The Wisdom of the Radish (19 page)

The typical chemical program calls for spraying every three to five days from the time when the ears begin to form silks to the time when most of the silks have wilted. And for farms like ours—that have new blocks of corn maturing every week for continuous harvest—this would mean spraying every three to five days for most of the summer and into the fall. Biological control is also an option, with predators such as lacewings, minute pirate bugs, and damsel bugs all eager to dine on earworm eggs and small larvae. But on our farm, the cause of death of any given corn earworm is more likely to be kin than kith. Specifically, a corn earworm is more likely to be killed by another corn earworm than by an unrelated insect. In some fields, as many as 75 percent of the total corn earworms fall victim to cannibalism—which is why, when Emmett started shucking cobs, he tended to find either a few small earworms
or one large one. First, the earworm eats the shell of the egg from which it hatched. Then it turns its attention to the corn kernels, then to its siblings, and then it eats its way out of the ear and pupates in the soil. Once it metamorphoses to the moth stage, the process begins again.

And so our little corner of the corn world on market day was full of worms. In the end, Emmett's optimism—his dogged insistence that a flaw really isn't a flaw, or maybe just that imperfection isn't the end of the world—overcame my disgust. Which is why this chilly Saturday morning air filled with grunts and bone-snapping sounds. Rip the branch off the corn-tree; snap the ear off the branch; toss the ear in a pile. Drumstick tear; grunt; pop; thud. Breathe.

 

 

 

At the Healdsburg farmers' market, we hauled out two gray plastic bins filled with corn and placed them on the market table. To one bin, we taped a paper sign: Worm-Friendly Corn. The words were accompanied by a hand-drawn sketch of a corn earworm. Emmett drew the worm hesitantly—unsure whether too much honesty made the best advertising policy—but even so, the wiggler had a certain panache: this wasn't some country worm, more like a city worm headed out on a hot date. I found the saucy invertebrate cute, artistic, and embarrassing as hell.

We finished setting up the booth early, which was unfortunate. We stared at the clever sign, the heaped corn, the green casings, some with escape holes drilled by exiting corn worms. By the time the market manager's bell pealed to signal the start of the day's sales, I was already blushing. The flash of heat across my cheeks took me a little by surprise: I hadn't expected
a surge in self-consciousness so far into the season. But there I was, back at the beginning, a suburban slicker with weathered wares and a face that inevitably revealed too much.

There's intimacy in tending the plants that provide the food that people will lovingly prepare in some variation on a family ritual. In many places, farm work is purely mechanical, the end results bulk, the products shipped off to be consumed by unknown masses. But here, it's an art. And it feels like reading a formal poem in front of a classroom of students who have styled themselves after postmodern critics. Or like how I felt at the elementary school spelling bee when the judge asked me to spell the one word—out of all the words in the contest to that point—that I didn't recognize. I'm the girl who has to know how to spell the unfamiliar word; I'm the girl who has to know how to grow the vegetables. This is what I
do
, and I'm expected to do it well.

But I haven't; we haven't. Maybe it's impossible to grow aesthetically perfect corn without unleashing the wrath of the chemist on the corn maze. After all, much of the organic corn I've seen sold in the grocery store was shrink-wrapped in plastic, silky tips trimmed off. In other words, it may have been wormy too, but the corn had been shucked, cut, and shrink-wrapped so it could presented in a sterile, worm-free fashion to the customer. Even though the corn looked appealing, all the excessive packaging wasn't exactly an earth-friendly practice. Regardless, we didn't have any plastic wrap. Our corn had worms. All we could do was wait to see what people would do about it.

Moments after the market manager's bell rang, the results started rolling in. Corn, like the tomato, has a magnetic personality. Despite its sorry asking price, it's not like the bean—somehow it's a big-ticket item, a piece of produce people get
excited about. Corn brings summer its sweetness: fresh from the farm, tossed in its husk on the barbecue next to sizzling sirloin steaks, it's an American icon (albeit—like the tomato—one pilfered from vanquished native peoples).

