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

Sad Veggie Stories

Sad Story #1: We have had some sad pea times on our farm. It seems like five out of six years, our pea germination is terrible. First we do a lot of work: plowing, discing, spreading compost, harrowing, and making and raking out beds.Then we sow the snap and snow peas, with great hopes. We wait, and wait. But the peas don't come up.

Sad Story #2: We have had some sad spinach times on our farm. It seems like five out of six years, our spinach germination is terrible. First we do a lot of work: plowing, discing, spreading compost, harrowing, and making and raking out beds.

Then we sow the spinach, with great hopes. We wait, and wait. But the spinach doesn't come up.

Sad Story #3: We have had some sad beet times on our farm. It seems like five out of six years, our beet germination is . . . fantastic! First we do a lot of work: plowing, discing, spreading compost, harrowing, and making and raking out beds.

Then we sow the beets, with great hopes. We wait, and wait. The beets sprout, and sprout, and sprout.

But how can this be a sad story? Well, our nice little hand-push seeder has a constitutional problem with beet seeds. None of the seed plates work well with beets, and when we called the seeder company, many years ago now, they suggested sticking some beeswax in the holes. We stuck some beeswax in. It fell out. Then they suggested we spend a lot of money on a custom-built seed plate. This, however, did not pass the budget committee.

Basically, the beets seeds clump out of the seeder, and when it comes time to thin the beets, there might be a hundred where a farmer would want two. I spend a lot of time thinning, and feeling as if I am wasting everything: my time, the seed, and a delicious beet that could grow, given enough room.

But the winter before last, I read a book called The Lean Farm, by Ben Hartman, which put me in ecstasies, as it was all about getting rid of stuff on the farm, which is what I have been trying to do for years, as my fine fellow trundles home more useful looking things from the free store at the dump, among other places.

Now I am a zealous convert to “leaning,” meaning looking carefully at your systems to see where you can eliminate waste. My fellow, on the other hand, is slightly wary of my evangelism, as I try to clear out everything everywhere.

When I read about leaning methods for sowing and planting, I got even more excited. For example, Hartman claims that thinning beets takes far longer than sowing beets in flats and transplanting them. I blinked my eyes rapidly at this revelation. Why, we've been direct-sowing and thinning our beets forever!

I told my fellow all about it. He reluctantly agreed to try, after I reminded him of all the beets that were a) thinned and thus composted or b) not thinned, and thus never grew. On that very first transplanting, faced with 400 feet of beet plugs spaced four inches apart, my fellow was a bit daunted. But soon we were both very pleased to have such lovely beets and beet greens, so beautifully spaced, so fully grown.

I kept reading my book. Now my guru Hartman said I could seed spinach in flats, and transplant them too. Exuberantly, I suggested this to my fellow, reminding him of all the wasted work on non-germinating spinach. Once again, my fellow was daunted by the now 800 feet of spinach plugs spaced four inches apart. But he, and I, persevered.

What satisfaction to see full rows of spinach instead of enormous gaps full of weeds! What a pleasure to harvest 6 pounds of spinach times 30 CSA shares on just one day!

As for the sad pea story: my fellow recently reported that the peas had germinated terribly. This was especially discouraging, because just the year before we had switched from our direct seeder, which also seems to have a pea problem, to planting every single pea (at one inch apart for 800 feet) by hand, on our knees. We had fantastic germination! We did it again this year, with great confidence.

Alas, hardly any peas came up.

“Now what?” groaned my fellow.

“You might not want to hear this . . “ I began.

“What?” said my fellow suspiciously.

“I just read it,” I said, “in my book.”

“Uh-oh,” said my fellow.

“Yes!” I said. “Sowing peas in flats and transplanting them works great! You want to try it?”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, June 30 - July 6, 2021

Farm Horses Love Local, Grassroots Investing

First I watched the trailer. Then I read the book. Then I saw the movie. The super star: Michael Shuman. The hot plot: local investing.

The trailer was a talk on local and grass roots investing by Shuman last fall, hosted by The Local Crowd Monadnock. Inspired, I read Shuman's recent book Put Your Money Where Your Life Is.

This spring, I attended Shuman's first “movie,” a four-week workshop. My experience only got better and better, especially since I started out with a level of interest in investing comparable to, say, gathering information for my taxes. Necessary, but painful.

Then, as my level of knowledge about investing was even more pitiful than my level of interest, I braced myself for some good old patronizing disbelief from the experts: You don't understand how stocks and bonds work? You don't automatically compute rates of return? You've never heard of a solo 401 K or a self-directed IRA? You don't even get the big deal about retirement funds? What planet do you live on?

I live on a farm planet. A small farm planet.

My fellow and I farm here in southwestern NH, growing three acres of vegetables biodynamically, working with draft horses, for our 60-member CSA garden. We also sell produce at a local farmers' market. We have been making our living as farmers for over twenty years, not an easy task, but one made possible in part by a thrifty budget and by friends, neighbors, and local vegetable- lovers.

Maybe someone loans us a truck, or barters plumbing or farrier work, or helps us set up our website. Someone helps us get the hay in before the rain, or helps us get our naughty horses back in the pasture after a jaunt around the neighborhood. Someone picks up our daughter after school, or makes us a surprise meal. Lots of someones sign up for shares of produce, or buy vegetables at our market stand. Both our farm economics and our quality of life depend on the community.

But now that we two farmers and our four workhorses are nearing our mid-fifties, we notice that a hard day in the field is a little more daunting than it used to be. How can we continue to live and work on a tight budget, on our farm, before and during retirement, and do it with care for our local community, which also cares for us?

Enter Michael Shuman. His dry wit and kind, down-to-earth manner, combined with his expertise in local investing, made for a pleasant surprise. (Turns out investing talk isn't nearly as painful as the taxes. It can actually be kind of interesting!)

Shuman gave an entirely digestible overview of investing in general, followed by a picture of the giant corporate investing world. Next was the welcome news of the range of possible local, grassroots investments: from paying off your credit cards to installing energy-saving devices in your home, from crowdfunding to municipal bonds, from helping friends or family expand a small business to investing in a company such as Equal Exchange, with its fair trade coffee and chocolate, which assists the small farmers who are our global neighbors.

My favorite part of the workshop was learning about people all over the country who are investing in their communities in all kinds of ways, from small farms and solar panels and affordable housing to co-ops and local restaurants and community loan funds.

In Port Townsend, Washington, there's the community-owned Quimper Mercantile, a department store started by community members because there was no place in town to shop.

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, there's Zingerman's Deli, whose owners wanted to expand, but not become a chain. Instead of going wide, they went deep, by looking closely at what came into and out of the deli. Now there are around a dozen small businesses in Ann Arbor connected with the deli, including a bakehouse, a coffee roasting company, a creamery, a restaurant, and a fancy cake business.

In my own state of New Hampshire, there's the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund (homes, farms, food, small businesses!). People all over are investing in local economies, ecologies, and racial and social equity, all of which builds stronger, healthier, and more secure and vibrant communities.

Gee, it's enough to make a farmer want to save a little money and make a local, grass roots investment (even if it's at the hundred dollar level!). After all, we love community. We love small. We love local. We love sustainable. We love grass, and we love roots.

Our four work horses agree completely. In fact, they may be wondering right now why a farmer is writing about local investing this time of year. Shouldn't you be fixing the fence? So we can go out to pasture? And eat the local grass? Come on now, farmer.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, June 2 - June 8, 2021