Posts from — June 2009

I took this picture in April, upon receiving a package in the mail from Johnny’s full of sweet potato slips that looked awful. Crumpled and wilty and sad. Really awful. I figured that if we needed to call and ask for a refund, we could also send the pictures as evidence of how truly awful they looked.

But the call never happened. We put the slips in the seed starter frame in the greenhouse, watered them religiously, and they came back. Not right away. Almost imperceptibly slowly, over the course of weeks. In the end, we sold most of them down at the stand and kept just a few for ourselves to grow, for fun.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, there’s no way of knowing one way or the other. The plants we pour our hearts into can prove incredible resilient or simply unable to hack it. The tomatoes at Sepiessa could go either way. We already have so much sunk into them, and they still need to be irrigated and mulched, which will take a long time. But we have the drip tape ready to go, the mulch in bales by the deer fence.

So we’re going to save half - the better looking half - and till the others in. A compromise, if you will. We’ll replant the space with something that’ll come up quick - probably salad greens we can sell to restaurants. It’s painful to watch the rows go under, but it’s all part of it, and we knew that when we started, when we opened the seed catalogue and started talking. It’s kinda like baseball. From year to year you can win a lot, but you can’t win ‘em all.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to lose.

Unfortunately, the effect is not intentional. The auto-focus on my Canon digital is kaput. I’ll be ordering a new camera in the next day or two, and will try not to hyperventilate over how f-ing expensive it is. Until then, I’ll use some archival shots, maybe mess around with the blur effect a little. I think this shot of kaya and tim in the camper is actually pretty nice.

There’s a problem at Sepiessa. Of large proportion. Involving the tomatoes.

“It’s the worst they’ve ever looked,” Caitlin said. “Maybe you should get a catering job.”

It’s been a cascade of miscalculations and mistakes – seeded too early in February, put in the ground too large and too late. The deck was stacked from the start, but Mother Nature delivered the coup de grace in June, two weeks of rain and a Nor’easter.

I went down to Sepiessa last night. It’s shortly after the summer solstice, and days are long, but the light was fading fast as I rattled down the long dirt road. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to see anything when I got there. But I had to go. I had to know, right in that very moment, which varieties of snap beans were germinating, what percentage of the tomatoes had snapped in the storm, what we had worth banking on.

The field was lovely, dusky blue against the bordering black trees, with a pale sliver of moon rising in the sky. I tried to be there. You know what I mean. To appreciate the ground beneath me and the world around me.

I stomped around the lower and upper plots, rather like a bloodhound, nose to the soil, trying to discern detail in the fading light. It’s not so much that the tomatoes are broken, and neither are they dead, for the most part. But in the three weeks they’ve been down at Sepiessa, they have yet to click in and take off, they have yet to show that elemental desire to branch and fruit and grow.

It’s a bad situation. We’re not going to make money.

It’s hard to feel optimistic – about this growing season, about where I’ll find myself next, about whether or not I’ll ever be able to build a life for myself in farming. Sometimes it feels like running underwater.

The island would be a great place to take a step back. Just go the Squibnocket and vegetate, potlucks and parties at night, maybe landscape or something on the side, to make ends meet. Cruise for a while. I wish I wanted that. But I don’t. I want to farm. I want to get my own place and be successful, now. It’s so incredibly frustrating to work so hard and care so much, to live on other people’s farms and to have no idea what’s waiting for me on the other side. It feels like giving myself away, and it is, and that’s beautiful, but it’s hard, it’s just really hard.

I remember working the market in Brooklyn last summer. Those days were obscenely long. We left the farm before dawn and spent the daylight hours strung out on a noxious blend of caffeine and fatigue, selling sunflowers and tomatillos to lanky hipsters who confessed their own farming dreams while fishing for change in their retro fanny packs.

And I always wanted to say, but didn’t - I wouldn’t have it any other way, but this life, it’s not what you think it is.

The rain had been relentless! The crops are green and healthy (so are weeds), but they’re behind, significantly behind where we’d expect to see them at this time of the year, especially given how early we got a lot of the stuff in the ground. Here, it’s not really a business issue - for a csa the crop delay is tough, but we’re really a market garden. School just got out, summer people are just beginning to arrive, we can sell the stuff later.

