Potatoes are even stranger to me. For some reason the fact that pumpkins are grown aboveground makes their growth partially plausible. The sun, the air, the vines, they must be responsible in some way for making pumpkins—but potatoes? They are underground. The tuber harvest was close to a thousand pounds this past year. What are they made of? The soil is still there. I doubt that any is missing. The potato plants are dead and gone, but they are never all that big anyway. I water the potatoes the same as the squash, but that water also just seems to seep deep down into the soil. What are those thousand pounds made of?
I could go to a botany textbook, probably a pretty basic textbook at that, and get the answer, but I don’t want to know the answer in that way. I leave it as just the wonderful part of growing vegetables. In no way am I a religious man, but there are miracles: Potatoes grow in the ground and they are tasty. Pumpkins come from little seeds in a few weeks. Cows eat grass and produce milk.
I want to take credit for most of the food produced here. I planted the seed. I milked the cows. I fed the lambs. In reality there is something greater at work. Not sure exactly what it is, but it is a force far greater than myself.
I am fortunate to live in the part of the country that I do. The Pacific Northwest is very temperate and here on the island we are buffeted by the marine air; it is never too hot, nor too cold. The result is a near year-round growing season. I feel fortunate to have been raised in this region and I have chosen to remain here because of this easy-livin’ climate. Although it freezes here every year, in no way does the weather resemble Vermont or Illinois or most any other northern part of the country.
Although I grew up helping in the family garden as a child, the greatest adjustment I made from cultivating vegetables on a home scale to growing for a small farmers’ market was in the method of starting plants. I had always been taught to direct-seed the vegetables in the rows in the garden. The soil is tilled up once it is dry enough, and long straight rows are set with lengths of string anchored at either end of the garden with a small stake. Then a hoe dragged down the line opens up the freshly tilled brown soil just enough to create a valley in which the small seeds will land.
The seeds are gently dropped in the furrow, the soil gently placed back over the seeds and with a bit of good weather the seeds will sprout in a few days. It is a great system, but except for a few vegetables—primarily carrots and radishes—it is never used to grow vegetables in volume. I do continue to seed those pumpkins, but only for nostalgia and because of the joy it brings me.
The more efficient method of growing vegetables is to germinate them in the greenhouse and then to plant them out when they have sprouted and gained an ample start on life. The advantages are many, the disadvantages just a few. Here at the farm, we have a small glass greenhouse to hold all of the plant starts.
When the vegetables are started indoors, heat can be added to guarantee good germination of the seeds. If there are any problems with sprouting, they are easily apparent and replacements can quickly be started. When I leave seeds in the open garden they must wait for the soil temperature to rise adequately to sprout. It might happen quickly, but it could just as likely take quite a few days for the ambient temperature to rise high enough for the seeds to germinate. Greenhouses have the great advantage of easy temperature control. Even if it is snowing outside, flats of onions, leeks and scallions can begin to grow on heat mats in the greenhouse, the soil a toasty sixty degrees. When the weather is right for the plants to go in the ground, the slender wisps of the onions will be eight weeks old. If I had to wait to seed those onion seeds in the ground, those eight weeks of growth would be lost. The growing season may be long in this part of the world, but it’s not endless; time matters.
Although I cannot say that I am the most efficient grower, nor am I particularly organized, it is beneficial to use the garden space for growing vegetables and not for germinating seeds. In the two weeks that it might take beets to emerge from the cool spring soil, that real estate could be used for other crops. In those two weeks the last vegetables can grow a bit more, ripen a bit more, compost can break down a bit more. Every little bit helps.
Efficiency is all well and good, but I also enjoy sitting in the greenhouse in spring as it gets warm out, but before it’s quite T-shirt weather. In the warmth of the greenhouse I can pretend that it is May even if it is a few weeks and a few degrees in the future. Filling flats with clean fluffy seeding soil, going through the packets of seeds and filling the individual cells in the flats with a seed or two, writing the variety on a slim white plastic tag: it makes me smile. The dirt is clean and dry, the air is warm from the sun hitting the glass, the seeds are all very uniform and tidy, no weeds have found their way in; mud has no place in the tight world of the greenhouse.
