The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  It took thousands of years of artificial selection to turn that piddling 6-kernel cob into the 1,200-kernel monster corn is today. Along the way, Zea mays has been cultivated into specialized varieties: flour corn, sweet corn, popcorn, dent corn (primarily used for animal feed), ornamental corn, corncob corn (raised for the cobs, which transform into a solvent for extracting crude petroleum), high-lysine corn, and high-oil corn. Flavors of the eating ears range from sweet to starchy—but up until the 1950s, even the sweetest eating corn would start to lose its flavor shortly after harvest because the plant immediately began to convert the sugar into starch. For a long time, this is what kept people growing their own corn—and why local farmers bothered to grow it, too. Corn couldn’t be kept longer than a day or two without losing its sweetness, and it couldn’t be canned without adding loads of sugar and salt.

  In the 1950s, the fate of the world’s crops was still largely in the hands of farmers and agriculture universities. John Laughnan, a professor at the University of Illinois, published a paper in 1953 that he thought could be of use to the commercial corn industry: he’d devised a corn hybrid that contained four to ten times more sugar than the traditional sweet corn and, even more important, didn’t convert that sugar into starch. He called it “supersweet.”41

  If there’s one thing that college taught me, it’s that scientists generally suck at communicating with the general public. Laughnan’s supersweet corn—which had the potential to revolutionize the corn industry—flopped. It wasn’t until the 1980s that seed companies got serious about developing commercially viable forms of this hybrid, and the agriculture world caught on to the potential brilliance of this concept. Now, corn can stay sweet for a week—plenty of time to get it from a field in Iowa to a grocery store in California and onto your plate. Americans produce 2.8 billion pounds of supersweet corn per year.42 Yet that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the stuff we’re growing for animals. Field corn—or corn destined to be processed and fed to cattle, hogs, or chickens—makes up the majority of the corn market. (My chickens are eating some of this corn in their grain ration.) In 2009, while all the country’s farmers planted around 656,000 acres of sweet corn,43 Mississippi alone planted 730,000 acres of field corn. And Mississippi isn’t even among the top fifteen field corn–producing states. Feed grade corn covers eighty-five million acres nationwide; for every one acre of human corn, there are more than one hundred acres of livestock corn.

  Ironically, American corn-fed cows would probably be better off if they were turned loose in a corn field to feast on the corn leaves and stalks. It is, after all, a grass. Instead, giant machines flatten the cellulose-rich corn stalks into the ground, strip them of their paltry two-per-stalk cobs, and feed that to the cattle that live thousands of miles away.

  Emmett’s parents used to own livestock, but now they borrow them. In early summer—when the grasses on the property are as high as an elephant’s knee, if not its eye—a motley herd arrived on the ranch. A friendly Brahman with huge wattles and a fleshy backpack, a couple of mean-looking bulls with their famously large heads, and a host of nervous new mamas and leggy calves ranged the property. They’d trim the grasses down to nubs, reducing the fire danger and fertilizing the ground for the following year’s growth.

  When our first planting of corn was harvested, Emmett’s dad suggested that we feed the still-green corn stalks to the cows. We piled them up in a pickup truck and, feeling a bit like we were in a car commercial, drove it out on the range.

  You know how cows have a tendency to look dumb and bored? So dumb you almost don’t feel guilty when you start a car guessing game of how many hamburgers would that black and white one make?

  Well, the free-range cows on the property did not look stupid. They looked rabid.

  As soon as they spotted the heap of corn stalks spilling over our tailgate, they barreled down the hill toward the truck, lowing urgently. Emmett quickly climbed into the truck bed and I remained in the driver’s seat; he tossed corn stalks out the back while I kept the truck moving so we wouldn’t be entirely surrounded by several tons of overly enthusiastic ruminants. Still, a couple of the cows had clearly decided that the stalks in the truck were always better than the stalks on the ground. While the rest of the herd was content to munch on the stalks we’d tossed them, five cows doggedly pursued the pickup, easily extending their heads over the truck’s side to munch on the stalk pile.

