The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  That sort of stubbornness gives me hope.

  Still, at first, the idea of our own farm was the kind of thing Emmett and I only whispered about in bed at night, half-afraid that it would sound too romantic in daylight, too ridiculous if we uttered it while wearing clothes like the responsible people we pretend to be. I should note that at the time of said whispering, our bed was actually a futon mattress in the back of a 1989 Toyota minivan, and I had only two pairs of pants and one rainbow-striped skirt to my name. Over time, though, even in broad daylight, the idea started sounding—well, not exactly smart per se, but not exactly crazy either. With a little bit of help and a lot of luck, it just might work.

  Emmett’s father is in the grape-growing business, and he had recently ripped out two acres of old vines. The space wouldn’t be replanted until spring, and in the meantime he offered it to us. We could test-drive the organic farming life for a year, before making a long-term commitment. In our spare time, Emmett could help out his dad and I could write. (Nobody—except maybe Emmett’s dad, who was too kind to mention it—realized then how little free time the farm would leave us.)

  After the idea solidified sufficiently to be spoken aloud during daylight hours, we began mentioning it to family and friends. Although I braced for disapproval (“You went to grad school for what? I thought you were going to be a journalist!”), I was met with a host of well-wishers: My hippie grandmother dubbed starting a farm “a fan-fucking-tastic idea.” A neighbor offered an environmentalist’s stamp of approval, saying, “This town needs more people like you—ready to work out the best local food production system.” Other friends, getting a bit ahead of themselves, vowed to come visit for our glorious end-of-season harvest party. Even my mother, who approves of very little, gave her blessing—after encouraging me to buy a farm with a guesthouse so she could visit. Oh, and by the sea, so her allergies wouldn’t act up.

  Armed with good intentions, two master’s degrees in environmental science, and what at the time seemed like considerable farming experience (one year organizing educational food gardens, three months of a work-trade program, and four months of working on farms in exchange for room and board), Emmett and I set off to start our own farm. We didn’t exactly end up with an ocean view, and our farm income won’t afford a guesthouse anytime soon. (Actually, we’re more or less living in Emmett’s parents’ guesthouse.)

  Broadly speaking, the farm nestles on the floodplain of a small valley, surrounded by rolling, oak-spattered hills and Northern California’s coniferous coastal range. On the outskirts of Healdsburg, Foggy River Farm’s approximately two acres more specifically sit between Eastside Road and the Russian River. (When we named it, we didn’t know it was going to be one of the hottest summers on record—and that smoke, not fog, would most frequently cloud our sky.) The farm is framed by Emmett’s family’s vineyard, and if you walk up the hill from Eastside Road a little, you just might be able to squint and make out one higgledy-piggledy postage stamp of staccato vegetation next to three skyscraping poplar trees in the midst of hundreds of acres of clean, continuous, perfectly parallel grape rows. That’s us.

  And this is our story.

  Chapter 1:

  BABY GREENS

  Lettuces

  It was 10:00 a.m., and I was not a born salesman.

  Standing behind a rickety card table, I found myself wishing for a hole to crawl into—preferably one with a comforter, pillow, and foam-topped mattress. Or perhaps a giant tractor beam could split the sky and I’d find myself transported to a Hawaiian beach, or at the very least to Berkeley, where rumor has it the customers actually value hole-pocked produce. (They consider it proof-positive of organic growing practices, as well as evidence of superior flavor: if the bugs like it, it must be good.) There, my bumbling excuse for a farm would be prized and coddled—not given the stink eye by customers who immediately bustled on to bigger and brighter stands.

  We were tucked at the end of a long farmers’ market row in Windsor, California, standing behind a borrowed card table covered with a borrowed checkered tablecloth beneath a borrowed cream canvas umbrella. On the table rested a few clear plastic bags filled with two different types of mixed greens.

  The bags we purchased by the thousands for fifty dollars at Reynold’s Packaging. The greens, I regret to say, we grew.

  “Good morning,” I said, fluffing the top leaves on a bag of baby brassica mix. I couldn’t hide the holes that peppered the leaves’ surfaces, thousands of tiny imperfections. But damned if I couldn’t make the bag look pert.

