The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  “Well, I’m planning on growing some,” I said, putting on a brave face. “So I hope you’re right!”

  Sonoma County, long a Mecca for wine lovers, is on the front lines of the local food movement. It’s not a bad place to start a small farm: Healdsburg sits at the confluence of three different local Slow Food convivia. The farmers’ market has been going strong since 1978. Artisanal food shops and locally sourced restaurants (the type with big plates and little foods) dot the town square. And the nonprofit direct farm marketing organization Sonoma County Farm Trails has received national acclaim for tasty, tourist-friendly farm fare. Founded by a plucky group of local apple farmers, it’s been in business since 1973.

  My seatmate was thrilled that I was on the brink of diving into this culture. He couldn’t believe I was going to start a farm, and he described in great detail the artisanal cheese baskets he received on a weekly basis. He encouraged me to branch into the cheese market, after my farm got established of course, because cheese is so complementary to the area’s wine tourism.

  At this point, in spite of the seed disaster, I’d regained my farming optimism. Chalk it up to a few days spent surfing and the fact that the conversation took place a few thousand feet above the glowing Sierra Nevadas. When he suggested cheese, I wasn’t thinking if only; I was thinking, Heck, maybe we could get a few goats and make a little chèvre.

  As we stowed our tray tables, straightened our seat backs, and began to descend, I peered out the window. The plane was banking over the hills that had led Emmett in his childhood to fashion bows and arrows out of saplings and build wigwams out of eucalyptus limbs. He was a hunter-gatherer; although he was really successful only at gathering soap root (a bulb that is chock-full of saponin compounds and lathers like soap), he had long-term plans of growing up to be a Native American. If that failed, he figured he could always become a standardgrade hermit. And so he practiced for his eventual vocation by building shelters in the hills, sleeping in them, and constructing elaborate snares and traps—swim-in fish baskets sunk in the pond, leg snares laid across deer trails—that never caught anything. He shot arrows that didn’t wound a single animal. But his failure as a hunter didn’t turn him into a cultivator; on the contrary, he bristled when he was branded “farmer boy” in elementary school. He rode in the passenger seat of the big flatbed truck with his dad at harvest time, honking the horn and dropping tons of grapes off at various local wineries. But beyond the occasional truck ride and the familiar chore of dumping the kitchen compost into the compost pile, Emmett had little to do with farming.

  When we first started dating, I asked him where he would live if he could live anywhere. He told me he had never thought of living anywhere but Healdsburg. At the time, he made it clear that our relationship could change that assumption—and that perhaps he just hadn’t ever taken the time to consider alternatives—but there I was, flying over his hills.

  “Beautiful, eh?” my seatmate said. He leaned over me to look out the window and grinned.

  To my neighbor in the aisle seat, and to Emmett, the hills were a signifier of home. To me, they were just hills, the oak trees foreign, the open space perplexing, and the general appearance—from this height, anyway—not unlike a bunch of broccoli florets glued to a series of upside down colanders. In the six years since I had left my hometown of San Diego, I’d become something of a wanderer. I hadn’t lived in the same house for longer than nine months, and I wasn’t sure I had that kind of signifier anymore. It had once been the ocean yielding to San Diego’s Mission Bay, but no longer.

  As the plane banked over my future home, I knew there was water somewhere thirty thousand feet below me, but it was murky and fresh, predictable. It lacked the salt sting, the force of wave energy built up over thousands of miles of blank ocean, and the frigid upwelled deepwaters that push you under and strip you clean.

  “Yes, it is,” I said, my stomach tightening a little.

  On the way out the door, my seatmate introduced me to his wife, who’d been sitting across the aisle from us.

  “She’s just moving to Sonoma County,” the man informed his spouse.

  “Oh really! What brings you here?” she asked. I’d just spent the past half hour explaining the whole complicated situation to her husband. How to cut the description short?

  “A man,” I said, and it was the first time I’d admitted it so openly to anyone, including myself. Sometimes the security of strangers can do that to you.

