Farm Week: June 3-7, 2013

In a milder week after much May weather, we slogged through much mud on the farm this week to do an escalating battle with weeds. Monday brought a visit from the CRAFTers, and Dan and Tracy's assigned topic was the CSA model and the finances behind a CSA farm on this scale. The apprentices really appreciated his openness and transparency in talking about the financial realities of running a CSA farm, because so many of them work for people who would never disclose their financial situations, or that came to farming with lots of family resources. Dan and Tracy's start-up story is full of lucky turns, but they relied mostly on their hard work to slowly build a farm at a comfortable scale.

This week brought the first substantial harvest and subsequent vegetable delivery. They organized the CSA calendar in such a way that the first harvest is the only one that week, providing a way for us to learn the mechanics of harvesting all the different vegetables, as well as the routine that takes vegetables from the ground to a box in the back of the van. We started harvesting right away in the morning, wearing our bibs to keep dry in the mud and the dew. This week's harvest included salad mix, spinach, arugula, dandelion greens, komatsuna, scallions, dill, and turnips. We bring big plastic bins out to the fields and fill them with rubber-banded bunches or loose leaves, depending on the crop. We bring them back to the packing shed, where we wash them in large tubs of cold water and stick them in the cooler. After the greens have dried off a bit, we come back and bag them to the appropriate weight before sticking them back in the cooler. The next day, we started in the packing shed, first counting out the right number of boxes (this time 83), then filling them in the right order (heaviest first, most crushable last), moving down the rollers in the packing line and ending up in the back of the van. We flipped a coin to see who would make the first delivery, and I won (or lost, depending on your point of view). I ended up driving down to White Plains, NY, which was a little more than two hours each way. Next week, we'll ramp up to the full harvest schedule, which will be about triple this week's. At the same time, we'll be battling the weeds (now in full force) and the wet weather (which shows no signs of letting up).

Thinking about: pollen, saison yeast, essays

Eating: wraps of all kinds, spicy radishes, sweet juicy turnips, greenest greens, eggiest eggs

Reading: Gene Logsdon's Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, George Saunders' Tenth of December

Farm Week: May 27-31, 2013

Spring came back with a bang this week, with some hot and humid weather, a little bit of an overnight downpour, and lots and lots of sun. The farm is still a little soggy from last week's deluge, but the near-90's heat has started to do it part to dry the beds out. Some crops have bounced back well from the hailstorm last week, but some of the crops in the lower fields are still a bit waterlogged (check out the picture below from earlier this week). We're also bouncing back from a grey week, soaking up the sun, then starting to sweat, then sagging, then righting all with a dip in the stream after work.

We spent much of this week battling weeds that for some unexplainable reason took rain and heat and sun as a sign to explode into being all at once. It's been a bit too soggy to drive the cultivator, but we did what we could with hoes (and sometimes hands). We also planted sweet potatoes this week, which get shipped up from somewhere down south as slips. Slips are basically one step removed from planting a potato directly, giving us in northern climates a head start on the sweet potato's long, warm growing season.

We also got our next batch of chicks in the mail! Fifty fluffy little things that look so much smaller than we remember our now-month-old chicks ever being. We won't have to be as worried about the chicks being too cold anymore, but now the hot days mean that we have to keep a careful eye on the water level for the birds outside.

Thinking about: harvest knives, hydration, uphill bicycle endurance

Eating: fresh salads! radishes! turnips! scallions!

Reading: Mary Roach's Gulp, Julie Klausner's I Don't Care About Your Band

Farm Week: May 20-24

There is nothing like a week of humidity and heavy downpours to really reinforce the importance of weather to someone who works entirely outdoors. When one is essentially camping, that importance becomes magnified: every trip to the bathroom or the kitchen sink involves planning. When those downpours are not just downpours, but veer into the territory of lightning, hail, and tornado warnings, the camper does not have a basement to hide out in. Instead, one must take cover, say, under a nearby concrete bridge. Hypothetically, that might have happened this week to some hypothetical semi-campers.