  The customer, a middle-aged woman in gray sweats, gave the hole-pocked greens a sidelong glance and kept walking.

  Surveying my meager display of bagged lettuces and rubbing my lower back, where a low constant throb had set up shop for the past few weeks, I was reminded that it wasn’t just my salesmanship skills that were lacking.

  I wasn’t a born farmer, either.

  I grew up in suburban San Diego, culturally (if not literally) as far away from a farm as an American can get. Neither of my parents were hippies, and neither of them were in the habit of cooking vegetables or dishing up fresh fruit for supper, let alone growing such items. My mother, who became a single working mom when I was sixteen, grew things that were mildly attractive and difficult to kill, like bougainvillea and geraniums. She wouldn’t even dabble in roses: too much pruning.

  Until very recently, my entire agricultural heritage could have been summarized in a couple of portentous anecdotes. My grandmother was the closest thing I had to an agricultural influence. She grew parsley and carrots in terra cotta pots on the deck of her second-story apartment. Although I do remember munching impossibly tiny carrots, which somehow never got bigger than my pinky finger despite being planted in Miracle-Gro potting soil and enhanced with Nutri-Grow fertilizer, those memories are largely dwarfed by the overwhelming disgust I felt at the invasion of snails, and my grandmother’s consequent joy in their demise.

  Sometimes she’d scatter the pots with snail poison pellets; other times she’d go on a gleeful rampage, following the gleaming snail trails to their source. “Be free!” she’d say, chucking the unlucky invader over the deck railing to crunch on the alley below.

  Then, when I was in high school, my mother put on a family gardening day. She bought gardening tools for everyone and brought home plenty of root-bound six-pack flowers from a local nursery. The plan was to beautify the narrow side yard of the house.

  While digging holes to transplant geraniums, I uncovered an earthworm, which convulsed and contorted itself in a rather terrifying way. I screamed and hurled my shiny new trowel at it. Judging by my brother’s shouting (“Jesus! You idiot! You nearly cut off my middle fingers!”), my velocity was good but my aim left something to be desired.

  I promptly abandoned digging duty and took up weeding. After my mom chastised me for uprooting the volunteer strawberry plants (“I was in charge of weeding that patch. Did you stop to think I might have left those plants there on purpose?”), I decided I was a hopeless black thumb. I went inside to make lunch, my gardening experiment concluded presumably for the rest of my life.

  If you’d told that sixteen-year-old that, in less than ten years, she’d find herself swept up in a perilous attempt to grow things for a living, she would have rolled her eyes, swallowed her last bite of Stouffer’s microwaveable macaroni and cheese, and headed toward her room to lock the door and turn up the punk radio.

  Yet by some strange twist of fate, I had ended up here: perched behind a farmers’ market stand of my own creation, self-consciously adjusting lettuce bags and greeting potential customers. Gone was my high school society of scorn and skepticism; gone, too, the ardent intelligentsia of my undergrad and grad school years. I was no longer part of a buzzing newsroom, driven by impending deadlines and ringing phones. Around me were my new people: colleagues, competitors, and co-conspirators in the local food system. I hoped I didn’t look as out of place as I felt.

  A few min
utes after the opening of the farmers’ market, I left Emmett to tend the stand and took a stroll down the aisle to assess our competition. From previous visits, I’d gathered that there were two main categories of farmers’ marketers: the entrepreneurs, who grew efficiently and marketed themselves slickly; and the “real” farmers, who enjoyed growing their product but didn’t give a rat’s ass about selling it. They seemed to prefer the joy of complaining about lack of sales to the joy of, you know, actually selling stuff. Some farmers straddled the two categories; others were a two-part business, a terse male grower who focused entirely on the production side, and a congenial wife who lovingly arranged the produce into a customer-ready array.

