Mulch Stories

I hadn't been able to arrange a hauler in early May to deliver a big load of bales from my regular hay source at $2.75/bale, and now several weeks later that haystack was inaccessible from wet ground and re-growing grass, which meant I couldn't get back in until early June. I'd missed the window, and I needed hay bales to mulch all the plants we'd put in the ground. So I turned to Craigslist, where I found an ad from somebody needing to move the remains of last year's hay to make room for this year's bales: “50-70 bales, $1/bale, or $55 if you take all.” It was a bit of a drive into MD out to where he was, but that was a serious deal even if it wouldn't fill up my truck. He was a nice person who raised some animals for fiber, and needed these old bales gone to make room for this year's new hay. “I'd had them up for a while at $2/bale, but now I just need to get them out of here.” Because of a number of boring agricultural details, the only time I had to make the trip was at about 2:00 in the afternoon, and I figured I had to just ignore the detail that it was heading up over 90 degrees during that first hot week of the year and hope for the best. He said he could help load the bales, and I figured it might be hard work in the heat, but it'd get done. I headed northeast, waited out a 10 minute delay for one-way road construction after Lovettsville, then finally crossed the Potomac and drove through the beautiful agricultural fields of Adamstown before arriving at his place on the far side of the Monacacy.

After the usual pleasantries we began, him setting the bales from his run-in shed on the floor of my twenty-year-old ex-Uhaul boxtruck, and me stacking them up to the ceiling. The highest layer had to be hoisted overhead and stuffed longways in the hole remaining between the ceiling and the previous row of bales—a tight fit, and difficult to aim correctly in the enclosed truck, especially as it heated up in the sun and filled with dust from all the bales tossed in there. When I'd finished the second row of bales in the truck, now over halfway full and well over the 50 bales he figured he had, I still couldn't see the back of the shed where the bales were. “I guess there was another row more than I thought,” he remarked. And there might have been two rows more than he thought, because when I stuffed the last bale in the truck and wrangled the door closed, there were 105 bales inside and still a few left in his shed. It WAS hard work, but it did get done—and at near 100 degrees and full of dust, it was about all I had in me.

We were both happy and tired: I had a full load of hay for about one-fifth the usual price—with help loading—and he finally had an empty shed. I got some cold water from his well and began my long drive back to the farm, now with near two tons of hay in the back and hotter than ever. On my way downhill towards the Potomac I stopped for ice cream at the stand I'd passed on the way there to cool myself down—no AC in that old farm truck.

Setting off again, now uphill towards Lovettsville, the needle on the temperature gauge on the old truck is inching through the letters of the word “NORMAL” printed along the arc between the blue line on the left and the red line on the right of the gauge. It's almost to the “L”, about a letter hotter than usual. While on the outbound trip I'd lamented my poor luck of being delayed ten minutes at the flagman, this time it was quite the opposite. I was glad for the opportunity to wait out my time in line, giving the engine had a chance to cool down, idling in the shade, while I ate my ice cream. The needle retreated back down a letter, and I made it the rest of the way home without incident.

So we're mulching the bales, and they are just beautiful: Old hay cut for eating and stored dry is so much more pleasant than fresh hay from a junky field, or hay that's gotten wet—the sort of mulch hay never in short supply. But we're about to run out and I need to find another load of hay to last the rest of the season. Even though it'd be all right to wait until June and just go to my regular guy when his stack opened up, after landing that last load for fifty cents a bale I figure I might as well check the Valley Trader local classifieds before resigning myself to paying the regular full price. Sure enough, there was an ad for “Mulch hay.” Advertised that way it could mean anything from “moldy junk” to “old bales no longer fit for feeding,” so I call the guy and find out it's the latter: he's in the same situation of having last year's hay in the shed where this year's new hay has to go. He also thinks he's got 50-70 bales, and he's looking to get $2/bale—though when he asks if I want like 3 or 4 bales, or what, and I say, “nope, I'd take all of it,” he lets me know he's willing to make a deal. He's out in WV, a far way to go for so few bales at that price, and I ask again to see if he really thinks 50-70 bales is how many bales are in his stack. Somewhat indignant at my question, and potential doubt of his count, he says the stack's 8x8x10 feet and he knows what he's sold and that's what he's got. Now waitaminute. As he tells me this so confidently I'm thinking, my boxtruck is smaller than that, 7x7x11', and I know that I can fit 80-100 bales in it. So either his stack is smaller than he says, or his bales are huge, or—most likely—he's also underestimated how many bales are in his shed. I figure as long as I come away with a good volume of hay in the truck I don't care what size the bales are. So I call back and offer $100 to fill my truck, however many bales that is, and that sounds all right to him.

I set off west in my trusty old Uhaul, up over the mountain and coasting the long way down the other side and across the Shenandoah river towards Berryville, continue out past Winchester and find his place down some windy old roads. This time the weather is cool and rainy—perfect for moving bales. As before, the hay is feed quality, better than expected, and he's glad to get rid of it. He explains that he'd baled it last year intending to sell it for horse feed, which would have fetched upwards of $6/bale, but the hay field had just been reseeded and so produced a bumper crop. Turns out it was already a good year for hay, so in the end the market was flooded and he had a good portion left over. The horse people, ever particular, don't want his bales now lest they've wicked up moisture from the ambient air over the winter.

As before, he's carrying them to the truck and I'm heaving them into place—these bales are longer and don't fit so elegantly in the truck, but still I'm packing them in well and by the time I'm on the second row, about half full, there are a lot of bales in there. “How many do you have so far?” he asks me. I figure the layers and tell him it's 46 bales. He turns back to look at his stack, realizing there are still quite a few bales there too. I can see how many more rows will fit in the truck and I know I'm about to get a lot of bales at a good price, and he knows he has more bales than he thought he did. We keep going. In a little while longer the truck is almost full, and we work together to get the last bales stuffed into place on the top of the last row—with a full truck there's nothing to stand on, of course—and even though it's cool weather we're both getting tired. I figure up the rows and it comes to 90 bales in the truck, and a few more left in the shed. I pay him a little more than we agreed on: still less than 90 bales is worth, but I wouldn't have made the trip in the first place if I hadn't been gambling on a good deal. We have the obligatory rural chat about farming, and organic vegetables, and people these days, and I drive off. As before, I remember passing an ice cream stand and stop to take advantage of it on the way back, even though it's hardly hot out this time.

Going down out of the mountains into Winchester, I'm feeling great, the loading work done, upwards of 2 tons stacked in the truck—which is a heavy load, not over capacity, but a serious load, and the '97 truck isn't exactly new. Around Berryville, I start thinking about how I have to get back over the mountain to get home: there's no way around it, just one road to be on and that's that. So, having no other options, I figure it will be fine. Coming across the bridge over the river I pick up speed—some more momentum can't hurt—but it's a steep climb. Partway up, the truck has shifted itself into a lower gear, and it's racing, trying to maintain speed under the load. I ease off it a bit, keep the engine at what seems like a safe RPM, but the speedometer clearly shows that I'm slowing down. The temperature needle is edging over through the “A” in “NORMAL.” Not unexpected, and no matter, it's a cool day, it's not THAT big a mountain, I'll make it. I turn off the radio to hear better. Now I'm going 35mph on the 55mph road, still making progress, and the temp needle's well into the “L”. Rather than gun it and try to force my way up with brute force that this truck may not possess, I figure I'll just take it slow and steady, stay in a low gear, and eventually the mountain will end. At this point I'm barely keeping 25mph, and the temp needle is on the end of the “L”. I must be near the top by now—here's the sign warning truckers of the downgrade on the other side! Almost there! I'm going to make it. The needle's now left the “L” behind and is creeping through the no-man's-land between “NORMAL” and the red bar at the end of the gauge. I fear if I pause on the shoulder to let the engine cool, I'll never get going again with such a load on such a slope. Almost to the top, almost to the relief of coasting downhill and letting the engine cool, some hikers watch me creep by at 25mph. Near as I may be to the end of the uphill climb, at a slow speed it takes a long time to go even a short distance, and the whole time I've got my eye glued to the temp needle, now nowhere near “NORMAL,” watching it creep inexorably closer to the red line of disaster. Finally, to my relief I'm at the crest of the hill—I let off the gas to just barely coast over the top, then pick up speed to 60mph down the other side, the cool air blowing through the radiator of the now-idling and un-loaded engine, and the temperature needle quickly falls back to its usual position.

I'm reminded of Radiator Charlie, creator of the famed heirloom tomato, and his radiator shop at the foot of a steep hill in WV in the 1930s, where he repaired all the trucks that overheated on the way up and ended up back at the bottom, and where he sold enough of his famous seeds to pay off his mortgage. I don't want to end up like the folks in that tale, and this was a little too close for comfort! The hay man told me to keep his number, in case I need more hay when he has some to get rid of in the future. I don't think I will.

Crew Work

It's Labor Day week! As we're celebrating the contributions of organized labor, I'm thinking about organized labor of a different sort: the task of picking up the winter squash. Although the plants were set in neat rows, the vines spread far and wide in a green canopy and now, as the leaves are dying back to shriveled brown paper, they uncover the tan butternut squash dropped every which way across the entire field. The puzzle is what method to use to clip and gather them all up. 

It's a job for many people—but not simply a number of people working individually with their own set of clippers and crates (many, many crates). This is a job for pallet bins—the sort that hold pumpkins in front of the supermarket at Halloween—and four people working together as a unit: one person to toss squash that's been clipped and gathered from the rows, one person on the corner of the pallet to catch the squash, one person in the bin to pack it, and one to drive the tractor, pallet, bin, and people along the edge of the field. Each person's work is connected to the others', interrelated with the whole. The tractor driver watches the others and moves the rig at the proper pace; the tosser throws squash one after the next but only when the catcher will be ready, handing off the previous squash to the packer. When it's well coordinated, there's a squash in the air while the last one is still being handed off to the packer.

This is the sort of crew work I enjoy most, where my work relies on the work of others and where others are waiting on me to complete my element of the task. On a small farm, here, we rarely have large enough jobs that we can access this sort of crew work. Two people often work individually in parallel, each doing the same task in their own row, and several people might work simultaneously on different single-person tasks. This is efficient, productive, and appropriate for the scale of farm I have here. But occasionally there is call for three people to work on a transplanting rig, each person's work reliant on attention to the others, the entire project accomplished as a group with no single person feeling ownership of any particular part. It's not relevant which particular plants any one person planted, or the fact that the person driving the tractor (me) didn't plant any plants at all. We all together completed the same project, and much more pleasantly than if we'd each done a third of the field all by ourselves. I miss the crew work of my time years ago working on larger farms—when the projects were large enough that most of the work was in some way a group effort, with five or ten people accomplishing a large task acting as one unit—and I appreciate the rare opportunities for that sort of work when they come up here on my own farm.

