A Greenish House

     My father started it. Last spring, about the time I was planting those first seeds and trying to resign myself to the fact that I'd have to revert to the bad old pre-greenhouse days of seed starting (check out spring posts and you'll see why sans-greenhouse is a challenge), he sent me some lovely greenhouse porn online. The options were tempting, and put the costs of house ownership bellow the $2000 price tag for the smallest of tunnels from Farm Tek. Still, I didn't have the capital to justify even a modest hobby house, and resolved to make do with cold frames (also documented in those March posts). Still, for some reason I didn't delete those tempting pictures and their alluring blue links to sites offering walk-in spring protection.
     By the end of summer, the Patient Spouse began delicately re-opening the question. "Where are you going to put your greenhouse," he inquired now and again throughout the hot days of August and early September—when, like the cricket in the fable, I was still fiddling away the summer as if all issues of seed starting and icy winds would never again be an issue.  As the leaves began to change, so did his tactics. Besides increasing the frequency of his gentle inquiry, he began to offer his spare time. Did I want help clearing out the garden? Would the greenhouse go here, or over there? How big was I thinking to make it? I stopped insisting that I was not, in fact, "Thinking to make it" any size at all, and began tentative, then aggressive, measuring, staking, and land clearing. "Is this where the greenhouse is going?" he asked, coming out one buggy October morning with gloves and a shovel to help dig grapevine. I realized I was talking siting, dimensions, visibilty to neighbors and proximity to water and electricity rather than denying the presence of a mental greenhouse. Like two separate people, I was the Scot with the $2000 profit and a copy of the Help Wanted section, and a farmer with startup capital of my own and a Muck Boot poised to step into my future.
     Land clearing is far more comforting than sitting down with the want ads. When the going gets (emotionally) tough and I can't really validate my abilities, it's by far easier to get outdoors and pull bittersweet roots than it is to think how I could have made it to the age of 46 without a stable career (fodder for another post someday). Through hot autumn, I cleared the swath from the squash bed to the Northwest corner of the property. The Patient Spouse helped level dirt, move rocks, and cut vines. While I hemmed and hawed over dimensions, measured materials and drew up rudimentary designs, he merely smiled and nodded. His smile puts the Mona Lisa's all to shame.

This is the spot, all cleared and more or less level, limited by the old boulder wall marking the West property boundary (greenery growing on it—parallel to neighbor's hedge), North boundary (thin white stick in background is the corner post), North edge of squash bed (post and wire in foreground) and a huge boulder after which land drops away. We had to dig out and move about 2' of soil down-slope to rocks in foreground to make a more or less level 10' X 20' pad. It's a long way from either the spigot or the rain barrel, which I'll surely regret, but this was the only place with flat ground, all-day sun and not needed for ag or access.
     The Patient Spouse looked at my rough, not-to-scale renderings of the greenhouse I could make for pretty much nothing out of existing lumber and an 8' X 100' roll of 6 mil poly bought for an earlier, failed attempt at a retrofit lean-to greenhouse. The width of the plastic ruled out making a hoop-style frame from either conduit or pvc pipe because there is no way to attach separate sheets over such a framework and keep the plastic "skin" airtight. Besides that, buying materials that would bend to hoop shape immediately meant a $200 investment in building materials, not including another $100-plus for greenhouse plastic of an appropriate width. It seemed easier to think in terms of an old-fashioned, frame-style house, using the existing salvaged 6 X 6 and 4 X 4 posts I had on hand, with a sturdy kicker board base and  top frame and some sort of roof... maybe 4 operable lights like I built for the cold frames. "Free"...or, mostly free... the term appeals to this farmer.
     Little did I know, the P.S. was biding his time. He had heard the words "of some sort" in that design of mine. I built. He went to work and earned an actual living wage for us. A rather exciting frame rose up from the dirt. Here it is.

     Meanwhile, the weather grew colder. A couple weeks back, we hiked in the mountains and saw the first of the snow under the trees. Oh, yeah: winter. Snow weight. We didn't have any snow at all last winter until March. But I saw that I had been deceiving myself. Those cold frame lights for the roof would have to be smaller, reinforced, and maybe all removable wasn't such an affordable idea. Either way, I'd be buying about $75 of welded-wire fence for inadequate reinforcement under the plastic, lots and lots of firring strips to build the frames and hold down the plastic, and 4 10' 2X4s to hold up my increasingly elaborate, no-longer-so-cheap roof. Use Palram plastic? Not for under $300. Use cattle panels in place of welded wire? Only available in useless dimensions for my increments-of-5 design. The Mona Lisa smile never left my man's face. I endeavored to persevere with my giant cold frame design for a few more days. Then I went back to those porn pics from Pop's.
In two weeks, for $100 shipping, I could have the kit for a complete $400 Shelter Logic tunnel frame (think "sheds snow") delivered to my door in 2 weeks. Dimensions? 10 X 20. How about that!
The P.S. let me use his laptop to place the order. He waited until I hit the "print purchase confirmation" button on Home Depot's friendly website (!Free Shipping!) before he said, seetly as ever,  "That was the right choice." I had to rough him up a little before he would even confess that he "Didn't want to say anything." Under no amount of wifely pressure would he utter the words "I told you so." He is a far better man than I, you know. End of part 1.