  Grumpy Man, our kitty-corner neighbor, was perhaps the only person who fell purely into the rat’s ass category. As I walked past his stand, he muttered from inside his VW minivan. Later in the season, I’d catch him drinking whiskey behind his stand. And while I never caught a whiff of the potent leaf at the market, he’d openly sell opium poppies to anyone savvy enough to recognize them as such.

  Next to Grumpy Man, The Grocery Store—run by a Hmong family who carted their produce in from the Central Valley—burst with things that couldn’t possibly grow in Sonoma County. Like tomatoes, this early in the season. Gnarled ginger piled high. Not to mention thirty-five other varieties of produce. They had the whole alphabet covered, with enough quantity of each product to supply two or three Windsors—from asparagus, broccoli, chard, and daikon, to zucchini and zebra tomatoes. This stand constituted a source of resentment among the truly local farmers, and a source of delight among local consumers who were thrilled to have out-of-season produce and the feel-good buzz of shopping at the farmers’ market, too.

  A bit further down the aisle I came across the farmer version of Cindy Crawford. Chatty, blonde, beautiful, and surrounded by a gaggle of gawking customers, she was passing out plastic bags hand over fist to customers snapping up pounds of asparagus. I immediately placed her in the first category: someone with marketing savvy who probably hired a crew of workers to grow her produce. (Later, I’d learn that Farmer Cindy actually cultivated two acres all by herself, grew the best corn in the county, fed a nearby prison with her produce, and was a practicing CPA with a master’s degree in accounting to boot. So much for first impressions.)

  These were my new people: vendors who stood alone behind tables brimming with strawberries, nectarines, garlic, onions, potatoes, chard, kale, and flowers. I trotted back to our stand and slipped behind the card table.

  “Goooood morning,” I tried again, flashing my best friendly farm-girl smile. Come on, people, I’m wearing overalls.

  I glanced back toward Farmer Cindy’s bounty and winced at the comparison. Somehow, it had taken two people to produce our meager showing of battle-weary greens. Other ingredients that went into this sorry display: six hundred hours of labor, $1,260.52 in savings, and one and a half disasters.

  I had received news of the first disaster over the phone: the seedlings were dead.

  “Which seedlings?” I’d demanded.

  “All of them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Well, most of them, anyway.”

  At the time, I was sprawled across a bed, cradling a phone to my ear. Since I was about to move to Emmett’s hometown for the foreseeable future, I’d been spending two weeks with my family down south while Emmett broke ground on our farming enterprise up north.

  In early May, the California summer was in full swing. I’d join Emmett in another seven days. In the meantime—when he wasn’t sowing seeds, laying irrigation pipe, hunting for manure, or double-digging rows in the field—he’d been keeping me updated with daily farm progress reports via phone.

  “What do you mean, most of them?” My mind raced trying to calculate the potential cost of this loss.

  From the start, I’d been a strong supporter of extravagant seed purchasing. Part of our business plan was to offer a wide variety of heirloom produce—the sort you can admire for its unusual beauty, enjoy for its unique flavor, and feel good about, too, knowing that your dietary choices are encouraging greater crop diversity. Anybody can buy orange Imperator carrots from the grocery store; we’d offer the discerning customer carrots in every shade of a San Diego sunset. Sure, we’d carry run-of-the-mill green beans, but we’d also bring in burgundy and yellow ones. We’d plant a few standard russets, but most of our potato crop would possess purple flesh. Our greens mix would brim with flavor and spice, courtesy of succulent baby brassicas: mizuna, arugula, Russian kale, mustard greens, and tatsoi. Heck, the biodiversity of a square meter on our farm would rival that of a rainforest.

  It was precisely this pro-diversity mentality that led me to orchestrate an online seed spending spree. Ten types of tomatoes? Better make it twenty. Six varieties of winter squash? I suppose that’s enough, but only because we seed-saved others last year. Lacinato kale, Temuco quinoa, Mei Qing bok choy, Armenian cucumber: the more, the merrier.

  Even if we hadn’t previously grown these varieties from seed ourselves, we’d experienced all of them on the various farms we’d worked on over the past couple of years. And weeding someone else’s kale patch is kind of like growing it from seed, right?