When I worked here a long time ago as a nineteen-year-old, it was for a farm that planted 20 acres of vegetables, employed a dozen workers, and went to 14 farmers markets each week. At my three-acre farm now we plant, at most, four rows of a crop in any given planting, and with only two or three people in the patch, it's easy to keep track of what areas have been done or not done. With so many people in a large field that wasn't the case, and that farm crew had developed its own culture of crew work, a culture passed on to new folks each year by the returning, experienced folks who appreciated the system. It worked like this: when a whole group of people enters the patch, each person takes the row closest to the top of the patch that doesn't have anyone in it. Whenever anybody finishes a row, they move down to the start of the unoccupied row just below the person in the lowest row. Once the last row is occupied, anyone finishing their row now goes to the far side of the first still-occupied row and works towards the person languishing in the middle—who now knows that help is on the way, the work of their row just cut in half! Once those people come closer and closer and eventually meet, completing their row, they go together to the center of an incomplete section between two other people, and go back to back, working towards those other two—who were previously working with their partner, but who now have a total of FOUR people in the row! Done in no time.

It’s clear where anyone should go next, without anyone having to be in charge, or answer any questions: people start from the top of the patch and complete rows working down to the bottom, and work down each row always moving towards another person or towards an end of a row; the undone section is clear, and so, it's clear where to join to help—without confusing anyone. This understanding was common to the crew; each person knew it enough to execute it or to direct an unsure person how to participate in the group project. Nobody who followed the system could get lost, and everyone could trust that no sections were missed, even though no one person paid any attention to the others' individual work.

There was no need to talk about the work, no need for judgment calls, or for any direction from one person over another—we simply executed the work together. We talked about other things, that's for sure, and stayed within talking range as much as we could. And we were glad to confirm that we'll split someone's remaining section, or to say “Let’s go help them with that row” and then, to the two people being joined, “Hey, we’ll split you!” If our own spot turned out to be a hard, slow-going row, we knew others would arrive to help, and we wouldn't be left to complete it alone. We were always working towards somebody, and when we met, a milestone, minor victory—the end of a row, the end of a section, and a chance to walk down and brighten somebody's day with the knowledge that the end of the task was now close at hand—the very arrangement of people letting everyone in the field know that the long task is coming to a close. That feeling, of one's own effort as part of the whole, is the crew work—so different from just working alone for a while, and then stopping, even if others are also working alone nearby, also doing their task on their own, in parallel.

At last, after finishing our row, after joining our neighbors, and then all four moving on to the next section, finally everybody accumulating to join together in the last, worst, slowest area, all so ready to stop and be done with the giant project, we're all getting closer and closer to each other splitting and finishing sections until everyone is shoulder-to-shoulder in the last part, all having accomplished the thing together, having reached the largest milestone and climbing into the pickup truck bed to return home for lunch.

Yellowjackets!

There's a shed building on the farm, not much used in the summer: warm during the day from its east-facing doors, and full of crevices, angles, and protected spots. Basically, an ideal wasp habitat. I'd been noticing some wasps taking up residence, but...I had other vegetable-related priorities during the height of the season. Recently I went in there, and it was a museum of local wasp species. There were the unthreatening black mud wasps, the larger brown wasps with the painful sting, and—unusually—yellowjackets tracing a path in and out of the shed to a nest hidden behind a part of the wall, invisible.

Wasps are a standard farm problem: this is a story about solving that problem with standard farm methods to dispatch a harmful concentration of insects—although not the typical pests one might think of needing to control on a vegetable farm...or the typical methods.

I've worked outside enough to learn the habits of wasps, and what to do about them: to do a quick visual check on the likely places in a shed where there may be nests; to step back after moving a cardboard box, or a metal piece of machinery, or anything enclosed that becomes warm from the sun; to differentiate the normal flight of wasps at work from their aggressive flight when their nest is disturbed. I've learned how closely to approach--calmly, carefully--and how quickly wasps can move once they've decided to sting. I've learned about the usual species, too: to jump back from the papery flutter of the brown wasps, but to merely note the shuffle of wings of the mud wasps inside their tunnels and keep an eye out. Yellowjackets, though, are a species with which I have little experience.

What was clear, though is that these wasps needed to go. While every wasp nest I'd seen before was perhaps hand-sized with wasps simply sitting on it, guarding, this hidden yellowjacket nest had “beehive” levels of wasps flying in and out every couple seconds, doing their work and returning home to build their nest--and their population. I had never seen such a steady stream of yellowjackets coming and going: appearing from a particular crack in the boards and flying off, and a similar stream returning through the same crack to what was, presumably, an extremely large and well-developed nest inside the wall.

This was a problem. Not the usual sort of problem needing solving on the farm, but a problem nonetheless—and one that could be tackled in the same way as the ones with which I have more experience. For getting out of a typical mechanical jam, for example, I'll think of all the ways that force can be applied (ratchet strap, come-along, spring, jack, hydraulic cylinder, turnbuckle, bolt & nut, etc.) and eventually find something that will solve the problem at hand. For wasps, I thought of all the options I've used and came up with...wasp spray. And dismantling the shed so that the nest would be accessible...thereby no doubt becoming swarmed with hundreds of yellowjackets.

I needed more ideas for this new problem. I turned to the internet. Reddit comments noted that “yellowjackets are A-holes,” stinging unprovoked and without warning—although I'm not sure that these reports aren't from careless people who've gotten too close, I wasn't about to chance it. What did seem to be true is that when one yellowjacket stings, it releases a pheromone causing the rest to follow, swarming the perceived threat to their nest. I wasn't interested in being stung even once, but this was more serious: I had an idea how many wasps there might be in there, and I knew that that many stings can be life-threatening even for a non-allergic person. Other people on the internet reported having been stung through clothes, through jeans—but that two layers would stop them. Possibly they are attracted to black clothes. (Or is it yellow clothes. Or floral patterns?).

And as for what to do about them, other creative possibilities were soapy water (still, needs a clear shot), gasoline to burn them out of the ground (it's the internet, after all), and then I found one person suggesting...a shop vac, with accompanying video of a long vacuum hose doing just what you'd expect to wasps flying by. Reports were that even for a large nest, running the vacuum for several hours would suck up 95% of the yellowjackets, dispatching them with soapy water in the shop-vac canister. And I remembered, then, that I'd used the shop-vac for this purpose before: not for aggressive yellowjackets, but for the less aggressive mud wasps (a story for another time). 

On a cool morning recently, when wasps are least active, I put on two pairs of work pants, a thick long-sleeve shirt, a flannel-lined jacket, winter headwear, boots, and welding gloves. And I brought my wallet, in case I got in too deep and needed my ID for responding EMS. I was taking no chances. Moving slowly, to keep both myself and the wasps calm, I first dispatched the visible nests of brown wasps with a spray. Then--still moving slowly, calmly, carefully, so as not to attract attention--I gathered the shop-vac tubes, hose, and machine. I filled the canister with soapy water up to the level of the filter, set everything up, backed up as far as possible, and nudged the end of the vacuum tube right up to where the yellowjackets had been coming and going through the wall to their nest.

It was still only morning, with little wasp activity, but I was ready for the test. I turned the switch to send power to the vacuum, maintaining my distance. A wasp flew into the shed, aiming towards its usual landing spot, but then – shoop!! – disappeared down the hose! I went for a closer look – each wasp that returned followed its typical trajectory, and then – shoop!! – once it got within a couple inches of the end of the hose, made a perfect little arc following the air currents down the tube!

Several test-case yellowjackets successfully dispatched, I shut the vacuum off and came back later when the nest was more active, once it had warmed up. Just as before, the wasps were tracing their path in and out of the nest in a steady line, with the efficient choreography of planes at an airport. I turned on the vacuum, and watched in awe as such a simple method – and one which I might have dismissed as too fantastical had I not read about its success – proved to work so elegantly, so cleanly, and so obviously: every few seconds, a yellowjacket came or went, and most ended up down the tube. I left the setup running for a few hours, as directed, and upon returning found the stream of wasps had stopped.

That night I got more confident and looked with a flashlight between the boards of the shed – closer than I ever would have dared before – and saw the outlines of just the giantest, most massive wasp nest I could ever imagine. And on it, still, a few wasps remaining. The following day I ran the vacuum a little more, for good measure. 

As for what to do with the nest, I had imagined carefully disassembling the shed to get a clear shot at the nest to spray it for good. The internet, though, says that yellowjacket nests die over winter, except the queen, who doesn't reuse the same nest next year. I figure I shouldn't get overconfident, and that if I don't see any wasps, it's now safe to work in the shed and that'll be plenty good enough until winter. Even if it's likely possible now to open it up...I don't think I'll test my luck by tearing into a yellowjacket nest on purpose!

Although I assumed success it turned out that this was only Part 1…Part 2 is Mechanical Destruction, a story for the future!

Between the lines of the seed catalogs

I picked a lot of melons last week, and ate a few of them too. Some were great, some were fine, and some were "meh" (hopefully I can by now guess which those are, and those didn't make it to you).  Of course, all the melons are the same variety—a cultivar new in catalogs in recent years, which has enough disease resistance to survive without fungicide sprays, unusual in a melon plant—yet any individual melon can taste quite different, and there's no way to be sure what's in there without cutting it open! 

Out of everything on the farm, though, only melons show this kind of unpredictable variation. Contrast that to a potato: all the potatoes of the same variety taste the same, so far as I can tell. Each tomato, or pepper, or lettuce of the same variety will taste pretty much the same, when grown in the same conditions and eaten at the same maturity. 

For that reason, I've always felt it of great importance which varieties to select from the catalogs: the choice of cultivars that will taste great, and grow well, and produce good yields has an incredible effect on the results. And, in placing my winter seed order, it's something I have complete control over—unlike other variables on the farm.

The farmers I learned from always noted that they simply selected varieties where the catalog description mentioned flavor or taste: so many varieties are bred for uniformity, easy shipping, or purely for yield, that catalogs find it worth mentioning when a variety is bred for taste as well. In a commercial seed catalog aimed at the commodity industry, a note about "exceptional flavor" is probably meaningful—if nothing else, it means not to buy the other ones which don't mention taste at all! A home garden seed company, on the other hand, well, they know their market: of course all those varieties taste good according to the catalog. It becomes a game to read the seed catalogs in the winter, gambling on which varieties might work well based on that company's audience, its writing style, and comparison to other options listed on the same page. Cross-referencing to other catalogs offers some reassurance, but it's always unknown how a new trial variety stacks up.