A common sight in most small farms around here, and most small farms in this country, are hoop houses. Matt and I built one when we first started growing vegetables, to house tomatoes and peppers. They are poor-man’s greenhouses, built cheaply and quickly, and are relatively portable. Made of PVC pipe bent into a semicircle and anchored into the ground, the hoops are lined up as long as the greenhouse is needed—fifty, eighty, a hundred feet long. The hoops are then covered with clear plastic sheeting that is attached to the individual PVC hoops. Hoop houses create low-cost spaces for growing vegetables that need a slightly higher temperature and protection from the wind and rain. On an even slightly warm day, the interior temperature in the hoop house will rise dramatically. The challenge of these hoop houses is keeping them cool. The plastic on the sides needs to be raised up to allow warm air to escape and drop the temperature down.
As these are covered structures, rainfall does not enter to water the plants inside. Long plastic irrigation tubes are run down the length of the hoop house, hitting all of the plants. In order to keep the weeds from taking over the precious plants, plastic landscape cloth often lines the bottom of the hoop house. Holes are cut into the landscape cloth and the plants are inserted.
Hoop houses are staggeringly efficient: they can be put together in a day once the parts are mustered, and can be moved if needed without too much effort. The cost is low considering their size and the quantity of food that can be grown in them. They lengthen the growing season for warm-weather crops such as tomatoes, peppers and melons and guarantee their success even during a cool summer. Without the added heat, these heat-loving plants would often not ripen well in the northwestern climate. Although rain is thought of generally as an asset to plants, it can be damaging to tomato plants, causing blight. When tomatoes are grown in a hoop house, the possibility of blight is eliminated.
A hoop house is warm inside, safe from the wind and the plastic covering is opaque, creating a diffuse glow of white light inside. In early spring, the newly planted tomatoes have not yet started their growth spurt of summer; they are still small and tidy. The floor of the hoop house is clean new plastic landscape cloth, the dampness of the winter months long since dried from the spring heat.
Midafternoons are the ideal time on the farm for a nap. The afternoon animal chores have not yet started, lunch is finished and the morning projects have been completed. I often nap on the floor of the hoop house; it is a private, warm, hidden spot. Where skinny-dipping is a logical extension of swimming, napping without the discomfort of muddy work clothes is a logical extension of farm napping. One warm afternoon, I decided to strip down before my afternoon doze in one of the hoop houses.
The hoop houses were located in the farthest field. Each paddock surrounding the field is gated and chained closed. The hoop house plastic is opaque and completely private. And yet, a customer looking for milk, intent on finding me, managed to walk to the upper pastures, trek through the pastures, through the gates, through the paddocks, past the cows. Looking to find some milk from the farm for her family, she made it all the way to the hoop houses.
She was a lovely mother of two beautiful young daughters, and I doubt that Lisa had expected to pull bac
k the plastic and find a naked man asleep in the rows of small, verdant tomato plants. As I proceeded to quickly and discreetly cover myself, she made conversation. Either through nervousness or, with luck, having no idea what was going on, she chatted on endlessly, about her great interest in food, her love of tomato plants and her expectations of the summer growing season. I countered her conversation with my own banter, avoiding her eyes, yet knowing that she would never mention my weeding outfit.
Although I love napping in the hoop houses, I have intrinsic issues with them. I often wonder what the customers’ perception of a farm is when they are making a purchase at a farmers’ market. Prior to ever seeing a vegetable farm, I had a vision of vegetables growing in the field. Long rows of tomatoes and beans and beets, under the sun, farmers walking the rows, picking tomatoes into lovely wicker baskets. The reality is, at least in this part of the country, a lot of vegetables are grown under plastic.
Should we care that our produce is grown with the added protection of plastic sheeting? No, not really. The public is looking for tomatoes over a longer season than is possible in the northern latitudes. I have no reason to believe that the food is contaminated or changed in any way from the use of the plastic in the hoop houses. The cows are housed in the winter in a barn with cedar shakes on the roof. I expect the shakes will last twenty-five, maybe thirty years and then be removed and replaced with new roofing. Old cedar shakes can be burned or even left to rot in the forest and returned to the earth.
