Posts from — December 2009

The view from the barn on the last morning of 2009. The tiles on the table seem to glow.

The farm crew is gearing up to go to a potluck at a nearby farm – stir fry and vegan cookies are in the works, but there’s talk of leaving early. In the first morning of 2010, duty calls. We’ll be packing boxes with oyster mushrooms, tomatoes, bee pollen, and callaloo.

But anyways, Happy New Year.

We picked the ingredients early, before it got hot – crate upon green crate of red mustard, tatsoi, black kale, yukina savoy, and komatsuna. When it came time to pack half pound bags for the csa in the afternoon, Muriel mixed all the greens on two long tables, arms like salad tongs. Asian mix is my favorite for salads. Most people braise it to take the edge off, but I rather like the the slightly chewy texture, the peppery mustard bite. Unfortunately, there was none left over. I think I will be heading back out to harvest for dinner.

While I was up north, things around here started taking off. We’re spending less time weeding and more time harvesting (always a plus), and tomatoes are just around the corner. This morning I picked 18.2 pounds of rattlesnake beans.

They’re most commonly eaten as a snap bean, and have gorgeous purple streak similar to dragon langerie, the bush bean I grew at Mermaid. The plants have already topped the six foot bamboo trellis and are beginning to drape over the side, dripping beans. I see more harvest mornings in my future.

I came back north for the holiday, and it’s been smashing.

Yesterday, on the morn of Christmas Eve, I went out to Hopkinton to look at some used hoophouse frames. I’d done a fair bit of research on this earlier in the fall, and had found that used hoophouse frames in Massachusetts are kind like used Tacoma trucks in Massachusetts – mighty tough to track down. But I opened my email a week or two ago and found a classified ad tucked away at the end of Mass Ag Farm & Market report:

Hoop Tents For Sale -

Measure 7 ft. high, 14 ft. wide by appx. 120 ft. long
Durable ¾” galvanized iron pipe hoops, 21 ft long, bent to half-circle
Hoops 3 ft. apart insert into pressure-treated 6×8 landscape timbers
Dozens available

The design of these houses is rather unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It is more conventional to anchor the hoops in the ground, by first pounding a steel tube of a wider diameter into the soil, then inserting the end of the hoop into this anchor tube, and finally bolting the two together for good measure. The resulting structure is very stable, but rather fussy to put together – you should expect to hit rocks while trying to pound in the anchors, to have headaches over placing them precisely, to spend a lot of time with a sledgehammer, etc. A hoophouse constructed in this way is also, for obvious reasons, not an easy thing to move.

The alternative design of these houses is rather clever. The pressure-treated landscape timbers are heavy enough to be used as effective anchors, but light enough that any two reasonably handy people can move them around without too much trouble. And because the landscape timbers are uniform in size, and the anchor holes have been cut at regular intervals, there is no need to agonize over placement. You can just lay them down in two parallel lines fourteen feet apart and start popping in the hoops.

For my needs, the fit isn’t perfect. In their current life, the hoophouses are being used to provide winter protection for woody nursery plants – azaleas, hydrangeas, etc. Therefore the modest height (7′) is an advantage. The structure retains optimal heat while providing enough head clearance for people to work comfortably. But I plan to grow tomatoes in them, and indeterminate tomato varieties in a hoophouse climb like spider monkeys. They could reach seven feet by mid-July, no problem.

But the price for a 120′ house is quite reasonable, and the ease of construction is immensely appealing. I’m basically starting from square one with this whole project in terms of infrastructure (except for the epic deer fence), and i don’t relish the idea of standing on a wobbly ladder in the cold gray spring, struggling to erect some fifteen foot behemoth on my own. I am confident I could put up one of these used structures on my own. So I think I am going to get two. One for tomatoes, one to break in half. Part will be used for starting transplants, part will be used for growing peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, and fancy cut flowers (lisianthus, karma dahlias) under cover.

It’s a lot of row feet under cover, given the lilliputian scale of the farm, but I think for the island climate it’s one of the best things I can do to set myself up for success. The yields are just so much better in a hoophouse, and the season is extended dramatically on either side. Even the Massachusetts NRCS is getting in on the action:

http://www.ma.nrcs.usda.gov/news/news_high_tunnel_pilot.html

I’m going to apply for funding, but my eligibility is rather questionable given the farm is a first-year startup. But it’s a great idea. Everyone should check it out.

This morning I was the grateful recipient of some excellent gifts: a long-handle shovel (tall people shouldn’t have to put their backs out digging holes), a hard rake, and a cast-iron skillet (bought in chinatown and preseasoned by my dad). amazing and appropriate one and all.

We packed four hundred seventy something CSA boxes today, with organic fruits and veggies that come from Bee Heaven’s partner farms all over Southern Florida. With the sheer volume of produce passing through our hands on Friday mornings, we pretty much always find something funky to pass around.

