The Wisdom of the Radish (27 page)

There were other, less tangible qualities about my produce, too. Shopping at the farmers' market is a feel-good experience. I'm not ashamed to admit it: there's absolutely a sense of charity, of supporting local farmers, in addition to the simple pleasure of attending a market—the music of the hometown band, the heaps of colorful vegetables, the artisanal cheeses, the aromatic bouquets of local flowers, the farmers who are
willing to troubleshoot your backyard garden troubles or offer you tips for cooking summer squash. Many locals value this experience and the certainty that the produce they purchase is locally grown, knowing that the money they spend is going to a good cause. And for many customers, shopping at the farmers' market becomes a social outing and even something of a status symbol, a place to see and be seen by friends.

Even fuzzier, we already had customers who preferred our produce to that of other stands—or preferred us, or perhaps preferred our story of being young farmers just starting out. Part of that might have related to our “brand”—the real-life farm-startup adventures with which we regaled customers—but part of it did relate to tangible quality (and extra work on our part). We plucked our radishes at the peak of ripeness to ensure tender, crunchy roots, and we offered a variety of heritage radishes that customers couldn't get in the grocery store. Long, slender, blushing French Breakfast bunches were heaped next to the pert, festive little bouquets of white, lavender, and mauve Easter Egg bulbs. So perhaps a radish wasn't just a radish: there were radishes, and then there were fresh, local, heritage radishes, harvested when young and tender by young and tender (and slightly foolish) farmers.

It was about this time—mulling cost over in my head and trying to justify our prices—that I started to feel guilty again. Like I was part of some sort of liberal farming elite. Here I was, hoping to feed my local community—but in order to make money, I was charging folks a premium for local produce.

Who was, and wasn't, willing or able to pay that premium? Mirroring the different value systems were different types of customers. There were those who treated the farmers' market like a flea market, hunting around for the best prices. Then there were those who just walked around smiling, immersed
in the experience, and bought whatever produce struck their fancy, from whatever farmer they happened to come across. And of course, there were the foodies, who usually had a farmer they'd frequented for years—and loved their piatta onions, or butter leaf lettuce, and bought it every week. But this sort also sometimes ventured around the market to find the best produce available, price be damned.

The final sort of customer was the bearer of the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) certificate, who zeroed in on stands—like ours—that had posted WIC signs. They were limited to the stands that were enrolled in WIC—a government program that gives low-income mothers certificates with which to purchase fresh food at farmers' markets. Farmers weren't allowed to give them cash change for the certificates, so we'd throw in more produce until the total came to an even dollar amount.

Beets (taxonomically identical to chard) proved to be a good winter crop. They grew slowly but survived the frost.

So what was the optimal price for a radish? It depends on which customer you ask or which farmer. Should it be enough for me to live comfortably or enough for a working single mother to purchase it? Should there be a sliding scale? Some people consider the dollar, bandied about in a free market, to be their sole value system. But we don't provide emergency services only to those who can pay for them. People who can afford emergency rooms, firefighters, and policemen subsidize these services for those who can't. Society realizes that some commodities are life giving and therefore priceless. And what is food if not life?

Emmett was handling a transaction with a family friend, and another customer walked up. “How much for a bunch of radishes?” she asked me, peering at the price list to try to find it.

I sized her up: a sweatpants-wearing, toddler-toting mom. “For you,” I say, “$1.25.”

“I'll take a bunch,” she said, “I love them with butter.”

 

 

 

Radishes survived long after fall's vibrancy had passed. Peppers and tomatoes had withered to the ground; corn leaves were wispy brown paper flecked with mildew, any abandoned ears shriveled and fuzzy inside. In the field, the radishes remained, accompanied by other survivors like kale, chard, beets, and broccoli. Frost tolerant, these lucky few would last the California winter into the next spring.

The local farmers' markets had closed with the proverbial whimper. In the last weeks, they had been more craft showcases than a place to purchase local produce. Even the farmers turned artisan, peddling garlic braids and handmade wreaths, wool blankets from their sheep, shellacked gourds
cut into birdhouses. Most customers were more excited to start Christmas shopping than to start eating lots of kale, and who could blame them? To tell you the truth, we were excited to set our sights on Christmas and bid the farmers' market farewell. 'Tis the season, and all that. We were tired and needed the rest. We were ready to have a few months where we could be normal people, sleeping in on the weekends, rising after the sun does, going outside on our own terms instead of the market's.

With the farmers' markets closed, we were selling produce to customers whose e-mail addresses we'd gathered in the last few weeks before the market's demise. We'd e-mail out the week's availability to these customers, and they'd e-mail in their order. We harvested for them and left the produce in the basement with an honor system jar for collecting money.

It was a Sunday, and Emmett asked me to help him harvest an order for the Green Grocer (a local grocery store that carries only foods produced within 250 miles of the store's geographic location). They'd requested our radishes and arugula, so on a frosty, foggy winter morning, we drove down to the field. I was bundled up in jeans, a pajama shirt I'd worn to bed, and two jackets, a scarf wrapped around my neck and a wool hat pulled down over my unwashed hair. Emmett asked if I'd mind harvesting the radishes.

When it's cold and wet, I much prefer yanking out roots to snipping salad greens, so I began busily pulling up French Breakfast radishes, selectively harvesting only the largest specimens. As I moved down the row, Emmett called out and suggested that I start at the base of the row and harvest every single plant. “We have a lot of radishes ready right now,” he said, “so let's just pull them all.”

