The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  Baby greens were in short supply at the market, so we hoped that our bags, though few, would sell fast. Oh, how we doted on those greens. We mixed extra alfalfa meal into the soil to ensure a plentiful nitrogen supply. We broadcast the seeds by hand, and tamped down the soil by gently massaging it with our palms. We purchased and installed a series of micro-misters to provide the finest, gentlest watering experience around. We misted them thrice daily, and when the temperatures stretched above 100 degrees F, we brought them plastic shade cloth, an exorbitant expenditure at two dollars per foot, and stretched it over PVC hoops above the greens row so that the baby greens wouldn’t be singed by the sun. We monitored them daily for any obvious weeds. And when our second, half-disaster struck, we hovered over the bed for hours trying to squish the insects that were poking thousands of tiny holes in our thousands of tiny plants.

  As the day of our first market drew near, it became clear that we would have to start out as the salad stall. The bug-munched salad stall. Aside from radishes (which the seed packet noted were “a good choice for kids to grow”), our sales inventory consisted entirely of hole-pocked mini lettuces, tiny tatsoi, itsy bitsy mustard leaves, doll-sized kale, and pretty much anything else that was small, green, and decorated with pin pricks. Since we were about to rely entirely on baby greens for our initial farmers’ market sales, it was time to bone up on my lettuce smarts.

  Rumor has it that the English word “lettuce” comes from an Old French word, laities, meaning milky—probably referring to the milky white sap that comes out of mature lettuce stems after the farmer snips off the leaves. Like milk, these leafy greens have a long tradition of popularity. Lettuce dates back at least as far as the sixth century before Christ when Persian kings dined on fresh-cut leaves at their banquet tables. By the first century after Christ, at least twelve different varieties were known to the Romans. Note that none of these were head lettuces, but rather loose-leaf varieties; head lettuces didn’t come onto the scene until centuries later.6 By the early years of America’s independence, Thomas Jefferson was growing fifteen varieties of lettuce in his gardens at Monticello.7

  Fast forward to the twenty-first-century United States. Today, lettuce is a common household item and has the highest production value of any U.S. crop. California and Arizona account for approximately 98 percent of all domestic lettuce production—and, surprisingly, nearly all head lettuce sold in the United States is actually grown in the United States.8 That’s in large part because lettuce can be grown year-round here. If you go to the grocery store and pick up a bag of precut, prewashed lettuce any time from April through October, it probably came from the Salinas Valley in California, just east of Monterey. If you buy that same bag any time from November through March, it came from Yuma, Arizona, or the Imperial Valley. (Huron, California, typically fills in the seasonal transition periods.) This, truly, is food as business—a smoothly operating machine offering consistent supply and quality.

  Our first cash crop: baby greens.

  And then there was The Patch, which offered neither consistent supply nor quality.

  The big baby lettuce operations, like Earthbound Farms, plant each variety of lettuce separately and then combine the different types after harvest to create that lovely mix of green and red tints. We planted a seed mix so that all the lettuces grew together in a dense, biodiverse rainbow bed. Often, the faster growing varieties outpaced the slower ones, leaving us with giant green leaves and teensy red ones. The big farms specialize in multi-acre swaths of one crop, providing a single type of food for thousands of Americans. We grew a row of lettuce immediately surrounded by chard, beets, carrots, and potatoes to provide an entire meal for a few local families. They plant with ever-evolving machines; we used a more timetested method: a rake and our hands. The big farms employ laser-leveled planting beds so that their harvesting machines can cruise over and scoop up baby leaves with precision.9 We weren’t so technical; that first market morning we snipped the leaves with scissors, our hands automatically adjusting to the depressions and hills of our uneven planting bed. The big players store their lettuce just above freezing, at 98 percent humidity, with a two- to three-week shelf life.10 They typically inflate their lettuce bags with noble gases to prevent oxidation and enhance freshness. We plopped our lettuce in a cooler surrounded by run-of-the-mill troposphere until it made its way onto the market table and into a basket, where—if hand-misted with a spray bottle—it might stay fresh for a couple of hours. The California lettuce industry harvests more than 40,000 acres of loose leaf lettuce in a single year.11 So far, we had planted about forty square feet. The industry earns about 300 million dollars annually,12 but at that first market, we made, oh, fifty dollars on lettuce sales. Depending upon whether you’re a pragmatist or a romantic, you might describe our tenderfoot farm as either dinky or spunky. Either way, it’s safe to say we were a well-intentioned-but-muddy drop in the far larger bucket of efficient, effective commercial agriculture.