  After a while, Emmett and I traded places so I could experience the adrenaline rush of jumping into the middle of a cow feeding frenzy. Perched on top of a pile of corn stalks, wobbling as the truck lumbered over bumps, I was knocked over by the huge head of an animal trying to wrest food from me before I even had the chance to toss it overboard. I’d always wanted to go on safari: maybe this was it. Over to our left, a black-backed jackal feasts on a dik-dik gazelle. Look! A giraffe and her calf lumbering up to our truck. Now, watch out for the rhinos ... they know we have food in the truck, and they can be quite aggressive when they’re hungry....

  And then the thought occurred to me: at our farm, corn wasn’t a subsistence crop, or even a cash crop. It would never be perfect, and we needn’t expect it to be: let the corn worms eat a little cake, and the ants eat a little corn worm. From now on I’d measure the worth of corn not by the number of ears it produced or the dollars it brought in, but by the excitement of those it fed. I thought back to the faces that lit up at the farmers’ market, drawn in to our stand to make other purchases; the chickens that played tag with the corn worms for hours; the cows that raced for a taste of green grass in the middle of the brown California summer and, in their eagerness, bowled over their hapless feeder.

  Maybe corn wasn’t so useless after all—assuming that you used the entire plant and that you were able to find at least a few worm friendlies in your community. And somehow corn seemed more elegant when approached holistically: kernels for humans, who bred them over the years to satisfy our need for quick calories; stalks for cattle, who had been eating similar grasses for most of history; and worms for the chickens, whose close cousins still subsist almost solely on bugs and grubs.

  And who, at ten weeks old, were entirely capable of snatching and safely digesting even the fattest, meanest, kingpin corn worm—much to the delight of a certain worm-hating chicken keeper.

  Chapter 8:

  THE LONG WAIT

  Winter Squash

  In mid-October on a market morning, dawn didn’t arrive at the field until 7:00 a.m.—about the same time we did. I pulled my station wagon up next to the compost pile. Emmett was already unloading harvest bins from the pickup. His breath puffed white, and beyond him, stripes of silver anointed the ground.

  I scrambled out of the car, pulling down my wool hat and tugging my scarf a bit tighter.

  “Did you see this?” I asked Emmett, who’d arrived a few minutes before me.

  “I know, isn’t it gorgeous?”

  Frost coated the wide green leaves of each winter squash plant, catching and tossing back tiny pieces of the early morning light. In the furrows of the newly planted winter garden, frost highlighted the trench walls, tracing the contours of soil matter, the compost and bits of leaves, the rough manure and smooth chunks of clay.

  We had harvesting to do and a market to get to, but still we stole a few minutes for wonder.

  “Look at this!” I said. “The hose is frozen; I can’t water.” In San Diego, hoses never freeze, and somehow the fact that this one was frozen made me giggle.

  We both wandered around for a few minutes, breathing in the sharp air, blinking the cold away from our eyeballs, examining different parts of the transformed field. And then I noticed something.

  “Hey, Emmett,” I called out. “I think the winter squash has frostbite.”

  On each beige butternut squash, a darker color splashed across the top of the gourd. I checked the delicata: same thing. Ditto for the spaghetti, sweet dumpling, jack-o’-lanterns, and pie pumpkins. All appeared to have
suffered some sort of frost damage.

  “Did we just wreck our winter squash? I thought we were supposed to leave them out through the first frost.” We’d heard that we were supposed to wait for the first freeze to kill off the winter squash plants: it would be easier to pick out the gourds, and it sweetened them up, too.

  “I don’t know,” Emmett replied. “But there’s not much we can do about it now.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “I guess this means the end of the cucumbers, zucchini, and crookneck squash.”

  The thought dampened my mood a bit, but it didn’t bring negativity so much as a sense of solemnity. Ecclesiastes, right? And that song by The Byrds?

  It occurred to me that there aren’t just four seasons—there are thousands. And the season we were in right then lasted only one morning. The world was as white as it would ever be in coastal California. The planet’s finest lace—spiderwebs hung with frozen drops—overlaid iridescent green gowns. There was no end here; just possibility. After all, I couldn’t water, the dark garden hose was stiff and frozen.