On the hottest day yet, with a humidity so thick you could cut it with the dullest of better knives, we transplanted about an acre with of beets, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Before making a beeline for a dip in the stream, we covered about a third of them to protect them from potentially damaging downpours. Had we heard anything about hail, we probably would have tried to cover the rest of them, but the damage wasn't as bad as it could have been. The plants that were still small had less surface area to damage - the large leaves of older, larger plants were a bit holey after the hail. We had taken advantage of the heat to move our not-so-chicky chickens out to the pasture, which meant that we had to go rescue them after the huge storm. The rain continued all week and into the weekend, so we and the chickens are itching to get outside next week, when the weather looks much much more enjoyable. Meanwhile, I hope the riverbank holds up!

Thinking about: weather patterns, Bluths, good breeding

Eating: fresh-picked greens(!), farro salad, avocado and freshest egg breakfast tacos

Reading: Kelly Klober's Dirt Hog, Michael Ruhlman's Ratio, Jane Smith's The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants

Farm Week: May 13-18, 2013

Another week of extreme temperature changes, from an overnight frost at the beginning of the week, to high seventies and sunny on Thursday. Last weekend brought some rain and some dramatic fog and winds to the valley, but we had a great weekend nonetheless. We stewed up a mean old rooster into jerk chicken stew, sat around a bonfire, and I even brewed up some beer. Unfortunately, the mad temperature swings this week made a consistent fermentation temperature impossible - hopefully the beer didn't suffer too much!

The chicks turned two weeks old, and are hale and feisty as ever. They're getting close to full feathers, at which point they'll leave the brooder for the great outdoors! We also ordered our next batch of chicks - this time fifty instead of twenty-five! We have two outdoor "chicken tractors" at our disposal, so we'll be able to get a nice rhythm going this summer with batches of chicks coming in every three weeks. That means that eventually we'll have batches going out every three weeks, which will be the harder part.

We opened up our largest block of field yet this week, preparing for a large wave of transplanting and direct seeding. The first step in that process was mowing the cover crop, which Dan accomplishes by driving his bush hog backwards over it, his reasoning being that with such a tall crop, the wheel tracks would leave a large portion of the rye intact. After Dan C. mowed, we hooked up the chisel plow and I did my first big plowing job. The nice thing about plowing up a large field is that you can drive more in figure-eights or loops instead of doing lots of tight little turnarounds after each pass. I had a great time, and it was oddly relaxing. The next day's task of rototilling that same swath was not as relaxing, however. The machine itself is louder, and is much more sensitive to rocky soil -  it was much slower, bumpier, and louder than plowing. I didn't have to worry so much about straight lines (as when rototilling and punching beds), the purpose being to mix the remains of the rye into the soil for a faster digestion.

Thinking about: pork possibilities, blooming, organic matter

Eating: jerk chicken and sweet potato stew, homemade meatballs and risotto

Reading: Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, Kelly Klober's Dirt Hog

Farm Week: May 6-10, 2013

This week brought the full range of spring weather, including some much-needed rainfall. The trees are waking up, and the view up the hillsides in all directions from our little valley becomes greener every day. The winter rye is over knee-high, and the smell of apple blossoms has caused me to stop moving and breathe deeply at least once per day.

Now a little over a week old, our broiler chicks are bigger and more fully feathered every time we feed them. They're still small and cute, and they still have a few weeks to go before they go outside. We decided not to buy organic feed because the price was prohibitively high, but we did find some conventional feed without all the unnecessary antibiotics. If the farm were certified organic and we were selling them formally to the CSA members, we might have made the decision to shell out for the organic feed and price the birds accordingly higher. Instead of going for the omnipresent fast-growing hybrid Cornish Cross, we opted for Freedom Rangers, which is a breed known for its hardiness and its foraging, which makes it the perfect bird for pasture-raising.

This week brought a bit more transplanting, and lots of cultivation. The same amount of transplanting that would have made us tired and sore a few weeks ago is now just a matter of course. The first round of spring carrots also needed to be thinned - Dan chooses to over-seed these notoriously bad germinators to avoid long gaps between carrots so we all sat down in a pathway and weeded and thinned the carrots to 1-1.5 inches. It is very slow-going, monotonous, and miniscule work. I loved it. We've done some hand-hoeing, which always makes for some great conversation as we move down the rows. The carrots also provoked hours of interesting conversation, but for some reason I have a skill for this particular task, and after awhile I was too far ahead to take part. So I put on some old-timey fiddle and banjo music and somehow my fingers moved even faster.

