The Wisdom of the Radish (3 page)

If you'd told that sixteen-year-old that, in less than ten years, she'd find herself swept up in a perilous attempt to grow things for a living, she would have rolled her eyes, swallowed her last bite of Stouffer's microwaveable macaroni and cheese, and headed toward her room to lock the door and turn up the punk radio.

Yet by some strange twist of fate, I had ended up here: perched behind a farmers' market stand of my own creation, self-consciously adjusting lettuce bags and greeting potential customers. Gone was my high school society of scorn and skepticism; gone, too, the ardent intelligentsia of my undergrad and grad school years. I was no longer part of a buzzing newsroom, driven by impending deadlines and ringing phones. Around me were my new people: colleagues, competitors, and co-conspirators in the local food system. I hoped I didn't look as out of place as I felt.

 

 

 

A few minutes after the opening of the farmers' market, I left Emmett to tend the stand and took a stroll down the aisle to assess our competition. From previous visits, I'd gathered that there were two main categories of farmers' marketers: the entrepreneurs, who grew efficiently and marketed themselves slickly; and the “real” farmers, who enjoyed growing their product but didn't give a rat's ass about selling it. They seemed to prefer the joy of complaining about lack of sales to the joy of, you know, actually selling stuff. Some farmers straddled the two categories; others were a two-part business, a terse male grower who focused entirely on the production side, and a congenial wife who lovingly arranged the produce into a customer-ready array.

Grumpy Man, our kitty-corner neighbor, was perhaps the only person who fell purely into the rat's ass category. As I walked past his stand, he muttered from inside his VW minivan. Later in the season, I'd catch him drinking whiskey behind his stand. And while I never caught a whiff of the potent leaf at the market, he'd openly sell opium poppies to anyone savvy enough to recognize them as such.

Next to Grumpy Man, The Grocery Store—run by a Hmong family who carted their produce in from the Central Valley—burst with things that couldn't possibly grow in Sonoma County. Like tomatoes, this early in the season. Gnarled ginger piled high. Not to mention thirty-five other varieties of produce. They had the whole alphabet covered, with enough quantity of each product to supply two or three Windsors—from asparagus, broccoli, chard, and daikon, to zucchini and zebra tomatoes. This stand constituted a source of resentment among the truly local farmers, and a source of delight among local consumers who were thrilled to have out-of-season produce and the feel-good buzz of shopping at the farmers' market, too.

A bit further down the aisle I came across the farmer version of Cindy Crawford. Chatty, blonde, beautiful, and surrounded by a gaggle of gawking customers, she was passing out plastic bags hand over fist to customers snapping up pounds of asparagus. I immediately placed her in the first category: someone with marketing savvy who probably hired a crew of workers to grow her produce. (Later, I'd learn that Farmer Cindy actually cultivated two acres all by herself, grew the best corn in the county, fed a nearby prison with her produce, and was a practicing CPA with a master's degree in accounting to boot. So much for first impressions.)

These were my new people: vendors who stood alone behind tables brimming with strawberries, nectarines, garlic, onions, potatoes, chard, kale, and flowers. I trotted back to our stand and slipped behind the card table.

“Goooood morning,” I tried again, flashing my best friendly farm-girl smile. Come on, people, I'm wearing
overalls
.

I glanced back toward Farmer Cindy's bounty and winced at the comparison. Somehow, it had taken two people to
produce our meager showing of battle-weary greens. Other ingredients that went into this sorry display: six hundred hours of labor, $1,260.52 in savings, and one and a half disasters.

 

 

 

I had received news of the first disaster over the phone: the seedlings were dead.

“Which seedlings?” I'd demanded.

“All of them.”

“
All
of them?”

“Well, most of them, anyway.”

At the time, I was sprawled across a bed, cradling a phone to my ear. Since I was about to move to Emmett's hometown for the foreseeable future, I'd been spending two weeks with my family down south while Emmett broke ground on our farming enterprise up north.

In early May, the California summer was in full swing. I'd join Emmett in another seven days. In the meantime—when he wasn't sowing seeds, laying irrigation pipe, hunting for manure, or double-digging rows in the field—he'd been keeping me updated with daily farm progress reports via phone.