  Our first round of spending set us back $150 at Seeds of Change and $120 at Johnny’s Seeds. Then, realizing we’d forgotten some old favorites, we went back and ordered more.

  To make matters worse, throughout the virtual seed selection process, I’d been the mascot cheering our team onward. With my Southern California upbringing, shopping was one skill I brought to the table. As Emmett cringed entering our credit card number yet again, I was by his side murmuring, “Remember, honey, it’s an investment.” While Emmett’s mind was fretting over vanishing dollar signs, mine was delighting over an imaginary harvest basket that carried quinoa, leeks, heirloom tomatoes, Genovese basil, kale, corn, crookneck squash, and big, rose-petaled heads of lettuce, all at the same time. And although I knew that we were a bit out of season to start some of these plants, deep in my heart I always assumed that the investment would pay off. Or, if not pay off, at least not wither and die before ever making it into the ground.

  But there’s a risk of crop failure associated with any farming endeavor. Add to that the fact that we were getting a late start on the farming season. (Emmett was starting our seeds in a makeshift greenhouse in May because the field wasn’t yet irrigated or amended.) And then, of course, there’s the comeuppance factor. Although we’d both spent a fair bit of time on farms, neither of us had ever started, from scratch, a farming operation of this scale.

  Evidently, we failed to harness beginner’s luck.

  More specifically, Emmett overwatered the seeds. This led to fungal growth on the roots—a type of “damping off,” which is gardener-speak for anything (other than animals) that stunts and/or kills baby plants. It’s hard to blame him, really. If you combine hundred-degree May weather with a busy man working fourteen-hour days, overwatering isn’t exactly surprising.

  “They’ve been struggling for a while,” Emmett said. He let out a small sigh that wheezed into my receiver. “I didn’t want to tell you until I knew they were really gone.”

  Just what I wanted to hear: no hope. Three hundred dollars’ worth of seeds gone, really gone. Think of how much Northern Californians would have paid for local, fresh Cherokee Purple tomatoes. Or Green Zebra, or Black Plum, or that Waltham butternut squash.

  With Emmett’s pronunciation of doom, our conversation—like our nascent farm—didn’t really seem to be going much of anywhere. After a few moments of awkward silence, we dutifully recited our long-distance I-love-yous and hung up our separate phones with a considerable amount of relief.

  That night, I dreamt of seedling armies marching together. Right before I woke, every single little hopeful green thing was flattened by a team of giant red lawnmowers.

  I rose, slightly befuddled, with a purpose: time to close the communication gap in this partnership and c
ount the casualties. I called Emmett and with forced cheer and a hearty dollop of delicacy, I inquired more specifically about our losses.

  Conclusion number one: the beans rotted. As in, some of the seeds never even emerged. A post-mortem conducted by Emmett in the hoophouse—knee-high PVC pipes bent over rebar and covered with plastic in Emmett’s parent’s backyard—revealed that they had simply disappeared, composted in situ. Only 2 out of 216 survived. The trauma left them stunted, their ultimate fate still unclear.

  If the beans fell to a fast massacre, the 330 tomatoes were victims of a slowly spreading epidemic. Some of them died quickly—now just a dehydrated wisp on top of the potting soil—but many of them lingered, cruelly prolonging our hope. Still, the stems looked a bit pinched at the bottom (“damped off,” perhaps?), and although they were three weeks old, not a single plant had donned a second set of leaves. Emmett didn’t harbor much hope for them.

  Other casualties: 550 multiply planted cells of lettuce, 100 cells of spinach, 100 chard, 60 kale, 36 fennel, 90 arugula, 120 golden beets, 100 leeks, 50 broccoli, 24 basil, 24 cilantro, 12 sage, 12 dill, 24 chives, 24 parsley.

  Tabulating the totals on a spreadsheet, it seemed safe to conclude that they added up to a small farm. A small, stillborn farm.

  On the plane ride up to Sonoma County, I sat next to a friendly fellow who could scarcely contain his delight when he learned that I was moving up to the area.

  “If you like food,” he said, “you’ll love it here. People here really appreciate good food.”