Entropy

We might think of farming as a natural system, in some way working with nature to grow those natural plants out there in the ground, left to their own devices and undisturbed by the “unnatural” pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. But the farm is an ordered, organized, linear, countable system created with effort towards a certain end—that is, tasty vegetables each week for you all. Natural systems are not arranged in this way; they don't take effort to maintain. Nature—which is to say “those woods out there,” the consequence of natural systems—is not the farm. And it always wins in the end.

Right now, towards the end of the season, the farm is a mess! It's almost embarrassing. Over the course of the season I put effort towards maintaining the crops that are in production, but as soon as their utility is on the wane we put our effort elsewhere, not wanting to do extra work just to keep that natural reclamation at bay. And without energy put in to weeding, mulching, and rowcovering, first the grass covers the spaces between plants, and the pigweeds grow tall from any square inch of soil exposed to sun, and before we know it there is no longer order. The mower restores some peace of mind, but only long enough to take up the drip tape, the tomato stakes, the fabric mulch, before nature finishes dismantling the agricultural order we had put so much effort into arranging.

If left even longer, for a year or two, woody perennials would arise, seemingly out of nowhere, as happens in unmowed meadows and under power line rights-of-way. Passing birds drop seeds, and, soon enough, a little seedling tree here and there. Eventually, without effort put in to mow the fields and maintain the farm, it would turn into forest. Indeed, a few dozen yards into forest that grows just off the west edge of the farm, lies an old fenceline—that fenceline is a memory of what at one point used to be the edge of the forest, which has since escaped its boundary, now held at bay only by the mower and the occasional chainsaw.

In physics, there is the idea of “entropy:” Everything under the sun and everywhere else inevitably tends toward disorganization, as the amount of energy available for work gets to be less and less over time. I'm sure I'm about to mis-apply the concept here because I'm not writing about some thermodynamic system, but that's okay—I'm no physicist either. The principle I take away is that it takes some energy to keep a particular biological system organized, and over time, disorder—entropy—rises as it seeks its natural equilibrium instead of the “unnatural” carefully ordered state. That natural state might be complex—look at the woods, and the cycles of plants growing, dying, being consumed by insects, bacteria, the fungi in the soil linking trees together in a web of biological communication – yet given this region's fundamental conditions it's the inevitable, characteristic result, absent any outside force.

The only reason there's a treeline by my field at all, of course, is that hundreds of years ago people put their energy towards clearing fields to farm, and it's only due to continued effort that they have remained clear and not reverted back to forest. People from elsewhere say this part of the country is beautiful, green and lush, and, as someone who grew up around here it's hard to appreciate: of course there are forests, of course there is undergrowth, of course highways are lined with trees and smaller gravel roads I drive near the farm are cut out from beneath the overhanging canopy of limbs. But this Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest is a product of our own climate, with four seasons and frequent rain. In another part of the country, the nature that would move in would be a product of that area's own climate and geology underlying its own natural system—the plains states, if left alone, would progress towards grassland. It's not that the area has never seen tree seeds, but that because of climate and geology and soil, trees just don't grow well there, apart from along the creekbeds. A forest of trees would take some effort to establish, and if left alone, would in time revert back to prairie.

And even our forest here—our characteristic Mid-Atlantic forest that grows by default without any particular attention—is itself changing rapidly. Recently I visited some friends nearby and we we walked through their woods. They noted the number of dead and fallen trees: all ash trees. When they moved here years ago, they told me, it was an elm forest. Once the elms died of Dutch Elm disease, it became an ash forest. It's only a matter of time until the last ash trees succumb to the emerald ash borer, and we don't know yet what will fill the space left by the departing ash. My old house is built of chestnut, whose original status as the dominant woodland species here is remembered only by its ubiquity in old buildings, barns, furniture, and how its nuts used to offer a subsistence living to people carving out their own ordered stability in the Shenandoah mountains.

Last January I drove up to Vermont to help a friend fell some trees to clear space for a building. Driving north through Pennsylvania, across into New York and up along the Hudson river, I looked for the transition out of my familiar, homey Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest. Even well into the Hudson valley, the roadside forest looked remarkably similar to what I'm used to around here. Finally, crossing east into Vermont, and with the Green Mountains on the horizon, I saw my first birch tree and soon enough, the ground became snow covered and the forests turned to birch and evergreen. Left to its own devices, nature had tended to create something different in response to different natural conditions.

