August 22, 2004
Smells Like Summer
I was off gallivanting all over the place, and when I got back I devoted my first afternoon to washing the salt crusts off my kayak. So when Lorenz wandered by (ok, he didn't just wander by, he showed up because I poked my head into his office and asked for help moving my 17.5 foot fibreglass "paddle boat", as Lorenz calls the kayak) and asked if I'd uploaded anything onto the red barn troll lately, it took me a minute to figure out what he was even talking about. It seems that I had several weeks of spying to catch up on, and I had no idea where to start. "But I have nothing to say!" I protested, "people aren't going to believe me that whales and puffins are growing in the fields and that's all I've been spying on!". Lorenz's solution to the barn troll's ignorance? "Come on the field walk this afternoon".
The "field walk" is when Lorenz takes his staff and walks the field, discussing what needs to be harvested and weeded and what to be vigilant about. The staff included not only the triplets, but Lukas the Spanish woofer and Vanessa the Torontonian woofer. There was much discussion of little bugs that prevent a heaed of cabbage from forming and dryness of roots and maybe even irrigation, but I'll admit that I didn't pay that much attention. I've always been big on smells, and there are a few that are the smells of summer: freshly cut grass, sun-warmed basil and tomato vines. I watched the field walkers walking, but mostly I had my camera pointing at some pretty detail and my nose close to the ground. (What an attractive image I paint of myself, like some little dog, sniffing the vegetables.)
The pretty images of this week: the first ripe cherry tomatoes, tomatillos ripening, an okra flower, asparagus peas (these are a new phenomenon for me. We ate some later that night - and after an inital "why would I eat these, they're too much work for what I get?" I actually really liked them and started treating them like edamame), savoy cabbage, summer squash flowers, a detail on a cabbage leaf, swiss chard glowing in the sun. It's a cornucopia of pretty things that smell good (and taste even better!) up in the field.
I rejoined the field walk at some point - Lorenz was squatted beside the tobacco plant, explaining something or other to the crew. Now, before you get all huffy on me and tell me that tobacco isn't a vegetable, listen to this story. The tobacco was grown from seed that Lorenz once upon a time got from Black Creek Pioneer Village. He's been propogating it for years, on only a few plants. He doesn't actually smoke the tobacco (though some interns do from time to time), but he grows a few plants and then people experiment. This crop will be cured in the manure pile. Yes, you heard that right. Horse manure is so hot when it composts, you can bury a container in it and there will be enough heat to cure tobacco. Cool, huh? I made some comment on topping the tobacco, but that's not going to happen since he needs more seed - in part because some First Nation near Montreal has asked him to provide them with a heritage variety of tobacco seed.
The last bit of the field walk that I was interested in was the melon part of it. There are lots of melons ripening, and Lorenz showed everybody how to look for the "pigtail" to see if a melon is ripe. To illustrate, he cut open a few melons that had pigtails at the right stage of drying out, and then there was a sound of summer: much slurping. They're tasty. Clearly, the crows think so too, since many of the best melons have been ruined by the birds. There was also one interesting curio: one of the melons had managed to develop under the plastic mulch, and was growing as a shrink-wrapped melon. Sooner or later, though, the slurping changed to outright silliness and J.P. started juggling melons. I think it was at this point that Lorenz climbed back onto his tractor and drove off into the sunset (and I went back to fussing with my kayak).