Neither a product of the world, nor a reaction to it

Although I can eat a lot of vegetables myself, it's only the smallest fraction of what I grow—so why bother doing all this work to grow so darn many? Clearly the farm plays a big part in your dinner plans, the vegetables being your main interface with what's going on here! But there are many reasons to have a farm, just as there are many reasons to join a CSA: there's the ecological principles, living in the natural world, or engaging with an enterprise that contributes to connection with sustainable agriculture and local food systems. These are all things that you might appreciate, and that I do appreciate. Another facet is to be a part of the local economy, and for you to support small businesses, ideas you're probably familiar with in general. It's a little harder, though, to get a feel for why exactly to do that, and what arises as a product of that small-scale, local economy. For me, one of the main things I appreciate about the farm in my own life is that it is a way to support my livelihood with an engaging, positive project while living as a part of the economic patchwork of the world around me.

The area I live in is based on farming, at least in a historical sense; there's still enough of that agricultural community left that I fit into it on that basis. But it also contains repair shops, parts stores, mechanics, truck drivers, and all the other support businesses and tradesmen required to keep an agricultural area going, all here in this same place. My farm is an operation that lives in that larger picture—my peer group is comprised of the people and businesses who are doing that same thing, living in that same world. These people are the vegetable farmers I learned from, selling at farmers markets to provide for their lives, and now, retirement. They’re the neighboring businesses we sold next to and thought well of for the fact that they could do the same. They're the farmers I pass on the road, people I don't even know, driving tractors to make hay before rain. It's the machinery repair shop, the traveling mechanics; it's Fred the plumber in his truck heading the other way down the road, and the propane delivery drivers delivering fuel for greenhouses and winter heating. In our own way we're all doing the same thing, a part of the same world.

This social fabric is the cultural history of the place where I live. Describing the society of immigrants who came to Pennsylvania, then spread down into the Shenandoah valley and across the Potomac here to Lovettsville in the 1730s, Warren Hofstra writes in A Separate Place that “No farm was entirely self-sufficient, and few farmers sought to live in isolation from their neighbors. Many...could not produce all they needed to feed, house, and clothe their families. They had to depend on local trade. ... The need for wagons called for wagonmakers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights to make them and teamsters to drive them. ... Thus the farm and the limited scale of commercial activity on the farm generated an intricate goods-and-services economy. ... This network was a community premised on a set of exchanges that were reciprocal and mutually supportive.”

Not all farms, though, are a part of that goods-and-services economy, today or in the past. I use the same equipment and production systems as farms many times my size, to produce vegetables of largely the same types—tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, squash. But the giant farms of agribusiness out in the Salinas Valley of California, they aren't owned by people—and a monocrop of thousands of acres of lettuce isn't really my speed. The tomato fields of southern Florida, the same: whichever businesses control that ground are designed to export the resources of the region to generate more and more money and power well beyond a human scale, rather than to live with their neighbors in small-scale commercial relationships.

On the other end of things, many small sustainable farmers have the opposite orientation to the business side—in fact a deep discomfort with the imperative to support one's livelihood with one's farming efforts. I didn't encounter this questioning in the world of farms I came up in; here it was laudable to support one's long-term life by selling vegetables. In my first job, the farm owners talked about money and shared their numbers; anybody paying attention knew how much money they made and how they saved for retirement.

Being neither a product of the world that seeks money and power, nor a reaction to it, is what in fact allows a farm to exist via human-scale commerce as a node in the local social fabric. And it's the economic interconnection of buying and selling, and relying on local repairmen and service providers, and employing people from the same networks, which allows the world I live in to flourish under more or less the same principles as it has for centuries. When people talk about local economies, small businesses, main street, etc., this is what I feel like they're getting at. There's no aspiration to endless growth as a metric of success, nor to make a farm bigger than what one person can run—never mind to build the sort of empire a true business entrepreneur might. I'm doing the upper level planning here for the farm, and also still picking the lettuce.