I often think of Vermont as an agricultural state, with cows, Cabot cheese, and all the back-to-the-lander farming operations supplying fresh, fancy food to New York and Boston—and in fact I had gone up there in part to take a closer look at its rural, agricultural economy. The Hudson valley had been full of small farms, greenhouses, farmstands, but driving north through Vermont, it was only sawmills. I passed sawmills and firewood mills, little small-scale businesses, I passed logging trucks driving along the road—with hardly a farm to be seen. I can't tell you the last time I came across a sawmill here in VA, or passed a log truck on the road, but I can barely go anywhere around here without passing an agricultural operation of one sort or another. Just as with natural systems, the business enterprises that happen to do best as a result of an area's climate, geology, and economics are the ones that over time end up predominating.

The Loudoun Valley, where I am, has long been known for its good soil and agricultural promise—as opposed to the area east of the ridge, between Leesburg and Fairfax, which is remembered for its scrubby useless forest and poor soil. The thoroughly agricultural history of the valley here reflects that, as does the arrangement of farms—this area's rolling hills and creeks has made small-scale land-holding the predominate social arrangement, because unlike in the flat land to the south and west it would take too much work, too much energy, to have expansive plantations here.

My own, particular farm, as idiosyncratic as it is today, it too is shaped by the same forces of place, of geology, of climate, tending towards the low-energy state of this region's characteristic vegetable farming activity. I started off, in the beginning, growing the uncommon crops and storing root vegetables for sale over winter, because there was a better market for those items as a new farmer breaking in. The reason for that, of course, is that it takes more effort to grow spinach, carrots, and beets in this climate, and in this heavy soil. Those crops and that style of mechanized farming was not the characteristic operation well suited to this area. Indeed, I was copying systems familiar to the Northeast, which few people employ down here, to produce crops that were marketable precisely because few people grew them. I had learned to farm from my neighbors, but my farm didn't look anything like theirs.

As I farmed, year by year, making decisions about equipment, about crops and sales models, I tended (as anyone would) to drop the elements that were less successful, or less productive, or that I over time found to be less reliable than others. And as I adjusted towards what works best and grows most easily in this area, I can now look back over time to find that my farm, for some unseen reason, has less and less direct-seeded roots and greens, and more and more of the hot-season summer crops grown from transplants on plastic mulch. I realize that my farm is coming to look more and more like my neighboring vegetable farms I learned from in the beginning. Not because of any particular intention, or even awareness, but by following what produces with the least difficulty, the least energy. Which is, of course, what those other farmers had done, in their own day, regardless of their own interests, abilities, and skills—and they too happened to settle in to the same sort of farm that am being pulled toward today. Like any system in the world—in the universe, even—my farm can't resist the principles of entropy, bending towards the characteristic arrangement that arises with the least complexity, the least special intention.

Miracle of a mustard seed

Here's something I've had in my mind for a very long time, but not yet written about until now. Way back during my first year farming on my own—well, actually it was the fall before, a mini "trial season" of sorts where few things worked because I hadn't made enough mistakes yet to know what to do and not do—I was ready to plant my first crop: salad greens!

I'd seen the entire process and done every part of it as a worker on other people's farms, but it was my first time doing it all myself for my own farm. First I prepared the ground, as we always did, bringing the tractor to till up a patch of sod and find the soil underneath all those grass plants—just as, indeed, underneath every plant everywhere around here lies many feet of dirt, soil, ready to be turned from two-dimensional surface of the earth to three-dimensional space ready for useful activity: a field to plant in. I marked off rows and brought out my push seeder to help there become neat lines of new plants, useful to people, where there had been just weeds before. I poured in the round, hard, black orbs from a packet (quite literally they were "as small as a mustard seed"), ran the seeder back and forth straight as I could and just had to trust that those little seeds were dribbling down there, not too deep and not too shallow, being too small to even identify once covered with dirt.

After clearing those sod weeds, loosening the soil, and covering the tiny round kernels with the soil, I left, my work done. In three days I returned. Where there was nothing before but bare dirt, now there were visible faint lines of tiny mustard seedlings, each with its tender stem unfolding up and out of a crack in the seed up through the dirt, spreading into two-lobed seed leaves, and a little root pushing down into the soft earth. I had seen seeds before, of course—perhaps the first was in second grade, the bean seed in the paper towel, or perhaps before that the colorful marigolds in our flower garden at home, dying and drying to seed heads, surprising me with new marigolds the following summer sprouting up far from where we had planted them. I had planted thousands of seeds working for other people and tended the resulting crops. So now, off on my own, with my own field, my own seeder, my own seeds, I can't say I was surprised, as much as mystified, in the sense of beholding the mystery of what had happened.