Another highlight this week was the first CRAFT visit of the season. At first twice and later once per month, all the apprentices from sustainable farms in the area get out of work early on a Monday and gather on one of the participating farms for a two-hour workshop followed by a potluck dinner. This week's topic was cover crops and compost, and I'm working on an essay about the thoughts the tour and workshop provoked. For now I'll say that I'm really looking forward to these visits all season. Even besides the workshops, I think it's immensely instructive just to see how different farms are set up and how they operate. The potluck was great, too - good food and good conversation, and I'm looking forward to many more.

Thinking about: bare feet in the soil, wide-brimmed hats, smells of spring

Eating: Pita with homemade hummus, avocado, apple, and homemade sauerkraut

Reading: Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King

Farm Week: April 15-19, 2013

Work continued this week in the greenhouse, potting on more tomatoes and peppers, hardening off more greens, and giving our onions a haircut for better growth. We kept on with the transplanting, the tractor practice, and added a few new faces to the farm!

This week's adventure in tractors was the winning combination of bucket-loader and manure spreader, combining all kinds of hand-eye-foot coordination into one package. After a few minutes, I got the hang of the controls for the bucket loader, but I think I would have taken to it more easily if I had played more video games as a child! The scooping motion necessary to move compost from the pile to the back of the spreader takes some practice, and while it got easier by the second load, I was still being a little too timid. Plenty of time to practice! The manure spreader combines the specific skill of backing up and otherwise maneuvering a trailer with the PTO engagement that I learned for the spin spreader and the rototiller. Surprisingly, when I took the wheel to do a three-point turn with the trailer, I found that I had magically become better at it in the past two weeks of non-practice. It was like I had only remembered the skill and forgotten the other 50% of very frustrating non-sucesses. I think I'm going to like tractors.

As I alluded to above, we got some pigs this week! Two tiny little Red Wattles, which I helped named Biscuit and Gravy. They'll fatten up all summer on the farm's scraps and some feed, and then will take their place in the freezer! Right now, though, they're very cute, and the kids are having a great time taming them.

The other thing I have been reflecting on this week is how odd it is to be completely dependent on the radio for all of my news and weather on a daily basis. I've been an avid listener of NPR my whole life, and even had a few jazz radio shows during college. But usually, I've listened in the car or as podcasts while I do chores or run errands. The radio was always a supplement to other forms of media - I could look up the local weather report on the internet when I got up, and turn on the TV for a major news story. But my discovery this week is that when you don't have a TV, internet, or even cell service, you are subject to the schedule and the reporting whims of your local radio stations. I might turn on the radio to get a weather forecast and wait half an hour before I know how many layers to put on. This week especially, when I turned on the radio to non-stop news coverage of the events in Boston, I felt that I was always playing catch-up without the ability to pull up the whole story. It was an exercise in patience, and for the first time I really understand what it's like not to have total control over your information-gathering/media consumption. This week was a peek into that pre-TV, Rockwellian image of a family gathering around the radio for the latest news.

Thinking about: food forests, efficiency, warmer weather, pests large and small

Eating: italian sausage and borlotti beans, brown rice with yellow dal (lentils) and baingan bharta (eggplant); salami finocchiato on San Francisco sourdough

Reading: Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture, Jonathan Safron Foer's Eating Animals

Farm Week: April 8-12, 2013

Week two started in sun (and sunburn!) before reverting back to a frigid rain, but not before we had time to plow and till a few fields! We direct-seeded our carrots and spring turnips, got the peas in the ground, and transplanted some head lettuce and brassicas: kale, chard, cabbage, and bak choi. The continued greenhouse work of seated seeding was contrasted with the very physical rumble of the tractors and the flexibility and agility demanded by efficient hand transplanting, leaving us very sore the next morning.