And my farm does this in conjunction with all the other small businesses in my world who share this orientation, in a network of mutual reliance comprised of people who despite being entirely different characters understand that holding a society together as neighbors does not require being friends. For all our apparent differences in farming methods, products, and professions (not to mention the variety of social, political, and religious backgrounds), yet we share a common orientation towards our own work and interface with others.

Describing the social organization resulting from William Penn's land policies, Hofstra writes that “Englishmen, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, and others...built Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Sectarians like Quakers, Moravians, Mennonites, and Dunkers founded their own towns. … But although religion and ethnicity provided a basis for community among small groups, neither could bring cohesion to the whole society. … Only the commercial life of Pennsylvania provided a basis for community beyond the neighborhood.” As these people moved through Maryland and into the mountains of Virginia, the contrast with the society of Virginian plantation owners to the south and east became clear—a world built on class difference, subjugation, and hierarchy, formed for the purpose of exporting profit to England.

But for those Pennsylvanians, and their economic descendants in my neighborhood today, commerce and trade bring positive results, the exchange of goods and services encouraging connection and social cohesion, not exploitation—a system of economic exchange where everyone is better off, no one person more powerful than another, no one business large enough or self-sufficient enough to take advantage of others less well off. There's a place in this fabric for everyone, from the scrap man collecting cast-offs useless to others, to the well-driller's assistant able to run the shovel and retrieve tools from the truck—not much, but enough.

In the 1790s Irishman Isaac Weld spent three years traveling through our new country and published a popular book of his accounts; I'll conclude with this passage about the area of the Shenandoah Valley due west of here around Winchester, where he describes the social organization and aspiration of the Pennsylvanians, of their communities in the Shenandoahs, and by extension, of those who came across the Potomac to Lovettsville. “There are no persons here, as on the other side of the mountains, possessing large farms; nor are there any eminently distinguished by their education or knowledge from the rest of their fellow citizens. Poverty is also as much unknown in this country as great wealth.”

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.

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.

"old way of life"

Sometime last winter my friends/neighbors/landlords and initial farm employers were clearing out some old files in their basement and came across a copy of the original application I'd mailed in to work for them on their farm here when I was nineteen, my first farm job—really my first real job at all. In response to a question on what interested me about the farm job, I wrote that “I would not be simply another employee of some retail chain. It always saddens me to see the sort of 'old way of life' disappearing. ... Farming is a fundamental institution, what people have done for thousands of years. ... It is not just a job that takes up free time; it will be my life for three months.” Although I knew next to nothing when I wrote it, there's nothing in there that isn't still true.

Recently a new neighbor was telling me about the temporary tutoring work he's been doing and, in conversation, I asked what sort of job he's looking to find more permanently—or whether, like his farm neighbors, he would hope to carve out a life with less distinction between “job” and “the things one does with their days.” And in posing that question, it became clear to me how far removed from my own life the concept is of maintaining that dichotomy of a “career” separate from "non-work life," although I do plenty of work on all sorts of projects every day. They're all simply projects I'm working on, with some being more critical than others.

That “old way of life” I imagined in that old job application isn't farming itself, exactly, but what arises in a world where many people have projects going on that need doing, profitable and non-profitable activities all mixed up together, the sum total of which happening to yield enough money to live on—and where people are tied to place, and therefore to neighbors.

The local plumber, who's in his 40s, was in my basement once and we were talking about Lovettsville history. He said that, of his high school class, about half of his classmates had stayed in the area after graduation. His father, also a plumber and also in my basement, pointed to himself and said, “For me, ninety-five percent.” What that "old way of life” of generational history and overlapping livelihoods generates is a different kind of community, a different kind of neighborliness, a different kind of friendship—there are not "work friends" or "professional connections," which largely evaporate when people change jobs or careers, but "community" and "neighborly" connections that arise as people live their lives in close proximity, doing what matters to them personally and interfacing with each other through the course of their daily activities. And even when people change projects, or switch jobs, they still all live in the same community. That connection of necessity, of needing to visit the members of one's local community in order to get something done on one's personally relevant work, creates and sustains a relationship different from a work friendship or a purely social relationship: one that, although less personal, can become stronger than one where people only see each other out of intentional action.  And when these interconnections reach a critical mass, a different social fabric arises.

