Farm Week: July 15-19, 2013

And now for something completely different! This week was a whole lot different than weeks past for a few reasons. First of all, we had a mostly rain-free, absurdly hot week. That means our fields are drying up, and the puddles and mud pits are shrinking. The main reason this week was different than most other weeks is that we put ourselves at the mercy of the CSA shareholders. After weeks and weeks of rain, mud, and lightning keeping us out of the fields, the weeds were winning the war. With harvests taking up three of our five workdays, we were at the mercy of the weather to be left the last two to do our battle with the weeds. We could have harvested some great veggies for our members this week, but if we had there's no way we could promise that we'd be able to deliver on that promise come August or September. The weeds were winning, and we couldn't even make it to the battlefield. So put the CSA on hold for one week and did battle with the weeds. During what I'm sure will turn out to be the hottest week of the year, we grabbed our hoes and our hats and attacked some weeds. We uncovered beets, basil, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, pepper, onions, squash, cucumbers, cabbage, and more. We finished harvesting the garlic and put it out to cure in the greenhouse. We pulled so many weeds we pulled weeds in our sleep and woke up with our hands balled up, grasping at imaginary pigweed. We're not all the way caught up, but we're only a normal amount behind now, and we lived to fight another day. Nobody got sunstroke, and they're promising that the weather will break this weekend. Boy, I hope so. I've got more weeds to kill.

Thinking about: ambition, friends, ounces of prevention

Reading: Lisa Cohen's All We Know: Three Lives, The Greenhorns' 2013 New Farmers Almanac, Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Eating: more bacon and tomato sandwiches, tomato and cucumber in olive oil and balsamic, green beans

Farm Week: July 8-12, 2013 (with a poem!)

This week's post is a bit unorthodox, but it actually sums up this week (and the last two months) rather nicely:

It started with the rhythmic patter,
on wood, on canvas, on plastic and fiberglass.
Faint, then constant, then pounding.
It started then it stayed,
at last coming up to a roar
eventually receding in the mind
like so much white noise.
Hours became days became weeks,
the roar ceasing for few precious hours,
supplanted by the resulting rumble of the brook,
near breaching its brown banks,
with bated breath you awaited the flood.

And in and around the rain
you worked, layers of cotton
mouldering under layers of rubber,
hair curling under the humid hood,
toes, soles, souls soggy in your socks.
Staggering through kale,
mud covered the tops of your feet,
passive, feigning innocence,
then violently  grasping your boot,
relenting with an obscene SHLOOP!
Bent scythe-like, you filled your bins,
willing the clouds to part.

And then one day, at last, the heat came.
Your bodies from soggy to sweating and burnt,
your fields from grey to green.
But the relief was fleeting, for bending closer
to the earth, you saw the green not of
nightshades or cucurbits, but of
noxious weeds, galinsoga and sedge,
waging a battle you hadn't time to fight.
You peeled off socks, and sank
to your shins in soaked soil,
clawing to save your precious plants,
each day closer, yet farther from victory.

And on you worked, falling into rhythms:
harvest, hoe, sow, muster for battle.
Hundreds of row-feet planted,
thousands of plants saved. And yet,
another menace emerged, at first invisible.
From the tire-tracks of tractors,
from the lowest fields and pastures,
the winged militia took flight, evoking in you
a arhythmic dance, a slap, a flick,
an equine swing of the mane,
the perfumed attempt at evasion,
And finally, the itch, the scratch, the rub.

And as battle raged in you and around you,
you came upon treasures, buried and not.
The faint pip! of a root pulled from the ground,
the sweet smell when you pop off the carrot-top,
the small snap of the pea as you bite,
the mint and parsley and dill and cilantro,
that force the deep breathing of calm.
And finally, when the memory has all but gone,
you spy that glint of deep red in the greenhouse.
You pluck it, you smell it, your mouth waters.
Bacon sizzling, you reach for the toothy knife,
and at last you remember why you farm.


Thinking about: start-up models, intentional community, creativity

Reading: Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy, The Greenhorns' 2013 New Farmers Almanac, Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Eating: bacon and tomato on sourdough with homemade mayo, carrots fresh from the ground, penne with sauteed broccoli and garlic, some beautiful lemon birthday cake

Farm Week: July 1-5, 2013

My hands are bloodied this week. They are consistently, undramatically bloodied with every slapped mosquito. It is a constant battle that I am losing on every front, the secondary attack of those many weeks of nonstop rain and standing water. There are the constant daytime outdoor attacks, but then there are the night-time sneak attacks, the cumulative damage that two mosquitoes can inflict on a body over the course of a good night's sleep. On the upside, I haven't been seeing as many ticks recently, which isn't a comfort to Dan, who's now a week into his Lyme antibiotics.  

My hands were also dramatically and momentarily bloodied during our first large-scale chicken harvest. We had done a practice-run last weekend of the four biggest birds, so I could relay to Dan the procedure that I learned a few weeks ago from former Chubby Bunny apprentices. So on Saturday we had 22 birds left to dispatch and a heat index in the very high nineties. If I thought flies and mosquitoes were bad when we're in the fields, that doesn't compare to flies when you have buckets filling up with first-rate fly food. We got through it, and now we know that three people is not enough for a fast and efficient chicken processing day. Lesson learned! Boy did that cold stream feel good, even if it is slowly drying up. But as I told my fellow fieldworkers and stream-dippers, I'd rather have to lay down in the stream to cool off than have another week of rain.

My hands were only slightly bloodied in the tomato greenhouse this week, where a mix of tomato sap, pollen, and dirt turned them ghastly colors. We also ate our first greenhouse tomato! There are a handful of slowly ripening fruits, but plenty of big green tomatoes, so hopefully we'll have enough in a few weeks to start sharing the bounty with our members. I definitely didn't mind biting into that blood-red fruit this week!

Thinking about: essential oils, lifestyle choices, the art of storage

Reading: The Greenhorns' 2013 New Farmers Almanac, Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Eating: our own chicken (pieced, BBQed, and shared with two girls hiking the Appalachian Trail), fresh-caught brook trout with mixed-veg risotto, summer squash in eggs and in pasta, so many snap peas

Farm Week: June 24-28, 2013

This week dawned hot and muggy and stayed that way. A few times, the humidity condensed into afternoon thunderstorms, but we were thankfully spared the kind of downpours that have become all too familiar. As long as these daily deluges stay under a quarter inch each time, and maybe even closer to a tenth of an inch, we'll be fine.

As the fields slowly dry out, we've been able to get the tractor through some of the most important beds needing cultivation. Besides our usual harvest load, we kept up speed transplanting this week, getting a bit closer to caught up after weeks and weeks of rain delays. We've also started to get almost caught up on cultivation, through a mixture of actual cultivation and a bit of traige - cutting our losses. We hoed everywhere this week from a rocky hilltop to our lower fields, in mud and puddles halfway to our knees.

We also got our latest shipment of chicks in the mail, moving us up to a temporary population of three different flocks of birds at once. We're slaughtering our biggest birds next weekend, so we'll be back down to two flocks in another week. Dan (my business partner in this chicken venture) hadn't processed chickens before, so we decided to do a practice run of four of the biggest birds so that when we do the big harvest next weekend, we're all on the same page. We're grilling one of those birds up this afternoon, so I'll let you know if a bird you raise from a day-old chick really tastes better than a store-bought factory-raised chicken.

Thinking about: scalability, full-diet CSAs, trust

Reading: Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life, David Sedaris' Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Eating: wraps with bacon, borlotti beans, chard, and garlic scapes; overripe strawberries; sugar snap peas

Fun With Farmers: The Greenhorns Solstice Mixer

This past weekend, I took the back roads up to Keeseville, NY, about 120 miles up the Hudson River right next to Lake Champlain in the beautiful Adirondacks. The occasion was a Solstice Mixer hosted by the Greenhorns, an awesome organization of and for young farmers. I had a great time, met a ton of awesome young farmers, toured three great new farms cooperating in really inspiring ways, and learned some great stuff. For once, I made myself take pictures so I would have something to show for the weekend. Click through the slideshow below for a blow-by-blow of the weekend!

 

Farm Week: June 17-21, 2013

Sun, glorious sun!! After a few short but heavy showers early in the week (what's a week without rain this season, after all), we finally had a few days of sun! Our fields are by no means up to code yet, and the tractors are slowly taking back land from all but the muckiest lowlands on the farm. There are still areas with standing water, some of which has been there for about a month now. That means the heat and sun this week also brought out some new visitors: mosquitoes! It's gonna be an itchy summer!

