Rambo and the Rotten Pepper Stink Grenades
On my second workday at the Eco-Institute a few weeks ago, a fellow volunteer gave me a list of people I should contact for my endeavor of learning-by-doing sustainable agriculture. One of those references was Ten Mothers Farm (https://www.tenmothersfarm.com/), a few minutes north of Hillsborough, NC. A web search led to a cold email, which led to a successful and satisfying volunteer day.
Ten Mothers is a small, no-till vegetable farm that doesn’t use synthetic chemical inputs. They’re not allowed to use the term “organic” for reasons of bureaucratic fine print, but from what I’ve seen they’re more worthy of the term than some farmers who are actually USDA-certified. The owners are a husband-wife pair (for more info, see https://www.tenmothersfarm.com/about). I didn’t get to meet Vera, as she wasn’t there that day, but Gordon was immediately friendly and conversational while we worked. At one point he mentioned his college years, and after some fishing I found out he graduated from Yale. After working for a few years at a nonprofit (Slow Food International; https://www.slowfood.com/) he wanted to get his hands dirty, so he started Ten Mothers with Vera.
They use a greenhouse and a plethora of hoop houses to extend their growing season to 12 months a year. Right now, in November, they’re growing mostly lettuces. It’s popular, healthy, and grows both quickly and densely all winter. By harvesting the leaves down near the ground, they can sometimes get two or three heads off of one plant, all within a few months.
Our first task was removing a few rows of lettuce that had rotten. Gordon didn’t know what exactly had gone wrong, but the plants were definitely not fit to be sold, and thus became compost. Consistent with what I learned at the Eco-Institute, we clipped the plant a bit below the ground, composting the leaves and letting the root mass remain. It keeps organic matter in the dirt, keeps the soil structure intact, and — this was new — the microorganisms that interact specifically with lettuce will stay alive for later planting.
The alternative to clipping the plants out one-by-one would have been to till it all. Tilling does fantastic things for soil, Gordon explained while we worked, and it also would have been faster. I don’t remember all the science behind it, since I don’t bring a recorder out with me, but the main idea was that tilling supercharges the microorganisms in the soil by flooding them with oxygen, and there’s a huge spike of nutrients for the plants. The problem is that it isn’t sustainable, since if you release that flood of nutrients a few years in a row, the dirt will get progressively worse — it runs out of nutrients. He also said that if you don’t till, you control weeds better, since you aren’t bringing the weed seeds up to the surface every time you turn the dirt over. As another upside, you avoid the high costs of purchasing, maintaining, and repairing tractors.
After clearing the lettuce, Gordon and I stopped in the central greenhouse to coordinate with the farmhand. While we talked, I got attacked with love — the farm dog was absurdly affectionate.
Next, without immediate explanation, Gordon handed me a sheathed knife that looped onto my belt. “You’re going to need this,” he said. Armed and dangerous, I felt like I’d been initiated into some sort of farm-brotherhood.
I soon learned it was for harvesting radishes. At the Eco-Institute they pulled up the entire radish plant and ate the leaves, but Gordon instructed me to cut the leaves and stems off in the field and drop them as I moved down the row. I’m assuming this was because his customers aren’t accustomed to eating radish leaves, and it’s free compost that would otherwise be going to waste in a trash can somewhere.
I’d always thought of radishes as little red roots the size of a golf-ball. These massive things looked more like potatoes. I managed to avoid cutting myself with my newly acquired weapon, so I’m calling it a success.
Sections of the field were covered with black tarps. Gordon explained it kept down weeds and accelerated decomposition of organic material by trapping both moisture and warmth. After winter, the mulch we were making would be transformed into healthy, rich soil.
Last up was clearing out pepper plants, which had died after the recent cold snap. This was the hardest work of the day, made unpleasant by the rancid odor from the rotting fruits. Step one was clipping the plants slightly below the ground, leaving the roots intact for the same reasons as with the lettuce. The thick woody stems made this difficult, so the farmhand equipped me with leviathan clippers (the type with handles two feet long). Getting the clipping angle right required squatting a bit and leaning over enough that every few minutes I had to stand up because my back muscles were burning. Squeezing the gigantic trimmers was tiring, too. It felt great to get exhausted, but what was a little less great was as I moved through the rows, I would unavoidably step on dozens of rotten peppers that had fallen off the dead plants. Peppers are normally firm fruits, but half-rotten ones are actually pretty juicy and soft, although still airtight. With enough pressure, they pop loudly like all-natural water balloons, spraying smelly juice everywhere. This job took well over an hour, so by the end of it everything around me, as well as my clothing, smelled absolutely fabulous.
After clipping all the pepper plants at the roots, we cut the strings between stakes, then pulled the stakes out. If clipping the plants was hard, taking out the stakes was frequently impossible. The farmhand and I were trying not to break them, but they were pretty firmly driven in. It required straddling the row of plants (to avoid compacting the soil) and bending with my knees so I wouldn’t herniate a disc, and of course every time I stepped I’d explode more rancid peppers. I accidentally broke a couple stakes, and we ended up leaving quite a few more in the ground because the sun was setting and work was wrapping up for the day. It was easy for me to leave the job, knowing I wouldn’t have to come back to it, but Gordon and the farmhand are going to have to show up on Monday and finish things up. There’s always more work to do on a farm.
This workday was longer and more strenuous than previous workdays have been. The muscle soreness has lasted a day and a half so far. I enjoyed the stark contrast of the experience to the physical ease of grad-student life, but that’s easy for me to say, knowing it wouldn’t last very long. The people I was working with had worked twice as long as I had that day, and they were finishing out 40+ hours of hard work that week — and they’d been doing it for years. Sometimes we city folk romanticize farming and agriculture, but it is hard. And of course this work I did at Ten Mothers only barely scratches the surface of what it’s like. I’m enjoying the process of learning to respect what it takes to grow food.
