FrankenCorn

"Peaches and Cream! My husband and I don't eat genetically modified food; where's the yellow corn?"

Customer in our market, August 2014.

I grew my first crop of sweet corn in 1972; a variety called "Golden Bantam", that had been around since 1903.

Discovered by a farmer in Massachusetts, it was the first yellow sweet corn variety that bridged the gap between feed corn for animals and something that would be enjoyed by people.

Golden Bantam was (and is; it's still available from some seed suppliers) an open pollinated variety, meaning that it reproduces true from seed year after year.

Although many of our older customers suggest that Golden Bantam was the best sweet corn ever, I would suggest that their misty water-colored memories are flawed. The variety has neither the tenderness nor the sweetness of modern day sweet corn offerings. It displays a chewiness and flavour that was enjoyed by many back in the day, but again, doesn't compare favorably to present day hybrids.

So what is a hybrid ?

In its simplest form, a hybrid is developed by crossing two parents with individual desired qualities to create a new variety with both of the desired characteristics present.

When a female horse is crossed with a male donkey, a mule is created, combining the hardiness of a donkey with the size and strength of a horse.

Similarly, when when sweet corn breeders wanted increased tenderness and sweetness, they crossed two sweet corn parents with these qualities present. When a yellow variety and a white variety of sweet corn are crossed with each other, a bicolor variety may very well be the result (Peaches and Cream is but one of many bicolor varieties).

This is a gross over-simplification, and yet this is textbook classical plant or animal breeding. It has gone on for centuries; however the hybrid concept really came to the fore in the 1930's, especially in field corn breeding.

This is where the confusion creeps in for a lot of people, who figure that any new, improved variety has been genetically modified.

Genetic modification involves insertion or deletion of genes in a lab between organisms that could be conventionally bred in the field. The reason this is done is to create resistance to certain herbicides or insect pests. Field corn, soybeans and cotton are the most widely grown G.M. crops. They are often referred to as "Frankenfoods" for obvious reasons.

As most of you know, the practice is highly controversial. Europe has an outright ban on all G.M. crops. A large part of the problem, as myself and many other farmers see it, is that consumers were never made aware of the benefits of G.M. crops before they were introduced. Many highly toxic pesticides that were widely used by most farmers are no longer needed, due to the introduction of rootworm resistant field corn, for instance.

That said, rest assured that we grow absolutely no genetically modified vegetables on our farm.

There is a G.M. sweet corn that is resistant to corn earworms, but we don't grow it. There are also G.M. tomatoes and peppers; again, we don't grow them.

Any new variety of vegetable that we grow has been created the old-fashioned way: through classical plant breeding, because that is what you want and that is what we would prefer to grow.

Un-modified near Markham,

Guy

Seed Orders

" I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."
                              Henry David Thoreau

  The annual arrival of seed catalogs is a wonderful time of year.

  Whatever our successes and failures of the previous season may have been, we have a chance to give that farming Etch-a-Sketch a good, hard shake and start over with a clean slate.

  To settle down in a comfortable armchair with a brand new seed catalog is to be transported into a garden of  boundless possibilities and future perfection.

  When I was thirteen, my family received our annual Dominion Seed House catalog, mailed from Georgetown, Ontario.

  This was not a catalog that would be remembered for its lavish illustrations. What it was instead, was an absolute masterpiece of copy-writing craftsmanship, generously leavened with descriptive phrases, like  "deep-red tender flesh", "monstrous succulent fruit" and "powerfully delicious fragrance."

  Although these phrases evoked some mighty powerful imagery in a thirteen year old boy, the most unfailingly compelling words for me were "unusual" or "unique", probably a reflection of my own awkward state in 1966.

  The following description stopped me cold:

BANANA MELON. Muskmelon. Dates to 1885.

      "Unique banana shaped fruit, having a powerful and delicious fragrance and banana-like flavor. Grows 18 to 24 inches long."

 There it was: the whole package. That magical intersection of the exotic, the mysterious and the delicious.

  My order arrived a couple of weeks later. The seeds were planted into peat pots, tended on our kitchen windowsill and transplanted with care to their prime piece of sunny, fertile garden real estate.

