.

Sigh. The first CSA and Farmers Market harvests are over. The first harvests are greens and salad turnips and kohlrabi and bok choy and strawberries. They are all so delicious, and they are all such short season crops, only a month or less of harvesting. In June, we can finish up a bed of bok choy, and think, “There, got that done for the year!”

But in July, we're picking tomatoes. We're picking zucchini and yellow squash and cucumbers. Of course, these are also marvelous, and very much longed for. Yet once we start picking tomatoes and squash, it means we'll be picking them for the next four long months. We get to know our many tomato and squash rows very, very well.

Sigh. The sparkling clean farm kitchen is no longer sparkling. In June, there's still a hope of sparkle, still an effort made to keep ahead of dirty dishes and cluttered counters.

In July, the dirty dishes multiply almost as fast as the weeds in the garden. The dishes fill the counters, and sometimes even creep on to the floor. There's not much space to cook up a yummy meal, but hey, who needs to cook in July? Let's just slice up a tomato! If we can find a clean knife!

Sigh. Happily, the very last sigh of a July day on the farm is a good sigh, a great sigh, a fantastic sigh: it is the going to bed sigh. There's not much nicer than a good bed after a good day of work in good company, in a good place. (And, of course, with good food to eat!)
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, July 6-July 12, 2016

The Make-Believe CSA Member

In June, we farmers always want our place to look nice. After all, it's the beginning of the harvest season, when we welcome new and returning CSA members to the greenhouses and gardens and the vegetable distribution shed. This time of year, my fellow farmer and I try to look at our farm with new eyes: we like to pretend we are brand new CSA members.

First we vroom up the farm road in our make-believe cars, on the way to our first exciting CSA pick-up. We eye the burgeoning multiflora rose hedge along the road dubiously. Did the road crew succeed in trimming it back adequately this year? Will people be able to park, without scratching their fine vehicles or their fine bare summer arms? We park our make-believe cars, which are not scratched at all. Excellent!

Then we assess the driveway. Are there any dead chipmunks and mice, or some viscera perhaps, thanks to our lovely two new kitties, ambitious in their youthful hunting years? Or are the kitties themselves there in the driveway, presenting a friendly, purring countenance to welcome everyone? (Or perhaps it is our scratch-bitey kitty, who, if not presenting a friendly countenance, at least presents a familiar one, to returning members. He has been scratching and biting CSA members for years now.)

“What cute kitties,” we croon from afar, or pet from close up, depending on the nature of the cat. “What a nice CSA farm!”

Next we check for piles of horse manure in the driveway of this nice CSA farm. Our four draft horses don't seem too concerned, on their way to and from pasture or gardens, whether our driveway is presentable. Happily the same shovel that picks up dead animals works well for horse manure too.

While the one farmer shovels, the other farmer, who is enjoying being an excited newly arrived CSA member, instead of a dead animal and manure shoveling farmer, checks out the the charming herb garden. Is it, in fact, charmingly dug and planted, reminding CSA members of their lovely summers in the lavender fields of Provence, or are the poor herbs still languishing in their pots, waiting to be transplanted and to become charming?

And another question: are the languishing herbs in the company of other languishing plants on the wooden tables next to the herb garden? Or have the farmers gotten all the tomatoes and basil and sweet peepers and squash into the greenhouse beds weeks ago, where they are now flourishing?

The CSA member/farmer peeks in the open door of the greenhouse. “'Ooo,” she says, “Look at those beautiful tomatoes! Look how big they are!” Excellent indeed. By the beginning of July, by the looks of the fruit, there will be scrumptious heirloom and standard tomatoes ready for eating.

The shoveling farmer rejoins the CSA member/farmer, and both are quite happy that there are no languishing plants that need to be planted in a hurry, before this new member tour is over. Plus the grass has been nicely mowed, which both cuts down on ticks and cuts down on the unkempt, scraggly farm look.

At last we are at the harvest shed, the true goal of excited CSA members, looking forward to the fresh crisp first greens of the season. Here we find the bamboo shades in good repair, keeping the sunlight away from the fresh and crisp, so that the fresh and crisp do not become limp and sad.

We find that the shed has been cleaned of its winter accumulation of lawnmowers, buckets, and errant tools, and that the harvest tables are in place. One CSA member/farmer shakes the tables vigorously, making sure heavy crates of produce and wooden tables don't fall upon innocent and excited new members. Luckily, the drill is handy, so we can screw the tables to the wall for a little insurance.

Then we notice that the harvest chalkboard has not been erased from last November's final CSA harvest. We admire a moment the evidence of all those vegetables we gave out so many months ago. We hope that we have a good harvest again this year. One of us erases, and then writes a fresh new greeting: “Welcome to Hillside Springs Farm!”

“Welcome! Welcome!” says one farmer to the other, offering a hearty handshake.

“I am so excited!” the other farmer shakes hands with equal gusto. “What a nice CSA farm! What a really really really nice CSA farm! Gee, I'd like to live here!”

“Gee, you're in luck!” The one farmer ceremoniously presents the dead animal and manure shovel.

The other farmer takes a step back. “Oh, no! No, thanks! I'm a newly arrived and excited CSA member! Remember?"

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, June 8 - June 14, 2016