Welcome! Nevermore Farm grows and conserves a variety of unusual produce and poultry in partnership with Scofield Farms, a producer of extraordinary almond nutmeats. We offer CSA subscriptions, attend the Woodland Farmer’s Market, and are willing to deliver our products to homes and businesses in the Woodland/Davis/Colusa area. Member: Seed Savers International, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy ,California Farm Bureau Please visit the Heritage Turkey Sales link to learn more about our birds. If we can answer any questions or you would like to purchase birds, please contact us.

If you have scheduled an visit and need directions to our farm click here. We are closed to the public except by appointment. No pets. Contact Deborah at: 530-574-3597 or Click Here to email us.

7/20/10 Summer has been in full swing for weeks now….right around the end of June our schedules became a bit like falling off of a cliff. And we usually don’t get to climb back up until something like late October or November. As one might expect, it’s a time of year when quite a lot of food comes down the pipe and demands attention. And since we have an orchard of over 100 mixed fruit trees, the fun never really stops. In previous years we determined to try and dehydrate a lot of the summer bounty, but this year, things aren’t going so well in that department. Part of the problem was that I wanted to build a solar dehydrator. I must have been delusional to think in April that I was actually going to have time to crank something like that out in less than 6 weeks. It didn’t happen. However I still had my two small electrical units. I dutifully spent the time during baseball games slicing fruit and loading the dehydrator. This takes a long time, it can easily take two hours or more to set out fruit like cherries. But what I found is that I was managing to burn a lot of the fruit to a crisp by either forgetting to take it off at the right time or having the temperature maladjusted. Or maybe the problem had some other origin. Whatever the root cause, the end result is that I became really tired, really fast, of feeling like my time was being wasted to make charcoal fruit bits. So then I started making fruit juice, but somewhere after 1.5 gallons of apricot juice coming down the pipe, I really couldn’t stand the sight of one more bottle of the stuff. Then I began to mull over all those canning jars I’d racked up over the years. I have resisted canning for a long time, because as everyone knows, it’s time consuming, tedious, and demanding. Everything has to be done right in order to have a safe product for consumption. For better or worse, my years of employment at a food safety laboratory left me a little too aware of just how many microbes would like to multiply inside of those jars. But then a friend of mine began to mention shortcuts she would take in order to save time and still obtain good results. One day there we had a mounting pile of bird-pecked fruit, and…the canning began. Then I also remembered that I had promised to create some baby food for a friend of mine. So, the fruit was simmered in a pan until it self-poached. Then into a food mill to make a puree. Then for the baby food, into jars. For the rest of it, I was going to make jam. But then I looked at the recipes…I am about the biggest sugar hound ever, and even I was taken aback at how much sugar goes into jam and jelly. There is more sugar than fruit, and that’s just not OK. So I went the route of making butters. Butters are somewhere between jam and syrup. They may be on the runny side, or perhaps like a thick sauce, but they use relatively little sugar. And let’s face it, this isn’t crummy rock hard store-bought fruit, this is fruit that is already very sweet. And when butters got boring I remembered the 25 lbs of raisins I have sitting around, and started in on some chutneys. Chutneys, if you don’t know, are a condiment especially favored by folks from India, and it has a lot of merit. Chutneys can be sweet and sour, spicy and acidic, all at the same time. They contain things like raisins, fruits, onions, vinegars, spices, nuts….really the sky is the limit. Somewhere in this canning process, I remembered that a friend had given me a pressure canner. That changed the whole landscape of canning activities. With water bath canning, there is always the worry that the processing won’t go well. But a pressure canner is basically a miniature autoclave, killing germs through a combination of heat and steam under pressure. Nothing whatsoever survives 15 minutes at 15 lbs of pressure, and it feels good to know that food which comes out of this unit is a guaranteed success. So the living room floor is littered with jars large and small of the various creations. In spite of all the bounty though, there has to be a lot to do any good. Most of this will be stored up for doling out to our CSA customers in the months when fruit is long gone…and that means that just to supply for one week will require 30-40 jars of….stuff. The fruit has been taking up so much time that I haven’t been able to make it to the vegetable based recipes I’d like such as relishes, chow chow, picalilly….in a way though it’s not just canning, it’s time-travel. These are the basic skills any woman living on a farm would have possessed less than 100 years ago. It would have been the only way to enjoy these foods year-round, and in some cases, it would have been the only way to have enough food for winter. Go ahead and even say “picalilly” to anyone under 50 and see the funny looks you get….this is a lifestyle that has been left far behind. But that’s ok, we continue to learn about what to do with real, home-grown food while far too many other people eat whatever processed garbage rolls onto the shelves these days.

7/24/10 So here I am with my computer on my lap, riding in an RV. The crew of three at Nevermore Farm, in the middle of summer with gobs of vegetables and fruits needing daily attention, is going camping at Mt. Lassen National Park for two days. This automatically plummets us to the ranks of bad farmers….or does it? Farming is probably one of the nost notorious professions for cultivating a mindset that involves little in the way of personal time to rest and rejuvenate. There is absolutely always a reason for not going on a vacation or taking a day off, or even three hours off, because there is never a day when all the work is done and one can just walk away, knowing that things will be good for a few days. And usually it’s much worse than that….walking away means knowing full well that matters at home will be actively sliding in a detrimental direction. Produce won’t get picked on time and will be so overgrown that it’s only good for chicken food. Eggs will be uncollected and give the hens and critters a good chance at ruining them. The weeding and pruning and cleanup and projects that are already behind schedule will slip that much further behind, in a job where accomplishing tasks on time is more important than any other thing. So why are we going? Well, in the demands of the job, sometimes some of your life can slip away. You realize you haven’t had a conversation in days, weeks, that didn’t concern irrigation systems and problem employees and how many batches of fruit still need to be sorted and canned. And it never ends. I am reminded of a ditty I read in Anna Sewell’s book  “Black beauty” as a child: “Do your best and leave the rest/’twill all come right some day or night.” There is a world of valuable perspective in those words. There are times that you just have to walk away, just have to go do something else for a little while in order to remain a whole person. I’ve met lots of farmers who haven’t embraced this part. They are stressed, fundamentally unhappy, overweight and in poor health, and very one-dimensional in their interests. They are not bad people, in fact, they make their farms and ranches thrive by their diligence and unceasing efforts. But that achievement comes at a price, and the price is often their very existence as whole persons. We as a human race began to get somewhere when our need to work 24/7 was able to give way to the kind of thinking and creativity that gave us art, music, science and pretty much every mentionable discipline not directly associated with basic survival. And yet many farmers are still tied to that model…all efforts go only to getting proverbial bread on the table, with nothing left over for all of the things that decision to be irresponsible in the service of a greater good. I’ll be reminding myself of that while my s’mores are toasting.