At the End of the Season

     October 14, the eve of my final farm market of the season, a white frost settled over the grass. It dimmed the zinnias, turned the marigolds to a faded amber drift, wrestled the tomatoes and peppers to limp black rags. Summer is over. For that final market, I offered vivid bouquets of variegated "Fish" peppers in all stages of ripeness, set amid the last of the dark red dahlias, fiery sprays of burning bush, plumed bronze miscanthus grasses and graceful Ruby Silk Looooove Grass. (It must be said that way, just as grits can never be ordered without a drawl.) Most of those bouquets came home with me. It was a better week to sell dried bunches of Japanese lanterns. Perhaps with the blaze of color everywhere around, nobody needs bouquets; we're living in one.
     The need for bouquets has been a bugaboo all summer. I was doing pretty well back in lilac season selling seven bunches at a market, I now realize. Back in May, even here in the country, shoppers must have been hungry for a little captive springtime to put on the dinner table. The start of the summer bloom season, however, coincided with a floral glut: buckets upon buckets of bouquets brought by the local BIG farm, which has a farmstand open seven days a week, a full greenhouse and bakery, and a presence at all the larger farm markets as well. My bouquets sold between the moment theirs sold out and the end of the market. Four bouquets per market is a good take. I had to learn to accept that and look away. My price was the same as Big Farm's, I really think my quality and overall loveliness was the same. I even invested in plastic sleeves like theirs, thinking the presentation might make impulse buying more inviting but the addition made no noticeable change in sales. The fact is, a tiny stand can't compete with a huge stand that offers one-stop shopping. If I'm going to sell flowers again next year, then it will have to be during the shoulder seasons, it won't include the sunflowers or glads other vendors have done so well with that I can't compete, and it will have to be with some niche flowers no one else has thought of. Maybe no flowers at all? What, then?
    Will there be a "next year" for First-Flower? During this month of Last Flowers, it's time to tally up the successes and failings of the spring and summer now past. Discounting major one-time gifts from family members, my first year's labors cost a grand total of $3,333.64. Most of that wasn't the kind of one-time expense I'd hoped; it was the cost of market fees, health department licenses, sugar and canning jars. That means these costs will be annual ones. There is no way to spend less. My total profit after expenses? $2,606.36. Not a living wage. Pretty humiliating, actually.
     And yet, the voice inside my head keeps scheming. Even as the Math Major tells me "Mom, you should look for a job" and her gainfully employed elder sister pounds the pavements looking for even more ways to make herself useful and rich, I'm mooning about, expanding garden space and looking up seed possibilities. There's a new greenhouse of sorts rising from the newly cleared tangle at the back of the property, and 100 mixed late tulips tucked among garlic cloves in the cutting beds. 100 mixed tall Dutch iris are setting down roots beside them. Three elderberries are rallying to make syrup-perfect flowers and fruit come spring. I'm happy when I'm out there in the dirt and the fresh fall air. That's where the math fades into the background, and all this labor makes perfect sense with no calculus needed. I may not have a job, but I have a livelihood. Bloom where you are planted!

Tasting the Past

     When summer comes, I want to eat plums.
     Most people wax lovingly of sun-warmed tomatoes, devoured right there in the August garden. I've eaten my share of tomatoes this way, it's true. I have my favorites, most especially little 'sungold' which there are never enough of for long enough into autumn. But poetry? That's not for pedestrian love apples, which have grown almost tiresome from their enduring presence in the limelight, the darling of heirloom vegetable proponents to such a degree that even the supermarket uses the term "heirloom" as a sort of flavor guarantee. Tomatoes are useful, pretty, estimable for their sheer variety and ability to earn the adulation of the masses. But plums... oh, plums, warmed by the ripening sun, warm on one side and still leaf-cool on the other, eaten in the long, baking grass to the hum of cicadas, with no way to clean the juice from wrist and forearm than the swipe of your own tongue, and the taste of sweat and sweet-tart mingled together... To my mind, this is the reason the word "delicious" was coined.
     Sadly, mine is a taste unfulfilled, summer upon summer. It's easy enough to grow or buy that sun-warmed tomato, even if all you get is a pot on a rented balcony or a day in the country at tomato time. Sure, there are plums in the grocery store, and even at fruit stands in my rural county near the orchard-lined Hudson River. But my longing is more specific than any of these blue, or red or yellow plums can satisfy; something more like the first heirloom tomato advocates three decades ago were espousing. I want a specific plum, a Greengage plum: army-green under that smoky bloom on the skin, and meltingly soft golden ripe within. A ripe greengage sometimes collapses in the hand once your teeth have snapped the skin. It is a fruit to be sought, nearly camouflaged among the leaves, and devoured in place. Sometimes, even the ones I carried home from the orchard in my childhood never made it intact to the kitchen. It is not a plum for shipping, and it is rarely seen at farm stands. The only way to taste a greengage seems to be to grow your own. I tried that once; it was a fifteen year tale of heartbreak, pruning, white flowers and black rot, a tale of trying to recreate my past that ended when my ex-husband pruned the tree one final time on a winter day, six inches above the snow line.

