Posts from — February 2009

SPRING

snap peas   (sugar snap – traditional, crunchy, sweet)

snow peas   (oregon giant – large flat pods for stir fries)

shelling peas  (maxigolt – old time english garden pea)

spinach   (tarpy – smooth, spoon shaped, fast growing)

pea shoots  (field pea cover crop – nitrogen fixer)

brocolli raab  (spring raab – large, slow to bolt)

SUMMER

green bean   (tavera – a stringless haricot verts)

yellow bean   (gold rush – a nice wax bush bean)

bicolor bean   (dragon langerie – long pods with purple streaks)

shelling bean   (flagrano – a french flageolet type)

italian basil   (superbo – traditional genovese variety)

purple basil   (red rubin – italian, flat leaf, deep purple color)

lemon basil   (lemon – a scented basil, amazing with fruit)

tomato   (matt’s wild cherry – a tiny currant tomato)

cucumber   (armenian – thin skin, mild, crunchy, delicious)

Here in late February, I have received boxes in the mail from Johnny’s and High Mowing, and my seed order for spring and summer is 90% complete. All that remains is some persnickety flower seeds, that I, being a persnickety flower person, can’t do without.

But I passed on sentimental favorites, like edamame (which doesn’t size up well) and the incredibly lovely lime green zinnia pictured above, which isn’t as vigorous as the traditional pink. Instead, I bought solid sunflowers and snap peas, italian basil and cherry tomatoes, those beloved familiar things, the easy sell.

Most everything I chose I have worked with before on other farms. On the one hand, I want enough diversity to keep things interesting and to cover the bases if we have pest or blight problems with a particular crop. On the other hand, I’ve never been part of such a tiny team, and I don’t want to get caught in the weeds, literally, because the planting lacked focus and we didn’t have enough labor to stay on top of it.  We will be planting a ton of heirloom tomatoes, for which Caitlyn saves seed, so in the ordering I tried to keep in mind the supplies the farm already has.

On the desk in my room, the whole order clocks in at a little over ten pounds, less if you factor out the five pound bag of field peas we’ll use for cover crop. Arranging the packets and checking the invoices, it gave me a moment’s pause, to consider all that these small contents can become. Long, thin-skinned Armenian cucumbers the size of a child’s arm. Slender, tender piles of yellow wax beans. Rubber-banded bunches of dainty white Japanese salad turnips. And, of course, bucket upon bucket of flowers in bloom.

If there was a fast-forward button, would I press it? Probably. Wouldn’t we all, in February, in New England?

Instead, for now, I make yarn.

I went to see this truck, an ’03 Toyota Tacoma, in New Hampshire today.  The dealer let me take it back to Boston for a few hours to have it checked out by my family mechanic, Ed Baker.  Turns out the previous owner hadn’t kept up with maintenance, so it’ll need some stuff in the near future, expensive stuff – a timing belt, a new set of tires, and a little bodywork.  Those add-ons pushed the truck, which was already in the upper reaches of what I could pay,  squarely out of my range.

Out of curiousity, I asked Ed if he thought it was worth the money, if he thought I could find something better with the same price tag.

“Well, I’m not sure you could,” he said. “And I’m not condemning this one. But I wouldn’t jump at it either.”

And so the search continues.  I drove back north slowly and carefully, frustrated and resigned and calm. As the warm afternoon dripped away, I returned to square one.

I’ve been looking for a few months now, and it’s been complicated by a couple of things, primarily by my stubborn devotion to Toyota, a quality which I appear to share with the entire Eastern seaboard.  Toyota trucks are durable and desirable and hold their value, so even older models with high mileage are pricey.  And with the wonky economy, fewer and fewer people are trading in solid vehicles, particularly work vehicles, just because they want something shinier, so there are less options out there for us low-rent scavengers to squabble over.

Working in New York, I drove what may have been the world’s most ridiculous box truck.  The farm had two, a nice Mitsubishi Fuso that went into Brooklyn, and the Lariat, which puttered around the farm and went to Westhampton once a week in the summer.  When the Lariat wasn’t in motion, it was hooked up to a battery charger, or the hood was up and the battery was entirely disconnected.