Something that has been on my mind lately is a snippet in the newspaper from a few days ago. A volunteer crewmember of the Star of India, without a doubt California’s most storied tall ship, died when he fell from the rigging and struck his head on the gunwhales before tumbling into the water. And I’m not pondering this because it was unfortunate or dramatic, though it was both those things. I have felt a sense of unease that yet again, well-meaning interference is going to occur in response to this accident that is going to have the net effect of making our world a little worse via the law of unintended consequences.
I read an elegant editorial yesterday which lamented the differences in many youth today. The writer noted that they are unoccupied, purposeless, don’t know how to do a hard days’ work, and see no reason whatsoever to change any of that. While I always look askance at sweeping generalities, I think pretty much everyone knows what sort of young person is being described here–unless one lives in a cave, they are to be seen in every downtown and mall of every city large and small. But he went on to note that we as a society have taken away the right of juveniles to occupy their time with work, even in agriculture. In our quest to “protect” youth, we make darn sure they won’t experience any form of physical danger, be challenged, or learn ambition for success at an early age unless it is the ambition to get good grades in school. So what does someone dying on a ship have to do with that? The tall ship community is probably one of the most positive, demanding, character building, tradition-laden arenas a young person could hope to find themselves in. I carved out for myself the opportunity to sail tall ships over ten years ago. I learned to find courage in the face of danger, the very limits of my physical and mental abilities, a sense of carmaraderie probably found elsewhere only in times of war among soliders, and how to endure discomfort and hard work. And I also saw a number of sights so exquisite in their beauty that I wouldn’t trade for anything. My time aboard was the single most transformative experience of my life…..and I know that because of all these things, when young people participate on tall ships, they gain those same positive experiences that open opportunities for them as people that will benefit them all their lives. So my fear is that in the course of making the world a safer place, with which as a society we have become obsessed, some new law or rule will be legislated that because of the danger, pretty much nobody will be allowed aloft on a tall ship without needing to pass a ridiculous gauntlet of rules and tests. I caught a glimpse of this some years ago when I paid a visit to the tall ship Californian. I saw their “requirements” for being a volunteer deckhand on the ship–and I’m sure those requirements were driven by insurance issues at the end of the day. One requirement was the ability to do a certain number pull-up. Well, guess what? I cannot do even one one of those. But I learned, and learned well, how to safely and securely navigate the heights of a tall ship without this physical ability, and I was able to pass on my knowledge to many other women who similarly lacked that kind of upper body strength. And I should mention, that the process of learning to be fully comfortable aloft on a ship was probably my greatest personal achievement because I had to overcome so many barries, both physical and psychological. So some sense of trepidation hangs around me as I wonder just how many people are going to have to miss out on the opportunity to transform their lives, as the powers that be try to engineer a world to exist in, free from all risk and free from all real living.

7/24/10 The first official day of rest and rejuvenation is underway. Unfortunately since the RV hasn’t taken a big trip in some years, this is also the first “shakedown cruise” for this vehicle and some amusing, if inconveniet incidents occurred. I have noted that the most galling things to go wrong always occur when a journey is 99.9% concluded. So there we were at campsite #44, and drove in. But this RV has only one door, and we wanted that door to face the area with the firepit and picnic table. And this led to the discovery that the RV would not shift into reverse. Let’s just say driving around in circles, using inclines and declines, and having three guys push it backward were all involved. We had time to get out and take a short walk. We are very close to a lake that is warm enough for an easy dip. We saw just the edge of the Fantastic Lave Beds, a nuclear blast zone of something called scoria, a manifestation of volcanic rock, and we are going to take this trail to climb a cinder cone in the midst of this amazing desolation. It turns out that this landscape was formed in the 1600s. The trails are pulverized pumice and rotted pine needles, so it’s much like walking on sand. It should be a great hike.

7/25/10  A great time was had by all yesterday, though I think I need  t-shirt that says “I was burnt on the Cinder Cone”. Since the Park Service describes that as a “moderately strenuous” hike, i find myself wondering just what a “strenuous” hike might be. I took a series of photos that will explain the scenery far better than words can describe, but we commenced our walk at a little after noon. It was warm, maybe mid-80s. The trail footing was made of crumbled basalt and pine needles, and was much like walking on loose sand at the beach. While not difficult in itself, each step was much more effort because of the loose surface. Surely, I told myself, the trail will firm up when we reach the actual cinder cone. After some walking and pausing under the shade of scattered pines (we started out above 6000′ elevation, which leads to a bit of feeling breathless). I remembered that I have been schooled in the breathing techniques of singing, and started making sure I was filling my air tanks a little better than before. So after a short while we saw it, looming through the trees. Stark, bare, and imposing looking stood the cinder cone. The only other cone I’d climbed before was a small one to the south of Mono Lake, a mere baby in comparison. As the destination fully emerged into our view, we saw the trail….a 35% grade winding in an ascendinig spiral up the side. And the trail footing was worse, not better, that the trail we already traversed. Oh, crap. On the upside, a stiff breeze stirred, providing some much needed cooling. Or dehydration. But we at least had the brains to bring more than a gallon of water for the four of us. Not even fifty yards along the general impression settled in of “me and my bright ideas.” A hundred yards up and for me progress was formed around a series of countings worthy of an OCD patient. “One two three four five” steps upward. “One two three four five” counts standing still to take a deep breath. “One two three four five” steps upward. And each step wasn’t necessarily much progress, as for each step, it was possible to slide half of that distance backward. Occasionally I looked up, and saw the beautiful peak of Lassen volcano coming into view on the north side. That’s the thing about climbing, there’s always a view. yet each time I looked up, the steep trail ahead never seemed to diminish much. And at one point I looked back, and saw a family with three young children just arriving at the trailhead. “Yeah, right” I smugly thought, “they’re going to turn around after 20 feet with those kids in tow.” Well…..wrong. When I looked back again some minutes later, they were gaining. At that point personal pride kicked in and the new count became “One two three four five six seven eight” steps up. But oh, the legs were screaming. I really don’t know how long it took, but finally I arrived. My two companions, obviously being much less wimpy than I, had been enjoying the top for some long moments already. The landscape up top proved worth the journey. There were, in effect, two craters. And a wierd moonscape of different colors of ochre, red, gray, black. A few yellow wildflowers dotted the desolation. As we circumnavigated the crater rim, we could see the pattern of the eruption. Dunes that had concentric circles of different coloration in pink, yellow and green, the “Painted Dunes” surrounded much of the cone. Then the flow of the Fantastic Lava Beds wound its way through the dunes and the surrounding lakes. The eruption caused a rearrangement of the lakes and a certain amount of upheaval. At one place on the crater rim, the site of the lava flow could be clearly discerned. The sharp deliniation between lava bed and dune made for quite a spectacle. There was a trail within the crater, leading down to the very bottom. The appearance was of a black funnel. I would have liked to have gone down, but had reason to believe my legs might entirely refuse to bring me back up. I hopefully fished out my cell phone while we were up top, remembering that years ago I had full reception on the peak of Mt. Lassen. Alas, no service, but as I continued around the rim suddenly the phone awoke and I had a whopping two bars…but then they went away. Oh well. Rumbling stomachs announced it was time to leave….none of us had the foresight to even toss in a bag of peanuts for the road. Descending didn’t require nearly the amount of effort as the trip up, but on jelly-legs was still a bit much. Our heels slid deeply into the loose cinder, and when I reached the bottom it was time to get pebbles out of my shoes. And then I noticed my high quality Eddie Bauer hiking boots….the sole of both boots was 66% sheared from the shoe. Nice. So I started the rest of the way home walking like Bozo the Clown in order to try to keep the rest of the sole attached. Finally one of my companions had the brains to suggest just pulling the things off competely, as on the soft footing shoes really weren’t entirely necessary. So the rest of the way back I had sort of moccasins going on, but it worked. I haven’t checked but I suspect a Made in China label is going to be on that shoe somewhere. We returned at last to the RV, and many sandwiches and peanuts fell before our appetites.