This grapefruit ripened unevenly because it was squashed against other grapefruits during packing, and now it’s kind of misshapen, with candy pink oblongs bleeding into the lime green background. I think we’re going to leave it out and see it ripens or rots.

We also got some insanely large harukei turnips. The bulk of these things kind of freaked me out. I had no idea they could get this big. They’re a raw eating turnip, dainty, crunchy, sweet. As I mentioned in the spring, I’m a little crazy about them. I grew them on the island, even though few people buy them and they basically make no money. I sold a bunch of seven perfect little ping-pong ball size ones for two dollars, and when you do the math on seed and labor cost that’s practically giving them away. I don’t really care. I gotta have ‘em. To me, the harukeis are as much a part of spring as sugar snaps and spinach.

The taste of these turnips on roids was surprisingly close to that of the little minis I grew. The texture was almost spot-on, less tender but not woody or tough. The greens were pretty hairy, almost to the point of spiny, but would be fine cooked. I don’t know what it is about the weather here that made such a huge difference. The heat? The humidity? Both? Whatever. Beats me.

Today the crew took the afternoon off to go visit a farm of a different sort, just outside the Everglades.

Bill raises tropical fish for the pet trade, but he’s also an animal collector, tank upon tank of everything from albino frogs to african cichlids.

The sheer diversity of agriculture in the Redlands is incredible. There are nurseries that specialize in growing braided ficus for export to europe. Some grow only ornamental grass in plastic pots. Strawberry farms. Avocado groves. Long trellises laden with dragon fruit. A place down the road raises koi and tilapia. Bill is next door to a gator farmer. I’m sure there’s so much more I’m not even aware of.

Some of the fish were housed in massive circular outdoor tanks, blue tubs with little portholes. Others lived in concrete tubs under shade shelters, or in glass, or in the case of the tarpons and gar fish, a large freshwater pond.

Gar fish, by the way, are pretty insane. The ones Bill is raising he’s had since Hurricane Andrew, so they’re about seventeen years old and maybe five or so feet long. I didn’t really see what the big deal was. But given more time, alligator gar can reach ten feet long and weigh in at 200 pounds. According to wikipedia, they’re “popular amongst bowfishers because of their size and tendency to brawl.”

We just sat on the dock and tossed dog food into the water, watching them surface and snack on the floating pellets. It was all very civilized. But I do not see alligator gar farming in my future.

As always, I found something small and pretty to hold and photograph

It’s the empty shell of a ram’s horn snail. I put in my pocket, for remembrance on a gray afternoon in New England, when I return to my real world.

I find him on the hood of my truck most every afternoon. I think he likes the heat of the metal. Which is a little ridiculous, because the climate zone here is pretty much ‘sauna.’ But hey, to each his own.

Usually he hops off when I start the engine, but this afternoon when I went out after work to run Christmas errands, he hung on the way down the driveway to the chain link gate. I was a little tempted to let him ride out on the open road, past fields of beans and palms, wind on his scales, just to see what happens. But then I had visions of him letting go, cartwheeling through the air, splattering on the warm gray pavement. I hopped out, and chased him off into the grass. Maybe he’ll go eat the bugs that are eating the eggplant. Stranger things have happened

I’m closing in on a week in the Sunshine State. The sheer abundance of food here blows me away. Pretty much every day, I try something I’ve never tried – tiny thai bananas, curry leaf, sour tangerines, yellow-finned starfruit. At market, curly kale and purple-top turnips sit beside key limes and sugarcane, a juxtaposition of the tropical and familiar. The seasons are mysterious and giving.

It’s funny to be kicking myself back into gear, creaking back to life at this time of year, as Christmas approaches. One of my favorite things about being a farmer is how our own cycles tune into those of the crops. The fall is a long slow slide towards hibernation, planning and resting and doing other things. But here I am in the first week of December, picking arugula and planting peas.

We went to a big Sunday farmers market today in Pinecrest, about half an hour north of the farm. It was first one at a new location, so all the vendors were a little unsure of what to expect, but the turnout was smashing. For the first few hours it was all we could do to keep food on the table. I didn’t get too much of a chance to poke around, but we were stationed right across from this glorious rig:

So it was a great success. That being said, I am really excited to go back to the island and not do a market. I’m realizing that I’ve been working markets for about five years now, and they’re exhausting, and the excitement of the interaction isn’t as big of a motivator as it once was. Part of farm life is really tuning into the rhythms of a place. To disrupt that flow to go to a parking lot and hawk wares out of a tent for hours to hundreds of customers is a trip, especially when you’ve become accustomed to the relatively predictable patterns of the plants and people you work with. I can’t wait to make a little stand by my growing field, trick it out just the way i like it, and be done with loading tents and tables every week.