  “Me, too,” she said, smiling and glancing at her husband. And in that moment I felt a sudden pang of claustrophobia: I wasn’t really putting down roots, was I? Shit, I’m, like, so way too young for that.

  And with that I walked down the thin metal steps onto the tarmac and into a cool Sonoma County evening.

  The Sonoma County airport is so tiny that it doesn’t actually possess a real conveyor belt baggage claim. The “baggage claim” sits outside, a few yards from where the plane has pulled to a stop. It’s somebody’s job to lift each piece of baggage, by hand, into a metal display chute where suitcases pile up dangerously. I watched nervously as someone tried to wiggle a duffel out from underneath roller bags stacked three high. Note to self: not in San Diego anymore.

  I looked around—where was he?—and caught sight of Emmett walking through the one-room airport. We were filled with silly back-together-again joy as we grabbed the luggage and headed out to my Subaru.

  In the station wagon, our cat crouched nervously on a headrest. A little card, along with a bag of homemade cookies, perched on the passenger seat.

  “Welcome home,” the hand-drawn cover read. I opened the card. “By which I mean, to your cat, your car, and your man.” A sweet thought—and who could ask for more than a skinny, tall, goofy, stern, wholly well-intentioned cookiebaking man—but it had been a long time since I’d had a home, and the closest thing I had to a home landscape was the mutable ocean. Ironically, the sea grounds me, and I feel little connection to the earth except where it falls away. Each time I returned to San Diego, the city felt more distant—the storefronts changed, new developments sprawling across canyonland and another lane added to the freeway—until it was entirely unfamiliar. I wasn’t sure whether the sting in my eyes could be attributed to joy or to something less settling. To be honest, it was more than a little depressing that my home could be summarized as a boyfriend, a car, and a cat. I wanted a connection that I didn’t yet feel. Still, I was comforted to be with Emmett, whatever that meant.

  On the ride “home,” we whizzed past classic Sonoma County scenery: endless rows of grapevines interrupted occasionally by sprawling oaks. The cat stress-panted the entire time, his face frozen into a taxidermy-like grimace. Emmett stalled the car. Twice. And we held hands with a death grip whenever he wasn’t shifting gears.

  Beginning the following morning, we’d be starting a farm ... together.

  When starting and maintaining a farm, neophyte farmers face challenges. I knew that coming into this endeavor—but it’s one thing to know a thing, and something entirely different to feel it. There’s standard risk associated with any agricultural venture: the potential for a crop failure, the potential for loss of market or drop in price of goods. Add to that a young person’s lack of experience. Between the two of us, Emmett and I had a few (nonconsecutive) years of farming experience. Some Greenhorns have more; some even graduated from a hands-on sustainable agriculture program like U.C. Santa Cruz’s. Still, many of us went to university, not agriculture school.a And most of us lack what many other farmers have: twenty, even forty years of growing the same crops in the same place. While a hands-on, yearlong educational program would definitely have left me better prepared to start a farm, it still couldn’t have taught me everything.

  Place-specific farm knowledge takes years to develop. A long-term farmer has seen the gamut of pest population booms and busts; she knows which are temporary and which are likely to stick. The old-timer has experienced the effects of these population spikes
on various crops, and as a result is better at hedging bets. She has a long-term sense of the first and last frost dates, and how they might vary year to year. The farmer has seen drought and flood, cool seasons and scorching seasons, fire and freak hailstorms. In short, she is better equipped to gamble, thanks to an intuitive grasp of the local statistics. Gambling can pay off: if you guess right on the last frost date and end up with the season’s first tomatoes, you can bet that your farm stand will be packed with eager customers willing to pay a price premium. But professional gamblers know the odds. Novices usually lose their savings to the casino.

  Our roll of the dice, starting seedlings in a greenhouse in May, didn’t turn out so well.

