Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt has lived on his great-grandparents’ farm in North Pulaski County for more than 40 years. This is the latest in a series of columns about day-to-day life on the land where he raises heirloom tomatoes, rabbits and other crops for local restaurants and the Hillcrest Farmers Market.
Gazing out across my two big greenhouses in early spring, it looked like a tomato mass casualty event. Brown leaves and dead limbs hung from hundreds of 2-foot-tall heirloom tomato plants. Their stems had turned to mush overnight, drooping over their hydroponic buckets like dead soldiers over their parapets. The day before, they had been full of flowers, green and vibrant. I was no longer running a farm; I was running a plant hospital, an ER for dead and dying heirlooms.
It’s been a rough winter at India Blue Farm.
Trouble began Jan. 21 with the rabbitry, an enclosed converted peacock house. Rabbits usually handle the cold well, but that night, with a foot of snow and ice and 6-degree temperatures, five of the does gave birth to 32 newborns. I spent the bitter morning feeding their small frozen bodies to Inca, my Great Pyrenees. This is my first year with the rabbits, and it was the largest single birthing since I got the breeders last spring. Fortunately, I had drained the PVC automatic watering system the night before and placed water bowls in the cages. The water bowls froze solid, and for the next week, I was tramping out with jugs of hot water three times a day to thaw them out enough for the animals to drink. Adult rabbits can survive extreme cold but they need a lot of water.
That first morning of the terrible freeze, I received a text from my neighbor who germinates my seeds each year for the tomatoes and other plants that go into my hoop houses, greenhouses and the fields. She told me her greenhouse had collapsed under the weight of the snow and ice. She had lost her livelihood and I had lost all the tomatoes and other plants that had just germinated. Then I walked out to check the rabbits to see one of my hoop houses that was full of green cabbages crushed and buried in the snow. It looked like a giant foot had come down across the middle of the house with the metal struts twisted at crazy angles. That was just the beginning of a very bad morning.
A week before, I had finished converting two of my hoop houses, a 96-footer and a 40-footer, into heated and cooled greenhouses. It had been a slow and expensive process with big propane heaters, swamp coolers, circulating fans and exhaust fans as tall as I am. My goal was to transform the unheated hoop houses into a year-round tomato habitat in a humidity-controlled environment that was always between 55 and 80 degrees.
The snow and ice had spared these structures, and a couple of weeks later, I turned on the 500-gallon propane tank, plugged in the 250,000 BTU heaters and commenced planting 440 heirloom tomatoes in the middle of February. In these greenhouses, I grow hydroponically, and the health and speed at which these tomatoes began growing is amazing. They were growing a foot a week and by early March had begun to flower. I was looking at May heirloom tomatoes in Arkansas.
I have been growing in hoop houses for 20 years, but have never heated them or used propane. I was told a tank would power the greenhouses for a couple of months. But then three weeks later, on March 16, the temperature dropped to 21 degrees and late that night, the propane ran out. I had a bad feeling, and at about 5 a.m., I bundled up and walked out to the greenhouses. The frozen grass crunched as I walked, thousands of little crystals sparkling under my flashlight. As I neared the first greenhouse, I realized everything was deathly quiet. There was no low roar from the roof-mounted propane heater. Inside, I shined my flashlight on the tomatoes and they sparkled, just like the frozen grass. I reached out to the nearest plant and the leaves shattered, frozen solid. A sense of total exhaustion was the only feeling I could muster.
The next afternoon, I began the depressing process of pulling up all the dead plants when I noticed that the tomatoes toward the center still had upright green stems. I wouldn’t have replacement seedlings for six weeks, so I left them in their hydroponic Bato buckets and continued to irrigate them. Then, about the first of April, I noticed something: green, leafy shoots had begun to sprout where suckers would ordinarily appear. A lot of the plants were completely dead, but perhaps half were coming back. It was a resurrection.
A week later, I noticed small tomato seedlings sprouting in between my rows in the two greenhouses. They were volunteers from last year’s crop. It takes nearly two months from planting a seed to getting it up to transplant size, which was going to move my anticipated May harvest into July. But here were transplants growing at my feet. One great thing about old-fashioned heirlooms is that they are open-pollinated and, unlike hybrids, true to the parent. I dug up all the volunteers and replanted them into the pearlite-filled Bato buckets and they began to take off. I found a source for another hundred heirloom seedlings, which has been enough to replace nearly all of the frozen plants.
So I’m still a little exhausted but not in despair. A week after the tomato freeze, I planted 600 beets in the field. This was all done on my knees, and by the end, it was hard to stand. The next week, 100 Ouachita and 100 Prime-Ark Immaculate blackberry canes arrived from Mountainburg and shortly after, 10 Loomis Muscadine vines arrived from Georgia. And the next week, 75 pounds of Blue Congo, Yukon Gold and French Fingerling seed potatoes arrived.
By April 10, all were planted. Now, I’m waiting until the end of April to plant the outside heirloom tomatoes, Ambrosia Cantaloupes, squash, watermelons, red bell peppers, celosia, sunflowers, Benary Zinnias and African Marigolds. Except for the outdoor tomatoes, the large plantings are behind me and the heavy hay mulch will make hoeing unnecessary.
Newt Williamson, my grandmother’s second cousin and a beloved neighbor, taught me that this time between final cultivation and harvest was what people out here referred to as “laying by the crops.” Newt said that was when the tent revivals would take place out in our part of North Pulaski County. You likely won’t find me at a revival, but after this winter, resurrection is certainly on my mind.