     At Fist-Flower, part of my first year experiment involves growing vegetables from Slow Food USA's "Ark of Taste," a kind of endangered species list for plants of particular merit that have fallen out of commercial availability. They include Amish Paste and Cherokee Black tomatoes, Aunt Molly ground cherries and Amish Deer Tongue lettuce, Jimmy Nardello peppers and Sibley squash.  In most cases, you can't buy these crops at  the store, either because they don't submit to modern agricultural practices or, like my Greengages, they don't bear up to packing and shipping. In many cases, even the seed is hard to come by; a lesson in the stew of politics and power monopolies that is Big Seed. Somewhere among them, I hope to find other flavors that make eating something more than eating; that recall old memories, fire the imagination, that taste of the past and bring back something lost, or nearly lost.
To be continued... 

Blooming This Week

The hot weather has made everything grow; all at once, the flowers that have taken so long to come to full promise are budding, in many cases giving a first glimpse at what was only an idea from a seed catalog description. New this week: orange Zinnia "Inca", red zinnia "Will Rogers", Cerinthe in full purple bloom, many blue flowers on the borage, white ammi and snapdragons smelling of Grape Crush soda pop in shades of white, pink, deep red and a great Swedish red...

Blooming This Week

Today's walk-through (in preparation for the next two days' farm markets) suggests this is the last week I'll need to rely on established perennials. Most of the seed-grown plants are about one week of helpful weather away from first flowering! Meanwhile, bouquets this week will draw heavily on:

 and a little bit of courage, flair and originality,  like this:

Blooming where we are planted!

Rose Water and Chagrin

I am at my first market. I am nervous, excited, worried about what kind of reputation I will begin to develop among both the marketing and the market community. Will I sell anything? Will I ever break even on my investment? Is my hope of launching a farm even realistic? Since my marketing plan this year consists entirely of selling through these Thursday and Friday, and alternate Saturday markets, it feels like a major moment when a young girl walks up to my stand that first chilly afternoon and successfully petitions her mother to buy a pansy pop. I have made my first dollar. After child and parent have wandered out of earshot (lollipop already unwrapped and—a relieved sigh here—not stuck to the wrapper) the Mathematician says, "Hey—you should frame that dollar, Mom. Don't they do that in stores with the first money they make?" Heck no, not me, I tell her. Maybe I'll draw a smiley face on George, but this one is going in the bank. Now I'm only $2,397.22 in the red for the year.
     We make almost $80 the first market. Towards the end, I spot an old friend from my nursery days at Windy Hill Farm; delighted to see a familiar face, I wave and he comes over to check out the booth with his wife, who is a private gardener in the area. She size up my selection of hand-sewn aprons and bags, my flower syrups and my bouquets. "Living the dream, huh?" she says rhetorically, and I can't miss the rind of sarcasm in her comment. They don't buy anything, but the husband wishes me good luck before they move on. There is a little shadow on my lilacs after that.
      How can this not be living the dream? Here was my morning's work a few weeks ago, when the apothecary rose I lovingly transplanted and nurtured two years ago burst into glorious bloom. When I brought it that errant runner from the Shaker medicinal garden where I worked, I did so because I loved the way it filled the surroundings with fragrance for three very special weeks in late spring, and how its vase-shaped hips graced the final days of my fall labors. I had no idea I would someday be harvesting from this plant as part of my effort to turn a farm dream into a financially viable reality. Now, here I am plucking one silken handful of petals at a time, passing by only the ones with a honeybee working the pollen-rich stamens. The Shakers were not allowed to pluck the flowers with enough stem for a bouquet: decorating the household was considered frivolous. That wasn't the stoic misfortune it might seem. Each bloom on this simple species rose only lasts 24 hours, whether on the bush or in a vase. Moreover, a day among the blossoms is better than the brief splendor of such a bouquet. The chore of picking roses is undeniably sensual: taking the most beautiful part, in its prime, in a gesture that has to be a caress if the petals are not to be torn or sift down from the fingers to fall among the thorns.

