What Makes Me Laugh

On our refrigerator is a New Yorker cartoon with a woman sitting on a couch, talking to a man standing in the corner of a living room. The caption says, “After your tomato plants, you have nothing left over for me.”

We laugh about this cartoon but there is a grain of truth there. Doug spent hours this summer growing the perfect tomatoes. Obsessed with soil acidity, organic material, drip watering systems, growing seasons, planting depth, systems for tying the tomato up above the ground, he’s now completed the final harvest. Tonight he gathered the last of them because it’s supposed to snow in the mountains two to five inches, and that means a frost too deep for any plastic-covered tomatoes to bear. So, in honor of Doug’s hard work, and his beautiful harvest, I’m showcasing his photography. Wish you all could taste our luscious, home grown tomatoes too.

If I were to describe our life in August  in one word it would be: Mania.

It’s the time of year when you arrive home from work to 20 pounds of scrubbed cucumbers, and stand bleary-eyed past midnight, stuffing the last of the cukes in jars with garlic and dill to bathe them with boiling vinegar. About that time you reach a point of tired where you’re not sure you did everything right. “Did I do my math?” you ask. “Is 4/8ths into 5/6ths two tablespoons?”

It’s a time of great abundance, when the berries have finally ripened, and you have to use all of your digits to count the tomatoes on the vine. For a gardener, it’s bliss, but for the cook, it’s sheer panic. Nothing can be wasted. None of this goodness can be lost. Because if you have to look at a sad, mealy Albertson’s tomato in January instead of popping open a can of the most fragrant tomato sauce from your garden, you may really have to be committed to Warm Springs, Montana’s mental health hospital (aka insane asylum)- terrible name, isn’t it? It just says sedatives to me in an evil voice — “not hot, not cold, just the way you like it … yes.”

The weather, finally warm enough to be painful, gives you the energy to move mountains. Run a 5k race in the morning and make huckleberry jam all afternoon? No problem! Organize an entire room full of sheet music and musical equipment in a few hours? Pshaw! Stay up until the wee hours of the morning finishing a good book and then work a full eight hours? Peanuts!

You might do all of this and feel a wee bit of tiredness setting in, so beware of the second wind. That’s when you start to get stupid and buy a full box of peaches, ripen them immediately and then call your mother in a panic to find out how she cans them. “You do the medium syrup?” you ask, trying to sound like you know what that is, “And then what? Rub a spatula around the side to get the bubbles out? That’s important?”

She tried to warn you. She bought a case of canned tomatoes from the store for you — just to keep you from going through this every August. But you wouldn’t listen, and then you were hooked. Hooked on the taste of homemade jam and syrup and salsa, and you weren’t going back — not to Heinz, not to Smuckers, not to Old El Paso, not even to Vlasic.

But you can take it too far. Now you’ve graduated to sourkraut and sweet and sour cabbage and pickled beets. Things you wouldn’t touch as a child. You discuss buying a pressure canner with your spouse, so you can do beans too. What’s next? Making your own yogurt? How far can this go?

As you look at the pile of peaches on your kitchen counter, ready to be washed and bathed in boiling water, you think maybe just maybe you’ve hit your limit, gone too far, done too much, and then you realize it’s August, and you’re Super Woman, and no one will stop you until you’ve made enough jam to feed an army. An army of two.

Libby, Jude, Janelle, and Anya a Jurlique Educator at the Mylor Farm

When it comes to environmental claims by companies, you can usually color me a little cynical. Don’t get me wrong, I still buy as many organic, sustainable, fair trade products as possible, but I know that some companies simply look at is an eco-marketing scheme, not a real commitment to the environment. 

About eight years ago, when I lived in Colorado, I covered a story about an organic juice company called Mountain Sun that was dumping its apple waste into the Dolores River and polluting the water. The Environmental Protection Agency had to threaten them with large fines to get it to stop.

Most recently, I cringe every time I see the Sun Ranch listed as “one of the top ten ecotourism lodges” in magazines like Outside because of the many endangered gray wolves they have killed on the property, including the brutal killing of a female two years ago with an ATV by a ranch hand. 

So, I usually have my b.s. antennae up with eco-marketing and I’m excited to report that Jurlique is the real deal.

I almost want to work there myself. Yesterday we spent time “working” on the farm, which was really a true treat. We toured their shared vegetable garden. We planted sweet clover and coriander. We “rubbed out” peppermint leaves from the stems into a bin, and we learned all about the biodynamic preparation that was being made to spray on the farm because the moon is opposite Saturn.

Doug planting clover seeds in the greenhouse

Working to "rub out" the dried peppermint leaves. We smelled wonderful afterwards.

Now that sounds a bit weird, and since the preparation involves burying a cow horn with silica and manure for some time and digging it up to add it to the mix, you might think these folks are woo-woo about farming. But whatever you may think, the proof is in the pudding, or preparation, as you might say. 

Cow horns are filled with silica or manure and buried on the farm to prepare a special compost

Stag bladders used in the preparation

The biodynamic flow form is used to prepare the water for the crops

For one thing, the farm looks really healthy, with native tree plantings all around to encourage wildlife habitat, and a commitment not to use any chemical sprays on the invasive blackberry bush on the place – no matter how tiny the spray. For another, everyone who works there is passionate about what they do and really happy. You get the very clear sense that they all care about the health of the land and are proud to work there.

Jude and I get a close-up look at the biodynamic preparation

But, back to biodynamics. Biodynamic certification is based on the principals of farming laid-out by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf Schools. In the 1930’s, he researched ancient methods of farming for German farmers and based on that recommended preparing the soil and plantings on an astronomical calendar and using animal parts like cow horns and stag bladders to create unique, natural fertilizers. He was big into the idea that a little bit of something natural can go a long way (the whole premise behind homeopathy). 

Because the moon was opposite Saturn yesterday, the farm was preparing its special, four-times-a-year mix to spray lightly on the crops.

I haven’t done the research on whether there are published papers to back up the biodynamic claims, but such careful, meticulous farming certainly can’t hurt and hell, I might try burying a cow horn in my own backyard if I can get a garden that looks as healthy and productive as the Jurlique Farm does.