The Wisdom of the Radish (21 page)

And who, at ten weeks old, were entirely capable of snatching and safely digesting even the fattest, meanest, kingpin corn worm—much to the delight of a certain worm-hating chicken keeper.

Chapter 8:

 

 

 

 

 

In mid-October on a market morning, dawn didn't arrive at the field until 7:00 a.m.—about the same time we did.
I pulled my station wagon up next to the compost pile. Emmett was already unloading harvest bins from the pickup. His breath puffed white, and beyond him, stripes of silver anointed the ground.

I scrambled out of the car, pulling down my wool hat and tugging my scarf a bit tighter.

“Did you
see
this?” I asked Emmett, who'd arrived a few minutes before me.

“I know, isn't it gorgeous?”

Frost coated the wide green leaves of each winter squash plant, catching and tossing back tiny pieces of the early morning light. In the furrows of the newly planted winter garden, frost highlighted the trench walls, tracing the contours of soil matter, the compost and bits of leaves, the rough manure and smooth chunks of clay.

We had harvesting to do and a market to get to, but still we stole a few minutes for wonder.

“Look at this!” I said. “The hose is frozen; I can't water.” In San Diego, hoses never freeze, and somehow the fact that this one was frozen made me giggle.

We both wandered around for a few minutes, breathing in the sharp air, blinking the cold away from our eyeballs, examining different parts of the transformed field. And then I noticed something.

“Hey, Emmett,” I called out. “I think the winter squash has frostbite.”

On each beige butternut squash, a darker color splashed across the top of the gourd. I checked the delicata: same thing. Ditto for the spaghetti, sweet dumpling, jack-o'-lanterns, and pie pumpkins. All appeared to have suffered some sort of frost damage.

“Did we just wreck our winter squash? I thought we were supposed to leave them out through the first frost.” We'd heard that we were supposed to wait for the first freeze to kill off the winter squash plants: it would be easier to pick out the gourds, and it sweetened them up, too.

“I don't know,” Emmett replied. “But there's not much we can do about it now.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “I guess this means the end of the cucumbers, zucchini, and crookneck squash.”

The thought dampened my mood a bit, but it didn't bring negativity so much as a sense of solemnity. Ecclesiastes, right? And that song by The Byrds?

It occurred to me that there aren't just four seasons—there are thousands. And the season we were in right then lasted only one morning. The world was as white as it would ever be in coastal California. The planet's finest lace—spiderwebs
hung with frozen drops—overlaid iridescent green gowns. There was no end here; just possibility. After all, I couldn't water, the dark garden hose was stiff and frozen.

 

 

 

We had planted the squash three and a half months earlier. As far as I could tell, the intervening weeks comprised something of a miracle, or maybe a series of miracles.

As we set about planning our squash field, Emmett's dad described a longtime Italian friend who planted winter squash without watering them at all. This man knew precisely the time of the season when the ground would still be wet enough to trigger the seeds' germination, and the air sufficiently warmed to ensure that the frost wouldn't sweep in and burn the seedlings. He'd stick the seeds in the ground and,
ecco
, they'd sprout
without any irrigation. In the clay soil of a river's floodplain, overhead watering forms a crust that can be difficult for tender seedlings to break through—so his was a valuable skill indeed.

A winter squash swelled throughout the summer before ripening and changing color.

Italian legends. French, Italian, Japanese, and American squash. And it was a Mexican man who taught us how to plant them all.

I don't speak Spanish and couldn't catch the few words I did know from the man who had spoken it for sixty years. Enrique mimed with some exaggeration for me, and talked to Emmett, who translated. Dig a hole. Fill it with water. Wait. Maybe an afternoon, maybe a day, maybe two or three days. When it's reached the perfect moisture level—he poked his finger in the side of the hole—where it's easy to push the seed in, but not so soupy as to cause the seed to rot before it reaches the surface, stick four seeds in the side of the wall. East, west, north, south. Fill in the hole with moist dirt, then compact the soil by pushing a fist down onto it or walking on top of it, then sprinkle dry dirt on the top.
^l

And then wait.

Miraculously, without any additional water, Enrique told us, in about a week the seedlings would start poking through the dry dust. The surface they sprouted from may look like a desert, but their roots would be firmly fixed in the moist soil beneath.

We planted 11 rows with 25 mounds apiece, 3 or 4 plants per mound: 825 plants. Jack-o'-lantern, Marina di Chioggia, spaghetti, sugar pie, Sibley, baby Hubbard, delicata, sweet dumpling, kuri, acorn, kabocha, and Long Island cheese.

And before we knew it, the field was littered with tiny green things. Winter squash seedlings are like beans: robust
and ready for action from the start. After they broke the surface, they rapidly unfurled three good-sized leaves. Then we weeded them for the first and last time. Later on, we'd hoe the paths for ease of walking, but these plants would shade out most competitors in short order.

Overnight (or so it seemed) they sprawled along the ground and wasted little time with courtship. The first male blossoms—showy, bright orange, the size of my hand—were rapidly followed by female blossoms, equally showy and possessed of a small, hard, round green fruit.

