Posts from — August 2009

That is a dead tomato hornworm. Dangling from a healthy tomato plant. It’s rather weird, how deflated it looks.

Suffice it to say, the hornworms aren’t really a problem anymore.

Ok, maybe it’s a tropical storm. Danny, to be precise.

We’ve know he’s coming for a few days. The timing of the whole thing is pretty gross. This morning is the last Saturday market of August, the last hurrah if you will, or at least it was supposed to be. Instead, it’s pouring buckets, and we’re not there. Let me tell the story. Actually, it’s a happy story. I promise.

Caitlin and I decided pretty early on that we weren’t going to go, that we’d just take the financial hit, which we were probably going to take anyways, given that vacationers around here tend to avoid leaving their houses on wet weekend mornings and turnout at rainy markets is dismal.

But then Danielle from Scottish Bakehouse came by the farm and agreed to buy tomatoes. Lots of them. As in over 100 pints of them.

At which point I may or may not have done a jig in the driveway.

Cherry tomatoes in general and sungolds in particular have a tendency to split in the rain – the excess moisture causes them to swell until they burst, a long open seam radiating from the stem end. Once they split, they rot quickly, and are not fit for sale. The greenhouse plants were safe. But the outdoor trellised rows, which are producing heavily now, were about to get trashed.

Caitlin and I picked those rows for a few hours, filling one cardboard box after another with literally thousands of tiny tomatoes and stacking them in the tacoma. It was such an unexpected blessing, to have the washout weekend redeemed, to see the tomatoes put to good use.

We’ve been so lucky that Danielle is so flexible about buying produce from us. Part of the challenge of the farm-restaurant connection is that the supply we provide is inherently, intensely seasonal, here today and gone tomorrow. It’s hard to make plans for using it. It’s hard to process or sell it all at once. It’s more expensive as an input, making it harder for the buyer to then turn a profit. Pretty much every restaurant around on the island loves to toot their own horn about the local food they use, but not every restaurant follows through and walks the walk. She does. And we love her for it.

I love how that little appendage got ripe way before the rest.

That’s all I really have to say about that.

I was sixteen and going to school on a farm in Vermont when I ate my first ear of raw sweet corn. I had just finished loading the harvest into a pickup truck and was sitting in back with a bunch of other kids, when my friend Caen reached into a burlap sack, pulled out an ear, and began shucking, throwing the silk and tassels over the side as we bounced down the road.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

And he bit into the ear, nonchalant, easy as that. To me, it was as if he was eating uncooked rice, or a raw potato. Nobody does that. I had to do that.

“Hand it over,” I said.

Caen crawled back over the scratchy bags and handed me that gnawed on, vividly yellow ear.

The first bite was a shock. Expecting starchy, I got watery, fresh, sweet. I needed my own.

It’s my favorite way to eat corn now, straight off the stalk. It has to be grown well, extremely fresh, or else, to be frank, it’s disgusting. Starchy, chewy, everything you think it would be. But right place right time, raw corn is a revelation.

I ate an ear of corn from Morning Glory Farm this morning while I was at market, pausing here and there to sell pints of cherries. The corn had been out of the field a few hours, for sure. But it was still the best I’ve had all year. I’m pretty sure that there’ll be no Obama sighting for me during his time on the island, but really, it’s whatever. My summer is now complete.

My friend Rusty has a truly excellent facebook album called “Dogs of the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market.” It is exactly as advertised, a collection of snapshots of dogs wandering the peastones outside the Grange Hall in West Tis. And every market, there are tons of them. Sometimes there are fights, or they lift a leg on our flower cans. Some vendors think they should be outlawed. But really, especially on a Wednesday, they’re a highlight. They’re the entertainment. Seeing daschunds meet great danes. Seeing dogs who look like their owners (so funny! always!).

This is the first dog I’ve seen this year I just had to take a picture of. It might’ve been the smallest dog I’ve ever seen.

