September 13, 2004
Ode to the Onion
Well then. It looks like the Red Barn Troll left you hanging, permanently stuck in summer. Then again, you can hardly mind that, seeing as summer was so short this year. However, I know that you've most likely missed your allotment of Lorenz on the Tractor shots (look for a calendar coming out soon!), so, as double bonus this week, you get Lorenz and Lorenz's brother on the tractor today! Yes, that's right, Tilman Eppinger came all the way from Germany to sit on a tractor here at Greenfields.
Yeah, okay, he didn't just come to sit on a tractor. He also came to add some of that famous "Gemütlichkeit" to the farm-of-1000-chores. See, it's that time of year when vegetable farmers go insane (or get grumpy, depending on the farmer). When I asked Lorenz what he was harvesting these days, he looked overwhelmed for a second, and then said "everything". I pressed on, insisting that something had to be "done" by now, but no. Somebody needs to harvest the beans, edamame, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, kale, basil, winter squash, melons, summer squash, chard, parsley, carrots, cabbages, green onions, red onions, yellow onions, Spanish onions...
...that's right. It is also the farm-of-1000-onions. Do you wonder why I single the onions out, when there is this horn of plenty bounty of vegetables I could be talking about? (And I could talk about them. I could write a Haiku on Greenfields Carrots, they are so good, or a Sonnet on Celeriac, or the Ballad of the Juicy Yellow-Skinned Watermelon. But no, today is the Ode to the Onion.) See, I live in the red barn. Which means I wake up in the red barn. On weekends, I wake up, roll out of bed, make my coffee, and sit on one of the lovely chairs outside my apartment enjoying the gentle breezes and the delicate scents of wildflowers. On Saturday, the sun was warming my skin with a rosy glow, the breezes were as gentle and pleasant as they could be, the temperature was perfect, and I took my steaming mug of morning and anticipated a great hour with my book amidst wildflowers. What I got was a nose full of onion. The only thing I can relate it to is those times when you walk into the kitchen, see something bubbling away on the stove and get hungry already, wondering what delicacies my mother is cooking up. Then, you peer into the big pot on the stove expecting a delicious delight and are assaulted by laundry that is having the stains boiled out of it (and yes, this did happen in my mother's kitchen a couple of years ago. In one of those suitable twists of fate, though, it's Lorenz it happened to, not me!)
But, back to the onions and the stench that made my coffee taste bad. Lorenz, in an insipired move, had parked the van full of onions - red onions and yellow onions, to be precise - in front of the red barn the night before. I'll have you note that part - instead of unloading the van when he came back from the fields, he simply parked it and walked away, to top his 12 hour day with some of Til's dose of Gemütlichkeit instead of another hour of unloading. And do you know what happens when you park a van full of onions during the cool evening hours and then the sun hits the van in the morning while the red barn troll tries to have her peaceful morning coffee? Onion condensation! The entire inside of the van was wet with onion sweat! Even Lorenz, when he came down and poked his head into the van, recoiled with an exclamation of "that's disgusting". And thus, the humble onion becomes the theme of the weekend.
Of course, the onion sweat in front of my apartment had a fringe benefit for Lorenz: I actually got off my butt and abandoned my coffee cup to help make it go away. Storage onions (as opposed to "green" or "spring" onions) need to cure, which is really just another way of saying they need to dry a bit so the outside gets that typical papery feeling and they don't get mouldy. At Greenfields, the curing ends in the greenhouse, which is where we unloaded the 1000 onions that ruined my morning. Before they go to the greenhouse, even before they sweat up the van, the onions do a bit of drying up in the field. You "pull" the onions, which literally is pulling them out of the ground. Then you break their necks, which sounds brutal but is necessary to keep the still-attached greens from taking anything out of the now uprooted bulbs. You place the onions in nice, orderly rows, and let them sit in the sun for a while, to start the curing. Then, you wander along with a knife and cut the greens off, and then they get to start their stinking up the van thing.
The greenhouse isn't ideal as far as onion curing goes, since it does tend to get humid in there and air circulation isn't great unless you turn on the heater. Imagine an onion-scented sauna, and you're close. I decided to help matters a little bit and brought my big fan to move the air a bit, but now it's just like an onion-scented sauna with the door open just a crack. Oh yum. But then again, my hands smell no better, since I didn't stop at unloading the van - I actually voluntarily went up to the field and pulled onions, and crated them up while Lorenz cut the greens.
Wait a minute... the Red Barn Troll, who freely acknowleges that she is not inclined to helping most of the time volunteered on the farm? Indeed! Don't you want to know why? Of course you do! Just like you want to know why Tilman is around, because surely he didn't fly all this way just to get his picture on the tractor calendar! And no doubt Lorenz will get all cranky about having this announced on the internet (but perhaps you missed the crack about it being the time of year when vegetable farmers are grumpy), but...
...ssshhhhh...
...it's Lorenz's birthday! By some bizarre deal that involves a ph.d. thesis, though, it's not associated with a specific number, but! it's Lorenz's birthday! Today! C'mon wish him a happy birthday. (While you're at it, bake him a pie, and tell him to share!)
Onions and birthdays, that's all I want to talk about right now. It's only a small snippet of the past few weeks at Greenfields, but this catching up thing, it's going to have to happen one thing at a time. Perhaps, next we will do the carrot-themed entry. Oh, what the hell, here we go:
Haiku to the Greenfields Carrot:
The ripe orange root
Crisp, crunchy, deliciously sweet,
But never at Loblaws
(something tells me you won't be upset if I don't share the Sonnet to the Celeriac!)