This year I rented the greenhouse of the retired farmers directly to the south, neighbors who I like and often chat with through the fence line. We've known each other for over a decade and are friends dedicated to supporting each others' farming, although as much as we'd like to see each other socially, we rarely do. But this year, in the course of going over to water my transplants each morning, I saw them more days than not and in passing we inevitably registered the briefest observation or complaint, talked about some happening, or asked some question we'd never think to call each other for "on purpose." Now that the greenhouse season is over we're no longer brought into contact by my transplants and my neighbors' morning gardening, and we see each other less. Similarly, eight or ten years ago—I remember this because I remember when it changed—people talked on the phone to ask even a quick question (if you can believe it!), because there was no other way. A call to sell some lettuce or to buy some tomatoes might last only a minute, maybe two...but there, several times a week—without even thinking about it—in the course of accomplishing our work we would hear something of the news of the day in each others lives, and thereby maintain our relationship through such frequent and mutually-necessary interaction. By now, texting has solidified as the norm: straight to the point, no need to answer the phone and spend 60 or even 90 seconds talking to one another; no need to hear another's voice or to chat without intention. This new mode is admittedly more efficient, but I do feel the loss of that connection that arises when people are forced by the necessity of their work to cross paths not for social reasons but simply in the course of living their daily livelihood.

I've mentioned here before how I enjoy building and repairing the old farm equipment I use on the farm. During the evenings, for the past month or two, I've been fixing up my farm shop—organizing tools and sorting out an overwhelming volume of auction lots haphazardly stacked, much of which came from Bill Moore the welder's sale last year, which had been, til recently, sitting as it came home including his enormous 1000lb drill press from 100 years ago or more (a $40 bid) sitting awkwardly in the middle of things where the tractor set it down. A farm shop well organized and ready for work is just on the horizon, in time for the winter season. It's true I am looking forward to enjoying time spent practicing out-of-date mechanical skills learned from old books, a sufficient reason to be sure, but in no small part I'm also setting up the place with a mind that I might come to make repairs now and then for others. In the practiced assessment and hand-work of making a repair there’s a joy entirely different from the work of creating a tomato, and in fact there's not all that many things that break on my own farm so it would be interesting to have access to a body of repair work greater than I can generate here on my own. But moreover, to be able to send neighbors away with something that was previously broken but now allows them to do something that they want to do in their daily lives, that activity brings people into contact with each other in that “old way of life," keeping relationships strong through the interactions that happen to occur because we're living in reliance on one another.

Last week I invited a neighbor from down the road to come see the progress I'd made on the shop—a friend I like though we rarely talk to because we're both busy, but of course the shop capability was interesting enough that they made a point to come over to see it. We talked at length about drills and vises, and ended up with a social visit to boot, where we never would have gotten together "on purpose." We farm-types certainly are intermingled with each other, but we're also often busy, often sequestered off on our own projects, too caught up in our own activity to think of a visit except by necessity. In a world moving on from such inefficiencies, it's possible I might be able to create some of those necessities, with old-school metal and mechanical ability.

Bill Moore, the welder

Today is the anniversary of Bill Moore’s death last year at 63, of a heart attack. His family had kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years and his repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm. Other writing about his life is further down on this same page.

I always do see Bill Moore with a hammer, when I drive by his shop in Lovettsville and remember what it was like for his roll-up door to be open, to turn and record the momentary image as the car passes of him bent over, arm raised, working on something with a blacksmith's hammer just inside the shadow of the building. Well—the memory is just that, that single frame compiled from the hundreds of times I drove past him there on the main road—the story my mind extracted from that shape of him, bent over, arm raised, is of hammering. It wasn't a hammer, though. That would have been his grandfather, swinging a hammer at a forge, or perhaps his father. Bill, he would have been reaching for the vice grips, or returning with the cutting torch, or flaking out welding cable for slack and more precision, or standing up to lift his visor to take a closer look before bending back for the next weld.