Many of the newer varieties, it seems to me, DO grow really well...if they have ideal conditions: the sort of conditions on a commercial farm that grows, for example, lettuce in the ideal lettuce-growing climate. Which is to say not Virginia, where we rarely have ideal lettuce conditions. Finding varieties that have a good peak potential AND are still worthwhile when that full potential is (inevitably) not reached has involved some years of trial. The older varieties, it seems, don't grow as uniformly under ideal conditions, so I can see why they've fallen out of favor and been discontinued from most catalogs; but then, when they don't receive their ideal conditions, they do still grow all right. And overall, that's what I need: unlike those Salinas Valley lettuce farms, there's no way lettuce here will have perfect conditions every week of the summer!

For other vegetables, the question of which seeds to order isn't so settled. On the recommendation of other farmers, this year I'm trying out pointy peppers in addition to the red bells, ready to find out if they justify their exorbitant seed cost of 40 or even 50 cents a seed. They are supposed to be productive, tasty, etc. and, crucially, in my experience, they're less susceptible to a characteristic fungal defect that strikes most red bell peppers grown without fungicides. (Catalogs don't describe this characteristic, of course, because most peppers aren't grown without sprays in a humid climate, so it's just not a characteristic that matters to most customers.) I'm not completely sold on these new peppers—they're a little smaller than I'd anticipated—but we'll see how it turns out. You'll see them over the coming weeks, and you can make up your own mind.

Tomatoes, though, are where the real varietal excitement is, because there are just so many different ones... and they all seem to be over-hyped  Some years ago I settled on a red tomato that is good enough, reliable, productive, on sufficiently short plants, and that's been the safe bet ever since...but I've never loved it. This year I finally gave in and took what seemed to be the best of the "other" options, new offerings from a couple different catalogs, to trial alongside that old standard variety and see if I could finally find a variety to beat it.  Mixed results so far, but promising in that these two trial varieties do taste noticeably better than the old standby. It's enough to make me feel like there is an option to be found with a combination of flavor, growth habit, days to maturity, and yield that can beat the current standard.

Iterations necessarily take a long time in a yearly enterprise like a vegetable farm, but some day I hope to have locked down the tomato and pepper variety schedule the way I have for squash, cucumbers, winter squash, and, as of this year lettuce. After all, we do all the same work to tend a plant no matter which seed it grew from, selected, grew, and cared for over the course of the season. When its fruit turns out to surpass all others in the standards that matter, that feels like an excellent use of effort! Surely that can be the case for all the crops, and some day I hope to have such a rewarding experience for all the plants that grow here. We'll get there the same way we do everything on the farm: relying on tried-and-true perfectly-good bets, while keeping a thoughtful eye out for what might be better.

Mulch History

As a new worker at Wheatland Vegetable Farms back in May of 2005, my first summer job as a college music student who knew nothing of farming, it felt like my first days and weeks there were filled with mulching. We mulched with those giant round bales you see in fields on the side of the road, pushing them out to unroll the 700lb bales down the aisles between rows of tomatoes, squash, and peppers. A third-year worker showed me how thick to keep it, how to feel the edge of the bale to tell the smooth direction or the pokey direction that indicated the way it needed to face to unroll properly. “Unroll” is a generous description of the process; although the baler rolled up the windrow of dried grass around and around like a carpet until the bale reached about 5' in diameter, and 4' wide, it never unrolled quite so easily. This was mulch hay, not high-quality horse hay; full of weeds or briers, or had been rained on and maybe gotten moldy, or was otherwise not fit to be fed to cattle, and sold for $10 a bale. Occasionally we were surprised by a nest of ground bees or an unfortunate rabbit that had got caught up in the baler. Since the 20-acre farm used so many bales all at once in the spring, before the new year's hay had yet been baled, Jay Merchant delivered rows of bales in the fall to stockpile over winter for use in the spring—and from sitting, they inevitability developed a flat spot, making them all the more difficult to push out. It was hot, heavy, dusty work.  Somehow it didn't even occur to any of us to wear gloves.

Most mornings that time of year began with mulching for everyone, before some groups were siphoned off for smaller or more specialized tasks. Knowing nothing yet myself, I was often one of the ones left to continue mulching. The reason for mulching was, at the most basic, to use a cheap, readily-available, natural materiel to block weeds from growing. And it added significant amounts of organic matter to the soil and protected vegetables from rain-spattered mud. Mulching also provided a unifying identity for the farm; it was a difficult job that everybody did and a practice that few similar vegetable farms employed. We heard once of a former worker who'd gone up as far north as New York State, and, upon telling of where they had worked down here, were greeted with--”oh yes, the mulch farm!”

The reason for our outlier status was our location here in an outlier agricultural area, one which had recently been entirely rural, but was turning over to houses as development pressure crept west. At that time there were acres and acres no longer being farmed for crops, in some sense waiting to be planted to houses, whose owners needed to take advantage of the “ag use” tax benefit from producing some sort of agricultural product on their land—and there were enough farmers of the old generation still around to make the hay, which was produced in such quantity that the price was kept low. It worked out that they were hired to hay the fields, and basically needed a place to put the bales. We were that place for a lot of it.

So, when I started farming on my own, I also used hay for mulching—at first in the exact same round-bale system, and then later with square bales, which could work with the narrower aisles resulting from the narrower tractor system I'd worked out to make more efficient use of space. Mulch was the system I learned, and mulch was the system I used. Still heavy, hot, dusty, hard—and never quite 100% weed control with all the Johnson grass and thistles. Jay Merchant still delivered the bales and mostly did the unloading himself, whether tipping the round bales off the trailer or stacking 100 square bales up tall and straight, interlocked so the stack wouldn't collapse. After watching a few times, I got to where I could make an all-right stack, and he tossed the 40lb bales from the trailer up to me to arrange on top of the stack. It felt like we were two people sharing the work, but even though he was over 70 and more than twice my age I knew he was doing most of the work throwing them so high; I was just doing the arranging. I did my best to keep up.

Eventually Jay came one time and told me he was retiring from making square bales, on account of their being too much hassle to move around anymore. I couldn't blame him. I went back to the list of phone numbers of mulch sources that I'd photocopied from my now-landlords' farm records, and worked down the list. Mostly these people, by now, were long retired (if not dead), and none knew where to send me.

As luck would have it I reached one man south of Leesburg, who I'd never heard of, but who did indeed have square bales—a giant stack of perhaps 800 or 1000 bales, under a tarp some years old, but still good hay he said, and cheap at $1.50 if I could move them myself. He was still at it making square bales, but he was a person to have all manner of mechanization to make squares easy to handle, I don't think he touched them once by hand from baling to stacking. But while we were chatting, as I handed him the check after loading up with a relative of a neighbor I'd hired, he told me how it was getting too dangerous to drive tractors down the road anymore, and how he was probably about to stop. His impression was that new people moving into the houses built on those former hayfields were glad to live in a rural area, but impatient with slow tractors on the rural roads. That giant haystack proved to be a two-year supply for my farm, and even though he gave me the old tarp they'd been stored under, still they ended up pretty rotten and full of snakes on the bottom layer setting on the ground.

After that stash ran out, I got along for a few years on luck and Valley Trader listings, or Craigslist, buying 50 or 100 bales here and there for cheap from people looking to clear the last of their prior year's bales out of the barn to prepare for the new-cut hay. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of packing bales into the 1997 U-haul truck that I had at the time for deliveries. When that truck died and turned into a shed on the farm I was happy to give it up. To my dismay, however, the only source of square bales I could find was a longtime Lovettsville farmer, who'd had nice bales the whole time but for more money than I wanted to spend. Now I was desperate having no other source, and so I paid him the $3.50, and then $3.75 per bale. At least he did the stacking & delivery.

By this time, about 5 years ago, economic and demographic change had come to the area. Those hay fields had turned to houses, no longer in need of land-use taxation, and that generation of farmers had pretty well gone away, with few folks left to fill that haymaking economic niche, even if there had been still hay to make. Agricultural change had also had come to the farm: I heard from a former neighbor in one of our yearly catch-up phone calls that he had begun using a thin landscape fabric, newly marketed in the produce-supply catalogs for laying down between crop rows, fulfilling the weed-blocking purpose of hay mulch. It was easy to put down even in hot weather and as fast as mulching with hay, blocked weeds 100%, and could be reused over and over again. I was beginning to find hay bales too hot, too dusty, too ineffective—the people who worked here were feeling the same way. And to my (continuing) surprise, the one-time cost to buy the fabric was the same as buying a one-year supply of hay bales at current rates. I didn't like—still don't, really—how it isn't a natural material from down the road and doesn't add organic matter to the soil, but there's no arguing with the benefits. We've gotten to where I've built a machine to roll the fabric up again, and learned to put it down in just 15 or 20 minutes a row—mulching the same amount with hay would take about an hour.

A year or two ago, in October, Jay Merchant called me up to say he had a truckload of square bales he'd made for his church's Halloween festival, for benches and all, and so they'd been set outside but really were fine. Did I want to have them? He really was just looking for a place to put them. Although I wasn't buying hay anymore, sure, I figured I'd take them for free. After all, it was garlic planting time and, of all things, garlic is traditionally grown under a thick blanket of mulch. I figured I'd do just that, since the bales were free and all. Jay came with his truck and trailer, and his grandson to unload. Jay stayed in the truck; his grandson and I dropped the bales down the garlic rows as he drove along. It turned out the garlic shoots came up faster than expected, and I missed the window for mulching them. Those free bales were still in the field, though, and had to be collected, transported, stacked, and stored in a greenhouse-style shelter for use on next fall's garlic. Over the winter, a windstorm destroyed the shelter and tore all the grommets out of the new tarp I'd put over it. The free bales survived under the tarp laid over the stack with sandbags, until they went straight-away in the spring to a neighbor.

I've so far kept my vow never to have a bale on the farm again.

Resiliency

Last week I told you about that spell of hot weather and the discovery of new methods that may become standard for planting in this new-normal of perpetual heat. Right now we're looking at another 10-day forecast of all 90s, broken in the middle by one rainy day in the upper 80s. The only difference is that we've had a practice run before it to learn how to handle this weather. In the midst of all this hot forecast, we've been appreciating the fact that we've focused our summer work schedule around mornings, that we've shifted from laying hot, dusty, heavy hay mulch in the crop aisles to using simple, non-strenuous landscape fabric, and that we now have coolers and cool rooms large enough to do work inside of during the heat of the day rather than doing the same work outside under a tarp on the deck. So during all this, when a group from a new-farmer training program came by for a mid-afternoon tour, I ended up sharing a lot about devising a farm for resiliency and thought to share some of that here.