People caught sight of the ears piled high in the bins, wrapped tight in their green husks. And it was like something had hooked them. Eyes locked on the corn, they made a beeline to our farm stand where, as if hypnotized, they tended to speak in sentences punctuated by exclamation points and question marks.

“Corn! When was it picked?”

“This morning,” I answered. My customer's face lit up: she was practically licking her lips. And then she spotted the sign.

“Oooh, worm friendly, huh?”

At this point, her reaction could take one of two turns. The next thing that would happen would either be an understanding chuckle, or a sort of shadow—ranging from uncertainty to outright revulsion—passing across her face. Then I'd know what type of customer I was dealing with.

“I think I'll pass.”

The period deflated me. To avoid annihilation of my ego as a farmer and vendor, I had to take a bit of a moral high ground here. The way I looked at it, if there was one good thing about wormy corn, it was that it formed a test of mettle separating the girls from the women and the boys from the men. Really, if they couldn't handle a little worm, they didn't deserve farm-fresh, beyond organic, pesticide-free corn. Let them eat vacuum-packed corn from Mexico, doused in organic OMRI-certified pesticides. Or let them rifle through piles of picture-perfect, genetically modified corn, gene-spliced to resist herbicides and produce their own pesticides.

Meanwhile, I am proud to say that the corn worms were enhancing my farmer gal cred. Wormy corn was good for me. Far from my former squeamish, worm-hating self, I now flicked the little fuckers off the kernels with abandon. I was handy with the clippers, too, easily slicing through the thick cob to lop off the unsightly worm-eaten tips. Even at home, away from public scrutiny, corn worms now only elicited a reaction if I wasn't anticipating them. Or if I caught one munching on my ankle. You might not think it, but the little bastards actually bite.

And I wasn't the only one putting on a tough face at the farmers' market. In Healdsburg, courageous men and women—diehard customers of the local food system—scoffed at corn worms. The fact that our corn had worms made it more real, and these customers liked real food. “That's how I know it's not GMO!” they'd say, or “If it doesn't have worms, it isn't organic, is it?”

But there were also those customers who desperately wanted to support local farmers but would prefer to do it without acknowledging that organic farming involved lots of insects inhabiting the food they were about to ingest. These were the people who came up to the stand and waited awkwardly until it was their turn to confess: “I found a
bug
in your spring mix the other week.”

Duh.

“I'm sorry, you know we do try our best to keep them out, but every once in a while one slips through.”

“Well, I just thought I'd let you know. You know.”

I know. Duh.

“Thanks! Well, I hope the salad was tasty, anyway.”

“Oh, it was. We gave it a very thorough washing, and then it was delicious.”

These people often requested that we remove the wormy bits before they'd purchase the corn. Obligingly, we did, although from an economic standpoint it clearly made no sense to spend several minutes husking and trimming items that we were offering for fifty cents apiece. But we did it, partly because we still felt a little depraved about selling wormy corn, and partly because I understood on a personal level how difficult it is to overcome worm phobias. I felt that it was my duty to extend a helping hand to those worm phobes with weaker constitutions than mine.

A particularly intriguing subset of the no-bug demographic was comprised of customers who didn't really believe in bugs in their salad or worms in their corn, but didn't really believe in killing them, either. This got complicated, especially when I pulled out the pruning shears to lop off the offending worm-eaten tip along with the offending worm.

“You're not going to kill it, are you?” one of our regular customers asked apprehensively.

“No, I'm just putting it in the bushes.” Where, lacking its moist food source and protective husk, it would dehydrate and die, if it wasn't picked off by a bird or engulfed by ants before then.

“Oh good, I wouldn't want to hurt it.”