All that “time wasting” had to do with an experience that has come to sum up much of life in modern America: The Consumer Doesn’t Matter. What am I talking about? Well, the saga began around two weeks ago when our iMac whizbang computer just wouldn’t turn on anymore. This same computer had already had a failed motherboard and a failed hard drive, and now it was another motherboard all fried up. Ms. Cheapo here hadn’t wanted to shell out $120 for the extended warranty, so the repair was going to cost within a few hundred dollars of the price of a new computer. Apple computers used to be built from quality components, but as time has gone on, those components now come from places where English is not the mother tongue, and I’m not talking about Germany, either. I used to have the delusion that if one paid $1500 or so for a computer, one could expect a life of about 5 years…it seems that I need new delusions these days. This computer failed pretty much every 12-18 months until it couldn’t fail any more, and so there we were…computer-less. Of course, in the past two years as the farm business has grown, the need to have a more advanced means of tracking expenses and accounts had to come too…so we invested close to $200 on the purchase of QuickBooks 2007, made by Intuit. Buying Quickbooks (QB) for the farm was a lot like buying Photoshop to edit a photo. The program is a complex monster capable of a thousand things, of which I needed about…..five. But there aren’t a lot of options out there for small business accounting, so I took a deep breath, installed the thing, and then spent some months forcing myself to learn to use it well enough to get by. As time went on, hundreds of customers came and went, with thousands of weekly transactions. So when the iMac went down, it took my ability to know much of anything about my business with it. Did so-and-so pay? I dunno. New client wants to get produce boxes? Write it on a notepad and wait. Customer moving to Tennesee? Sorry, I’ll close your account one of these days. So for ten days much wrangling and pricing and shopping was done, really all by Ken, to replace the machine, with me loudly bitching all the while about “Apple using cheap crap that isn’t made to last”. It just so happened that about 4 weeks prior to the crash, we had purchased a used laptop from UC Davis for $125. The purpose was to run a receipts program that I use for my tax receipt tracking, and I needed a PC for that. It took me hours to get the PC online and get software updates downloaded. And, we were lucky to have the laptop, which was at least a way to have email access without resorting to my iPhone. And so exactly a week ago the new iMac came home. No data was lost in the crash of the old iMac, and the data and programs were transferred by the technician at UCD to the new machine. I eagerly started up QuickBooks in order to tackle two weeks of customer backlogs. But, it wouldn’t launch quite right. It said I hadn’t registered the software yet….ok, I figured it was just one of those software glitches. I double clicked on my backup file on the desktop, and was up and running in no time. Possessed of post-crash paranoia, I made sure to back up the QB data each time as I quit the program. One charming feature of QB is that if you have to do a task “back in time” like ask it to enter eggs purchased weekly since February 17th, you have to quit and restart the program in order to get that to happen. So when I went to open the program again, there was the same problem with needing to register……hmmm. For a day or two I shoved it out of my mind, but then I felt that maybe I ought to try and figure out how to stop this from happening. And then the real hell began. I began a search of the issue and rapidly arrived at this blog that let me know I was in for no easy ride. Having no satisfaction from calling Intuit customer support, I joined their online forum to get some help there. For anyone who wants to bore themselves with the nuances of that exchange, enjoy . So at the end of this matter, I have to spend $140 on top of the purchase of the iMac. Why? Well this all gets back to grand old Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”….the concept of Built-In Obsolescence. There was a time when making things to last was a point of civic and personal pride. And then someone got the bright idea that if it can break, someone has to buy another one. And another one. And another, and that profit lies in every sale. So pride went out the window, and it became all about making a buck at the expense of others (and filling landfills everywhere and creating the great garbage raft in the Pacific Ocean, but I digress). Capitalism at its finest? You decide. One counterargument runs that if things don’t need replacing, no room ever gets made for something new and improved to take its place. So by an item failing, one has to replace it with an Agent of Change, a force for advancement. I suppose this has some merit, and as someone who spends more time with her iPhone than any other object in the world, I have to admit that I have benefited from all the advancements in technology. But my complaint comes from the fact that any choice in the matter is removed from the consumer. There will always be affluent people who can and wish to purchase each one of the latest toys. But what about when someone is struggling to get by (i.e. in the worst economic climate we’ve seen since the 1930’s) and needs to have things last, only to become a victim of the March of Progress? I can answer that…..the corporate mentality is “TOO BAD”. I often wonder if progress isn’t simply for Progress’ sake anymore. We do things as a society because we can, not because they serve the greater good. I realize that how I feel about this makes me a bit of a throwback, with an attitude more common to those who are older than I am. This comes from what I do to earn a living. For me, money equals food. The $140 I just had to spend on that software is ten sacks of turkey feed, or seven of the produce boxes I sell to my customers, or one Saturday of above average earnings from the Farmer’s Market. It is 70 pounds of beets, or just under 30 lbs of almonds. Or 40 dozen eggs. Someday I wonder if the people who make all the toys and software will have enough to eat. And if I’ll say “you keep your toy, and I’ll keep my eggs. I’m sure your toy will taste very good.” And in the meantime, I’ll ponder the situation I find myself in…still buying products from Apple and Intuit after having had very poor customer satisfaction. Who knows, if I get irked enough I just might make a cardfile. There was a way to do all these little jobs before computers made everything “better” and this is one gal who still knows how to keep records manually.

