FORAGER: What you feel like on the farm in the winter when a vegetable gets scary scarce

FORAGER
What you feel like on the farm in the winter when a vegetable gets scary scarce
January 6, 2010
The Farmer & The Cook
Steven Sprinkel
 
Twenty-ten, huh? That’s nearly as fictiony science as A SPACE ODYSSEY.  Might as well live in it anyway since you are not responsible.  I hope you remembered to pick up your avocados, tangerines and lemons when you came by today. If you came early, you didn’t get any of them, or an opportunity to get the newsletter or check your name off the list. Did you know that when you do not check your name off the list I wonder about you and worry whether you are alright, had car trouble, lost your house keys,  or if you don’t care about fresh vegetables any more? Maybe you are just surfing in Bali, like some people we know.
 
We have dilliberately been putting a lot of dill and cilantro in your box every week. Call it  A SPICE ODYSSEY. The herbs are good for you, better than you might imagine, and I will bet a watermelon that you would not pick up either of them at random at the farmers market or Trader Joes. Not that you ever go all the way down there anyway. Umbels such as these are very dillicious in salads, and dill can punctuate a potato rather handsomely. Fresh herbs are usually passed over by most dilletantes, but hardy Supporters of Community Agriculture usually enjoy them whenever they are dillivered. ( I guess this might have been more fun if you had heard Tim Rhone rolling a river of classy word twists together while dillicately bunching things this morning.)
 
A few folks are new to the CSA so I should be more businesslike and informative. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. I usually am very fond of the little birds that live in the farm, but the pack of finches flitting around so charmingly from bush to plant have worn out their welcome. I mowed down two artichoke rows four feet high to get rid of their little love haven last week. The chokes were “organic heirlooms”, all spikey and dangerous to touch, so it was no real loss. But in the intervening time the finches ate 1200 feet of carrots, 1200 feet of beets and were about to peck a bed of Romaine to death before John Deere rode to the rescue. These were all new plantings of freshly emerged plants. The beets in particular was a devastation. Finch, so small yet so very hungry! Stop flying around so much and burning all those calories!
 
We are planting again. The usual suspects. More chard. Less cilantro. People find it hard to dill with cilantro every week if your name’s not Nguyen or Rodriguez. Getting those snap peas going again. More broccoli, leeks, lettuce, spinach, beets and carrots. I am also starting tomatoes and peppers now. What? Yeah, you read me right. They need a good eight weeks to get going. Then you “bump” them up into a little bigger pot for a bit, then put them out at the end of March, when the karma is a bit more predictable. Hey we got the onion too. Texas 1015 onions from Carrizo Springs in Dimmitt County. Nice little plants. You don’t really wonder if they were certified organic by the Texas Department of Agriculture, do you? I know the rules. Plan on getting certified again this year by my old friends at CCOF.  Wish it mattered more though. Wish I’d asked them for a lifetime exemption from certification fees for all the pro bono I pulled for them/us back in Eden. Back when there were no pros giving us any of that bono, just a bunch of little sainted lay novices making sure that one day Whole Foods Market and the USDA could steal the word organic and every consumer’s good will too. Make sure that sidecar is firmly bolted to the chassis!
 
People always ask me if I grew all the stuff on the table at the farmers market. The Devil! I wish I knew how to cheat! I am a bad liar, as my daddy will attest. These not-so baby-butt hands should be all the evidence you would require, madam, as to whether or not I bunched the damn beets once the ice had melted off their leafs. Organic? You come down and look at what’s left of my pile of certified organic soybean meal-I mean, fertilizer- and then ask me about our Escheria coli 0157, Dr. and Mrs. Health Department. You want to know about my nitrate runoff? If there is any, its in that stand of knee high grass in front of the culvert, idiot. Not that the Steelhead would mind a little organic soybean meal to go with their bug larvae.

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