Posts filed under 'ecology'
New LIfe on the Farm Front
Baby Goat Pickle, photo courtesy of farm member, April WatkoLife on the farm is very cyclical, and although the seasons and their comings and goings, have always been at the forefront of my awareness, coloring my world both outside and in, there is also on the farm this continual presence of the duality of life. Here we are, still eating mostly winter vegetables while the planting to-dos rattling around in my head are all of those truly summer crops, the smell of basil starts mouth watering; and yet outside us the dogwood and cherry blossoms flutter to the ground…spring’s snow… and its lilacs and morel mushrooms, wild azalea colors out the car window, with the soundtrack early morning bird songs and blowing, blowing winds sounding spring, spring, spring. All the energy swirling around here is spring energy; the symbol of our days, the seed. It is a time of hope and faith, the hope of new growth, the faith we place in such a simple thing–a seed buried in the ground.
And alongside our faith in the earth to grow, there are the babies spring brings! We have those four week old goat kids that some of you met, so very, very cute. There are nine chicks warming themselves in the old hen house, the start of our next egg laying chickens for the family at least. We are still on the fence about how large this next flock will be–home or commercial scale—but while we were trying to make up our minds, we couldn’t go any longer without at least a few of the sweet cheeps we keep seeing everywhere. May is a good month to celebrate mothers, even when human babes are less beholden to the seasons. A lot of other mamas in nature have just hatched or birthed the new year’s little treasures.
The thing is that all of this energy of life exploding around us is being juxtaposed with the other side of the candle. The farm’s first dog, come to this piece of land when she was just on the doorstep of “old dog” status, passed on last week. Then the weekend began with a call from home about my father in the hospital and ended with a call about my mother in the hospital. All three of these things were not surprises; every morning for a while now, I have gone out to call for Zoya wondering if she would respond, and a trip home was being planned just prior to all of this because of my parents’ ailing health.
And really, this is not “farm” news except that for me, I wonder if these things might be harder in another life. In this one here, living amongst the cycles of the seasons, of plants and animals burgeoning and diminishing, of every day getting to work and play with my own next generation, thoughts about the end of one thing always lead the way back to the beginning of something else. It is the way of life, really, in all things. It just seems to be a rhythm that we beat a little more loudly on this farm. And it is not that it takes the edge off of the sadder turns of the circle, the darker months of our lives…indeed it sharpens them. It is just that it then kindly sets them down next to the immeasurable beauty of the mundane day to day.
So we have our own little bit of winter sky worries we have to carry alongside us as we plant seeds for the future. One thing we don’t have to worry about, though, is the real change that seems to be taking place in the farming world. Impediments or not, young and sustainable new farmers are studying this stuff in school and beginning ventures of their own while others, from young to middle aged alike go from gardeners to small farmers. Two new Yamhill county farms (our friend Scott Dickey of Dickey Farms West and a new acquaintance from Carlton whose operation is called Wholesome Hearts), will be growing vegetables for direct to consumer sales this year, while a friend’s son who is studying sustainable agriculture at OSU is growing on his parents formerly conventional farm his first farming crops! Just like the spring babies, the births of more farm operation aimed at promoting soil, economic, and community health are worth gushing over. New life and new farming, for my children and their children and on and on and over again, that is why we are doing what we are doing. And all of us working these farms applaud all of you choosing to buy your vegetables (meat, nuts, dairy, fruit, etc, etc) from farms who grow to sustain the land and its cycles. As one of our discarded taglines for the new logo goes, we are farming as if there’s a future. By supporting local farms (and every other local kind of business), you are spending your dollars as if there’s a future.
2 comments May 14, 2009
First CSA Harvest of 2009!
Photos by Olorin Jaillet!
Although we find ourselves 7 or 8 weeks past our hoped for starting date for the 2009 season, we are pleased to be starting 6 weeks earlier this season than last, making for 35 weeks of veggie harvests this year. Providing our farm members with fresh and healthy food for 2/3 of this year is exciting, and another step closer to our final goals for the farm. And at the start of this year we can’t help but being excited with where we are now.