Emmett's always trying to tell me how to harvest. Really, who crowned him the farmer king? Why can't he just let me do things
my
way?

I good-naturedly grumbled, but left it at that. Opting out of the argument rather than into it (a rare move on my part), I relented and restarted the harvest at the beginning of the row. As I pulled out the radishes with my right hand, I transferred them into a large bunch in my left, holding them by the greens for easy washing later. A flash caught my eye, and I noticed something strange around one of the bulbs.

“Um,” I said aloud, “There's a ring on this one.”

As I was trying to figure out how a ring had ended up on a radish—and starting to realize that perhaps it wasn't accidental—Emmett materialized by my side and asked me to marry him. I was unshowered, wearing clothes I'd slept in, with hands dirty from harvesting radishes. I said yes, or something like it. He picked me up in a great bear hug and spun me around the field. Everything so barren and empty, just the four rows of overwintering crops—but already tiny green stitches in the space that was ploughed under, wild mustard greens and bell beans sprouting that would be hip-high by spring.

He put me back down. In the gray world, we kissed for a while.

“Really?” I asked. “What made you decide now was the right time?”

That day, Emmett explained, was the four-year anniversary of our first date. There was no Green Grocer order; Emmett had made it up. And he'd placed the ring on a radish seedling three weeks earlier so the plant would grow up around the ring, holding it in place when I pulled it.

And the timing—well, it just felt right. He was ready. I always had been.

The next few hours before we started making the requisite phone calls were ours. We decided to celebrate by taking the rest of the day off. This was new territory, but we spent the afternoon at a familiar place: the fish hatchery at Lake Sonoma. We'd been there many times before, and had a knack for visiting when the museum and hatchery were closed and there was absolutely nothing to see. But it was winter, the river was high, and the salmon were starting to move. We stood on a bridge, lording over the dark pools of the fish ladder, squinting to try and catch sight of a salmon swirling in the current. After a while, we walked through the hatchery proper, out back to the blue grow-out tanks full of young salmon that would be released later in the season.

A river otter slipped into one of the tanks, nabbed his pescetarian lunch, and, fish in mouth, shimmied out of the tank. He waltzed across the sidewalk and scampered back behind a “Wilderness Rehabilitation—Keep Out” sign. On the cement he left behind perfect wet paw-prints and a telltale dotted line of drops from the fish's tail.

A lucky otter, I thought, to have his meal contained in those convenient tanks. And then I realized that we weren't so different. Like the otter, we could dash across the road any time we wanted and find ourselves surrounded by bounty—before disappearing back into our native habitat, our cozy little place that was starting to feel like home. Of course, his miracle was in the move from hunter-gatherer to inadvertent farmer. His food supply was secure, as long as his humans continued to tend it. My miracle was in my move backward—from a macaroni-and-cheese punk rocker who uprooted strawberries, to a woman who could coax green things out of the ground
and onto dozens of families' plates. A woman who just might end up a farmer's wife, after all.

I looked from where the otter had vanished to the humble silver ring on my hand. It didn't fit on my ring finger (which Emmett had guessed to be the size of his pinky), so it was on my middle finger instead. The Starbucks woman, the WIC mothers, the foodies: concepts of cost melted away. That particular radish? This simple ring? Some things are beyond concepts of price.

Chapter 12:

 

 

 

 

 

No sooner had we gotten engaged than I set out to convince Emmett that we should have kids.
Seven of them. My argument went something like this.

Vegetables: check. Fruits: check. Roots, tubers, bulbs: check, check, check. Eggs: check. And yet didn't it seem like our farm was missing something? Our house was surrounded by grassy hillsides that had been grazed down by the rabid cows that had nearly crushed me in an attempt to wrest corn stalks from the truck. At first, I thought that maybe it was sheep we were lacking. Or perhaps a sheepdog.

Sheep, I reasoned, would be relatively low maintenance. They'd keep the grasses neatly trimmed. The breed I selected—Babydoll Southdowns, a heritage English breed that is petite enough to weed beneath grapevines—was in hot demand in the Sonoma wine country, and the lambs sold for as much as $750 per animal. I could sell any lambs that were born and make a little money off my livestock, which would also function as something for a dog to herd.

Actually, to be perfectly honest, I can't remember which argument I took. I wanted a herding dog, so we needed sheep for her—or I wanted sheep, so I needed a herding dog. I may have taken different tactics at different times. Regardless, the growing menagerie somehow provided justification for purchasing itself and the sheep and Aussie puppy arrived on our farm around the same time.

The failed sheep experiment began with a breeding trio of Babydoll Southdown sheep inelegantly stuffed in the back of our pickup truck, to the great delight of our wiggly puppy, Kea, perched between us on the armrest. Three sheep: one male, Teddy, who would turn out to be further proof of my male livestock hypothesis; and two pleasantly timid ewes. I say “pleasantly timid” because the only thing worse than a stupid, fearful sheep is a stupid, aggressive sheep. Or, as Monty Python put it, “That most dangerous of animals ... the clever sheep.”

At first I was awed by the sight of the sheep grazing the hillside behind our house. How perfectly pastoral, I thought. Boy, were we real farmers, or what? Even Emmett agreed that the sight of the sheep wandering through tall grasses at sunset was a little slice of heaven. The bleating was pleasant (from far away, anyway), a soothing sound straight out of Wordsworth's hills.