Sure, through my own work, these plants had come into existence, for which I was responsible to grow and eventually (hopefully) sell, to support my own life. But how was it, really, that those seedlings came to be—that those seeds, seemingly inert for months or even years, at this particular moment had put forth plants? I didn't do that. Somehow, the seeds had done that. It felt as much a miracle as I had ever experienced.

With all our technology, with miniaturization, with all our science and engineering and "just add water!" hype, we can't come close—not even close—to making something that does anything near to what a little mustard seed can do. Just add water, something from nothing. I'm not sure we really even understand how it all works, though we know that it does. Some look to religion, for an answer in God; some find understanding in biology. Now and again someone from the CSA will offer an appreciative comment about how skilled I am at creating such good food or, from a religious perspective, how God has given me the skill of bringing food from the earth. And I appreciate the sentiment, I really do—but I know that it wasn't me who did the work of creating the vegetable. I don't have much of a hand in that. Somehow, it's the plants that did the job, that figured out how to create these things we eat. All I did was to spend my own day's work giving them the conditions necessary for them to do theirs.

Do you think of vegetables as being alive?

Most of us intuitively think of cutting a plant down, cutting off a branch, or digging up a root as separating that excised piece from the live part of the plant, and it's only a matter of time until the piece withers and dies. A lettuce leaf, once cut, can't recover and the head will grow no more--and the forgotten summer tomato quickly melts on the counter leaving behind only its finished product: the seeds.

But other vegetables are quite different... not dead and done, but alive, waiting. Their cells are respiring, warding off rot for months at a time until the warmth of spring arrives to move some collection of cells to action. From that mass grows a shoot, a leaf, and soon, a plant. We're all familiar with this from potatoes sprouting on the kitchen counter, and it isn't so inconceivable that some structure on a potato (the eyes) knows how to grow into a plant. What astonishes me every year though, is onions.

Onions seem complete, dead tops and paper-skinned. They seem to follow the familiar course from vibrancy to death, the way a winter squash plant grows and dies to leave behind the butternut. Every year, though, there are inevitably some odd onions left over somewhere on the farm—unsaleable, half-rotten culls left in a shed, some tiny onions in the cooler—all of which freeze and thaw and freeze again throughout the depths of winter, and seem entirely inanimate, if not decomposing. But then in spring, there they are—onion shoots wending their way towards the sun! In the fridge at home too, every year a delightful, almost comical, surprise—onions trying to grow their way out of their paper bag, out of the fridge, inevitably becoming the first fresh leafy green vegetables of the new year.

Somehow, pulled from the ground for nine months, frozen over winter, left without any care in conditions that would kill any other vegetable, each one of those cells knows what to do when the time comes. Each layer of onion is indistinguishable from the next, no kernel or germ in the center, it’s onion all the way through and yet: they know to divide, to build a green shoot entirely different from what was there before, and, as it grows, it consumes the energy stored over winter in the eatable onion, leaving it a withered husk as the new plant grows tall. It's exactly the inverse of what's happening with these onions right now: the onion leaves growing in the field put energy into the bulb and will decline and die as the bulb expands. The onion we eat isn't an end-point, but a mid-point. It's no surprise then that these are the vegetables that store the longest: onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots. Rather than being dead and finished with their life cycle, they're just in a holding pattern biding their time until the next phase.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween this week! Carving pumpkins don't make it into the CSA lineup owing to their inedibility, though they might be one of the most season-specific items out there! I'm sure you'll be seeing them all over town this week as we approach Halloween. This tradition began with the pagan holiday of Samhain, marking the beginning of the dark half the year at the midway point between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and its Christian counterpart, Halloween. Both holidays honor the deceased and involve the passage of spirits and ghosts from one realm to another. To ward away evil spirits, people practicing folk Christianity in the British Isles carved large turnips and beets into grotesque lanterns lit with lumps of coal, and, in the 19th century, Irish immigrants to this country found American pumpkins to be well suited to the tradition. Soon enough what we think of as “Halloween” began to be celebrated across the country, with carved jack-o'-lanterns set out on porches decorated with dried cornstalks and gourds.

