Posts from — September 2009

I just got back from a long weekend road-trip to the Common Ground Fair in Maine. I was thrilled by how many people I ran into – a former teacher from Mountain School, a couple of friends I worked with at Garden of Eve Farm, a girl I went to Wesleyan with. It’s pretty rare to feel like progressive environmental values have critical mass, but MOFGA set an attendance record on Saturday and the energy was great, a vast display of craft and optimism.

It was a fitting send-off for what’s to come, a whirlwind of traveling and transitions. We’ll see, she said, hoping. We’ll see.

A Tuesday morning at Sepiessa in Septmeber. Drip tape, bundled and tied. Salad greens in a plastic tote. Empty fifty-pound grain bags. A tan fleece jacket. A five pound watermelon. For now, life is peaceful.

Two arms and two legs. Pretty nifty.

With all the Sungolds and Juliets ripped out and gone, my favorite tomatoes of the year, Orange Russian 117, is finally coming on in earnest. They taste pretty good, but mostly I think they’re insanely beautiful.

They are a bicolor (yellow and red) in color, and the shape, in tomato parlance, is an oxheart – lobed around the stem end and tapered to a point at the bottom. Most are large, over a pound no problem. After a long season of anxiously pondering the huge green fruit (what is up with that kind? why won’t it ripen?), here in late September they are doing their thing.

Yesterday, while I tromped around Sepiessa pulling out the drip irrigation from the tomato rows (which, I’ll tell you right now, is nobody’s favorite fall clean-up job), I harvested about ten of these, and wondered what to do with them. It’s certainly more tomato sandwiches than I plan on eating.

I got this little widget a month or so ago that gives me access to all sorts of nifty stats about crookedrow.com

It tells me number of hits a day, referrals from other websites, and best of all, the google searches that lead people to my little corner of cyberspace.

As you can see, the phrases that pop up reflect the sheer wackiness of human curiosity, encompassing things practical, philosophical, fragmentary, non-sensical (“caitlin ate?” what?), and of course sexual. Is “salad underwear lingerie” some sort of fetish?

Sometimes writing here feels like talking into a void, in ways good and bad. But the stats page is pretty much always good for a laugh.

This is the root ball of one of the sungold tomato plants we pulled out of the greenhouse this week.

As you can see, it is majestic, expansive, smooth, healthy, with none of the knots or bumps that are characteristic of nematode damage.

These plants were grafted in the spring, the sungold fruiting stem cut on the soil line and attached to Maxifort root stock with a tiny plastic clip. Over the course of a few weeks in the greenhouse in March, we waited for the stems to fuse. Not all attempts were successful. Some just went whole hog and died completely, in others the rootstock took over. Those we were careful to discard, as the Maxifort plant, for all its robustness, produces tomatoes that are small, ever green, and gross.

But for the most part, the grafts took, and by transplant time in April, we had a few flats of healthy little superplants.

Mermaid Farm is the first place I’ve participated in tomato grafting, and I was skeptical, to say the least. First off, the up-front investment is more than double that of plain old plants – you have to buy seed for and raise twice the number of seedlings, put time into grafting them, and then take the losses on the grafts that don’t take.

But having been through this rough tomato season with them, I’d say that I’m a convert. The yield was exceptional, and as we pulled them out this week I was very impressed with the extensive root systems they’d formed. I think they could’ve done even better with slightly more generous spacing in the rows, to accomodate the rather beastly rates of growth.

Caitlin did all the grafting herself, so I’m going to have to study up on youtube videos over the winter, or pay someone to graft plants for me in the spring. But for hoophouse production in New England, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Caitlin in the bucketloader, amidst piles of plants.

September smiles upon us.

Yes, my friends, that is what you think it is.

The dread late blight.

The end is near, the end is here. We pulled out the first greenhouse on Monday, and have started ripping out the outdoor trellised plantings as well. Many farms burn the plants and the mulch, to ensure that the blight does not become established in the soil, where it can lie dormant until next year. Allen’s digging a hole out back and we’re just burying the truckloads as they come.

Thus far, the whole thing has been cathartic rather than sad. We had a good run, and although sometimes you can have greenhouse tomatoes well into October, second week in September is nothing to sneeze at in a year like this. As they say, don’t cry for me Argentina. We are grateful.

Festive photos to come.

As I’ve said before, Caitlin and I didn’t focus on fall plantings. We did, however, grow beets. A ton of beets. Maybe not literally. But to us, a lot.

One of the facts of camper life is the lack of oven. For much of my time there, it’s been of little interest. But now that it’s the season for butternut squash and apple pie, I feel the lack more acutely. The beets are like my consolation prize.

I find the ritual of cooking beets especially soothing too. Watching them knock around in the simmering water, poking with a fork for doneness. Slipping the skins off afterwards in a bath of cool water.

But still, later, when I have gone elsewhere to roost, I am going to make some major apple pie.

I take no credit for this gorgeous work. It came from Martha’s Vineyard Fiber Farm. I think it’s some of the nicest variegated yarn I’ve ever seen in a long time – there’s so many different tones, but the palette as a whole is cohesive and somehow soothing. But maybe it’s just the season talking. After a long spell of ditching knitting/spinning/anything involving wool in the godawful heat, my desire to make fuzzy functional things has returned.

I’m going to use this skein to make a replacement hat for my friend Rebecca – her first was lost on a trip last winter. I made it a few years ago based on a popular pattern called Odessa. The Odessa hat is a sort of delicate, pretty thing, with a nautilus pattern spiraling around towards the top. It’s an easy one to memorize the pattern for and I’ve made it too many times to count, all over the country – California, Connecticut, Chilmark, wherever I need a little project that can travel light. Unfortunately, ironically, it’s not a hat that fits me at all. My thick curly hair puffs and pokes, distorts the neat nautilus shape. Even in college, when I cut off all my hair one summer in a bout of heat-induced frustration, it still wasn’t the hat for me.

The pattern is only available on ravelry these days, which you have to join to access, but if you have short/obedient hair and are into fuzzy functional things, patterns don’t come much better than this.