I didn't always have such a focus. In a year-to-year farm, once simply does what works most of the time in the characteristic conditions of the region. Yes, the weather and other events affect the day-to-day farming, but no more than usual—and that's how it goes; it's farming! Then, one year, it happened to be so, so much wetter than usual—where, in a season, we could typically rely on a dry period after a big rain, in that season it rained an inch or two every darn weekend! Where I would typically let cover crops grow longer and have the soil exposed for a shorter period of time by preparing ground just a week or two in advance of planting the crop (knowing it would be at a proper moisture at some point in that  period), it became clear for the first time that this was a risk: There was no certainty that there would be a dry period again. And so I changed my principles for deciding when to do field work, shifting from valuing doing it as late as practical to doing it in any appropriate window, because no matter the forecast there may not be another clear window for a long time.

More recently, I acquired a tracked one-person machine that weighs so little and has such large tracks that it puts less pressure on the ground than a footprint—with the ability to plant on sodden ground, rain is no longer the determining factor it once was in keeping to the spring planting schedule. Of course this year it's barely rained at all, but the point is to be ready for whatever conditions may come—to devise systems robust and resilient enough to work in any possible condition, not just the conditions of the moment.

Farming of this diversified, small-scale type is often defined by the crop mix—one of the most common questions people ask me is, “so, what's your favorite vegetable to grow?” I started out growing difficult crops like carrots and beets, which are not particularly suited to this soil or climate, but are eminently marketable as a new farmer on the scene. I had great successes with these crops—and also complete failures. The possibility of success was always there, and so I kept planting them, with overall “average” results, as you might expect. At a certain point, I looked at the numbers and knew that, no matter the potential they may have, the reality is that they only reached that potential intermittently. Over time, the farm has been shaped by these evolutionary pressures, keeping the most reliable crops and dropping the more difficult and volatile crops. I've ended up with the focus on the long-season summer crops you see in the CSA—these just happen to be vegetables suited to this region and climate and which do well (not merely “average”) in almost every year, no matter the conditions. (An exception to that is potatoes, which were basically a crop failure last year due to unheard-of levels of potato beetles. Now, knowing such an event was in the realm of possibility, I changed the entire planting and growing system to one that would be okay in such a year.)

These climate- and crop-related shifts towards long-term resiliency are the most vital for the plants and vegetables themselves, which of course is what most people think of when they think of the farm. But there are also people here who do the work each season—one of whom is me, now in my late 30s and having done this sort of work outside on the ground for just about the last 20 years! Our own experience on the farm becomes more of the main focus each year, now that the business is stable and profitable enough that we no longer need to scrape together every vegetable to sell for every dollar. Fastest and cheapest used to be the necessity, and, while those are still baseline values to getting things done in the practical world, the growing systems now are efficient enough that we have some breathing room to focus also on what's simplest and most pleasant. Our own experience of the work—rather than the simple possibility or impossibility of getting it done—becomes the main source of incremental change both so that people can have a great time working on the farm, and so we're all less tired and worn out as the years go by.

Even much of the mechanical innovation on the farm is towards this end. People tend to relate machinery with efficiency, but mechanization is also about ease and pleasantness. Often the work isn't all THAT much faster start to finish, it's just easier than doing it on our hands and knees. And when handwork is required, sometimes a two-person method isn't overall faster in labor hours but we do it anyway when we have time because it's so much more pleasant a process. Like anybody, we're only getting older. Developing a farm NOW with a mind to what we'll still feel comfortable doing LATER—rather than operating a farm that is simply fine in the present—is perhaps one of the most resilient and future-focused decisions of all.

Hottest summer on record...again

Colloquially, farmers are always talking about the weather. In the early years of the CSA it's true, I did often write about the weather and the effects of it—especially the rain, which cancels tractor work and delays critical spring planting until ground conditions improve. The reason, of course, that farmers talk about the weather is that it has such a determining effect on the outcome of our season's work.

As my farm systems became more resilient and experienced, my decision-making allowed the farm to meet the thinner margins of success offered by tough weather years, and so the effect of the weather on the farm work list has diminished (and the presence of the weather here in the weekly CSA writing has similarly diminished over the years).

But, this heat: this heat was a new thing. It's been hot before, yes. We all know that summer is hot around here, with highs over 90 not uncommon. But that's in July, not June, and for perhaps five days at a stretch—not a long-range forecast filled with ten days over 90, all 90s with no end in sight, and upper 90s in the middle of it all. I looked in the record, and so many consecutive days over 90 hasn't happened even in the summer, never mind the spring. Just like last September, when an unheard of five days in the upper 90s made the weather again the topic of the week, cooking some of the winter squash as it sat in the field, it's not only that it's hot; it's that we've been having this outlier heat also in outlier seasons.

Farmers tend to learn from the older generation and from their neighbors, adopting tried and true best practices because, in an annual project such as farming, the timescale of innovation and learning from one's own mistakes would be far too long to develop one's own knowledge, experience, and methods from scratch. Systems that still function in unusual conditions can't be worked out on one's own, since those unusual conditions come round so rarely. But here—and in recent years—we are more and more often experiencing conditions that never have occurred before in our region.

Normally, the rule is not to transplant tender young plants in the heat of the day, nevermind when it's going to be in the 90s—wait it out; don't plant. And if it's merely 5 days in the mid 90s, that's well and good—but what if it's 2 weeks of hot right at the end of spring planting season, when a 2-week delay in planting would mean a critical gap in vegetable production some months from now? So we did the planting and I figured that, since it's been hot before, these temperature conditions aren't really that unusual... they're just longer-lasting. I didn't, however, account for how such heat would affect young transplants as opposed to the established plants that barely notice July's peak summer heat. Or, for that matter, how so many consecutive days over 90 would add cumulative stress to young plants and dry out the soil faster than the irrigation system could replace it. Relying on experience learned over decades of farming (my own and my neighbors') didn't hold when faced with conditions not seen over that period.

So I spent a weekend keeping plants alive, hour by hour directing water to where it was needed most—not so that plants would grow well, as is the typical role of irrigation, but so they would not immediately die. We decided the best way forward was to set up overhead sprinklers in the new tomatoes, to cool their leaves and give them a chance to recover–something I've never done, or heard of. I ran it 20 minutes every hour, for their first day in the ground. The soil was plenty wet at the roots; the plants just couldn't move water up to their leaves fast enough to keep from being dried out and wilting in the sun. I rebuilt the lettuce sprinkler system to reach farther side-to-side, covering the outside beds that typically don't need much water. I filled the transplanter tank and drove over the tiny new squash and cucumber plants, twice a day, letting water out into the holes where the new plants were struggling, to save irrigating time for crops with more-developed root systems. Typically, we barely think about newly-planted squash and cucumbers for the better part of a week. I made decisions between irrigating the potatoes and onions, which were needing water for good yields during a critical period of putting on bulk, and irrigating the peppers, whose leaves became soft and floppy in the dryness and heat. It typically doesn't matter which crop gets irrigated today or tomorrow, but when everything needs water at once (even though it had all been irrigated within the week prior, the usual interval), new decisions need to be made.

Night was a period of calm before a repeat the following day, and when the temperatures dropped on that Monday, the feeling was of the passing of a storm at sea: doing the best I can to batten the hatches and ride it out, responding to the conditions moment-to-moment, and coming out to inspect when it's all over. And on Monday, most everything was alive. It was a new feeling knowing that, while the plants on the farm normally persist without help–that being their nature–this time, these new plants would have likely not made it.

Experience allows for meeting more challenging conditions, and finding success where margins are slimmer, the route to a positive result more narrow. I'm not sure what I would have done early on, or what a new farmer would do. The farming principles and methods we use are well suited to the variety of conditions typically experienced in this region over the last 50 years; what I was seeing was the breakdown of our normal growing systems when met with unheard-of conditions. Nobody in this region has ready answers to these problems.

Over the years I have adapted systems in response to unusual pressures of rain, wind, dryness, and insects. In a hot-summer climate, growing hot-weather crops, heat bedevils us workers but not so often the plants—they need it to grow. But here, a new pressure: unusual heat, far too much of it, at the wrong time. And in response, I learned new tools to add to the system when conditions require. And when this happens again—because it surely will—I will be ready with these methods, not as outlier stopgaps, but perhaps as normal elements of a hot-weather planting system.

Weather & Climate

Happy September! The light at the end of the tunnel after a long hot summer, with the first early winter squash this week as we head towards fall in the beautiful cooler weather at the end of summer.

JUST KIDDING, it’s above 95 degrees all week and time to talk about the weather. I accept these sorts of conditions in July, but, you know, at this point I’m over it—September is no time for this. In earlier years of the CSA I remember “the weather” being a fairly common topic of the weekly newsletters, but it doesn't end up coming up that often anymore. I think that's because the weekly weather used to have a critical, direct effect on the weekly work list—in particular rain and the week's rain forecast, which determined tillage timing and interrupted transplanting schedules with soggy fields. As the years went on, as we were exposed to more extreme weather situations, and as the weather patterns seemed to become more unusual (and weather forecasts less reliable), I made incremental changes to farm systems, crop plans, and decision-making principles so that farm operations became more resilient to these events—and so at this point, run-of-the-mill weekly weather barely affects our ability to get plants in the ground on time and has relatively little impact on the work list. It's also the case that with the longer periods of dryness between large rains these days, there just isn't rain often enough to get in the way of all that much.

And so “the weather,” that perennial farmer-favorite topic, rarely shows up in the weekly newsletter anymore. Because I know what to do about weather, which is to say, the various rainstorms, dry weeks, hot days, frosty nights, etc that all require certain decision making and work-list decisions to shepherd the farm to best effect. The bigger factor now, and what I do NOT yet know quite what to do about, is the climate—which is to say, the typical and expected weather patterns over time—and the major events a shifting climate can bring once a year, which still can determine the season's success.

Sometimes it feels like I'm just primed to see unexpected events as a product of shifting climate, where there in fact has always been surprising weather, and no year exactly like the last. But for us to have experienced all within the span of nine months: a shock of 5 degrees for 12 straight hours last Christmas, and then unseasonably warm conditions for the entire rest of the winter with barely a flake of snow, leading to a good percentage of the onion seedlings being eaten by onion maggots (their typical mid-spring timeline so accelerated by the warm winter that their emergence coincided with our ideal and unusually-early onion planting day of March 31st), and then biblical levels of potato beetles, weeks without rain followed by spring deluges of several inches turning the ground from “too dry to till” directly to “to wet to till”, and a parched summer with rain forecasts evaporating week by week, and days of wildfire smoke—a curiosity a couple years ago from west coast fires, but by now an accepted possibility, smoke visibly hanging in the air with no escape in a feeling reminiscent of the pandemic era, except in reverse, where indoors is the safe, un-masked location and masks are worn in the dangerous outdoor air. And now the hottest week of the year arrives, in September, a month that hasn't topped 97 degrees in my lifetime (at Dulles), and here we have three days in a row hotter than that. And of course, overall, this is the hottest year on record (which really has stopped being news; most years nowadays are the hottest on record.) Wells haven’t run dry and nothing’s on fire, but that just seems like more unusual events than there used to be in a year, and it's only September.

