Conversations are as important as sales

After a hand-shake to seal the sailboat deal, I give Sandy a small bouquet.  “It’s a thank you in advance for your help getting the boat sold.”  Sandy laughs.

“The person we have in mind used to own a Laser.” Tucker says.  “She had a really stressful job.  She’d get out of work late, after dark. In order to blow off steam, she went for a sail.  Used to stuff light sticks into the batten pockets and take the boat out to Latimer Lighthouse by Fishers Island.”

“Can you image what that looked like!” asks Sandy.

Well, yes, I can ... but I’m skeptical.  With a fifteen-foot fiberglass hull, the Laser is a single-handed racing boat and a day-sailor. Tucker knows the qualities of the boat well being a top international competitor in the class.  The boat has neither bow nor stern lights; nor running lights port and starboard.  Three glow-lights in sail pockets are inventive but definitely not Coast Guard approved.  I sometimes think sailors have a many tall tales as fishermen. 

Later in the morning someone drops by to inquire about renting my home for the winter.  Another offers a heads up on an interesting house which might soon come up for sale.

I may be the “Flower Lady” who sells bouquets at a Farmers Market, but I am also a part of a rich network of people who use this time and this place to exchange information and help each other solve mutual problems.  Here, conversations are just as important as sales. 

Conversation make a difference ...

Should we expect a buying opportunity also to be a social opportunity?

To participants in Farmers Markets, conversation is extremely important. According to sociologists, people who shop at a Farmers Market engage in ten times as much verbal exchange as those shopping at a big-box store.  

At a market in late July, I pay close attention to the number and types of conversations I engage in.  The amount of information exchanged and the number of problems solved amaze me.  Here’s what that morning looks like.

Emmy is a distinguished woman.  Every hair is in place.  She stops by to say she’d consider taking Buff The Cat for the winter while I travel to California.  Else, a mutual friend, told here I need a caretaker. ( “Hostess,” Emmy calls the position.)

A few minutes later, I see Else and thank her for encouraging Emmy to consider my cat as a houseguest.  Else does not remember any such suggestion.

“Don’t think Emmy ever had a cat.  Don’t think she’d do well with one.  More a dog person, really,”  Else says in her brusque, good-natured way.

My next conversation is with Tucker, president of the Stonigton Small Boat Association, and his wife Sandy.

“By the way, Tucker, I’m looking for a buyer for my Laser.  Any ideas who might be interested?”  I ask.  After several windy, white-knuckle racing seasons, I have decided to acknowledge that I am underweight and over aged for the boat.

I know just the person for the boat!” Tucker replies.  “Consider it a done deal.”

Meet and greet at the Farmers Market

It’s not only freshness and quality that drop out of the food equation when we shop at huge grocery stores.  We also lose human connections -- with local farmers who grow especially for us and with our friends and neighbors as we meet regularly to participate in the ancient ritual of going to market.

Our Saturday Farmers Market in Stonington is a beehive of activity where people meet neighbors, and farmers indulge in brief bits of education.  By contrast, the local supermarket is a box with a high ceiling where speed and efficiency rule.  Well-oiled carts wide aisles, and brightly lit display cases loaded with over 30,000 items --- all tout the same themes: shop fast, pay less.  Human interactions take a back seat.  Greeters at the door (part-time workers probably earning minimum wage with few benefits) are the only hints that human interaction just may be important.  But most greeters are weary or bored.  We easily ignore each other.

At a superstore there may be over thirty aisles of food but no conversation.  Maybe a “Hello” or “Have a good day” brackets your food transaction. Or maybe not.  If you process your purchases through the increasingly popular self-checkout center, you will get a greeting only if something goes wrong.  Only a machine malfunction brings a clerk who oversees four to six stations to assist you. 

But, is it really important to serve up conversation with the purchase of food or flowers?  Is it possible to raise the bar and put social needs on the same pedestal as economic needs?

Vegetable perfectionism

The perfection of grocery store produce came up for discussion one summer day when Elisa Whitman worked with me as a garden apprentice in my food garden.  Professionally, Elisa teaches biology and environmental science at Stonington High School.  She is a vivacious woman with a great sense of humor.