“What do you mean,
most
of them?” My mind raced trying to calculate the potential cost of this loss.

From the start, I'd been a strong supporter of extravagant seed purchasing. Part of our business plan was to offer a wide variety of heirloom produce—the sort you can admire for its unusual beauty, enjoy for its unique flavor, and feel good about, too, knowing that your dietary choices are encouraging greater crop diversity. Anybody can buy orange Imperator carrots from the grocery store; we'd offer the discerning customer carrots in every shade of a San Diego sunset. Sure, we'd carry
run-of-the-mill green beans, but we'd also bring in burgundy and yellow ones. We'd plant a few standard russets, but most of our potato crop would possess purple flesh. Our greens mix would brim with flavor and spice, courtesy of succulent baby brassicas: mizuna, arugula, Russian kale, mustard greens, and tatsoi. Heck, the biodiversity of a square meter on our farm would rival that of a rainforest.

It was precisely this pro-diversity mentality that led me to orchestrate an online seed spending spree. Ten types of tomatoes? Better make it twenty. Six varieties of winter squash? I suppose that's enough, but only because we seed-saved others last year. Lacinato kale, Temuco quinoa, Mei Qing bok choy, Armenian cucumber: the more, the merrier.

Even if we hadn't previously grown these varieties from seed ourselves, we'd experienced all of them on the various farms we'd worked on over the past couple of years. And weeding someone else's kale patch is kind of like growing it from seed, right?

Our first round of spending set us back $150 at Seeds of Change and $120 at Johnny's Seeds. Then, realizing we'd forgotten some old favorites, we went back and ordered more.

To make matters worse, throughout the virtual seed selection process, I'd been the mascot cheering our team onward. With my Southern California upbringing, shopping was one skill I brought to the table. As Emmett cringed entering our credit card number yet again, I was by his side murmuring, “Remember, honey, it's an investment.” While Emmett's mind was fretting over vanishing dollar signs, mine was delighting over an imaginary harvest basket that carried quinoa, leeks, heirloom tomatoes, Genovese basil, kale, corn, crookneck squash, and big, rose-petaled heads of lettuce, all at the same time. And although I knew that we were a bit out of season to
start some of these plants, deep in my heart I always assumed that the investment would pay off. Or, if not pay off, at least not wither and die before ever making it into the ground.

But there's a risk of crop failure associated with any farming endeavor. Add to that the fact that we were getting a late start on the farming season. (Emmett was starting our seeds in a makeshift greenhouse in May because the field wasn't yet irrigated or amended.) And then, of course, there's the comeuppance factor. Although we'd both spent a fair bit of time on farms, neither of us had ever started, from scratch, a farming operation of this scale.

Evidently, we failed to harness beginner's luck.

More specifically, Emmett overwatered the seeds. This led to fungal growth on the roots—a type of “damping off,” which is gardener-speak for anything (other than animals) that stunts and/or kills baby plants. It's hard to blame him, really. If you combine hundred-degree May weather with a busy man working fourteen-hour days, overwatering isn't exactly surprising.

“They've been struggling for a while,” Emmett said. He let out a small sigh that wheezed into my receiver. “I didn't want to tell you until I knew they were really gone.”

Just what I wanted to hear: no hope. Three hundred dollars' worth of seeds gone,
really
gone. Think of how much Northern Californians would have paid for local, fresh Cherokee Purple tomatoes. Or Green Zebra, or Black Plum, or that Waltham butternut squash.

With Emmett's pronunciation of doom, our conversation—like our nascent farm—didn't really seem to be going much of anywhere. After a few moments of awkward silence, we dutifully recited our long-distance I-love-yous and hung up our separate phones with a considerable amount of relief.

That night, I dreamt of seedling armies marching together. Right before I woke, every single little hopeful green thing was flattened by a team of giant red lawnmowers.

 

 

 

I rose, slightly befuddled, with a purpose: time to close the communication gap in this partnership and count the casualties. I called Emmett and with forced cheer and a hearty dollop of delicacy, I inquired more specifically about our losses.