  Their steady growth throughout the summer became exponential when the sultry, steamy dog days of late August arrived.

  By Labour Day weekend, the vines had receded enough to clearly reveal a couple of dozen green to light tan colored, 18 to 24 inch long caveman club-like fruit, with a curved flourish at the handle end. An aromatic sweetness hung lightly in the air.

  I picked my first fruit and carried it into our kitchen to share with my family. I was about to discover whether truth in advertising really existed or whether banana melons were going to be just like the sea monkeys ordered from the back of the Superman comic book: a bust.

   In the grim world of mid-sixties rock hard 39 cent supermarket melons, we tasted muskmelon nirvana. The taste was everything that Dominion Seed House promised and more: the salmon colored interior was plush and exquisitely sweet, unlike any melon we had ever tasted before. We were sure that we could taste banana.

  We ate until we burst, and my parents offered samples to family and friends, who were unanimous in their rave reviews. I was ten feet tall all week.

  It remains a defining moment in my life. For one brief, delicious moment, I was no longer the kid who was struggling in Chemistry, but a rock star in the muskmelon world. How could I have gone on to do anything else but be a farmer?

  And so I think it is as I fill in my 2013 seed order that I am looking to recapture a small slice of that magic from long ago.

  Some years we fail. But in most years that wonderful and mysterious chemistry of seed and soil, sun and rain align in such a way to create something that is close-your-eyes-and-look-to-the-heavens delicious, whether it be sweet corn, tomatoes or banana melons.

  "Ponder well on this point: the pleasant hours of our life are all connected by a more or less tangible link with some memory of the table"  
                                                            Charles Pierre Momelet

  We are looking forward to helping you create some wonderful memories of your own this season.

  Here's to a sweet 2013!

  Guy

Deep and crisp and even

"I used to be Snow White, but I drifted"       Mae West

It is still in the early innings of the 2013 ballgame, but this winter is shaping up to be a good old-fashioned one, meaning lots of snow to go with those colder temperatures.

Those of us who live in, drive in and shovel our snow may curse it at certain moments, however, it provides several important advantages for northern farmers:

 Increasing soil moisture:

Our annual precipitation in the form of rainfall here in Gormley averages about 28 inches (71.8 cm.)
In addition to that, we also average 56 inches (142 cm.) of snowfall.

If that seems like a lot of snow, bear in mind that it takes roughly 10 inches of snow to provide 1 inch of water, thereby adding 5.6 inches to our rainfall total. Therefore, 17% of our annual precipitation comes in the form of snow!

If that doesn't seem like much, imagine your life with 17% more holidays, 17% more golf or 17% more whatever-floats-your-boat and you begin to understand how vitally important that additional moisture can be.

Many variables affect the quantity of snowfall melt water that is actually taken into the soil to recharge it with water in the spring. Simply put, a slow,steady thaw in the spring that allows the melting soil to percolate down through the soil profile is best. A mid-winter thaw with most of the melt water rushing away over frozen soil is not on our farmer wish list.

We seem to have had very few winters of late with snow that lasted throughout the winter. January thaws seem to have become the rule.

 Insulating the soil:

That cozy duvet that keeps you warm in your bed works because of the air trapped in the down insulation.
Similarly, air trapped between snow provides a blanket to help protect the soil ecosytem. Our winter wheat requires at least 3 inches of snow cover to help prevent it from winterkilling. Garlic needs this protection as well. More is certainly better in this case.

 Preventing wind erosion:

Once you have a thick layer of unbroken snow on the ground, the wind is unable to blow soil around. That fact alone helps me to sleep much more soundly this time of year.

 Increasing soil fertilty:

Snow has been called "poor man's fertilizer" for a reason. As reported by the Michigan State University Extension service, snowflakes trap dissolved organic nitrogen, nitrate and ammonium in the atmosphere, delivering it free of charge to cold and quiet fields.

Rain and snow together will provide between 2 and 22 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year. Given that sweet corn (our largest feeder of nitrogen) requires about 100 pounds per acre, all that free fertilizer is a lot better deal than a bunch of pennies from heaven that you'd have to clean up.

