Winter Harvest
Kneeling in the dirt, knife in hand I cut fresh cauliflower in the morning light as the rooster reassures his girls that indeed the new day is here. The white crispy heads of this brassica seem to grow more beautiful with each successive plant as I pull back the leaves before making the harvest cut.
It is still a brisk 52 degrees as I get to the tomatoes, inside the hoophouse it is a toasty 82 with nearly 90% humidity – I’m sweating. Beads of perspiration form salty streams that run into my eyes and drip from my brow as I stoop over fragrant tomato plants picking red and green fruit.
The flats of tomatoes look a bit rough. The freezing nights and high winds that ripped into the hoophouse a month ago have taken their toll. Some customers will turn away at the less than perfect sight of these nightshade fruits but I still prefer my winter grown little uglies to the red sacks of water stores dare call tomatoes.
Crowns of broccoli reach for the sky as I step into their plot to arrest them, cutting them down before parading them off to the market. The sheriff farmer’s work of corralling these tall green outlaws never seems to end. By the end of the roundup I’ll probably pull in a couple hundred pounds of broc.
Over in the carrot plot the shovel slices into the earth and with the downward pressure the garden tool is pulled close to the chest wedging a scoop of soil to break the grip of the carrots below. Bunches are taken up by the handful with a yank of the greens, upward and out. The carrots try to hold fast to the clumps of dirt binding them together, but will soon emerge to see their first light of day. Stacked in roughneck containers they’ll be dropped into a cleansing bath of fresh cold water before being packed for the weekend market.
The containers start to stack up near the house. Two, three, four containers of cauliflower, I could probably pick more. My best looking broccoli in eons is abundant, dark green, and sweet – not using chemical fertilizers or pesticides there is no fear of popping a small crown into my mouth unwashed to sample and be certain that what my eyes see, my taste buds can be in concert with.
The harvest continues. The onions could have used another week or two. But these petite table onions are going to please and sell out to those lucky few who arrive early on market day to snag the few bunches that will be on hand. Two months from now the remaining onions left in the plot will have hopefully matured to full onionhood, embodying everything a fat bulb onion should be.
I inspect the beets again. Poor year for beets. Oh the greens look good and there are those folks who still appreciate a nice saute of beet greens with a little butter, honey, and walnuts. But the beets below are tiny at best. Won’t see much profit from this crop.
A new vegetable to the farm this year that is performing fantastically is the Daikon radish. Pulling an edible root that has crept down to as much as two feet into the desert soil is a sight and sensation maybe only someone familiar with the difficulty in making food grow in such a hostile environment can truly appreciate. Many will ask, what do I do with it? May I suggest making a Daikon Slaw: grate the Daikon, add some thinly sliced red onion, some crosswise cut snow peas if you have them and sprinkle with a small amount of sesame oil, rice vinegar, a teaspoon of sugar, salt, and a shake or two of black sesame seeds.
One of my helpers busies himself hand cutting peppery mustard greens. Osaka purple, India curly leaf, and broad leaf mustard leaves are bound together, secured by rubberband, stacked in a container to be rinsed and put into cold storage for the next 24 hours. Another poor seller that customers don’t much understand, these greens are terrific in a simple saute with onions, garlic, olive oil, and a small dash of sesame oil. Rachel Ray over on the Food Network recommends braising them in a large skillet over medium heat: brown a few slices of bacon, add chopped mustard greens, 2 tablespoons of white vinegar, 2 teaspoons of sugar, coarse salt and 2 cups of chicken broth, simmer for 20 minutes.
In the lemon tree one must avoid thorns of extraordinary puncturing length that seem intent on making a skewering of the hand that reaches in to steal the tree’s fruit. Grapefruits on the other hand welcome the picker as it appreciates the lightening of its heavy burden supporting hundreds of pounds of the plump sweet yellow orbs.
Throughout this routine the chickens continue to cluck in announcement at the successful laying of yet another egg. The first half of the day is the most productive for these prolific fowl who offer their eggs to our breakfast tables. Every so many hours someone with basket in tow makes the rounds to collect the still warm brown and white eggs.
Back to the citrus, oranges are ripe for picking, tangelos not quite yet. My new peach trees might begin to produce harvestable fruit next year. Still to go into the ground are my new plum trees (three different varieties), apricots, desert gold peach, ruby red grapefruit, Bartlett pear, Lisbon lemon, and tangerine.
Still to be harvested this afternoon will be the spinach, chard, salad mix, and cilantro. Finding room in the walk-in where free space is becoming rarer by the hour will be the challenge of the day. The bad weather that kept us from harvesting last week has left the farm with an abundance not often seen here following the week to week picking that can leave me wondering if I will have enough for the farm stand the next week. This weekend the customers will be offered a bounty of fresh all-natural winter harvested veggies that are a unique treat for us desert dwellers who can grow nearly year round. And you thought only cactus and cranky hermits grow out here.
It’s now after 4:00 pm. Lunch, which was also breakfast, came late at 3:00 pm. Picking 75 pounds of broccoli florets was a longer process than hoped for but they do look awesome. The lettuce is being hand cut. This allows me to selectively take the best and largest heads. Anyway, you don’t want any of the greens to stay in the ground too long as sooner rather than later they are going to bolt, meaning they will send a stem up the middle of the plant bearing seeds with the end result that the veggie will become bitter or fibery. I have two and a half bins of lettuce and as always the nagging feeling that maybe I won’t have enough.
Jerry is cutting spinach in the next plot with my little electric harvester. After that is finished, the spinach will be dumped in a large trough that looks roughly like a hot tub where it will be washed and to the best of our ability we try to remove the majority of weeds. But time and daylight only goes so far. Of course a herbicide could solve this problem, then again the people who shop with me do so precisely because of the nurture, care, and love I pour into my farm.
The late afternoon sun sets the farm aglow. The various plants with their myriad of colors standing at different heights all catch and reflect the light in a million different ways. By now the chickens are quiet, the birds’ songs have changed, they are lighter, maybe chirpier than the complex morning songs. The doves add their song to the soundtrack and the movie of life on the winter farm rolls on. This golden hour of light makes me take a step back and I realize the luck I have to be here and the honor I feel that so many of you entrust me to offer you some of the best food I can possibly produce.
