2022, Fantasy, Food, gardening, Gatherings, Uncategorized, work

Paradise Farm

53 Comments

Because our green beans were hailed out in June, we went to the local farmers market to get some. Green beans from the garden are so good.

It was a busy day at the farmers market, as the local tomatoes are just now coming in, and there is lots of other produce. The high school marimba band was playing as a fundraiser, so it was even more festive than usual. I can’t imagine the amount of work that these local gardeners have to do to get their crops to market.

I find a lot of peace and satisfaction gardening. I wondered what life would be like if I gardened full time and became a market gardener.

Hard work, but fun. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to make a living doing it. In my garden fantasy I see us putting in a couple of acres of butternut squash and cantaloupes, harvesting lovely, pest free crops and selling them to happy, grateful consumers. A dream, I know, but nice to have when life gets hectic.

If you were a farmer, what would you want to grow and produce? What is some of your favorite marimba, xylophone, or vibraphone music and musicians?

53 thoughts on “Paradise Farm”

  1. Lionel Hampton, Cal Tjader, Modern Jazz Quartette with Milt Jackson on vibes.
    Whatever peace and satisfaction I might garner from growing produce would be offset by anxiety over the weather, pests and disease, and being tied to the garden and market activity throughout the growing season. Too unpredictable way to make a living.

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    1. A lot of us here are gardeners. I do many vegetable, but I do not do what you call maize (we call it corn). Where the people on this blog are located is the Midwest of the USA where corn is cultivated on a mass level. It is so cheap and abundant I buy it at the farmers market. The vegetables I grow are tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, kohlrabi, beets, carrots, and lettuce.

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  4. I don’t enjoy physical labor, as a rule. And while I love being out pulling weeds on a cool, unhurried morning before the sun hits, I would never enjoy it on a large scale. Even after seeing Ben’s stories, where he obviously loves what he does, can’t convince me I’d be any good at this farming thing.

    Our friends J. & C. on the little farm grew stuff for Rochester farmers market back in the 90s – mix of flowers and produce. I saw how hard they worked, and all the uncertainties they experienced – they had just set up a mini-greenhouse when C. was diagnosed with glaucoma, and that was when they decided to give it up.

    That all said, if you gave me a little plot and lots of helpers, I’d do the Native practice of the three sisters – corn, beans, and squash – that I read about in Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer).

    I’m afraid I don’t know marimba, xylophone, or vibraphone music players by name, except to recognize the ones named so far, so I’ll go with the flow and say Lionel Hampton.

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    1. Barb, at my Master Gardener MS community garden they are doing a three sisters experiment (one of the gardeners is native). They had such success this year that everything is too lush which interfered with the pollination of the corn—the beans are smothering everything else. But this is an ingenious combination of plants that support each other when the beans are more restrained. They needed to give each unit of three more space, I think.

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  5. Heirloom tomatoes, black raspberries (short season) and certain melons are my favorites at Farmers Markets but I know the work to produce these on a scale to be able to market is hard! Can’t think of popular marimba or xylophone artists but several of the modern pieces the MN Orchestra did over the last year had very creative use of these types of instruments (bowing the edges etc).

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I deliberately chose NOT to live out my adult life as a farmer, or more specifically, a farmer’s wife. In college I was wooed by a farmer-to-be, as well as by a Baptist minister-to-be. Neither were a match for me. Farming I knew well and I was sure I wanted a different kind of life apart from that. However, the day I was born, both my parents would have said my fate was to be a farmer’s wife. It was the family tradition for all the generations on the family tree. I like to live near to other people, and I like many options for work. The life I chose fits me well.

    I don’t know much about the instruments you name or the artists that play them.

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    1. It’s a family joke that Kelly’s mother did not send her up to Rochester to marry a farmer! Kelly grew up on a farm, and both her mother and her aunt were pretty uncertain about me for a while. Thankfully, I won them over and they realized our farm and our lifestyle would be different from how they grew up. I think Kelly always liked the country life and she knew it would be OK.

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  7. Lionel Hampton is perhaps the obvious choice, but there are several others that stand out. I’ve seen Lionel Hampton in concert with the Oscar Petersen Trio once, and they were magical.

    An exciting contemporary vibraphonist is Joel Ross, a young artist from Chicago. Love his work. I have not seen him perform live, but love to.

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  8. I think I’d like to grow flax. I would also want to keep bees, and maybe have some kind of orchard or berry patch for the bees to enjoy. I do not like xylophones or vibraphones; If I’m going to listen to a higher-pitched metallic sound, I’ll go for Jamaican steel drum!

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    1. I often will grow a patch of flax as a nod to a childhood memory. I grew some this year. It is still blooming every day. My Grandpa always grew a field of it as a cash crop. The blue flax flowers snagged my heart—a field of flax is a square blue ocean in the middle of corn and soy bean fields, waving and shimmering in the breeze. I do not do anything with my little patch except enjoy the blue.

