Family Roots
Design by Alex Povis. Photography by Rolf Ringwald.
David Bohlen squats down in a muddy field and inspects red and green leaves of chicory poking through the soft earth. “We eat a lot of dirt here,” he jokes, searching for a semi-clean sample.
He finally picks a small leaf and dusts it off one last time before taking a bite. Nearby are some old plastic domed skylights Bohlen found in a building he was cleaning out; he's been experimenting with using them as mini-greenhouses. They’re currently covering two plants in the field at Bohlen Family Farms in Perryville, Missouri.
“A lot of people are scared of chicory, because it’s bitter, but if you grow it in the cold – we’ll see how bitter this one is,” he says, tasting the “greenhouse” chicory (also called radicchio). He then takes a bite of chicory that’s growing out in the open field. “It’s less bitter, but neither of them are overly bitter,” he decides.
It’s late March, and one of the first mornings in days that isn’t drenched in spring rain; although the sky is still gray, birds are cheerfully chirping. Bohlen and his three-man crew – which includes his youngest brother, Mark – are taking advantage of the break in the weather to remove stakes for tomato plants a few fields over and prepare the beds for sweet potatoes.
In this field, part of what Bohlen refers to as “The Orchard,” because it contains a few young peach trees, he’s got some feral garlic, rare French gray shallots, three rows of treviso chicory, a row of castelfranco chicory, then more treviso, grumolo rossa chicory, Korean onions, wild pennycress – and that’s not even the half of it.
“I try my best not to think about it,” Bohlen laughs, straining to come up with an estimate of just how many varieties of fruits, vegetables and herbs are in production at any given time on the farm. “Because if I do, I’ll lose my mind. It’s early spring, and we’re just trying to make sure we have as many different products as we can going into market season and as restaurants start to build their spring menus.”
Bohlen concedes that his farming style is a bit scattered, but that tends to complement the changing nature of the many variables he has to consider: What does he have enough time to plant? Is the soil ready? What seeds does he have on hand? What seeds hasn’t he planted before? What do people need a lot of? What plots are available at the different properties?
“There’s pros and cons to it, but it definitely allows me to grow a bit more variety than most folks are willing to grow,” he says.
It’s been six years since Bohlen and his middle brother, Thomas, and their neighbor, Louis Arman, first planted vegetables in a lot across the street from their home in Ferguson, Missouri. The brothers grew up eating fresh produce; Bohlen says he didn’t even realize what an amazing cook his mother was until he ate at a friend’s house in sixth grade, where a frozen chicken was roasted in the oven with no seasoning.
“I thought everybody was at home eating good,” he says, shaking his head. “When I moved out of my parents’ house, I wanted to be able to cook for myself. I realized that it was expensive. I didn’t even have the money to cook [healthy food] every day; I had the money to cook ramen noodles every day. So I started growing stuff.”