A New Season in Earnest

This was a propitious week for us, the beginning of our winter CSA subscription. The first box from Even' Star Organic Farm in Lexington Park, MD arrived on Thursday.

Inside the box were some lovely Beauregard sweet potatoes along with one very long Courge de Longue squash (very much like a butternut squash), some arugula, ancho and Peachy Mama peppers, French breakfast radishes, heirloom eggplants and one dozen brown eggs from farmer Bretts Grohsgal's pastured hens.

This year we are splitting the subscription with our friends Helen and Jeff. There's just too much vegetable matter in each week's delivery for our small family to manage. In the deepest part of winter, we will be seeing tons of greens: kales, collards, mustards. We love our greens, but we can only eat so many at a time.

Things will be a bit different this year because of the prolonged drought that plagued our part of the country. Brett announced that he was accepting no more winter subscribers because he spent much of his summer running irrigation pipes around the farm. At one point, he was sucking mud off the bottom of his holding ponds.

In the most recent of his regular e-mails to subscribers (always newsy, written with flair and well worth the price of admission), Brett reports that many of his winter crops--rutabagas, turnips, collards and kales--were destroyed, either by lack of rain or by starving grasshoppers.

What did survive were sweet potatoes--lots of sweet potatoes. Last week Brett and his wife Christine held their annual fall bash for subscribers. This consists of several dozen families driving their automobiles into a parking area in the fields and feasting on a groaning buffet of exotic dishes such as venison posole, prepared by Brett--a former chef--in huge pots. Conveniently, there is also a keg of cold beer.

Many of the guests take a tour around the farm conducted by Brett while the kids chase through the nearby woods hunting for Halloween candy on a specially designated trail. Then there's a bonfire and subscribers are invited to pitch tents anywhere they please and spend the night gazing at a sky brilliantly lit with stars, especially the Orion constellation for which the winter subscription is named.

As we arrived, I couldn't help noticing huge piles of sweet potatoes outside the farm house, surrounded by empty milk crates where workers obviously had been seated recently sorting through the crop. Being in our fourth year of the subscription now, I surmise that we'll be seeing quite a few sweet potatoes in our box in the coming weeks.

Got any recipes for sweet potatoes you'd like to share?

Making Food is Hard Work

Another of the rites of spring is starting a new compost pile. I've been extremely busy lately--the warmer weather brings on a flurry of activities--and with the intermittent rains my lawn just kept getting taller and taller.

Not such a horrible thing, as the grass clippings make an excellent addition to the compost pile. The green clippings add lots of nitrogen to the compost, like and injection of lighter fluid--the bacteria love it, and heat the pile until it is steaming. That's very good for decomposition

But the process involves getting several different tools out of the garage, setting up a leaf shredding operation to add the necessary brown--or carbonaceous--matter to the compost for proper balance (I go around the neighborhood in the fall and collect the bags of leaves the neighbors leave at the curb). Mowing is no easy trick either, the lawn being interrupted by numerous vegetable and flower beds. And that still leaves the weeds that have begun to encroach on the beds. They need to be pulled, the edges trimmed and reshaped with a spade.

All of which is to say that before you can harvest those wonderful lettuces and greens and other vegetables, you have to work on the soil and the weeds and maintaining the tools. Food does not just happen, even though it might appear so if you are just strolling the produce aisle at the supermarket. There is much human toil involved. That is one of the advantages of shopping at a local farmer's market: You actually see the faces and meet the people who are responsible for bringing your food forth from the soil with their own labor.

Whenever I despair of the work involved in my food I remember Ward Sinclair. Ward for years covered the agriculture beat at The Washington Post. Then he succumbed and became a farmer himself. He bought a piece of land in Pennsylvania and sold his product at the farmer's markets here in the District of Columbia, as well as to several restaurants. He also started a column in the Post's food section called "Truckpatch."

To my mind, Ward's "Truckpatch" column was probably the best thing ever written about food in a newspaper. His personal essays brought home so vividly how the food we either take for granted or glamorize in slick magazines begins with the muscle and sweat of an individual who is committed to the soil. Most farmers, especially the small truck farmers we see in the farmer's markets, do not make a lot of money. They are just crazy about the work. And there is so much of it.


After all these years, one particular column Ward Sinclair wrote, republished in the book Truckpatch: A Farmer's Odyssey, sticks in my mind. It simply details all the chores that lay before Ward on one typical spring day as the new planting season approached and he contemplated his schedule.

Knowing how to plant a seed, nurture it, harvest it, and take the finished product to market is only a part of the demands of the truckpatch, he wrote. The to-do list requires the farmer to be mechanic, carpenter, supply specialist, labor negotiator and employer, writer and graphic designer, plumber, banker and a host of other arts.

Oh, it would be simpler to call in an expert and have the job done right. But there is neither money nor time enough for the farmer to rely on others. When a tractor goes dead, he can't wait on help from afar. When wind rips the cover off a greenhouse, it must be replaced immediately.


So the to-do list is the farmer's master. It determines how his time is allocated and in its cryptic code language reminds him every day that the work on the farm is never done if the place is to flourish and succeed.

Ward Sinclair, ran a farm near Dot, PA, with his partner, Cass Peterson. They started one of the first farm subscriptions, or CSAs, in the United States. Ward died too young in 1995. Whenever I think that growing food is too much work, I remember his words.

If it's Thursday...

...it must be delivery day for our box of goodies from the farm.

Let's see. What do we have here...

...a gallon bag of mesclun...some Siberian kale...tender collards...a Ziploc of salad mix with tat soi and Asian mustard greens...English cress. And, for us "Yes-eggs" subscribers, one dozen eggs from Brett Grohsgal's brown chickens. A veritable riot of produce, and it isn't even April yet.

I've mentioned the subscription from Even' Star Farm so many times I thought you might like to see it. Brett gets up--oh, about 4 in the morning--usually on Thursdays to make the almost-two-hours drive from his 75-acre spread outside Lexington Park, Maryland, and drop off more than 100 of these boxes to clients in and around the nation's capital. We drive about 15 minutes from our home in downtown D.C. to fetch our box off the front porch of a "neighborhood coordinator" in Chevy Chase. (You get a big discount on the subscription if you coordinate your neighborhood.)

We are among the "winter" subscribers, a season that runs from early November into May. Brett loves his brassicas, hence the profusion of cresses and collards and tat sois and arugulas. We've come to love them, too. But there's so much in one box that we share the subscription with my sister and her husband. The cost: $311 per couple for the season.

As good as the vegetables and the eggs--and sometimes jams and spice mixes and flower arrangements--are the notes Brett sends out each week telling us what's on the menu. Who knew a person could write so much, and so vividly, about the contents of a box? Brett's missives are written with such gusto and precision--they are so detailed--that I've saved every one going back three seasons now as. As well as providing evidence of every seasonal thing we have consumed for the past three years, Brett's e-mails are a window into the mind of a truly impassioned philosopher-farmer, someone who cares deeply about the land and how we feed ourselves. I'm not sure you could just bind them all together into a book. If you did, it would constitute a kind of encyclopedia of brassicas and the life of a subscription farmer, the kind of book I imagine Alan Davidson--a man of equally intense interests, and author of The Oxford Companion to Food--might write.

Brett also operates a summer subscription. But by then we will be swimming in the produce from our own front-yard garden here in the District of Columbia. We also like to see what the local farmer's markets are offering.

Now to figure out what to do with all this stuff. So many greens, so little time. Salad? Vegetable saute? Or, could there be a frittata in our future? A little goat cheese, anyone?