This is the point where I was no longer on the same page as the customer—in fact, I was in an entirely different book, in a library on the other side of the world. I
did
want to hurt the worm. In fact, I wanted to hurt as many worms as possible. And I'd been a vegetarian for six years, so it wasn't like I didn't understand empathizing with animals. I wanted to ask, do you eat meat? If not, do you wash your hands, killing millions of innocent bacteria who are just trying to eke out a living and provide for the next generation? What would you do if five
thousand ants invaded your refrigerator—let them eat cake? Really, we had to draw the line somewhere, and I can assure you there were thousands more of these worms in my field ready to replace the fallen hero.

Another regular customer walked up, a big grin plastered across his face at the sight of our corn. Later, I'd learn that he once worked on a farm in Haiti; he knows how these things go. “Worm friendly?” he mused. “I'll take eight!”

I'd throw in two extra, I told him—worm insurance. And with that, I'd set the hook. Even if a couple of the ears are worm cities, our worm insurance would ensure he'd be back at our farm stand looking for more next week.

 

 

 

On the human menu for the evening: leftover sweet corn from the morning's market, paired with roasted new potatoes—dug that morning to check on the plants' progress—and roasted beets. On the avian menu for the evening: corn worms.

Now, the chickens weren't terribly adventurous yet. They were in the awkward teenage phase, which was every bit as bad in
Gallus gallus domesticus
as it is in
Homo sapiens
. They were leggy, scrawny, and covered in their adult feathers—but a few down feathers from chick-hood remained, reminding them that they weren't
really
adults just yet. Rather than pimples, sheathed feathers jutted up awkwardly from their skin. (I would imagine it would feel about as bad as a big zit, too; think about trying to push a feather tightly wrapped in fingernail out of one of your pores.) They spent a lot of their time preening themselves, trying to break through the keratin sheath to free the feather underneath. Their efforts rendered their rooms perpetually dirty, coating everything in the vicinity with a fine
golden feather-dust. Their wattles and combs were, embarrassingly, just starting to swell and redden—the cockerels' more so than the pullets'. And, of course, they were starting to squabble and assert themselves, pushing their boundaries, discovering their personalities, and establishing social norms.

Up to this point, their diet had been limited to chick starter and a chard leaf or two. But today, they forayed into a new world: their first taste of flesh.

The original surviving seven chickens had already passed the ungainly phase. Now, just entering their prime, they inhabited the retrofitted chicken coop that had been safely floored with plywood to keep out predators. We'd also created a chicken yard by installing a chicken-wire fence. During the day, the gate would remain open, enabling the chickens to roam where they would. But at night, I'd shut the gate so the foxes wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to the coop: double security.

We hadn't yet introduced the awkward teenagers to the original chickens, and the reality of predation altered our coop plan. Originally we thought we'd have a dirt run “porch” attached to the chicken coop, to provide them with more space overnight. Now we realized that was just asking for trouble. So Emmett and I were working on a second, larger coop—but until it was done, our teenagers were spending their nights in the garage and their days in makeshift enclosures in the backyard (cardboard boxes artfully arranged to form an outer boundary, and old window screens placed on top so they didn't fly out and get eaten by the neighbor's dog).

Our dinner was almost ready, the roots browning in the oven, the water hot and the corn husked and trimmed, ready to go. We headed out into the yard with a handful of corn
worms, slipped back the old window screen, and dropped in a fat green worm, which wriggled as it hit the ground.

The worm instantly became the focus of the flock's attention. The chickens stood around it awkwardly, sticking their necks out, turning their heads sideways and tilting them so that one eye squarely faced the ground. They studied the worm intently, yellow eyes blinking. For a half-minute they were practically frozen in place: a game of ring around the worm combined with freeze tag.

Suddenly a Rhode Island Red reacted. She took two steps up to the contorting worm, darted her head down quickly, and grasped it in her beak. And now, suddenly, everyone realized that worms were food—and not just any old food, but the best food they'd never tasted. As Red looked around nervously for an exit, the entire flock began to chase her. She darted back and forth, trying valiantly to keep her head away from the birds who were snapping at her beak, trying to deprive her of her prize. Her sisters were in hot pursuit until an evasive maneuver—running through them, rather than away—confused them momentarily.