We’re doing all right with the weather this week (we know what to do this week when it's hot—the same as we do in July) and we're prepared to meet the challenges as the intensity of weather dials up and it comes to be more likely now to have major deluges followed by long periods of dryness, rather than reasonable amounts of rain at regular intervals. And then there is the increased and real risk of intense and unavoidable hailstorms that may in any given year track across the farm, for which there is no preparation—as happened in 2020, and will happen again. But in the big picture it’s not clear what the future brings, with the newly variable climate year-to-year an unknown challenge. We've experienced new possibilities of climate-related pest appearance not before imagined—and so we'll learn to cover the onions with netting, and introduce an organic spray for potato beetles, while changing the mix of potato varieties and planting density to have the best result in case of early death. Someday, to our great surprise, it will have been dry not for a few weeks, but for a few months, or more, and we'll wonder if (or when?) drought can become so extreme that our well runs dry. Now knowing wildfire smoke can arrive without warning, we will be ready with masks and air-quality protocol for hot-weather outdoor work, but there will likely be a summer when we see smoke-filled air not for a couple days, but for weeks on end, as already happens in other parts of the country. Not to mention the ways that a changing climate affects the larger infrastructure we rely on, like the electrical grid which suffers under demand during extreme weather and has gone down in other parts of the country. We already get our electricity from solar panels; do we invest in off-grid capability before or after experiencing an extended outage?

In the earlier years of the farm the moment-to-moment implementation of the farm consumed my decision making and efforts at improvement, working out what to do for situations that might arise weekly or monthly in years to come; now it seems like that planning turns more and more long term, making subtle changes to increase resilience as once-outlier events become more and more possible. The process for meeting future challenges is really the same one as has allowed the farm to come to where it is today in the first place—I mean, farming was never a straightforward uncomplicated enterprise—it's just that what's to come may involve new and unexpected challenges different from the one ones my neighbors here and I have all faced for years. As we've solved problems in the past, we'll meet future problems just the same.

What is the CSA, anyway? and, a concrete example...

What “IS” the CSA, anyway? You can read a lot of words on the website about what the CSA is, and my impression is that's a fairly accurate description. Still, everyone has to sign up in advance, based on that description and before they really know what they're signing up for. Rarely—and honestly less often than I would expect—someone interested in joining the CSA asks about a sample share or a trial week. I always consider it, and I always refuse. Not because it wouldn't be possible, but because I don't think one week can ever say all that much about what the CSA is. If anything, basing one's impression of the CSA on one isolated week would give a less accurate view of what to expect! Each week is different from the last, shifting slowly but surely through the season. I'm even disinclined to let people join the CSA partway through, even when there's space at the site, because, in some way, I feel like someone joining only for the second half of the season (tomatoes, peppers, winter squash) misses the context of what came before (zucchini, cucumbers, onions) and the change and growth over the course of the entire season. They might very well miss understanding the defining feature of the season, whatever it might be. The CSA is more than the sum of its parts, more than just one blue bag, which could be sampled in a trial week and then repeated 16 weeks in a row.

But in the bigger picture, is one whole CSA season even enough, to know what the CSA is? At this point, going on ten years running the CSA, the planting schedule and crop list is fairly nailed down with only minor adjustments each year. (For example, more tomatoes this year and hopefully a longer, less-intense melon season.) ...And yet, somehow, each season always develops its own character, unpredictably different from the year before. Some years it feels like a potato year, or a squash year, or a tomato year. Years ago there was even a beet year, which I was sure not to repeat once learning people's feelings on the matter. The funny thing is, these feelings about what the season was like (“too many beets!” “not enough tomatoes!” etc) are real, but they are just our impression, and often when I go back and look at actual numbers the seasons are, to my surprise, much more similar than they are different. The “reality” of what happened doesn't determine our impression of what the season was like.

Some years into developing my farm I heard from my neighbors, for whom I'd worked and learned to farm in the first place, that even they had winners and losers every year—and they'd been doing this for decades! That's just the way of it. Their farm always had enough overall, and approximately the same total quantity of vegetables each year, just not in the same proportions. I find that to be true for me too. I used to be concerned when a crop didn't seem to be working out, as if any given thing “should” work each year simply because it's worked in the past. And I didn't notice as much when certain things happened to be exceptional, because, well, maybe they “should” be like that every year. It took me a long time to get a sense of what a “typical” year is, and now I know that ALL of this is normal. We can't plan for what WILL happen in a given season, only for what is most LIKELY to happen, and, given enough seasons, will happen, on average, in time.

And so if someone were to join the CSA for just one season, does that tell them what the CSA is? They would certainly see a variety of different shares throughout the season, as you are this year, but it would be an error to assume each year is a repetition of the last. Sometimes I myself even worry about that, that as the farm plans become more similar year-to-year, the CSA might get boring for returning folks—and then I remember that my plans don't actually have the effect on the farm that I think they do, and so even if the plans are the same year to year, the farm never is!

To really get a sense of what the CSA is, I'd say one needs to experience not just one week, or one month, or even one whole season. As with farming, doing it for only a few years teaches a whole lot while still leaving one unprepared for year four, and it takes many more years than that to have experienced a breadth of situations to where everything that happens feels possible, normal, and with a ready answer for what to do about it. Similarly, for the CSA I'd say maybe 5 seasons is about right to REALLY know what the CSA is like, to understand the context for what might happen in any given year, and to feel that all the variation and surprises are well within the range of normal expectation given the experience of the prior years.

---

Last week you heard about how every year of the CSA is, in some way, different from the last; some of you might have noticed by now that last year was a Potato Year, and this year most definitely is not! I have been parceling out potatoes a little bit at a time and only when necessary, not wanting to exhaust the supply before they become a critical item for fall shares. You see, although I did everything I was supposed to for the crop—as far as I knew—we had plague levels of potato beetles this year. Unheard-of numbers. And I thought, in fact, that we had been on top of it, looking for eggs to squash by hand and collecting the adults long before any larvae had yet appeared! Sure, some eggs did hatch, as always, and I figured the potatoes would outgrow them like usual... and then there were more potato beetles eating the plants, and I continued to trust my experience from prior years, which had not included such a comically unbelievable potato beetle situation, and, by the time I recognized that this year was NOT to be like any other, it was too late. Plants were eaten down to the nub. First in selected areas (surely the plants in the other rows will take off any minute now), and then across the entire patch. This is why your potatoes have been pretty small this year—that's all the potato the plants had time to make!

You can be sure I've been thinking all summer about what adjustments to make to avoid this situation in future years. On the other hand, the adjustments I'd made on account of LAST year's productive but very weedy potatoes didn't prove to be important. The bigger picture, here, is that potatoes are something planted only once a year. Lettuce, on the other hand, goes in the ground weekly; tomatoes and squash, 5 times, every year. I've grown plantings of those crops many, many more times than I've grown potatoes! And the systems for those crops, in response to all that experience, are pretty dialed-in. I've already made and then adjusted for the most common mistakes. But with potatoes (and onions, for that matter), it'll take decades to have as much experience with them as I have with tomatoes or cucumbers. In so many cases, one minor oversight or unusual situation results in, “Well, better luck next year.” And then, inevitably, some new combination of growing conditions will result in some new and unforeseen circumstance.

A farmer friend of mine, who goes to all the vegetable-grower conferences, once told me about a conference where a noted potato-grower spoke about how he did it. And he was sure to point out something to the effect of, “I've spent my entire career growing potatoes, and you're all looking to me to learn about how to grow them. But you have to understand.. I've only done this 30 times in my entire life!” How good can one get, in only 30 repetitions, each one in different climactic conditions? Over the same span, tomatoes would get planted 150 times, or lettuce, 500 times—now that's enough to get seriously proficient!

And this may be why farmers are a notably conservative bunch, in the sense of being resistant to change—whether new methods to combat climate change or new equipment to do the work better or faster, most farmers probably want to wait and pay close attention to how it works out for a neighbor before trying it themselves. Because even it it seems like an innovation “should” work out, a farmer who knows they've only done something 30 times knows that their lifetime of experience is insufficient to make the proper decision about an untested innovation, and therefore one must rely on principles and methods developed over a much longer timespan—and so knows that it's risky to deviate from the established custom: the best practices not of the last few years, but the last few generations.

Here on my farm, I've accepted that I'll always be better at tomatoes and cucumbers than at growing potatoes and onions. My experience with those can never hope to catch up. I accept the long term project, too, of incremental improvement year by year and the curiosity of seeing what happens in a new situation, and then waiting an entire year to make the one adjustment that might have fixed it (and which might, itself, cause other unforeseen issues—or might simply be irrelevant in the new year). The other factor at play here is that while I don't come from a farming family, I did learn from older farmer neighbors, bringing their far longer experience to bear. And those older farmers excel at the standard market crops I mentioned: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, etc. Not one of them was any good at growing potatoes.

The Groundhog(s)

Gardeners often ask questions of a farmer, thinking we must have surely solved all the home garden troubles they encounter, since we, from their perspective, can grow an even BIGGER garden. It turns out, though, that most of the gardener troubles seem to be unrelated to farming: we farmers are really good at organizing thousands of plants in a field, but we really don't know much about growing a few plants behind a house. I remember when I sold at farmers markets, with a big table of tomatoes laid out, people would often ask about squirrels eating their tomatoes at home, and did I have that problem, and what did I do about the squirrels? Well, the farm is actually comprised of...fields. So, there are no trees around, and, sorry, no squirrels.

One perennial frustration we DO share though, is protecting our lettuce from all the animals that would rather eat it. Colloquially, this would be bunnies. But although there are bunnies around here, it turns out they are largely benign—and very cute. I've never actually seen one eating lettuce, or any other crop (not even carrots). Deer are the major pest here, so much so that we all spend thousands of dollars and tear our hair out anyway trying to keep the deer out of the farm, so good are they at finding the one little hole or gap in the fence. They LOVE lettuce and are quite happy to take a little bit of lettuce every night until we farmers figure out how they're getting in. I've attempted to chase deer out of the fence and watched them enter a small patch of tall grass with no escape... but, after driving through the grassy patch to flush them out, discovered that they have positively disappeared. This year, though, the fence has been 100% all season—no deer in the early lettuce—and I thought I had it made.

