The Wisdom of the Radish (14 page)

Beets, beans, potatoes, and tomatoes: the farm was starting to take shape.

We decided to prune the vines, another point of debate in the tomato world. We'd trim off the runners, shoots that sprout between forks in the vine, effectively channeling more of the plant's energy into producing fruit rather than bushy foliage. Is trimming runners worth the effort? Some farmers say no, others yes. Pruned plants can tower overhead, tied up to six- or even eight-foot wooden stakes, while unpruned plants tend to be shorter and bushier. The answer to the pruning debate often depends on scale. We decided to prune because we had only eighty plants, all of which were indeterminate, meaning they'd produce fruit continuously for the duration of the season. (Determinate plants set fruit all at once, so there's little sense in pruning them.) While most large-scale commercial tomato farms grow determinate tomatoes—allowing
harvesting machines to come through and essentially rip out the entire plant while pulling the fruit—we preferred plants that would keep on giving week after week.

Correction: We preferred plants that
should
keep on giving week after week.

After dutifully amending the soil, carefully transplanting the tomato starts, pruning all runners, and religiously watering the plants, you'd think the tomato plants might consent to setting fruit. Instead, several decided to protest, and showed their dissatisfaction by refusing to grow, allowing their leaves to curl and shrivel, or donning an odd spotted motif. When that happens, gardening books told us, the dutiful gardener must rip out the affected plants and burn them lest his whole field become contaminated. Oh, and we couldn't replant tomatoes in those fields for two to three years.

There's a reason large-scale commercial operations don't tend to grow heirloom tomatoes. Namely, heirloom tomatoes can be overly sensitive to insect-borne diseases like spotted wilt virus, mosaic virus, bacterial canker, septoria leaf spot, grey leaf spot, bacterial speck, bacterial spot, or syringae leaf spot. (They also crack open easily on the vine, and their irregular shapes and sizes make it tough to pack them efficiently by the tens of thousands.)

And unlike large-scale commercial operations, which harvest their tomatoes while they're still green and hard, ripening them through a complicated process using special hormonetriggering gasses, we'd wait to harvest our tomatoes until they were ready to eat. We'd be trucking them only five minutes down the road, after all. And vine-ripened fruit has a balanced blend of sugar and acid that is unparalleled: one reason why people shop at the farmers' market in the first place. Now, if only the vines would stay alive long enough to ripen the fruit.

Chapter 5:

 

 

 

 

 

Scrawny seedlings had come into their own. No longer tentative, sprawling squash plants, bushy tomatoes, and bean hedges debuted with confidence, crowding out the weeds with their bright green gowns. Paparazzi bees swarmed the orange squash blossoms. The Patch was no longer a swath of dirt stitched with occasional green thread; it had become a bolt of rich green fabric ribbed by narrow dirt paths. We were over an acre now, which definitely pushed us past the garden category. At some point we blinked, and in that split second the farm assumed an air of ramshackle legitimacy. Small, none of the rows precisely straight, but prolific. Our series of screw-ups—dead seedlings, insect massacres, chicken funerals—was a distant dream. I wished it had been more gradual, that I could have built up slowly to the climax. But the transition was sudden. One day we were fretting over the loss of a squash plant that fell victim to a gopher;
the next, we were fielding a deluge. Hope and aspiration were replaced by the physical reality of constant harvest.

So this was what it felt like to be a farmer.

The night was warm. My knuckles itched. My forearms, ankles, calves, and shins itched. My palms itched—not that it meant, as legend dictates, that I'd be coming into money anytime soon. (Summer squash—the root of this itch—fetches two dollars per pound at most.)

As far as I could tell, to feel like a farmer was to feel consistently uncomfortable. And to look like a farmer at locations other than the farmers' market made other people uncomfortable, too. Overalls and a straw hat do not a farmer make: squash rash, cracked knuckles, and stained hands do.