 Floating your boat:

 Thinking globally rather than locally for a moment, consider the plight of the Mississippi river. The U.S. had their worst drought since 1956 last year. That has created historically low river water levels, so low in fact, that all shipping on the Mississippi could grind to a halt by mid January as of this writing.

 Although dredging of the river bottom is currently taking place, a heavy winter snowfall upstream along with the subsequent melt waters and some timely rains would certainly help our neighbours.

So, all together now; "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...."


Enjoying powdery snow rather than powdery mildew,

Guy

Garlicky in Gormley

"What garlic is to food, insanity is to art"

Augustus Saint Gaudens

There is a lovely saying that goes "tickle the earth with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest".

Most years it holds up; I'm constantly humbled by the bounty we harvest every year.

In other years, you've got to do a whole lot of tickling to even get a grin out of 'ol mother earth. Take garlic for instance:

Garlic is extremely labor intensive. Because it is planted in the fall, it's the first crop out of the blocks in the spring. Those green shoots usually appear just after the frost goes out of the ground.

The first weeds start to appear about 18 seconds later. Garlic has many virtues, but being competitive against weeds is not one of them. Picture a seniors' lawn bowling club against the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl and you have some idea.

In addition to weeding, there is also time spent on pulling scapes (removing the seed heads for a bigger bulb), harvesting, putting on racks to dry, cutting off tops and cleaning. It is by far and away the most costly crop for us to produce on a per plant basis.

Although I've been growing sweet corn since the early 70's; garlic is new to my farming repetoire; we harvested our first crop in 2008.

In 2008 and 2009, there was a huge amount of Chinese garlic dumped into Canadian and American markets, despite restrictive tariffs. A price of 9 large offshore bulbs for $1.00 sticks in my mind, at a time when we charged $1.00 for a single large, freshly harvested bulb.

The outcome, and of course the outrage at our price, was predictable and unpleasant for us. Although we had a relatively small crop in 2008, it took all season to sell it, despite its excellent quality. People constantly reminded us how cheap garlic was in the supermarkets.

In late 2008, the mainstream media released several articles about the dubious safety and quality of Chinese garlic. (Rather than belabor the point here, check out the "Chowhound " website, among others, for more details.)

By the time our 2009 crop came off, the word was starting to get out; fresh local garlic will trump dried up, bleached imported garlic any day. More media attention was paid to the cancer-fighting potential of garlic.

Blame it on beginner's luck; our 2009 crop quality was again excellent. Customers began to remark on the juiciness and pungency of our newly harvested crop rather than kvetching about the price. Some people even bought 4 or 5 bulbs at a time.

We sold out by mid-September and had a few people to call if we decided to sell off any of our planting stock.

By 2010, everyone and their cat knew about Ontario garlic; it was like a gold rush. The combination of media attention to garlic, the "buy local" campaign and the realization that Ontario actually produced delicious garlic, in addition to a shortage of both local and imported garlic, created a perfect storm of a sellers' market.

People that had complained about our price in 2008 were now buying garlic by the dozen, despite the higher prices. 2010 was about as close as we'll ever get to an ideal crop year in this area; the quality was phenomenal.

We sold out by the third week of August and had a long list of people to call if we found any more.

Our 2011 crop is by far and away our best quality yet. Reasons why?

. The fall/winter of 2010-2011 had lots of snow cover to minimize the amount of garlic lost to winterkill, and allow root growth until late in the fall.

.That wet spring that had us all cursing was a blessing for the already-out-of-the-blocks garlic; it sized up magnificently.

.The July harvest saw bone dry conditions: perfect for pungency and storage life.

It amazes me that, in 3 short years,we have gone from a lose-lose to a win-win proposition with this crop. My hat is off to the "Good things grow in Ontario" folks and to our many fine customers who stood by us and made growing garlic such a delight.

Remember:

"No one is indifferent to garlic. People either love it or hate it, and most good cooks seem to belong in the first group."

Faye Levy

Best,

Garlicky Guy

Is Your Farm Organic?

"If it isn't Scottish; it's crap!"

Mike Meyers, as owner of a Scottish import shop on a "Saturday Night Live" skit

I'll begin with a word from Michael Pollen, an author and unabashed organic proponent, who wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma". If you haven't read it , and you're interested if food and what we eat, it's a great read.