When I needed his skill for a repair for my own farm, or his take on a mechanical problem, I stopped and parked and walked down the short gravel driveway between the weeds and up to that shape of him, bent with work, until he stood, half surprised to see someone, curious what I brought. He always had an answer to my problem, but it often came sprinkled through a longer exposition, almost stream of consciousness, of interconnected recollections stuck end to end, relating in some way to the problem at hand. One time I came to seek his advice on a thermostat I was trying to repair, and came away with an accounting of mercury switches, how mercury was used in critical applications because being a liquid it wouldn't corrode. Surely that story came because mercury switches are often found in old thermostats, although I don't think he included that detail. Later on I noticed the thermostat in my old house had just such a switch, and I watched it in action.

His stories might have been of recent events only ten or twenty years ago, or from his time on the mobile welding truck in the peak of his career, or might comprise a profile of somebody recently died, though told through old anecdotes; and other subjects from time to time appearing (like the highway being built over in Maryland and all the work and machines that went into it or the Black school built with community funds against opposition from the local government) that seemed to be reported of his own experience but in fact turned out to be a recollection of events that occurred when he was a child, or long before his birth. All the same, he kept the record.

Any story, really, is about something that occurred in the past, but many of the people and all of the places his stories were about, they still exist—and in that way those stories to me were just stories of the current world, as all stories are a telling of what happened in the past to inform an understanding of a place, of a time, of an event. In this case, Bill Moore's stories were telling of the world he lived in—the town of Lovettsville and its surrounding activity. The field was right around here where the man had a heart attack by his tractor, where the pilots who worked for the airlines out of Dulles lived and flew their private planes and where one of them once took Bill up in a glider, where the man once planted his corn in a spiral for simpler cultivation, Bill's church up the road and the mechanical problems of an old building, the stories of his neighbors in the community: the honest, crooked, hard-working, or the self-important—who all happened (just by chance) to now be old and some already dead. I never saw a young man with work for Bill at his shop.

When I came to him I inevitably and without even trying, or noticing, brought something of this same world: to weld a new ball onto the tie rod of my little International Cub, designed in 1947, (I learned how International Harvester tested new equipment in the southern hemisphere's summer, to be ready for summer sales up here, before losing its global dominance to the 3-point hitch), or a broken sprocket from a McCormick grain drill from the 50s that needed a new tooth brazed on, or a disc tongue that had cracked from some farmer's poor repair long before I got it. Cleaning out the grease channels on a used disc I bought, with uncommon 7/16ths carriage bolts, Bill remarked that such bolts were often used on equipment built by Ford, in the 70s, and wasn't surprised when I told him it was, in fact, a Ford 201 disc.

These days as I drive south on the main road, through Lovettsville down towards my farm, I no longer look over and see Bill working in his shop. His bay door is closed, as if he's just away for the day, or it's after hours, and he'll be open later. He won't be open later. The grass is grown tall, now that he's not here to keep it mown on his tiny old riding mower. Instead I drive down the same road as ever but I don't see Bill and the world he described through his stories—though I still know which person built his own house and everything else before in his old age becoming obsessed with growing potatoes (never successfully) and from whose son I happened to buy a wagon frame after Bill sent me there looking for potato equipment; and how the traveling salesman (from whose catalog Bill's father bought a welder) helped a man start the business down the road, now run by his son; and how Lovettsville is all farms and Brunswick across the river is all railroad; and how the humble scrap man is more respected than the cabinetmaker who is industrious and highly skilled but thinks he's better than you. Instead of the world these stories are a part of I see the houses, and the new strip mall, all built over the last 20 years since developers discovered the flat, perfect farmland of Lovettsville was also perfect for houses, offering an amount of money no retiring farmer could refuse as fast roads came west and the suburbs grew from DC to connect isolated towns in the country into a continuous exurban expanse. The thousands of people who moved into those houses on every cornfield don't know of the hundreds who comprise a parallel world of activity—or who used to, anyway—and now it becomes difficult to reconstruct the connections, to feel the presence of that world anymore.