“Look at this zucchini!  This eggplant!” she says, picking up vegetables just harvested from the garden.  “They look just like the ones at the grocery store!”

We both laugh ... at first.  But it’s a sobering point to consider: a grocery store, not our own mouths, set the criteria for perfection.  We not only have learned to judge excellence by the eye instead of the taste buds; we have also learned to hold unrealistic expectation about what produce should look like.

A similar bias holds true for varieties.  In other words, if your grocery store carries only Anjou and Bartlett pears, the appearance of a brownish Bosque or a small hard Sickle pear seems different and unappealing.

After all, some vegetables and fruits are naturally larger or smaller than the average.  But grocery stores display only the industry norm.  Oversized or undersized items seem odd when they do appear.

This expectation of perfections sets the stage for starlet strawberries and tangelos that could win tango contest.  Everything is bright, perky, uniform, and flawless.  How does a domestic tomato compete with the champions at the store?  Especially if it rained last night after a two-week dry spell, and the poor thing split its sides in relief. 

An apple is never just an apple

Big-box food retailers would like to convince us that an apple or a pear is the same no matter how it is grown or where we buy it.  They want customers to accept corporate branding as the assurance of flavor instead of our own taste buds.  Despite what industrial agriculture wants us to believe, however, an apple is not just an apple.  Each apple is the end product of a way of life.

Applies are not the only food item influenced by corporate food giants.  Take the tomato, for example.  A taste test quickly proves the point.  Juice oozes from a Thistle Farm tomatoes, while I need a serrated blade to pierce and cut the skin of a South American winter wonder found at Wal-Mart.  I may have to settle for an off-season import, but nothing will convince me that those two tomatoes are the same.

When we shop at a big-box food center rather than a Farmers Market, we lose control over freshness, quality, and variety of our foods.  Instead of an apple picked by hand by the orchard’s owner and delivered to market the next day, industrially produced fruits and vegetable arrive unripe and weary after a long journey from a far-away farm.  Then, in hangar-sized regional distribution centers, produce is “ripened” artificially with carefully regulated doses of ethylene gas. 

Fortunately for big-box stores, apples exposed to ethylene for 24 to 48 hours will ripen more uniformly than in the orchard.  With a little more ethylene, above the two days already endured, even less mature, rock-hard apples will begin to turn red.  Now, these perfectly-sized fruits that have been perfectly ripened are ready for reshipment to a local super-sized food store. 

Apples from a different world

Where we buy out food determines what we buy.  In other words, I will not find a Purity Farm apple in a supermarket; or an apple from a big-box food supplier at a Farmers Market.  Each apple inhabits a totally different world.  There are no crossovers.

For me, the biggest contrast in food-purchase environments is between a Farmers Market and a Wal-Mart Supercenter.  Wal-Mart began selling food in l988.  Within twenty years , it became the largest grocer in the United States.  There are 5,000 Wal-Mart outlets and 3,400 are “Supercenters;” that is, stores that combine the sale of  furniture, clothing, and garden supplies with food products.  Each of these stores is the size of four football fields, or four acres under roof. 

Did you know that Wal-Mart’s annual revenue is two percent of the United States gross national product?  Wal-Mart, if ranked by revenue, is the world’s largest corporation.  In terms of revenue from all products, Wal-Mart is four times larger than the next largest company.  Its revenue is eight times the size of Microsoft. 

When I enter my local Wal-Mart Supercenter with its 38 aisles of food, I enter a world where I may buy more food for less money, but I also leave behind my local food supply.  Small local farmers do not participate in Wal-Mart’s food empire.  Small farms are not designed to see to such a giant.  For one thing, small farmers cannot provide the uniformity or the predictability Wal-Mart wants -- let alone the quantity.  Consider the specs for a No. 1 Bartlett pear described by the California Fruit industry: “2 1/4 inches round after the crown and before the base, showing no flaws, and displaying an even yellowish color.”

An Apple Tasting

The next morning Liesbeth and I finish our usual early morning stint at the McC’s garden.  I invite her for a cup of coffee and some apples.  Sunlight pours through tall south-facing windows.  A muted blue-green plaid tablecloth covers the round kitchen table.  Each of the five apple samples from Paul’s orchard has its own clear glass plate, a label, and a blue-handled knife ready to cut it open.  I approach the collection just as I do a session of wine tasting.  I bring a combination of ignorance, curiosity, and anticipation.

