Posts filed under 'challenges'
Staying Healthy
I spent most of this week on the farm tending to fevers and sore heads, throats, and tummies. As terrible as that sounds, the farmer was better by day 3, the kids each after 1 or 2 days. We made lots of chicken soup from Kookoolan Farms’ birds with lots of veggies to make a rich, healthy, and healing broth. We sipped tea with some of the elderberry syrup we made at summer’s end for just such occasions, and we took hot baths and rested. In the end, we were happy that it was over quickly and that it wasn’t too bad.
We tend to look to food for our vitamins and minerals and medicines, and I feel blessed to be able to continue to eat fresh, nutritious vegetables through the fall and winter, times when our bodies are called on to fight off the colds and flus that come during this time of year. All growing vegetables and fruits begin to lose nutritive value once they have been picked, and they also will not reach their maximum nutritive value if they are picked under ripe to make it through shipping and handling to stores far and wide. And although each season offers its own set of repeating foods, we hope that with your CSA share you notice a rainbow of colors, from dark leafy greens to bright orange carrots and squash, with red, cream, purple, and white roots. All of these provide a well balanced supply of various vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. There are, no doubt, always many pieces to the pictures of our health, and colds and flus are hard to avoid, but I hope that you are staying well and enjoying the bit of natural medicine the healthy and tasty produce we share together provides!
Add comment October 27, 2009
A hard frost!
The farm frosted hard this morning! This may be the last week of veggie harvests that teeter in the space between eating seasons. The very last peppers, the very last summer squash…although the tomatoes are always picked to ripen in storage just so we can spread out the season of everyone’s favorite summer fruit, and we may just get another eggplant harvest next week because the plants rebounded quite unscathed from this morning’s layer of frosty white. Other signs of change abound. Waking at 5:30 this morning to help a wee one get a drink of water, I was struck by how much it felt like the middle of the night. It was dark, the bright moon set for the night, and no sight of the rising sun. I just couldn’t imagine staying awake, the feeling that it was still night was too strong, even though this was the hour we did wake on Tuesdays not long ago, sky light blue, ready to begin the harvests for the day.
In many ways, everything around us is telling us to slow down. The days are shorter, the sky telling us to sleep more, work less. The crops that needed us to tend to them day in and day out, to harvest, harvest, harvest their mad rush at setting as much fruit as possible while the heat lasts, the weeds competing with our plantings in a summer long race to win, all done for the year. The frost itself calling to us to take the time to start the fire and warm the kettle again, because no harvesting could be done until the leaves thawed. The farmer’s market ends this week too, and in a flash, our summer routine is gone for another year. Slowly, slowly we inch towards winter.
So alongside your summer squash this week we have the first of the season’s winter squash! And everything that has been touched by this morning’s frost (and our two softer frosts before this) has been infused with the sweetness of the season. This is the best time to eat fresh food, the sweetest and fullest of all. We were caught off guard this morning, the first really cold fingers of the season, but harvesting food for all of you through the fall is one of our favorite things to do. Unlike in the warmer months, food becomes such a treasure, a source of warmth itself, as we head into colder weather. If you are at all busy bees like we are in the summer, the true savoring starts now, when nature beckons us to slow down and sip some soup!
Add comment October 6, 2009
Reflecting
Tonight, I reside inside a Maxfield Parrish painting. The white oaks black outlines, with mad purples and pinks and peach swirling through the sky. There is no wind to lift my head to, no cliff to stand on, this isn’t “Ecstasy”; as joyful as we are, as in love with each other, this life and this land, there is a melancholy that sits with me this summer, I know a feeling that lingers after the passing of my parents. It it double edged, because even as I feel this, I also feel my perspectives have become unlimited with this experience, I feel my compassion, my understanding, my clear belief in meaning in this life, in the purpose of love and family and all things human, has expanded beyond limit. It is heart wrenching, both in how sad it can be and how beautiful it all is.
Farming this year is a bit like this as well. In all ways, our best year yet. A good sign, and each year should be our best. But I have a feeling that each year will come with some sharp points to. A farmer friend we talk with at market joked that with farming, it is a good year when you don’t want to bang your head against the wall, really hard, or something to that affect. It was a joke, but it was also very funny. Funny because, as much as we have been able to ride the waves that this year has brought, it can take its toll.
Will there be a year when all the crops do well and there are no weather impediments, no seed variables, no undone tasks? Doubtful! I know that we will just have to roll with things, and plan for some amount of missed deadlines, crop
failures or mishaps, unpredictable weather, which we do. We will have to accept that it is not reasonable to expect a “perfect” year, and that once something has happened, our sanity lies in assessing what we can do from there, and gracefully moving forward. Isn’t that really the way to make it through all of life, bending and bowing to the wind rather
than remaining rigid, only to break in the end.
We are already making our plans for next year, the changes we will make, the next year’s goals. It is hard to see that more than one of this year’s goals weren’t met, but better to see that some of those most important to us were realized, and that although the year isn’t at a close by any means, from our perspective right now, it has been a success. Soon, we will have a short survey for all of you wonderful farm members. We haven’t done this before, because as we evaluated our first two seasons, there were some major issues to address, ones that were blatantly clear to us, we didn’t need to ask anyone else.
But now, we have a few questions to put to you, to see where some things will take us next year. It is all of you, so many of you sure support from the beginning, that have brought us to where we are, and you and the CSA program are the ongoing heartbeat of our farm operation. We look forward to continuing to grow together, in all kinds of weather!
Add comment August 26, 2009
Abundunce
The exciting news this week is ripe tomatoes! We know you have all been waiting and waiting, and this is really just a small bit of the very first, still nothing to write home about; nevertheless, as some of you saw at this weekend’s open farm, the tomato planting is massive this year, so there will be no shortage of everyone’s favorite garden vegetable. Since things are just getting started, we will be picking off the cherry tomatoes for the next couple of weeks. After that, all of our farm pick-up members can pick from these every week at pick-up if they desire. Likewise, the cut-flower bed, a project idea that barely came together this year, is flowering nicely, albeit only a handful of varieties. Feel free to ask for help cutting some flowers to take home if you’d like, or ask our expert bouquet man, our oldest son Olorin, to pick one for you. Olorin has brought a small amount of cut flower bouquets to each and every farmer’s market this year, a business he has enjoyed and is considering expanding next year! Maybe with his help we will have a wider selection of flowers for the u- pick flower patch next year! And it is almost canning time; once the tomatoes hit full speed, we will let all of you know about extra picking for winter preservation.
Our main winter preparedness goals lie in the fields. We have been working overtime to be well prepared for our second season of continued harvesting through the winter. There have been bumps in the road these last few weeks. The potatoes that had looked so good this year are now showing signs of distress. We imagine that yields will still be good, but his high cost start up crop is always leaving us wanting more. The parsnips planting we tried everything we knew to get started still hasn’t germinated, four weeks later. Notoriously hard to start, we can only try again in the cooler weather, with
hopes of smaller parsnips in early spring.
But, the planting and planning is still more positive than not, especially for us, eaters who have come to relish the flavors of these coming crops probably more than even the ubiquitous fresh tomato. Not to say these summer flavors aren’t just right for this time of year. Simple, vegetable laden dishes are fast and filling on busy summer farm days, and being able to snack on so much, from cucumbers to tomatoes, simply out of hand in the fields is a blessing. And being in the midst of abundance does wonders for the soul. Zucchinis and cucumbers and tomatoes up to our ears, a sign of the graciousness of the earth to bear fruit, and reminder to be thankful for all that we do have.
Add comment August 12, 2009
August Rush
August is here, and all of a sudden the steady pace we have held to since spring’s crazy planting rush has picked up tempo again. We are in the thick of fall’s planting, which is a rush just like in spring, but feels even more like a race since we aren’t working our way towards warmer, faster growing weather where late plantings often play catch up, but rather towards the cooling down, the slowing down. Unlike most crops in the spring line-up, which are often going to be planted in succession anyways or want to be planted when its nice and warm so there is no hurry anyways, we have pretty clear deadlines on most of our last plantings of the year if we hope for adequate growth and sufficient yields to make it through the fall, winter, and early spring. So, there is a lot of clearing house right now, prepping beds, and general angst about whether it will all get done because we also happen to be in the thick of summer’s glorious but unrelenting fecundity. We felt like all we could do last week was harvest and water, demands of the heat and its boost in productivity all of a sudden in the fields. The weeds enjoyed a week of undisturbed growth as well while we were busy, but the farmer and our wonderful farm help managed to make pretty good mileage against those yesterday. Really, the fields at this point are the tidiest we have ever been able to manage, so that will be a boon as we push through this month, perhaps our busiest of the year.
But even this August rush isn’t all there is to come. Its bramble time, blackberries in the mornings. Sunflowers and zinnias, tomatoes too. Dark purple fingers picking bright orange and red and yellow, the colors of the height of summertime. As much work as there is to be done in what seems to short a time, being able to do this work, to be out so fully in this time of year, to notice every bit of it and to love it for its beauty as well as its hectic routine, it is all worth it, for a zillion reasons. The greatest of which, aside from our own personal pleasure in living this life, is sharing the bounty of these fields and this labor with all of you.
Add comment August 4, 2009