Starting the Lariat required at least two people, sometimes three, working in concert.  One would sit in the cab and turn the key.  Another would stand on a crate by the open hood and hold a piece of metal (usually a harvesting knife) across the spark plugs.  Finally, on rough days, a third person would spray ether into the air filter.  This was bad for the engine but usually did the trick.

Basically, the Lariat was a money pit. It ate batteries, it ate time, it ate patience, but more than that it gobbled cash.

I’m not saying I need something snazzy. The first truck I ever drove deliveries in, a two-tone GMC dinosaur, was perfect in so many ways. The brakes were a little soft and the radio was awful, but it was steady and predictable and I loved it.

Buying a truck is my first big investment, exciting and scary and achingly slow. I am desperate to do it exactly right. I’m tired of the anxiety, of used car salesmen, of waiting for the future to arrive, but I guess these things take time. I know how to wait.

JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE

I learned a hundred lessons 
in the garden 
dig 
deeper was the first 

the least little root 
of Jerusalem artichoke 
carries a sturdy new 
plant into April 

like the vaguest hope for 
a friend 
buried, like a sliver of moon 
in the heart in spring 

there are hundreds of sun chokes 
take more than you need 
give them to people you’ve 
never seen 

look for me 
in the garden laughing 
and crying at once. 

                                                                      Janine Pommy Vega  
                                                                                      Willow, New York, May 1999

The ad on craigslist was suspiciously brief, but the picture of this 1971 Catalina camper looked good, and the $200 price tag was irresistable. I gave the owner a call and left a message, rather expecting not to hear anything.

He called back in five minutes. The next day, I was in Beverly, Massachusetts to take a look.

I had been looking for a camper for about a month or so, and had become fascinated with rv culture, particularly vintage enthusiasts on the internet. Having grown up in the suburbs, I had no frame of reference from which to operate – in fact, I had never set foot in an rv before. The ones I had seen on the highway were generally boxy and beige, and often desperately ugly, with a depressing pre-fab feel, like they were made in the same factory as cubicles and dentist chairs. When I visited a dealership and stepped inside land yachts valued at double my life savings, my suspicions were confirmed – they had many appliances and accoutrements, and all the soul of a port-o-potty.

And so I decided to hunt down something vintage, for the price yes, but also for the clean and clever design, and for the challenge of making it livable, making it my own. This task would have been rather easy had I lived in California or Arizona, where the dry desert heat allows for Airstreams produced in 1955 to be sold today in near perfect condition, shiny and rust free. But here in snowy New England? It’s not uncommon to see older models in classified ads with descriptions like “Roof collapsed in 1982.”  One of these days, I’d like to drive down to the Southwest and pick up one of those good ones, like a 1960′s Shasta with a two-tone paint job and original wings.  I just think they’re so beautiful.

It only took one visit to Beverly for me to decide that I wanted to take on the Catalina, but in a great show of pseudo-grownup restraint, I waited almost a week to go back and buy it. I love the lofted sleeping area, because it provides more floor space for living, which is important when you only have 13′ by 6.5″ to begin with. I also like all the storage space under the benches. The exterior metal skin is a little dingy-looking, but it’s been caulked and is leak-free, and the interior has been stripped, reinsulated, an 90% repanelled with thin blond plywood.  It is a hodge-podge of old and new, a little off-kilter and far from finished, nothing that any retro refitters would be having a cat fight over.  But for me?  It’s everything I need and nothing I don’t.

A little kitchen (four burner stove, no oven).  A little dinette. Plenty of windows. And, of course, a place to lay my head at the end of the day.

The work it needs is substantial, but not particularly difficult. For starters, there’s no upholstery anywhere – no mattress, no cushions for the back benches. I threw away the ones that came with the dinette when my mother pronounced them as “dog breath smelly” and evicted them from the basement, and now I’m back at square one. I’m planning on taking care of all the upholstery before I move in – I’ll just buy foam and make covers myself. It’ll be a good test of my grade school seamstress skills and the sewing machine somebody gave me at a yard sale in Vineyard Haven two years ago. Skeptical? Yeah, me too.  Also, considering that 3′ x 6.5′ is not in fact a legitimate mattress size (in fact, it’s sub-twin), finding something to go in the loft is shaping up to be an adventure.  