Yellow Bell Flower 

Our favorite apple by far is the “Yellow Bell Flower.”  It’s a very large apple, yellow with a red bush on the outside, pale lemon-yellow flesh inside.  Paul says it was “considered ancient in 1817.”  It’s crisp to the bite with a fulsome flavor that could be further enhanced by cooking.  I understand why Yellow Bell    Flower is a favorite pie apple. 

Golden Russet

Second on our list of favorites is the “Golden Russet.”  Small and greenish-brown, the apple feels a bit mushy when squeezed.  I am not impressed with this ugly little thing until I bite into a piece of it.  It’s surprisingly tangy and has been used to make cider since colonial times. 

 Two apples tie for third place: “Thompkins County King” and “Baldwin.

In last place is “Fameuse” also called “Snow Apple.”  It is a large red apple with perfect snow-white flesh.  Both Liesbeth and I find its texture and taste insipid, be we are not in the majority.  This apple dates to the 1500s and is still popular today.

As I sweep remnants of our tasting into a pan to make an apple dessert, a lady cardinal arrives at the birdbath.  Here to drink, it seems, and not to bathe, but a change of mind sends her into the basin for a stiff-kneed dip.  Head first, she tosses the water over the top and onto her back and wings.  A robin arrives.  The cardinal departs for a branch in the birch tree.  The robin, a more sensuous bather, squats to get as much of herself as possible into the water, then splashes enthusiastically, sending waves of water over the side.  I chuckle at her antics as I add a topping of oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter to complete the desert. 

18th Century Purity Farm (con't)

Paul Desrochers is an inventive fellow who wears coke-bottle glasses.  He manages several other local orchards, as well as his own.  Paul’s ingenuity helps him solve many orchard problems.  For instance, he created a five-wire deer fence supported by cedar trees felled in his woodlot.  He also used old hay bales to house bumble bees.

“Bumble bees are our best pollinators.  But we also keep honey bees.”

Paul’s resourcefulness also led to the development of special pruning techniques to keep trees small but productive.  Neither he nor his much shorter wife ever climbs a ladder to pick fruit.  Cherry trees grow under a special netting system Paul invented but still considers a work in progress.  The couple uses limited spray on fruit trees and no herbicides.  All the small fruit -- strawberries, raspberries and blueberries -- are grown organically.  

“We hand pick bugs and toss them to the trout in the pound.”  Paul jokes.

Along with heirloom apples, peaches, and cherries, the couple grows, at JoAnn’s insistence, apricots and nectarines.

“I have to ration my apricots or there will be a stampede at market!”  Paul says with a grin. 

Modern fruit varieties grow on a terrace a bit farther down the hill.  Instead of growing independently as individual trees, like the heirloom apple trees, these contemporary varieties are planted at a slight angle.  Then their trunks are attatched to two tiers of wire.  This highter density Europenan-style planting pattern, similar to techniques used in a vineyard, allows the trees to come into production in their second year and into full production in five years.

“A close-planted orchard of modern apples can produce 1,000 to 1,200 bushels per acre,” Paul explains. “On the other hand, an orchard of free-standing heirlooms produce only 400 bushels per acre.  But the heirlooms are very popular.”

Before I leave, Paul steps into his walk-in cooler which maintains fruit quality after harvest.  He pulls out several varieties of apples for me to take home.  

18th Century Purity Farm

The next day, I head up to 18th Century Purity Farm in Moosup.  Squaw Rock Road runs along a ridge that overlooks Route I-395.  It is mostly ledge rock and big houses, a strange place for a farm.  Then I come to a small valley that falls away through several terraces.  Each level is planted with apple trees, or blueberry bushes, or strawberries, or asparagus.  Farthest down the hill is a field of potatoes.  The current farm covers 45 acres, but only ten are cultivated.  The rest is woodlot.

JoAnn and Paul Desrochers greet me when I arrive.  JoAnn wears a well-worn, wide-brimmed straw hat and an ample smile.  The pair started Purity Farm in April 1996.  Paul has recently retired, but when I first met him, he worked full time on second shift at a local company that produces high-tech batteries for space vehicles and deep-water submersibles.  The pair share selling duties at ten Farmers Markets each week.

