Signs and Miracles

In the evening of my first day at Caretaker, a perfect rainbow spanned the valley as I stepped out of the house to walk down to my cabin. At the time, I took the Biblical interpretation, and inferred that it was a promise of a wonderful season, definitely one without too much precipitation. Well. I've seen about 10 perfect rainbows since, and I have now come to the conclusion that rainbows are actually a promise of lots and lots of rain. It's raining now, as I write this, as a matter of fact.

But we have a new sign on the farm, so I'm not worried. A few days ago Katie mentioned that she had seen a dove fluttering around the farm. As anyone who graduated from Sunday School can tell you, a dove brought back an olive branch to Noah, indicating that dry land was nigh. All week long, the sun has shone and the fields have flourished. My garden has been churning out eggplants; we're eating raspberries by the pint; Chloe isn't even kicking the bucket any more. Today brought the greatest miracle of all, however.

While pulling up black plastic yesterday afternoon, we noticed something red though the opaque plastic walls of the hoophouse. We closed the hoophouse 3 weeks ago in defeat, convinced that the blight had finally invaded even that safe haven. The plants were beginning to die back from disease, and the fruits lacked even the merest pink blush. In their prime, the hoophouse tomatoes had grown into a jungle, so we anticipated a huge hassle in removing the dying vines. To simplfy our task, we decided to hasten their death by roasting the tomato plants to death. We left the sidewalls down, the doors shut. We stopped running irrigation to the plants. We imagined their leaves shriveling from 145 degree heat, the blighted fruit withering even as it rotted.

Instead, we seem to have created juicy, sweet, California-style dry farmed tomatoes.

Late blight is a fungus like disease, technically classified as a "water mold." It spreads through the air, but can only really infect a plant when the leaves are wet and the temperatures are between 60 and 80 degrees. Our benign neglect prevented the introduction of cool, humid air, and the brutal daytime temperatures within stopped the blight in its tracks. Even better, the sudden stress seems to have kicked the tomatoes into high gear. When we opened the door this morning, we found plants so heavy laden with fruit that they could barely support themselves on their trellising. Sure, there are some blighted fruits and dead leaves in the hoophouse. But to haul a cart full of ripe, red slicers up the hill felt like the greatest victory of the season.

Oh and that dove? It is actually a white pigeon with an affinity for compost piles. Better than a rainbow, I say!

Because these tomatoes are such precious commodities, I can't offer recipes that utilize the normal summer abundance of tomatoes. For us, raspberries are the wonder crop this year, which has inspired me to try an unusual take on chilled berry soup. While I'm sure it seems crazy to put jalapenos in a berry soup, the peppers actually add the perfect piquancy to turn a dessert soup into something a bit more substantial.

Chilled Garden Berry Soup with Lemon Verbena
Recipe courtesy of Homegrown Pure and Simple, by Michel Nischan
Note: Lemon verbena is an unusual herb with lanceolate leaves and a heavenly lemon aroma. It is a perennial, so if you can purchase a plant and find a spot for it in your garden, you will be richly rewarded.

1 cup honey (I imagine that you could reduce this a bit, depending on the tartness of the berries)
1 cup lemon juice
2 Tablespoons grated lemon zest
1 cinnamon stick
4-5 teaspoons seeded, finely minced jalapeno (the seeds are where the real heat of hot peppers is, so do NOT include them in this recipe)
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 pints garden berries (I used raspberries, but the recipe assures me that any combination of blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, or strawberries would be delicious)
1/4 cup loosely packed lemon verbena leaves, sliced
whatever lemon verbena stems the leaves were on

In a small saucepan, combine the honey, lemon juice, lemon verbena stems, lemon zest, cinnamon, the chopped pepper, and the verbena stems. Simmer for about 5 minutes over low heat. Season with the salt, remove from the heat, and let sit for 10 minutes to cool.

Put the berries in a food processor or blender. Add the honey mixture, pouring through a fine sieve. Process until smooth.

You can sieve the soup again to remove some of the seeds, or simply stir in the sliced lemon verbena leaves and chill until serving.