Thing is, that world was on its way out when Bill Moore was in his forties. Long before I knew him. Bill just never saw a need to change—he kept things mostly as they were in his father's day; even the rack of wooden tool handles still hung from the ceiling, from when the shop served as the local hardware store, ages ago. His stories too were probably just the same as ever, new ones added to the canon as they came up. He had something to share from the moment I walked up until long after the work was completed. Sometimes I looked for a pause where I might add a topical anecdote of my own, but I rarely found one; he needed to tell me what he needed to say.

On the final page of the classic memoir The Things They Carried, the author Tim O'Brien keeps people and place alive by making up stories, and writes of being dead as “like being inside a book that nobody's reading...the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hoping somebody'll pick it up and start reading.” Bill Moore seemed to live through stories, some recent, some from long ago, some incidental, some personal, but mostly just an accounting. Maybe he wasn't just keeping the record, or sharing it with me, but in the telling of it, he was keeping his world alive. For himself. Like a memory, whose neural connections have to be refreshed, if not gone over in recollection now and again, it fades. Without his stories keeping the threads knit together, his world would soon unravel. As it begins to for me, without him. He kept it alive as long as he lived, alive enough for me to feel it was real.

The lasting imprint of Germans & Jefferson on July 4th

I thought last week, for the Fourth of July, I might write something at least mildly patriotic while watching those fireworks blooming on the ridge. But it took me a week to nail down the idea—in this political time, to write anything on large-scale “patriotic” themes seems likely to feel divisive to one faction or another. The important point though is not the national politics and government, disagreeable to all in one way or another, but the small-scale patriotism of the local society in which we live our day-to-day lives. A patriotism of being proud and appreciative of that social fabric of schoolteachers, librarians, letter carriers, volunteer first-responders and the other connections of the community fabric, which I think (I hope!) might be more universally appreciated: to focus not on the greater concept of the Country, but on literally the country (as in country-side) in which we live.

Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about lofty national ideals, but when it came right down to it, one of his core visions was of a country whose social fabric would be comprised of farmers—independent, self-sufficient, self-governing homesteads reliant on neither government nor employer, and therefore truly free to vote and act towards the best interest of the nation. (Even though the only people eligible to vote in the first decades after independence were those who owned land—and who were white and male.) This agrarian vision of the American Family Farm remains rooted in our national consciousness, showing up in children's books, the famous Fisher Price Farm, and in grocery-store (and pickup-truck) advertising. But at exactly the same time as young Jefferson was developing his agrarian perspective on the colonial plantations of the Virginia Piedmont, German immigrants were moving down from Pennsylvania into the flat fertile farmland here where I live between the ridges west of Leesburg...and down into all the hills and valleys of Virginia west of the Piedmont, in the Shenandoah Valley. Jefferson's plantation culture of the day was indeed one of self-sufficiency, each plantation essentially an outpost for the purpose of exporting profit back to England, a company large enough for all work to be done in-house—and mostly with enslaved labor, while somehow claiming the virtues of an agrarian moral high-ground. With no need for outside help from independent tradesmen or merchants, there was little need for towns, or for that matter, roads. Social connections developed from status; government, the same. Perhaps Jefferson imagined the virtues of agriculture remaining the same at any scale, with a modest homestead maintaining an equally self-sufficient lifestyle, as if the goals of a multinational corporation could be in any way compared to those of a small business in town. The German agrarian society worked in just about the opposite way—there was no social hierarchy, no aspiration to wealth, and no sense of self-sufficiency, but rather, community resilience and a focus towards modest, stable, agricultural livelihood. No one family's enterprise was large enough to employ their own tradesmen, and so there had to be independent blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, transportation businesses, and every other ancillary function the community needed to get by. In this way the German society was a society of equals, who, through their livelihood, were drawn into contact with each other—in towns, and along roads, and in the daily course of business—and so developed strong social ties, and an understanding that the success of the community as a whole relied on the success of one's neighbors, each person's livelihood reliant on the others'.

