Childhood (Mis)conceptions

Every morning this week, I've showed up at the U of M's student organic farm. I stick around for a couple of hours, helping out with the tasks at hand: transplanting pansies, harvesting chives and cilantro, weighing the produce, thinning the turnips.

My mind often turns to images formed of farming in my childhood by the Little House on the Prairie books and even The Boxcar Children. Of course, we've got a Prius and more water sources than you can shake a stick at, but I hoof it an awful lot and watering, although it doesn't involve lugging water buckets, can still be tedious.

And then there's thinning plants. You may recall that in the first Boxcar Children novel, back when they were actually living in a boxcar, the Alden children do yard work for Mr. Henry. One task was to thin the carrots. I really had no idea what this meant: I imagined Jessie pulling out a carrot, running it between her fingers to "thin" it, and putting it back in the ground. Why would anyone pull out perfectly good carrots? When Jessie asks to take home the pile of thinned carrots (apparently they didn't all make it back into the ground), I always imagined a heap of pale, pinched roots, ready to wilt at a second glance.

The reality is less laborious. Thinning involves only the removal of the smaller plants, no size-reduction at all. We ended up with a healthy pile of turnip greens that destined for the Campus Club. No humble junkyard stew pot for these organic roots.

Photo source: http://mysticdomestica.blogspot.com/2009/07/boxcar-kid.html