The plastic used in vegetable growing just gives me a lump in my gut. Something feels wrong. It looks wrong, and the shoppers at the farmers’ markets are unaware of hoop houses’ existence unless they travel out to the farms that they support.
The day when I walked back to the old vegetable garden after three destructive winter seasons to take down the first old hoop house is still fresh in my mind. The wind had damaged the structure beyond repair. Winter had been cruel.
I headed out to the garden, my tools with me: socket wrench, pliers, cordless drill. Little by little, through the morning drizzle of a late winter day, I took apart the PVC pipes, sorting out the puzzle that the orderly hoop house had become. The nice lines of the original hoops were now twisted pieces of cracked, brittle plastic. By noon, I had separated the hoops from the plastic sheeting; the nuts and bolts and screws that had held them all together were now in my soggy coat pocket.
After lunch in the warm kitchen, I changed into mud boots and a rain outfit of rubber overalls and hooded rubber jacket, all the snaps closed tight against the weather as the drizzle turned to showers. I spent the afternoon trudging back and forth from the back garden to the house, dragging the broken PVC pipes to my waiting pickup truck, and drove the load to the garbage dump. When the field was cleared of the white shards of sheared plastic, I set my sights on the plastic sheeting. Ripped and torn, battered by the winds, the plastic sheeting was now spread over much of the back field. I attempted to ball it up as best I could, and the ball was as big as my full-sized Ford truck.
I grabbed as much as possible and began the long drag back to the house, through the gates of the field, past the orchards, down through the muddy pastures and up past the kitchen. Along the way errant ends of the ripped sheet would snag on a corner of the fence or a stick protruding from the ground, ripping it further.
When I finally made it down to the truck, I attempted to find the corners of the long rectangle and hoist them up into the bed of the truck. The plastic was unwieldy and uncooperative. After working through the afternoon, I finally packed all of the plastic onto the truck. The sides of the truck were smeared with mud—my overalls, my jacket, my boots as well. As I drove down the driveway, out of the farm and down to the garbage dump I tried to remember the day, years before, when Matt and I had installed the hoop house.
It was a sunny spring day in April. The PVC was straight and clean, fresh from the hardware store, the plastic tight in its box from the greenhouse supplier. The field had been freshly tilled, light brown; clean, no weeds.
We measured out the hoop house, pounded in the stakes and bent the PVC in graceful semicircles. In the space of a couple of hours we had a row of hoops all in a line. And then we opened the cardboard box and pulled out the roll of plastic. We unrolled it the length of the hoop house on the dry, fluffy dirt. Then Matt and I went along the long length of plastic, found the many layers sandwiched together and opened up the sheeting, unfolding it to its full width.
With great fanfare we then each grabbed hold of a corner of the plastic lying on the ground and began to lift it up and over the waiting hoops. The plastic slid gently across the top of the hoops and back down the other side to the ground in just a few moments. We continued on down the length of the hoops until we reached the far end of the hoop house. Suddenly what had in the beginning been a series of erect sticks in the ground was a form, a covered space, a greenhouse.
As we got to the end hoop, the wind picked up just a bit in the back field and the plastic was gently lifted, but with great loft and power. We held it fast, but the sight for a moment was tremendous—like a giant butterfly, a glider rising from the earth, alive. The sun was shining and the opaque white plastic glowed.
We attached the plastic to the hoops, securing it against the wind, and immediately the interior warmed on that sunny spring day. We had been successful in capturing the heat that would be needed to keep the tomatoes and peppers thriving in the less-than-predictable Pacific Northwest summers.
It is those great spring days that I remember when I think of vegetable-growing, not the muddy winter days of cleaning up. It is springtime that is the golden time of year on a farm: everything is possible. The tomatoes will all ripen, no bugs will eat the salad greens, the soil will be weed-free, the dogs will never race through the garden knocking over the peas, all will be good. The vegetables in my garden will look just like the seed packet photos.
