Posts from — August 2009

Yellow wax beans, basil, baby beets, dahlias, cosmos, garlic, two crates of mixed heirlooms, and seven crates of mixed cherry tomatoes – brown berry, snow white, super sweet 100, yellow pear, and of course sungold. I picked last night until i couldn’t see down the row in the gathering darkness, and then got up with the sun to pick again.

I felt pretty good about all this around 8:30, standing in front of a nice full table at market with iced tea and a biscuit. But now, I think need a nap. Big time.

Usually, it’s the root crops that have really rad and interesting deformities – carrots, potatoes, turnips, and the like. Growing in the soil they run into other roots, run into rocks, run into one another, and whatever conventional shape they were taking (a cylinder, a sphere) changes course and becomes something exceptional (a dauschund, a lizard). At Mountain School we once made a village of carrot people.

But here we have this tomato.

Too great to eat. Too great sell. I have no idea what would cause this type of growth. But maybe I’ll save the seed and see if it can be replicated.

Tomatoes, for all their propensity towards blight, fungus, premature death, can be the most incredible, sprawling, productive plants. Somehow, through some weird alchemy of skill and sheer luck, we ended up with the sort of tomato greenhouse you dream about while seeding in the spring – a verdant green tunnel, floor to ceiling tomato land. It is my favorite place on the farm right now. Here’s how it all went down:

April 16, 2009. We have cleaned up in the greenhouse and are now using it to house flats of spring stuff – turnips, spinach, flowers.

June 2, 2009. The plants have been put in, irrigated, heavily mulched, pruned down to two leaders, and given strings for support.

August 12, 2009. Just over two months later, the plants have grown to about twelve feet tall, and we have the tomato tunnel, in all it’s glory.

Island life in August. It’s a trip. On the one hand, it’s awful. The growing season and the tourist season here are inextricably linked. Farmers like us stand to make over half our income in these short 30 days, income to sustain us for the other 330 days of the year. Daily revenues at farmstands suddenly quadruple. Mercedes SUVs with Jersey plates pull into the drive at 7 am on Sunday morning, seeking yet more tomatoes. Already strung out on months of planting and weeding, we kick it into high gear and basically work like dogs, in service to vacationland. It’s actually enough to make you feel sorry for yourself.

On the other hand, every day, there’s the strange and marvelous possibility that something amazing might happen. You never know who might come up the drive, what they might have to offer. On Thursday evening, with no prior notice, I took a spin over the island in an airplane.

My grandfather arrived on island the same day, having been flown over in by his good friend Melissa, who is an experienced pilot and owns a red and white four-seater Piper Cub named Peppermint. The plane is her baby, gorgeously maintained. They came over to the farm and Melissa offered to take us up for a ride.

True to the habits of childhood, Nat took the backseat, without a fight. Although I should admit that he has recently proven that he is now the dominant contender in physical altercations regarding seats. Never mind that I am still bigger. He is apparently craftier. Or maybe it was the few months he spent on the high school wrestling team…

We did a couple of loops over the farm so I could take pictures. On the ground now, it kind of feels like chaos – weeds everywhere, empty flats and cans everywhere, chaos. It’s all I can do to take a deep breath and keep going. But from the air, it looks so orderly, so green and peaceful. I can see clearly the rows of tomatoes and raspberries, three greenhouses lined up along the clean cut of the dirt road. Yeah, I feel strung out, tired, pushed beyond. It’s August. I long for September, Indian summer, butternut squash and kale, empty beaches and flannel shirts at night.

But I could do a lot worse than right here, right now.

I’m growing around fifteen different types of sunflowers (yes, I know, I have a problem), and I love them all, but this one might be my favorite. I didn’t properly label them when they went into the field, and now the variety name is lost to me – I’ll have to go back through my seed order receipts in the fall and see if I can puzzle it out. In the future, I think I’ll diagram it out in a notebook when I transplant them into the field. The little wooden tags we use to label flats of seedlings always get lost somehow – pulled up during weeding, or faded beyond recognition in the sun and rain.

But I just love the green centers, and the way the petals pull back shyly, a few at a time. They’re single-cut rather than branching, less productive for the grower. But I think for me they’re worth it.

A mesclun mix – a good mesclun mix – is a tricky thing to balance. To keep it interesting, special, worth the money, it needs to have something unusual, something you don’t find in Stop & Shop, a schtick. But you can’t go off the deep end either. Color, flavor, texture, size – they all have to balance, pretty in a bag and tasty on the tongue. As more and more growers get into salad, throwing all sorts of funky things in the mix, the search for something both appealing and original becomes more challenging.

I decided to do mild, with herbs. Another farmer in our area already does a spicy, mustard-heavy mix, which I love and probably couldn’t do better. So ours is mostly mitzuna, tatsoi, and pea shoots, with a little bit of purslane for crunch and purple basil for color. The size on the asian greens is imperfect, a little too big from the summer heat. But it’s pretty enough for people to pick up the bag and ask what’s inside, tasty enough for people to come back for another when they finish their first. I have no complaints.