A Prelude to Tomatoes in Several Movements

What do farmers do all day? This seems to be a particular question among the uninitiated (ie: those who don’t talk to plants). This question always leaves me at a bit of a loss—I don’t have a pat answer like “I milk the cows” or “I mill the grain.” On a fruit and veg farm like Serenbe, farmers are the original jacks of all trades and our daily work varies depending on everything from the season to the most recent rainfall. Last Thursday, however, was a red letter day for us: we planted out our tomatoes.

We’ve been babying these particular tomato plants for several months now. They’ve grown from fragile shoots delicately testing the air to bushy transplants with furry stems and frond-like leaves. In total, we’re growing approximately 40 different varieties with names that run the spectrum from the evocative (Green Zebra) to the colorful (Cherokee Purple), from the techy (X3R Red Knight), to the positively mouth-watering (Big Beef).

The steps from farm to table, however, begin long before we harvest the first juicy red fruit. Two weeks ago, our tomato fields were waist high in cover crops of vetch, clover, and rye grass. We keep our fields cycling through a rotation of cover crop and vegetable production, both so that the soil is never left bare (which would cause erosion and a general leaching of nutrients from the soil) and so that the cover crops can fix nitrogen back in the soil once our veggies have removed it.
We began by mowing the fields in bed-wide swaths and left our cover crops as a mulch on the soil. About a week later, we attached the tiller to our tractor and ran over the field again, this time incorporating the cover crop into the soil and facilitating faster decomposition. Again, we let the field sit for about a week. Finally, the cover crops died down to the point where we were ready to plant.

As a final prep before planting, we use an attachment called a spader, which looks like it could have been invented by Dr. Suess. The spader resembles a box on skis, which contains 8 spades (oversized trowels, really) attached to a system of pistons. Running behind the tractor, the spader fluffs up our beds and breaks up clots without destroying the soil profile. After a good spading, our hard, red soil magically becomes brown and velvety. We then pull our 45 lb row marker (not to be confused with the markers, aka tags, that we use to indicate the beginning of a new variety, or the marker, aka pen, with which we write on the markers. As you can imagine, we are often a bit confused ourselves…) over the bed to establish a grid for planting evenly.

We prep our plants for transplanting by watering them thoroughly—they come out of the cells much easier when wet, and we don’t want to shock them in their new home by transplanting them dry. One person lays out the tomato plants in 1’ or 1.5’ intervals down the center of our bed, while the following farmer quickly sets them in the soil and firms the ground for good soil-to-root contact. The third person follows with a bucket of compost, ringing each plant with a small berm of the rich, black super-dirt. ** As a side note: compost is NOT poop. Once upon a time it may have been, but it has been processed by bacteria until it becomes ultra-nutrient-rich soil. Compost does not smell like anything other than fertile soil. I feel the need to clarify this point as everyone from my friends to my father has mistakenly assumed that I am regularly up to my elbows in manure. ** Tomatoes are notorious for catching diseases from the soil, so we hope that by keeping any low-lying leaves on semi-sterile compost, rather than dirt, we can save our plants from STDs (sucky tomato diseases).

Lest the weight of their fruit send them toppling into the dirt, our tomatoes require trellising on which to drape themselves. As our next step we pounded about 200 7.5’ conduit posts into our bed. We’ll eventually string them with wires, but as our plants are still wee young things we put that off for another day. We ran drip tape—our irrigation fallback when Mother Nature serves up a drought—down the center of the bed, weaving it in and out of the posts so that it lay immediately adjacent to our plants. Then we mulched. Covering the bed with a thick layer of straw will hopefully keep weeds low and soil moisture high. Finally, we hooked up our drip tape to the main irrigation line, checked for holes or leaks, and turned it on to water in the plants. Transplants must be watered in (either by rain or drip tape) within 12 or so hours of planting.

Of course, that wasn’t all that we did. Planting 700 fragrant tomato seedlings only consumed the better part of the day after lunch. Prior to that we seeded 500 bed feet of peas, watered in yesterday’s transplants of celeriac, fennel, and assorted herbs, and spaded several beds in anticipation of the afternoon’s tomato blitz.

Our work varies from day to day, but one thing remains constant: the indescribable refreshment of my end-of-the-day beer.