Things on the technological front have been functioning less than optimally for the last few weeks.  Grandpa is setting up his office out here on the farm in their little studio apartment, and in the midst of trying to get internet out here for him, we currently don’t have it in our house or with our computer.  Whenever anything like this happens, I realize how many little things in our day to day we use the computer for.  For better or worse. 

It is about the only place I write, although I am trying to resurrect both the paper journal and letter writing in my life  (not very successfully I should add, because handwriting happens so much slower than both typing and thinking, and is often illegible afterwards).  It is for some odd reason where we store all of our phone numbers since we don’t have cell phones…a file we started a while ago and meant to print out but haven’t. It is our main means of communicating with everyone, we rarely make a phone call anyways.   From our business to our day to day planning of park trips, the back and forth of e-mails is how we do it.  It is where we go to listen to music, although our oldest son’s newfound love of the CD, and specifically used CD’s and our lovely used CD shop downtown, have rekindled my own past love with old record shops and buying music and holding it in my hand.  There is just so much out here that we can connect to on the web, more than we could ever hold in our hands.  Like I said, good or bad, it simply is.

So for us, I can’t say the two weeks of spotty availability to the web have been nostalgic or calming or refreshing, more of a hinderence in getting along normally.  To top it off, something happened to the camera the last time I let the big boy take pictures and so I couldn’t get any photos from there onto here.  Finally, we had to delete everything and get help from the farmer to figure it out.  Without a picture, what is a blog post?  It is now hard to let the words carry themselves, even though that used to be the way I liked it.  Just another thing that the computer has changed. I used to hate that photos were such a huge part of blogging because I didn’t take photos very well.  Now, I have really come to love the way they expand the story and have practiced enough to take a shot that is decent enough to open up our story.  Still, when there are no photos available, for whatever reason, are there no words to share?   

Of course there still are, but as you can see, no posts were made in that interem, so now I feel a strange dependence on the camera, again, for better or worse, I am not sure.

Anyways, once the camera situation was fixed, Olorin quickly came along and asked to take more pictures (he’s getting his own camera for his birthday, thank goodness).  And since it had been so long since I updated over here and I had lost all the pictures I had taken for the last few weeks, I asked him if I could use his picture of a frog tucked into the leaves of the fig tree, a sight spotted while we were picking the last of this year’s strawberries Tuesday night,  and came on over for a mini farm update. 

Aside from dealing with the inconvenience of not being able to say hello to all of you at the drop of a dime, we have been:

*planting all of our winter brassicas:  purple cape cauliflowers, rudolf and purple sprouting broccolis, collards, regular heading broccoli, more kale (always, more kale!), radicchios, and of course, cabbages!  I keep thinking, we are almost done planting for the year, and then we can relax a little;  but really, we will be planting through August, although most everything will be in by the end of this month.

* loving all the space we have to plant in for the fall thanks to both our neighbor’s tractor work on the farm and some hired tractor work out at our leased growing space–more than we have ever had to work with! Even though summer may be late or never this year, meaning all of those crops we grow only in the summer will arrive late, we will undoubtably have a really big late summer/early fall, with loads of food. 

*wondering if all of  that will make up for having less food in late spring early summer than we would have liked?  We can only hope!

*moving on from strawberries, as wonderful as they are, to gooseberries from our place, wild cherries galore but almost gone, and this week, blueberries from our favorite blueberry patch!

*harvesting the very first “summer” crop, green beans, dragon’s tongue!

*constantly telling different stories of what we might do differently next year, where we will take the business, what we need to focus on, invest in, etc, etc.  This is an amazing process that I am just now, five years in, able to recognize as it happens.  Through the year, as we observe the weather and its effect over the last few years, see harvests unfold, markets go through their season,discuss customer buying preferences, CSA feedback, and how our family life is working in the midst of it all, we begin imagining the next year in various ways, over and over again, until we usually finalize our new plans around for the coming season by the end of the year.  This morning I wondered if the farm would ever just be a certain way, settled as a business, but realized that no business is probably ever like that, at least if it wants to continue to be successful.