It's no coincidence that pumpkins, potatoes, butternut squash, and other root vegetables are what we decorate with and eat during October and November—and that these are the traditional vegetables of Thanksgiving dinner. These are the vegetables that were stockpiled for winter in the root cellar, before the advent of easy shipping and the modern industrial food system; in a very real way, these are the vegetables that kept people alive during the dark half of the year. Drawing much of our cultural touchstones from regions with long winters, it is no surprise that they are so encoded in our cultural memory.

The fact that these vegetables in particular are our seasonal favorites is simply a product of the principle of evolution—everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. These fall vegetables are produced by frost-tender plants that have all figured out a way to use the sun's energy from the year's growing season to persist in some way over winter to get a head start next year—potatoes with their starchy tubers sending up shoots when the soil warms; turnips, beets, and carrots ready to sprout a seedstalk first thing in spring. These same strategies allow us to keep them over winter for food; the stored energy nourishing us humans instead of growing a new plant next year.

Cabbage and the other hardy brassica greens are also considered traditional fall vegetables because they grow well in cool weather and do keep a while over winter. However, this cultural memory doesn't account for the fact that different types of plants are at home in different climatic regions (take brussels sprouts, which only taste good when grown in cold climates, yet have made it onto Thanksgiving menus nationwide). There's a reason tomatoes are a big deal around here; likewise, New York and Wisconsin are major cabbage growing areas.

Although most plants CAN be grown in most places, different types of plants thrive in the types of weather patterns found in specific regions at specific times of year. The more out-of-season or the less ideal the growing conditions, the more attention required to keep the plant in its comfortable conditions and the more easily they are knocked off course by weather outside of their comfortable range. Tomatoes and peppers, they just grow here in Virginia's heat, no special attention required; same for the fall crops like squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, since they to do all their growing in the heat of the summer. Cabbage and greens, on the other hand, really would love to grow in New York, with a mild summer and long, beautiful fall. Here we get a blazing hot summer followed by a short period of nice October weather quickly becoming too cold and dark for plants to grow. And how many emails have I written over the years about waiting for the exact conditions to seed spinach or the trials and tribulations of growing carrots? They definitely CAN be grown here, and we have had amazing spinach or carrot seasons, but being ill-suited to Virginian conditions it takes some effort and attention to guide them through the times when weather just isn't what they're expecting. I'd say about half the years see reasonable success; and the other years, slim pickings or outright failure. In any case, these are not the crops that we rely on to get us through the lean times.

So as we are immersed in the pumpkin spice everything season, with gourds and winter squash turning up in every major supermarket, and as you get ready to carve those pumpkins, rest assured! You are not participating in the fad of the season. Quite the opposite—you are celebrating culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Tomato Tomtahto

Let's talk tomatoes! You may have noticed that there are two kinds of tomatoes in the bags this year: a regular firm, round, red, modern hybrid variety, and an heirloom-type that's dark, soft, oddly shaped, and very tasty. Although both are tomatoes just the same, we farmers and food writers somehow always talk about hybrid tomatoes vs heirloom tomatoes, with heirlooms definitely the gold standard in the tomato world. But what exactly is it to be an heirloom tomato?

The "social" definition of an heirloom tomato is one with a story: an open-pollinated variety cultivated year after year by careful seed saving which, because of superior quality, was kept in a family or achieved a measure of local or regional fame. Many heirloom types are from other parts of the world--cherished varieties that can be specifically tied to a group of people and were brought to America by early immigrants. The preservation of these seeds was not due to sentimentality, but because these were time-tested varieties bearing an implicit seal of approval. Heirlooms represent, quite literally, the interwoven fabric of both natural and human history.

But many backyard hobbyists and commercial breeders still create new open-pollinated varieties with standout "heirloom tomato" qualities even today. In fact, this year I'm growing out some seeds I saved from two fruits of unknown cross that turned up in the field a couple years ago. These new "heirloom" tomatoes have none of the lineage or history, but have all of the characteristic exciting stripes, colors, irregular shapes, and strong flavors we associate with other soft, thin-skinned "heirlooms." All these modern tomatoes meet the "aesthetic" definition for "heirloom tomatoes"--and yet, some of the historically kept heirloom varieties from 100 years ago or more were, in fact, plain red tomatoes, entirely uninteresting and which would never pass as heirlooms today on any restaurant menu or farmers market table.