  We had planted the squash three and a half months earlier. As far as I could tell, the intervening weeks comprised something of a miracle, or maybe a series of miracles.

  As we set about planning our squash field, Emmett’s dad described a longtime Italian friend who planted winter squash without watering them at all. This man knew precisely the time of the season when the ground would still be wet enough to trigger the seeds’ germination, and the air sufficiently warmed to ensure that the frost wouldn’t sweep in and burn the seedlings. He’d stick the seeds in the ground and, ecco, they’d sprout without any irrigation. In the clay soil of a river’s floodplain, overhead watering forms a crust that can be difficult for tender seedlings to break through—so his was a valuable skill indeed.

  A winter squash swelled throughout the summer before ripening and changing color.

  Italian legends. French, Italian, Japanese, and American squash. And it was a Mexican man who taught us how to plant them all.

  I don’t speak Spanish and couldn’t catch the few words I did know from the man who had spoken it for sixty years. Enrique mimed with some exaggeration for me, and talked to Emmett, who translated. Dig a hole. Fill it with water. Wait. Maybe an afternoon, maybe a day, maybe two or three days. When it’s reached the perfect moisture level—he poked his finger in the side of the hole—where it’s easy to push the seed in, but not so soupy as to cause the seed to rot before it reaches the surface, stick four seeds in the side of the wall. East, west, north, south. Fill in the hole with moist dirt, then compact the soil by pushing a fist down onto it or walking on top of it, then sprinkle dry dirt on the top.l

  And then wait.

  Miraculously, without any additional water, Enrique told us, in about a week the seedlings would start poking through the dry dust. The surface they sprouted from may look like a desert, but their roots would be firmly fixed in the moist soil beneath.

  We planted 11 rows with 25 mounds apiece, 3 or 4 plants per mound: 825 plants. Jack-o’-lantern, Marina di Chioggia, spaghetti, sugar pie, Sibley, baby Hubbard, delicata, sweet dumpling, kuri, acorn, kabocha, and Long Island cheese.

  And before we knew it, the field was littered with tiny green things. Winter squash seedlings are like beans: robust and ready for action from the start. After they broke the surface, they rapidly unfurled three good-sized leaves. Then we weeded them for the first and last time. Later on, we’d hoe the paths for ease of walking, but these plants would shade out most competitors in short order.

  Overnight (or so it seemed) they sprawled along the ground and wasted little time with courtship. The first male blossoms—showy, bright orange, the size of my hand—were rapidly followed by female blossoms, equally showy and possessed of a small, hard, round green fruit.

  With the arrival of the first few flowers, we panicked. Where were the bees? We had no problem attracting flea beetles and cucumber beetles to dine on the tender young leaves of our brassicas. But here we were offering what were clearly the world’s finest flowers, and no bees bothered to show up for supper.

  We had heard of a supposed solution to lack of bees: hand pollination. In China, this is a way of life. In some areas of the country, all apple trees are pollinated by the hands of farmers. Worried that our crop wouldn’t set fruit, Emmett and I personally attended to the first adolescent bushes. We plucked out the male stamens and pressed them into the female flowers, smashing them together awkwardly.

  Bees are gentler as they perform the act of entomophily. They slip inside the petals and sip on sugary nectar, filling their honey stomachs. Yellow dust coats their furry abdomens and clings to the hairs on their legs. They groom themselves, concentrating the protein-rich pollen into pollen sacs behind the bees’ knees to bring back to the hive. Thus costumed in the flower’s sperm, and all the while processing the nectar into honey, they head to the next flower, where they repeat the process. Yellow dust shakes from the bee’s torso and fertilizes the pistil. New pollen commingles with the old, coating the bee further. The bee is the act of flower sex: at once delicate, sloppy, and sensual.