Beyond that, the electrical wiring needs to be finished, as does the plumbing on the sink.  The dinette table is wobbly and cheesy in the extreme and could be replaced.  I’d like a little tile for the counter, a little linoleum for my beach-towel-size patch of floor.  A refrigerator.  Lamps.  Curtains.  A propane tank for the stove.  Pots and pans and mugs and spoons.  Maybe a space heater for the spring.  

When put that way, it sounds like a lot.  But young people in farming, we do this over and over again, setting up shop, chasing the new season.  Here in February, I like to think about the camper, sitting on the farm waiting for me, wrapped in white snow.

[singlepic=26,320,240,,right]Throughout my growing seasons, I have lived in fairly unusual places.

It all started simply enough, in a house at the end of a dead-end road, in the sandy soil and scrubby pines of Edgartown. I was 18, and Terry was my first landlord. I am not a strict constructionist when it comes to character, but Terry was unwaveringly stingy, grumpy, and belligerent, the nightmare next door. I relied heavily on my older and wiser housemate Abigail, who had dropped out of college and travelled alone through Scotland and Cuba and clearly knew what’s what when it came to handling a wack landlord. And it wasn’t all that bad.  In that house I had my own room, with two twin beds, and a splintery deck where I could lay down on the warm boards after a long day and relax into the heat.

[singlepic=27,340,260,,left]The following summer, I moved into the loft of a barn in Chilmark, where I was greeted by raccoons raiding the pantry and nests of fledgling barn swallows who pooped ceaselessly and mercilessly on the floor.  But I learned to live with this and more, grew to enjoy the sounds of the goats milling about downstairs and the feeling of high season heat trapped in by the sloping metal roof.  One of my best friends came to visit and painted a goddess mural over my bed, and I felt safe sleeping in her shadow.  It was a magical place to live, there in the very center of the farm’s life, and it was a place that captured my imagination.

[singlepic=24,320,240,,right]Most recently, I lived in a shack in Riverhead, overlooking Long Island Sound, hemmed in by mansions on either side.  It was a dumpy, rotting sort of place, with a rusting stove sitting in the weedy front yard, but it had private stairs down to the beach, and a wrap-around porch, and the house was filled with light.  Sitting on the couch, you felt as if you were on a wooden houseboat, floating across the water towards the mainland.  It had a sort of run-down romance to it, and was the farm crew’s favorite hang-out, for birthday parties to haircuts and anything in between.

But I did not love that house on the Sound.  In fact, I hated it.  I hated the brown stains in the bathtub, the sand in the floorboards, the kitchen covered in extension cords.  Impassively, I nodded when a guest’s eyes grew wide at the view, mumbled agreement when I was told how lucky we were.  I drove a lot in those months, past sod farms and strip malls, to farmers markets or CSA delivery points, and was perhaps happiest behind the wheel of a truck, radio blaring, on my way to somewhere else.

I missed my friends and family. I wasn’t happy in my work on the farm.  I realized, and not for the first time, that where I lay my head at night was peanuts compared to what I did with my waking hours.  I try never to make the same mistake twice, and early on I decided that I would stay on Long Island until the leaves had fallen and winter came on, but I would never return, and the next farm had to be first and foremost a place I could love.

So when Caitlyn and Allen said that they could take me at their farm in Chilmark, but we needed to figure out how to put a roof over my head, I said yes, intuitively, impulsively, truly, yes.  I knew I wanted to come back to the island.  I was interested in learning about small-scale dairy.  And I was god-awful tired of being an apprentice.  I wanted to be something more.  

Thus, the search for a camper began.

How hard could it be?  Seriously.  I had months, and I had craigslist.

Then, a few weeks later, I met Catalina. She was the first camper I looked at, and a seriously fixer, but the price was right, and she was a keeper. Game on.