*trying to think very positively about the extremely mild summer we are experiencing.  For example, seeds started in July can be a real trick, keeping them as wet at they need to be in either a greenhouse that is really hot or outside where it is really hot.  No worries about that this year!  Also, most people seem to thrive when the temperatures are in the seventies, and as much as I feel like I thrive when it is hot and I am sweating while I weed instead of thinking about getting a sweater, I am thankful we are comfortable and hope that those folks who are dealing with extreme heat right now soon get some of that same comfort.

*getting ready for our oldest son’s tenth birthday and absolutely becoming charmed with the new phase of his development as much as I am equally overwhelmed with emotion at the end of his whole babyhood, because let me tell you, at ten, it is nearly gone! 

All of this and many, many other small little bits of life have been happening.  The baby is crawling!  We are frantically trying to rearrange the home to suit this new little guy on the move.  Parks, lakes, play dates, new friends.  Sweet and tart wild food, market day socializing, quiet summer night frog hunts.  Playing daddy elves while he isn’t looking and weeding places like the kohlrabi bed, those that don’t make his most important to do list, but need to be done just the same.  In the meantime, another year is passing in ways both wonderfully the same as we go through another season on the farm and always different as it unfolds and we grow, all of us, a bit more.  I hope that computer troubles aside, I can share more of the season with all of you before it is gone.

The farmer is not one to wear the newborns we’ve made in slings, get up in the middle of the night and do a diaper change, or go through a night time routine each night that can turn from 30 minutes to 3 hours depending on the spunk left in these kids by the end of the day.

He has always been the worker bee.

He has, from day one of papahood, worked so hard to provide for this family.  When we met, why we married, it was all about raising a family together.  It was about a mother, home with the small ones, the most important thing to him.  It has always been my way to take care of the day in day out job of tending the little people while he spends most of his day hard at work.

Now that work is at home, he gets to weave fatherhood into his day more.  He will patiently slow down to enjoy working side by side the child who has come to visit him in the fields.  He will stop altogether sometimes to embark on a small project that someone comes to him with.  He will go out for his evening work with a baby on his back.

He is the wrestler, the one who takes them fishing, their own brilliant children’s muscisian who strums his guitar while singing the most hillarious songs made up just for them.  He does not remind them to brush their hair before coming to town nor notice if they have on a dirty shirt, and I think they appreciate the difference.

He does, however, gently set an example of right action.  He is the wise and just judge that hears many a children’s squabbles.  He is the helping hand a mama sometimes needs when their balance is momentarily lost.  He holds them to the important things:  kindness, fairness, respect.

He is such a good dad.

So here’s to a happy father’s day for the farmer!  He will be working (surprise, surprise!)…but at least not all day!  There will be dinner with his own wonderful papa (and mama) tonight, then to the lake for fishing.  Simple and fun, just right for him.

And a happy father’s day to all of the other wonderful papa’s out there too!  Such important people you all are.

We have been feeling the neighborly love of rural living so much lately.  That tractor pictured above is in the middle of prepping our luscious bottom land soil–which is finally dry enough to work–for the upcoming planting of fall/winter crops.

See that rototiller there?  It is ever so much smaller than that tractor!

And the farmer spends hours upon hours working ground with it.   It has proven just right for working our sloped field now that we have been growing on it for a number of years.  It takes just a few passes to work in the compost mulch that has been added, and with single row plantings, works fine for cultivating for weed control occasionally through the season.  We have a furrow attachment to hill our potatoes and the farmer usually enjoys being mobile while he works rather than stationary.

However, this small ditty is horrible for getting new spaces into production, and we have two areas we have been trying to prepare for planting now for a few years.  One is in need of serious amendment, so that will be a long process anyway.  The other area is a portion of our bottom land.  The soil is wonderful, but it was planted in canary grass before we bought the place, and is wet from December until May or June.  When it is dry, it needs to be ready as fast as possible so we can make the most use of it we can with such a limited amount of time for growing on it.  The tiller never could get as much of it ready in time as we wanted.

One of our neighbors had stopped by earlier this spring with some mole and gopher traps.  He, and his faithful sidekick Luca, spent some time investigating the various mounds of dirt around the farm, and ultimately reduced the population of these artichoke plant eaters and new row of seedling destroyers quite a bit.  During this time, he and the farmer spent a lot of time talking farming.

