TL;DR

We harvested celeriac, washed eggs, planted in the high tunnel, and packed bags for Friday pickup in Rockport. It was great weather and the work was good for my soul.

Finally, Our Secret ‘Celeriac Party’

Though I was out on the day that the celeriac plugs were planted in the main field in late April, I watered them as babies and watched them grow up all season long. Celeriac is of course related to celery, but instead of focusing on thick stalks and minimal roots, celeriac is all about the root which is round and bulbous like a turnip or rutabaga. Its stalks are chopped off in the field and the beards of the base are trimmed off as well. In about 2 hours, one volunteer harvested around 120 celeriac roots.

On the way back from picking them up from the field, heading back to the garage to wash them, I had a moment of appreciation for the weather, the space, and the opportunity to be doing this work all year long. Not being glued to a computer screen in a corporate office building for most days has been a real gift. If I could thank my prior VC overlords for their part in this journey, I would do it by giving them a bag of this fresh fall produce and telling them about what they’re missing out on, the kinds of things that money from doing their work can’t buy. Namely this would be:

• Health (hard, honest physical labor instead of being plugged in to a matrix)
• Head space (time for critical thinking, reflection, and re-orientation)
• Meaningful learning (from people not certifications and from natural systems)
• Connection to the broader cycle of life and my local community

If I were to take some of this year’s personal growth and apply it to my inevitable engagement in political activism, I would be in the Party of Celeriac. It takes a long time to grow, its flavor is not overstated, it avoids predators nicely, and requires patience to enjoy like I am doing now. It is dedicated, resilient, independent, and matures predictably. While none of these characteristics are present in the current political climate (of the United States of America), that’s exactly what upcoming voting generations will need in leadership for the future we’ve inherited.

Adjustments to the High Tunnel

Today we did two things in the high tunnel: we put up the second of the two enclosure plastic ends and we planted lettuce plugs in a freshly tilled half-bed. For some reason the spinach that was direct seeded about six weeks ago didn’t take, likely due to weed pressure in the area of the row it didn’t thrive. So we tilled it and planted the lettuce plugs.

This high tunnel, the resident senior greenhouse on this farm, has seen better days. While structurally it’s still sound, the poly layer needs replacement, one or two corners need anchoring, and the overall effort used to maintain it has increased year over year since it was first constructed. This is typical in structures that humans erect to manipulate conditions to subvert natural cycles into something that is more favorable for extending the growing season in a climate like New England.

Typically, mechanisms like a high tunnel don’t consume grid energy because it’s a passive solar structure…which is one of the most responsible versions of a ‘green’ house you can build. They are typically constructed such that they live in the same space as many concurrent years as possible to minimize the effort to sustain their usability over time. Covering the same space year over year increasingly require extremes in soil management and constraints on usefulness as the seasonal temperatures vary. In fact, Eliot Coleman (Four Season Farm, Harborside Maine) has written extensively about growing carrots in the Northeast using movable greenhouses.

A high tunnel isn’t a manipulation or a trick on nature…that’s the wrong paradigm. A better paradigm is demand-driven consumption. Many species of flora, fauna, and funga hide themselves away in places specifically to protect themselves from harsh conditions, predators, diseases and most recently humans. Sub-Saharan species like giraffes, leopards, hyenas, zebras, kudus, and wild boars have been doing this for millennia, but vegetables are slower to react to recent human interference so that’s why the dominant form of our consumption manifests as farming things slower to revolt than we are. So we constrain vegetable and animal seedlings alike because they are in high demand compared to the average consumer’s ability to garden.

Human taste buds drive demand to farm pigs, chickens, fish, and cows and this is highly profitable in developed countries, even so far as to replicate this sin in our children’s video games. IMO, our evil hunger runs deeper than the simple need for caloric intake. In the case of the human species, it is largely to satisfy our overtake everything ‘else’ by consuming the highest value items (e.g. via protein levels or sale price) available across local and global boundaries now. The biggest difference between humans and pigs for slaughter is that our neocortical capacity could in theory comprehend the global constraint problem faster than long-term evolved species such as celeriac and layer chickens.

The Fall Share is More Than You Expect

Each of the four weeks of our fall share is packed with delicious and unique vegetables. At a price of $220, this means each week is about $55 worth of vegetables in each bag. You might be able to get them cheaper at, say, H-Mart and maybe by weight they might look like a better deal. But they’re not. The quality and variety are unparalleled, and what you get in high-volume low-price stores is usually grown under the exact opposite of organic conditions.

I’d like to think that I could produce this level of abundance given a similar set of inputs as Jamie, but he didn’t just start with earlier opportunities and context…he’s just a better farmer than I could ever be. Given that I’m mostly an observer and not an active decision-maker on this farm and that this is my first year of farming, still I think that there are people built for this kind of multi-decade engagement and those who aren’t. No matter how hard I try, my personal honesty says that I could do the field work but I wouldn’t be able to pander to the other…administrivial elements…of running a farm.

Thus I think that next year, if you live on the North Shore of Boston, if you don’t see Sweetsoil Dehydrates products in the metro area farmer’s markets, the best you can do is to support local farmers by signing up for their CSAs…if they offer them.

AI Summary from Field Notes

Nicely, my transcription-to-summarization process caught an emphasis on the importance of labeling and packaging hot peppers separately from everything else in the CSA bags. Tossing a bunch of high-capsaisin peppers in with everything else is a bad idea…to my intuition as a home cook, a decades-long CSA member in the local community, and as a parent who anticipates that young kids will dig in to anything available to them…a “better safe than sorry” approach to farming is very apt.

Despite that positive reinforcement, the minimally-augmented LLM summarization process demonstrates deeper issues in lack of context. Even with the weight of the whole internet’s resources on its shoulders, the latest Qwen3 LLM (Large Language Model) is still struggling to understand the nuances of the farm’s operations and the specific challenges faced by the farm. Yes, a lack of context is a significant barrier to effective summarization, but how much context is enough before you result with summaries that don’t include:

“Are alternative methods better?”

… about the “string barrier” fix to broken zipper seams in a poly greenhouse enclosure. This is a classic human-context obvious solve to a problem that LLMs trained on only published and publicly accessible sources suffer from. This isn’t a problem that I intend to solve with my future work with tech.I want to empower humans to improve the work that they do for their own benefit, not for a CEO or shareholder bottom line. You shouldn’t work for tech; tech should work for you.x You shouldn’t work for tech; tech should work for you.

Summary