dreams and doings of a young farmer

Lady Lea and I at the Tisbury Wharf Farmers’ Market on Tuesday morning.

I picked exactly nine sungolds this afternoon at the farm. It was a good way to follow up a morning of slaughtering chickens out on Katama. Having tomatoes by the fourth of July is the perennial goal of Northeast farmers, one we often don’t meet. Judging by the fruit set on the plants and the weather we’ve been having I think it’s going to be a phenomenal tomato year, a fitting reward for the blighted washout of 2009.

I love pretty much everything about tomato plants. I love their smell, their messy sprawling strength, the sticky black tar they leave on your hands. Having the tomato haus perform well makes my little heart sing.

So early this year!

Second week in June.

This little two-tone number, Zephyr, is my favorite summer squash.

But I’ll eat the green ones too.

For now, they’re just for me and my peeps, for dinner.

Mixed in with chard and scapes and I’m not telling how much butter.

They just taste good that way.

I found out the other day that I’ve been officially sponsored to be a delegate to represent Slow Food Martha’s Vineyard at Terra Madre, the annual meeting of Slow Food International, which takes place in Turin Italy. I’ll be making the trip at the end of October, when things in the fields have quieted enough for me to slip away.

The things we islanders complain about are the very same things that make us stay – the rhythms and routines, the underlying sameness of a world without traffic lights or k-marts, the quiet of the off-season on a rock in the Atlantic. In some ways the world feels more finite here, more knowable. Slow Food makes sense everywhere, but here in particular it resonates.

That being said, in Italy I plan to wear clean clothes, eat fancy food, ask lots of questions, and have one hell of a good time.

I planted the sugar snaps in the least fertile area of the field. In mid-April I dug shallow two shallow trenches, hacking through sod and roots with a triangle hoe, and I backfilled with compost from the restaurant, which was rich and black and flecked with bits of egg shell.

It was the first thing I planted. I didn’t expect much. I put up a lame, cursory sort of trellis made of skinny oak stakes and scraps of old deer fencing my friend Jeff gave me and went about my business.

The peas have since determined that they love it here and have been growing like gangbusters, loaded with blossoms and pods. Every week I chase them with more stakes and lengths of twine as they pass three feet, then four, then five, climbing to the sun. The trellis looks like some sort of earnest and unfunny art installation, a melange of plastic netting and tangled string. Every week, the place is less of a garden and more of a farm..

From left to right – tomatillos, heirloom tomatoes, yellow squash, basil, and cucumbers.

It’s summerland.

I can’t believe it’s June!

After a manic few weeks, I have all the first rotations in the ground, both at the bakehouse and the glassworks. Harvesting has yet to kick into full gear, and there’s a little bit of quiet before the storm, to bake cookies, weed the beets, clean up the greenhouse, stay out at the bar later than I should.

Or, of course, trellis the tomatoes.

It’s time. Unfortunately, the tomato haus has no purlins. A purlin is a pipe that runs down the length of the greenhouse, parallel to the ridgeline. After this spring’s construction marathon, I had no interest in running around town buying pipe and connectors and u-bolts and making a professional expensive purlin. So I took some leftover fencing wire and a big handful of zip ties and made do instead. So far, so good.

The past couple weeks have been transplant mania on the farm. It is starting to look less like spring and more like summer with every passing day. Many of the first rotations are approaching harvest time – I started to harvest this pac choi a few days ago for the restaurant kitchen. It will be followed by either cucumbers or yellow wax beans, whichever strikes my fancy when the row is empty.

Different people connect with different parts of field work – it’s part of what makes working on a field crew so interesting. I’ve worked with people who dream all winter of transplanting. I’m not one of them. It’s not in my top three, it’s not in my top ten. It’s something I do because in order to harvest, which I love and could do all day, I have to get out there and plant. Non-negotiable.

I have five or so rows – about a quarter of my field space at the bakehouse – under plastic mulch. Burying plastic mulch by hand is pretty bad. I always feel like an ant while i’m doing it, I don’t know why. I think it’s worth it – the mulch conserves soar heat and soil moisture, and heat-loving crops like tomatoes, peppers, and summer squash do much better in a bed of it, especially in our climate. And looking the the completed row is pretty great. But if i ever hit the big time, i’m buying a mulch laying implement for my little tiller, post haste. that’ll be the day my friends. that’ll be the day.

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