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? I’ve always found it amusing that almost every blog starts out with some variation on “I’ve been really busy lately” but lately I have indeed sailed into Uncharted Waters of Busy-ness. Most of this concerns having fired all the hired help. I don’t regret that decision for a minute, but it certainly does cut into the time one has to type and eat bonbons.

So spring has come to the farm and summer is knocking at the door. Many, many changes have been made. The soil in certain garden areas, while never robust, has demanded a new approach. For a long time I’vegrown vegetables with minimal or no fertilizer, and that no longer works. Our class AA sandy loam has always had poor tilth and available nutirents, and developing a functional strategy to boost that up to acceptable plant levels takes time. We are working on a two-pronged solution. First and foremost, feed the plants. The easiest way to do this is tha traditional N-P-K fertilizer….whterh granular or liquid, a single application of some moderate numbers (16-16-16 has seemed good) can do the job. But the second approach has to address longer term issues…I think it’s unacceptable to grow on crappy dirt while only addressing three nutrients. So the second approach involves top dressings of good quality compost, addition of rock dust to rows to take care of micronutrients, and when possible more reliance on mulches (especially between rows) to offer plant matter to break down over time and provide moisture retention. What I’d really like to explore more is traditional cover cropping but that isn’t as simple as everyone thinks in permanent garden beds. First, the seed is expensive and has to be sown at just the right time. The cover crop needs just as much attention and support as a food crop. Then it has to be tilled under at the right time…lacking a garden tractor, this is no small job. Then the crop needs time to decompose (more irrigation needed). And after all that, it’s golden. That is a huge amount of time, resources and labor to allocate to a traditional soil enrichment project. Over time, we may have enough resources of fava bean seed to be able to try this out in a test area. But for now something is better than nothing.
Another significant project is crop removal. Not every crop “works” and comes to harvest. Some plants decide that temperatures are too high or there wasn’t enough humidity and bypass being edible in order to go straight to seed. Once a plant heads for flowering, it is usually worthless for eating and needs removal if there is no need to save the seed. This isn’t easy work either. Each plant has to be dug out with a shovel in order to release the roots. Extra soil needs to be shaken off the roots, since the object is to keep soil on the garden beds. This year I am simply laying the removed vegetables down in the bottoms of the furrows between rows. The good news is, they will slowly rot and release nutrition back to the soil. The bad news is, until they break down somewhat I’ll be tripping over them, and every earwig in the garden will have a haven. Also, some weeding happens during this process, since it’s unusual to have a row still be weed-free at this point in the cycle. Each short row takes about 45 minutes to complete.

And of course there is picking. Right now we have three pea crops in full swing–shell, snow and snap– each of which should be picked once to twice a week. Very soon there will be fruit added to the load of vegetables to harvest. The first cherries are within a few days of being ready, to be followed by the apricots and beyond.

Weeds have been a lot of work but I’m hugely determined to keep on top of them this year. I’m paying the price for all the years I wasn’t working full time on the farm and weeds were allowed to go to seed. This year, no matter what has to be done–mowing, spraying, hand-weeding, the goal is to keep them from forming seed. And even the poultry pens had to be mowed. In some spots the weeds were two and a half feet tall, which is a danger on many levels. Certain grasses form “foxtails” that can burrow into the skin or even ears of a bird and cause an infection. And should a fire occur, the unthinkable would happen. This is the time of year when large fuel loads that feed summer wildfires grow tall and thick with the extra spring rains we’ve had. It was an eye-opener to me to learn about how a rangeland fire can move, especially in any kind of wind. We’ve done 10 acre field burns in which I’ve seen 40 foot flames roar out of nowhere. The heat is searing and unapproachable. So I’ve taken note from what I’ve seen of others’ tragedies: what isn’t there can’t burn.

Planning and efforts toward the summer crops have also been necessary to the outcome. A  lot of work had to be done in the greenhouse to get tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melons, cucumbers, basil, onions, leeks, etc etc ready for the summer garden. Many were transplanted 3-4 weeks ago. The tomatoes, eggplants and peppers need to be transplanted from their starting trays into larger cells, so they need an extra step in order to make it into the field. Every year for the last four years some accident or disaster has befallen one of these three plants in the greenhouse. And I have to chalk this up to me leaving the work to someone else. It’s the old adage:”If you want it done right, do it yourself.” This year I was able to head off every problem that we’ve had in the past by being hands-on and having the chance to realize what the plants need and when. Right now is the last battle before the plants go outside…every year the aphids invade the greehouse and try to suck the life out of the young starts. But this year they didn’t have much of a chance with my trusty bottle of Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. So I feel that this year was a success, and the end of a basic learning curve that has taken a long time. It isn’t easy to start certain plants from seed. And it also isn’t easy to understand how to work with a greenhouse. We’ve had ours for several years and it “behaves” uniquely. Learning how it heats, how it cools, how each kind of plant responds to living inside of it and in which location (there are warmer and cooler zones within the structure) has taken considerable observation and recordkeeping.

In the avian realm, there has been plenty of work as well. Without going into all the details, we either hatched or purchased not quite 40 chicks. Some of those are sexed hens, others were, well, not sexed and we’ll find out eventually. We have decided to basically not raise any new turkeys this year except Beltsville Small Whites. The expense of feeding them, coupled with meat sales that have plummeted since the economic downturn, have made it seem a good idea to put the turkeys on hold until times are better. We’ll keep our breeding stock but not much more. And, we’ve been exploring ideas, such as offering classes. We held our first class on Backyard Poultry Processing for a group of interested persons. There is a growing number of people who would like to know how to supply themselves with their own meat. And while our grandparents would have laughed at needing a class for this, so it is. This has become something of a lost art, and having experienced firsthand the frustration and uncertainties of having to learn to do this “from scratch”, I’m glad to be able to offer something useful.
The orchards are gaining steam for the season. The fruit trees become more rewarding every year….in the beginning it seemed like we would wait an eternity for fruit, but the time has passed and we are starting to have to think more and more about how to manage harvesttime than when the baby trees will give us fruit. Every year the trees are a bigger job to keep up with. This last season we failed to keep up on dormant season orchard tasks. We applied dormant spray too little and too late, so we are currently contending with a significant outbreak of peach leaf curl. This will be powerful motivation to be on time with those jobs next fall, but for now we have to look at some ugly peach and nectarine trees. Another problem will be last year’s discovery of a full=blown codling moth infestation in the apples. We had almost 100% of the fruit be ruined from this pest. The new and fancy method of controlling this is to use pheromone disruptors in the orchards to make sure that male moths can’t find females with which to mate, but those methods are very pricey to use, over $100 for about seven trees…..I don’t think so. So we are going to apply a barrier chemical called Surround that basically coats the fruit with a film of clay in order to keep the moth larvae from burrowing into the immature apples. It has to be applied carefully, about three times during the growing season.
Recently we attended the annual Field Day at the Nickels Laboratory. This is an event presented by UC Davis which rolls out new and relevant research pertaining mostly to almond production. However, I find that many of the topics are also quite valuable to my understanding as a Grower of Everything. Topics included discussions of the contrast between producing almonds organically and conventionally, new techniques for getting the most out of chemicals for weed control, and how trees respond to minimal irrigation in times of crisis (drought). Events such as this bring cutting-edge data from academia into useful formats that allow those who actually do the growing to make better decisions about their practices. The only downside was, it was gusting up to 40 mph that day. During lunch one farmer let go of his plate for just a minute, and next thing he was wearing his beans. These things happen.

