Z&N Farm of Bear Lake takes special care to grow its beloved tomato crop. Photo courtesy of Z&N Farm
By Nicole Mezeske, Z&N Farm, Bear Lake
When you farm in Northern Michigan, there is a short window of time in August known as peak season. As I write this, we are currently in the thick of it, those few short weeks when our determinate tomatoes, watermelons and cantaloupes ripen. Sweet corn, pickling cucumbers and green beans are all in abundance. We’re surrounded by a field of ready-to-pick produce. The days are starting to get shorter, and we spend more time harvesting and washing vegetables in the dark than we care to admit.
We know it’s more common to see a farm growing hundreds of acres of one or two crops and employing dozens of workers to harvest for wholesale. We are trying to do things differently. On our farm, we grow about six acres of diverse vegetables and melons ⸺ without any full-time employees. When you see produce at our farm stand, it is all grown, harvested, washed and sold by us. Much of our produce is sold directly to consumers, such as yourselves. We could not do this without the support of the community around us, and for that we could not be more grateful.
2021 farming challenges
Planning for the next harvest season begins in fall when we buy the seeds. It takes a year of planning to pull off a successful harvest: preparing the fields, even planting some crops, such as garlic, just before the frost. We grow 95% of our crops ⸺ potatoes to tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, green beans and sweet corn ⸺ from seeds we start ourselves. All are nurtured, cared for and cultivated by us for months before we see the fruits of our labor.
There is much that can go wrong in that time, some of it within our control, like maintaining the weed pressure. Outside our control is Mother Nature, which can change the course of a harvest completely. We are only in our fourth season of farming here, so there is still much for us to learn about weather patterns and pest pressure. But this year was a challenging year for many farmers, not just new ones like us.
The season began with a late frost, then drought made germination of some crops difficult. After that, we saw torrential rains which washed out an entire patch of our green beans. These are hard-learned lessons that really shaped our harvest season. We were a month behind our usual green bean harvests, due to the washouts. Though we had planned to have several sessions of green beans to extend our season, Mother Nature cut that season in half for us.
Fresh pickings
Those losses behind us, we are now harvesting buckets of pickling cucumbers and green beans. These crops must be picked every day to ensure they’re the right size and tenderness. The work is labor intensive as we must harvest them by hand, bent over in the field, combing from plant to plant. If you’ve never picked a pickling cucumber, they are prickly! The reward is in the harvest. When our customers tell us the green beans are so tender and the pickles are the perfect size, we know we are on the right track. Comments like these motivate us to keep going.
Our main crop, tomatoes, are in full production now. So, along with daily harvests of green beans and cucumbers, we are picking vine-ripened, field-grown tomatoes by the hundreds of pounds every day. Tomatoes are why we started farming. Zac knew there was nothing like a Michigan field-grown tomato, and he just had to grow them. He spends the day picking tomatoes then comes home and slices them up for a late-night snack.
Harvest days
Zac’s hands are in a permanent state of stain during the growing season. When our daughter was born during peak tomato season three years ago, he first held her with tomato-stained hands. The morning before she was born, he spent hours selling tomatoes at the farmers market. The morning after she was born, he woke up and headed back into the field to pick before the rain. Much like he does today, after days spent harvesting in the heat, after a morning spent at market, and with rain in the forecast, he heads back into the field to harvest as many tomatoes as is humanly possible. Because the rains crack ripe tomatoes. And if the rain cracks the tomatoes before we get to them, a year of planning and months of hard work can be lost to the fruit flies.
So, despite the exhaustion and the ache in our bodies, we keep pushing. Through the long hot days and late nights. While others enjoy Lake Michigan in its finest final hours of summer, we pick. Because this is what we’ve planned for, worked for, spent a year dreaming of. The tomatoes are beautiful and bountiful. The sweet corn is quite literally the sweetest corn we’ve ever tasted. The watermelon juicy. The pickles crunchy. The green beans tender.
It’s peak season and we are feeling it.
