dreams and doings of a young farmer

Don’t get me wrong – Bee Heaven’s stand at the Pinecrest market is always pretty nice. But this past weekend, it was a new level of abundance.

In the picture above, Margie is holding a slice of calabaza. The squash itself was huge, pushing thirty pounds. You can see a picture of it on the farm scale over at Marion’s blog, redland rambles.

This was also the first week we brought carrots to market, riotously colored in yellow, white, purple, and orange. The weirdo colored ones are growing quite well – surprisingly, the white ones lead the pack in terms of size and vigor. I’ve never seen the specialty carrots do that well up north. I was the lucky one who got the harvest task of collecting and washing them. There’s nothing quite like pulling a nice carrot. The firm tug, the dramatic reveal, a blip of color in a sea of green fronds. Especially gratifying after many hours of tedious weeding in December.

There was lots of fruit as well – perfectly ripe canistels, green baskets of strawberries, a wooden box of passionfruit, soft black sapote. It’s a good thing lots of people showed up. Sunday is a long day, and I was not keen on the idea of loading full crates back onto the box truck in the afternoon.

It was also the first market of the season that involved a serious amount of heirloom tomatoes, and despite all the other flashy offerings the tomatoes were probably the darling of the ball. Not shocking. I guess there’s nothing quite like a real tomato, especially when it’s been a while since you had your last one.

Dearest reader-

You may be thinking to yourself-

What the hell is that?

It is not the inner workings of a songbird or cotton rat.

It is not evidence of life beyond our blue planet.

It is a fruit – the mamey sapote.

Or, as Jamie dubbed it, “fetus fruit.”

They typically come into season sometime in March in Southern Florida, and are very valuable, in large part because of the time commitment for each crop. From flower to fruit, a mamey sapote requires between 13 and 24 months. For every two harvests a starfruit grower gathers, the sapote farmer may get only one.

The skin of the fruit is positively homely, a rough sandpaper brown. The flesh, on the other hand, is a revelation – creamy and sweet, with a texture something like an avocado, with the most incredible gradations of orange, red, and salmon pink.

The slices reminded me of raw tuna sashimi.

We processed a whole box on Saturday for dehydrating. Margie’s friend Sal brought them over. They, too, were a casualty of the frost, dropped from the trees before fully mature.

“Don’t sell these fresh,” he warned. “They’re not right.”

He had a point – they weren’t perfect. But they were still incredibly delicious.

Remember the nighttime visitor? He froze. I found him out by homer’s hutch, on the limestone gravel. In the palm of my hand, he was light as a feather, stiff as a board, toe pads like brittle paper over his heart.  I showed him around to the rest of the crew, but they didn’t seem to find his corpse so moving.  I put him under the pidgeon peas, and in the morning he was gone.

RIP little man.

Last week one of Margie’s partner farms sent us the biggest collard greens I have ever seen. Anyone seen that movie Avatar? It looked like something out of that – cartoon tropical. We sold a fair amount of them at market, but most people seemed rather intimidated. Honestly, I can’t blame them. They’d take up a whole shelf in the fridge, if they even fit. I like greens and everything, but I don’t own a pot big enough to take those on.

Muriel spotted this little guy on the floor of the barn the other night. Frogs bring out the five year old in me, and I scooped him up to check out his little buggy eyes, his sweet toe pads. After parading him around for the farm crew I plopped him outside under the pidgeon peas, and lo and behold, he was back in the barn five minutes later. I have no idea why our cold cement floors were so appealing. Maybe he was in the market for a snack.

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.