This was only the second week with a full harvest-load, but we're already getting faster at the whole process, which means more time for the all-important fieldwork that has been neglected for these past few soggy weeks. At long last, we were finally able to use the tractor in some fields, so we started clearing the docket of our seed and transplant backup. When the ground is too wet to till or cultivate, you don't only stand to lose crops under water and weeds, but you're pushing back the harvest of all of those crops you aren't able to put into the ground. Our CSA members have been so supportive so far, voicing for the most part how impressed they are that we're delivering them full boxes of vegetables after all this weather. We can only hope that all of this understanding carries over into late July and August, when the boxes might get a little light from all of the crops that were hit so hard this past month or had to wait way too long to get into the ground. Today was a long day of transplanting, the first in a long time. It was at once exhausting and exhilarating. At the end of the day, we were all hot, tired, toasted, and covered in mud. But looking over all the rows and rows of squash, cabbages, tomatoes, greens, celery, etc., that we planted today, we all had the same feeling of accomplishment. Things are starting to look up again!

The solstice is this weekend, and I'm heading upstate early tomorrow morning to spend the weekend celebrating the occasion with other young farmers in the northeast, courtesy of the Greenhorns! I love living and working on the farm, but it will be great to have a change of scenery and meet a bunch of other like-minded people. So look out next week for some pics and inspiration from the event!

Thinking about: movements, expectations, sun-warmed strawberries

Reading: Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, David Sedaris' Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

Eating: foraged oyster mushroom and bacon omelette, local all-beef hot dogs, last year's beet chutney with local goat cheese on crackers, fresh-picked strawberries

Some Thoughts from Real Writers

I've been reading lots lately, and not just farming books. Here are two passages that I loved from books I finished this past weekend.  

From "Up, Simba," a David Foster Wallace essay that appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays about the 2000 McCain campaign:

"The fact of the matter is that if you're a true-blue, market-savvy Young Voter, the only thing that you're certain to feel about John McCain's campaign is a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen."


From Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

"We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment where everything was possible. And there will be a moment where nothing is possible. But in between we can create."

 

Farm Week: June 10-14, 2013

Soggiest week thus far. We've had about 25 inches of rain in a little over three weeks in our little green valley. With only a handful of dry days in between the wet ones, the fields haven't been passable with the tractor of hoe for more than a few hours at a time in the past month or so. We put in about an acre of large summer crops in one day last month, and then the deluge started that very night with a memorable hailstorm. For a look at what 25 inches of rain and a month without a hoe does to a stand of tomatoes, look at the greenest photo below. The fields have standing water (these past two days, even running water!), and a few crops seem to have melted right into the soil. In the next week or two, we're going to have to make some decisions about what crops to try to save and where we'll have to cut our losses.

In situations like this, the CSA model can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you don't stand to lose large portions of income like you would were you relying on farmers market sales. On the other hand, the 250 people who pre-paid for their weekly vegetables are expecting full boxes all season long. Over the past few days and weeks, almost every shareholder we run into around town or on the farm has had the same reaction to the weather: they notice it! Someone picking up their produce at the grocery store might only be slightly inconvenienced by some inclement weather, but our shareholders have been looking forward to fresh vegetables all winter and spring, and were just getting ready to pick up their first share of the season. But as they start to anticipate visiting the farm (or their local CSA drop-off) for their first time this year, they start to notice that it has been raining quite a bit recently. Everybody seems to be thinking about us when it rains these days, out there slogging through mud and rain in our boots and bibs. That personal connection with the farmer is what makes it possible for our members to understand why the box might not be filled to the brim for a few weeks this summer, and that is the beauty of the CSA model.

Despite the weather, this was our first week harvesting a full load for delivery and pickup, and we most definitely improved in speed and efficiency as the week progressed. My stint as the only person who hadn't cut themselves with the sharp harvest knives came to a close on Thursday in the cilantro, and I'm hoping that will tide me over for awhile. I drove the White Plains route again this week, a task that both reminded me of the joys of rural living and provided an opportunity to practice the ancient art of zen traffic-sitting.

Next week, we can only hope for a sunny, dry version of this past week, in which we harvest so quickly and efficiently that we have oodles of time to finally transplant the crops that have been waiting out this weather and to save some of the potential losses from the past month's saturated excesses.

Thinking about: dry heat, time management, trade-offs

Reading: David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, George Saunders' Tenth of December, Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Eating: chicken I personally killed, plucked, gutted, cleaned, and cooked a variety of ways, homemade refried black beans, kale risotto, rainbow chard, small handfuls of fresh ripe strawberries