Over the course of the season, different crops had modified my body. My skin revealed the most visible changes. The contact dermatitis that appeared like clockwork on Tuesdays and Fridays—harvest days—was courtesy of our squash plants. I couldn't bring myself to don long sleeves and pants in 100-degree weather, so I suffered the consequences of exposing my body's largest organ to the ravenous
Cucurbita pepo
. Tender squash fruits grow at the heart of the plant, sometimes several feet inside the monster's outermost reaches. These beasts belong in Jurassic Park: deep, fern-green foliage; long, thick stalks; massive leaves bigger than my head. And all of it festooned with tiny, sharp-toothed thorns—thorns that never quite puncture the skin, but irritate it enough to leave the unhappy harvester itching and scratching as she lies in bed at night, waiting for sleep to come. So my arms and legs were always a little red and chafed. The squash rash lasted about a day, and the late-night rake marks from my fingernails lasted the next two, until it was time to harvest squash again.

Then there were my hands, which would make a manicurist weep. I was proud of my shovel-ready palms, thickly callused in all the right places. I could, however, have done without the cracked fingertips and knuckles, and the splinters that were always appearing and disappearing and trading places with the inevitable abrasions and cuts.

I couldn't pin the cracks on any one plant—it was just a general weathering, exposure to the wind and sun and earth, that dried out my fingers and left them canyoned. But for the stains that reached from my fingertips to my palms, I could thank our earliest nightshades, the cherry tomatoes. If you've ever picked a few tomatoes off the vine, you might have noticed that your fingertips developed a slight green-brown tinge to them. If you pick a few hundred, that tinge turns into an inky brown encasement that stubbornly resists rinsing. With a lot of soap and scrubbing, you can dilute the stuff sufficiently to send some of it swirling down the drain. It is difficult enough to remove the substance from smooth skin, but I found that getting it out of the cracks was impossible.

Which is why my hands drew reactions at the grocery check stand: each imperfection was inked, the rough nails and split skin and abrasions and splinter-holes clearly outlined by the tomatoes' brown stains. When I placed my cereal boxes on the conveyor belt, those in line behind me must have wondered why hand soap, scrub brushes, and lotion weren't heaped in my shopping cart. But I had stopped striving for manicured hands. Mine were a work of art in their own right, a map of hard work and harvest.

The rest of my body was changing, too. I couldn't run a marathon or swim a mile. I couldn't remember the last time I exercised for the sake of exercising. Moving muscles for their own sake seemed silly when there were other things they
should be doing, like weeding beets. There were always beets to weed. But the work-exercise was imperfect, unbalanced, turning me prematurely into an old fart. My breaking back, my sore neck, my stiff knees!

And always, my body was slightly warm with exhaustion, so bone-tired when it hit the bed that sleep should have been easy, if it weren't for the hot night and the ache in the back and the itching and Emmett tossing and turning beside me, making it hard to settle down and find that perfect place where everything could just sink toward the floor and stop work at last.

 

 

 

NPR was on the radio, a comforting drone. As with so many market mornings, I wasn't sure exactly when I'd fallen asleep, nor was I entirely clear on why I was here in the passenger seat, pulling on socks as we drove down the dirt road to the field before the full moon had set. Emmett was just starting to pull the truck onto the shoulder that separated the road from the tomato rows when he slammed on the brake. My head, which had been leaning against the window, banged against the overhead handle.

“What the hell?”

The truck stopped and I swung open my door to the sound of a rushing river. In the glow of the headlights, I could see an island surrounded by muddy water. Beyond the island, a small sea lapped at the edges of the tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash. On the island perched a plastic chair, and to the plastic chair was taped a hand-written note.

My mind was as muddy as the water, and as the water sought the lowest point, so did my thoughts. We had left this place less than twelve hours ago, and what the fuck?

What the fuck.

Seriously, what the fuck?

The note was difficult to read, given the lack of light and our inability to get within ten feet of it. This was the middle of summer, which typically meant four months without rain, so we didn't exactly bring waders. Eventually I was able to recognize enough of the letters that I could fill in the ones I couldn't read like a crossword puzzle. The note, in Emmett's dad's handwriting, said something about sorry for backing into the pipe, it was late and dark, and that he'd be back in the morning to fix it.