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      1. That’s a very worthwhile thing to do, Jacque. My equivalent crop would be cabbages that have gone to seed, a very evocative memory from my childhood, when every farm cottage we moved to seemed to have last year’s garden, run wild.

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      2. Very cool! And enjoyment is enough, far as I’m concerned. I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism for a year or so during college, and thought about trying to learn the craft of making linen, but I couldn’t find anyone who was taking apprentices for anything, much less hackling and spinning linen.

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  9. Very often, I post a comment, and although it “takes”, the original doesn’t disappear from the space, hmmm, well, the space in which I typed it. Must have a name, I suppose. I tend to delete it, in case something terrible happens.
    But now, when I’ve just written a masterpiece about the farm I would have, and then pressed something that brought up a post from last year, I finally found my way back here, and yes, my masterpiece is gone. Maybe I’ll find it’s posted after all, but meanwhile I’m really behind with the washing up.
    Which I believe you call “Washing the dishes”, as opposed to washing my face.

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  10. Report from Grimes Creek, is a recording by Rosalie Sorrels that I treasure. In this cut, she’s reading an excerpt from her mother Nancy Stringfellow’s memoir “Report from Grimes Creek after a Hard Winter.” It’s quite lovely.

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  11. I think I would have enjoyed being a farmer when I was younger. Now my back hurts too much and I know I wouldn’t be able to do all the work. I would have like to have all the staples and some fun extras. Of course I’d have the three sisters, as well as all the Italian stuff which I love: tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, herbs. There would be a whole separate herb garden too. And I think I would love to have a flock of chickens and a henhouse and GOATS! Goats are so cool and fun to watch. I’d have a lot to learn though because I have little to no real experience with farming.

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  12. I’m on my work computer and WP is fighting with me.
    Yes to Lionel Hampton. And who’s the Brazilian musician, maybe Mambo, and he goes ‘HUH!, isn’t there vibraphone in that? Or one of those percussion instruments?

    Farming; I really enjoy growing oats. Yeah, I enjoy the entire process, but I really like having oats in the mix.
    My hats off to the Vegetable farmers; farm too much manual labor involved and I’m far too lazy for that.

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    1. They grow fruit trees here. I have no interest in this, beyond wanting to buy the orange grove my neighbour Antonio has for sale. It would keep me in organic juice for a long period, as he has both normal and late croppers. And the tiny bit of spare space would tax my ingenuity, in trying to grow vegetables for ourselves, plus sunflowers and corn (Midwest variety), to feed the small flock of hens I would keep. The word croppers reminds me, I’d definitely need to grow some green onions.

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  16. On my proper farm, in North Devon, my sheep free, chemical free mainly grass farm, I’d employ a gradual rotation which I’d fully work out when I took possession. I’d grow barley and oats on the ground that was ploughed this year, to feed my small herd of beef cows and their calves and followers. A smaller piece of wheat and, hopefully, just for fun, sunflowers, would feed the free range chickens. The vegetable garden, which may, or more probably, may not, be permanent, would consist of a long, narrow strip, which lent itself to tractor work for as much of the cultivation as possible.
    Beef cows: I mean, cows which feed “busk calves”. A busk calf is one that suckles right through the lactation, rather than, or as well as, being given solid food. The followers are the young replacements for the older cows.

    I recognise that my type of farming needs to bite the dust. Meat is a very inefficient florm of food and the world needs to do away with it, along with turning over the earth with ploughs. It would be a big conflict for me.

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  17. Apropos oats, there’s an old Danish song called “Jeg er havren, jeg har bjælder på.” It was written in 1916 by the well known and much beloved Danish author Jeppe Aakjær. The song is written from the perspective of oats (havre), from the time it’s seeded, through the season of its growth, through harvest. It likens the grain to bells that absorb the birdsong at the time of planting and through its lifecycle. Oat has always been my favorite grain because of that song, despite the fact that as a child i misunderstood the lyrics of the opening lines.
    The opening lines declares: I am oat. I have tiny bells on, I believe, more than twenty on each straw – literal and somewhat clumsy translation, sorry. The trouble was that the Danish word for twenty – tyve – also means thieves, so I thought Aakjær was saying that he believed more in thieves than he did in the straw carrying the grain. That made no sense to me, but that’s what believed for years. I was probably an adult before I realized my mistake.
    Here’s a video playing the tune. It also includes the lyrics to each verse if you care to sing it.

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      1. I hope you understand, Renee (and vs), I don’t think these problems are in any way your responsibility or fault. It just strikes me as bizarre that something like the comment you deleted makes it through WP’s algorithm – or whatever is the cause or source of these issues. I wonder if other blogs on WP are having similar issues? Is there any way of finding out?

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