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Garden in the City: Ask a Corny Question, Get a Serious Answer

By Patty Wetli | August 1, 2014 8:29am
 Corn tassels blowing in the breeze — not nearly as nerve-wracking as gale force winds. Notice how colorful the tassels are up close.
Corn tassels blowing in the breeze — not nearly as nerve-wracking as gale force winds. Notice how colorful the tassels are up close.
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DNAinfo/Patty Wetli

LINCOLN SQUARE — Funny that gardening is viewed as a sort of wimpy pursuit because, frankly, it's made a warrior of me.

I've battled bugs and blight, bounced back from drought and disease, and fought off frost and something called powdery mildew. I thought I'd learned to handle whatever curve Mother Nature threw at me, but then she added wind to the mix and I temporarily lost my mind.

Some sort of weather front passed through the city last weekend, kicking up blustery air that I'm fairly certain barely registered with most Chicagoans.

I, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck.

Patty Wetli is struggling to let the corn do its thing, on this week's episode of Garden in the City:

Picture me at my garden plot watching in horror as blast after blast blew in from the north, the gusts sending my spindly-stemmed, shallow-rooted corn stalks to their knees.

Instinctively I wrapped the plants in a bear hug, throwing my arms around the corn to hold it in place as yet another gale threatened to snap the stalks in half.

Screw you wind, I will stand here for hours if I have to.

The instant that thought flashed across my brain, it was followed by another: These are not the actions of a sane person. Get a grip.

I needed help, and for that I decided to consult with the experts.

The thing about being a reporter is that it gives a person professional license to approach complete strangers with the expectation they'll be willing to supply whatever information I seek.

So I headed to the Lincoln Square farmers market, walked up to the Noffke Family Farms' booth and began interrogating the folks in charge.

"How do you do it?" I asked. "How do you keep from getting attached to your crops?"

The short answer: You don't.

"My dad, when it's not raining, he's probably up every two hours checking the irrigation. When it's raining, he's up all night," said Kara Schmuhl-Gowin, a fifth-generation farmer. ("My mom's a Noffke. She married the farm boy next door.")

"It's every day, all day. My dad's up at six o'clock every morning and he runs constantly. When I come home from a market, I've been up since 3 and he's like, 'We have peaches to pick. It's not dark yet,'" Kara said. "That's their life."

This past winter's arctic deep freeze killed off "a lot of peach trees" and left the rest so damaged that the fruit is coming out egg-shaped, she said.

A couple of weeks ago, a storm cost the farm, located in Berrien Springs, Mich., its sour cherry crop, which was nearly ready to be picked. The fruit fell, useless, to the ground and the handful of cherries that managed to hang around were too "wind-whipped" to sell, said Kara.

Hail is a bigger threat than either heat or the kind of unseasonably cool temperatures we've been experiencing this summer — the latter actually prolongs the harvest season with more gradual ripening.

 My attempt to build a cage around my corn, to keep it safe from the elements.
My attempt to build a cage around my corn, to keep it safe from the elements.
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DNAinfo/Patty Wetli

But frozen water pellets are "wicked on your fruit," said Kara's husband Chris Gowin, who married into the Noffke farming family. "There's nothing you can do. It's Mother Nature."

One common coping mechanism: Hedging one's bets.

"We used to be just strawberries and peaches," selling the latter by the bushel back in the day when people were more into baking and canning, said Kara.

The farm now grows a wide array of fruits and vegetables, with corn and soybeans on top of that for a steady income.

Still the Noffkes, who farm more than 400 acres collectively as a family, start every growing season in debt.

"We live on borrowed money. There's isn't a farmer here that's ahead," she said.

Kara, her siblings and cousins all went to college. When she's not busy helping out on the farm, Kara's a nurse.

"My parents made sure all of us had something to fall back on. It's getting tougher," she said. "I don't foresee a whole lot of family farms being here in 10 years."

Sometimes the only way to deal with the heartbreak and hardship that is farming is to simply walk away.

That's what my family did.

The Wabers, my maternal ancestors, farmed a fair amount of acreage in southwest Michigan, outside of Kalamazoo. If things had played out differently, I'd be a fifth-generation farmer, too.

But after the death of their elder son in a tragic accident, my great-grandparents said "enough." Their younger boy, my grandfather, would know a different, less precarious, way of life.

By the time I entered the picture, the Wabers' land holdings had been reduced to 20 wild forested acres, a pair of barns and an ancient tractor. My grandpa would hitch a pallet to the back of the vintage machine, pile on a couple of blankets and take us for a ride around the property. For the longest time, I thought nature smelled like diesel exhaust.

My youngest brother, Matt, was six when grandpa died and we sold the land. We were talking the other day and out of the blue, he said if any of us ever comes into serious money, we should buy the place back. Three generations removed, and that farm is still in our blood.

I asked Kara why, with all the work and all the uncertainty and all the financial burden, the Noffke family still works the land.

"I think it just gets handed down," she said. "It's a family tradition."

So chalk it up to genetics. Some of us were born to throw our arms around the corn — physically or metaphorically — and hope for the best.

Check out earlier episodes of "Garden in the City"