This quote comes from his followup book, "In Defence Of Food; An Eater's Manifesto"

"Eat Well Grown Food From Healthy Soils....It is true that food certified organic is usually grown in relatively healthy soils, yet there are exceptional farmers and ranchers in America who for one reason or another are not certified organic and the food they grow should not be overlooked. Organic is important, but it's not the last word on how to grow food well."

Certainly, the connection between healthy food and healthy soil is irrefutable; how then can a conventional farm achieve that healthy soil that is the cornerstone of organic agriculture?

A large part of the answer is crop rotation, the practice of growing different crops on the same piece of land,as opposed to monoculture; where only a single crop is grown year after year.

In any given year, our farm acreage is planted as follows:

Year 1. Soybeans.

Year 2. Wheat (straw chopped and returned to soil) with red clover under seeded .

Year 3. Red Clover (clipped twice and then plowed )

Year 4. Vegetables, followed by Year 1,2 etc.

We are in the extremely fortunate position of farming enough of a land base to allow us to rotate our crops in this manner for the past 30 years. Years 2 and 3 are the foundation of our healthy soils: we have seen an increase in organic matter and a drastically reduced need for purchased nitrogen fertilizer.( I'll save the lesson on how clover does this for another time.) We soil test religiously and pay close attention to fertility trends and trace elements.

It also allows us to use fewer pesticides, as it is more difficult for insects,weeds and plant diseases to establish themselves on different host crops from one year to the next.

In other words, we try and maintain natural processes to the very best of our abilities. Our vegetable varieties are chosen for taste rather than yield or shipping abilities; picked fresh daily and sold at the height of their flavor and presumably, nutrition.

The organic camp maintains that food grown organically is more nutritious than conventionally grown food, and yet current unbiased university research suggests otherwise: they are the same.

Soil scientists and nutritionists would surely agree that we have really only just begun to scratch the surface of understanding the complex relationships between the thousands of elements that make up soil.

Putting the organic vs.conventional argument aside for a moment, I think common sense would argue that a cauliflower from a field that has grown only cauliflower (or other cole crops) for the last 20 years is less nutritious than one grown in a crop rotation, planted every fourth year .

Different crops use different elements in varying quantities and, conversely, different crops add different elements (besides the basic nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium.)

Surely, growing the same crop year after year, that is pulling the same fertility out of the soil is creating a crop that is less nutritious. Someday, we will understand the interplay and crop use of different major and minor soil nutrients and be able to make more informed nutritional comparisons.

In the meantime, the question that concerned consumers need to ask is not "is it organic?" but rather "is it nutritious?". That last sentence is a direct quote from Eliot Coleman, an widely respected American organic farmer and author.

Given that one of the strongest drivers for the purchase of organic products is the perception that they are more nutritious and healthier, I think that it is high time that consumers who genuinely care about their food started to ask farmers other questions besides,"is your farm organic?"

How about: " What crops do you rotate your fields to?"

Any responsible grower would be delighted to share this knowledge with you; it's something that we're all passionate about.

How about: "Did you grow this on your farm?"

You might be surprised. A straw hat and a pickup truck doesn't necessarily make a farmer.

How about: "What was this crop sprayed with?"

Food safety and nutrition go hand and hand. In 2007 (a dry year) we didn't have to spray our tomatoes at all. In 2010 (a reasonably wet year) we are forced to spray for late blight to get a crop. My organic grower friends were wiped out. I understand their position,but I can't afford to not have tomatoes on our farm. Google "LD 50" and find out how benign some of those chemicals that organic farmers are allowed to use really are.

Finally, take a deep breath and realize that we're all in this together.

There are many good stewards of the land on this earth (kindly allow me to be immodest enough to include myself.) Green manure, cover crops, soil tilth are among our earthly (pardon the pun) delights. They make our job easier,our crops better and your food more nutritious.

We're not trying to poison you or ourselves; we are trying to do something that we love in a responsible fashion. When we open a roadside market selling our own crops , we're like a cook laying on a great meal: we love doing it and we love hearing back from you that you appreciate us for it.

