Some of you may have read my article “The Good Earth” that appeared in the June issue of Milwaukee Magazine, and know that I wrote about the Seeley’s CSA farm (Community Sustained Agriculture) that my family has belonged to for about 5 years. In any case, this past Friday we went back out to the farm for an open house.
We haven’t been there in a year, but nothing much has changed. The trampoline that used to be under a tree to the side of the house has been moved to the back, and I don’t see any kittens tumbling around in the dirt, and the puppy of last year is a dog who trots out to sniff at us, and then as we don’t seem to have anything on us that smells good, trots out back to the barn. But the humans, Bernadette and Anneke Seeley, greet us warmly as usual. My friend Larry and I have brought my youngest granddaughter, Emma, who is going on five, and her mother, my daughter, Robin, who works off her share of the weekly groceries by helping to unload the delivery truck that brings the boxes of vegetables each Friday back in Milwaukee.
We set off to wander freely in the greenhouses and to look for as Bernadette has put it, “something good to munch on.” We find cucumbers in the first greenhouse, too big to munch just now. But in the next greenhouse, we strike pay dirt! Some of the tomatoes are ripening, and Emma searches diligently for just the right one—small enough and ripe enough to eat. There’s something about picking a vegetable or fruit right from the tree or vine and eating it then and there that never fails to thrill me a little. We find just the right tomatoes and then move on to other greenhouses where huge, still green tomatoes hang on their vines.
When we emerge from the back of the last greenhouse, we run into Peter on the tractor just coming in from the fields. He greets us warmly, mentions the magazine article, and we chat for a few more minutes about this season on the farm and then we all move toward the house where Peter will soon give a farm tour. As we pass a shed, some other folks are seeding trays of herbs and exchange greetings with two other subscribers we know back in Milwaukee. The farm does seem sometimes like a large community of like-minded (about food at least) people.
A little later, we gather in their front yard and some folks move off for the Peter-guided tour. I stay behind with the my granddaughter, sitting on a bench, hoping the kids will all soon get past their shyness and play together, but this is what my friend Larry learns on the tour:
The Seeleys are outsourcing some of their products to other farmers with the will and the right space to grow them. Among these crops are: potatoes, mushrooms, maple syrup, some Kale and the eggs. Also, this year he has found the right way to plant clover with his corn so that when the corn is harvested the clover crop will be well under way and providing needed nitrogen to the soil. He says it’s been tricky getting it all planted at just the right time.
Larry notices that he has about 8×25 ft. of arugula planted under some gauzy material that Peter says protects it from bugs and wind. He shows them a plastic tape method developed by the Japanese of delivering tiny seedlings into the soil at a much faster rate. He has been able to plant a number of things including broccoli, corn, even lettuce this way. He said other farmers laughed at this method they thought odd, but he has proved them wrong by being able to get the plants into the ground faster than before. He has to re-plant about every two weeks to keep up with his supply to all of us.
Then the tour goes past a first year strawberry bed. First year strawberries are purported to be sweeter. (All I know is that when I finally had a nice sized bed in my back yard in Milwaukee, a chipmunk came in and gobbled them up, and then when I tried to drive him away by sprinkling red pepper flakes on the berries like an organic gardening tip advised me, he screamed all night and made my little granddaughter distraught with his pain. I began wishing I had just bashed him over the head and been done with it.) They taste these strawberries and agree that they are sweeter, but Peter isn’t sure why this should be.
After the tour, we spread the supper dishes everyone has brought out on makeshift tables. There are rice, quinoa and pasta dishes. Pesto sauce from the Seelys, salads, cheeses, roast chicken, breads, cookies and someone has brought Kopp’s Custard. The temperature is a lovely 70 some degrees with a nice breeze blowing across the lovely green fields. All seems very right with the world–for a time at least.