Ok, probably not. But still, it was an amazing little thing, a perfect minature. Appropriate that the beautiful child-sized dog is held by a beautiful child.

I don’t know what my problem is. I just love the deformed tomatoes. The lumpy, cracked, scarred kind. Something about all the different textures makes the colors more striking, the shape more beautiful. They don’t sell as well, they’re worth less, but I smile every time I see a good one, a really unusual one. On these long humid days, the promise of something new down the vine is what keeps me crawling on my hands and knees, moving slowly on the row.

To quote Miss Meredith, in truth:

Whoever chose a muted turquoise for tomato cartons was a genius.

Six dollars at the art show at chicken alley, last weekend. I stopped in there with my parents on my way off-island for the day, and decided that the stand must have yet another ceramic chicken, this ceramic chicken, long inconvenient journey be damned. I carried her all over boston by her skinny little neck, nearly left her behind on the bus. But she’s here now.

The tomato hornworms have arrived in our Edenic greenhouse, the green tunnel greenhouse. We hadn’t picked in there since Tuesday, and went in yesterday evening to get ready for market, and there they were, munch munching away. They are huge, juicy, beautifully strange bugs, the larvae of the hawk moth. When pulled away from their dinner, they are likely to gyrate wildly and poop all over your hand, a watery green goo dribbling down towards your wrist.

I’m not usually squirmy about bugs, but tomato hornworms kinda freak me out.

Fortunately, they are easily controlled with an organic spray, bt. Bt is actually a bacterium, and it kills tomato hornworns quite handily. When the hornworm eats tomato or foliage that’s been sprayed with bt, the bacterium eventually ends up in the worm’s gut. There the worm’s digestive juices break down the bacterium and a toxin is released. Because the gut of the tomato hornworm is only one cell layer thick, the toxin literally eats a hole in the gut, and the hornworn dies.

Fortunately, the action of bt is very specific, and it’s not toxic to most other critters. In many other insects, as well as all types of people, birds, and fish, bt has no deleterious effect at all.

So we’ll use that, but we’ve got some volunteer help as well.

This poor guy has been colonized by a parasitic wasp, most likely Cotesia congregatus. The wasps knew the hornworms were in the greenhouse before we did and are already hard at work. Larvae will hatch out of those white eggs and will feed on the insides of the dying hornworm until they are ready to pupate. Once they have emerged from their cocoons as adult wasps, they will seek other hornworms, to lay their own eggs upon. It’s one of the great advantages of growing organically, that when you have an excess of some pest (aphids, tomato hornworms), there is often some other natural predator (ladybugs, wasps) that is already on the case. You could just get some spray and kill everything, true. But those natural predators would be a real loss for any kind of grower.

The Martha’s Vineyard Ag Fair started yesterday in West Tisbury. I rode my bike over after work to poke around in the exhibit barn. In addition to traditional catagories – pies, knitted things – they also have really excellent, strange, creative classes. Flower arrangements in tea cups. Arrangements inspired by songs. Sculptures made out of vegetables. The one in the picture above is made out of green tomatoes and peppers, and it won first place, which was really inevitable – it was even more miraculous in person.

I had a goal a few years ago to make over $20 in prize money, which I did. You make about four or five dollars for every class you win in the exhibition hall, except for the big competitive classes like painting and photography, which I never enter anyways. I entered my pet rabbit Duncan, some angora fiber from his last shearing, a few knitted things, some handspun yarn, and a couple of flower arrangements, and eventually received a check for $22 from the MV Ag Society in the mail, which I never cashed.

It is an heirloom now, a record I will probably never break, because I’ve stopped entering things in the fair. It requires levels of organization, enthusiasm, and creativity I have a hard time finding the first two weeks in August, when I’m basically running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But I love wandering the barn, checking out the sea of ribbons and jams, seeing windows into the interesting lives people lead, the secret skills people have. Who knew that the lady down the street makes the island’s best bread-and-butter pickles? Now I do, I guess.