With the arrival of the first few flowers, we panicked. Where were the bees? We had no problem attracting flea beetles and cucumber beetles to dine on the tender young leaves of our brassicas. But here we were offering what were clearly the world's finest flowers, and no bees bothered to show up for supper.

We had heard of a supposed solution to lack of bees: hand pollination. In China, this is a way of life. In some areas of the country, all apple trees are pollinated by the hands of farmers. Worried that our crop wouldn't set fruit, Emmett and I personally attended to the first adolescent bushes. We plucked out the male stamens and pressed them into the female flowers, smashing them together awkwardly.

Bees are gentler as they perform the act of entomophily. They slip inside the petals and sip on sugary nectar, filling their honey stomachs. Yellow dust coats their furry abdomens and clings to the hairs on their legs. They groom themselves, concentrating the protein-rich pollen into pollen sacs behind the bees' knees to bring back to the hive. Thus costumed in the flower's sperm, and all the while processing the nectar into honey, they head to the next flower, where they repeat the process. Yellow dust shakes from the bee's torso and fertilizes the pistil. New pollen commingles with the old, coating the
bee further. The bee
is
the act of flower sex: at once delicate, sloppy, and sensual.

And then there was Emmett and me, feeling rather sordid as we tore out the male parts of the flowers and forced them against the female parts. It wasn't a job I enjoyed, and considering the size of the field, it could take days, or even weeks, to pollinate all of the squash. I thought of the recent spate of emptied hives, victims of Colony Collapse Disorder. The work performed by insect pollinators is truly unparalleled, and estimated to be worth $57 billion per year in the United States.
⁴⁴
Humans have been able to mechanize almost every aspect of the growing process in order to mass produce food—but so far we haven't found a replacement for bees, and if we don't ensure their continued survival, we'll soon find ourselves spending untold hours raping flowers.

Fortunately, our luck soon changed. The presence of bees tends to be proportional to the presence of flowers, and it seemed that there was a minimum number of flowers required to attract their attention in the first place. Once our flowers became an unstoppable force—flamboyant orange diner signs littering a green freeway—the bees came. And so did the opportunity for an early harvest from our winter squash vines.

With the flowers out in droves, I'd zip around the field on market mornings chasing the bees, trying (like them) to find the biggest and brightest flowers. I'd snip them with florist shears and carefully place each blossom on a cookie sheet, which, when full, would in turn be placed in the most pampered spot in the truck: my lap. On our inaugural flower harvest, a disoriented bee came careening out of the flower tray as we started down the road to market. First one, then another, and another, until the cab was buzzing with involuntary stowaways. They'd gone in for a morning swig of nectar and come
out to find themselves in a whole new world. We escorted them out of the car windows, knowing that they'd never find their way back to the hive and sad to see them die.

At the market, the display of flaming orange flowers drew gasps from the customers, and even from other farmers. They'd be snatched up for fifty cents each, destined to be stuffed with feta or ricotta, folded into crepes or pancakes, or breaded and deep-fried. But eventually, the flower harvest slowed and we all but forgot about the winter squash. Emmett would turn on overhead sprinklers to water the jungle every few weeks—the squash field being the only part of our farm without drip irrigation—but other than that, the squash field was a no-man's land. We were too busy beating back the cucumbers, beans, summer squash, and tomatoes. Too busy canning tomatoes and trying to dry wormy corn. We didn't really remember the squash until September.

 

 

 

At the farmers' market on the day of the first frost, we checked in with the other farmers. They chattered with each other: some had spotted frost on the side of the road on the way into town, but their fields were safe.

You could call it bad luck, but there's a reason that this season was ours alone. At night, heat radiates quickly from the earth. The air quietly rearranges itself, densest layers down. With a good arm and a miraculous parting of trees, you could throw a stone from our field and hit the Russian River. I imagine the cold air flowing like the waters, always seeking the low point, pressed down with the weight of an atmosphere that stretches 430 miles above it. The river channel is a pathway for so much: fog when it exists, cold air when it doesn't; salmon
preparing to run and raccoons and deer and wild boar who root along its riverbanks. But it's the sunken air, not the salmon starting to move, that gives us our singular season. The coldest air for miles around settles on our field, chilling and killing the squash and the beans.

 

 

 

In September, we were startled. I was thinning beet seedlings, casting baby plants onto the path to die so that their neighbors could grow in stronger and faster, when Emmett called me out to the squash field.

There, on the corner by the dirt road, rested a huge orange pumpkin. How something so obvious could have snuck up on us was beyond my comprehension.

We wandered the field, which was suddenly filled with almost-pumpkins, almost-butternuts, almost-spaghettis. Everything the size it ought to be, but green. A few of the early
ripeners had turned their proper colors: bright orange, beige, daffodil yellow. There were petite and perfect sweet dumplings and dark green turban-shaped monsters. (Lost in the dozen varieties we planted, we'd tell customers they were ornamental and sell them cheaply, until we suddenly remembered that those monsters were actually Marina di Chioggia, a sought-after heirloom Italian squash that's delectable in ravioli and risotto.)