I was wrong. This year, seeing the tasty buffet before them with nary a deer in sight, the groundhogs moved in. This is is a first! Groundhogs live all around here but I've never had trouble with them in the lettuce. In the greenhouse this year, many early lettuce transplants had already been munched down in their trays (no mice in mousetraps, no larger rodents in their traps, no deer inside the fence...could it have been birds?? I still have no idea what it was, although the eating has stopped), and, since those little plants went in the ground already a little eaten, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on. Every time I looked at the baby plants in the field, they still looked a little eaten... but they had *always* looked a little eaten so I didn't think a lot about it. Eventually though, I admitted that this was new damage.

There is a big groundhog hole near the lettuce patch, but since we'd never seen a ground hog dash towards it as we drove by, we assumed it was old and abandoned. Just to be sure, I kicked the excavated dirt back into the burrow to close it up. And, well, the next day it was open again. Somebody was living there. I got out the groundhog trap, and baited it with lettuce—the very lettuce they had been eating—and got lucky this first time. It only took the better part of an afternoon to catch it. Yet, the next day, there was fresh damage. I again went to kick in the dirt to close up the hole, and see if it would re-open, and this time, a groundhog was looking back at me from inside the hole, taunting me with its comical rodent buck teeth! I met its gaze and taunted it back, ineffectively. I reset the trap. Eventually I caught that groundhog, and then over the next couple weeks, two more out of the same hole. Now, finally, the hole has stayed closed after being covered with dirt: nobody home.

I've been planning to write this story to you for the Week 2 newsletter for a little while now. I planned a triumphant story of farmer besting the perennial foe. This evening, however, I walked down the aisle in the lettuce thinking about what to write and admiring the bushy new growth in a part of the row far from that groundhog hole—and then, WAIT, why is that one freshly eaten?? No deer prints. It must be a small animal, and I considered for a minute the bunnies, but then decided to take a look around the fenceline near that section of eaten lettuce, knowing that groundhogs rarely travel far from their burrow to dine. Sure enough, there was freshly dug dirt, standing out light brown against the green grass, and a hole down into the earth.

I reset the trap.

Farm Artifacts

I'd say an artifact is something of a former time that has persisted through the years that, when viewed in the context of today, allows us to understand something of that past era... or something of a place that shows something of what that same place was like in a different time. Of course, most artifacts originally were hardly worth noting in their own day, being so thoroughly normal and not offering any comment at all on their current setting. On the farm, the artifacts I find are often just oddly shaped pieces of rusty metal, nearly meaningless on their own—but there's always a larger story to be found once somebody can figure out what it is and why it fell to the ground in this particular place.

Things lost on a small farm always turn up eventually, no matter where they were lost. As a worker here during college summers, sometimes I would discard a long-sleeve shirt on a warm day, lose it, and it would appear again weeks later. Even my indestructible Nalgene water bottle was lost track of, written off for good, and then it too turned up again—with a big dent in it. I always assumed it had fallen into a field and then got tilled up.

Everything lost can't have gone far on a vegetable farm, and, after enough work weeding, or enough tillage passes, or enough time pulling up drip tape, someone will view the exact spot where it happens to be. Even items like the small gas cap from my International 884 that I left sitting on the tractor fender while refueling and then promptly drove away, leaving it to fall off into a field (and forcing me to sheepishly turn up at the parts counter to buy a new gas cap like an idiot)... several years later someone working here walked up and handed me a little rusty round piece of metal—I knew exactly what it was.

One of the more common items that turns up here—we find one or two each year when sticking a pepper plant in the ground or digging up potatoes—are the spring clamps that I used, until a few years ago, to hold up the plastic on a long hoophouse. The hoophouse no longer exists, and even though nobody ever lost a clamp on purpose, still they keep appearing in that part of the farm.

Sometimes more interesting pieces of metal come to the surface. I think it was 2016 when we found this pointed piece of metal, clearly manufactured in a specific shape but for what purpose I had no idea. Years later, at a farm auction, looking at the old rusty equipment, I saw a part that was was exactly the same shape as this piece of metal—it was the guard on a sickle bar mower, through which the toothed bar slides to cut the tall grass to let it fall over evenly on the ground to be dried and raked into windrows for making hay. I never saw a sickle bar mower as a worker on farms, and nobody has used that machine on this ground (or even made any hay here at all) within the memory of anybody I know.

Around the same time that mower part came to the surface, I was discing up a patch of ground at my neighbor's flower farm and found this heavy triangle of rusty metal. I knew exactly what this one was though, although to somebody else it would be as foreign as the sickle bar guard was to me. All of the ground here, her flower farm and my vegetable farm used to be farmed by the people I worked for and learned from. And their key piece of machinery was the spader, a game-changing one-pass tillage machine that replaced the old plow and disc. Being a mechanicallyinclined ninteen-year-old, I was one of the workers assigned to replace the spades when they wore out twice a year. I'd know those plow bolts anywhere, with their difficult deformed-thread locknuts. The piece I found is not just the replaceable spade, but the fixed part of the machine it bolts onto—the remains of a poor quality (“meets farm tolerance”) weld are visible, where it would have been attached to the arm of the tillage machine.

Just as that sickle bar guard tells me something about what happened before my time here, 50 years from now if somebody found a spader spade (and could identify it!) it would tell something of what happened here before their time—the only people in this area who would have ever had a spader would have been the few small-scale vegetable farms here around me now.

I've been farming this very ground for nine years now, tilling it up every year, making beds, laying plastic, transplanting down every row, and I thought by now I would have found anything of any size—and honestly, the finds I've recounted here are just about the sum total of what has turned up! But digging potatoes last week, I pushed my hand into the loosened ground and felt something thin and pointy, about 18” long and curved in a gentle arc. I couldn't believe it, but it had to be. A tine from the part of the spading machine that leaves behind a flat fine seedbed. It's hard to miss—and dangerous! How on earth had nobody come across it before? But it's been here the whole time! I remember new tines being repair welded back on to the finish harrow from time to time, which means they must have broken off from time to time, and here was one of them—found 13 years after the last time anyone used a spader here. It's been down there, underground and unnoticed, only now brought to the surface.

These bits of rusty metal tell something of their era—a sickle bar mower used to be the standard way to make hay, now going out of fashion, and it's neat to find a piece that came off of an old machine. But the bigger story is that an old machine piece tells not only something about the old equipment it came from (and the fact that these parts fell off, requiring a careful repair to get going again), but also about the past story of this particular place.

Sometime, long before I was here, before the 50-year story of the farming here in Wheatland as I know it, there is an earlier part of the story of this farm that I would never have known—that it was at one point a hay field grown tall. One day, somebody came to mow hay, a thoroughly normal activity, and they brought a tractor not unlike the old ones I drive on the farm today (except in that day it looked modern and normal), or perhaps even a horse, if it was long enough ago. And as they drove that sickle bar mower back and forth, looking west at the same treeline I look at, looking east at the same horizon of the ridge between here and Leesburg, following the same contours I drive over in my own tractor and in the very same place where my field is now, a mower guard just dropped off into the grass, the only record of what happened here that day, really the only record of anything at all that happened in the past right here, separated from my own work only by time, but not by space.

And some day long after I'm gone from farming here, I will have unintentionally and unavoidably left a record of my own particular farming, artifacts all common to my shop-built farm equipment and nobody else's, but which few people would know to put together into the full picture—4 1/2” bolts, 5/8” hitch pins, 1/4” clip rings, and a few greenhouse clamps scattered around a 15' x 270' rectangle.

"Perfect" is not a standard

Back in the 70s, well before my time, a neighboring orchardist happened to be a NASA engineer. He packed peaches at night, and by day he dealt with the high precision and tightly controlled NASA tolerances required to build rockets. From time to time he would be called upon to give his engineer's take on a neighbor's idea for some home-built farm hack job construction, and came his reply: “Well, meets farm tolerance.”

Everything in the world has a tolerance, a range of acceptability. The only "perfect" to be had is a concept in one's own mind, and, when executing work in the real world, everyone has to decide their level of tolerance for their own work—decide what is “good enough.” Nearly everything done inevitably could have been done to a higher degree, and, while there is an infinite amount of perfection to refine towards, there is always a finite amount of effort, time, or money. When not warranted, excess perfection is a waste of effort (or money or time)--when trying to produce something, the needlessly superior result is in fact a worse job done.

Last winter, I re-did the tiny kitchen in my wonky old house that has no parallel walls and uneven floors—not a 90-degree angle to be found in the whole building. I needed to build a frame for a new granite countertop, and, although I could operate the tools and design the concept and execute the work, I didn't know how level is level or how true is true enough for an inflexible, brittle slab of granite. Chatting with the plumber I expressed my uncertainty and concern about whether I had built it perfect enough, and he told me that, in the real world, every countertop he'd ever seen used shims to make up for variation in the cabinetry. Well, the installers came with the countertop, I sweat, crossed my fingers. They didn't need to use a single shim. In my inexperience, I built it perfect. I was excited to have reached the precision I had aspired to...but in the end, watching the tradesmen work, I learned that such close tolerances just didn't matter. I hadn't done all that perfect a job after all.

So in farming, especially with its endless supply of work to be done and the limits of daylight and human energy, there is a sweet-spot trade off of perfection and speed. The gardener can spend all the time they want pulling every last weed or carefully tamping down every little transplant, but on the farm... we just don't have time for that. I think of “farm perfect” as about 80% of what the attentive gardener might do, and I describe it that way to prospective employees: How do you feel about leaving some little weeds that don't matter in order to move through the work expeditiously? Or about stuffing lettuce plants into the ground to let them fend for themselves, even though a few won't make it, because we have 1000 plants to move through and it just doesn't matter? I've learned that some people are perfectionists who can't bear to leave anything to a lesser degree than they are capable of, while others are slap-dash speed demons who do sloppy work (albeit quickly). The trick is to develop a close tolerance for what is neither too slow and careful nor too fast and sloppy—to dial in and reliably execute the precision of that perfectly imperfect “farm tolerance.”

The real skill, in doing work, is not knowing how to execute a job as perfectly as it CAN be done, but knowing how good it OUGHT to be done. And, unlike with home carpentry, I have enough experience farming to have a clear perspective on where that standard lies at each point in the season. These last few years it's been a delight to dial it in, to be able to perceive higher tolerances and reliably execute the work to that standard. Whereas a new worker can hardly tell one squash from the next, and so must have a wider tolerance, having picked and sorted thousands of zucchini and cucumbers and handled tons of tomatoes, each one looks different to me. And as the last person who sees the vegetables before you do, it's up to me to keep standards high, assessing which are the small-seeded cucumbers, finding the sufficiently unblemished tomatoes. Most that get packed into the CSA are perfectly good-enough, although I can see their flaws, but it's a true joy to recognize that rare “perfect” specimen, the outlier of form and beauty, or to appreciate picking lettuce in ideal conditions as opposed to the normal lettuce I cut day in and day out. And these standards aren't an absolute, but are assessed in response to a natural system in all its variation over the course of the season, over the life of a plant. Those tomatoes look nice now, but as the season progresses and the plants inevitably decline, they might not look so pretty as these first weeks—but we still want to eat tomatoes, and so a new standard is found, appropriate to the new conditions on the ground. (And, take your lettuce this week—considering it was hotter than 90 degrees all last week, it's all right! ...But there's no way it's as good as what could be grown in the cooler weather of June.)

