_loonatics_

I liken Terra Madre as sort of the Olympics/U.N. of food and sustainable agriculture.  The Opening and Closing Ceremonies were especially powerful: uniting with a global sea of people who are in solidarity about remolding our food system left me with indescribable feelings of inspiration, validation, and hopefulness.  During the actual conference activities, I was struck by great conversations and friendships found in long lunch lines, long bus rides, and happenstance encounters.   Over 1,300 of the 6,000 delegates were youth (people under age 30) including myself, and everywhere I turned there were young faces.  I felt like we brought incredible energy directed towards renewing and revitalizing sustainable and traditional agriculture. 

Many of the young people I got to know at Terra Madre were actively working on social justice issues within the food system.  I was most blown away through talking to some organizers for Immokalee, Florida tomato workers.  Immokalee workers have been getting paid the same wage since 1978, just 45 cents for every 32 pounds of tomatoes they pick! A wage so horrendous I could barely believe it was true, even in '78.  Although they are legally prevented from unionizing, they have formed a coaltion: Coaltion of Immokalee Workers, and they are currently in a wicked battle to get the Florida Tomato Growers Association to agree to a pay raise of 1 cent per hour that Food Giants like McDonalds, Subway, and Taco Johns already agreed to pay for!!!  Go to CIW's website to see the incredible work they are doing to end modern-day slavery in this country: www.ciw-online.org.
 
Other youngsters I met were working to get CSA shares to food shelves and poor neighborhoods in New York City, setting up farmers markets in urban food deserts, or saving nearly extinct indigenous seed varieties in Ecuador. Those social justice projects inspired me to try to move forward on similar social justice issues in our local MN communities, and to find a way for our farm to provide organic and local food to all.  How to do that and keep our farm financially sustainable is the balancing act, but many creative farmers and non-profits have found a way, and I talked to many of them to get ideas and impetus to move forward.

1st row (from left):
Brandywine. Quintessential tomato flavor. I think this is _the_ original tomato flavor that we are all after. It is meaty, gorgeous, Huge, and sets the bar for all other tomatoes that come after it.
Green Zebra, followed by Red Zebra and a more unripe Red Zebra. G.Zebra was popularized by Alice Waters, bless her heart. It has a tangy, but substantial flavor, and you can't beat the coloring: A deep yellow with streaks of green stripes. Red Zebra is new to us this year, and from the moment I saw it dangling in the vines, I loved it. Here's what Seed Savers says: "Gorgeous fire-engine red overlaid with golden yellow stripes. Top quality, extremely uniform strain, very productive. Great sweet flavor."
Italian Saladette (Juliet, I believe). This is a hybrid, but I am sold on the Saladettes after spending so much time at Gardens of Eagan. They are like a roma, but also a great fresh eating tomato, perhaps for salads? With the bonus of disease resistance and high-yields. My one observation is that there could be more leaf cover at times--a few Juliets have already suffered from sunscald.

2nd row (from left):
Nyagous (2 next to eachother). I started calling this a black roma at market and it kindof stuck, even though some fruits are larger than a roma. They have a beautiful duskiness to their sheen that distinguishes them from the other black tomatoes we grow. I can't tell apart a Black Krim from a Black from Tula, but I always know a Nyagous. That's helpful when sorting them at market. Awesome flavor.

Currant (Gold Rush-Orange, Matt's Wild- Red). Itty bitty tomatoes that we usually snip off the whole truss once they are all ripe. Picking each of these babies by hand would equal $10/pint, but we did throw in a couple of the loose ones in CSA pints. Matt's Wild Cherry might have the biggest tomato flavor in such a little bite, and they are constantly neck in neck with Sungold sales at farmers markets. More about the unbeatable Sungolds later....

San Marzano Paste (4 next to eachother). High solid content which makes it great for cooking. An Italian variety, an heirloom I believe. First year of growing this--we've never grown a true paste tomato, but I've heard good things about San Marzano. They are beautiful--I do love the shape of the traditional Italian paste tomatoes. The taste test will come once we make a fresh tomato sauce with them.

3rd row (from left):
Washington Cherry. These are big red cherry tomatoes. So big that I barely consider them cherries. I like my cherry tomatoesa little smaller, however these have nice flavor and hold really well on or off the vine. Plants don't stake well, and they are the only tomatoes that are showing signs of blight. I won't grow these again--there are better red cherries, but that doesn't stop me from eating copious amounts of them.