Moreover, as much as the dark, soft, tasty tomatoes in your bags meet this definition of "heirloom tomato," they do not, in fact, meet the "scientific" definition--and, surely, science should be the one to settle all this confusion, right? Botanically, an heirloom tomato is simply any open-pollinated variety, as opposed to a hybrid variety of tomato. That is, pollinating the flower with pollen from the same tomato variety makes fruit containing seeds that will reproduce the tomato, true to type. Growers can save seed from their crop and sow again in following years. A hybrid variety, however, is grown from seeds produced by mating two open-pollinated varieties together.

And truth be told, the "heirloom" tomatoes in your bags today are in fact hybrid tomatoes produced by crossing two different heirloom tomatoes together. Scientifically, the heirloom tomatoes in your bags are just plain-ol' hybrids...but seeing them as heirlooms may offer a more useful understanding of culinary reality.

Some tomatoes are easily categorized, such as a hard red shipping hybrid from the grocery store or Radiator Charlie's storied heirloom Mortgage Lifter, but the more ambiguous the tomato, the more it pushes the boundaries of its label, the less these seemingly-intrinsic scientific categories help us understand the world.

And that might sound subjective and un-scientific but in fact, this is exactly how biological categories are applied even in biology itself. In conversation with a botanist friend once, I tried to pin down with them the essential features that scientists use to distinguish one plant species from another, and was quite disappointed to find my layman's understanding of science to be incorrect: plants are out there doing their plant thing, and nothing differentiates one species from another but scientists themselves, making up labels in their effort to describe and understand the world. Boundaries are ill defined, and, to my great consternation, the very same plant growing in two separate parts of the country may be called a different species, although they are otherwise identical!

In many scientific disciplines there is big debate between opposing factions of "Lumpers" and "Splitters" about how labels are best utilized; the lumpers feeling like putting similar-enough things together under the same label describes their world well, and the splitters feeling that slicing & dicing to fine-grained labels allows for better understanding.

This imperfect human interplay may be the real reason this whole idea of "what is an heirloom tomato" is so complicated in the first place--leaving us with, in the end, no "real" answer at all. All I can do, at this point, is to come down on the side of the lumpers for the weekly vegetable list and simply call them all "tomatoes."

We made it!

Well, we've made it through another farm season, and with one more week to go after tomorrow, you've just about eaten everything up! The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash, but we've just been sending it out little by little each week, and now all of a sudden there's plenty of room in there. And in the field, it seems like just about every week now there's some crop we've reached the end of, some new section of rows that are finally ready to be turned into cover crop.

You've seen the farm through its whole cycle start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May, through the heat of summer, then back again to leafy greens, and now moving towards the root crops of November. We've felt abundance, scarcity, and perhaps monotony--but never the same thing month to month, since your cooking moves through the seasons along with the farm. So too on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. The grocery store may have just about every single thing just about every single week, sourced from somewhere in the world unknown, but here we eat from the same plants the whole time, and so we see the change as each plant moves from its peak of production to its eventual death and decomposition back into soil.

Take this week's peppers for example. These are the last intrepid remnants of plants germinated way back in March, transplanted in May, blasted by hail in July, finally bearing fruit in August for a few short weeks of big, beautiful peak-season red peppers, only to begin to decline soon after, with green peppers mixed in with the slowly-ripening reds. A week or two ago, as the real freeze was coming on, we spent all afternoon picking everything that remained: reds of any sort, half-ripe peppers mostly green with a stripe of red, and the true green peppers to save for later. So last week you saw those last true-reds; this week you have those peppers that were half-red when picked and have now ripened in the cooler to interesting shades; and next week will be the last true green peppers. As for the pepper plants? They're no more, all mown down just like they never were there at all, disced under and seeded to cover crop before Wednesday's rain.

These peppers are a bit on borrowed time, here in the second week of November, but then again, so is most everything else. These plants grew when there was warmth and light and there just isn't so much of that anymore, and so the CSA is coming to a close not because we've decided to stop, but because plants are no longer doing much of anything new! We're working through the last of what was produced during the growing season; soon enough there won't be anything left and it will be time for the season of rest.

Origins of seasonal culture

We are now deeply in the apple and pumpkin-craze season, which is what we have come to expect after the berry craze of late spring and early summer, and then the tomato frenzy of high summer. Have you stopped to wonder where these seemingly-recent seasonal fixations came from? It's not just the power of advertising.

Plants have over millions of years developed some pretty specialized strategies for getting a leg up on the competition. Some vegetables, like alliums (onions and garlic) form a bulb in the sun's summer energy to persist, alive, over winter, using that stored energy to beat the competition, and sending up a shoot first out of the gate when the weather warms. In spring they're some of the first vegetables we get.

