Swamp Creek Produce

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The next couple of months were spent fertilizing, plowing, starting seedlings, and getting machinery ready (all done while we were still driving school buses). Lettuce went into the ground in early April and everything else about a month later. The first sowing of corn (1 /4 acre) was made on April 23 and was killed by three nights of late frost. Tomatoes, under hot caps, came a few days afterward, and the month of May was chock full of planting: cucumbers, zucchini, more tomatoes, cantaloupes, more corn, and peppers.

Ali, yes, those peppers! Since all the room in the hotbeds was taken up by tomatoes and cantaloupes and we couldn't raise our own pepper seedlings, we bought thousands of bare root transplants from a Georgia outfit. The seller goofed somehow, though, and the shipment went to the wrong airport and sat for three days in 90° heat. When we finally got the PLANTS FIVE days after they were sent most of the seedlings were dead. The company, however, guaranteed its deliveries so we complained, renewed the order, and picked up a healthy batch the next day (for which we had to pay the shipping charges).

The weather report called for rain that afternoon, and we transplanted peppers like mad in the hope of beating the shower. No such luck! We finished the job in a downpour, got covered with mud from head to foot, and headed for our favorite swimming hole to clean off.

That was the last rainfall for six weeks, which meant watering the whole farm manually with 100 feet of hose and a 55 gallon drum full of water mounted behind the little tractor. Everything grew very well especially the weeds, and we'll be the first to admit that hand hoeing four acres twice is no fun at all. Still, we did it with the help of our friends, Ruth and Joe and kept the land clean and well cared for. (Fortunately, we were able to cultivate the six acres of corn with the tractor which saved a lot of time and work.)

Our first harvest of lettuce was a real high point: The A+ quality pleased the federation, and the premium prices we received made us happy. After all the money we'd laid out, it was good to see some coming in.

Our optimism, however, was shadowed by a couple of clouds on the horizon. About this time, for instance, one cat' the three participating unions of coops found it too difficult to send someone to the central meeting point every week, anal so it dropped out of the arrangement. Swamp Creek, too, was having transport problems because the early harvest of cukes, zukes, and cherry tomatoes didn't amount to enough for pickup by the coop truck. It looked as though another month would pass before we'd have the needed, quantity, and we arranged with Martin to take turns delivering both farm' produce to the city.

Two further problems soon developed in our relations with the co op buyers. One was that the member groups thought were charging too much. Rates arrived at by weekly bargaining with the federation were based on commercial market reports plus 10 percent because we were delivering everything ourselves, and because the federation's organizers genuinely felt that organic growers should get premium prices.

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