Our neighbor is one of a handful of folks who farm most of the land on our little road.  He farms grass seed and grains and grows them fairly conventionally.  When we first moved out here, all these fields looked the same to us–not ideal.  But as we began to become familiar with our surroundings, we soon noticed this father and son driving back and forth on our road many times a day, a sweet dog in the back of their truck.  We would see them walking in their fields when other fields rarely, if ever, saw the farmer who was “farming” them.  We appreciated that.

After getting to know them, and subsequently many other farmers in our valley who grow crops in all manner of ways, it really became impossible not to separate our dislike for certain farming practices from the wonderful folks still out here engaged in working the land.  And with our neighbors, this is doubly true.

So while talking about farming in general and farming our land in particular, two wonderful things happened.  First, this tractor came for a visit!  Our neighbor offered to work up the area we needed ready in our lower field, so generous!

And probably even more exciting was this:  he offered to help Andre find some land to lease on our road!  Although we love our little farm, our years of getting a business started on it have made us realize that although it makes a great homestead–what, with all this fencing! a turn of the century barn in solid condition to build a home out of! a giant machine shed and a workshop! and a lovely view!– it is not the ideal spot for growing vegetables for a living.

Through the farmer’s eyes back when we were looking at properties, it looked like the perfect permaculture spot, and that it is!  The water alone is worth it.  But we need some good easy ground to grow vegetables on.  As we mentioned above, our bottom land is great, and makes up about 7 acres of our property.  But with such a short time available for growing on it, it can only be a small part of our growing space.  The rest of our land is much better suited to fruit and perennials, and our own goats and pigs and chickens.

Starting last fall, we had the opportunity to begin working on an acre right outside of town.  It has been nice to have the extra growing space, a warmer micro-climate, and somehow, no slugs over at that piece of land.  We originally planned on just planting it in a few crops for the fall and winter.  We weren’t sure about water, and we weren’t sure about needing to go so far to harvest on a weekly basis.  In the end, we have collaborated with the owner on getting irrigation set up and decided to plant it more broadly.  So far, it hasn’t proved to be too hard to get the work that needs to be done over there done in one long day plus a few evenings after our markets when the farmer is already in town.

Getting the feel for this has just made our back burner plans to find some acreage to lease move to the front burner.  Wednesday night, our neighbor showed the farmer a really nice 5 acres with water and good soil right near our home.  It is too perfect– I hate to get too excited about it.  But just this maybe helps us feel like we will find the spot we need to easily grow more great vegetables while growing great fruit and other perennials on our own, much more dynamic, piece of ground.  Growing the business in the way that is right for our land’s particulars.

And if things work out with that 5 acres, or another 2-4 somewhere else, we will likely just have to bite the bullet and finally get a tractor ourselves.  Until then, it is nice to have so much kindness and generosity for neighbors.  In his way, our neighbor is now part of another kind of farming.  Even though we don’t understand each other’s perspectives entirely when it comes to this, working together comes naturally.  It’s just neighborly love.

Hooray!  Today marks the beginning of another CSA season, our fifth.  This week we have been thinking back to our first year, the beginnings of Growing Wild Farm.  We were happy to realize that a third of our members are founding members, folks that have been part of this farm experience since the beginning.  Another third have been with us for almost as long, joining in our second or third years, and about another third of you are just starting with us this year or joined sometime last year.

For some of you, the start of another year is old hat and our history is part of your own history of eating with us.  For our new members, though, we realized that some of our story may be unfamiliar, so we thought we would briefly share it today.

So, how did Growing Wild Farm begin?

The seeds of our farm started to germinate  within the first year of our marriage.  We, admittedly, married and started our family while relatively young by today’s standards.  The farmer was just 23 (I was 25) and up to that point we were still pursuing other interests.  When we met, one of us was going to be starting a graduate program in literature and philosophy , the other was focused on making music.  We really didn’t have the kind of clear ideas about how we were going to make a living that many people do.  We were both idealists and at that point, we were happy to be doing what we loved and money was not a concern.

But together, we quickly realized that we wanted to start a family.  Long story short, after starting a family and beginning to grow our own food and becoming friends with someone who had spent time working on a CSA farm out here in the Pacific Northwest, we decided that this was the work for us.  It would fulfill both our need to make a living to support our family, as well as our own personal need to do work that we loved and that held significance to us, all while keeping us together as a family.  Having been introduced to Wendell Berry in college, the idea of local foodsheds had always stuck with me, and I had always imagined living in the country in a self-sustaining kind of way.  Once we began gardening, the farmer quickly found that he loved growing food, building soil naturally, and creating diverse and alive spaces where our crops flourished as well as provided a balanced ecosystem for wild things as well.

