Light rain all morning, scattered showers through the afternoon. The temperature peaked at 60F.
It was a bleak day. All the boys gathered around out back. Things are running thin this year. The raspberries are over, to tell you the truth--they've been done for a little over a week now. The rain and fruit maggots have melted anything ripe into mush/killed off the young buds/infested the few survivors. Maybe I am over disclosing, but we usually pull 2000 a week from raspberry sales alone. The fall variety is usually long lived and, on a good year, carries through most of October. Not this year, and we're feeling the loss hard. The foreman was stone faced-- he said the pumpkin crop is shit too: not enough, not big enough and not the flawlessly formed gourds people insist upon. A third of the butternut squash has developed a marbled-molding (we'll skin/chop those ones and sell 'em in baggies), fortunately 23 rows yield an enormous number-- 2/3s perfect still equal out to some jaw-dropping tonnage. But it's the tomatoes that are saving us. All the hard work this spring/early summer followed through into good harvests-- on a perfect year we'd have made a fortune, as it is we are able to sink the raspberry losses (narrowly). Bad weather means slow growing, but also bad markets-- no one turns out for produce in a downpour. So it hurts on all ends. Wholesaling has carried us-- we've shipped 60-100 boxes twice a week for the past two months and the checks are coming in just in time (wholesalers are very lackadaisical about payment promptness, its usually about a month until the money shows). Of course, the boss wouldn't lay things out like this (though, over the working weekends he confided some of his worries)-- it was the foreman who put the situation out plain and public. It wasn't discussed today, but last Saturday the boss admitted he might have to start letting go some of the crew in the coming weeks-- the boys will stay, Bah and Old Rudolpho will stay, but some of Bah's friends and the extended Guatemalan family could be let loose. It's a shame that the season trickled into this-- it had such a promising start.
But as Gizzie and I concluded at "The End" bar-- it is the hard gamble of farming: you have to sweat. We can't see what weather is coming 2-3-4-5 months ahead, anything could happen-- so every time, you have to work as though everything will go perfectly. It won't. But if you don't and the weather goes right-- you cannot catch up, it's too late, the opportunity was lost. So you work, regardless of how things look and regardless of how things go-- week by week by month.
A few weeks ago, when Gizzie was first starting, we had our lunch out in a field together. An old man came over for a chat. He was eating ice cream, and said that he'd never been down our road before and decided to stop in for a look. Years ago as a younger man, he'd worked at a vineyard and the wine-master told him something that made all of us stop and think. The wine master said: there are only so many seasons in a lifetime, if everything goes well and a person's health holds up you get 40 seasons. Just 40 seasons. 40 tries in a life to learn/perfect something so sensitive and subjective as wine making. There's a thin line of difference between the vineyard and the farm-- different crops-- but we all face the same limits: 40 tries to get it right. It took the boss 30 years-- to learn his soil, his water table, his crops, his seasons, his customers, his markets, his town politics and his farm. And that's why you ( we, he, I )work-- there's no time for botched tries.
Gizzie and the boss got off to the market. Newport, the foreman, Bah, Old Rudolpho, his family and I got out to the tomato fields-- another wholesale truck is due tomorrow. We picked straight through to lunch.
After lunch the foreman, Newport and I got busy dismantling the head pipes/valves that connect into the drip lines in the tomato/squash/cukes/cantaloupe fields. We stowed away all the plugs, nozzles, connectors and joints. Then back to the tomatoes. We filled every bucket on the farm.
Newport and I ran down to the barn's tomato storage and cleaned everything up. We shuttled the buckets back to the barn and began the sorting/shining hours. Everyone was down in the barn-- nearly went through everything, only 30 or so buckets left. We filled: 25 big trays of unripe 1sts, 15 trays of ripe 2nds, 6 boxes of sauce tomatoes and 45 boxes of 1sts ready to be shipped. We'll get back at it tomorrow morning-- 100 boxes is the magic number.
I'm soaked through, tired and ready to work. It's a funny thing. After hearing of the situation we all set down harder, picked faster and squared ourselves up-- as though force of arms could flip over the season, if only we worked hard enough. This weekend is going to be in the city visiting Darlin, but until then: it's time for working.
Take it easy.
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