Sungold. If I could only eat one tomato, Sungold would be it. They have nearly perfect flavor--very fruity, very sweet, literally they taste like a sunny summer day. They are the crack of the tomato world (in more ways than one, Ha!) and drive customers to do things they would never want to admit to doing over a few handfuls of orange tomatoes. BUT with good reason. These are fresh market treats only. They are prone to cracking and bursting with mere drops of rain and the cracking precludes any ability to ship cross country. This is always the best kind of produce no? Well, not always, even for us fresh market growers. The cracking drives a picker insane, especially towards the end of last season when it started to rain non-stop in mid-August. We would pick pints and pints of sungolds only to find that half of them cracked in the pints within a 1/2 day of being picked. Then the fruit flies would descend unto the cracked fruit. These will go in the hoophouse next year to control water flow.

Cherokee Purple OR Black Krim (below Sungolds). I forgot to keep track while I was picking, and I can never tell these black tomatoes apart. It hardly matters because they both taste so damn good. Seedsavers states that Cherokee is their favorite purple tomato (it is more a rosey color) that rivals Brandywine's flavor. I agree. It can be smoky sometimes. That goes for Black Krim too. I used to maintain that Black Krim was my favorite heirloom--now I cannot say that with certainty since I can't really tell Cherokee, Black Krim, or Black from Tula apart. They are both equally delicious I guess. More research needed here.

Eva Purple Ball (far right, last row). These are a purty deep rose color that are supposed to have a fine white mottling. It's our first time growing these. Recommended by Carolyn Male's 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden. Carolyn stated that "there are no obvious faults with this outstanding variety....Taste is...sweet, luscious, and quite juicy." Very good yield, disease resistance, despite variable weather. "Originally brought from the Black Forest region of Germany in the late 1800s." I have yet to taste these since we want to have enough to give away to members tomorrow, but I'm sure we will not be disappointed.

We have even more tomatoes, however these are just the ones that have started to ripen up first. Profiles will be forthcoming on the Yellow Riesentraube, German Pink, Green Grape, among others.

Up to a few weeks ago, I was doing quite well in appreciating one of the most underappreciated seasons of the year.  Then the frigid temps descended, 45 below windchills, gray skies, week after week, and the looming month of February gave way to the winter blahs.    I felt like every time I opened my mouth all that came out was BLAH.  Winter fatigue. It is bound to happen and it happens to us every year, but as soon as you think you can't stand it anymore and thoughts of warm summer breezes, t-shirts, and sweaty watermelon eating torment you as you scrape the ice off your car with a plastic tape case (i lose my real ice scraper every winter), THEN you get to go to a kick-ass farming conference and be surrounded by _thousands_ of like-minded folks.  Talk about a breath of fresh air.  MOSES   Organic Farming Conference comes up in a week and a half or so, jam packed with so many cool seminars that our new dilemma in life is deciding between them all.  Every year when we return from Moses we are renewed with inspiration, invigoration, and are ready to get to it.  Plus, by then February will be almost over and greenhouse season looms, days grow even longer, and I can look forward to the possibility of peeling off my long underwear.

Our CSA is sold out though.  Already got a waiting list for 2009 (!).  I'm looking forward to the day when we don't have to turn people away--or at least not so many of them and to be able to delegate some of our CSA share boxes to go to the local food shelf.  That definitely gets me excited.  I'm just about to start David Masumoto's book,  Epitaph of a Peach.   Heard the story is fabulous and the writing even better.  He chronicles a year raising his Sun Crest peaches in California--Sun Crest is an old peach variety that was left by the wayside for "better" peaches with brilliant color and weeks of shelf life.  Bulldozers were about to come and demolish the last of Masumoto's trees when he stopped them and decided to try to market the fruit for one more year.  Should be a doozy of a book and I'm sure I will be driven to consume the rest of the summer peaches still hanging out in our freezer.  I'll keep ya'll posted.

