Weeds Are Our Friends (Sort Of)

Weeds are a farmer's friend. Well, sort of our friends. At least they are firm acquaintances, and we've come to know their quirks and habits by long association. They come back, year after year, in dependable succession. Some have lovely flowers and interesting names; some are edible and easy-going; some are deep-rooted and determined. We always say it's a good thing those determined perennial weeds appear first, in the spring, when a vegetable farmer still has abundant energy and will to entertain the first of the weed visitors.

Morning Glory: When our daughter was very small, and just learning weeds, she called Morning Glory “Glorintine.” Thus we have two nice names to call this perennial, in the rare moments when we're not calling it not-so-nice names. Glorintine has a pretty cup-like white flower, but if we get to the flowering stage, we're in trouble, because it means the glorintine has already twined and vined itself with incredible vigor and strength around any and every available vegetable. Recently it took me and a pair of clippers more than an hour to free eight suffering pepper plants from flowering Morning Glory bondage.

Quack Grass: Some people call this couch grass, or quitch grass. Along with Morning Glory, it is our most difficult perennial weed. Quitch is enough to make a farmer twitch, quack, and want to lie down on a couch (though it is pronounced “cooch.” But we'd be happy to lie down on a cooch, too.). It spreads by long white roots underground until it has colonized the entire garden, requiring a weeding revolution, and a fair amount of farmer foaming-at-the-mouth.

Hairy Galinsoga: This is often the first of the annual weeds, and it is speedy, coming to flower (and shortly after to seed, spreading itself everywhere, fast) in only 21 days. It has tiny white daisy-like flowers, and a tough root system that likes to dislodge neighboring vegetables when we pull the weed out. Old H.G. also has an alternate name on our farm. I grew up in a cheddar and American cheese household, whereas my farming fellow's family was morely likely to venture into Brie and Gorgonzola. When I inadvertently said “Hairy Gorgonzola,” my fellow thought this was riotously funny, and now we have lots of hairy, cheesy weeds around.

Red-Rooted Pigweed: We like this weed. It has a good name too, with many variants: purple or common or pigweed amaranth. Best is that it pulls up easily, not disturbing the vegetables nearby, even when it is very large. It does grow fast and has a scratchy flower bud, but we don't mind; it's just such an easy-going weed. When our girl was little, she would start out by weeding everything out of the row of lettuce. Then she would weed out only the weeds she liked; pigweed was one of the ones she liked. (Next she would start playing with the weeds, making families and stories. Then it would be time to go in for a snack.)

Lamb's Quarters: is also known as wild spinach, and some people eat it. In fact, when we had a friend visiting, a friend who finds edible weeds very interesting, he picked a lot of lamb's quarters, laboriously plucked off the tiny leaves, and put them in a basket for our CSA members on harvest day. There was even a sign: “Wild Spinach.” Our CSA members looked with mild interest at this little basket full of little pale green leaves, and then sidled over to the harvest crate full of big dark green hearty civilized spinach. But sometimes I eat a leaf or two as I am pulling it out of my carrots and beets, and I feel very thrifty and wildcrafty indeed.

Purslane: A fleshy, floppy kind of weed, purslane is also edible. It has a tart, almost lemony taste. Recently, we had a Weeding and Ice Cream Party for our CSA members. Undaunted by the knee high weeds in our Brussels sprouts patch, the good members waded in and weeded. Along the rows, we offered the copious purslane up for samples. One person nibbled doubtfully, shook her head, and said “Hmm, I'm not getting lemony.”

Another person took armfuls home for her salad, which just goes to show how weeds really are our friends, and it's good that they visit the farm regularly. After all, If a vegetable farmer doesn't produce enough produce, there's always plenty of weeds for people to eat. Yum.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, August 30-Sept 5, 2017
 

We Like it Fresh

July is all about freshness on our New Hampshire vegetable farm. Well, maybe the farmers and the farm horses aren't overly fresh in July, but they plug steadily along, working in the heat or the pouring rain, in the four greenhouses and the four garden sections, and in the hayfields to boot.

But the food on a vegetable farm in July? Now that's fresh.

Of course, since early spring we farmers have been eating some fresh-from-the-garden food, such as the lovely salad turnips and bok choy and salad greens and spinach, but “some” is the key word here. Because in March, and April, and May, and often even in June, we're still working primarily on last year's store of food.

There's the winter squash, for example, which keeps for many months, and even if it begins to tire in March, we cook it and freeze and have it for many more months. Why, we had pumpkin-it's- really-winter-squash cookies and muffins and soup in the middle of June this year. (But at least we had some yummy fresh salad to go along with it.)

It's a little harder to think what to do with the last bag of frozen kale as summer approaches, because the new kale in the greenhouse is already coming in, tasty and tender. Still, throw a handful of frozen kale into that pumpkin-it's-really-winter-squash soup, and we've accomplished another thrify meal.  

Then there's the shallots, which keep the longest of all our onion crops. By summer we've made our way through the white onions, the yellow onions, and the red onions, and now we're on to the shallots. The onions start growing green tops sometime along in the early spring, but we just cut them off and pretend they're scallions, and use them along with the onions and shallots.

