From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

Our potatoes are growing this year better than ever. Everything is growing better this year, after two years that would try any gardener’s soul. When the potato plants started blooming a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see the patch turn into something of a flower garden. (See photos of the patch and a closeup of one potato blossom.)

It got me to thinking about the usual dichotomy we adhere to as garden farmers. Over here are the vegetables, over there the flowers. I don’t have any problem with that; roses are showier than potato blossoms. But maybe I think that way more because of cultural prejudice than fact. When you remember that potato blossoms are a byproduct of one of human society’s favorite foods, a byproduct that comes without any extra work on the gardener’s part, and compare that effortlessness to all the attention one must pay to a rose garden, which plant really is the most beautiful, all things considered? The only thing better would be roses that sported potatoes on their roots.

Sometimes vegetable and flower become literally one and the same. Squash flowers make a delightful food, fried in batter. Violets and nasturtiums can spice up salads. Dandelion buds, right before they unfold into flowers, are the best part of a plate of wilted dandelions to my taste.

But it is the philosophical question that intrigues me. I may be mistaken but I don’t think any garden writer has waxed eloquent about the beauty of a potato flower. All vegetables have in fact quite beautiful flowers but mostly they are smaller that those blooms we honor in the flower garden. Small equals not showy. But if you look at these small flowers through a magnifying glass or the closeup lens of a camera, oh my. Even bean blossoms are quite spectacular. Or if a great many un-showy blooms grow together, oh my again. A bed of thyme in bloom. A field of clover blossoms.

Methinks (when posing as a philosopher, a writer can get away with weird words like ‘methinks’) that the contented gardener is the one who can find a bean blossom or a potato flower as beautiful as a rose. Methinks that the human tendency to have the biggest or the rarest or the most striking of, in this case, flower, is at the root (drat those puns) of our discontent. A child, as yet uninfluenced by human culture, will be enraptured by tiny flowers, like a tomato blossom, if it is pointed out to them by an adult who is also enraptured by it. Even a homely corn tassel is a thing of beauty if you study it closely, and when you think of the succulent ear of roasted corn that will come from that tassel, even orchids are among the also-rans.

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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.
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From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

Shoppers just now discovering the allure of open air fresh food markets in towns and cities should be aware of new developments. Not only is there an increasing  number of different fruits and vegetables being offered, but also meats, dairy products, even fresh fish— all from small garden farms. And you know these foods come directly from garden farms because in the best markets, rules prohibit buying wholesale and reselling.

I recently visited one such market at Bellefontaine, Ohio, where friends of ours have a booth, and was pleasantly surprised at the variety of foods for sale. A farmer was selling cheese he processed from his own small dairy herd. Next to him was a farm couple selling pork  they had raised  themselves. They were even selling fresh, home-produced lard— the good stuff rarely available in any store.

Even more surprising, these marketers were selling cornmeal processed from their own corn and were planning to sell their own oat grain products this summer. Hull-less oats is so much easier to process than the commoner hulled varieties. Having predicted a long time ago that this was going to happen, I could hardly resist preening like a silly old peacock.  I tried to grow hull-less oats years ago and learned to my chagrin that birds love it when the oat grains are in the milky stage. They ate almost my whole acre before I even knew I had a problem. Back then I was probably the only person in my neck of the woods growing the stuff (I got the seed from Canada) and every red-winged blackbird between here and Lake Erie dropped by to enjoy the feast. Now, hopefully, as more and more garden farmers grow hull-less oats and learn how to avoid heavy bird predation, the story will have a happier ending.

The reason why animal products and grains are now more in evidence at farmer’s markets is primarily because of  heavy demand from consumers suspicious of foods from factory farm environments. On the other hand, the reason these products have not hitherto been much in evidence  is because health regulations governing the retail sale of  animal products can be a real snarl for the small producer  to try to follow. Fortunately, the modern garden farmer, more than the farmers of my generation who would just as soon take a pitchfork to bureaucratic regulators, are much more willing to engage officialdom and work out the problems. The regulators on the other hand, are also more helpful and reasonable than they used to be (the milk inspector we had in the 1950s when my father and I went into big time dairying was a draconian son of a hardtack soda biscuit). Regulators are human too, believe it or not, and they realize that some of the regulations can be more than a little bit silly for small farmers intent on producing the most healthful food that they can anyway. Most inspectors want garden farmers to succeed because their food is the best available.

The dairyman marketing his own cheese, for example, decided instead of going through the travails of trying to sell raw milk products, which is an issue now enmeshed in a real bureaucratic turmoil, went to the trouble of putting in a pasteurizer.  Whether that makes economic sense in the long run remains to be seen, but at least he avoided one of the biggest hassles in small scale marketing of dairy products. Where they can get away with it, raw milk producers sell their customers shares in the cows since it is supposed to be illegal to sell the milk outright. Obviously, this practice will continue to be controversial.