As we walk down the hill to the first terrace, I hear the hum of traffic in the near distance.

“A lot of the original farm -- 100 acres established in 1738 -- is buried under that road,” JoAnn explains, pointing to I-395.  Her family has been growing apples here since the 1870s, but ancestral roots go back even farther: her family arrived in Moosup in 1699.

We arrive at a small orchard.  Several well-spaced rows contain free-standing trees that grow about eight feet tall. "These are the antique varieties we grow," Paul explains, pointing to hand-painted signs under each tree: Baldwin, Arkansas Black, Rambo.  Of the 62 types of apples in the orchard, forty are heirlooms.  An heirloom variety is generally defined as a type of apple grown prior to the 1930s.  A popular heirloom is Red Delicius, introduced from Peru in 1874.  In contrast, there are newer apples such as Gala, a native of New Zealnd that has gained an enthusiastic following since the l970s. 

Starry Night Farm

Later in the week, I visit Ibby Archer at Starry Night Farm.  Though most farmers at Stonington's Farmers Market raise their crops using organic methods, Starry Night Farm is the only farm in the group certified as organic by the the United States Department of Agriculture.  The farm has been Certified Organic since 2001.

Ibby hesitates when I ask to visit.  “There’s lots of weeds,” she apologizes.

“Sun and rain equal weeds,” I reply. “Don’t worry, we are both in the same business.”

We sit on her stone patio surrounded by overgrown perennial beds.  Spiky blue echinops tower over the weeds, along with bright yellow blooms of Jerusalem artichoke.  Ibby’s farm operation represents one of the important innovation at Farmers Market, the introduction of value-added products. 

“My speciality is garlic-scape pesto,” she explains.  “Scapes are those curly stalks that grow from the top of hard-neck garlic in early summer.  The bulbs are attempting to create flowers and seeds.  Most farmers grow garlic for its bulb, so the scape is usually discarded.  I harvest scapes from my own land and pick more from other local garlic growers.  In all, I froze almost 100 pounds of scape this year.”

On a weekly basis, Ibby rents a certified kitchen at a local church to process the crop.  After chopping the scapes, she adds oil, nuts and cheese.  Small plastic containers with a Starry Night label hold the pesto.

“I use a church kitchen because my home kitchen is not certified for commercial cooking,” Ibby explains.

In January, 2013, California enacted the Homemade Food Act which amends the state’s Health Code to create a new category of food operation called “Cottage Food Operations.” Thirty other states have similar laws. These regulations allows home preparation of foods available as direct sales to customers or as value-added products sold at Farmers Markets.  Hopefully, similar laws will soon spread to all states.  

Conch bait

A buyer from the local fish wholesaler, Gambardella, speaks up for a larger horseshoe crab catch and a longer season. Located at the Town Dock, the business is a major force in Stonington.  When a Gambardella daughter marries, the whole fleet is in port to celebrate.

“Cut up, horseshoe crab is good bait for conch,” the buyer reminds the DEP representative.  “Right now, we have to buy lots and lots from out of state.  Might as well give our Connecticut boys a chance to earn some money here.”

An environmentalist from the Audubon Society objects to enlarging the size of the catch or extending the length of the season. 

“Shorebirds have evolved to time their migration to the availability of horseshoe crab eggs,” she explains.  These pearly-green eggs are laid in holes, on sandy beaches, then buried.  A single clutch contains thousands of eggs.

One fisherman says in a loud aside, “Birds are birds.  Let them eat bird seed.”

On the other hand, a local shellfish farmer has no objections to a longer crab catch season since horseshoe crabs feed on his thumbnail sized oysters called “spat.”

"Those crabs are attracted to spat like flies to a spill of coke,” he says.  “They’re as bad as rabbits in a carrot patch.”

All this discussion surrounds a creature that predates dinosaurs and will be cut into quarters for conch bait.  But then I remember what Bobby told me about conch.

“As a kid, I used to pick conch off the beach and give them to the old Italians in town.  Now I get $60 a bushel for them.”