Ahaha! Tomatoes and Chard

Oh boy. Forgot to mention it yesterday... but we had a visitor--the photographer for one of our state capital's big newspapers. Sure enough, as I was washing and bunching some beets, he snuck over and clipped a few hundred shots of me. So when I swung by the gas station to get coffee this morning, look who I found laughing back at me on the front page:

If the boys catch wind of this my name is mud.


Full sun all day through to closing, started getting a little cloudy around then. Temperature stuck in the mid 80Fs.

Long slow day today. I sharpened up the knives this morning and we got the boys together: Stretch, Newport and me. Piled up 8 crates and headed to the lower fields to cut swiss chard. Things went smoothly enough at the bed's head, but once we got further down things got bad.

Take a look at the chard photos from this weekend-- just a few days ago. It was enormous and healthy. When we got mid field we found nearly all the leaves (on every plant) eaten back to the stems, covered (caked, every square inch) in little shit pellets and big black/gray flying ant like beetles. In just three days they'd turned the chard into a near wasteland. I was the first one down there-- furious, I went from plant to plant crushing or slicing every beetle I could find (sometimes 10 on a single leaf). What would have been an easy half hour of rapid picking became a dirge. The foreman came over and we worked the entire field's length-- killing every beetle we found, pulling off every bare stem/emaciated leaf. On Saturday (when Darlin took pictures of the chard), I bet we could have filled 25 crates easy-- we just barely filled 8 lean crates. Finished going over the damage just before lunch.


After lunch, still in low spirits, we headed out for some serious tomato picking. The boss came down and joined us as we worked the rows. Tomato picking isn't as exciting as I'd always hoped. Rot/fungus has taken a hard toll on the first round of fruit (the boss plans on spraying a bit of fungicide to curb the dilemma)-- for every good tomato we picked, we pulled 3-4 rotted mold covered ooze sacks. There's nothing like stretching your hand beneath the plant and coming back with a handful of sludge. The field (and soon us too) smelt like ketchup mixed with gasoline with a dash of day-old diaper tossed in. The tomato plant's stem and leaves have a fine hair/film/power covering them over-- our hands, hair, pants and arms turned black/green. The trellised tomatoes were in much better shape and easier to pick-- less rot and less work negotiating around the plant. That said, this was the first big tomato harvest. We got:

Fair number of Rose, tons of fine looking Cherokees (they held up surprisingly well), fair number of striped romans, one ripe striped german, 3 buckets of red cherries, 1 bucket of yellow cherries and 1 bucket of dark purple cherries. We packed the tractor's front loader with the full 20 something tomato buckets, then headed up to the store.

Sorting and wiping time. We rolled over 2 carts and got everything squared away into: 52 full cardboard boxes of big tomatoes, 5 trays of cherry tomato pints. Not bad, not too damn bad at all.

8 of the boxes were ripe and ready to go, so we moved those into the store-- leaving the rest to ripen beneath the awning. Closing was a half hour off, but there wasn't enough time to start any of the next picking projects-- a big potato pull is next on the list. So the boss sent us home early, with a day's full pay.

Time to scrub off my tomato coat and get set for tomorrow-- gonna be a long day, market starts a little after noon and ends a bit after sun down. Gotta remember to bring a change of fancy 'market clothes.'

Take it easy.