We just placed our seed order (this is a record-setting earliness for us!) and we were excited to cross that project off our list of to-dos.  Adam has an ongoing project with our little Hefty G tractor (s(seen above).  It is kindof a funny looking tractor, very boxy--we got a great price on it last spring and we used it sparingly to plant with our Planet Jr. seeders.  (the orange seeder can be seen  belly mounted under tractor.)  The original engine for this tractor is the smelliest, noisiest thing ever which dramatically decreased our use of the tractor.  So.  Last fall we removed the old engine and Adam is in the process of outfitting it with a new Electric engine that will run on four 12 volt batteries.  A clean, completely noiseless tractor!  Sounds like an oxymoron to me, (no ear plugs necessary??) but I hope to see the unbelievable become a reality this Spring.  I profess to limited knowledge of mechanics, especially a project of this magnitude, however it is fascinating for me to learn a bit more about this conversion.  We first got the idea here from Huguenot Street Farm. This farm got a SARE grant to convert their Allis G cultivating tractor to electric and they detail the steps on their website.  The Hefty G is a similar tractor to the Allis G and Adam is hoping that our Hefty G might be even easier to convert than the Allis G which might be a great thing for like-minded small farmers that would like to get away from polluting and noisy gas engines.  Hefty G's can also be priced thousands of dollars less than Allis Gs, since they are not as coveted among collectors and growers alike so converting a Hefty G could be more cost-effective than looking for an Allis to convert.  At any rate, I'll be writing about our progress on the electric front in the next few months--more will of course be happening in later Spring as it becomes easier to work outside again. 

Here's a photo of the (large!) gas engine, minutes before being taken off tractor--hopefully for good!  Electric engine and batteries will sit  here.

Although daylight falls for just 8 1/2 hours on this part of the world today (sunrise: 7:47, sunset: 4:34), the minutes will imperceptibly begin increasing.  For me, this is really when I think of the new year beginning, so yesterday we celebrated the passing of another successful and healthy year and the move into another cycle along with the Earth.  This past year was really a key building block for us, and the coming year brings another opportunity to improve, experiment, and explore crops, varieties, ways to improve efficiency, and as always, be better recordkeepers!  Once July/August hits, our field notes trail off and we are left to our fuzzy memory of how each green bean variety compared to eachother.  Beats me.

We have also started what feels like the official process of looking and getting financing for our own farm!  We are most concerned with the financing part, but  we are looking to go through the FSA Farm Loan Programs for beginning farmers, and most importantly there is a local bank and lender willing to work with us and wade through all the paperwork.  It is becoming a better time to buy--we are looking in about a 30-45 mile southern radius from our current location and prices are beginning to drop a bit.  The goose chase driving to look at properties has begun.  We've got potential properties highlighted on our county maps, and mapped a backroad route to drive home for the holidays and check out four or five farms on the way.  We are in no hurry to buy something soon--we still want to do a full season here this summer, and ideally wouldn't want to move or buy anything until fall 2008.   But it is beginning to feel more like a reality and that is an incredibly exciting (and sometimes slightly terrifying) prospect.  

Happy New Year to you and yours. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday.    

Finished up our last market and promptly left on vacation the next day. As we had hoped, when we returned the fields had finally dried out. I feel that I have not felt or seen dry soil for months! Just in time as we need to get our garlic in and mulched. I think we will make it folks!

We headed to Northern California on our vacation to San Francisco where my sister, Sarah, lives. We camped at Harbin Hot Springs relaxing in the natural hot and cold springs there, then toured through some wineries, apple and pear orchards, camped in the Redwood forests, and over to Mendocino and down the coast. Fabulous sunny weather, chilly nights. It was harvest time there in the vineyards, apple and fruit orchards, and we ate some fantastic heirloom apples. Pinot Noir Grapes hanging on the vine at the Goldeneye Vineyard:

We tried some grapes off the vine--they were surprisingly sweet and had a thick skin. They had just finished harvesting this year's grapes the week before--a crew of 15 workers for 5 weeks picking all the grapes by hand. Over 300 acres I think.  Here's another photo of the vineyard: 
The wine was excellent.

We also attended theEmbarcadero Farmers Market.  It is a pretty incredible farmers market--they had absolutely everything.  So strange eating local satsuma mandarins and organic grapes.  There was really too much, I wanted to take one of everything home with me.  However, we were also scouting out their displays to get some ideas and inspiration.  There were some impressive displays:

Mountainous piles of broccoli

Cascading Peppers (I really like this set-up--it looks like a lot of work to build though)....

In comparison, here's the display for r last market:

Not bad for an Oct. 20th market, however we want  Spectacular and Bombastic next year.