That’s what we do here. Well, that and take care of horses, cows, chickens and pigs. But aside from eggs, we sell vegetables. And that means plant, weed, harvest. Over and over and over again.
Naturally there’s subtleties here. The soil must be nourished with cover crops and prepared with various implements. You have to decide where each crop will go, since each bit of soil is affected for good or evil by what grew there last time. There’s a lot to it; in short, you will have to read more than this blog if you want to garden. Nonetheless, the overall pattern is plant, weed, harvest.
I emphasize this because there’s a certain simple pattern that took me months to discover. The one thing nobody ever teaches is the stupefyingly obvious. Probably you already know all this, but I didn’t.
Plant. The easy way is to put the seed in the ground. The complex way is to make a super-duper soil mix, cut it into little blocks, put a seed in each block, keep the blocks warm and safe in your greenhouse until the little plants are preteens, then transplant the blocks to the ground. I thought all that effort was a glorified waste until I weeded a row of carrots that had been “direct-seeded.” Since those carrots went into the ground as seeds, they didn’t have a headstart on the weeds. Not pretty. Of course, there’s tricky ways around this dilemma, but they’re not as straightforward as growing your plants in blocks until they’re much bigger than the weed seeds they’ll compete with.
So we do a lot of transplanting. When the block plants are ready, you lug out an old bread tray full of two hundred blocks or so and plant each block along the garden row. Some (probably most) plants, such as tomatoes, take awhile to grow. You put them in the ground in spring, and by late summer (theoretically) you’re harvesting. Other plants, such as the lettuce we sell as salad mix, only take a month to mature, so we’re still planting fresh batches now in August. Somehow I never knew that all plants don’t take the exact same amount of time to mature. By now, that’s embarrassing.
Weed. For me, this process was always shrouded in mystery. I have no idea why. Apparently, you need only know what your crop looks like. You rip out everything else. It helps to know what crops in other rows look like too, since, say, carrot seeds can spill or get left in the seeder and wind up infesting the beets. But this is the exception.
As with anything else in farming, timing is a matter of life and death. Weeds are just like any other plants, so they start as baby seeds and grow up to be big and strong. They don’t stop growing when you go see The Village or bake cookies or take off for the weekend to a wife’s friend’s wedding. Obviously, little baby weeds don’t have quite the same chokehold on life as their older siblings, so knocking them out when they’re a quarter inch high is the intelligent choice. Generally, we don’t get around to it until they’re a foot or so.
What happens if you don’t weed? The weeds take over. “Weed” really means “the right plant for this soil, as opposed to the chuckleheaded ‘crop’ you’re trying to shoehorn in here.” If we could only eat weeds—oh wait, we can. But that’s another blog.
Harvest. Eventually, hopefully, the plants mature and you go pick the part you eat. Since we’re not into the Eliot Coleman Four Season Harvest dance that uses greenhouses, hoophouses, cold frames, and some form of dark magic to conjure up harvests in the dead of winter, most of our stuff gets planted in spring and harvested in summer. (Not counting the “green manure” plants that get sown on unused plots to restore soil health, which is yet another blog.)
Our stuff is fresh, so it’s picked the day before or even the morning that it’s sold. They sell at four markets a week and they run two CSA groups, one here and one in another town, so that’s a lot of picking. CSA means Community Supported Agriculture, and members buy a share in the farm early in the year that entitles them to a selection of crops each week for the duration of the growing season.
If you’re into poison-free food, join a CSA. You get a major discount over what this stuff would cost retail, you support a local farm, and you actually know the person who grows what you put in your body every day. (Fancy that!)
The slight catch is that, since you’re part of a real farm, you take the risk that their tomatoes will bomb or the peppers be late. Fortunately, no CSA Secret Police will prevent you from going and buying other tomatoes. The other thing is that, since you’re not getting stuff shipped thousands of miles from the tropics, you have to wait for crops to be ready. Early in the season, there’s mostly salad mix, as well as kale and chard (weird greens you don’t see in the store). Lots of salads.
But with time come peas, broccoli, tomatoes, squash, peppers, onions, scallions (little onions), herbs like basil and cilantro, beans, potatoes, carrots, beets, even pumpkins…all as fresh as you can get it unless you grow it yourself.
Great for you, “challenging” for the pickers. But it beats going into debt to get huge fuel-slurping picking behemoths that compact the soil. Better that we’re out in the sun with the mild work than a factory slave making a machine for us. Four days a week, we pick. It takes hours. Every plant’s different. Some are more fun than others. I like squash myself—you have to hunt among these huge, prickly leaves. Sometimes I remember with a start that a few months ago, I didn’t even know what a tomato plant looked like. Strange how I could get all the way through a college degree, fortified by many a pizza, without even knowing how God designed the food I eat. But oh yes, I’m educated.
Anyhow, that’s a glimpse of the cycle here. Spring has more planting, late summer more harvesting, but every crop has the same arc. Plant, weed, harvest. If we let a few crops “bolt”—mature enough to make their own seed—we could save that seed and the whole life cycle would happen here on this farm. But seed saving is complicated. In fact, since they don’t do it, I’ve no idea how. Yet. That’ll have to be another blog.
Meanwhile, a CSA member’s here, picking up the share. Gotta go.
