The Wisdom of the Radish

Table of Contents

 

 

 

The Beginning:

As usual, I'm awake—having opened my eyes ten minutes before the alarm's shrill beeps—but wakefulness does not correspond to readiness. At the moment, I'm firmly fixed in a state of denial. It isn't 4:30 in the morning, I'm not going to work, I didn't spend another Friday night harvesting instead of drinking, I'm not about to sprint around a field brandishing scissors and a buck knife in the predawn gloom.

It will be approximately half an hour before I admit that yes it is, yes I am, yes I did, yes I will—and I'll actually enjoy it, despite the epithets that slip out of my mouth every few minutes.

Last night, we harvested the less perishable items: golden and green zucchinis, Armenian cucumbers, Chioggia and golden beets, French Breakfast and Champion radishes, and baby bok choy (which is definitely perishable, but slightly less so than our other greens). We hand-watered the beet, broccoli, and carrot seedlings with our trusty galvanized steel watering can, knowing that the following morning we'd be too rushed and groggy to remember to do it—and that if we didn't moisten their topsoil, the tender little guys might not survive our day's absence.

At 9:00 p.m., we finished watering and tucked floating row covers over the seedlings, readying them for bed. The sky gathered darkness in the east. To the west, gold-flecked cirrus clouds accented the silhouette of a pine-serrated ridge. In the evening wind, the field danced: the beans, which have outgrown their ten-foot-tall fencing, waved long, skinny tendrils in the breeze. The row covers fluttered, white ripples across the ground. The corn plants rattled, and the tomatoes strained against their supporting twine, stems full of bobbing green fruit. Stealing a brief moment to take it all in, I turned in a slow circle before joining Emmett in the Gator. He flicked on the headlights and put the pedal to the metal: we raced away from the field at a good ten miles per hour, filling the night with our dust.

But the day wasn't quite over. Back at home, I stayed up to satisfy my personal addiction: posting to my farm blog. In bed, I lay awake for an hour thinking about how little sleep I was about to get. The longer I thought about it, the less sleep I got, and the more I thought about it.

Which brings me to 4:40 a.m. My work pants and shirt are on, as is the light. I'm shoveling Cheerios into my face, gulping down lemonade—no time to brew tea and we're out of juice—and slowly transitioning from simply awake to ready to go.

In the car, Emmett drives, I pull on socks and shoes, and we're on the field before the clock ticks over to five. The coolers—all six of them—come out of the car and onto the dirt. I unfold the card table that we use for sorting salad and put a clean pink bath towel on it.

Time to cut.

We have salad down to a science. We each grab a pair of scissors. Emmett heads for the brassicas (a mix of baby kale, tatsoi, mizuna, arugula, and mustard greens) and I head for the lettuces (a mix of baby Blackhawk, Firecracker, red
Salad Bowl, Tango, Parris Island, Deer Tongue, and Rouge d'Hiver—or, in layman's terms: red, green, flat, and curly).

The metallic sound of scissoring slices through the frigid morning air. My hands, up to the wrists in dewy lettuce, quickly lose feeling. The light is blue and the birds haven't yet started chirping. As I snip fistfuls of lettuce and toss them into the harvest bin, I keep a watchful eye out for weeds, mushrooms, slugs, cucumber beetles, and bug-savaged leaves. Things always slip through; although we'll give the lettuce a second once-over as we scoop it from the bin into plastic bags, our quality control still leaves something to be desired. We've been meaning to build a long screen table for more effective sorting, but who has the time? On this weekend alone, we'll each put in twenty-six hours of work on the farm—and that's not counting Friday night.

So, for now, we still find cucumber beetles and weeds sneaking out of our salad bags at the farmers' market, sometimes in front of customers. On the bright side, I'm pretty sure none of the weeds are toxic.

We each fill two tubs with our respective salad mixes. Emmett runs a hose into the brassica bins to rid them of cucumber and flea beetles. We'll let the bugs float to the top while we harvest the Lacinato kale, then spread the brassicas on the pink towel to air-dry. The lettuces don't attract nearly as many insects, so they go straight into the bags without washing.

En route to the kale, I walk by the hip-high potato plants, which recently burst into bloom—purple flowers for the purple potatoes, white for the russets—and think back two months ago to when we first planted the potatoes.

That, actually, is where this tale should begin. A farm does not start at five o'clock on an efficient market morning. It starts out with mistakes and uncertainty. Two months ago, Emmett and I couldn't figure out which way was up. Literally.

We were arguing over whether the things coming out of the potato were sprouts or roots. The things were several inches long, knobby, with a few elbows apiece. Pure white, too: not even the barest tinge of green. Six of them sprouted in a cluster, breaking through wrinkled brown skin.

“Emmett,” I called out across the field. “I have a question.”

He bounded over to where I knelt, clasping a sprouted russet potato, in the dust. “This thing,” I said, “Is it a sprout or a root? Which way is up?”