Reality will arrive a few weeks later. Late killing frosts, bugs that eat prized vegetable plants, drought, bad soil—all will have their run later through the year; but spring is about hope.
It reminds me of the school year as a child. Even if my fourth-grade teacher Mr. Pand didn’t like me, or I didn’t like him, the next September I would start fresh with Mrs. Palmer in fifth grade. She would know nothing of those dull days of winter, sitting in the classroom listening to Mr. Pand drone on. Each new school year was a fresh start, all was forgiven. Even with false threats of a “permanent record,” each year was new, the slate wiped clean.
So too it is in the vegetable garden. The muddy days are forgotten, the errors and missteps in the past, in the spring all is green and fresh and possible.
Ten
Fowl
As I added new ventures to the farm, poultry seemed like a worthy experiment. Sure, poultry would never be a primary cash crop, but it’s hard to imagine a proper farm without chickens pecking about, providing eggs and meat for the kitchen. Chickens have become permanent residents, year-round egg producers that become stewing hens after their prime has passed. I started my career in the food business as a pastry cook, and a love of baked goods has remained with me all these years later. With a summer garden full of ripe, full-flavored strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and currants, there was no question that I would need eggs to pair with farmhouse butter for pies and tarts. Geese and ducks have a supporting role: arriving in the late spring, spending the summer fattening up on the spoils of the season and then being slaughtered in the fall and preserved for winter eating.
Chicken, geese and ducks are essentially similar. They come from an egg, grow up, feather out, fatten up and make for a tasty roast bird or hang out longer and lay lovely eggs. If you can master and understand one bird, the rest pretty much follow suit. Geese, for example, are much bigger, certainly smarter, meaner and messier, but are not fundamentally different than laying hens.
Fowl are hardy enough to travel huge distances when they are not even a day old, which means that top-q
uality, interesting, varied birds can be hatched in Iowa and be at my farm the next morning, still very much alive. Hatcheries breed chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl, peafowl, and ship them overnight all over the country. Day-old birds are fairly inexpensive, even by airmail. A couple of dollars each, maybe six dollars for a day-old gosling, quite a bargain compared to a top-quality calf that might be hundreds of dollars plus pricey transportation.
Each winter I page through the catalogue from the hatchery. There is an entire section of bantams—miniature chickens—that I find a bit too cute. Why would someone want a miniature chicken? The full-sized bird simply isn’t that big to begin with. I turn to the rare breeds section and imagine my farm with fancy peacocks, flashing their feathers at guests. They too get vetoed. I take a quick pass at the French varieties: Salmon Faverolles, Crèvecoeurs, Mottled Houdans. It would certainly be a good look—the Houdans prancing by the French-timber-frame barn—but perhaps a bit too precious.
In the end my parsimony prevails. I order the cheapest chickens in the catalogue: either the brown egg-layer combination or the rainbow collection. With either of these selections, a motley crew of birds ships. I like their un-purebred nature; they are “under-chickens,” if you will. I make the call; the day-old birds are scheduled for delivery.
On the appointed day, early in the morning the local post office calls to say that they have arrived and asks me to quickly get to the post office to pick them up. Actually it is false to say that the post office clerk asks me to arrive quickly. In reality I hear the phone ring, hear my answering machine click on and listen as the clerk gives me the message. I hide under the down comforter as long as possible. I do like chick day, however. The phone rings exactly at six a.m., which I am guessing is the official United States Post Office early call time. It is usually winter and cold. I get myself together and drive off to town. I am often up early, but I rarely drive off the farm at that hour, and never before milking the cows and feeding the other animals. Chick arrival day is different and in some small way exciting. The dogs hop into the truck, I scrape the windows of the morning ice with an old credit card and we shiver in the cold pickup as the cab warms up in the short ride to town. In the old days I would just walk in the back door of the post office and chat with the mail carriers sorting mail into the little metal bins. In this post-9/11, post-anthrax world, I am left on the back loading dock to buzz in, large secure doors keeping me from the warm, well-lit interior of the post office. I still feel oddly special, though. The regular post office customers use only the front door and only come during business hours.
Growing a Farmer Page 17