A Precarious Beginning July 15, 2012

Greetings Friends of the Farm,

Sunday morning. By 10 AM I just had to come inside and rinse the sweat off my face. I'd done two batches of laundry. First the farm stand sheets, then our personal farmhouse sheets. All were on the line at the roof edge of the pole barn. The morning sun hit them sideways, helping to bleach out the stains of tomatoes and perspiration.


While the sun was working over the sheets, it had time to also hit my backside gently as I bent to examine, to search for, and often find, the tiny eggplant seedlings. In a gambling mood, I'd sown them several to a"hill" a week ago. Some of the seed, Daesene Green, was seven years old, the two other varieties of seed brands, new. I over-seeded the Daesene for that reason, but I also doubled the number of seeds of the others too.

It's dangerous out there for seeds and seedlings. You know that Pigweed Amaranth sows hundreds of thousands of seeds and hopes, of course, that they all will come up, but as Nature is a tough environment, the majority do not. If they did, most of them would falter anyway as too many people, too many rats, too many weeds on the same plot of ground get in each other's way.

Thinking about how some of my acquaintances urge me to go to yoga classes, I maintained a "dead (ramped up from 'down' dog" stance off and on for 150 feet. I finally gave up the potentially 220-foot task because of the sweat running into my eyes, but I thought about the hot atmosphere type of yoga that has interested some, so I felt a bond with the yoga-sufferers.

The little eggplants had just emerged a few days ago, and already they had quite a bit of company in the bed. Even okra with its comparatively large tractor-seat sized leaves tried to edge them out by killing them with shade. The okra is all over the farm, seeds dropping from each year's cow-horn pods. It's comforting to know that crops self seed, but alas, these "giant" seedlings had to be pulled and tossed, along with the teensy and not so teensy amaranth plants.

I'd sown the eggplant seeds every two feet, near a drip hole in the irrigation tape. The tape is several years old, carries little sticks plugging small leak-holes, and an orange and black inter-connection here and there to correct scissor cuts, but when I turned it on, all the official holes dripped out water in circular patterns. That was good performance as I wanted the eggplant to find home in every other circle of moisture.

Adjusting my vision to detect them -- seeing their distinctive bent-over emergence, then the standing tall two narrow-leaf posture -- I bent to the task of drawing a moat around them with my fingers, to mark their locations. Then I pulled every tiny competitor by hand in their immediate vicinity, and with the hoe, cleaned squatters from the rest of the bed. Thus the dead dog -- hoe in hand -- got to stand erect every four feet. Less than a relief, up and down is actually more of a pain to me than leaning one elbow on one knee and just stoop-walking like a dead dog for thirty feet or so. After that, being up is a great relief. And going down again makes one look at the end of the row and wish for it mightily, feeling in need of tongue-hanging-out panting in the shade somewhere.

I did give up, hoping I'd get to it first thing Monday morning. After all, it's Sunday, my day of rest. I shed my shoes at the laundry line and walked barefoot back out to the field to take the photos. I kept my eyes on the ground, for sticks, rocks and of course chicken poop.

I grew up going barefoot anytime I was not in school -- even walking barefoot on the sidewalks in downtown San Antonio (Chief, my dad, wound up carrying me if the concrete grew too hot for comfort) -- so it is an especial delight to me, at this time in my life, to once again feel the Earth's energy through the bare soles of my feet, tender as they now are. Heading back to the farmhouse, I scrubbed them off on the moist Bermuda grass (1/20 inch rain last night). It's good for something I reckon, besides softer walking.

It's been a hard year for eggplant. Unjustly so. The transplants we planted were healthy, but flea beetles took a hard hatred for them and nearly pierced them to death....so many minute pin-prick holes that there was little of the leaves to make energy for anything except a painful survival. Even new leaves were immediately affected. I'd almost given them up, but with the 2/10" of rain we received this past week (the first meaningful rain in two months), suddenly the eggplant felt like living. We actually harvested about 8 Daesenes for Saturday's market! Now, that is a ridiculously futile offering to our customers who love Daesene (it didn't even merit a sign), but it's a start, and we are encouraged.

So Friday my new intern, ranch girl Lauren, and I weeded the intensive-care crop and promised it we'd spray it with fish emulsion and seaweed to reward its tenacity and give it hope for a better life.


Maybe. You have to spray these concoctions before the sun arrives in full force, and sweating over the rest of the tiny new eggplant is now a priority. After all, some of them are already disappeared or distressed as something is nibbling on them. But most seem healthy, so we're going to try to give them a fair chance against the weeds.

It's almost a matter of honor. We're used to having huge amounts of eggplants, and we are taking this crop failure seriously. Life is fragile, for the newly born as well as those who've neared the end. We'll help them both. We love eggplant.

Carol Ann
PS: Eggplant is even getting attention from researchers:

*Eggplant extract: Solasodine rhamnosyl glycosides (BEC), which is a fancy name for extracts from plants of the Solanaceae family, such as eggplant, tomato, potato, Bell peppers, and tobacco ... impact only cancerous cells leaving normal cells alone. Eggplant extract cream appears to be particularly useful in treating skin cancer. Dr. Bill E. Cham, a leading researcher in this area, explains:
"The mode of action of SRGs [glycoalkaloids solasodine rhamnosy glycosides (BEC)] is unlike any current antineoplastic [anti-tumor] agent. Specific receptors for the SRGs present only on cancer cells but not normal cells are the first step of events that lead to apoptosis in cancer cells only, and this may explain why during treatment the cancer cells were being eliminated and normal cells were replacing the killed cancer cells with no scar tissue being formed."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/11/bromelain-enzyme-aid-cancer-treatment.aspx?e_cid=20120711_DNL_artNew_1