Lettuce Begin!

Dandelion Springs Farm. 30 Brick Hill Rd. Newcastle, ME. 04553.



So, i decided to work on a farm because i think food is fundamental and i know hardly anything about where it comes from. This in addition to my fascination with nature and my roaring mid-20's which seeks to unearth a certain quintessential phenemonelogical answer to all the bullshit questions of "why?" and "why not?" that plague and irk me like a tumultuous bull trying to escape his pen at the rodeo, only to realize the whole world is one big rodeo.

You ask, why work at a farm? And I'll answer, "do you know where your food comes from?" Working at a food co-op for the last couple years brought a very good impression on me that the globalized food structure is so out of whack, we have no idea where any of the things we are necessitating for our survival come from. And i don't just mean processed junk like the hydrogenated oils and refined sugars and corn; but the eggs, milk, sugar, wheat, cookies, meat, tea, tomatoes, peppers, microwave enchiladas. It's so stretched out to lowest bidders, third parties and who knows what that it is near impossible to eat only what is local...

And even with that, what happens locally? Where do the cows live? The chickens who lay these eggs? What does a farm look like? What are the animals fed? What is the soil fed that brings us cucumbers, zucchinis, fruit and lettuce? What do potatoes look like when they're growing and what does broccoli look like when it's in the ground?

THEN you can ask, how do i grow these things? Say one day i need to grow my own food for some reason. I know plum nothing about growing my own food. I mean, have you ever planted things by seed. Ok, so if you get the potting soil from the store, put the seeds in it, some of them come up. Then maybe you have from a 250 pack of seeds, a bunch of plants come along that give you a total of 100 tomatoes. 100 tomatoes for a whole year?!

I think it is necessary to learn how to grow food on a large scale. When you get down to it, it is a necessity of life that fewer and fewer Americans know anything about. I am truly interested in the phenomenon of food and its growing necessity for not only survival, but heritage cultivations and maximum efficiency/output.

Hence, to be a farmer...

So let's begin: We start from the seed:



We take planter trays with 72, 50 or 200 holes, putting one or two seeds in each hole. And then they sprout!



It is something else to watch the burgeoning of life peddle through. We sleep the plants in an unplugged cooler, warmed by an electric heat mat that is set to 70 degrees (the ideal temperature for most germination to take place.)





It is an odd thing, because the seeds somehow know how to react to daylight, even at night! This germination process needs to be watched carefully. We leave them in the coolers until about four seedlings begin to sprout. We then transfer that tray into the greenhouse proper.



scallions afoot!



Cabbage runnin wild!

This is essential. If the seedlings don't get a sense of the light, their initial stem continues to grow. They get too long and stringy, that part of the stem never maturing right and once the plant really starts to get heavy it breaks. So even at night, the plants can sense if they have breached the darkness of their soil and start to bend upwards, relaxing their necks and beginning to unfold their initial leaves, or cotyledons (this a greek word for "seed leaf," a part of the seed's embryo that gives it initial photosynthesis once the seed begins to sprout. Plants drop these leaves once they get their real plant leaves.)


Cotyledons on tomato


Cotyledons on bok choi

The plants will stay in their seedling planters for a while. Some like the tomatoes will be transplanted to bigger cells once they start to make their first leaves.



here is a tomato's first leaves burgeoning.



they get very cramped in their small cells. Most of the time planted with a roommate. Sometimes with as much as four or five, depending on how many seeds slip out of our hands into the hole.


Aargh! Get me out of here!

We also just transplanted these cucumbers this week.



They are called Socrates cucumbers, because they are a type of cucumber that is parthenocopic, or self-pollinating. Get it!

Later on, we will be hanging these little suckers in their gigantic pots in the greenhouse. As self-pollinators, they have both male and female flowers. What a crazy bunch of hermaphroditic hounds, eh!



Whoa there, fella!



Hold on there! What's going on here!



Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Get away from me mister!

Welp, i hope you guys enjoyed this first post. And to end on a joke:

An old Italian man lived alone in the country. It was Spring and he wanted to dig his tomato garden, as he had done every year, but it was very hard work for the aging man as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was currently in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:

Dear Vincent,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If only you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot for me.

Love Dad

A few days later he received a letter from his son:

Dear Dad,
Not for nothing, but don't dig up that garden. That's where I buried the BODIES.
Love Vinnie

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived at the old man's house and dug up the entire area. However, they didn't find any bodies, so they apologized to the old man and left.

That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Dad,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love Vinnie