In the summer, as you may know, most of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a part of a plant that contains seeds–surrounded with something tasty to help spread the seed or to decompose, offering fertility to the next year's germinating seed–such as a tomato, squash, strawberry, or apple. But it takes a lot of energy to grow a fruit (first the plant, then flowers, and finally the delicious fruit) and that's why these are our summer vegetables, needing a long time to accumulate enough growth and sunlight to produce the food we want to eat. Other fruits solve this problem by using stored energy from last year to get the job done earlier (strawberries) or have figured out how to survive year-to-year as bushes or trees.

Now, in the fall, we are back to brassica greens–biennial plants gaining a foothold in the cool, meager growing conditions of fall where other plants decline, in order to grow just enough to survive the winter and send up a seedstalk at the first hint of spring. And of course, we have the fall storage crops like potatoes, carrots, squash and, yes, pumpkin spice.

Seasonality is no accident, but a product of the principle of evolution--everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. Why pumpkins for Halloween? Why potatoes and butternut squash for Thanksgiving? These are the plants that arrive in this season, and these are the fruits and tubers developed to last through the cold months–surviving without rotting to keep people alive during the dead of winter, just as they would otherwise survive to put up new plants in spring. Of course, it's not to the squash's plan to produce a butternut only to be eaten up in December... but isn't that, in fact, botanical success, to be cultivated on purpose, grown with care year after year, its genetics persisting for having found the niche of sustaining human life? As we take in the Halloween displays since September, pumpkin spice for weeks yet to come, then turkeys, everywhere, it's a small comfort to know that all this amped-up insanity of the advertising world is based entirely upon pre-industrial agricultural reality. It's merely marketing finding its niche.

So, enjoy your Halloween pumpkins and your butternut squash at Thanksgiving, and even your pumpkin spice. You're not just being trendy after all! The opposite of recent fad, this is culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Clockwork

Before starting farming on my own ten years ago I had already spent a couple seasons on farms in this area and elsewhere. And, despite that farming experience and having grown up spending my free time wandering the outdoors of the DC suburbs, I hadn't spent any particularly focused time paying attention to the minutiae of the Mid-Atlantic seasons. So when it came around to August, and suddenly there were grasshoppers everywhere, whole flocks of them rising up in front of the trucks as we drove through the grass, I was a bit surprised–and amazed by their density. How could I not have noticed such an entomological bloom before? I chalked it up to the vast fields of grass out on the farm as opposed to the neatly mown cul-de-sac lawns of my childhood.

The following year, when I struck out to farm on my own, I eagerly awaited the return of the grasshoppers in August... but they never arrived! Had I mis-remembered and was actually somehow astounded at several grasshoppers flitting away from me in a field, now an unremarkable sight? I was confused. And then I forgot about the grasshopper clouds, one of those memories that feels true but might in fact be a function of its time in one's life filtered by the vividness of being in a new place. I forgot about it, that is, until 2016, when in August, as on cue, again there were dozens and dozens of grasshoppers stirred up from where they sat, invisible, but now floating clumsily out of harms way whenever we drove past, looking like little brown butterflies until, near the ground, wings folded away and all of a sudden a regular old grasshopper dropped to the earth. 2016 was a Grasshopper Year.

I used to assume that each year the same animals appeared at the same time like clockwork, a product of the Newtonian seasonality of climatic cause and effect, inevitably the correct species materializing at its proper time. In fact, I used to assume the same of plants on the farm: that given identical inputs of seed, water, and calendar, results would be predictable from one year to the next. But it turns out--as all the returning CSA folks already know--each farm year is different, a product of unseen and unknowable factors.

2018 was a Wasp Year. Wasp nests in the shed, expected. Wasp nests in rolls of irrigation line, unexpected (and painful!). Wasps residing inside the tubular metal frames of farm equipment so often that, before hitching the tractor, I began to sight down the framing tubes (from a distance) to be sure they were clear of wasps. I dispatched wasps with boards, with poles, and when necessary, with wasp spray.

This year, there are no wasps. Nobody has been stung anywhere on the farm, not even once, and when it became clear that this was not a wasp year I began to feel safe and secure yanking old pieces of metal from the weeds and reaching into storage containers. What would have been dangerous in a Wasp Year holds no risk at all this season.