The people selling their own cornmeal had to go through some weird hoops too. It may surprise you to know that in some instances, you can sell grains to customers at market, but not flour ground from the grains. So you sell the grain and then grind it as part of customer service. In other instances you can’t sell flours and meals you grind in your kitchen but you can in some other building.  Getting around ridiculous rules like this requires a positive attitude on all sides.

The number of fruits and vegetables is increasing too, as is the season for them.   Our friends,  Andy Reinhart and Jan Dawson, who sell under the name, Jandy, grow, among other things, vegetables in hoop houses for early markets. They had brought along a considerable amount of early butterhead lettuces (this was in May) and  were all sold out by ten o’clock in the morning. Another marketer told me that he and his family took some twenty pints of wild black raspberries to market once. The berries disappeared faster than a handful of candy in a group of first graders.
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See also Does Gardening Make for Better Sex? at Chelsea Green→ 
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.
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From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

When our bed of irises (in the photo above) bloom for one brief but glorious week in late May, I think, strangely enough, of a letter a friend of mine received from a doctor in Minnesota. The doctor observed that in his medical practice, rural people face the prospect of dying with more equanimity than urbanites.

He theorizes that people who live close to the natural world and to farm life have their thinking shaped by the way life and death follow each other up and down the food chain every day. They understand that death is the unavoidable way of nature and it applies to everything and everyone. Urban people more often live in a sort of surrealistic plastic bubble where they never see a nice neighborhood doggy tear the guts out of a lamb or a cute raccoon slaughter a henhouse full of chickens. They have never seen a hog die after having its throat slit to bleed properly so that the meat tastes the way they want it to taste. They do not associate their eating with anything dying. They become paranoid at the realization that they must die too and try to find ways to avoid every possible or even imagined threat of death that comes their way. That doctor didn’t say it, but mine would add that this paranoia is adding 500 billion unnecessary dollars to the cost of Medicare and Medicaid programs according to recent statistics.

I suppose that there are quite a few urban people living in areas of high crime rates who are even more conscious of the inevitability of death than rural people who care for animals or must deal with the wild animal kingdom, but generally speaking, I think the good doctor has it right. I would add gardeners in the group of those who accept death philosophically. There is an underbelly of sadness to the delights of gardening. The flowers in the photo above, mostly irises, are the result of my wife’s nearly year-round care, but peak bloom lasts hardly a week around Decoration Day. Some flowers last less than that. I am particularly fond of a little wild one, purple cress, that comes up and blooms for three days in our lawn in April when it is often still very chilly. For it to prosper I have to wait until it matures and goes to seed in June before mowing where it grows. So for three days of enjoyment, we wait all year and then have to endure a shaggy lawn all of May. I don’t mind the unkempt lawn because it is much more interesting that plain old grass, but visitors infected with Neatness Disease get very nervous at our unmowed sward.

To develop the knack of being able to enjoy the temporary nature of all existence is the secret of happiness, I think. It requires the realization that the fullness of life means weeping as well as laughing. It also means that what dies down does rise up again and so preserves our hope for the future.

The paranoia so rampant in society right now stems at least partly from the fact that so many people lead a life sheltered from the reality of nature. They don’t see life the way it really is: the entire food chain sits at a huge banquet table, eating and being eaten. Such people begin to entertain strange ideas. For instance, if we would just quit eating meat, some of them think, many of our problems could be solved including not having livestock exhaling and emitting carbon dioxide. I think most of us eat too much meat too, but it is impossible to solve any carbon dioxide problems by getting rid of livestock, as some people seem to believe. Nature abhors a vacuum. Take the domesticated animals away, and the land no longer used to raise livestock would fill with wildlife. It already is happening and eventually something will have to be done about it.

Herds of deer, sometimes thirty or more in number, are now roaming at will over the farmlands where I live. If they were cows, people would be having fits. Eventually, if we quit eating meat, there would be just as many wild animals burping and farting as there are livestock now. I ask people affected by carbon-phobia how much carbon emission comes from squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, geese, deer, bears, elk, rats, birds, not to mention dogs, cats and horses etc. etc. etc. No one seems to know. The only concern at the moment is about getting rid of cows, as if these are the only animals that belong in the equation.

I have another question: how much less carbon emission would follow if the 6.5 billion human beings on earth would all just quit eating beans. The carbon phobic society doesn’t seem to have thought of that. They are too busy worrying about death from cow breath.
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.
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