“I think it's a sprout. So I think
that
way's up,” he said, turning the potato around in my hand so that the things pointed skyward.

“Damn, I thought it was a root. Look, see how there are lots of them? Don't plants usually send up just one stem? And this potato has been exposed to light. Wouldn't the stem be producing chlorophyll by now? And why aren't there leaves, anyway?”

Emmett was unable to defend his hypothesis with anything more than a shrug, so we decided to postpone potato planting until the time when we could conclusively determine which way was up.

Being twenty-first-century farmers, we often turn to the Internet as our number-one resource. But the Internet, for all its information on potato blight, potato pests, potato wine, potato nicknames, and potato history, refused to yield any potatoes-for-idiots diagrams. After a half hour of fruitless searching, I still didn't know which end was up.

Clearly, we were in need of a guide. Heck, if we couldn't even figure out how to plant a
potato
, we were going to need a sage, amenable third-person companion to shepherd us through the entirety of the farm-starting process.

Having already failed with Google, I headed over to Amazon.

The search results sounded promising:
The Young Farmer's Manual, Vol. II: How to Make Farming Pay
;
The Elements of Agriculture: A Book for Young Farmers
;
The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know
.

Promising, that is, until I glanced at the original publication dates: 1867, 1868, and 1859 respectively. For the last 150 years, it would seem that young people haven't identified themselves as farmers in sufficient number to merit substantial publishing on the topic. Sure, the '60s and '70s yielded a rash of hand-illustrated primers on self-sustenance, aimed at a fresh crop of hippie back-to-the-landers. But these books were more about lifestyle and less about earning a living. Let's face it: the last time farming was seen as a viable, venerable career for young people—the sort of thing for which a two-volume manual might be written—women wore crinoline hoop skirts and were still decades away from the ballot box. (In that day and age, the use of the universal masculine pronoun in a title was presumably less likely to offend.)

Back then, farming was a respected way of life. Now it has practically fallen off the census as an occupation: less than 1 percent of Americans identify themselves as farmers.
¹
Faced with colossal agribusinesses (Cargill, Tyson), farm-gobbling suburban sprawl (Anytown, USA), and cheap imports from overseas ($63 billion worth in 2009
²
), most farmers' kids don't have to think twice about which professional path
not
to take. In fact, the percentage of American farmers over the age of fifty-five has risen from 37 percent in 1954 to 61 percent in 1997.
³

But the times, they are a-changing. And things are looking a little brighter for tomorrow's young farmers. The proliferation of farmers' markets—6,132 in the United States in August 2010
⁴
—farm stands, and locavore-friendly restaurants has opened up new doors for direct marketing opportunities, in
effect creating a new local food economy. Small-scale farmers, rather than routing goods through multiple middlemen, now receive top dollar for their produce by selling it directly to their customers.

There are other signs of a sea change. The economy's down, but seed sales are up. Backyard chicken coops are spreading across the country like new strains of West Nile virus. Even Walmart is starting to source “locally” (that is, same-state). Small farms spring up where you'd least expect them—in abandoned city lots, on conservation easement properties, or sandwiched between blocs of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines in the heart of California's wine country.

So although young farmers may not have been the publishing world's hottest topic of the twentieth century, there's every reason to believe that they will feature prominently in the twenty-first. Where there's a business opportunity, there will be young people willing to take a risk—and taking a risk we are, in sufficient numbers to merit the naming of a movement.

Today's Greenhorn Movement is a growing force. Think of it as a cyber-savvy, more marketable version of the '60s back-to-the-land shebang, with equal parts idealism and business sense. Whatever way you look at it—skeptically as a passing phase, or hopefully as a permanent change in food production—the Greenhorn Movement is a catchy phenomenon. Recent articles in the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
have featured the new wave of young farmers. We're even the topic of a documentary film. But of course, the Web is where we really shine, discussing the trials and tribulations of our nascent farms on innumerable blogs, message boards, and other portals.

We can't take all the credit. The Greenhorn Movement stands on the shoulders of giants: intrepid authors and farmers who worked hard to draw a clear line between local,
sustainable agriculture and resource-intensive factory farms. We owe thanks to farmers, ranchers, and landowners who stayed put rather than selling out to developers; and to the millions of Americans who are voting with their forks, frequenting farmers' markets to provide direct market opportunities for growers.

One of our strongest assets is one for which we're hardly responsible: our collective age. With the average age of Californian farmers at 58.4,
⁵
the addition of youth is crucial to the local food movement's longevity. Even as I thank customers for buying my produce at the farmers' market, I find myself being thanked in return—even worried over—by my customers. “How's it going for you?” one of my regulars likes to ask. “I mean, are you making it?” She means financially, and often, my answer has been noncommittal. “Well, I hope you do, because we need young farmers like you,” she replies, charitably handing me three dollars for a bag of holey mixed greens. It's a refrain I hear time and time again, and it never gets old.