Shifting Ground: The Longest Days
Himanee Gupta-Carlson, a writer and professor with SUNY Empire State College, is writing a series of articles about moving the farm she and her husband Jim Gupta-Carlson own and operate from a small piece of land in Saratoga County, NY to a much larger parcel in Washington County. The articles reflect on the journey as well as the couple’s commitments to cultivating food security on a regional level through regenerative agricultural practices and food sovereignty movements worldwide. This article explores ideas of ownership around land and its harvests.
I began writing this installment five days before the summer solstice, the first day of summer on the calendars of the Euro-American settler colonialists whose belief patterns lay down the grid for the modernity we live with today, and the longest day. At this time of year, the sun rises over the part of Turtle Island where I reside at 5:15 a.m. and sets at about 8:30 p.m. With about a half-hour of dawn and a similar amount of dusk, we have nearly 16 hours of daylight.
Long days give us cause to rejoice — and, on the new farm in Washington County that increasingly feels like ours to care for, more hours to work. Theoretically, we can be up and out in the fields from 5 a.m. to well past 9 p.m. Long days mean natural light and warmth. Conditions are perfect to plant, weed, and on harvest days, to gather big bunches of kale, collard greens, and chard along with armfuls of lettuce and baskets of salad mix, radishes, and spring turnips. Long days are creating peas on our vines and scapes on the garlic we planted in late fall. These days give us an abundance of spinach, arugula, spicy mustard greens, and our favorite — komatsuna, a relative of the turnip family that also is known as Japanese mustard spinach.
I try to pick it all as fast as we can before Nature takes over. Once the plants flower, the lush foods we treasure wither. The plant produces seeds to create its next cycle of life and then dries up and dies. If we want to enjoy its fruits, we have to move fast.
Sugar snap peas on the vines. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Summer Days
Our days are long and our sleep intermittent. I am still living at our former farm in Saratoga County while my husband Jim continues to reside in the barndominium - the two-room apartment he created in the barn at the new farm. I wake up as early as I can and drive 45 minutes to begin harvesting. He appears in the fields with a cup of coffee for me, often accompanied by two of our three cats, both of whom are acclimating well to life at the new farm. I harvest until the sun climbs too high in the sky to work, and then take a break to catch up on other work. I resume in late afternoon and continue through sunset.
Jim meanwhile works throughout the sweltering hours, racing to get the last of the seedlings from which we’ll harvest in late summer and fall into the ground. We both drive back to the old farm to shower and have a quick dinner. Jim returns to the new farm to check on the animals and sleep, while I head upstairs and collapse.
We harvest at least three days a week, usually Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for farmers markets that take place on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Each of these days usually amounts to 10 to 16 hours of farm work, with college responsibilities and writing sandwiched in between. On Mondays, my “day off,” I catch up on bills, paperwork, e-mails, and eggs. I deliver the eggs to our loyal CSA subscribers in Saratoga and try to make a large meal for dinner that will yield enough leftovers to eliminate the need to cook for several days. Although it is tempting to call a restaurant and order takeout, I try to resist the urge. The gardens are giving us so much. Not eating its bounty feels like a waste.
Harvest days start with walks down the long rows of “bunching greens”: long-stemmed leafy vegetables that are best sold in bunches one can grasp in the palm of one’s hand. These greens include komatsuna, collard greens, Swiss chard, and three varieties of kale — curly green, purple, and jacinato (which also is known as toscano or dinosaur). I gently break off luscious leaves from the plants and hold them by the stems upside down in my hand. When I have all I can hold, I walk back to the five-gallon trug I have brought with me and drop them in. I fill the trug, transfer the greens to a storage bin, and get them into a refrigerator as quickly as possible. Although the greens are hardy, they are like flowers in that they can wilt quickly if not kept cool. Before market, I will bunch and weigh them and give them a quick dunk into ice water.
Next comes our chicories, lettuces, salad mixes, and such low-to-the-ground greens as spinach and arugula. With a knife, I slice off whole heads, leaving space on the stem for re-growth, and with scissors, I snip off loose leaves. This work often gets quite dirty as I need to bend low, kneel, and sometimes plop myself down entirely to harvest without ruining the plant. I use two-gallon colanders to gather a dozen different types of such vegetables. Each colander of snipped greens requires a quick wash in a bin of cold water before going into the refrigerator. I dunk each head of escarole, radicchio, frisée, and lettuce individually into the bin.
