dreams and doings of a young farmer

On Sunday night, the big freeze finally arrived in Homestead. After a long and frigid day at market, Jamie and I took shelter for the evening at the local Cracker Barrel. As my friend Chelsea put it, you know you’re in a bad way when you’re digging the local Cracker Barrel. I was more than digging it. I was loving it. The country ham. The curiously uniform cubes of breaded fried okra, with their slimy seedy insides. Whatever. Bring it. Just let me defrost my toes for a while.

After dinner we rocketed from the truck straight into our down sleeping bags, armed with hot water bottles. And while we slept, the frost fell. I woke around 7 am to glitter on the grass.

The whole Redlands area got it bad. All down Bauer and Krome, fields of bush beans and tomatoes look crispy and dark, fried by the cold. Muriel said that one of our neighbors appeared to have had some success with covering his young tomato plants with empty nursery pots - thousands of them. But for the most part, the fields are fried.

At Bee Heaven, the pole beans look the worst. It’s a downer. We only got a week or two of harvesting in, and most varieties had yet to really hit their stride.

Can they bounce back? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m curious to see how other local growers roll with the punches. Are they going to till in all in and start over? Is the season too far along for that? Today I saw tractors out spraying on my way to the craft store - Margie is one of the few organic growers in the area, and most spray a hard core herbicide on crop residues before they till them in. I’m not even a chemical phobe, per say, but I’ll usually roll up the windows on the truck as a I drive by one of those rigs. It’s incredible the effect the herbicide has - overnight it looks like someone went in the fields with a blowtorch, everything crumpled and brown.

But finally, after over a week of frigid nights, the big freeze seems to be abating. Tomorrow, the row cover comes off, and we can see who’s still standing.

So apparently you can eat these things. They’re on my ever-increasing list of South Florida edibles I’ve been meaning to try. Thus far, I’ve been taking the easy way out and just eating the bananas, which are unreal.

On this bunch, you can see where I’ve been snacking. The bananas are small, maybe 1/3 the length of supermarket bananas, and they’re plumper, less tapered. The taste is sweeter and smoother, a little sticky even, less soft and starchy. I’m basically addicted. Every few days I do a walk-through of the farm, looking for bunches that are filling out and beginning to show color. At that point we bring them under the eaves of the barn and hang them, to keep the local wildlife (particularly fire ants) from joining in the feast.

Yesterday I bought a bunch of these bananas at the farmers market in Pinecrest, but when I tried one they weren’t the same - they tasted like the supermarket. Then I spotted the little sticker. Columbia. Not the town. Not the university. The country. In South America.

That’s one of the frustrating things I’ve noticed about farmers markets in Southern Florida. A lot of them do not have strong vendor regulations. Wholesalers can come in, put their non-organic globally sourced produce in quaint wooden crates under a colorful shade tent, sell their wares at a decent mark-up, and walk away. It’s frustrating, because they undercut the local growers on prices and mislead the people who visit the farmers market. I wouldn’t buy those bananas in the supermarket. At the farmers market, I thought I was buying something different, when in fact that bunch probably came out of the same South American shipping container as those on the shelves at the local Publix. And now I’m the ambivalent owner of a $1.50 bunch of mealy, unappetizing bananas. But now that farmers markets are growing in popularity and profitability, I guess it is to be expected that the wholesalers will be finding ways to get in on the game.

Jamie and I spent the afternoon on Thursday cutting up tropical fruit to put in the dehydrator - carambolas, black sapote, passionfruit - Margie’s “fruits of summer” mix. Cute, right? Yes. But perhaps much better in the heat. Today, our fingers got so cold while cutting the slippery chilled fruit that we made a little warm tea bath for finger dipping, and would periodically leave our station to stand hunched over the humming dehydrator, frozen hands pressed against the warm metal shell.

In fact, we’ve been pretty cold all week down here, waddling around the farm in hats and mittens and many layers of shirts and pants. At night, we make mad soup and hang around the fire pit at night, burning old pallets and bean crates and talking
about the cold. This ain’t supposed to happen in southern florida. I am from the north, I understand the winter, but I left my down jacket and insulated overalls at home. This is, after all, the land of alligators and palm trees. Margie says it’s the cold snap of the
decade. I believe it.

From the roof of the box truck, looking out over the neighbor’s avocado grove, 5:50 pm.

Maybe in Southern Florida this isn’t that miraculous, but today, when Gus gave us a tour over at Paradise Farm, I picked a pomegranate straight off a tree. To me, this was a major event. Honestly, embarrassingly, I didn’t even know that pomegranates grew on trees. Jaimie and I hopped over to it like kids in a candy store.

It didn’t look like the ones you get in the grocery store. It was small, the skin spotty and half green. It was already splitting open, the gaping seams revealing the seeds inside, which weren’t entirely red, but half white. They still tasted good. They tasted great, actually. I broke it into chunks and we all continued on the walk, leaving a trail of peels and seeds in our wake.

I still love the North. I can’t wait to go back in the spring. I can’t imagine calling anywhere else home. But I’m getting really spoiled with this whole pick-tangerines-on-the-way-to-the-bathroom thing I’ve got going here. I wish I could take that with me.

There is in fact a town in Florida, optimistically named Frostproof. Unsurprisingly, they grow a lot of citrus in Frostproof.

Florida growers gamble with the weather every year. Much of what can be cultivated profitably here in the winter (tree fruit, tomatoes) can also be killed by frost. And even here in Homestead, which is about as far south as it gets, frost happens. Not often, but it happens.

Most commercial growers just turn on the irrigation and pray when the temperatures dip. The water encourages the ground to release radiative heat, which is sometimes enough to protect the crop. Bee Heaven Farm is small enough, and the crops valuable enough (Margie gets $5.50 a pound for heirloom tomatoes, which is more than I get on the Vineyard), that we covered all the beans and tomatoes with row cover. It is a spun breathable polymer that helps insulate the plants and provides a few crucial degrees of protection. Right now the farm looks like some sort of weird art installation, cross-hatched by long white sheets on the trellises.

Temperatures are supposed to be low all week. It didn’t freeze last night, but sleeping in the drafty barn it felt pretty damn cold. We’ll see what happens.

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.