It’s more of a morale issue. You can wait out the showers, make sure you’re wearing wellies, all that stuff, but when it rains every day and you’re a farmer, you’re just going to get wet. A lot. More often than not these days, I feel like Rita and I have a lot to commiserate about - wet, muddy, waiting.

Last week, the first pallet of custom milk bottles finally arrived on the farm. Getting them made was a long road for Allen - he asked an artist friend to design the label, and received a gorgeous, detailed pen and ink drawing. Good start. But then the bottle company insisted that the design had to be radically simplified, because their printers couldn’t render that much detail. And then the government’s raw milk regulators suggested that the standardized health labeling (raw milk is not pasteurized, stuff about microbes, etc.) should have a more prominent place on the label, and be printed in a larger font - basically, they had seemed to have no interest in or respect for the artistic integrity of the design. For a while, the whole thing was looking pretty thorny.

But then the bottles arrived, and they’re gorgeous. The green ink color, which Caitlin chose, sets off nicely against the creamy white of the milk. And although the design was greatly simplified, it retained much of it’s character. The one pitfall? The mermaid’s nipples. You can’t really tell in this picture, but they’re, um, a little target-like. There’s really no other way to put it.

Bunches of rainbow chard in the Tacoma, on the way to Saturday market in West Tisbury. We sold them all in an hour. The first couple of markets have been busier than I remember in previous Junes, and come noon we’ve been reloading the truck with a bunch of empty crates, and a cooler filled with other people’s produce - strawberries from Ralph and Ethel, bread from Julie, cucumbers from Rusty and Andrew ($1 each! In June!), and of course greens from Rebecca. Caitlin makes fun of me for buying them - we do, of course, grow our own greens. But I like hers, and there are worse things in the world to splurge on.

I pulled this little guy off a leaf of swiss chard, after he’d been underwater a minute or two, thinking he was dead. Do snails breathe? Do they have a respiratory system? I pondered these questions as he flopped on the cross-beam, inert, soggy, pathetic.

But then, like a phoenix, those little feelers rose again.

Tomorrow’s the first farmers market, and we’ve spent the day frumping around in the rain getting ready. We’re in a slow spot with the vegetables these days, a little lull between spring and summer. We have also been able to sell pretty much everything we want through the stand and restaurants, so there’s not the sense of urgency there sometimes is about getting in gear for a market. I’m sure that later on in the season, when we’re strung out and tired, we’ll miss the lazy quiet June markets, sitting on the tailgate and eating brownies and talking with other vendors. There are worse ways to spend Saturday morning.

This is the fourth calf of the past month - a bull, I think.

As the title suggests, I covet his eyelashes. In a big way.

Judging by his mother’s reaction to my camera’s attention, I’m guessing they’re not for sale.

Yesterday, when talking about the weather, Caitlin described the spring as spitty.

I’m not sure spitty is a word.

My word processor certainly doesn’t think so.

But it’s entirely accurate. The gray days, the misty spitty mornings, lead to some really nice spinach. I’ve never grown really nice spinach in the spring, and it’s made me inordinately proud of myself. The color’s been spot-on, a nice mossy saturated green, and the plantings sized up quickly, with little or no insect damage. I did a smooth, spoon-shaped salad variety, and a big wrinkly savoy type. Both seemed the easiest thing in the world to sell - I guess just about everybody likes spinach. The most recent transplants aren’t doing as well. They’ll be the last ’till fall, when they’ll be back with a vengeance. I’m now a hopeless addict.

This radicchio has been in the ground since early April, yet for some reason it won’t head up. It’s had time, water, fertilizer, you name it. Won’t budge. Maybe because it’s an Italian heirloom, and I’m not doing something right. Maybe because it isn’t so cool outside anymore.

The thing is, I don’t even like radicchio. I do bitter, but I have my limits.

But it’s beautiful, isn’t it? I can’t bring myself to rip it out. It’s a great weakness of mine, as a farmer, an inability to just cut my losses and move on.

Will somebody come and take it away? Lie to me, say you’ll eat it, throw it in the compost. Just smile and take it away.