Cleaning buttercrunch lettuce. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Bringing the chicories - escarole, endive, and radicchio - to the farmers’ market. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
By the time I have finished these two tasks, about four hours have passed. The sun is high in the sky, and the long sleeves and socks that I donned early in the morning are starting to feel oppressively hot. I take a break to drink water, snack on a few strawberries and spoonfuls of my egg and vegetable rice, and head for my car where I have stashed a change of clothes. I change clothes two or three times during the day to keep myself comfortable and to avoid tracking even more dirt into the barndominium where Jim — not the best housekeeper — resides.
After the greens and salad mixes come garlic scapes and root vegetables. As I go through the rows of garlic snipping the scape — a winding green stem that is actually the flower of the garlic plant and a sign that the plant is ready to produce seeds and die down — my eyes catch sight of the pea vines nearby. They are flowering. The next time I looked I could see peas forming. The pods were small, but a day or two later they were ready for harvest. I gathered a small basket’s worth to enjoy for ourselves, and as I crunched a few peas into my mouth, I started thinking about what we’d need next for a good pea harvest — more bins, more storage space, more time.
The Beauty of Bounty
“I don’t know how you do it,” is a remark I often hear from friends and colleagues at the college and in the community. My mother worries that I’ll wear myself out, and some days, I too wonder how long I, at age 58, can keep carrying on.
Those questions evaporate when I am in the garden. Seeing all that is growing overwhelms me at times, but once I am in the rows — hat on, scissors, knife, and basket in hand — I am energized. Jim and I are providing food for ourselves and for dozens of others each week. We are a small farm, but we are fulfilling a mission to feed others.
And then I am reminded that it is not me, at all. The land is the provider of all this food. I am just a set of hands, a pair of legs, and eyes — the medium by which the land and community connect to help ensure all have an opportunity to receive plentiful food.
I stop and I look around. I think of the indigenous Americans of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — those who were on this land long before European settlement. I had learned recently that the Mohican name for the Hudson River flowing alongside the lowlands of our farm is Mahicannituck, “the waters that never still.” Those waters used to be full of fish, and their banks welcomed both animals and peoples to feast and find homes. Three centuries of European conquest and colonialist settlement by the United States led to a genocide of the Native populations. Industrial development resulted in contamination of the waters and surrounding lands. But Nature always seems to trump humans. The Mahicannituck still flows, and the land continues to provide.
I bring my palms together in the namaste greeting of my Asian Indian ancestry and verbalize my thanks to the skies, waters, soil, winds, and plants — letting my words meld with the air.
With so much to harvest and limited time, efficiency is important. At our old farm, we created systems that worked but required many extra trips between our garage where we stored bins to the gardens, and to an outdoor wash area I had set up on a low-lying roof, into our basement for refrigeration, and then later upstairs into our kitchen for a second, third, and sometimes fourth rinsing; draining and drying; and then trimming, weighing, and bunching or bagging for market before going back into newly cleaned bins and into the basement refrigerators for storage.
Eager to improve our methods, I spent part of the winter studying harvest and post-harvest practices through books, classes, and visits to other farms. I had hoped to create a straight flow from field to final storage, but a need for such items as a triple-wash sink, separate spaces for drying and prepping, and walk-in storage spaces cooled to different temperatures for different crops have hampered these efforts. Yet, when I stop to express gratitude, I gain vigor from a reaffirmation of why I am farming. I take heart in knowing that while our old methods weren’t efficient, they did still keep our produce at its maximum level of freshness, and that once our move to the new farm is complete, we will be able to do even better.
One adage in the life of market farmers is that if you want to sell a lot, you have to bring a lot. That belief ensures that your tables will be heavily endowed with nature’s goodness, providing the public with a plethora of choices. It also ensures that you’re likely to end a farmers’ market with plenty of leftovers. We try to give away as much of that produce as possible.
Connecting Past to Present
For years, I have collected produce and other market products from vendors at the Saratoga Farmers’ Market to take to the Franklin Community Center in Saratoga Springs. The center’s food pantry services the entire county, and in 2016, I worked out a system with its outreach coordinator to transport highly perishable items donated from the market on Saturdays directly to the pantry for quick processing and storage for its distributions beginning on Mondays. Ever since we began moving to our new farm in Washington County, I had been hoping to expand this outreach. I found a means of doing so in June.
After one of our Sunday markets, I left a message with an organization known as Community Comfort Kitchen, asking if they could accept fresh produce and how I might best get it to them. A representative called me back and told me a woman named Mary would come to the farm to collect what we could offer.
“What is your address?,” the representative asked.
When I told her it was 5 Wrights Road, she laughed in delight.
“Mary grew up with your farm,” she said. “It’s her family’s farm.”
“Mary is a Wright?,” I asked.
“Mary is a Wright.”
After hanging up, I began searching Google for Mary Wright. She might have been doing the same. I quickly discovered she had started to follow our farm’s Facebook page, and that she not only collected food donations but worked with other food retrieval projects in the community. On her first visit with us at the farm, she arrived with her father Bob. I was in the fields weeding, and Jim was in the goat barn assisting one of our does with a difficult birthing of triplets. We both ran out to greet them with excitement. The Wright family had lived on the land from the beginning of the 19th century to the first decade of the 21st century. I had heard descendants were in the area but had not yet had the opportunity to meet any of them.
“Can you tell me about this?” I asked, gesturing toward a tangle of thorny vines bearing beautiful yellow roses. It was climbing around the edge of the historic Wright home and would be lost when the house was to be lifted from its foundation if we didn’t try to save it. Because the Wright family had built the house in 1805, I had had nightmares of losing a 200-year-old rose bush.
“My mother put it in,” Bob Wright said. “Sometime in the 1960s or 70s.”
I laughed and heaved a sigh of relief. “So if we can’t keep it alive, we won’t be losing a Revolutionary War relic?”
“Well, it might be older; she did get it from a cutting at another farm,” Bob replied. “But you’ll be able to save at least some of it.”
As he described how to dig out and re-plant the roots, we all looked around. The Wrights talked about the cows they used to raise, and we compared milking one of those bovines with milking goats. I showed Mary the garden, and invited her to go through the house and to take out any items they might want before we moved in.
Later, as I reflected on the coincidence of meeting members of the Wright family through an effort to distribute food to others, I was reminded of how ownership is illusory. Eurocentric values lead us to believe that a document like an ownership deed gives us full control over land. In reality, land tends more to own us, making us caretakers and temporary occupants. The Wright name marks the street address of our farm and remarkably the family held the deed to the land for two centuries. But ultimately in 2011 they decided to leave the land. The deed was passed along via sale first to one set of farmers, then to a farmland-holding firm, and as of September 2020, to us.
In signing our intent to hold the land, we inherited a history that remains incomplete. I seize fragments as I find them, in hopes of piecing a little more together, bit by bit.
Back at the old farm in Greenfield, I sense a similar lack of completeness. We do not know exactly when the house on that land was built. We only know it was once a much larger farm that shrunk in size and influence with the advent of real-estate transactions after World War II. As the land left its first owners and entered the market, its value was measured not by the qualities of its soil or that soil’s relationship to the creek waters behind it but by what it could command as a residential commodity.
Now, I continue to pack boxes and clear out closets. As I do so, I look out the windows and watch deer re-discover what are once again fence-free fields. I invite them to graze on the thick grasses that have swiftly grown in, and think about how these grasses house hummingbirds, butterflies, birds, bees, and other wild pollinators. I think of the perennials we started that will return — asparagus and horseradish — and the ones that were here before us — rhubarb and chives. And I think about the house itself and its past, a past only imagination can fully re-create.
A mother duck emerges from a hidden nest with ducklings. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Without human intervention, nature lets life flourish unfettered. Grasses fill cracks in our driveway, vines start to pour into the garage. We can control the wildness a little, but like the produce that is growing faster than I can harvest it, we ultimately must yield.
The Solstice arrived at 11:52 p.m. on June 20. It was a Sunday and Father’s Day. Jim celebrated the day with the discovery of four ducklings, hatched a day or two earlier in the secrecy of a farm duck’s nest. I enjoyed the day — the longest day — with a market, fresh salad, and sleep.
As high summer begins, we will continue to enjoy long days and long hours of work, even as our minds begin turning slowly toward the cyclical shift toward diminishing daylight and fall.