Our root cellar, too, depending on the year, may still hold potatoes or daikon radishes or rutabagas into the summer. The produce is a little soft, maybe, but what's a thrifty vegetable farmer to do? It's three months or more before those crops come in, and besides, if the potatoes are soft, they'll just take less time to cook.

Thus we make our sustainable way through the spring-time, munching determinedly on the old stuff, celebrating the end of the frozen winter squash and the frozen summer squash, the frozen kale and chard, the frozen beans, broccoli, eggplant, pesto, the peppers and berries and rhubarb and salsa. There's the canned beans and tomato sauce and applesauce and cider, the maple syrup and pickles and jams and jellies, as well as the dried hot peppers and tomatoes and apples and herbs, and the sauerkraut and kimchi. The root cellar holds potatoes, beets, carrots, daikon radishes, turnips, rutabagas.

We peer into the depths of root cellar and chest freezer, we rustle among the jars in the pantry, we study our charts where we mark down everything we froze and canned and dried and fermented the year before. We are grateful indeed for all this food, and amazed once again at all the work we did in storing it up. How did we ever manage to put all this food by when we were so busy in the garden? And will be able to pull it off again?

But we don't need to think about that yet. It's only July, far too early to start canning, freezing, and drying. We've finished the old, and it's all about fresh food this time of year. As one of our CSA members said long ago, enthusiastically, “We like it fresh!”

We like it fresh too (even though we haven't got as much nerve, or maybe as much humor, as our farmer-colleagues on Tracie's Community Farm in Fitzwilliam, whose T-shirts say “Get fresh with us!”). We revel foremost in the luscious tomatoes, slicing and plum and cherry, closely followed by snap and snow peas, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, scallions and lettuce. We've got basil and fennel, carrots and cabbage, beets and broccoli. We've got beans and eggplant and peppers.

And did we mention the luscious, juicy, mouthwatering tomatoes? All in all, we've got it fresh . . . we've got July!
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, July 5 - July 11, 2017

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

Weeding and Ice Cream Party: No Weeding, No Eating

Our very first “Ice Cream (and Weeding!) Party” with our CSA members was fifteen years ago, in the very first year of our very first CSA garden, near Ithaca, NY. Homemade, hand-cranked ice cream in return for an hour or two of weeding sounded like a great deal to us, especially since our hours of weeding were (and are) not generally followed by creamy, delicious, homemade, hand-cranked ice cream.

We planned it all out: we would weed for two hours, and then we'd start cranking the ice cream, just in time for afternoon snack. With all the hordes of people flocking to the party, we'd surely get the fall carrots and the beets and the broccoli and the cabbage and the winter squash weeded, and if we needed more to do, we could tackle the onions and garlic. We made a big tub of ice cream mix, with six quarts of milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, and a pinch of salt, all ready to be churned in our ice-cream mixer.

Then we sat on the porch, and waited for the hordes.

And waited.

“But where are all the people?” said I, as the minutes ticked by. “They were supposed to be here at two, and it's two-fifteen already.”

“Hmm,” said my fellow farmer. “I'm not sure. Maybe all their cars broke down?”

By two-thirty, our then baby began to appear a little restless, waiting on the porch for the people.

“I guess we have to go weed by ourselves,” I said glumly.

“Yeah,” said my fellow. “I don't really feel like it. Maybe we should just make the ice cream right now?”

“But what if somebody comes? What if they got their cars fixed, and they're coming? Let's just take a little walk around and look at what needs weeding. The baby will like that, too.”

My fellow sighed. “That's half our trouble here, isn't it? That we just walk around and look at what needs doing.”

“Nah,” I said. “Half of our trouble is our CSA members won't come and help us weed.” We got a good giggle out of this, and, once we got out to the desperately weedy beets and carrots, we couldn't help ourselves. We started weeding, as the baby took a little nap in the pathway.

“We're just having a party all by ourselves,” said my fellow. “And it must be time to make the ice cream by now.”

I lifted my head. “No, wait! I hear a car! Somebody's coming!”

My fellow jumped up. “You're right! Let's go see who it is!”

By this time, we were so sure no none was coming that the arrival was a pleasant surprise: three fine weeders, and never mind that two were under six, and more interested in ice cream than tidy garden beds.

Now, fifteen years later, we still have our Ice Cream and Weeding parties, though we call them Weeding and Ice Cream Parties these days, just to be clear on the order of things. We still hope for far more weeding to be accomplished than could ever reasonably be (ah, there it it is: the optimism necessary to sustain the farming fire for all this time!).

We have also learned over the years that making six quarts of ice cream is a little too much for our ice cream churn: the mix squishes out the top. But five quarts is an ideal amount for any number of people. It's been ideal for the giant parties of ten plus weeders, and it's been ideal for the weeding party in the (light, very light) rain, where we had one stalwart fellow in a raincoat. And it's been ideal for the parties where two farmers, and one now teenage daughter, walk around and look at what needs doing.

Of course, we three have to weed a little, even if no one else shows up, because that's the Weeding and Ice Cream Party rule: no weeding, no eating. And gosh, just think if we had Weeding and Ice Cream Party rules in effect all the time: imagine the gloriously weed-free gardens, the fantastically fit people, the peace, love, harmony, justice, and happy farmers in the world!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Sept 2-Sept 8, 2015