Conclusion number one: the beans rotted. As in, some of the seeds never even emerged. A post-mortem conducted by Emmett in the hoophouse—knee-high PVC pipes bent over rebar and covered with plastic in Emmett's parent's backyard—revealed that they had simply disappeared, composted in situ. Only 2 out of 216 survived. The trauma left them stunted, their ultimate fate still unclear.

If the beans fell to a fast massacre, the 330 tomatoes were victims of a slowly spreading epidemic. Some of them died quickly—now just a dehydrated wisp on top of the potting soil—but many of them lingered, cruelly prolonging our hope. Still, the stems looked a bit pinched at the bottom (“damped off,” perhaps?), and although they were three weeks old, not a single plant had donned a second set of leaves. Emmett didn't harbor much hope for them.

Other casualties: 550 multiply planted cells of lettuce, 100 cells of spinach, 100 chard, 60 kale, 36 fennel, 90 arugula, 120 golden beets, 100 leeks, 50 broccoli, 24 basil, 24 cilantro, 12 sage, 12 dill, 24 chives, 24 parsley.

Tabulating the totals on a spreadsheet, it seemed safe to conclude that they added up to a small farm. A small, stillborn farm.

On the plane ride up to Sonoma County, I sat next to a friendly fellow who could scarcely contain his delight when he learned that I was moving up to the area.

“If you like food,” he said, “you'll love it here. People here really appreciate good food.”

“Well, I'm planning on growing some,” I said, putting on a brave face. “So I hope you're right!”

Sonoma County, long a Mecca for wine lovers, is on the front lines of the local food movement. It's not a bad place to start a small farm: Healdsburg sits at the confluence of three different local Slow Food convivia. The farmers' market has been going strong since 1978. Artisanal food shops and locally sourced restaurants (the type with big plates and little foods) dot the town square. And the nonprofit direct farm marketing organization Sonoma County Farm Trails has received national acclaim for tasty, tourist-friendly farm fare. Founded by a plucky group of local apple farmers, it's been in business since 1973.

My seatmate was thrilled that I was on the brink of diving into this culture. He couldn't believe I was going to start a farm, and he described in great detail the artisanal cheese baskets he received on a weekly basis. He encouraged me to branch into the cheese market, after my farm got established of course, because cheese is so complementary to the area's wine tourism.

At this point, in spite of the seed disaster, I'd regained my farming optimism. Chalk it up to a few days spent surfing and the fact that the conversation took place a few thousand feet above the glowing Sierra Nevadas. When he suggested cheese, I wasn't thinking
if only
; I was thinking,
Heck, maybe we could get a few goats and make a little chèvre
.

As we stowed our tray tables, straightened our seat backs, and began to descend, I peered out the window. The plane was banking over the hills that had led Emmett in his childhood to fashion bows and arrows out of saplings and build wigwams out of eucalyptus limbs. He was a hunter-gatherer; although he was really successful only at gathering soap root (a bulb that is chock-full of saponin compounds and lathers like soap), he had long-term plans of growing up to be a Native American. If that failed, he figured he could always become a standardgrade hermit. And so he practiced for his eventual vocation by building shelters in the hills, sleeping in them, and constructing elaborate snares and traps—swim-in fish baskets sunk in the pond, leg snares laid across deer trails—that never caught anything. He shot arrows that didn't wound a single animal. But his failure as a hunter didn't turn him into a cultivator; on the contrary, he bristled when he was branded “farmer boy” in elementary school. He rode in the passenger seat of the big flatbed truck with his dad at harvest time, honking the horn and dropping tons of grapes off at various local wineries. But beyond the occasional truck ride and the familiar chore of dumping the kitchen compost into the compost pile, Emmett had little to do with farming.

When we first started dating, I asked him where he would live if he could live anywhere. He told me he had never thought of living anywhere but Healdsburg. At the time, he made it clear that our relationship could change that assumption—and that perhaps he just hadn't ever taken the time to consider alternatives—but there I was, flying over his hills.