It's not that everything IS perfect this year—far from it. Surely there are as many mistakes as ever, and just as much that I want to do better next season. But each year, the errors and imprecision come within a smaller and smaller margin. There is still plenty to improve on the farm, even though most everything so far has gone perfectly acceptably this year. Of course, like the workers who can't tell one squash from the next, my work this year is only “acceptable” to what I can see, to where my current standards lie. Perfection being always just out of reach, the new possibility for improvement is only apparent once having reached a certain level—and the “acceptable” standard rises accordingly. I can work on a level of precision of execution of the farm season that I couldn't even perceive in the past, and for those of you with a long-term perspective on the CSA (and a good memory) I think that might come through for you as well. In any case, the farm and CSA this year is leaps and bounds beyond what I could imagine even five years ago. Five years from now, the CSA will have evolved even further and I will have reached a new, and different level of perfection. The inevitability of adaptation towards that perfect season we can conceive of yet never will reach keeps us working towards that illusive perfection, and also satisfied in the limitations of our current moment.

Old-School Weather

Most years I write about the weather from time to time, except this year it hasn't come up as often. Perhaps that is because this summer we've only had two periods of weather: HOT & DRY and now, COOL & WET. The dry period sort of snuck up because it didn't quite feel like it was never raining. Rain was very often in the forecast, and that threat of rain very often determined the worklist on the farm. But every time rain was predicted, the skies darkening promisingly, the small storms missed us out here and then bloomed into giant thunderstorms by the time they reached the city. The ground got drier and drier, limiting tillage, until I gave up hoping for rain and assembled the overhead sprinklers in an unplanted field just to get the ground into a condition where it might eventually be able to grow something.

And yet last week I went up the road to visit the local welder, who in conversation about the weather (an obligatory topic), noted how well his neighbor's soybeans are doing next to the shop. He mentioned getting consistent rain, much to my surprise, but I knew what he was going to tell me next because he'd told me about it before: "It's just like back in the 70s when there were a number of great growing years..." He went on to describe this year's storms all coming up from the south, dropping just the right amount of rain... And I went on to describe how, yes, I know those rainstorms well... I watch them skirt my farm to the north and head right up here to you!

My neighbors, from whom I learned to farm and now retired after growing vegetables here since the 70s, often mention that back then a storm came through just about every week to drop an inch of rain, the perfect amount. They didn't even use irrigation until the 90s, the rain being so reliable. But weather patterns are changing. For example, every year there is usually 5 days of cool and rainy weather during the first part of August; I watch the forecast closely, for this is the fleeting window to sow spinach seeds in the ground. This year the cooler period came right on schedule...but with no rain in sight, I waited until the next window of good spinach-planting weather: a true rainy week towards the end of August, too late to re-plant if it didn't come up well. I had high hopes given that week's rainy forecast, but, as it turned out, that week kicked off these last 4 weeks of rain (pretty much every Wednesday, like clockwork, and on other days as well), which turned out to be too MUCH rain for the tiny spinach, many of which didn't survive germination. The survivors are fine, there just aren't as many as I'd hoped.

Sure, all weather is local and no trend predicts the weather at any particular spot at any particular time, as the welder's quite different growing season indicates, his shop being not 5 miles north of me. But old timers talk how the summer weather these days is just not like it used to be--and, unlike most "back in my day" lamentations, this one is empirically true! The year-to-year variability has increased; the range of weather considered "normal" and unremarkable is getting broader all the time. So much of farming relies on predictable weather, because plants like predictable, stable growing conditions. This widely varying weather, from drought to deluge, late freeze to blazing July, creates new rhythms we don't yet understand and can't adapt to on the fly.

Several years ago, I gave up on the idea that I could trust the old-time weather patterns from the era of the farmers I'd learned from, and began to intentionally diverge from the rubrics learned from those older farmers. I began doing fieldwork when it is possible, rather than waiting for conditions to be ideal, as ideal conditions became more elusive, and adjusted other practices to be more adaptable to changing conditions. And as weather continues to become more unpredictably extreme, I'll continue to shift to more resilient growing systems, like transplanting rather than seeding directly into the ground. These sorts of things take more work and used to feel silly if most years are all right, but the more those "outlier" years become the norm, the less silly it feels to instead see the "regular" times as the outliers and be sure to be prepared for an ever-widening range of possibilities in the future.

Farm Olympics

Did you watch any of the Olympics? It's hard not to see a few parallels to farming's physical feats, although I did only catch the highlights due to my full-time participation in the tomato-picking event here on the farm. In fact, for a long time, in Summer Olympics years, the farmers around here held the Farm Olympics, complete with all the events you might imagine: square bale tossing, speed market tent set up, round bale hurdles, triathlon (including pond swim), and the quadrennial favorite, the tractor & trailer back up. It was full of good-natured rivalry between neighboring farms, stories passed down year to year, and, in general, a celebration of the community of many farms all coming together at the hardest-working point of the season for the big neighborhood event.

And farming itself--at least this type of small-scale, seasonal, manual-labor based farming--often seems like an Olympic event done year in and year out. Surely farming would fall into the marathon category. A six month marathon, that is, with vegetables as pace setters, one foot in front of the other until the finish line, invisible on the horizon, inevitably arrives in November. Or perhaps, considering all involved, it's more like the pentathlon (or the dodecathlon, with one event per month): right now we are in Tomato Pick, having arrived here from Squash Pick, and before that, Transplanting.

In any case, here we are in the middle of the season. Up until the April starting gun I plan and prep for this year's trial, finding my niche and developing my style over the past 10 farm years, and then we're off! The event underway, it is up to me to rely only on that training and planning to see how well I can do. After a winter off it takes a bit to hone the relevant muscles, to acclimate to long days of physical work in the heat, to remember the technical skills of doing all the repetitive tasks quickly and accurately--the muscle memory and cognitive training built only through experience. For workers--and I remember this acutely--the first two weeks are nearly impossible; even for long-time farmers the first two weeks each year are a shock. Since the output of the farm is all physical objects (delicious vegetable objects!) created from physical processes, the work put in is entirely involved with manipulating things in the physical world.

One of the farm neighbors, whom I used to live with, ran marathons--no, ultramarathons--50 miles in the woods from which he came home unable to walk up stairs. I didn't get it, and still don't quite, except I realize I feel the same way about farming: there is the satisfaction in voluntarily setting up an almost absurd physical challenge, and then seeing if I can complete it--whether that's the big picture of picking vegetables for 20 weeks straight to pack and deliver 60 beautiful shares three times a week without fail, or the smaller challenges of picking squash every day for weeks on end, picking ALL THE TOMATOES, or getting an unreasonably giant list of fieldwork done before rain or darkness on a 90-degree day, then getting up early to do it again the next day. All of these things are objectively difficult, strenuous, and exhausting, and yet, just as someone might choose to run an ultramarathon, or climb a mountain or twelve, this challenge of the objectively absurd is what offers the satisfaction of completion. (And at least farming yields tasty vegetables!)

The Game of Farming

I hardly know the first thing about poker, but I like knowing how things work so when I came across How To Be A Poker Champion In One Year in The Atlantic, I opened it right up. To my surprise, I realized the author's approach to becoming a poker champion in one year is similar to what I enjoy about farming--although with a longer learning curve.

"Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the 'right' thing to do."

I can make all the plans in the world--and I do, over the winter--but the longer I farm, the more I accept that there is no certainty in them. How can there be, when the implementation of those plans is necessarily reliant on weather yet to come and other unknowable factors related to the essential problem of farming: imposing human order and human desires on inscrutable natural systems.

I used to aspire to the perfect season, where all the ground was perfectly prepared, the seeds all sown according to winter plans, each vegetable abundant--because surely if I made the perfect plans, with the perfect execution, that would inevitably lead to perfect agricultural results. But as much as that is my starting point, in the end I am not working with a mechanical system; there is no certainty here on the farm. Being good at farming is not about knowing how to grow stuff (plants just do their thing, really) or even the methods (although there are indeed incremental improvements and new innovations each year), but about honing one's decision-making ability and making the best decisions each day, moment-to-moment, based on the situation at hand.

There is no "knowing" what to do, as if it could be learned in a textbook; my job is to figure out what course of action is most likely to work out best, accounting for some intuitive sense of how bad and how likely the worst results might be, as well as how likely the best results might be. For sure the longer I've farmed, the more conservative I've become, favoring decisions that are very likely to work out acceptably, and with little downside risk--even though this inherently leads to a similarly small chance of perfection. To borrow from a different card game, to "shoot the moon" is not a viable farm strategy; that perfect result is an impossibility.

“Less certainty. More inquiry,” Seidel relates to Konnikova in the poker article.

Assessing what may happen and understanding why past results were the way they were is a more useful approach here than feeling any certainty about how to proceed. I realize that I use my years of observation of my own successes and non-successes--as well as the much longer experience of my neighbor farmers--to game out what might happen as a result of any farming decision, in order to assess the likelihood of positive results. Will the soil crust before the seeds emerge, or perhaps the rain will come--or what happens if it rains too much, and would it be a net advantage to delay until later? The longer I farm, the more chances I get to observe and understand why things worked out the way they did, and the more granular detail I can build into my imaginary model to make more informed decisions about what is most likely to be the most advantageous course of action in any given situation. I enjoy, each year, being able to understand deeper levels of detail, to be able to act with closer tolerances during short windows of opportunity--not to know what to do, but to have a clearer sense of what is most likely to work.

"The object of poker is making good decisions....When you lose because of the run of the cards, that feels fine. It’s not a big deal. It’s much more painful if you lose because you made a bad decision or a mistake.”

So too with farming. I can't know what's best, and I surely can't get it "right" every time--there may not even BE a "right answer" every time. The best I can do is to make good decisions, good gambles, and know that I've played my best hand no matter how it ends up going in the end.

Happy August!

Typically July is the hardest month for a farmer, since it's the month of picking overlapping with planting, the satisfaction of summer crops competing with concerns about fall crops yet to be grown. The main focus becomes simply getting the food out of the fields, with our schedules now determined by the plants rather than our own desires. In past weeks I could decide in advance what was going into the shares and knew that vegetable quantities were going to add up after we completed the picking. But now that we're picking squash every day, cucumbers four times a week, tomatoes twice a week, only after the harvest comes back can we determine how much exists and figure out how to divvy it up for the CSA. This is the first week that has felt for me like the vegetables are fully in control.

