Summer at Squashville

A quick perusal of Facebook tonight showed friends on summer vacations. Photos of beaches, brunches, weddings, honeymoons, parties, and picnics were in abundance. Just looking at all of those lovely scenes of summer-dom made me start to wonder where my own summer was going.

A day in the office this afternoon yielded a different scenario. Colleagues were harried and stressed, working on projects that couldn't get finished during the regular academic year. Listening to them made me feel a bit guilty because I've been working at home and working out a lot.

So what does summer at Squashville translate to? My husband Jim has a quick and easy answer: digging, planting, and creating topsoil from yard waste and kitchen scraps.

For farmers -- even fledgling farmers like ourselves -- summer is not the best time for vacations because every day off is a day lost in pursuit of creating new food. Creating new food is like an artistic practice. It's lovely, warm and self-fulfilling -- and it needs constant work.

We began planting seeds in February, in seedling pots, old yogurt containers, and plastic cups. Snow blanketed the ground, and the wood-burning stove that provides most of the heat for our home did double-duty keeping both us and the hundreds of seedlings that soon began to sprout comfortably warm. The planting pace quickened in April and May as the snow finally melted and the ground thawed. Already we could see the first signs of a promising harvest when the field where we had sown some 400 cloves of garlic the previous November went from snowy white to fertile brown and then to a hazy green, indicating rows upon rows of garlic plants growing.

The weather turned erratic in May, with nighttime temperatures dropping into the low 30s well after the Farmer's Almanac and USDA hardiness zones suggested the last frost had occurred. This delayed our planting of what are known as the solanaceous crops: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and squashes of all hues, shapes, and sizes. It also slowed the development of our Three Sisters garden, a three-crop planting scheme modeled after indigenous American practices of planting corn, beans, and squashes together.

Then, in June, the soil suddenly heated up. So did the fervor of work. In addition to needing to get the solanaceous crops in the ground, we were suddenly confronted with a burst of spring bounty: kale, collard greens, bok choy, Swiss chard, turnips, beets, peas, and rhubarb. Now, not only were we planting at a crazy pace, but we were harvesting to eat and considering when to pull out the freezer wrap gadget to start storing food for the winter.

And then there's the garlic scapes. These are swirly green shoots that form on the stalks of garlic plants. The scapes eventually sprout seeds that burst and scatter all over the earth, re-seeding the garlic in the process. It's a wonderful thought, with a couple of issues. The first issue is that it's advisable to rotate your crops on an annual basis to balance out the soil and to "trick" certain garden insects from finding their favorite crops. As a result, a bursting of seeds -- while beautiful to contemplate -- means a bed that might have been planned for potatoes in the following year will be overrun with weedy garlic. The second issue is that the scapes deplete energy from the plant, resulting in poorer quality bulbs of garlic. So you want to cut the scapes off. Fortunately, they're tender, fresh, and delicious so cutting off scapes means more pleasure for the palate.

Except when you have 400 of them.

A little bit of back story on the garlic. In the fall of 2011, we planted 50 cloves of garlic, and expected to get about two dozen bulbs. We ended up with about 50 bulbs, essentially a 100 percent success rate. Emboldened by our success and our love for garlic, we decided last summer that we would plant 250 cloves, figuring that we'd get about 200 bulbs, some of which we could donate to the food pantry, some of which we could give to friends and family members as gifts, some of which we could save as seed for the following year, and most of which we would consume. The only problem was that when we consulted with one of the farmers at the Saratoga Farmers Market as to how much "seed garlic" we should order, we couldn't quite nail down an exact amount because seed garlic is not sold by the clove but by the pound. After some head-scratching, the farmer recommended that we order about ten pounds, figuring that if each bulb of garlic contained five or six cloves, we would have about 25 cloves per pound. Her calculation turned out to be wildly off. We ended up with about 75 bulbs, each of which held anywhere from eight to a dozen cloves. We planted as much as we could, gave some to a friend, and ate the rest into early January.

Still, we were sure that we would lose at least 10 to 20 percent of our plants. At last count, we have lost maybe two plants. Not two percent, but two. That means we have a lot of garlic, and garlic scapes to boot.

Since the scapes are fragrant and delicious, I have been cutting them off periodically to use in cooking. But hundreds remain on the plants. Which means tomorrow is Operation Scape. I plan to rise early, enjoy a cup or three of coffee, have a good breakfast and then hit the fields with shears and basket in hand, and cut them all, hopefully before 10 a.m., when I'll need to head into the office for a conference call.

Our rooster crows at 4:55 a.m. My husband jumps out of bed to open the door to the coop and then comes back in to snooze until sunrise. The rooster refuses to stop crowing until he has some evidence that the humans of the household have actually awakened and begun their day. The cats going outside often seems to satisfy the rooster. The day for the humans begins at a leisurely pace and picks up steam as the heat rises. I balance my time between the office, my writing, and the fields; my husband spends most of the day in the fields. Dinner is usually after sunset, which is about 9 p.m. these days. We then have an hour or two of leisure time on the sofa before the eyelids droop to sleep. And, then, as the rooster crows, we start it all over again.

It is not the beach. But the sun shines. It is not a brunch, a picnic, or party. But the food is fresh, abundant, and wholesome. It is not a getaway trip. But overall it is a pretty good life.