I started my tractor education this week! After some basic practice driving a tractor around and (attempting to) back up a trailer, I got in some practice on my first three implements: the spin spreader, the chisel plow, and the rototiller. Spreading a custom blend organic nutrients is the first step toward preparing a field for planting in the spring, and it is a low-stress, high-dust introduction to the tractor. After emptying eight fifty-pound bags of nutrients into the cone of the spreader, I donned my protective eyewear (sunglasses), facemask, and earmuffs and headed out to the field. Then off comes the spreader and on goes the chisel plow. A much more intuitive tool, the chisel plow is dragged through the field at a depth of about eighteen inches in order to aerate and loosen the soil without inverting the soil profile too much. This trip to the field involved a little more coordination; it took a few passes before I got the timing down to lower the plow right where the row started and lift right when it ended. A chisel plow also shows you how mistaken you were about driving in a straight line. The third and most complicated implement we tackled this week was the rototiller. Far from your garden variety walk-behind model, this rototiller is over five feet wide, and when dragged behind a tractor at the right speed with the right power will make a bed so smooth and fluffy you just want to lie right down in it yourself. Running the rototiller can be a slightly nerve-racking experience. For one, besides lowering and raising at exactly the right time, you also have to stay in as straight a line as possible while also lining up in a precise way with your last row so as not to leave any untilled spaces or create ridges by tilling too close. As if you weren't concentrating hard enough already, each and every rock you pass over with the machine makes a clank so big you're sure that this time you've broken the thing. I tilled and "punched out" (drove over to create a bed and a tire track/path) six beds, and the whole time my face was frozen in a look of "yikes that wasn't a straight line at all what was that sound I'm not very good at this at all did I just break this thing?" When I was done, it turns out that the beds didn't look so bad after all, and the good news is that I'll only get better with practice.

In other news, fellow apprentice Dan C. and I put in an order on Friday for twenty-five Freedom Ranger chicks to be delivered in the first week of May. We plan on raising them for meat, both for our own consumption and to sell to any CSA members that are interested. Mostly, we're doing it for the learning experience, and if the first batch goes well, we might scale up production for future batches through the rest of the season. So look out for future blog posts on baby chicks in the brooder, chicken tractors, and adventures in chicken slaughter!

Thinking about: horsepower, routines, reciprocation, projects

Eating: sweet potato and black bean tacos; pasta salad with green beans, olives, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and dijon-mayo; roasted beets, potatoes, carrots, and onions over refried borlotti beans

Reading: Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Augusten Burroughs' A Wolf at the Table, Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture

Farm Week: April 1-5, 2013

My 2013 farm season has started with a cold front of frigid nights and mornings, combatted with a never-ending rotation of layers and plenty of greenhouse work. The heated greenhouse is full of trays in all states of germination - the earliest of spring greens, plus onions and their relatives ready for transplanting, and tomatoes getting a hot head start. Outdoors, the winter rye is waking up on the untilled fields, the chickens are starting to lay more eggs, and the peepers are signaling spring by the end of the week.

The week was mostly an introduction to Chubby Bunny Farm, which is a fitting way to start the "Farm Week" series here on the blog. Chubby Bunny Farm is located in the small hamlet of Falls Village in far northwestern Connecticut. Dan and Tracy are in their twelfth year running the business, and their tenth year on this land. The farm sits in a valley on the south side of Canaan Mountain, with 12 out of 50 acres currently in production. This year, the farm will provide over 250 weekly CSA shares starting the first week of June and running through the end of October. Besides the 12 acres cultivated for row crops, the farm includes a 60' heated greenhouse for starting transplants, and 60' and 100' hoop houses for season extension and some heat-loving crops in season. While the vegetable operation is the bulk of the business, the farm also houses a small laying flock, a family cow, and a few feeder pigs each summer. The tilling and some cultivation is handled by a pair of tractors of about 50 horsepower each, but all of the seeding, transplanting, most cultivation, and harvesting is done by hand. This year, I am one of four full-season apprentices living and working on the farm; besides all of our hands-on learning opportunities, Dan is very open about the finances of the farm and the reasoning behind his farming decisions. We'll also be participating in the Western Connecticut CRAFT program, which includes visits to plenty of nearby farms.

I also spent the week getting situated in my new living arrangements! We apprentices are living for the season in decommissioned campers on the edge of the farm. We each have our own camper, complete with a little mini kitchen, and we share an outhouse, utility sink and an outdoor shower between us. We're constantly making little improvements, like constructing a covering over the sink, laying out a stone floor outside the tub, cutting a path to the neighboring stream, or digging a fire pit. Right now, we're relying on space heaters, sleeping bags, and layers for warmth, but as the weather warms up we'll eventually be grateful for our placement in the coolest part of the farm. We have mostly no cell service in the valley, and our internet is limited to the twice weekly overlap of hours of the local public library and our free time, so there will be plenty of time for reading, writing, and reflection.

Thinking about: flannel, thrift, imminent spring, leafy greens

Eating: fresh, delicious, rich eggs; spiced chickpeas and carrots with fresh ginger; seeded rye and gorgonzola cremificata

Reading: Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture