Greenhouses

While my garden continues to grow back home, these days I’m elsewhere from 7am till quittin’ time Monday through Friday, transplanting lettuce seedlings and pruning tomato plants and harvesting baby cucumbers in a professional greenhouse.

That greenhouse: 85 degree Fahrenheit, 90% humidity, a vegetable-scented sauna of a workplace. So. Much. Sweat. Sweat continuously trickling down your breastbone to your stomach as you stand on tiptoe to reach for the highest-hanging cucumber. Sweat dampening every crease of your clothing so it folds heavily into your flushed skin as you squat down again to pick the lowest cluster. Sweat dripping down your spine and straight on past the waistband of your jeans as you advance to the next trellised vine. Sweat gluing stray hairs to your forehead and frizzing out the rest into a face-framing mane of frazzled blonde. Sweat pooling around your glasses and making them slide down your nose. Sweat dripping into your eyes with a burn so startling that your vision blurs on one side for a good ten minutes.

After all that, once you’ve filled a couple bins with fresh-picked cucumbers, you carry them outdoors and have an instant of SWEET GOD, A DRY WIND, PRAISE BE, upon which you're slammed with a wall of heat all over again, because although you didn't realize while inside that it was conceivable for any other place on Earth to be even hotter, here it is. The dusty outdoors with its searing sun—95 degrees to the greenhouse’s 85.

At which point you carry your cucumbers across the farm’s dirt drive to the walk-in cooler, which is 40 degrees. Pushing through the door, you could cry for pleasure because the relief is so indescribably sweet all through your body and soul. The stickiness of the sweat finally starting to dry is the best kind of unpleasantness you've ever felt.

Then it’s back to the greenhouse. Back for more cucumbers, or to prune more tomato plants, or to transplant more lettuce seedlings, because the greenhouse is a veritable assembly line of seeds, water, and nutrients turning out a continuous supply of vegetables for local restaurants and co-ops, and if the farm crew doesn’t stay on top of that supply chain no one will. Back to the greenhouse for a summer’s worth of farming.

Professional

Okay, setting up a home garden from scratch takes some work, but here’s the actual reason I’m exhausted this weekend: I started a new job this past week. Yours truly is the newest full-time member of the seasonal crew at a local family farm. In other words, we just took things to a whole new level. I still feel like an amateur when it comes to producing food, but technically I’ve gone pro. 

Tired

I am so happy that my food garden has made it this far, and that my plants have survived the last week’s long, sweltering, glaring-hot days. 

And I am so exhausted. Good night. 

Pride

Hey, I’ve been writing about food and gardens here for four months now.

I’ve doubted myself and debated my options. I’ve read histories of agriculture and philosophies of land use. I’ve studied monocropping and permaculture. I’ve attended soil amendment classes through the local extension program and participated in seed workshops in Arizona. 

I’ve learned to care for pet worms and cultivate a healthy outdoor compost heap. I’ve raked, cleaned, and dug 432 square feet of trash-laden dirt. I’ve fenced it off from critters, laid a path of paving stones from the gate to prevent compaction, and amended it with compost and natural mulch. I’ve planted, watered, and waited.

I’ve gasped at new seedlings and despaired over mysterious pests and celebrated plants’ persistence, their natural pursuit of life. 

I’ve gotten my hands dirty. 

Far be it from me to revel in hubris, but I’ll allow myself a little pride. 

Progress

Not that the sugar pumpkin is alone in persevering. Let’s give a shout out to the little bean that could. From nothing up to full outstretched arms in four days or less! 

From the morning of May 6...

...to the evening of May 9!

Persistence

My pumpkin plant has rebounded from the pest damage to its cotyledons and unfurled its first true leaf! Hope springs eternal! 

In fact, despite being threatened by weeds, insects, and sweltering heat over the last week, the young plants are continuing to thrive out there. The current seedling roll call includes: 

• 4 corn plants
• 4 Magdalena Big Cheese squash
• 2 cushaw
• 3 sugar pumpkins
• 3 Hopi watermelons
• 1 pole bean

...Three different types of bean planted, and just a single seedling has made it up. Several times now I’ve found unsprouted beans unearthed and rearranged in the dirt, so I think I can add foraging birds to my list of threats. I can only wonder which smaller, softer seeds they may have dug up and made off with—amaranth, sunflower, tomato. Time will tell as we see what else manages to emerge. 

Heat

A week into May and a heat wave is upon us. Temperatures are hitting the nineties today and continuing to rise in the days ahead. All I can do is water generously and hope the UV rays don’t fry my babies. 

Primal

A fire. A food garden. A small circle of people gathered around, gazing into the flames and sharing stories. A dog keeping watch. A quiet wind with birdsong. A setting sun. The scent of smoke and the sense that, for an evening at least, modern constructs have dissolved and laid bare what’s always been at the heart of us as humans. 

Prevention

Techniques for preventing pest damage depend on the pest in question, so it’s hard to know what steps to take against my mystery nemesis. To keep snails and slugs from approaching plants, I’ve learned I could put a ring of copper wire around each seedling or sprinkle dry eggshells in the area. For now I’ve gone with what I had on hand: coffee grounds. Supposedly their texture, scent, and caffeine content are distasteful to a number of different arthropods who might otherwise stop in for a snack. Here’s hoping. 

Perpetrators

YOU! Was it you who nibbled at my seedlings?? I’ve inspected all the affected cotyledons for caterpillars and eggs; so far no dice. There are ants crawling everywhere in the soil, but from what I’ve read they don’t go for greenery and can even help out by preying on aphids and other tiny plant-eaters. I did hand-evict a cutworm from the garden area, but they don’t eat leaves and happily none of my stems have been cut. No other sightings of insects or slugs to report. But there are a few snails who live five feet up on the fence nearby. Are they sliming their way down at night and invading the garden??