When I met my farming partner some years back, his house was the place to hang on hot summer afternoons. Fully air-conditioned, relative peace and quiet, and a big screen TV with HD. My farming partner IS a sports nut, which has always been a guaranteed eye-roller for me. Sports in general has always seemed to me to be a topic that aborbs too many, to the unfortunate exclusion of other more important pursuits. I grew up in a house where every sport known to man was on TV, seemingly constant. Football was incomprehensible and basketball wasn’t far behind. Boxing seemed ugly, and golf, NASCAR, tennis and anything else I’m forgetting to mention were like watching paint dry. There was always a little tolerance for baseball on my part, though, because my dad used to take me to A’s games and I liked that. I didn’t understand the game beyond the merest basics, but I strongly liked being at the ballpark. It felt exciting to see things happening in front of me, even though I didn’t know triple play from a ground rule double. My dad tried to explain the game to me somewhat, but at that time in my life it just didn’t seem to compute. But even back then there I had an awareness that baseball was something American, and that just like I was a kid sitting in the stands now, other kids at my age in days long past went to the ballpark too….it connected all of us.

So back to those summer afternoons…..my partner has season tickets to the SF Giants, and the ball games were always on during those hot afternoons at the house. One day I spotted a large book on the shelf, which was the publication version of Ken Burns’ “Baseball” mega-documentary. I started reading at the beginning for something to do, and rapidly found myself completely sucked in. By the time I was a kid in the 70s, I would argue that the game had changed quite a bit, and for the worse. Huge player salaries and all the bureaucracy that accompanies modern professional sports always seemed to be the talk. But in that book, I read about the old time baseball players that were heroes to generations of Americans. Men who didn’t earn big money, but played with heart and captivated the national imagination because their whole purpose was to excel with pride at what they did. No one will get me to believe that Ty Cobb or Christy Mathewson were in it for the money, because back then there just wasn’t that much paid to those guys. And so reading about these players of a bygone time gave me some excitement, some understanding of what the game was and why it had a pedigree worth learning about. Also noteworthy for the amateur historian in me were the parallels between baseball and the evolution of American society, which others have written about so well elsewhere.

So after many months, I finished the “Baseball” book, and was logging more and more hours staring at baseball games. I realized how much I didn’t understand about the rules and what I was seeing, and I asked a million questions. And one day we were invited to go to a game. I had never been to AT&T park, and was rather overwhelmed…the seats weren’t just okay seats, they were 9 rows behind home plate with a perfect view of everything. I had a great time, but it was the beginning of a monster being born. In the course of the next two seasons (which were pretty darn awful, reallly) I found that one day I knew who all the players were. And began to form some knowledge of how well or poorly they played. And while it made some fans happy, the Barry Bonds era didn’t do it for me. He always seemed surly, and his physique just screamed “enhanced body”. Baseball’s sad relationship with performance-enhancing drugs felt like another reason to not get too excited about this sport….who cares about how many home runs or whatever else, when it wasn’t done without a”little extra help”? I sat and thought about how Babe Ruth played his amazing ball in spite of being half-pickled most of the time he was on the mound…I could note with some irony that many of the old-timers played with performance-detracting substances and still managed to set records….that sort of excellence didn’t seem to be anywhere. And if some was out there to be found, the first thing I’d wonder is which steroid the guy was on.

So fast forward to the season before last. Not knowing anything about drafts or college baseball or any of that, I only knew that one day there was this Tim Lincecum kid on the mound. He pitched with a sneer and his cap pulled down so low it was hard to see his eyes. He was slightly built and….where did he come from again? But it didn’t take long to realize that here was finally something to become a little excited about. One look tells me there aren’t steroids in that body…and as the games unfolded, it became obvious that just maybe, here was someone who was a blast from the past and someone to defy the stereotypes all rolled into one. Then last season started, but this time Timmy had the Cy Young in hand. When it was time to get the season tickets, who cared who the opposite team was, just get the games for which Timmy was pitching! As the season ran on with a flagship pitching staff trying to bail out the leaky boat of No Decent Offense, Tim just shined. Sure, Randy and Matt, Barry and Jonathan put in amazing performances all around, but it was Tim that filled the seats more than any other…with those unhittable pitches and the physique that wasn’t supposed to be big enough for the major leagues. I was lucky enough to be there the night they almost ran out of spaces to hang Ks on the outfield wall…..I know why I like to see Tim play. It’s easy…he is displaying the excellence that comes from a young lifetime of hard work, sacrifice and discipline. When other 17 year olds spent their entire weekends moving a joystick around Grand Theft Auto, I’m guessing Tim either never touched the controller or at the very least put it down in short order to go outside and practice. And practice and practice. And frankly, in today’s society, individuals like that stand out because there are fewer and fewer of them around.

The sum of my baseball interests has at least shed some light for me on the value of sports. I now realize that they have a place….but I still think pro sports has been allowed to occupy a hopelessly skewed monetary importance, which likely will never be reversed.

So I haven’t mentioned farming yet, but here it comes. People that excel give us all a little boost. They are the visible reminder that nothing great (or even just good) can ever happen unless you get up, get focused, and get to work. And when things go badly, you take a deep breath, re-focus, get up, and get back to work to try again. Running a farm is not really so different from pitching…if it’s going to work, you have to exert the effort, week in and week out. And I could write another essay on how an excellent pitcher matches an excellent soprano in more ways that one can imagine. The qualities needed to excel remain the same through every endeavor out in the world, and that is something I like to keep in mind. And for now, Timmy still has that unspoilt demeanor, unswayed as of yet by the multimillionaire he is destined to become. He may not stay so wonderful forever. But for now, a day seeing him at the ballpark is still going to be a welcome getaway from 105 degrees in Arbuckle. For my birthday I received the best thing ever…..a number 55 SF Giants official jersey. Opening day is about 2 months away, and this farmer hopes to be there. Go Timmy!

This is clearly the year that the lightbulb came on as to how to properly shape stone fruit trees (plum, peach, apricot, nectarines). Pruning isn’t really that easy, and it is no wonder that homeowners quail at this annual job that everyone says must be done each winter. There is a lot to think about. What kind of tree? Dwarf or standard? Open center system, central leader system, espalier, or something completely different? How old is the tree?,  since that matters too as to technique. Apple versus jujube, plum versus cherry, fig, mulberry, the complexity runs all over the place. At the end of the day, each pruning technique is designed to compliment and keep under control the growing habits of a given kind of fruit. An untended cherry will grow one or two sticks 25 feet into the air unless forced to do otherwise. Apricots and peaches will immediately grow rampantly and guarantee their own demise by ending up in a shape unable to support the weight of the fruit that they are bred to bear, and if no intervention comes along the tree will be a split and diseased ruination in about 3 years. I remember once reading a backyard orchard website….it asked “are you prepared to forego weekends, vacations, and free time in order to properly care for your trees?” That sounded pretty heavy-handed to me….but I see now what they meant. In a way it’s true…trees have specific needs at specific seasons, and if you can’t commit to being available to do what the trees need, when they need it, the vision of luscious cherries or dripping sweet peaches is a pipe dream that will never come to be. We figure we have invested more than $3000on purchases for our orchard, which totals out at more than 120 trees. It is an investment in, and hope for, the future. A $25 stick that arrives in January will, in something like 5 years time and after a lot of care, yield unsurpassed food. When one purchases a fruit tree, the idea of waiting that long for results is a killer….in our society a “long time” is something like a month.  One always has to think, to quote my farming partner, “it isn’t about fruit. It’s about the needs and the health of the tree.” And what is unsaid, is that it is about the distant future, when, if all the right things are done, the best fruit you’ve ever had will be the reward for good work. It is hard to resist, in the beginning, letting the little tree set 30 peaches because you just want to taste them so much! But it’s not the right thing to do. Year one, cut every little branch off until there is nothing but a stick in the ground. Year two, choose the best looking sideshoots to become the future main branches of the tree. Remove any fruit. Year three, strip off almost all fruit deliberately, to promote healthy vegetative growth, while pruning to further strengthen and shape the tree. Year four, maybe let a little bit of fruit set, carefully monitoring that the weight isn’t too much for the structure of the tree. Afterward, monitor and prune annualy to keep a good shape and remove diseased or damaged wood while still making sure again, that there isn’t too much fruit on the tree. I had to laugh this year, because as I was planting the 5 new arrivals we purchased (4 pluots and an aprium–gettin’ fancy!) and stripping all the sideshoots off, I realized that I could do this so easily because “the thrill is gone”. Once the time has elapsed and one actually has a producing trees, it is easy to give the new ones the right care….there is no need to wait with bated breath for the fruit because 20 other trees are doing the job nicely. Of course, we’re lucky, as it would be madness to have this many trees without having customers. It’s probably still madness, but at least it sounds like a good excuse on paper. Our orchard is probably 20%-25% mature at this point in time. When it is fully mature, the yields will be more than I’ll know what to do with. We’re already looking at commerical sized dehydrators in order to be able to maybe handle some of the surplus…ah well, lotsa fruit!

Small business operators (and I mean really small, as in “mom and pop”) know about, but rarely discuss, the realities of trying to get paid. Like many financial matters, it is seen as somewhat culturally impolite to discuss the elephant in the room. Most clients of most business pay up, or those businesses would be insolvent in short order.  But from what I’ve seen in my own endeavors, and in listening to my cohorts, there exists an entire class of persons in this world who make it their life’s work to avoid paying what they owe. This isn’t to say that every delinquent client falls into this category. Quite the contrary. There are those who are Forgetful. And those who find themselves in Financial Distress, and who will make good on their obligations as soon as they are able. Having been in the “forgetful” category myself on an occasion or two, I can’t “cast stones” there. Certainly, one hopes one never finds oneself in severe financial difficulty, as honorable people don’t like being debtors, on principle. But alas, there are more categories than that. Some feel that it is unimportant if someone is owed $100, how can they be bothered with such a pithy sum? Yet others know full well they are ripping someone off, and just don’t care. Maybe they feel that their economic status (whether that good, or that bad) makes it OK to shirk payment. Or maybe it’s worse than that, and they are miniature white collar thieves with little or no intention of ever parting with their cash now that they have the goods in hand…..the word now escalates to “fraud”. Yes, I’ll call it fraud when one enters into a transaction knowing fully well that the provider of goods or services is not going to see what is owed them, yet accepts those goods or services anyway. Over time I’ve pondered all the paths humanity has taken in noting these ancient problems, as I am certainly not the first person to have ever wanted payment.

By way of examples, some 700 years ago Dante wrote his allegorical “Inferno”, and assigned the Frauds to the Eighth Circle of Hell (that’s not good) in repudiation of their twisted violations of man’s gift of reason. Those folks knew better, but talked themselves into believing that their behavior was somehow just fine. Later on, in Victorian times, one could be thrown into a debtor’s prison if one owed. Imagine that, John Doe can’t pay for his box of produce so off to jail he goes until his family can pony up for the turnips. I myself favor a resurgence of public humiliation, complete with tarring and feathering. I’ll supply the feathers, and pine tar can be used for humanitarian reasons.

These unfortunate cases of “being owed” always take the same course. We used to have a sort of free-for-all payment system…we didn’t care if people paid in advance or in arrears, as long as we were paid. This approach was somewhat naive. One day, we found that we were owed close to two thousand dollars! Our attempt at a solution was to enact a policy requiring prepayment for our produce boxes. One extra box of produce would be delivered to accounts going into arrears, but after that, no more produce until paid up in advance. While that sounds good, it is difficult to do. Farming is hard. Lots of work, lots to think about, and it’s easy to forget to check all the accounts prior to each week’s packing activity. (Or maybe, to be brutally honest, I don’t want to spend what little free time I have on this activity, even though I know I’m going to have to just do it if I want problems to stop.) If someone is in arrears, the time has to be taken to write a letter asking about the amount owing. I’m not an accountant by any means and sometimes the person doesn’t owe at all, I made a mistake. But if they do owe, there has to be some communication about how and when payment will be made. Most of the time this goes well, but sometimes not. The first letter is always nice. I try hard to give others the benefit of the doubt. If I receive no response, the second email is much more blunt. My fond term for these missives is “nastygram”. I don’t like to be direct, but what the recipients don’t realize is that I am overcome by waves of “Oh NO here we go again” and feel the need to be firmer than usual. I have also noticed that all payment problems are preceded by non-communication. Nothing arouses my concerns faster than someone who won’t respond to correspondence or who gives the appearance of avoidance. Another problem is that if our policy is strictly adhered to, it may cost us income. We usually need the income from all the boxes we sell each week. To not send a box on account of not connecting with someone who owes, and thus missing the income….ouch. So it becomes a gamble….do we think the person will pay? How much into debt can we allow someone to go before the risk of nonpayment becomes too high? And what if a longtime client is a little behind on payment, does one adhere to the exact rules, or is it better to be flexible in order to show goodwill? At what point in being a customer is a client entitled to more lenient and favorable treatment? After all, our clients are who we work for, and no one decent businessperson wants to offend someone else needlessly. Even more awkwardly, some of our clients are our friends, relations, or business contacts. How does one best cope with that? While it’s easy to say that “business and friendship should be kept separate”, sometimes the other party hasn’t heard that one.

So as noted, I have sometimes failed to keep up on accounts, which is when problems begin. (Although with each additional occurrence of being taken advantage of, I become a little more organized and defensive.) It can happen very quickly that someone owes $50 or $100, or more. This may be peanuts to many businesses, but those peanuts are what keeps us running at this farm. $50 is two fruit trees or 5 bags of poultry food or whatever else may be needed to function and grow. And then there is the really dreaded event: someone is in arrears, who notifies us that they are quitting the CSA program. They are told how much they owe, they may or may not promise to pay, and either way the check isn’t in the mail. Now it becomes much harder. We have had instances where I’ve nagged and emailed and made phone calls (and even had Ken make phone calls) and sent snail mail letters, and eventually received payment in full. Other times we’ve received partial payment and written off the rest, because if it was that difficult to get some of it, it will be impossible to get all of it. In yet other instances we’ve been stiffed completely, which left a complete feeling of disgust and betrayal. I often wonder what the other party is thinking, if they think this is funny, or if they feel bad about it (but not bad enough to do something), or if they are so oblivious to others’ feelings that it doesn’t even rate. I am convinced that defrauding a very small business is one of the most complete shows of  selfishness and lack of empathy possible. It only takes one or two of these events per year to make a business owner feel bad about humanity. And, there is an option available to large businesses of which we really can’t avail ourselves….the collections agency. It costs more money to use those services than the money we are owed. There is a part of me that would SO love to sick and agency on persons who have run out on their obligations and take pokes at their credit ratings, but, we don’t have the means (and I think the offending parties know that quite well).

So obviously I need to take the reins, run a/r reports weekly, and spend my time hounding people for payment……but that isn’t why I became a farmer. I became a farmer to grow good food and support a community of people for whom quality food and discovery of better eating really matters. And I think for the most part, that occurs. It’s just sad that a few proverbial bad potatoes always occupy the bottom of the proverbial sack. I’ll close this by mentioning one other thing…most clients pay in full, on time every month, and we never even talk about accounts. Yet other clients prepay quarterly, like clockwork, and we really never talk about accounts. And some people stop their membership in our CSA with money owing back to them. When I offer to send them a check for their balance, they tell me to keep it as a donation because they are so happy that we are here, doing what we do. It’s all these people that I choose to think of the most, and it’s people like them for whom we’re farming.

So I called their customer service in order to determine how it would work that I could pick up my order of fruit trees. The representative I spoke with was, I felt, less than nice, and I was informed in rather firm terms that if I wanted the fruit trees, they would have to be shipped to me at a cost of $30 per box because no way no how did they hold orders. That information would have been helpful at the beginning of the process, alas. I was facing needing about 3 or more shipping boxes, so now in addition to my costs for the purchase, I’m looking at another $100 or so in extra and unaccounted for expenses. Maybe not much for some people, but I found this upsetting both in terms of the principle and the lack of flexibility. So after all my research, this order may or may not go through. And I’m certainly not feeling warm fuzzies toward this seller at the moment. Likely I’ll have to pick one or two boxes worth of trees to get from PVGS and take the rest of my business elsewhere, as there are other nurseries that don’t seem to have these kinds of rigid rules.

And then I moved on to a search for sweet potatoes. I have never grown them before and would like to try, especially since cooking with them this Thanksgiving reminded me of how delicious and easy to prepare they are. I did a lot of reading and then began looking for suppliers. I found a place in Tennessee that looked amazing….a true mom and pop farm that would sell 500 plants for something like $60…how great is that? But then I started looking for the inevitable…….hard to find……where is it…..NO ORDERS TO CALIFORNIA OR HAWAII. *deep sigh*. Nuts. Living in California can be like being in a compound sometimes, if it’s a good deal and you’d like to grow it, rest assured that there will be some major problem trying to obtain it. Why? Our state’s ever-shifting USDA quarantines that are supposed to keep CA agriculture safe from pests and pathogens that threaten us. Never mind that NAFTA and other economically important import activity pumps invasive species into this state at a rate of which the government has just about lost control. However this time I wanted to know, what was so problematic about sweet potatoes? A little more internet digging revealed that the worry revolved around a colorful insect called the sweet potato weevil, whose larvae make an impressive ruination of the edible part of the plant. This insect doesn’t travel particularly far on its own steam, and there is already apparently an established population of them in San Diego county (seems like poor SD gets visited by just about everything, but I digress). So I abandoned Tennessee and went to search for a California supplier of sweet potato slips. There is one, in Merced. They are very sophisticated and use advanced laboratory techniques to make sure that not so much as a stray virus infects their plants. And they even sell the purple skinned and fleshed kind of sweet potato I’d like to grow. But the cost? 99 cents per slip if ordering less than 500 slips, and 60 cents per slip if ordering 500 or more. Ouch. So now comes the second stage of deep thought. What the hell do I want to do? If I buy 500 plants, that leaves me with a potential yield of 2,500 or more tubers if my growing season is successful. Even if my growing season were to be an abject failure, I have a vivid image of purple tubers overflowing out of my newly finished (I hope) root cellar something like in that film “Son of the Blob”. So I suppose even for the discount, $300 worth of discounted slips is out of the question. I’ll determine some other number, and save California from an insect that is already here.

