Farmers on a Spring-Time Date

We New England vegetable farmers don't have a lot of free hours in the spring. But spring is a green lively time, perfect for a romantic farmer date. This time of year, it just depends on how a farmer defines a date.

An Exciting New Place. Last year, for example, my farmer fellow and I went over to Walker Farm in Dummerston, Vermont to pick up a farm order for our big spring date. It had been a while since we'd been over in that neck of the woods, and we had never been to Walker Farm before. We had a fine time holding hands in the pick-up truck and commenting on the houses and little shops and barns and fields and critters along the way. Then, at the farm, we got to pick up our cover crop seed and our seed potatoes, and look over everybody else's interesting bags of seeds and taters. Then we drove home again, pleased, holding hands.

Cheerful Companions. This year, our spring date was even better. Of course, my fellow farmer is wonderfully cheerful by nature, always ready to go on a farmer date, but we also found more good cheer in the world. We went to Walker Farm again, and this time we wandered around the labyrinth of greenhouses for a little fun. We met a cheerful man wheeling flats of soil-filled pots into a greenhouse, and that cheerful man led us to another cheerful man, by way of many chickens, some of who were cheerfully clucking around in the hen yard and others of whom were even more cheerfully clucking around out of the hen yard.

Dressing Up. The second cheerful man came back to help us load up our bags of soybean meal fertilizer for our hayfields, which was very kind of him, since it was only 12 fifty pound bags and not 200, for example. We got to chat with him a bit about our respective farms, and then we loaded up our new row cover, and then my fellow farmer found one last thing on our order. It was a new hat, perfect for shading a farmer's sparkling eyes and delicate skin all summer. My fellow put his new hat right on. It is a fetching hat indeed, and he did look fine.

Great Food. We liked our romantic excursion so much this year that we decided to have another spring date. This time we went over to Ideal Compost in Peterborough, to buy our soil mix. On the way, I was glad we had remembered to pack some snacks, because we were picking up our soil mix at lunchtime. We enjoyed some apples and peanut butter, along with popcorn, none of which we had labored to plant, weed, or harvest on our farm. It was positively decadent, that snack.

Beautiful Surroundings. As we got closer, my fellow pointed out to me the road that looks exactly like the road that we wanted, and the river that looks exactly like the river we wanted. That look-alike road and river is where he got lost last year. This year we didin't get lost, though I suppose, depending on a farmer's temperament, it might be nice to get a little lost on a date. I, however, am the type of farmer who does not like to get lost on a date, and I was glad my fellow farmer and I found the right scenic road and the right pretty river.

A Puppy. And there, at our date destination, we discovered one of the most lovely things that can happen on a farmer date: a puppy! The nice soil mix people have a 12 week old Australian Shepherd mix puppy, and that puppy was absolutely delighted to see us. He jumped, wiggled, wagged, licked our hands and faces, brought us leaves, and dug us holes. He was a most marvelous puppy, and really, what more could a farmer ask for in the way of a satisfying spring-time date?

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Apr 12 - Apr 18, 2017

CSA Farmers: High Hopes and Radiant Smiles

It was spring. We had our first CSA garden planted, our greenhouses and fields flourishing, and our vegetable distribution shed ready. Now all we needed were some friendly CSA members ready to buy our vegetables in order for our CSA farm dream to come true. We had our hopes high, and our smiles radiating on our faces.

We were at our very first CSA Fair.

A CSA fair, in case you don't know, is a whole roomful of high-hoped, radiantly smiling farmers, representing many different farms, ready to answer any and every question a potentially interested person might have about any and every aspect of Community Supported Agriculture gardens. Each farm has its own table, with beautiful pictures of the farms and the farming life, along with brochures, pamphlets, and maybe even a delicious sample of food from that very farm.

At least, that is what we two hopeful, radiant, young farmers thought a CSA Fair was. True, there were many other hopeful, radiant farmers at our first Fair, and there were many interested persons, enjoying the yummy samples of food.

But there was also the Little Talk. Each farmer was supposed to get up in front of the crowd and give a Little Talk about her or his respective farm.

“What!” I quailed, in my firmly introverted way, as my fellow farmer and I drove to the CSA Fair. “I didn't know we'd have to do that! That's terrible! How long do we have to talk?”

“Oh, it's nothing,” said my extroverted fellow. “Just five minutes. I'll get up and do it.”

“Oh no, oh no,” I said, “What are you going to say?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he answered cheerily, “Something. It'll be fine!”

Despite his reassuring tone, I was not reassured. By the time we got to the meeting, I had worked my introvert self into a frenzied state of nervous tension that would pass for a person able to make a Little Talk in front of a crowd of people.

“I'm going to have to go up there with you,” I said grimly, as we went into the building.

“Nah, it'll be fine,” repeated my confident fellow. “I'm not worried.”

“I'll just stand there hopeful and smiling, then,” I said. “I'll keep you company.”

“Great,” he answered, as we set up our charming table of beautiful photographs of the farm and the farming life, along with our brochures, pamphlets, and yummy samples.

All too soon, it was time for the Little Talks. There was an introduction by some generous organizer of CSA fairs, and then my fellow and I listened to the first few farmers talk. They were polished, personable, and perky.

I cast a glance of despair at my fellow. He gave me a slightly nervous look, which became more and more nervous as we made our way up to the front. I myself was beet red and gulping.

My fellow started out pretty well, talking about our nice farm and our nice draft horses, and our flourishing greenhouses and flourishing gardens. I nodded encouragingly, much happier to be looking at him than at the crowd of people.

Then he stopped talking, after approximately 67 seconds. He looked hopefully at me.

I mustered up something farmy to say, lasting perhaps 24 seconds. I looked back at him.

He said a few more words. He looked at me.

Desperate, I mentioned that our first CSA season would coincide with the birth of our first baby. This was fairly obvious, since I was nearly nine months pregant, but everyone loved it. The nice crowd was smiling, rooting for us. My fellow and I nodded at each other a few more times, in the gathering silence.

At last, my fellow made one more remark: “We're better at farming than we are at talking!” Everybody laughed a big, relieved laugh. We laughed a lot too, much more relieved than the crowd could possibly be, as we made our way back to the safe haven of our table after our goofy, gulping, under-3-minute Very Little Talk. Nevertheless, several sympathetic persons took pity on us and came to ask us CSA questions.

Since that day, nearly 17 years ago, my fellow and I have learned many things, about farming, of course, and also about talking in front of crowds. But the best thing we've learned?

The best thing is the beauty of organizing one's own CSA Fair! For the past ten years, we two have organized the Monadnock Region CSA fair, chock-full of hopeful, radiant farmers, all with their charming tables, beautiful photographs, and yummy food. And not one of them is required to give a Little Talk.

But we're all very glad to answer any and every question about CSA farms that all you many interested persons might have. Come talk to us on March 26th, from 2 - 4 p.m., at the Monadock Food Co-op in Keene, at this year's fine, relaxed, welcoming CSA Fair.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, March 15 - 17, 2017

Tech Revolutions on a Slow Farm

We practice slow farming here on our New Hampshire place. We have less than three acres in vegetables, and we plow, disc, cultivate, and make loose hay at the speed of Belgian and Percheon horses and antique horse machinery. We plant and harvest kind of slowly too, at the speed of two well- past-youth farmers and antique tools.

Of course, we do have some fine modern items on the farm: our sturdy plastic harvest crates, our recently installed irrigation system, our electric fence around the garden. Plus, when it comes to winter farm paperwork, we have this fine new item: a computer!

It took us a while to get to the computer. In the beginning, we went down to our little local library for an hour every Thursday to use their computer. It was kind of nice having computer work restricted to one day a week, but it was also kind of hard to get all the computer work done in an hour, particularly when a farmer forgets to bring half the things she needs to the library in order to achieve her computer work.

Gradually, we began to acquire home computers, since we aren't very fussy about how old or slow they are. Friends, CSA members, mothers, sisters, all kind of fine folks, have given us computers and printers, too. As one friend said a few years ago, “Wow, that's great! You're in the '90s now!”

Next one of our creative, savvy CSA members made us a website in exchange for a share of vegetables. We've had the website now for 7 or 8 years, but we slow farmers are still amazed when people look at our website, and then send us a check in the mail.

“But they don't even know us!” we say. “They haven't even talked to us on the phone! What if we're a big hoax? What if we don't have a farm at all?”

At this last, we fall about laughing, in the middle of our hoax horses and horse machinery and garden tools and greenhouses and fields.

Once we had the website, we soon realized that posting pictures of our hoax farm would be a lot easier with a more modern camera. Our trusty 35 mm film camera finally gave up the ghost, so we borrowed a digital camera from another sterling CSA member to take farm pictures. The camera came complete with instructions on how to firmly grip the battery cover in order to function, as the camera had been repeatedly dropped by small children. We are good grippers, and we gripped.

We had a technology revolution in our budget work as well. For years we scribbled numbers on scraps of paper, and then wept copious tears when we could not find the scraps, or read them if we could find them. Then we made a great leap: we found a stash of hoarded graph paper from the old days, and suddenly we had grids, column, rows! We hauled out our calculators and cross-checked our figures. Then we only wept when our calculators came up with differing opinions.

Soon yet another magnificent CSA member introduced us to the beauty of Excel spread sheets. Finally our rows and columns added up. Our waterfalls of tears were reduced to small brooks, as we discovered that formulas and numbers have nothing personal against us slow farmers.

We must admit, however, that we have not upgraded our phone technology. The idea of having a cell phone in our pockets as we plow with the horses is painful. First the cell phone would fall out of the pocket, as the farmer bangs on the machinery, and then a horse's big foot would fall on the cell phone. But even if we

were to duct tape the cell phone to our bulging well-past-youth farmer biceps, the real truth is that the idea of having a cell phone at all is painful. We want to be quietly with our horses and our machinery banging or with our carrot weeding and our bird singing.

