Can’t quite seem to stop planting! Lynn and Libby put in a last 200 or so lettuce seedlings to see how far they’ll go in fall growth. The soil is still moist an inch (2.5cm) or so down, but the surface is way DRY from a few days of sun and breeze, so we watered in these guys—the weather’s been great, sunny and warm this week…and it’s back to the hoses!
lettuce
What’s new at the farmers’ market…
Ahhh, something new on the farmers’ market stand: BEANS in three colors (we had the first green beans last week)! There’s yellow (Indy Gold), purple (Royal Burgundy), and of course, green (Jade). One way I watch the season unfold is through the debut market days for the headliner crops, the big people pleasers. Lettuce is always the first up, a hit partly because it’s the first fresh veg of the season. Then, roughly in order, there’s spinach, peas, carrots, beans, garlic, and tomatoes. Strawberries and corn are also standard hits around here, but we don’t grow berries, and when we do have corn, it’s only for CSA shares. I find it odd that these particular veggies are so generally popular. What about delicate and delicious summer squash, lightly grilled? Versatile and tasty beets, diced and broiled, or grated raw with carrots in salad? Beet greens and Swiss chard, sauteed in butter and olive oil? The list goes on and on… Just about ALL of the 20+ basic garden veggies we grow are equally great to me, but that’s not the case for most people. Curious…
Still a lot of greens…
The Friday harvest is still greens-heavy, with beet greens in several varieties leading the way. Here, as the afternoon winds down and the temperature cools, Michelle and Lynn thin the second beets planting of Scarlet Supreme, with Chioggia and Bull’s Blood off to the right. There’s also the fourth planting of all-lettuce mesclun, just cut on the far left, and in the center, Panther romaine, miraculously spared by the earwigs and in excellent shape and taste, to be cut next… Elsewhere, cauliflower, parsley, the last of the spring spinach and peas,…
Rainy day market
Rain, rain, go away… Not something you’d actually hear me say, or even think, lightly. This morning’s market didn’t quite qualify, although it rained heavily and steadily for the first three hours. Rain at the market has never been too bad for our stand, people always come out. Today, the stand set-up was still in fully compact mode, across two sawhorses instead of four, but there was a fair bit of veg, including the first 60lbs (27kg) of snap peas (Sugar Ann), around 40 broccoli, and a (relatively!) vast supply of all-lettuce mesclun, spinach (Spargo), garlic scapes (Music) and beet greens from assorted varieties. Enough to just make the minimum return from market needed at this time of year to keep this tiny farm ticking. By the end of the morning, all of the CSA pick-ups had picked up, and most of the veggies were sold out. Which is…good!
Instant farmer!
Libby’s first day on the farm: a full day in the field, plus a Big Salad lunch! There’ve been a few first-timer days this year, and a bit of a casual presentation routine has developed. Starts with a tour: “How much detail do you want?” The difference between growing more or less by hand, as we do here, and different degrees of tractor-based farming is probably the main point I try to get across. And then, it’s on to the fabulous WORK, a taste of the many tiny farming fieldwork pleasures. Today, Libby pulled weeds from carrot beds, on her own for a while, and then I joined in. Weeding carrots and tomatoes, hand-pulling and with the wheel hoe, setting up some home garden-type tomato cages, transplanting lettuce…the time flew by. Chatting is usually a big part of working in the field (with no noisy machines to get in the way): farming stuff, trading bits of personal history, and inevitably, it seems, some Bigger Topics. Today, the concept of MINDFULNESS came up and really stuck with me… And so, another fine day on the tiny farm. Libby seemed PRETTY HAPPY with it all. Cool. We’ll see her next week! :)
A simple (chicken!) sandwich
Roasted a White Rock chicken last night, today, got a Spicy Cheese Loaf from Fran, the baker beside me at the farmers’ market. (The market day went well, it was the first day of CSA shares: mesclun, spinach, radishes, garlic scapes, beet greens—it’s still early.) The chicken and the bread naturally organized themselves into a late afternoon simple sandwich…
Looking at it before the first bite, I realized that I’ve been thinking about FOOD a lot more recently. Not exactly my own diet, but on a more personal level than as a local veggie grower, probably something to do with the Endless Salad, more communal cooking and eating lately…
Part of the running stream of thought has to do with nutrition, what I know about it, how much I want to and need to explore further. I mean, do I really have any sort of basic IDEA of what to eat, beyond “lots of veggies, little meat, drink lots of water,” vague general guidelines like that? Do I NEED a plan? Should I RESEARCH? Consult with a nutritionist or a naturopathic doctor (I’ve been considering visiting an ND for an initial workup)? Sheesh, more RULES! All that is really clear is that most people around here (a “developed nation”) don’t know much practical stuff about the food they eat, me included.
The other part is about food quality, and local food. The one thing I’m quite sure of is that it feels way better to eat fresh food that you’ve grown, and to know where the rest comes from and what’s in it, and that wasn’t at all painful to discover. So, I examined this pretty local sandwich. The cheese bread listed the ingredients: flour, water, cheese, sugar, milk, vegetable oil, butter, yeast, dried chili peppers, salt. The chicken was raised here on the farm from two weeks old, fed mainly Purina (Cargill) starter and grower feed (nutritional content in percentages, contact the manufacturer for the actual INGREDIENTS), with some greens from the garden. The lettuce is from the garden. I poured on home-made vinaigrette dressing: extra virgin olive oil from Italy, pink salt from the Himalayas, fresh-ground black pepper, vinegar, Tabasco pepper sauce from…the store. The mayonnaise is from Kraft, it was in the fridge, the bottle says it’s “real.” It’s all ingredients within ingredients… I’m planning to make my own mayo, with eggs from the farm and oil from…Italy. Should I care where the flour in the bread came from? The cheese? The chili peppers? And what about the “vegetable oil,” what’s up with that? Should I make my own cheese and bake my own bread? When do I start looking around for organic chicken feed, how IMPORTANT is that, what’s the priority, how much can I afford to PAY?
I don’t have any neat point to sum up with here, I’m just being a literalist and looking at what I eat. When you start to question your basic eating habits in a very primitive way, they may not hold up to much scrutiny, and that’s unsettling. I’m curious. The story unfolds…
Slow…
When you look back at last May on this tiny farm, overall, the state of the field isn’t all that different, BUT, the really cool nights for much of the month have slowed growth noticeably. Compare the first planting of spinach today, to the near ready crop of a week earlier last season. It’s the same for mesclun, beets, and chard. Snap beans are taking forever to germinate. And so forth. We’ll definitely be going to market at least a week later with the first field spinach and lettuce. Oh well, with all of the different crops going, bad weather for some benefiting others, it’ll overall catch up and more or less even out, I’m sure. It just about always does…