carrots 'n onions

Back on the farm, we've been doing a lot of vegetable harvesting since I've been here. Summer squash (which always gives me a rash on account of the little prickly spines all over the leaves and stems), beans (in green, yellow, and purple varieties), beets (purple and golden), cucumbers (I finally found out what a cucumber plant looks like), corn (lots and lots of it), potatoes (blue and pink and russet and King Edward), and even the odd tomato (we pick them while they're still green so the mice don't get to them). But I would have to say my favorite vegetable to harvest is the carrot.

Pulling a carrot is so simple -- just grab the greens around the base and give a gentle yank, and the carrot will hopefully pop right out of the ground. If the greens break off, then you have to root around in the soil and gently wriggle the carrot from between its neighbors. But usually they just pop out.

Most of the time, when we're harvesting carrots, we have to gather them into bunches, secured with rubber bands. A "bunch" is a rather unscientific measurement, generally between six and nine carrots. How do you know how many carrots to put in a bunch? Well, you want the bunch to be a "good-sized bunch." But how do you know what size is a "good size"? I often get a bit anxious during carrot harvests because no matter how many times Sue or Colleen might show me, I'm never quite sure if the bunches I'm making are too big or too small.

This is my favorite vegetable? The one which makes me think I'm either shortchanging the customer or bankrupting the farm with each bunch I make?

Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. And sometimes, as on Thursday, I get to harvest carrots without regard to assembling them into properly-sized bunches. That's right. Sue told me to go out and harvest a whole lug of purple carrots ("lug" is the word for the big plastic crates we use). Just rip off the tops and throw them right in. No bunches necessary.

Well. I was a carrot-pulling machine that morning.

The purple carrots we have on the farm aren't really purple so much as an orangeish-reddish-purple, all of those colors in different places and all at once, too. It's really a beautiful carrot, and the color only amplifies the pleasure of carrot-harvesting. Apparently, the purple carrot is the original carrot from which all other carrots are derived. The familiar orange carrot is a mere derivation, a mere shadow of the True Carrot. Take that, Bugs Bunny.

The purple carrots (which, by the way, are only purple on the surface, and are orange on the inside) taste a lot like the orange ones, except with a little extra kick, a little bitterness. The first time I tasted a purple carrot, it was straight out of the ground, and I thought that the different taste might just be from the dirt (hey, what's the point of living on a farm if you don't eat the freshest vegetables possible?). But a few days later, while washing and bagging the purple carrots for sale, I ate a few while Sue wasn't looking, and confirmed that the taste is, indeed, inherent to the carrot, and not just from the soil.

Most of the work on the farm is tedious in some way, which is to say that it involves doing a simple task over and over again. The difference is whether it's a task you enjoy -- such as pulling carrots -- or a task you don't enjoy. And I even get tired of harvesting carrots from time to time, looking at my lug and wondering why it doesn't fill up faster. But once that task is over, there's always something else to do. So there's no point really in getting all worked up about "getting it over with," since it's never really over (at least not until the end of the day).

That being said, I really don't like cleaning onions.

Somehow, there always seem to be more onions. In the packing shed, in the cinderblock building, in the barn with half of its walls missing -- the dirty onions are everywhere. "Cleaning" an onion basically means trying to rub off the dirt and maybe peel off its outermost skin to make it look more presentable. But you can't peel too far, because if you expose the flesh of the onion, then the onion will go bad. Ah, the anxiety! And of course, you want to clean fairly quickly, since it takes a lot of onions to fill a basket and the air in the cinderblock shed is full of enough dust to make even a non-asthmatic wheeze.

Still, it is something that must be done. On the farm, as in life, you must take the bad along with the good -- the onions and the carrots both.