The soil on this poor old farmstead had seen years of abuse…nothing chemical, thankfully, but the topsoil from two fields had been scraped and sold to the old Riverbend dump and almost every other space had been cut for hay or overgrazed. Although the animals that were grazed here gave something back to the land as they grazed, never as much as was taken; and when a field is cut and the green matter is removed, all of the energy the land put into the growing of that grass is taken, something needs to go back and this was never intentionally done. The pastures our first two years here showed signs of this. They were filled with thistles and grew grass poorly. The vegetable field was heavy clay, and was also weedy with thistles and queen anne’s lace. For those of you who have been members since our first season, you well remember the troubles we had in such a growing space.
But things have improved each year as more and more organic matter has been added to the soil. When we started working the beds this year, we found the soil in most spots is great, loose and rich and beautiful! And the thistles, which thrive in subsoil and poor soil have been replaced by lush clovers in the pastures and a whole host of really beautiful herbacious weeds that we have yet to identify. These are great signs of soil improvement, which is really our overarching purpose on the farm anyways. The rewards of healthy animals grazing good pasture and healthy fruits and vegetables from healthy and alive fields does ultimately benefit all of us in the form of delicious flavor and nutrient dense food; still, we believe that human survival depends on healthy soil, on the smallest of living creatures like healthy micro-organisms in the soil and the buzzing bees in the clover. It is hard for us to imagine that the farmer whose home this was and who at one time owned a hundred of these acres of farmland around us left behind a homestead with soil in disrepair, nor a single bit of fruit or shade/wind trees anywhere. The latter is a bit trivial, but it seems it is a farmer’s duty to protect the land, to build it, to nourish it, because as with anything in life, the take, take, take mantra will never really yield any true return. So we are thrilled with these signs, and we anticipate a great year of growing!
We are also working more space this year moving from growing on a little less than 1 acre up to 2 acres, which is exciting. Some of the new space is planted in fall/winter crops like leeks, Brussel sprouts, and potatoes,which we are determined to let grow to maturity, foregoing so many new potato harvests (our favorite!) in order to have them for winter when we will appreciate them even more. Most of it will be sown in cover crops for our mid-summer plantings for fall, winter, and next spring. This provides us with enough space to really have 45 weeks of veggie harvests, our ultimate goal, as well as allowing each field a resting period. We would have needed a lot of inputs to keep our smaller plot producing year round and healthy.
We are also hoping to experiment with growing on our lower field. Another source of frustration we have with the previous land owner is that this whole field is planted in reed canary grass. This grass was once encouraged as a good forage/hay grass for wetlands, but it is truly invasive and persistent and follows water, filling streams, choking out diversity. There is a small portion of our lower fields which the horse on our property favors grazing. We have begun to see a bit more diversity in this patch as well as less canary grass growth to this point. Aside from that, the soil under this grass is beautiful from river floods. So after we get soil test results, we hope to try a large pumpkin planting on this section, hoping that the sprawling vines of the pumpkins will help smother the grass. After Halloween, we will let this year’s pigs down to eat the rest of the pumpkin crop. Our hope is that they may be able to root out the canary grass rhizomes. This will most likely be a lengthy process, but one we are excited to try.
And although it is always hard for a parent to reconcile the fact that babies grow just as fast as weeds, as we tackle the heavy to do list of spring on the farm, our children, all another year older, are just that, another year older. The boys are so helpful, but our youngest, who is just a few weeks shy of 3, is (for the most part) now past just working on distinguising path versus growing space and we have another great garden helper! As she helped put transplants and potatoes in the ground this year, after each one she raised her arms to the air and exclaimed to the plant and the universe, “Grow, Plant (Potato), Grow!” It is hard to imagine that with these blessings we won’t have a great year!
