Frog Log

This Saturday may be our last market for the year. We don't quite know how the lettuce will "pick out" but if this Saturday isn't the last, then next Saturday will be. That means that we have trucked on down to the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market for six and a half months this year; that Ken King and designated family members have rousted out of bed at 4:00 AM for almost 30 Saturdays and 25 or so Wednesdays; that friends and family have pitched for just as many Tuesdays and Fridays helping to harvest and make salad mix for next day's market; that countless seeds have sprouted, grown to fullness and offered up their ripe richness to harvesting hands; that brightly-colored rows of vegetation have decorated the garden in a changing patchwork throughout the season; that bowed backs have moved slowly through the rows, keen eyes and nimble fingers creating order in cultivation or harvest; that hundreds of boxes have been filled, trucked to market, emptied and dispersed, a...

Okay, the garden really looks different now. Most of the remaining crops huddle under white polyester-filament row covers, hoping to survive the present cold snap. Amid the long white humps of covered rows, only the kale and collards stand tall, flexing their vegetal muscles as they tell Jack Frost to bring it on! If the lettuce makes it through the next few days, we will have salad mix fior another week or two. We'll also have greens, onions, beets, and some of the best-flavored winter squash we have grown in years. Hopefully customers won't give up on the Farmer's Market just yet. We growers have our tricks to extend the season. There will be plenty of good pickin's at the market, even long after the first frost. And if you arrived at this Frog Log to learn more about the Oct. 28. party...hope you can make it! With the Tigers winning their third game against Oakland tonight, it's starting to look very likely that they will be in the World Series! And if that is th...

The garden looks different now that Fall is truly upon us. The leafy greens have taken on a darker hue; the reds are more bronzey. And the texture of the garden has become more homogenous. The tall corn stalks have been chopped, errant weeds have been mowed, and even the bushy tomoato vines now lie in a tangle on the ground, pulled from their supports by the weight of plump tomatoes. All the crops are lower, closer to the ground; and as we make the final harvests, the bare earth prepares to be tucked away, to rest and restore until the growing season returns. And we are on our last bean patch. Now I have written about beans before. And Tom gave me a hard time for saying I was tired of picking them four times in one Frog Log. Okay, maybe that was a little excessive, but then we pick an excessive amount of beans! We start picking in mid-July, right around the Art Fair, when everyone on the market has beans. But when most other farmers go on to tomatoes and corn, we don't stop plantin...

Paper or plastic? A question that I found mildly irritating when clerks and baggers started asking it in maybe the mid-eighties. In those days, I was certain that of course I wanted paper; I wasn't about to fuel unnecessary petrochemical use with those increasinly ubiquitous plastic bags. But then plastic bags started being made out of HDPE #2 and #4 plastic, a material that can be recycled. So it got a little stickier at the checkout counter. Do I choose paper and make a small contribution toward lessening the pollution from petrochemical refining, or do I choose plastic and save a tree --or at least a twig? Of course the best answer is neither, and bring your own reusable bags. I always opted for paper, even when the plastic bags could be recycled, since we could always reuse the paper bags at the market stall anad give that tree a little more go-round. Yep, in those days at the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market, paper was the bag of choice. The helpful market manager even kept a sma...

Well, it's Fall and farmers are tired. In conversations with several of our organic farmer friends, the talk is of sore backs or scaling back. Three out of the five Frog Holler family members are nursing sore spots, although one can possibly attribute his to a nine-inning, full-tilt game of whiffleball! No doubt about it, organic farming is physically challenging and the reaction to the work in body, mind and spirit, builds up over the season. Now we can feel those big melon patches that needed to be hoed, and then hoed again, and then hoed again before we ever tasted a melon. Or we can look back on the tomato patch that we planted with high hopes and realize that, although we waded through those tangled rows of vines and weeds over and over, we didn't really get a crop. Or how about all of the broccoli those cutworms ate in the early spring? Or the mysterious disease that took out all the cucumber vines in Southeast Michigan, from what I hear and have observed in our field. Th...

Well, I got called on my last entry when I was whining about the pole beans. Tom, my friend and writing buddy, rather gleefully pointed out that the beans could not "rappel" up the poles because rappel only refers to going down. Well, I was wrong, but I was also right because those beans never did go up the poles; they mae a weak attempt and then RAPPELLED back down to the ground. And although pole beans have a flavor and substance that is so reassuringly beany, we had to stop picking the patch. We did give Tom a chance to pick it, as a reward for his astute blog reading! We exchanged pole bean picking for melon picking, and that was a pretty good trade! Just as mysterious as the pole bean's inability to climb is the rich sweetness in almost all of our melons this year. The sun, rain, heat and melon fairies conjoined in just the right combination to bring us a bumper crop. Finding that right combination is what must keep farmers, apparently gamblers at heart, coming back ...

Pole Beans. You see them pictured in the garden catalogs - lush vines covering six-foot high poles that have been arranged in a teepee shape. There is always a cute kid peeking out from this leafy green playhouse. Okay, we set up lots of pole teepees; we planted and watered this old-fashioned variety of pole beans, and we even taped the vines to the poles when they seemed to struggle with the concept of expertly wrapping themselves around those poles in order to rappel to the top of the arrangement and create the picture perfect bean house which would also make it mighty darn easy to pick those beans conveniently dangling at eye level. Forget the catalog pictures! I'm out there on a late Friday afternoon. It has been a long picking day and it's hot. The bean field is pitched to perfectly catch the full force of the late afternoon sun. Did I mention I was tired? Did I mention that the "pole beans" all lie in exquisitely tangled piles of vines, beans and leaves at the...