We read gardening books and permaculture books and some that pertained to commercial growing, moved here to Oregon, and began looking for land.  In many ways, we were so naive!  We had started our married life in Colorado were we knew we could never afford land, spent time in my home state of Nebraska where land was very reasonable, then moved here knowing that land was not too over-inflated, but it was still high close in to the community we had found in McMinnville.

So while we looked at properties closer to Sheridan and Grand Ronde, much farther away than we wanted, Grandma and Grandpa asked us how we would feel about buying something together.  There were many things to consider, especially since Oregon’s land use laws make it hard for you to have two residences on a piece of land with only one pre-existing home.  In the end, we decided we could figure this part of it out down the road since they would be staying in California for a few more years, and we all agreed it was a good idea.

Time was of the essence since they were selling a home to re-invest in the farm.  I was nearly due with our third child.  They came up for a week or so and there was a whirlwind of looking at properties and deciding on one that week!  It was not the long and drawn out search for our “perfect” property by any means, but it was going to be such a benefit to us all, and we would have some land to start our farm, so we were excited!  So that year we closed on the property on my little girl’s due date, she was born a week later, and we moved in when she was two months old.

The farmer started transforming this place even before we moved, planting our first orchard as soon as the farm was ours, coming out to water them while we coddled our new little baby at our home in town.  The rest of that year we walked the property, drew out a map of what we thought the whole place might look like one day (and we are always surprised, when we pull this out, how things are coming together so much like this first plan!), and we started to envision our business.

Again, we were naive in so many ways!  We knew we wanted to be a CSA farm primarily, while doing our one (at that time) local farmer’s market, as well as selling a little to restaurants.  This model has still proven to be the best fit for us and for a sustainable farm business.  However, not having grown food on such a large scale for production before, just having grown a home garden and selling some of that abundance at a very small Nebraska farmer’s market, we were not fully prepared to begin offering a CSA that first year….we just didn’t know that until after we were knee deep in our first season.

It was very hard and frustrating and, quite honestly, humiliating.  We took our permaculture growing method of sheet mulching and tried to apply it to our larger growing space on soil that was heavy, heavy, heavy clay, sold 50 CSA shares, and got really excited to be living out our dream.  That year, getting vegetables to grow in that soil was like trying to pull teeth that weren’t loose.  It hurt.  We kept our chins up, and worked really hard to meet our obligation to our CSA members.  We bought organic fruit from other farms to round things out.  By the end of the year we were exhausted and relieved to be done for the year.  We even ended farmer’s market two weeks early.

The farmer went back to work landscaping for the winter and we re-thought everything.  The truth was we didn’t want to do anything else at all.  We knew this was the work we were meant to do, we loved it and the life of living on the farm.  WE BELIEVED IN IT.  We knew that nourishing our community and the land we were stewards of mattered.

And so, despite that first year, we went forward.  We rearranged our farm model slightly, slowly building back up to this year, where we are right back to the plan we started with.  We have transformed our soil and are now growing on more land, all of it in good health.  Around our third season, we joked that we had completed our two year internship and that we were starting our business in earnest.  Now, in our 5th year we are happy to have a thriving CSA, two markets to attend with one year round, and some great local restaurants who like to buy our produce when we have it.  The farmer has even been able to retire from landscaping and is now a full time farmer!

We have had many growing pains along the way, but that comes with any kind of good learning.  We have been stretched and molded by the work we have done.  We have grown as our farm has grown, and found a home not only on our farm, but through our farm, in our community.

So, hooray!  Today marks the beginning of another season of eating together.  This year, you will share with us the delicious flavors of each season, of food that tastes unlike anything you can find in the store, full of life and nutrition.  We will welcome you to the farm, we will celebrate together this summer.  Each week, we will see each other and share small news with each other, all while communing together over the gifts of the earth, the beautiful produce grown on this farm.

Spring, in earnest anyways, has been late coming this year.  There have been a few subtle shifts to let us know that March 20th did in fact come and start a new season–the days are longer, the frogs and birds louder and more lively.  It has even, admittedly,  been a wee bit warmer; but for the most part, it has still been cool, and most certainly, wet.  The wet is no surprise, but warm and wet is quite a different story from cold and wet.

And I feel so impatient.

I am ready to soak in the sun without a sweater on, to be absolutely done with fires in the woodstove, to have the windows open and the night air in our room without wool socks and comforters making it happen.  Maybe I am really just ready for summer and not spring, at least here in our spot in the Pacific Northwest.  But more warmth is what I want!

The consolation for my impatience, however, is that the world is coming alive slowly and surely, even if it is more slowly than it would if we had a few more 60+ degree days.  And when the sun does come out, it is so wonderful that I swear the earth is singing. The cherry blossoms come alive with the sounds of so many bees buzzing, and we begin to get a feel for what is to come–the wild abundance of warmer weather.

This winter on the farm was many things. It was the first winter that the farmer did not have to do some landscaping work in order to supplement the farm income.  In fact, this month marks his first year of full time farming, and we are pretty excited about that.  It means that we are not hustling like mad through spring planting and prepping while wrapping up work off the farm.  Everything is getting the care and attention it needs in early spring, and no one feels like they are going crazy.  The pace is busy and steady, but not rushed, and that feels so good.

And for the rest of us, this was a quiet, quiet winter.  We retreated into the warmth of our home and our new little baby.  We took it easy, stayed home, and were inside more than out.  It felt good, to just be with this new little person during the season when the weather and the pace kept things on the low down.

But part of the itching I feel for warm weather is an itching to be doing more.  The time of the earth’s contracting in and us along with it is over.  We both want to stretch out!

It is true that so very soon we will be busy, busy.  The warm that I long for will bring with it the rapid growth of those spring crops we wait so pensively for.  The other green things will want to grow fast too, weeding will take over our lives (in a very lovely way) and the summer market season will be here and we will be out and about seeing everyone again!

I can’t wait.

There is some blooming happening, and I am finding myself hard pressed to wait for it to be the whole world.  Come on spring!  We’re ready.

Filed under: changes, family, farm, farming, nature, spring, Uncategorized Tagged: farming, seasons, spring ]]> http://growingwildfarm.com/2011/04/20/blooming/feed/ 0 growingwildfarm blooming http://growingwildfarm.com/2010/11/08/to-market-to-market/ http://growingwildfarm.com/2010/11/08/to-market-to-market/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:44:52 +0000 growingwildfarm http://growingwildfarm.com/?p=746 ]]> Although it happened without being planned, the babe and I spent almost all day at The Market yesterday:  he snuggled in his wrap sleeping soundly and giving everyone only a top of the head view of his baby cuteness, me working our market booth with the farmer for the first time since mid-August or so.  What a treat it was to see most of our CSA members and regular market customers again!  And what a treat it was to see it so bustling and busy!

Going into fall and winter, we can’t help but let worries sprout their ugly heads.  We can never count on the weather, but there is always more concern about what the weather will bring in the winter months than in the spring and summer.  There is always concerns about if enough was planted and if enough growth will be put on the plants before they just stop growing and sit out the rest of winter until the light and warmth return.  Will we have enough to harvest every week during these months?  Will our plans work out?

For the last two winters that we have tried this, they haven’t.  We have had weather that we were unprepared for and we haven’t been able to harvest, for the CSA at least, like we had hoped.   We have, however, always had vegetables to harvest.  And that is why we are so excited to have a farmer’s market to attend throughout the entire year.

But this is a new and young market, and it brought with it other concerns…could it draw enough folks to support us through the winter?

It has been such a relief, and such a testament to the great base of active, concerned, and savvy food shoppers we share this community with, to see that this market is already so vibrant at just its one-year mark.

And having a vibrant, year round market makes a world of difference!  Without the support of its community, small farms will not be there to provide their community with delicious and well grown products.  We are so grateful to all of you who are coming out each and every Saturday to see us.  And after such a long break from seeing everyone, it was really great for me to see all of you.  In previous years, when our Thursday market ended in October, there was always a whole lot of sadness to think we had more than 30 weeks off from market season.  Now, we get to continue without a break!  And for us, this means not only do we get to bring our own goods to town each week of the year, but we get to continue shopping from some of our favorite local vendors each week as well.

It also means that we get to keep our connection to the community, face to face, throughout the year.  Farmer’s markets are more than just a place to shop, for consumers and vendors alike.  They are a place for the community to gather, to grow connections, to become stronger and more unified, and most importantly, to have fun together!  I can’t say for sure that the baby and I will be there every week, but the farmer and our farm products will, thanks to all of you who will be there too.

With Labor day this weekend, school starting, weeds tackled, and planting mostly done for the year, September heralds the beginning of the end of summer.  We are squeezing in one more trip to the beach this weekend (surfing included) and one more summer party to attend next weekend, but mostly we are in transition both on the farm and in the home.  The kids and I will have a new schedule, one much less involved with the remaining 6 Thursday farmer’s markets as well as the harvests.  The new little one can be expected anytime really, but most likely in 2-3 weeks.  We have made arrangements for help to get our CSA shares harvested in the midst of new baby and to make it to every market of the season, so  hopefully there will not be any glitches in that plan.  Things are feeling settled for the year.

We had the opportunity to plant fall and winter crops with a friend over at his growing space (Dicky Farms West).  This gives us a nice bit of extra dry land to have veggies in for the coming seasons.  This week we harvested the first of the crops ready there, the lovely French Breakfast radishes we had at market and in the CSA shares this week. Radishes!  The beginning of fall food, although not the end of summer’s.

Really, even though these small changes are signaling the change of seasons to come, September’s vegetables harvests are still full of all the summer goodies.  With the crazy spring weather slowing everything down this year, we are just now getting in to some of our favorite summer crops like tomatoes and peppers.  There is still so much to be harvested!  September and October are the fullest, ripest months on the farm…duly referred to as harvest time!  It is indeed a time of abundance.  I can’t help but love the feeling this year of my belly ripening, fully round now and as sweet as can be.  As we work our way towards fall and Thanksgiving time, these next few months will give us much to be thankful for.  Enjoy every last moment of summer weather, each bite of deliciousness the season has produced for us, and your own season of fullness as we all get ready to settle in to autumn.

Now that the weather has allowed us to play catch up on work that should have been finished those last few wet weeks of May, we took a Sunday to ourselves and ran away for the day.  Not far, just over to the coast, but it was a loaded trip.  We left at 4:00 am, arrived in Newport to the rising sun and spent the morning fishing, clamming, and playing in the still jetty water, wet sand, and rocky embankment.

Everyone was so in the moment that the early rise time and snacky breakfast and wet clothes didn’t even matter.  Times like these are so good for us, especially in the summer, when we don’t have regular kid’s activities filling up the schedule and enough work on the farm, always, to just spend every day doing just that–working.  The kids, of course, play on the farm as well as work alongside us; and since they are their own best friends, really, life is good on those days too.  Still, adventures make the everyday all the more beautiful.  And memories are easier to make, and keep, when you pack the car the night before and spend time driving, talking, and laughing at hours you normally would be sound asleep.

It was beautiful and warm and not at all windy until we packed up just before lunch and headed north a bit to meet Grandma and Grandpa for a picnic barbecue to celebrate Grandpa’s birthday at Devil’s Lake in Lincoln City.  More water to play in, more warm sun, paintings and cards and homemade gifts to give to Grandpa.

The day was so, so good.  And it wasn’t just the children who had fun.  The farmer, ever the utilitarian even on his day’s off, was giddy to come home with a bag full of clams and cockles.  He has, since the summer we met, been one to try to catch us shellfish, whether it was in hopes of feeding us as we hiked across an island with very slim rations, or questionable river crayfish that flavored our camping cookware for the rest of a trip around the country. It was endearing (and funny) then, and it is quite the same now.  It makes him smile, and really, this time, made for a fabulous clam chowder.  He even got to nap in the sun, perhaps his (now second) favorite beach activity.

We came home completely exhausted.  There was nothing more to do than pop some corn for dinner and crawl in to bed.  It was a perfect day.

Yesterday morning, we were so thrilled to be greeted by the sun.  After such a long and rainy harvest day on Wednesday, we had high hopes for a dry and warm market.  Unfortunately, by the time we were setting up for the day, a coolness and cloud cover had returned, and although we stayed dry for most of the day, we did get rain for the last few hours at market.  The weather is on everyone’s minds, it seems.  We are all tired of the colder than average temperatures and the rain that we all hope is done for the season by now.  It is certainly on our minds, and has set before us new challenges, like it seems to every season in one way or another.

All spring we play a game with the rain, waiting for dry ground to work and plant in.  We had felt pretty good about keeping up with planting this year in the spring rush, and pushed really hard in May until we were pretty much forced to put planting on hold around May 19th because of rainy weather that has only let up enough for us to plant on one or two days since then.  Thankfully we had put in some of everything by then (except our eggplants, which with these low temperatures may just be better off in the greenhouse anyways).  We had planned on putting the rest of the summer and successive plantings in our lower field.  This field is low and very wet, with standing water from December through April.  It was already taking longer than we had hoped to dry out.  Some parts had, and we worked those up and have peppers and winter squash and a few other things planted there.  Other parts were still too wet.  Now, with all the rain, it is all wet again; we worry about it being too wet for the peppers and we did lose some winter squash plantings that just rotted.

Nevertheless, the sun is shining today and we have ideas for working around the weather as much as we can.  We are looking at our main field, seeing that there is space opening up, things that are already coming out of the ground.  Maybe we will just plant the eggplant up there, as well as in and around crops we will see coming out of the ground soon enough.  Our main field has a gentle slope, which doesn’t work well in terms of keeping nutrients evenly distributed, but does work great for drying out more quickly than other spaces.  With wind and sun and the increased amount of plant growth at this time of year, we are able to sometimes work in the soil after just one day without rain.  We are not panicking.  At this point, we have learned pretty well that the weather is far beyond our control.  We plan the best we can and then adjust along the way as each year we have a different set of weather events that throw us curve balls.  We are getting to be more experienced batters, we feel pretty confident about hitting most of these balls far enough to round the bases, even when we can’t always hit home runs.

So it goes in farming, as it always has.  The children and I are reading the Little House on the Prairie books, and everything in them…the weather and the pests…seems magnified in a land that is just being tamed.  We have it pretty good these days.  We have learned to work mostly to our advantage with the natural world.  We can’t get too upset when such a magnificent force is our main contender and we still manage so well.  Besides, we are vegetable lovers over here, and we aim to make you all such folks alongside us.  We love spring food, and fall and winter food,  just as much as summer food (or more, to be honest).  We choose not to invest in hoophouses and too much row cover, because right now the materials needed for all these season extenders are plastic, and we can hardly bear to throw the plastic we do use, recycled from our friend’s nursery greenhouses whenever they replace their hoophouses with new plastic, into the trash.  We are content, although it is a business challenge, to work with growing what we can when we can, weather permitting.  All of the foods that we grow are so delicious, it really doesn’t matter when and where and how much each year.  It is always an adventure that we are happy with by the end of the season;  always too much of one thing we can’t imagine eating it again, always a craving for more of something that didn’t work well and thus a drive to make that crop work the following year.  For our farm members and market customers, we always work hard with the controls we have to make things better, and then work extra hard around what nature hands us for the year to make it the best we can.  It is always deliciously satisfying and nourishing for all of us, while keeping us all connected to the cycles and whimsies of nature.

After what has seemed like a long winter and spring, with no early season harvesting for the CSA, we are so thrilled to be back at it. This week marks the first week of not only our CSA harvests, but both of our Farmer’s Markets as well! In a way, without those early CSA harvests, even up until Wednesday morning, and through the first harvest Wednesday and Thursday morning, it all seemed a bit surreal.

Maybe it was due to the last week of unseasonably cold and rainy weather, but until we got to market yesterday and started to see all our wonderful customers and farm members and the thriving market bustling as ever, it didn’t quite feel like the season was here. Even after three years of this routine, our first harvest this week was a little fumbly, our rhythms not quite keeping time.

Even after getting things in order in the wash station and upgrading certain tools and amenities–we built a nice walk in cooler that can fit all the veggies we harvest at the same time allowing for some extra harvest time on Wednesday and less concern about rotating and keeping things wet with just one refrigerator to use—we still felt slow.

Thankfully, it did just feel like a warming up, a getting used to being in the swing of things, and being back in the swing of things feels so good!