2 comments April 22, 2009
White Oaks
Having begun our married life in a cabin high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where the pines and aspen grew thin and the dirt was dry, and moving then to the plains of Nebraska where the sky was huge and the Cottonwood trees shaded us from the hot summer sun, it feels like it has taken these full three years that we have been here in Oregon to become intimate with this landscape. It really has only been since we moved onto the farm last year that the land here took on that familiarity where your natural surroundings begin to be a part of you. And as there have been token natural objects in the past that have connected me to a place….the Platte River in Nebraska, which saw so much of my youthful joy and carried away the tears shed by my younger self and the eyes of the Aspen bark and 14,000 ft summits in Colorado which continually reminded me of the wildness of that place….here too, a piece of the natural world has become a symbol tome of my home, no longer new now that I have found this intimacy.
For me, here, this is the White Oak. Our farm is blessed with quite a few very old and mighty White Oaks. It is funny to me now that these trees have taken on this role of connecting me to this place, for to be honest, when we moved onto the property last year, I wasn’t that taken with them. I complained of their awkwardness. They weren’t beautiful in any picturesque well rounded or elegantly pointed way. They did nothing to provide us with a shady spot to laze under. Of course I appreciated their age, and understood that we were lucky to have them on our property, these old native oaks, But I had a two month old baby and boxes to unpack, so I didn’t take much time to get to know them last year.
As winter came and they lost their leaves, I finally took more notice. Naked, the oaks truly looked like old men, like the wise sages who truly owned this piece of land we had come to inhabit. I began to gain the proper sense of respect anything that had seen the earth for so long deserves. They welcomed our winter bird population with open arms, they even looked graceful holding the snow.
Now summer is back, and even though we have barely put down roots here at the farm, the oaks have taken us in. We have a hard time believing that our property when we arrived had no fruit planted, no shade trees around the home, so little flowers, no herbs, nothing. But we have these oaks, and as our meadow grasses go to seed, all slightly different with hints of purple or pink or gold and the blackberries put on their show of white blooms, I let the beauty of my new place in the world soak through my skin. It feels so good to be a part of this place
2 comments September 7, 2007
GMO Seed
The question we have been pondering this week: Which is the worse of two evils, using vehicles that run on oil or on Genetically Modified Corn and Soy? We are not happy with our vehicle situation right now, and as we discuss what other options we might have for our five person family, this question keeps surfacing, should we try to find diesels to convert to biodiesel or not. After two different incidents this week, it is hard to imagine using biodiesel when the production of this fuel is produced with crops that are grown with genetically modified seed (not to mention with what we consider extremely destructive farming practices).
The first was the number of comments I received about our purple beans at Farmer’s Market this week. Many people who were age 50-70 mentioned that the used to eat these as little children, usually referencing that they were grown by a grandparent of theirs. One comment like this wouldn’t have surprised me, but I kept hearing this all day. I began to think again about why we like to grow heirloom varieties. We love this connection to the past, to a time when our plates were not so limited. There are literally thousands of varieties of different vegetables, and our modern diet consumes regularly only about 30. The care with which people have always cared for and preserved seed is a concept that is lost of us today.
But this care was taken for a reason. We tend to take food availability for granted these days, and simply assume that the farmers will always have the seed to grow the food that we eat. The truth of the matter is that whole seedstock crops fail every year. Now that we have limited the kinds of green beans that are grown by the large portion of growers to only a few, we have greatly limited our ability to pull through crop failures. Biodiversity abounds in nature because it is essential to survival.
Now we have genetically modified seeds to worry about as well. In an after dinner conversations with fellow farm share members, we discussed the case of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, whose canola fields were contaminated with GMO seed, and was then sued by Monsanto because their seed is patented. He lost this case. We can’t grow corn in our bottom field because our neighbor grows GMO corn, and whether or not we would get sued for “stealing” seed or not, we don’t want our corn to cross pollinate with this questionable seed. Whether or not these giant pharmo-chemical-seed companies intend to harm the world or not, these are serious issues. Seed diversity could be lost, small farmers could be finally shoved off the playing field. I love looking through the seed catalogs, choosing new , albeit old, plant varieties. I feel in my gut that these colors, these differences, keep us strong and healthy, and bring enjoyment to life.
Add comment August 30, 2007