  And then there was Emmett and me, feeling rather sordid as we tore out the male parts of the flowers and forced them against the female parts. It wasn’t a job I enjoyed, and considering the size of the field, it could take days, or even weeks, to pollinate all of the squash. I thought of the recent spate of emptied hives, victims of Colony Collapse Disorder. The work performed by insect pollinators is truly unparalleled, and estimated to be worth $57 billion per year in the United States.44 Humans have been able to mechanize almost every aspect of the growing process in order to mass produce food—but so far we haven’t found a replacement for bees, and if we don’t ensure their continued survival, we’ll soon find ourselves spending untold hours raping flowers.

  Fortunately, our luck soon changed. The presence of bees tends to be proportional to the presence of flowers, and it seemed that there was a minimum number of flowers required to attract their attention in the first place. Once our flowers became an unstoppable force—flamboyant orange diner signs littering a green freeway—the bees came. And so did the opportunity for an early harvest from our winter squash vines.

  With the flowers out in droves, I’d zip around the field on market mornings chasing the bees, trying (like them) to find the biggest and brightest flowers. I’d snip them with florist shears and carefully place each blossom on a cookie sheet, which, when full, would in turn be placed in the most pampered spot in the truck: my lap. On our inaugural flower harvest, a disoriented bee came careening out of the flower tray as we started down the road to market. First one, then another, and another, until the cab was buzzing with involuntary stowaways. They’d gone in for a morning swig of nectar and come out to find themselves in a whole new world. We escorted them out of the car windows, knowing that they’d never find their way back to the hive and sad to see them die.

  At the market, the display of flaming orange flowers drew gasps from the customers, and even from other farmers. They’d be snatched up for fifty cents each, destined to be stuffed with feta or ricotta, folded into crepes or pancakes, or breaded and deep-fried. But eventually, the flower harvest slowed and we all but forgot about the winter squash. Emmett would turn on overhead sprinklers to water the jungle every few weeks—the squash field being the only part of our farm without drip irrigation—but other than that, the squash field was a no-man’s land. We were too busy beating back the cucumbers, beans, summer squash, and tomatoes. Too busy canning tomatoes and trying to dry wormy corn. We didn’t really remember the squash until September.

  At the farmers’ market on the day of the first frost, we checked in with the other farmers. They chattered with each other: some had spotted frost on the side of the road on the way into town, but their fields were safe.

  You could call it bad luck, but there’s a reason that this season was ours alone. At night, heat radiates quickly from the earth. The air quietly rea
rranges itself, densest layers down. With a good arm and a miraculous parting of trees, you could throw a stone from our field and hit the Russian River. I imagine the cold air flowing like the waters, always seeking the low point, pressed down with the weight of an atmosphere that stretches 430 miles above it. The river channel is a pathway for so much: fog when it exists, cold air when it doesn’t; salmon preparing to run and raccoons and deer and wild boar who root along its riverbanks. But it’s the sunken air, not the salmon starting to move, that gives us our singular season. The coldest air for miles around settles on our field, chilling and killing the squash and the beans.

  In September, we were startled. I was thinning beet seedlings, casting baby plants onto the path to die so that their neighbors could grow in stronger and faster, when Emmett called me out to the squash field.

  There, on the corner by the dirt road, rested a huge orange pumpkin. How something so obvious could have snuck up on us was beyond my comprehension.

  We wandered the field, which was suddenly filled with almost-pumpkins, almost-butternuts, almost-spaghettis. Everything the size it ought to be, but green. A few of the early ripeners had turned their proper colors: bright orange, beige, daffodil yellow. There were petite and perfect sweet dumplings and dark green turban-shaped monsters. (Lost in the dozen varieties we planted, we’d tell customers they were ornamental and sell them cheaply, until we suddenly remembered that those monsters were actually Marina di Chioggia, a sought-after heirloom Italian squash that’s delectable in ravioli and risotto.)

  The bounty of fall: squashes, pumpkins, and melons.

  Some plants—tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, beans—spend their energy pumping out fruit after fruit, taking the scattershot approach to spreading their seed. But these winter squash plants had taken an entire season to produce just a few vehicles for the next generation. One monstrous plant; two, maybe three, pumpkins.