And during all this, of course, we've still got to get the fall crops like cabbage, carrots, and spinach in the ground! Being fall crops, they really aren't a fan of hot dry weather, so it's a matter of keeping a close eye on the forecast and making best guesses on when is likely to be the best opportunity to put out the plants--and being ready to go when that moment arises, since this moment is invariably on a Monday or Thursday during the big CSA prep day.

Last Thursday it was likely to rain two inches or more beginning late afternoon, and I had a decision to make. Do I seed carrots before the big rain, and risk them getting compacted into the ground by driving rain, struggling to break the surface four days later? Or does the big rain mean great germination, with more rain possible in four days to soften the ground and allow them poke up above the surface? Or do we wait out the big Thursday rain because it might be dry enough to plant over the weekend, and avoid the downsides of the drenching rain? But--what if it ISN'T dry enough, or even worse, what if a storm happens to come through on the weekend and keeps things wet--and then it rains Monday and Tuesday, and suddenly things are very delayed. The deciding factor, for me, was knowing that if the carrots didn't come up, there would still be time to re-plant and try again next week. If I waited until after the rain, it would be too late to make a second attempt if the first seeding didn't work out. And hey, if it WAS the perfect window of opportunity--well, I wouldn't want to miss it!

So in a flurry of Thursday afternoon activity, in the midst of CSA picking and prepping, we got the beds ready, seeded the carrots, and covered them with fabric rowcover to protect the soil from from driving rain and lock in moisture to keep those finicky carrot seeds happy. And... wouldn't you know, although the sky looked consistently ominous, the rain came hours later than expected, and so we just kept going, seizing the window of opportunity to get even more fall bed prep done. I ended the day picking squash by headlamp--but tradeoffs must be made. And instead of two inches of rain, we hardly got half an inch that night. The perfect amount--enough to keep it moist, but not enough to firm up the ground! Today, four days later, the seeds have grown little root "tails" and are ready to send up their shoot just as tomorrow's probable deluge will liquefy the soil surface and make it so so easy for the little carrots to emerge. At least, that's the hope. I feel very lucky so far, but we'll find out what happens!

As luck would have it, today is a repeat of Thursday; again it's a CSA prep day and again it's forecast to rain two inches. With four days of cool rainy weather on the way, is this the window to plant spinach? Encouraged by the (presumptive) success of the the pre-deluge carrot seeding, I decided to chance it and seeded all six spinach beds. So this afternoon, once it clouded over and got cool and before the rain began, we got the spinach done. And then I picked squash not in the dark, but in the rain. Because again, tradeoffs must be made. In this season of hot weather, the windows of opportunity are brief and not to be missed.

And so, with the last seeds planted, it's on to August and its relentless vegetables to pick and pack, but with the fall crops safe in the ground, gambles made, to hopefully bear fruit in a few months.

The adventure of farming, and, Why do we do this, anyway?

This time of year on the farm is always a combination of slowing and hustle. The days are shorter, the workers and crops growing fewer, but there is still much to be done to be ready for winter. Most of these winter-prep tasks have no particular deadline, but this season's weather constraints have persisted to the bitter end resulting in a worklist that has felt more like July than October. Which is to say, the last couple days have felt like quintessential farming days to me: a weather-imposed deadline for critical planting, resulting in a complex sequence of fieldwork and tractor work, which necessarily involves mechanical breakdown, all while managing the workflow so that essential picking doesn't fall through the cracks. Which is to say: exciting, challenging, rewarding. This time of year it isn't a cash crop we're rushing to plant, but a covercrop (in this case rye, which maintains and improves the soil over winter, before being tilled under in spring), since Friday's rain will close the window of opportunity for tractor work for a long time. Over the last two days we dismantled and tilled up quite literally half the farm, ready to seed with rye.

We prepared the long-dead cucumber and squash field, taking up the hoops that supported the fabric rowcover and pulling up the drip tape that irrigated the rows all season – a tool and tractor borrowed from a neighbor helped get it out of the firm ground. Then it was time to mow, but a few minutes to being finished with the field, I heard a disconcerting clunk and looked back to find that the shaft connecting the mower to the tractor had sheared off and broken free. Fortunately, neighbors will step in in a pinch, so I went to borrow their tractor to finish up. They were also preparing to seed covercrop, completing the same tractor sequence as me. I turned their tractor on, and it immediately ran out of fuel and died. We were surprised but filled it with fuel, I drove off, and stopping to open the gate noticed that fuel was now streaming out of the tank (from the bottom, where the drain plug should be). Well that explains why it was out of fuel! After running to find a n empty jug, calling the neighbor to help, getting buckets set up and settling in to let the 20 gallons of fuel drain right out again, I went to hook up my big disc to be ready for the next days' tillage. There's always a bit of unexpected setup and repair to do on such rarely-used equipment; this time a tire had gone flat and needed to be re-seated on the rim and a couple critical bolts needed to have the threads cleaned up with the tap&die set. I so enjoy the flurry of work that these sequences require, and the diversity of skills I get to employ – experimentation, problem-solving, equipment operation, and creative repairs to get the job done.

Today, luckily, everything went according to plan with the fieldwork. I drove the disc over half the farm, and over the one neighbor's field, and then the other neighbor's, since I have the big equipment for the tillage job and today is the right time to use it before rain. All the while the two workers were picking for CSA – but it took quite a bit longer than expected, because this season's weather and resulting lack of vegetables has forced us to rely on a couple terribly time consuming items this week. We finished the day by lifting the last two rows of potatoes with the tractor and potato digger, since waiting until after the rain would mean having to dig them out by hand.

Meeting the challenge of shifting weather, labor, and equipment logistics is always difficult, though it really is something I enjoy about this business: “Can we get this done? Let's find out!” In the end, the covercrop project will be a success, turning half the farm from crops to open ground seeded in rye, ready for the rain. However I'll have to do the seeding Friday morning, which means that I won't get the CSA packed in time, and hence the note about being late to deliver this week. In the midst of all this we did get the vegetables picked, which certainly feels like its own kind of success. I'm sorry to be off on the timing, and wanted to give you a little window here into what we're up to at the farm, so you can understand something of what's behind all those vegetables that appear in the blue bag. It doesn't always go according to plan, but farming always seems to offer an endless supply of challenges to meet and problems to solve, making it an endlessly rewarding livelihood.

Something I Love about Farming

Something I love about farming year after year is that past experience allows me to perceive ever greater levels of detail in the process of farming, offering the possibility of making ever more precise decisions in order to effect the desired outcome. An outcome like having spinach or carrots, for example. And spinach and carrots are two things I've been thinking a lot about these past few weeks.

In my early years of farming I read the seed catalog, picked a planting date, dialed in the seeding rate, and hoped for the best. This was met with mixed success. Even though we assume seeds will germinate into plants with some regularity, there is much that holds them back, and so naively setting the seeder according to the book and running it on the proper planting date may or may not yield a good crop in any given season.

It's been a few years since I learned to plant at the proper time of the weather rather than the proper time of the calendar. And even more years since I reluctantly had to admit, having studiously dialed in the seeder settings with ever more precision, that I had been erroneously attributing problems of spotty emergence to the easily-adjusted mechanical certainty of the seeder, rather than to the uncertain climactic conditions under the soil surface.

It was only after examining the failures of many past seasons and comparing the conditions and results in the present instance with the conditions and results of  previous trials that I could begin to tease apart the innumerable variables of these quite uncontrolled experiments. And in the classic way of “the more you know, the more there is to know,” I do enjoy being able to juggle these micro-level details and make my best gamble about how to provide the optimum conditions required.

I last planted carrots a few weeks ago, before the big rain, which I thought would be better than waiting until after, especially since if they didn't work I'd still have time to re-plant. Carrots need constant moisture to emerge (so two weeks of rain is great!) but they are quite wimpy and liable to stall out pushing their way up through firm soil, germinating successfully but never making it to the surface. Water makes the soil soft, but lots of rain compacts and settles the soil into a firm mass--a firm mass that requires even more water to loosen, which will dry and harden on the slightest sunny day. Planting shallowly offers a shorter path to the surface, but it dries out quicker up near the sun and germination can suffer. It's also hotter near the surface--though afternoon irrigation can cool the soil. Spinach germinates erratically above 90-degrees, compounding the difficulty of matching these factors to provide the ideal conditions to the seed for the 5-7 days it takes to (hopefully) break the surface.

On Wednesday I made my gambles with the last carrot planting and first spinach planting, both critical crops, and I enjoyed every minute of seeding-rate calculation with math and measuring spoons to settle on a rate that might be high enough for a reliable stand but low enough to limit the work of thinning, setting the depth (shallow) and planning to irrigate frequently--but lightly--and waiting until these cooler days which, however, have a higher chance of blasting thunderstorms that can pound the loose soil into crusty cement in an instant.

Whether all this effort and consideration will have the desired effect I do not know. And if the seeds do emerge, exactly at the right spacing, can I attribute the success to my care and precision? Who can say. Certainly I will have no idea which variable was the critical factor, although I might guess. Many years from now perhaps the trends will be clearer, and if the success rate continues to rise, only then might they hint at a causal relationship. Until that time comes I'll continue to pay attention and do my best, and enjoy every minute of it.

Week 21: Surprise, low of 20 degrees!

Wow, we're nearing the end--only one more week to go! 

Suddenly, after weeks of unseasonably warm weather, on November 10th we see a forecast low of 20 degrees. When the weather report changed a few days ago, I thought this was a miscalculation. A fluke, surely to be corrected soon. Crops that laugh at 30 degrees risk real damage at 20. We had a long, wet day today in preparation for the surprise freeze--but in a way, this is what we signed up for. These sorts of days are an adventure, in a way, a test: can we do it?

We began with the CSA picking, then after lunch we covered the at-risk plants (fingers crossed!), and set into the soon-to-be-frosted pepper patch to pick as many green peppers as we could in the time remaining. We finished picking in the dark, which was rather comical, though surprisingly possible. A day of work well done--but not done yet! We still wanted to pack the CSA bags, since Friday morning will be freezing cold with 18mph winds--no time to be outside.  With the bags packed and loaded into the van, I ordered celebratory pizza for us all and, although we were cold, damp, and tired after spending 12 hours outside under the November clouds, I knew that we were quite happy to have done just that. Quite happy to have seen the challenge ahead of us this morning, to rise to the task, and to know that we accomplished the critical work right when it needed to get done. That said, dry clothes never felt so lovely!