Because this year, it turns out, is an Ant Year. I have never thought of anthills as anything but a somewhat comical nuisance of working outside, a surprise to deal with from time to time (“OH! --ants here. Hm.”), but of no real consequence. This year, though, there are ant colonies in the potting soil bags and between stacks of wood, in a box of seeder parts (then scurrying away down the one blade of grass leaning up against the box), and in crates of onions curing in the greenhouse, no matter that we elevated them off the ground; under regular CSA-bag delivery spots forcing temporary relocation and, most recently, even living inside the weatherstripping of a seldom-used walk-in cooler door. This is entirely unusual, and no longer surprising–“OH. Ants, of course.”

Each year I scratch my head a little and try a little less to understand the unknowable, yet perhaps somewhere in that secret is the reason that each vegetable, equally mysterious, does not offer the same result from year-to-year even though I follow more or less the same planting schedule each season.

2020 is a Lettuce and Squash year, as you well know. Never in the history of the CSA has there been lettuce for you every single week! But peppers? Where are they? 2019 was a Pepper Year--there were so many that we sold boxes of seconds peppers for weeks--but not this year. We've had Sweet Potato and Carrot years, and even Eggplant Years (the most confounding vegetable). No matter how much I try to have just the right amount of everything, invariably a few vegetables end up defining the year with their abundance–or failure. Fortunately it always seems that whatever conditions depress one vegetable will boost another, so that on balance there are always the right amount of vegetables. I like to think it keeps the CSA exciting and fun--kind of like tie-dye, always plenty of color, always interesting, but the pattern unknown until the fabric unfolds.

Seasons on a farm

We've turned the corner to autumn, as you might have noticed by the slight color changing of a few leaves, the blissfully cooler nights, or maybe the the dramatic influx of pumpkin spice everything flooding the advertising space around us--nevermind the first winter squash and salad mix in the CSA shares and the obvious decline of tomatoes.

It's funny how the onset of September evokes such images of autumn and change for so many of us--back to school, the end of carefree summer, the beginning of sweater weather; the time to pick apples, resume baking, and cook hearty meals rich with winter squash. Even though astronomical fall begins three whole weeks from now on the 22nd at the equinox, perhaps our sociological Fall begins this weekend, at Labor Day.

But there's no conflict in that; even though spring, summer, fall, and winter seem integral to our understanding of yearly time, even though they're based on something as scientific as the celestial equinox/solstice cycle, our culture pretty much just made them up. In ancient Japan the year was divided into 24 seasonal stages and 72 microseasons, each lasting a few days, with names like, "mist starts to linger," "wild geese fly north," "first lotus blossoms," and "deer shed antlers." The Cree and Hindu calendars each recognize six seasons; Thai divide the year into three seasons. Science writer Ferris Jabr takes a big-picture view: “If we zoom way out, we can see certain global rhythms: the ebb and flow of light; the bloom and wither of plants; the expansion and retreat of ice. Earth has a million seasons, or just one, depending on your perspective." Jabr even suggests, what if we imagined seasons from the perspective of creatures other than ourselves?

Popular supposition might be that we farmers, being outside all the time, would see the shifts between the four seasons more keenly than most. However, the truth is just the opposite: we're zoomed in so close that we see such detail as to obscure the lines between the "four seasons,” leading us to mark time in the year based on small changes rather than quarter-year shifts. The culturally assigned seasonal categories are fairly irrelevant in our day-to-day experience of farm life; we have our own markers in the farm year, no doubt invisible and meaningless to others (just as you may have, in your own lives). Our year begins with the Groovy Bird singing “GROOvy GROOvy GROOvy” in April as we plant onions, then when it gets hot the June Bugs arrive, dozens of them buzzing slowly about. In Late July, around brassica-planting time, the Curious Wasps swarm low to the ground circling circling circling, never threatening, just curious to see what's going on, and then, now, we hear the first of many geese honking through at dusk as they look for a place to spend the night on their way South.

Seasons allow us to know not only where we are, but what's coming next. Those who have been with the CSA for a while may mark time in the CSA year, knowing that the season of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes declines and then gives way to the season of storage roots and greens, culinary seasons eliding one to the next without clear division--except to notice in retrospect that we no longer see the vegetables we used to, the food once rare and fresh now our common staple, letting us know that next season is on the way.

Seasonality

Well, it's happened again, you've eaten the entire farm. That's all the vegetables we've got. The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled carrots, potatoes, squash, and cabbage; after tomorrow morning the cooler will be emptier than it's been in a long time. That's the plan, of course. You've seen the farm season through from start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May to the last of the root crops in November, and now it is no more.