  So there I stood at the farmers’ market, neither salesman nor farmer, but something closer to a half-deflated idealist. One with nerdy, grandiose signs lording over her piddling produce.

  What seemed like a good idea the night before—when we were wracking our brains for something, anything, to sell—looked ridiculous next to Farmer Cindy and The Grocery Store. In permanent-marker bubble letters, we’d labeled the common rosemary pilfered from Emmett’s parents’ garden as “Fresh Seasoning, Rosemary: For baking with potatoes, chicken, and salmon.” Never mind that the stuff grows along half the sidewalks in Northern California and we wouldn’t sell a single stem.

  And yet somehow, over the course of three hours, customers started buying things. One at a time, haltingly at first—and then, miraculously, we actually had a small line forming in front of our paltry stand. Maybe they came out of pity, maybe out of curiosity, but hey, a buck’s a buck. And besides, we were the only ones at the market with bagged salad. It couldn’t all be pity.

  At the end of the day, we counted our earnings: ninetyeight dollars, minus 10 percent for our stall fee.

  “How’d you kids do?” Grumpy asked as I carried my envelope to the market manager.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “That’s actually pretty good,” my fifteen-year-old brother, Bobby, said. (We dragged him to the market with us; in town on a visit from San Diego, he was more likely to be found behind a computer than a card table full of organic greens.) “If you divide it by three, that’s thirty bucks an hour.”

  This cheered me considerably—my salary was downright respectable!—until Emmett, ever the practical one, pointed out that it wasn’t just the hours I’d spent selling; it was the hours I’d spent sowing, watering, weeding, and transplanting. And the hours he’d spent sowing, watering, weeding, and transplanting.

  We’d touched each lettuce leaf at least five times before placing it on the table. Once when it was a seed, hand-scattered into a bed, massaged with the back side of a rake, and palmpressed into the soil. At least three times when I’d pulled out the weeds threatening to choke it: tendrils of bindweed, wild mustard sprouts, and prickly scotch thistle seedlings. Then again when it was hand harvested, snipped leaf by leaf, and placed in a harvest bin.

  And when you add those hours in, my wage was substantially less impressive: $0.13 an hour if you omit the investment; –$1.95 per hour (yes, that’s negative) if you consider the money we’d put in up front.

  As we broke down the card table and packed up the station wagon, Emmett shared a joke.

  A farmer wins the lottery. A reporter asks him, “What will you do now that you have all that money?” The old, weatherbeaten man stares into the distance, turns back to the reporter, and without a hint of irony says, “I suppose I’ll keep farming until it’s all gone.”

  Chapter 2:

  BUNCHES

  Chard, Kale, and Bok Choy

  I stood at the farm stand, jaw set, and imagined my marketing pitch. It wouldn’t be in my voice, of course: the
words would boom out approximately one octave lower in that brassy, gravelly made-for-radio tone that has always reminded me of a trombone.

  Move over, Whole Foods.

  The Foggy River Farm market stand is back and bigger than ever. Not to mention we’re fresher, cheaper, and way more local than you—but while we’re bigger than before, we’re still intimate and friendly. If customers want to know how and where their food was grown and harvested, all they have to do is ask us, the farmers who grew it. How was it grown? Completely naturally, using only the finest locally sourced soil amendments and no pesticides. Where was it grown? An eight-minute drive from here. When was it picked? This morning, about two hours before the market opened.