  As I lay awake that night pondering our situation, I realized that we weren’t just unfamiliar with the odds—we didn’t even know the house rules. Not only did we lack long-term farming knowledge of the land, but we also were initiating a brand-new system. Like many Greenhorns, we weren’t inheriting a smoothly running business; we were starting our own. And while we had a bit of an edge—Emmett’s dad would prove to be an invaluable source of knowledge, and the use of his land and some of his vineyard equipment a serious financial boon—the ground Emmett had broken had been planted in grapes for decades. Because Greenhorns are starting farms wherever they can get their hands on some land, unforeseen consequences are to be expected. Some, having traveled thousands of miles in search of cheap acreage, will face entirely new seasons. Urban farmers may face soil contamination issues. As we grow organic vegetables in the midst of a giant grape monoculture, who knows what will go wrong? And although agricultural philosophies like permaculture, biodynamic, and biointensive offer loose guidelines for sustainable agriculture, they deal primarily in theory—and often disagree on specifics. In short, there is no one-size-fits-all physical blueprint for the small farm. Looking at our space, where do we plant the tomatoes, green beans, winter squash, lettuce? How do we set up the irrigation? Because none of the agricultural philosophers offer an easy answer, as Greenhorns, we were bound to sometimes do it the hard way.

  I knew all of these things on an intellectual level. But it wasn’t something I really felt yet. As Emmett woke me up way too early the following morning, visions of cornucopias still danced in my head.

  Our first task was to get me up to speed. Emmett took me on a morning tour of the farm’s three sections: the hoophouse, the raised salad bed, and the field proper.

  Before we could grow any vegetables, we had to lay irrigation pipe and amend the soil.

  By the very first stop, the cornucopias vanished, vaporized by a slightly less fertile reality. Time to step up and be supportive. Mine not to question why: As Emmett peeled back the plastic sheet to reveal the contents of the hoophouse, I didn’t inquire after the silent multitudes of empty flats containing only potting soil and one or two fatally wounded seedlings. (I’d been warned, after all.)

  Nor did I ask why a smallish salad bed was perched peculiarly across the road, hundreds of yards away from the main field and up a short, steep hill that distinctly lacked a path, steps, or on-site irrigation. I found this salad bed very perplexing: it required multiple cans of water to be ferried multiple times a day from a house-mounted spigot up the steep, slippery hill to the bed.b

  Still, the visits to the seedling cemetery and inconvenient bed were but tiny tremors before the Big One.

  After walking back from the inconvenient bed (down the hill, down the road, across the road, and down another hill), we arrived at Emmett’s dad’s shop—a staging structure for all things vineyard. We clambered into the Gator, our onloan farm vehicle that runs like a Deere (being a city girl, I’d never really gotten that pun before, because our suburban push lawnmower—the bane of my brother’s existence—instead ran like hell). With Emmett in the driver’s seat, we took off down the main dirt road through the grapevines. Dust billowed up behind us and a nice breeze took the edge off the warm morning. I eagerly peered ahead, anxious for my first glimpse of the farm. Vines, vines, baby vines, vacant lot. ...

  Suddenly, Emmett was pulling off the road, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.

  Oh.

  “It looks great!” I said, putting my arm around Emmett a little too tightly and smiling a little too widely.

  In reality, it looked like dirt. A great big empty patch of cream dirt (the floodplain’s special brand of cloddy clay soil), liberally striped with raw umber dirt (manure from a local dairy, trucked in and tractored over).

  I had to look closely to spot anything growing. Eventually, I caught sight of some tiny green things on the right-hand side of the field. Walking over to the area, I determined that there were precisely three planted rows.

  It was almost June. Most of our seedlings, besides these three directly sown rows, were dead or maimed. My heart was in my stomach, my stomach in my sneakers: clearly, we were fucked.

  “It looks great!” I said again, then realized that I was repeating myself. “Nice irrigation. You did that all yourself, right?”

  “I put two spigots on this one,” Emmett explained, “so we can run a hose and drip tape at the same time.” He smiled, pleased with his problem solving.

  “Great,” I said again. “Um, what are these guys?” All of the tiny plants looked the same to me: weed or heirloom vegetable, I had no way of telling the difference. At this point, I was thinking that if it was alive, it was probably a weed. But I paid attention to where I put my feet anyway, not wanting to accidentally pluck the final flight feather off our fledgling farm. Have you ever seen a baby parrot, all beak, neck, and pink nakedness? That was our dusty lot—and looking at it, I thought there was no way in hell this ugly creature was ever going to fly.

  But Emmett, the proud papa parrot, was beaming over his dirt. “This is bok choy, that’s arugula, and up at the end we have cilantro, parsley, and basil,” he said, pointing quickly to apparently different but indiscernible sections of the near row. “That row is all beans—green, purple, and yellow. Then the far row’s got your beets—golden, Chioggia, and the classic—along with radishes, kale, and chard.”

  Somehow this wasn’t how I’d pictured our farm. Where were the neat rows, the worn paths, the cute barn, the sense of place and purpose? While Emmett had enthusiastically talked about the farm as our “market garden,” I could think of it only as The Patch. And when I thought “patch,” my connotations were less folksy pumpkin paradise, less denim-clad scarecrow, more unspoken parenthetical (of dirt).

  Looking down a row of impossibly tiny alleged beets, it occurred to me that what I really needed was a rewind button. Let’s go back a few hours. How about a leisurely breakfast in bed? Brunch at the omelet place in town? Then maybe Emmett could butter me up a bit by describing The Patch as a blank slate, a place with lots of potential, a page waiting for its pen, or some other crap like that.

  But omelet brunches were part of our old lifestyle, the lifestyle where we had two solid incomes with health insurance plans and end-of-year bonuses. My savings account didn’t cover omelets. Emmett, although happy to show affection and engage in the occasional ridiculously romantic act, is not a sugar coater. And no one writes with pens these days, anyway.

  Time to buck up. “Well, it will be fun to plan all of this space out,” I ventured.

  “We’ll plan later,” Emmett said. “We’ve got some digging to do.”

  I don’t know if I’d ever felt the fear of God before, but that day, I did. Faced with a nothing of a farm, a rapidly diminishing savings account, and no employment leads, I worked hard. I tried to think positive thoughts about tomato jungles, bean forests, and squash thickets, but my mind kept slipping back to the empty flats of deceased seedlings. Fortunately, there wasn’t too much time to think—it took considerable concentration to make my weak shoveling muscles follow orders.

  We heaped manure into seven twenty-foot lines and adjusted them for straightness. Then we dug each row out by hand, turning the manure into the cloddy clay. Once each row was dug, we
poured a line of soil amendments onto it, then hoed them in. The alfalfa meal, soft phosphate, ground mussel shell, and kelp meal all had to be poured separately, and each triggered a separate allergic reaction. By mid-afternoon, I was sneezing in sets of five and my eyes were watering fiercely.

  We punched holes in black drip hose, then pushed red nipples into the holes until my fingertips were numb, indented, and no longer able to complete the task. By the time the rows were finished, and trenches were dug for future sowing, I was exhausted. And yet—despite my chronically itching nose and drip-irrigation eyes—a feeling of vague satisfaction crept up alongside my general state of scared shitlessness as we boarded the Gator and drove off.

  It occurred to me that never before had I held a job this tangible, one where I could glance over my shoulder as I drove away and actually see the results of my labor.

  We sat down at the dinner table that night to plan out our field and assess our options, which were diminishing approximately as rapidly as our savings accounts. We spread our beautiful heritage seed packets out on the table and scrutinized the information on the back. As one packet after another cited maturity times of 60, 75, 90, and even 120 days, we realized that we’d have to abandon visions of decadent cornucopias for the time being. By the time any of those crops were ready to sell, the farmers’ market season would be half over and we’d be mired deep in farm debt. But baby greens—with a maturity time of twenty-one to thirty days—could, perhaps, pinch hit until the stars of the season deigned to show up.

  Emmett had already planted one bed of baby greens half in brassicas, half in lettuces. We’d plant another right away, and one more a week later. In other ASAP crops: radishes, arugula, spinach, chard, and kale. After these were safely in the ground, we’d turn our attention to tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, and the like.