Similarly, on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. Take the spinach, which has transformed from new and fresh and small, to full size and vibrant, and now is diminished by cold. Within another month, by the time winter begins, the leaves will be small, wilted, looking nearly dead. But though some plants may die, the spinach in its stalk, the carrot in its taproot, the potato in its tuber, and the cabbage in its leaves all consolidate strength to lie low through the winter then send up the first shoots as the weather warms in spring, racing with the other plants to be the first to drop seeds for the new year.

Like the plants, so too the farm recedes into winter after a season's growth, the tomato stakes put away, irrigation hoses rolled up, the supplies stacked in the shed, and the remains of our carefully planted crops tilled under to turn back into soil. Although the life, the complexity, we built here this year is no longer, the farm is not destroyed and dead, but decomposed into its constituent parts ready to spring forth not five months from now with new growth next year.

As the farmer, I too feel quite the same way...quite ready to rest at the season's end and hunker down to rejuvenate over winter, sustained by stockpiles laid by while the sun offered enough energy for life–the food I've frozen, canned, and stored in the cooler in preparation for the cold and dark ahead. And, after spending every week for the last six months thinking about you all and what vegetables to send out in the shares each Friday, the biggest change will be to suddenly have no more CSA planning and picking.

I imagine the end of season may be a big change for many of you, too. You'll most likely have eaten vegetables from my farm more weeks than not this year! Come Spring, I bet you'll be looking forward to fresh, new vegetables as much as I will be looking forward to growing them again, and I hope you'll stick with the farm next season.

Week 19: Vegetable life cycle complete

There was a change in the air today and nobody knew why, but we all agreed: it smelled like winter. Cold, wet ground and cold, windy air, a characteristic winter look about the farm--no longer the beautiful sunny fall days with still-vibrant plants. Though it was cloudy and cool all day we still had to work to keep the just-picked greens from wilting--not from sun and heat this time, but from the unrelenting wind. All plants are noticing this change to the cold months; nothing but the storage crops is in its prime anymore. We're just getting vegetables out of the field while they're still useful.

The individual vegetables in your share might not look too different from week to week, but over time we all get to see the full cycle of production from these plants here at the farm. Remember when the spinach was huge and meaty, each leaf picked individually from the plant? Now the leaves are small, clear-cut with a knife to get all we can.  This is perhaps the biggest difference from grocery store vegetables: the fact that the size, shape, and taste of the produce varies over the course of the season as the plants mature and then decline. Commercial farms grow precisely what works best with their soil, at the optimal time of year, harvest it all at once at the peak and then it's on to the next crop. Winter spinach from the south; summer spinach from the north. Greens from California and its balmy bug-free climate. Tomatoes from Florida and carrots and cabbage from New York, or even Canada. No commercial wholesale farmer in Virginia would even think of having this variety of crops all in production at once, but for farmers like us, that's precisely the point. You get to have a connection to what's actually happening on the farm, in real time, as borne out by your weekly "snapshot" of production. 

Week 17: The botanical roots of seasonal food

As you may know from trivia night, many of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a seed-bearing structure from a flowering plant--such as a tomato, pepper, eggplant, or squash. Vegetables are all other plant parts, such as roots (carrots), leaves (salads), or flower parts (broccoli). Well, then there's tubers (potatoes), which are neither roots nor fruits, though they do generate new plants... but we'll leave that to another day.

To grow the fruit we eat, these plants must first grow a plant, then flowers, and then finally the food. This is a lot of effort for a plant, and plants that reproduce this way grow primarily in the summer when there is a long period of high-energy growing conditions. In the cool fall, with their seed-producing work complete, the warm-season fruiting crops slow way down. Our work turns towards the true vegetables.

We don't need to wait for vegetables to grow a fruit, since we'll just consume the plant itself. Moreover, unlike the summer crops, these plants (think spinach and kale) LIKE to grow in the cool fall weather and don't mind that there is no time to grow a fruit. They are simply aiming to get a head start on spring by producing a plant this fall before hunkering down for the winter. In March, when the weather warms, they will send up a seed stalk straight away before the competition even has a chance to germinate. And those beets, turnips, carrots? That's where the plant stores its energy for the long winter, to send up new shoots in spring. All these root crops and tuber crops are traditional fall foods because that is the time when the plants are stockpiling energy for spring. And the storage crops like carrots, beets, and potatoes are our traditional winter food since they store well through the winter when outdoor plants are frozen and dead -- precisely why the plants create those storage roots in the first place.