  Side note to brand manager—you can see by our folksy, handscrawled, permanent-marker poster and hand-painted wooden sign that our marketing strategy is ten times more authentic than yours could ever be. Your carefully cultivated artificial ambiance is our way of life. Our new table—an old door, rescued from the town dump and perched on collapsible sawhorses—says: we’re here, we’re real, we’re farmers. Above it hangs our beautifully redundant Certified Producer’s Certificate (a certificate certifying that we’re farmers), and alongside that, our newly certified hanging scale, purchased for $199.35 and sealed for accuracy by the Agriculture Commissioner for $61. And did I mention that we’re selling at two farmers’ markets now? Healdsburg on Saturday, Windsor on Sunday. Each market’s an eight-minute commute from our fields, one south and one north. How quaint and local is that?

  Really, given the chance, who wouldn’t want to shop at our little down-home stand? But let me offer one small confession: while you display only platonic ideal produce, casting aside all those leaves, roots, and fruits that harbor the slightest earthly imperfection, our produce is, um, definitely earthly. As in been through Purgatory—and maybe through a few levels of hell and back—before settling, with great, wounded weariness, on our wobbly table.

  Well, back to reality. I couldn’t blame the bok choy for looking so exhausted. Our farm was under siege. Just when we’d started to chortle over our chard—having outsmarted the summer sun by abandoning the hoophouse and adopting a direct-seeding strategy—mysterious things began to appear on our plants’ waxy green leaves.

  And by mysterious things, I mean holes. Millions of dastardly, ugly, big and small holes. Emmett had been crouched down above fourteen-day-old greens, weeding, when he made the discovery.

  “Hmmmm,” he said, and there was a certain lilt to his voice that made me pause from my beet weeding.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Something’s eating the baby brassicas.”

  Our battle-worn bok choy was tasty but not quite worthy of a Whole Foods display.

  I squatted down beside him. When I brushed my hand over the soft greens, a half dozen little black things scattered. Isolating one, I realized that it was an impossibly tiny beetle, its shell black and oily, shifting and tossing off multicolored light.

  I pinched a small mustard leaf between my fingers, still green, not yet showing its mature purple. It was pierced through with dozens of tiny holes.

  Two words popped into my mind: crop failure. It was a phrase I’d seen in seed catalogs. As in, “No Russian Banana seed potatoes for 2008. Crop failure.” At the time, I had thought, “What kind of an idiot has a crop failure? Don’t these people grow things for a living? Short of a hurricane, fire, flood, or a few tons of salt being accidentally dropped in your field, crop failures are inexcusable. If you can’t avoid failure, get a different job, for God’s sake.”

  In retrospect, perhaps that reaction was a bit harsh. After all, we were now facing our second crop failure. (And that’s being generous—if you count all the crops separately, we were in the mid-twenties.) Having already killed one farm’s worth of summer seedlings, as a follow-up act we had unwittingly invited a Biblical plague to destroy our interim cash crops.

  The destruction wasn’t, unfortunately, limited to the baby brassica mix. The bok choy appeared peppered by machine gun fire, each baby leaf scarred with dozens of tiny punctures. Ditto the arugula. In fact, all members of the brassica family that were located in the farm’s main field had become heavy artillery targets.

  And then there was the Bright Lights Swiss chard, whose Technicolor stems were just lengthening and broadening to support hand-sized dark green leaves. The poor chard suffered a different sort of wound. The leaves seemed to have had the life and water sucked out of them, tattered fringes left browned and shriveled on an otherwise healthy plant. But this burn seemed bug based; it appeared on all parts of the leaf’s surface whether or not the leaf was directly exposed to sunlight.

  Fanning out over the battlefield, I noted that our green and purple bean seedlings—only recently emerged from the ground—looked as if they too had been transplanted from some Middle Eastern garden swept up in a sudden desert storm. They were battered, torn, and full of holes.

  Our beautiful produce was defaced, defiled, destroyed. Emmett mourned, I swore, and we both headed to the computer to identify our adversaries and plan our counterattack.

  This wasn’t guerrilla warfare: our adversaries were easily identifiable. When we stumbled across their name it was a eureka moment, albeit one accompanied by yet another sinking feeling in my stomach.

  The tiny, iridescent specs that bounced off of our bok choy every time I flicked a leaf were known as flea beetles. It fit, in a painfully obvious sort of way: they look like fleas, but they’re beetles. And like their namesake, flea beetles are miniscule critters that can hop many times higher than their body size. Instead of suckers, though, these critters are chewers. Tiny, repetitive chewers who poked scads of tiny holes in our formerly beautiful greens.