   The resulting harvest is no less sensuous: a bowl of heart-shaped silk, that whispers as you sift through it, and fills the air with that evanescent fragrance of fragrances. There are so many petals! I confess, by the third harvest, I began to be drawn away from the idea of product and profit, and began to think of the emotionally healing potential of a bath carpeted with pink petals; a hedonistic soak in the middle of the afternoon, when the heat of the sun would send the smell of the highest flowers up and in through the bathroom window which is directly above the bush. No: I think the fear of bouquet-making must have been the least of the Shaker Elders' concerns as they planned for the annual rose harvest. Perhaps they sent the more prosaic males of their celibate sect out to accomplish the task, and left the women and girls home to boil the petals and drain off the rosewater.
    After some experimentation, I have dismissed the notion of making rosewater myself. The only part with intense fragrance is the steam that collects on the lid after I have cooked the petals at a bare simmer 20 minutes and then let them cool. The brew itself is a disappointing brownish color, and while it smells faintly of roses, it tastes like vaguely rose-ish tea. Cooked with sugar and re-steeped in fresh petals, I get a delicious thin pink syrup... which proceeds to show mold on the surface after a week in storage. With more sugar, it is a beautiful rose pink, thick and sweet and, in blind taste tests among The Sisters (mine, not the Shakers)  is deemed far more rosey and delicious than the fancy commercial stuff I received for Christmas. Now, to convince the masses that rose syrup is the stuff of their summer. I have about 25 bottles, and at an affordable $6 each I could not only make a reputation for myself, I could make some headway into that problem of How the Farm Pays.
    Except, oddly, that trying to sell rose syrup is an uphill battle. It begins to feel less like Living the Life and more like another of my thankless,  hopeless endeavors that rank up there with selling the novel, improving the Shaker Museum gardens, and writing the handbook for CSA customers. Offered up mixed in seltzer, the marketgoers are curious  for two weeks. I get smiles, and I get my first customers. It is an encouraging start. Then, as summer approaches, the skeptics and grouches come to rain on my parade. I might as well be smiling, issuing my friendly hello and inquiring, "Would you like to try some of my dog shit on a cracker?"   I receive, in this order, "Uh, I don't think so." "Does it have a lot of sugar? I can't eat any sugar." "I don't like roses." And, the chilly week when I am passing out half-Dixie-cups of black tea with rose syrup, "Does that have caffeine in it?" Really? I mean, really? One week, two women make it a point to walk into my booth so they can inform me that flowers make a mess, get in the way of conversation at dinner parties, and that the taste of flowers in any form is unappetizing. O-kayyy... thanks for that. Worse, they're not even working together. They come separately, like two different slaps on the same afternoon!  It's like a trend: each week, fewer buyers and more grief. To top it off, I'm bringing almost as much back home as I brought to market, except now it's wilted.
    The Patient Spouse makes, in three hours, what I can sell in 5, on a good day, net. I get a total of ten hours a week to replicate my wages a year ago: $15,000. He knows and I know it won't happen at three lousy farm markets. I can forget about getting paid for my time. But if you look at that figure, $15,000, it doesn't look like a lot to ask for in terms of earnings for a business. And yet...
     And yet, after that eyebrow-raising first week when I came home overjoyed at the $80 in my pocket and he zipped his lips before he could let them express the "that's it?" expression writ across his handsome face, I have gone through days where I have sold, coaxed, cajoled, clipped, packaged and pleaded my heart out for $25 or $30. What am I doing wrong? I can grow beautiful lettuces, incredible parsley, and outstanding dill. I can make heartbreakingly beautiful, fragrant, unique and lasting bouquets. It all travels to market...and most of it travels back home. I can cook, sew, or arrange the most beautiful and affordable hostess gifts possible, and no one stops long enough to consider them.
      This week, I am taking serious stock of my options. I don't want First-Flower to fail before even the first flowers from seed have come into bloom. I still think learning to deal with my envy at others' success and to pour forth happiness and gratitude has got to be the answer in a large-picture way. Besides—remunerative or not, yes, I am "living the life": not the life of leisure and luxury as this cliche implies, but the life I have studied, toiled, considered and waited for all the years of my life until now: a life of tending to the soil, finding what is good in it, and offering that to others. Maybe I just need a rose bath and then everything will be coming up roses again. Bloom where you are planted.

Pictures from the Market

No reading required: Here are some pictures taken by the Mathematician at our first market, West Stockbridge, on May 19. Lilacs were the feature flower: