photo courtesy of Jim Jaillet

That’s what we are, all of us I know; but when it starts to feel like the days are whirling by too fast, I start to feel a real love/hate relationship for this place and e-mail and facebook and the whole world wide web.  Who really has time for it?

We didn’t have a home computer for so long, until just four years ago.  And as much research and reconnecting and keeping in touch and writing about our lives here on the farm (and any other random thing that comes into my mind) as I can do now with such ease, I can’t help but feel a bit of a love affair with those days without.

Even something like getting our farm newsletter together sits me in front of this thing for longer than I would like, while three munchkins race around me and one more either sleeps or nurses in my lap.  And yet, as much as I daydream about taking a sabbatical from this screen, the benefits of it all mostly make up for the time it takes away from moving and breathing and seeing in 3-D.

This year is the first that I have really kept up with this blog, the first where we semi-regularly kept a farm facebook page updated, the first that we gathered a contact list and e-mailed our lovely customers almost every week before farmer’s market; and the truth is, we have seen results.  We have gathered more and more regular customers, and most importantly, we have deepened the connection that these folks have with us.

One of the beautiful things about selling nearly all of our produce to someone we interact with face to face is that we get to talk to them.  We get to know a little bit about everyone, learn from them, be inspired by some, and genuinely look forward to seeing them each week.  Still, sometimes we are busy at market!  And this is good, but it limits talking time.  Our spaces on the computer allows us to share as much as we want…or can find the time for…and this broadens people’s understanding of who we are and what we are doing here on the farm.

It’s a blessing I should be thankful for, and I am.  Just like I am really also thankful for silly places like Facebook where I can share the smallest moment that touches me deeply and gives me pause, because how often do we get to speak with our friends those tiny, but significant, thoughts that we have in passing when the sunlight is just so, or the colors of the world just right, or the space around you so filled with Beauty.

Or Chaos, or whatever, from a good song to what’s for dinner.

It’s just that it is busy sometimes, and I need my space.  That is why I will never, probably, be writing here, everyday; but, building connections through computer time will continue to be significant and important.   When Andre’s father came to snap shots of The Market this week, things had only just gotten started and our table was already well shopped.  All of these things that are keeping us busy, busy, busy…they are all really good things.  We wouldn’t want it any other way.

With much hemming and hawing, Halloween came and I still hadn’t signed up on the nano website, and then November 1 came and it was just one of those days.  Besides making it to a morning Farmer’s Market meeting, the rest of the day was a wash.  Nothing more than comforting the sweet (but fussy) baby and doing the dishes (from the night before) was really accomplished.  Even the farm newsletter, which had taken me the course of two days to finish with all the pumpkin carving, pumpkin cookie baking, apple cider warming, birthday party attending, mushroom hunting, and halloweening interruptions, had not been saved before I turned off the computer on Sunday and needed to be re-written (maybe).

I decided that this was clearly not the time, and that one-handed typing is just not fun enough to push myself when we are all busy with our normal busy-ness and the not-so-busy-ness of just being a new baby requires (allows).  Besides, I prefer rambling these personal semi-non-fiction blurbs on the blog better anyways, and thought that maybe, just maybe, a more reasonable goal would be to write every (other, or other, other) day here for now.

And it’s only four days into November, so I don’t feel too bad just getting here.  The last few days have been full of sunshine and warm temps and I can’t help but try to get outside as much as possible, to feel the sun on my face.  It has felt very cool and rainy to me these last few weeks, with less interludes of sun maybe, or more downpours than drizzles.  Either way, less blue is better for me right now.  I usually love the rain, but will take as much sun as November wants to give us.  Maybe it is because we are just now eating our summer watermelons.

But we have had our own hardships and we also have our just plain bad days.  And maybe those first two years of running this farm business there was a lot more discord going on behind the scenes than I felt comfortable sharing with most folks.  But even then, and especially now,  even on days when we go to the beach and it looks like this,

we are able to enjoy ourselves and what the day offers just was well as when the sun is shining.  That’s what happens when I sit down to write, too.  It is a chance to sort through thoughts, and what almost always floats to the top is gratitude and joy.  I continually find that this life is an adventure so worth taking part in, even on some of the darkest days.  Granted, our hardships have been soft and few from our perspective, and one of the few emotions that gets the better of me when I feel so blessed is guilt for others having a harder go of it.  Unfortunately, I am quite sure life can seem bitterly unfair just as easily, it just hasn’t been that way for us.

So Monday,  when we arrived at our beach side campsite to celebrate our oldest son’s 9th birthday, leaving a hot and sunny summer valley behind us and expecting (according to the forecast) an unusually sunny and warm Oregon coast, we were surprised to roll into thick fog and gray all around.  As soon as we hopped out of the car, we all changed into pants and jackets and stocking caps.  It was cold!  Or cool at least, and definitely not what we had expected.

But looking through the children’s eyes, it didn’t matter a bit.  The beach, the ocean, the rocks, the sand–hours can be spent here with children, and each is as fun as the last.  I kind of feel that way too.  There was no time for disappointment because we were all there to have a good time.  Some of us just relaxing and listening, others romping all around and getting good and dirty, some (the mama) a bit of both being the interloper between adult play and kid play.  Besides, it was a mini-vacation, so a break from the heat was just fine with us.

And my silly, newly 9 year old, had a great time.  Nothing else mattered.  There are many different lines being sold out there about how to live this life.  Some of the more pervasive ones, from the last two decades especially, are starting to fade away as people realize that the security of a certain way of going about living isn’t quite as secure as was promised.  Living a simple life, putting your family first, doing work that matters, enjoying the small moments….it feels to us fairly secure, and it brings us a lot of happiness.  So even on the days far, far away from a day at the beach, or even the more common foul weather days, if I sit down to think about (and to write about) it, almost always, a pretty picture would come out of this head.  I am thankful for this security, something I missed out on when I was a child.  Unshakable happiness.

Time was all I needed;  but having a community supported farm such as ours requires us to keep up with the giving of the fair share of our personal self that is part of the package, the part that continues to foster a connection between land, farmer, and eater and makes what we offer that much more meaningful and sustaining.   It was hard, but thankfully it meant that at least almost every week of the season I had a CSA newsletter to upload to the blog, to keep things from completely coming to a halt here.

The beauty of the rising sun is the promise of a new day.  It often feels like anything can happen when the earth sings itself awake each day.  And no matter if the day proves a wash or we stumbled and tripped on our path halfway through, come night, we sleep, and wake each day to that promise.  This is the same feeling that spring brings, only magnified by the presence of not just the promise of good things to come for us, but the bursting forth of new life from the ground, in hatching eggs, and baby goats and lambs.  There is so much solace in this, and so much energy.

So here on the farm, our family has moved right along with the seasons and jumped fully into spring, letting the sun fall on our skin again here and there in between the rain.  We are outside and in the dirt often; some of us to dance, others to get dirty, and the farmer and I, to work.  And as the body remembers the feeling of hard work again and we slowly harvest what is left of the dying winter garden while at the same time bringing it all back to life for another season, it all feelslike the beginning of the day.  Brand new, exciting and exhilirating, full of hope and the unshakable sense that anything can happen and it is all going to be good.

Besides, this is an exciting time of year for us as farmers, because as things do slow down, we begin the fall and early winter tasks of planning for next year. We have spent a lot of time these last few weeks using the good weather and relaxed field schedule to take more time walking the rest of the property. During these walks, we check on fencing and plan repairs or improvements, talk about and look towards the grand picture for all of these areas, then think about the next step towards this. Although during these strolls we aren’t in the vegetable field, we talk a lot about our plans there as well, all while the kids collect acorns and mushrooms and oak galls to bring the outside into our home, a tried and true decorating approach!

Our first year growing food on this farm–our first year growing food for a CSA–was wildly overwhelming, a result of our being overly ambitious, whole-heartedly idealistic, and surprisingly (to us) under educated in growing this way, all on top of finding out our topsoil had been sold to the dump and our first year soil amendments were not enough to loosen the heavy clay subsoil we found ourselves in. For my part, I went into last winter needing to not think about the next year. I re-focused on my home, the children, and tried to unclench the tightening of muscles and queasy stomach reflex I had every time we tried to make plans for the next year. Thankfully, our plan for this second year was to step back, to proceed more slowly, with a clearer understanding and with caution rather than abandon; an approach that brought success both in the fields and in our home.

As we find ourselves around the circle again moving past the big push of our second year, it is so wonderful to have had a good year, to have reached most of our goals, and to be able to move forward with excitement instead of stress. Our children are all a year older, all (mostly) wonderful little field helpers, our soil is rapidly improving, and the real life experience of working a small farm for the last two years has made our planning skills far better. We feel that our CSA goals were met this year, which was our top priority, and because we planned this year for just what one field worker could do and still only had 50% yields on most things, we are excited to look towards next year. Where we were conservative with multiple varieties this year to keep our expenses low, we plan on expanding this a lot for next year, fun for us and for all of you! With our continued plan for soil improvement and as we see topsoil returning to this place, we feel confident that next year our yields will increase at least 25%. And as the soil health improves, we anticipate pest issues will lessen, although we are brainstorming for effective controls on some of our worst problems.

The root maggots that plague the bottoms of most of our radishes, turnips, and rutabagas, as well as the rust fly that damaged all but our first crop of carrots this year, are at the front of this list. Things like flea beetles we have decided to combat by more seasonality. Although kale may sell all year long, it becomes bitter and is usually riddled with flea beetles in the heat of the summer while it is sweet and pest free in the fall and winter. All in all we are happy with the results of our switch to all open-pollinated varieties this year, although the non hybrid broccoli do not perform very uniformly, so we may need to succession plant these more often to make better use of their staggered maturity. With 100s of broccoli plants in the field this year, we still were never able to harvest 20 at the same time, not a good thing for a CSA! Still, as one of our market customers repeatedly expressed, the many florets we harvest from these plants who put out such small heads when compared to their hybrid cousins are more delicious and easier to cook with anyways. I suppose as with most things, there is always a balance between benefits and costs. We move forward through this balancing act based on our priorities and personalities. Although we abandoned our no-till ideas for this large (and getting larger!) of a growing space after our first year and now happily work the tiller and hire out tractor work, we will stick with the extra labor and loss of efficiency and predictability open pollination lends itself too because these choices still seem to leave the scales balanced for us and our members.

Now when I set out to write this week’s newsletter, I had planned a quick blurb and a copy of a poem because I am fighting a cold and have invoices to do on top of this. I guess sometimes the words find their way even when I don’t ask them to. Still, I wanted to share a poem, a different one than I had intended but by the same author, just more related to the thoughts that came out instead. It is by Wendell Berry, and I was reading his words because of a post by Rich at Mossback Farm linking to an article about Berry and one by Berry. I have been reading Berry since I was 19. After all these years, I never tire of his words.

As soon as I felt a necessity to learn about the non-human world,
I wished to learn about it in a hurry.
And then I began to learn perhaps
the most important lesson that nature had to teach me:
that I could not learn about her in a hurry.
The most important learning, that of experience,
can be neither summoned nor sought out.
The most worthy knowledge
cannot be acquired by what is known as study–
though that is necessary, and has its use.
It comes in its own good time
and in its own way to the man who will go where it lives,
and wait, and be ready,
and watch.
Hurry is beside the point, useless, an obstruction.
The thing is to be attentively present.
To sit and wait is as important as to move.
Patience is as valuable as industry.
What is to be known is
always there.
When it reveals itself to you, or when you come upon it,
it is by chance.
The only condition is your being there and being
watchful.