  But could undersized scarabs be solely responsible for a crop failure? A quick bit of research revealed that our adversaries dine almost exclusively on the Cruciferae family—also known as the brassicas. It’s no surprise, then, that our baby brassica mix had been attacked. Bok choy, arugula, and kale are also members of the targeted family, which explains why they, too, looked like Havarti cheese.

  But tiny flea beetles poke tiny holes. There had to be a second army advancing on our crops, one with bigger weapons.

  Our hunt led us to the cucumber beetle. Known to the educated as Diabrotica undecimpunctata, and to us as any of several four-letter words, cucumber beetles have only one saving grace: they look like green ladybugs. This might seem insignificant until you’re at a farmers’ market and one crawls out of a lettuce bag in front of a customer. At that point, 99 percent of customers will say something like, “Look! A ladybug! How cute, I’ve never seen a green one,” and your butt is covered. If a cucumber beetle resembled an earwig, a cockroach, a swollen tick, or a horsefly, our sales would likely have diminished by half.

  It’s sheer luck that the diabolical Diabrotica bears resemblance to the red polka-dotted celebrity of the insect world. But good looks aside, the cucumber beetle army was a force to be reckoned with. As though it isn’t bad enough to defile pristine leaves and eat giant holes through everything, cucumber beetles also transmit mosaic virus and bacterial wilt while they move from plant to plant. An insidious adversary, the bug renders the plant ugly, and then deposits diseases that may cause it to wilt and die. In the cold of winter, when the bugs go dormant, the viruses stay safely protected in their intestines until spring blossoms and the bugs thaw out enough to resume their reign of terror.

  In lieu of regular pesticide use, we turned to hand-tohand combat: mechanical management, or physical removal of the bugs from the plants. Some folks actually vacuum up cucumber beetles, dust-busting them to their doom. But because we lacked an electrical outlet, we tried the “catch and crush” technique.

  This was far less fun than the alliteration would suggest. For a girl who once threw (and still occasionally throws) conniptions over earthworms, I didn’t easily embrace squeezing green bug guts out of a beetle’s butt. By the third or fourth bug, my fingerti
ps were stained green and the thought of ever eating again had begun to lose its appeal. As I watched at least two cucumber beetles fly to safety for every one I was able to catch, I got the distinct impression that I was fighting a losing battle.

  Besides, we were only catching the adult beetles. Chances were, the ones we were squishing that day had already mated and produced hundreds of little eggs just waiting to hatch out more evil. There was no shortage of reinforcements to replace the fallen: each spotted female lays two hundred to three hundred eggs over the course of a couple weeks. The eggs can hatch in just five days and pass through the larval stage quickly, becoming horny young adolescents in as few as eleven days. After they’ve reached adulthood, they enjoy a leisurely two months during which they can parade around my vegetable rows, eating my chard and hiding their godforsaken eggs under every bean leaf.

  More bad news: These guys don’t just eat chard and beans. They also have an appetite for a long list of other crops, including potatoes, squash, corn, cucumbers (no surprise there), melons, and over 260 other plants in 29 families.

  And, of course, whatever vegetables the Diabrotica didn’t eat were swarming with flea beetles.

  Once we knew who we were dealing with, the question was how to deal with them. After our futile attempt to catch and crush all five million cucumber beetles, our next strategy was one of mitigation. (Well, Emmett called it mitigation; personally, I considered it denial.)

  We ignored the disaster, continued to sow more seeds, and hoped that the pests didn’t completely kill the plants before we had a chance to sell them. Then we did our best to wash all evidence of insects off of the produce during our predawn harvest on the day of market. We dumped the produce into a harvest bin, filled it with water, and rustled the produce violently to try and dislodge the creepy crawlies. Then we drained the bin and repeated the process all over again. It was awkward to try and siphon off the free-floating flea beetles before they could land on hopeful islands of baby greens, but after a couple of rinses, any extra protein was minimal enough to be unnoticeable to the untrained eye.