Remember:

" Soil is the tablecloth under the banquet of civilization"

Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean earth (2002)

This just in from Environment Canada: No more normal weather. Ever.

"Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists"

Kelvin Throop

T.V. viewing and vegetable farming are mutually exclusive pursuits throughout much of the year.

Very much like writing this blog and vegetable farming, as I've discovered.

That said, I had the luxury of watching the six o'clock news the other evening, followed at seven by a show dedicated to Hollywood types, most of whom I had never heard of.

The common thread seemed to be the sheer magnitude of their assorted dysfunctions. Apparently the attraction of these human train wrecks,delivered in a slick on-air package, is not a niche market: we are promised a whole new expanded playlist of bad behavior come the new year.

Weather forecasters have decided to take a similar approach. Gone are the days of Farmers' Almanacs (which rely on rolling averages) and their bland predictions of a "normal "season ahead. Gone too are a lot of local "father-knows-best" type weather folks. They seem to have been replaced by type A auctioneers halfway through their second six-pack of Red Bull.

Nobody wants to hear about Lindsay Lohan behaving herself: wearing sensible shoes and a house dress and running a church bake sale. Apparently, nobody wants to hear about Mother Nature behaving herself, either.

Nope, Environment Canada has decided to swing for the fences,calling for the mother of all winters for 2010-2011. This forecast is hot on the heels of calls for a "hot, dry summer", made back in early May.

Environment Canada is still high-fiving each other for their accuracy in predicting a hot summer, but let's back up a minute here: they called for a hot dry summer.

It was indeed hot, but rainfall was normal throughout the vast majority of the province.

What this means is that E.C. only got it half right.

What would happen in a world where accountants only got it right half of the time?

Or plastic surgeons?

You'd have an awful lot of funny looking people getting audited,that's what.

Much and all as we have gangs of roving T.V. reporters looking for mudslides,tsunamis, major earthquakes, massive forest fires and the like, the fact remains that Southern Ontario is blessed with an abundance of normal weather.

Although we occasionally suffer from widespread drought or rainfall, it is seldom on the scale of the disasters from around the world we see on the news most evenings.

And what may make for lousy "details at 6" makes us very lucky indeed.

Life in the slow lane

'' Sometimes I wonder if the world is being run by smart people who are putting me on, or by imbeciles who really mean it."

Mark Twain

Most of the last month has been viewed from the seat of my tractor.

Spring planting is a clean canvas: newly tilled fields alive with the potential (at this early date,anyways) for your best crops ever.

It's like getting ready to go out on a blind date with Mother Nature: She sounds great on the phone and you haven't found out she snorts when she laughs yet.

When you're travelling at 4-5 miles per hour through an empty field, you don't really need a traffic report. I tend to leave the radio off. There is no onboard computer, Blackberry or cellphone........

My wife and I attended an agricultural conference where a speaker asked the members of her audience:

"How many people here have a website?"

My wife and I joyously raised our hands along with many others. After years of talking about it, we could finally join ranks with the enlightened. Blessed technogeekdom at last!

This was the wrong answer as it turned out. Apparently the internet is too slow. Unless you're a farmer that is texting or tweeting; you're a twerp, yesterday's news.

Our speaker went on to explain how a Blackberry or similar contraption would improve our marketing skills, make use of wasted downtime and keep us on the cutting edge of the new "social media."

Anything with a blackberry sounds more like a social disease to me.

Or perhaps "unsocial media" would be a better term.

If you have ever sat down for a meal with a bunch of dedicated Blackberry users, you will know that actually carrying on a meaningful conversation with them is like trying to engage a bunch of people trying to dodge an assasin's bullet. There is a vaguely hunted quality to them.

I always have a strong sense of deja-vu at such moments. The last time I experienced so much under the table interest was during an informal and spontaneous game of "Who-squeezed-the-cheese?"at a friend's sixth birthday party.

I'm sure there's a place for all these wireless wonders; just not aboard my tractor. I love this undisturbed time and all the tweets in the world aren't going to make those beans ripen any quicker.

At this time of year, I think you have to go with ol' Waldo:

"Adopt the pace of Nature; her secret is patience."

Slowly yours,

Guy