I could point out how easy it would be to have an order from the Tennessee folks sent to southern Oregon, make a four hour drive to pick up the illegal plants, and smuggle them home past the “do you have any fresh fruits or plants on board” joke of an agricultural checkpoint outside Yreka….why are we using taxpayer money to only periodically station folks to ask a question that depends on the honesty and decency of our citizens? Don’t we know better than that by now? Fortunately, I support the concept that my desire to keep costs down is unimportant compared to the potential to cause my state neighbors economic harm, unlike people and industries who don’t care, and bring in god knows what in order to save a buck or a little convenience.

Still, all this turned out to be an interesting odyssey of learning about obscure…issues…in the course of simply trying to grow a new kind of crop. And really, the sweet potato project began when I heard about a crop found in the Phillippines called Ubi that I would like to grow. It is similar to, yet botanically distinct from, purple sweet potatoes….but until I can find those, I guess I’ll have to content myself with whatever I can find around these parts.

At 11:30pm a few nights ago, I found myself cajoled out of bed, trussed up in my cold-weather work clothes, driving off in a pickup with my farming partner and his brother, on our way to the local rice fields. There was something special they thought I should see. Usually at 11:30pm I tell people to go stuff themselves, but something sounded different here.

We crawled along, talking about the usual farming stuff…..when they’d gotten out of the rice fields after harvest, who still had yet to flood their fields, who messed up this harvest or did well at the other one. I was asked to keep the window down, and the still air was icy. All the land around was lit in shades of grays and deep blues, and clearest of all was the unending gray of the gravel levees that ran between the fields recently run with water. In the distance I could hear the sound of a large machine, and the see the lights from Beale AFB as well as the towers perched on top of the Sutter Buttes shone in the distance. We crept along, slower and slower, and finally came to a halt. The machine was much louder now, and we carefully exited the truck in order to see the rice fields we had come to, filled with water for the winter. In the distance were masses of white out on the water. The machine was not a machine at all, but was now making a roaring sound much like a turbine. We took three more steps forward and with the roar of a jetliner taking off, hundreds of thousands of geese exploded into the air. They looked like a wave of foam across the watery fields. The noise was simply incredible. We crept on to yet another section, and heard and saw the same thing. This was the experience of migration, the birds that depend on the man-made "wetlands" of the rice fields to feed before they move on to wherever it is they are going. I know from reading books that even 75 years ago, what I just saw was common. People took it for granted to see a sky so full of birds that it blacked out the sun. Now, it is an experience apparantly to be found only at midnight in the middle of nowhere. If you know a rice farmer who can find it. All I could think was, how we "people in general" have managed to screw so much up, in such a short amount of time. I know I’ll remember what I saw and heard for a long, long time. We may have screwed it up, but we haven’t killed it….not yet.

It’s not a surprise that a farm needs to buy some seeds and trees, Every gardener buys seeds…a quick drive to the local nursery or hardware store, plunk down a dollar or two per packet, no problem. It used to be like that, long ago! I sit next to a box that arrived yesterday, it’s 12”x10”x8”.  It contains $450 worth of seeds, and arguably, the future of our farm for the next two to three years. That alone makes it as good as my own private bar of gold. What the hell can cost that much money?….it’s not as hard to spend that much as one would like to think…in fact, it represents rather a lot of thrift and probably no less than 30 hours of research and work to compile. There is an easy comparison…imagine your boss tells you “order everything you will need to do your job for the next two years….supply prices are going up and we have to acquire everything now. Oh, and don’t spend a penny on anything you won’t use.”
So, enough about why it got so big….what is in there? Well, all sorts of things…spigariello liscia ( a special Italian broccoli raab), passionflower, bitter melon, pumpkins, hot peppers, special purslane, at least 7 kinds of hybrid pollenless sunflower, amaranth greens, sweet peppers, celosia, summer squashes, kohlrabi, bunching onions, snap beans, French shell beans, sweet corn, shelling peas, cucumber, cabbage, okra, and acorn squash. This doesn’t include the other $100 order with another company for the snap and snow peas and some other assorted items that the first company ran out of. Nor does it address the fruit tree order that is already hovering at $400. Not only does money not grow on trees, it takes money to grow trees. But, like everything else, it’s an investment in the future. We were short on pomegranates this year….don’t sit around and endure that; buy 15 more trees so than in 3-5 years there will be no lack! I haven’t counted in awhile, but I try not to think about what we invest in order to have a farm that can earn our living for us….the outcome is that in some ways we are not well-off at all, but we are richer than Midas when it comes to good food for ourselves and our customers. I was taken to a fancy early dinner the other day. Every single item in the dish I ordered (spaetlze with heritage turkey confit, butternut squash, chestnuts and brussesls sprouts)  with the exception of the sprouts is growing right here. There is almost no point to eating out, except to get ideas about what to do with all of it!
But back to the seeds. Or the trees. Picking them out isn’t some random stab of the finger in the catalog. Growers who love what they do are as addicted to these catalogs as…..well, it’s bad, trust me on that. We linger over each description, searching out the one that titillates the most. Looking for a pole bean? Ooooh, here’s “Marvel of Venice”….54 days, BIG, TASTY, YELLOW PODS promises “large, sweet juicy, 8”-9” ¾” wide flat pods borne on vigorous vines. This white-seeded variety is remarkably early”. Oh, and it’s an heirloom! Bonus, I can save the seeds! But wait, a quarter pound costs $9.05. And I’m really tired of moving t-posts for trellises. And every time the customers see a bean that isn’t green they freak and I have to spend 2 days explaining that yes, that is still a bean and you eat it. Just like if it was green. Really…….oh, maybe not that one. Hm, maybe a bush bean would be better….. If you can imagine this process repeated with some variation for every vegetable imaginable, now you know why it takes so long. Then there are the slightly unusual choices…oh, look, butterbeans! “Acclaimed as the finest in green vegetable soybeans”….that sounds good! 5 lbs for $12.80? I can do that! And look, “prolific” and “relatively easy to shell”, that’s great! So after all the weighing and deciding, we made the commitment to go with the butterbeans……but nooooo, when it’s time to place the internet order, they are already sold out!! (Insert cuss words of choice). And trust us, that won’t be the only time that happens! Want to buy some snap peas? Bwahahaaaa, You May Not. Try a less desirable variety, maybe your second or third choice? DENIED. No Peas For YOU. It’s like trying to negotiate a garden with the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. Well, I could go on for days, but the important thing is that the seeds are arriving and we’re going crazy planting them.