Plus our phone land line is so ingeniouly configured that we hate to give it up. We have two phones connected together, each of which functions according to its abilities: one rings, and the other does everything else. And, gee, it was another kind and thoughtful CSA member who gave us the second phone and helped us rig it all up.

Clearly, our slow farm technological advances have been in fits and starts, but we have given each of them some thought. After all, we don't want to go too quickly into all this newfangled stuff. Best is that each fit and start has been with the help and encouragement of CSA members and friends and family. It takes a whole bunch of nice people to keep a slow farm going, even a hoax farm, and we slow farmers like that.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, February 15-21, 2017

The Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure

My fellow vegetable farmer loves pizza. He claims he could eat it every night for supper.

“Every night?” I say, making a face. I like variety in my meals.

“Well, maybe every other night. We could have pasta in between,” he says, his eyes lighting up at this exciting meal plan.

“You should have been a pizza farmer. Or a pasta farmer. You could have amber waves of grain. What are you doing growing vegetables?”

My fellow grins and shrugs. “I'm halfway to pizza. Look at this.” He shows me a new seed catalog, where he's circled all the tomato varieties he wants to try next season. “See all these delicious tomatoes? They're practically pizza. And look here, onions, and peppers, and spinach and broccoli, for pizza toppings.”

I just laugh. “I'm the one who puts the vegetables on the pizza! You would be happy with cheese!”

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “I want lots of tomatoes, a nice thick sauce. Yum!” He circles some more tomato varieties, and falls into a January-vegetable-farmer-drooling-over-seed-catalogs daze. He is in a tomato-growing, pizza-eating dream.

I, however, am not thinking of pizza, at least not the kind of pizza my fellow dreams about. I am thinking of our root cellar full of vegetables and our freezer full of vegetables, stored for the winter. I am thinking how handy and thrifty and sustainable it is to be a vegeterian when one is a vegetable farmer. And I am also thinking of my digestive system, which seems considerably happier on a vegetable diet, rather than a pizza and pasta diet.

Thus I embark on the Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure. Long, long ago, when my digestive system was young and willing, and my zucchini harvest was overflowing, I tried a zucchini crusted-pizza, a recipe from our dog-eared copy of the Moosewood cookbook. Alas, my penciled notation read, “Yuk! Way too eggy.” The evolution of my tastes and diet is clear through my additional notes: the next one said, “I have learned to like this!” and the third one says, “Very good!”

The recipe calls for eggs, cheese, herbs, a little flour, and two cups of grated zucchini. It was easy to substitute yellow squash for zucchini when necessary, and cornmeal or rice flour for the wheat flour.

But one winter, I ran out of grated zucchini and grated yellow squash. I found another recipe, for a cauliflower pizza crust. Now, I love cauliflower, but let me say that a cauliflower pizza crust is nothing like a regular pizza crust, in my thinking. It really tastes like cauliflower, and cauliflower is not a subtle vegetable. Plus I had to eat it with a fork. “This is not a pizza!” I proclaimed. “This is a casserole!”

“It's a pretty good casserole, though,” said my nice fellow, trying a bite, between slices of his delicious homemade wheat crust regular pick-up-able pizza.

“Huh,” I said. “I'm going to try something else. I have a lot of beets. I'm going to make a beet crust. I love beets!”

And yes, I do love beets, but a beet crust pizza is almost unbelievably sweet. “This is not a pizza!” I said. “This is too sweet! Even if I can pick it up in a slice, and not by the forkful!”

But I did have plenty of carrots in the root cellar that year too. Carrots made a pretty good pizza crust. Carrots and beets mixed together made a pretty good pizza crust. And then last year, when the carrots and beets were all gone, I was reduced to the rutabaga. I hasten to add that I love rutabagas.

My fellow raised his eyebrows. “Rutabaga pizza?”

My dear daughter, who does not love rutabagas, politely turned her head away at the idea.

Undaunted, I fetched my rutabagas. I washed them, trimmed them, grated them, mixed them up with eggs, cheese, herbs, and cornmeal. I baked my rutabaga crust, topped it with tomato sauce, more cheese, onions, peppers. Then I waited.

Ding! Ding ! Ding! went the timer. At last! My rutabaga pizza! The most delicious vegetable pizza crust in the world! Slightly sweet, like a rutabaga, but not too strongly flavored, and it holds together nicely. I even let my fellow and my daughter try a bite. “That's pretty good,” they said, surprised.

“Yum,” I answered.

Now, when my fellow suggests pizza for supper every night, I agree, at least about once a week. The Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure continues: this year, stored in my root cellar, I have lots of daikon radishes, which surprised us very late in the season by their vigorous growth in the greenhouse.

Mmm. Doesn't that sound yummy? Daikon Radish Pizza!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 18 - Jan 24, 2017