Ah yes, the pipe. It clearly needed fixing, seeing as how it was cracked in half and gushing water like a ruptured fire hydrant, threatening to drown our newly productive summer crops.

“Well, it probably wasn't surrounded by water when he left the note there,” I said slowly, trying to untangle the strange scene before me. Blinking repeatedly seemed to help. “That wouldn't make sense. He wouldn't wade out into the water to leave a note, right?”

Emmett walked along the mud-water shore before digging his cell phone out of his pocket and making the call.

“It's still going?” I heard a groan emanate from the cell phone; it matched my mood. “I shut off the main water valve last night. It should have stopped.”

This is what it feels like to be a farmer: it feels like things are always going wrong, and that if only Equipment X wouldn't leak/break/rust/rupture/spontaneously discombobulate, life would be so much easier and the farm so much more productive.

The phone conversation droned on. I blew on my fingers, which had gotten cold, and watched the water rush out of
the broken pipe. I found it sort of soothing, like watching a fire dance.

I heard a snap: Emmett closing his phone. “My dad's going to try and figure out why it didn't stop, and then try and fix it,” Emmett said. We both eyed the geyser and the rising miniature lake that was a foot away from our precious Armenian cucumbers. “Hopefully it won't take too long.”

Emmett headed to the back of the truck to pull out the harvest bins. For now we'd just circumnavigate Foggy River Lake to reach the vegetables. Flood or no, it was Saturday morning: time to harvest and hurry to the Healdsburg farmers' market.

 

 

 

August summer mornings at the market were so bright they were almost cartoonlike. The squash, more than anything, was to blame: the Martha Stewart palette of daffodil yellows and lime greens seemed more suited to paint swatches than produce. I admit, Emmett and I had become a bit obsessed over the display aspect of the market. The farmers' market adage—pile 'em high and watch 'em fly—had given way to a more cultured approach. Pile them high in artfully arranged piles, the location of which were determined based on shade requirements, color, shape, and texture (in that order); accent as needed with baskets, tablecloths, and simple handwritten price signs; rearrange at least twice until perfect; then, watch them fly.

The rat's nest of crookneck squash, butter-yellow necks twined together, roiled next to a pile of staid, dark green Romanesco zucchini stacked neatly in rows. On the other side of the Romanesco, yellow zucchini, also neat. Next to
them lay the twisty, pale green Armenian cucumbers. And then the patty pans lineup: acorn-shaped or scalloped-edged, clad in lime green and evergreen and daffodil yellow. The display was all about carefully controlled chaos and a feeling of exciting, but not messy, abundance. And of course, quality counted—everything here was harvested multiple times a week to keep it pretty and petite. We weren't selling summer squash monsters, the sort that families use as car bodies in the annual farmers' market zucchini car races. We were selling young, tender squashlets—as popular parlance has it, baby squash. And like all baby foods (lettuce, arugula, bok choy, cucumbers, beets) they were highly sought after by the foodie crowd.

The public's penchant for all things baby explained my rough hands and aching back: harvesting these days was constant. (And whenever we weren't harvesting, we were weeding or sowing new crops.) And we were just a small-scale farm—some would even nitpick that label and dub us market gardeners. We weren't Stetson-style ranchers with five thousand head of dusty Angus cattle destined for Fourth of July barbecues. Surveying our pretty-in-pastels display, one might fairly ask, why did my back hurt so much for something so
frou-frou
? And just who was I growing this pretty food for, anyway?

Definitely not for myself. I mean, we hadn't purchased produce from the grocery store in months, but Emmett and I weren't eating the picture-perfect market items. We ate what didn't make it to the display table: scarred zucchini, sunburned tomatoes and peppers, split cucumbers. Or we ate the deflated leftovers from the once-glorious piles at the end of the day. None of this produce, being classified as “seconds,” could be
sold at a grocery store, but it certainly tasted better than the majority of what grocery stores carry.