Two items of interest to our WLBOTT agricultural committee occurred recently.
Elder JimZim and his companion Grønk recently volunteered to glean cherry tomatoes for the Maryland food bank.
Elder JA has grown somewhat assertive in his opinion of okra.
First… Elder JimZim and Grønk
I had a good time gleaning. There were eight volunteers, 250 lbs in 1.5 hours. Many varieties of small tomatoes- different colors, etc. The farmer worked along side us. It is a small organic farm that also grows butternut squash, gourds, pumpkins, peanuts… The soil there is very sandy. She uses soaker hoses and spreads hay for mulch. Easy picking – the plants were held up by some taut strings and were about 4 ft tall.
The farmer was a very nice woman. Her husband is a chef at a restaurant on the eastern shore. I didn’t get the story of how she got into farming. It’s a small operation – she hires local kids part time to help with planting, upkeep and harvesting. She doesn’t have a full size tractor but has walk-behind tiller. I think she sells at farmers markets, local restaurants and maybe small grocers. She seemed to enjoy farming and I guess she makes a few dollars from it.
Elder JimZim
Elder DZ calls this “plant-based produce.”
Grønk and Elder JimZim Gleaning for the Food Bank
Grønk’s Early Experience with Tomatoes
Grønk’s first attempt to grow cherry tomatoes was in northern Norway, above the arctic circle. He had a large wind turbine that powered the lights in a greenhouse. He had to install special fencing to keep the reindeer from nibbling on the tomato plants. He had developed a special variety of cherry tomatoes, influenced by the northern lights. But ultimately the venture failed, because of the high cost of transporting the cherry tomatoes by reindeer sled.
Grønk’s experimental cultivar was officially registered as Solanum lycopersicum ‘Aurora Grønkalis’. The tomatoes were tiny, intensely sweet, and developed unusual streaks of green, crimson and violet under the specialized greenhouse lighting. Grønk maintained that the aurora itself influenced their flavor. Botanists maintained that this was nonsense. Grønk maintained that botanists needed to spend more time outdoors.
Which Brings Us to Elder JA
Elder JA, head of WLBOTT-Canada, and our liaison to the Commonwealth, has expressed a displeasure with okra. We were as surprised as you are, gentle reader.
“That evil okra! Have you tried bringing it across on the Gordie Howe Bridge?” But after offering to send him our rail car of surplus okra, he advocated for a total ban. “I’m starting to feel threatened by this constant pressure to accept okra. “
Elder JA has gone so far as to suggest that we simply give away our surplus okra. He calls it the “Okra Win Free.” It does have a certain ring.
We tried to reason with Elder JA, showing him how okra has influenced the great works of art over many centuries.
Van Gogh’s Still Life with Okra
The Diego Rivera Collection
Edvard Munch
Anyhow….
Friðheimar – Horses, Tomatoes, and Dining
There’s a large greenhouse in Iceland that grows up to two tons of tomatoes a day, raises horses, and has an incredible restaurant inside the greenhouse. They have hives of pollenating bumblebees inside the greenhouse. They serve tomato soup, tomato ice cream, and even tomato beer.
Growing method Each greenhouse has a controller that controls heat, humidity, carbon dioxide and lighting. The controller links to the fertilizer mixer, which irrigates based on precise guidelines. A weather station on the roof gives information on wind strength, wind direction, temperature and light. When the sun shows up and the inlet reaches a certain level, the lights go out – and then light up again when necessary. All this is connected to the mother computer, which is connected to the Internet. Friðheimar can thus access the Internet wherever they are in the world, monitor the situation, change the values and control the watering.
We visited Friðheimar, a greenhouse devoted to intensive tomato production. The tomatoes are grown at a specific temperature by geothermal heating at significant expense. Iceland’s climate is not terribly conducive to traditional agriculture, and without greenhouses, the diet would either be much less varied or produce would have to be imported from other countries at even greater expense.
Naturally, though, what I was most interested in was this bumblebee, which was so laden down with mites it could barely fly. The greenhouse imports bumblebees (I believe the Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris) to pollinate the tomatoes, which like several other food crops require buzz pollination. These mites appear to be some kind of phoretic mite, perhaps Parasitellus; phoretic mites don’t directly harm the bees, but feed on debris. However, when they hitchhike en masse like this, they can hinder the bee’s ability to fly.
Fortunately, the other bumblebees seemed to be doing fine. We had some delicious tomato soup and then hopped back on the bus to head to our next stop, Gullfoss.
If this is Jalapeño Cheddar bread, I’m buying my ticket today!
The restaurant also has some cool meeting rooms. I can picture the gathering of the Viking Council:
Semi-Sequitur: Icelandic Horses
The Icelandic horse, or Icelandic, is a breed of horse developed in Iceland. Although the horses are smaller (at times pony-sized) than other breeds, most registries for the Icelandic refer to it as a horse. The breed is long-lived and hardy, owing to the ruggedness of its home country. In their native Iceland they have few afflictions or diseases,
Developed from ponies brought to Iceland by Norse settlers in the 9th and 10th centuries, the breed is mentioned in various documents from throughout Icelandic history; an early reference to a named-horse appears in the 12th century. Horses were venerated in Germanic religion, a custom brought to Iceland by the country’s earliest settlers. Centuries of selective breeding have developed the Icelandic horse into its modern physical form, with natural selection having also played a role in overall hardiness and disease resistance; the harsh Icelandic climate likely eliminated many weaker horses early on due to exposure and malnourishment, with the strongest passing on their genes.
Icelandic horses weigh between 330 and 380 kilograms (730 and 840 lb)[2] and stand an average of 13 and 14 hands (52 and 56 inches, 132 and 142 cm) high, although the shortest measured Icelandic horse was 113cm (11.1hh), and the tallest measured 157cm (15.3hh).
Icelandic horses are not usually ridden until they are four years old, and structural development is not complete until age seven. Their most productive years are between eight and eighteen, although they retain their strength and stamina into their twenties. An Icelandic mare that lived in Denmark reached a record age of 56.
In 982 AD the Icelandic Althing (parliament) passed laws prohibiting the importation of horses into Iceland, thus ending crossbreeding. The breed has now been bred pure in Iceland for more than 1,000 years.
There are about 80,000 Icelandic horses in Iceland (compared to a human population of 317,000), and around 100,000 abroad.