The imprints of these two agricultural societies—one based on large-scale agrarian virtue, a nation made up of independent and self-reliant farmsteads; the other based on small-scale agrarian relationships, a local community made up of interconnected economic activity—are still visible today, faintly but indelibly marked in the generational echoes of our past. For one thing these cultural differences between the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians caused Clarke County to split from Frederick County, to the west of here. But more locally, the dividing line is just as clear. To the north of me, the Lovettsville area has had a concentration of small-scale farm enterprises and support businesses for nearly 300 years, persisting long after people stopped speaking German and new families moved into what had been “The German Settlement”—as in “Those Germans Over There, In That Settlement.” Even as the individuals changed, the values and social norms persisted and the Lovettsville area remained a place where people knew who had what skill to offer, and where people were inclined to help a neighbor out of a jam. To the south, where the plantation-centered society set the culture, and then dissolved, there is not the same unbroken thread. I don't believe it can be a coincidence that every single plumber, electrician, builder, welder, hay salesman, machine repairman, fellow farmer, and “old-timer” I know around here happens to live to the north of me. Not a single one of these people lives to the south across Rt 9, even though the main town of Purcellville is down that way. I just can't believe that's all by chance, and not by history.

It doesn't seem that Jefferson's agrarian vision, scaled down, looks like the independence and self-sufficiency he imagined. From where I can see, the country of small farmers is an interconnected, inter-reliant one, as people necessarily are brought together in the course of their day-to-day livelihood, and that those small-scale economic connections of daily necessity bring about a robust social fabric of neighborly, community-minded relations. It's that way among the people I know in the farm world, at least. Relationships are kept up as an inevitable result of calls to buy and sell vegetables, inquiries of who to call for a repair, stories told and news shared while waiting in line or during a practical visit to somebody not seen in a long time. Even at the farmers market, the purest exercise of supply & demand economics, the farmers are competitors in name only. When I first worked here, for a vegetable farm selling at a dozen markets a week, it was clear that we were not competitors with our compatriot farms—we knew many of them, wished them well, lent equipment or workers to help out when necessary—we knew that the farmers market only thrived (and brought customers to our own stand) if each other vendor saw success. And in that way, we became woven into that fabric of our agricultural community, neighbors to all and friends with some, all engaged in the mutually understood “group project” we each recognized in the others: that of the success of our small-scale farm world.

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.

Entropy

We might think of farming as a natural system, in some way working with nature to grow those natural plants out there in the ground, left to their own devices and undisturbed by the “unnatural” pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. But the farm is an ordered, organized, linear, countable system created with effort towards a certain end—that is, tasty vegetables each week for you all. Natural systems are not arranged in this way; they don't take effort to maintain. Nature—which is to say “those woods out there,” the consequence of natural systems—is not the farm. And it always wins in the end.

Right now, towards the end of the season, the farm is a mess! It's almost embarrassing. Over the course of the season I put effort towards maintaining the crops that are in production, but as soon as their utility is on the wane we put our effort elsewhere, not wanting to do extra work just to keep that natural reclamation at bay. And without energy put in to weeding, mulching, and rowcovering, first the grass covers the spaces between plants, and the pigweeds grow tall from any square inch of soil exposed to sun, and before we know it there is no longer order. The mower restores some peace of mind, but only long enough to take up the drip tape, the tomato stakes, the fabric mulch, before nature finishes dismantling the agricultural order we had put so much effort into arranging.

If left even longer, for a year or two, woody perennials would arise, seemingly out of nowhere, as happens in unmowed meadows and under power line rights-of-way. Passing birds drop seeds, and, soon enough, a little seedling tree here and there. Eventually, without effort put in to mow the fields and maintain the farm, it would turn into forest. Indeed, a few dozen yards into forest that grows just off the west edge of the farm, lies an old fenceline—that fenceline is a memory of what at one point used to be the edge of the forest, which has since escaped its boundary, now held at bay only by the mower and the occasional chainsaw.

In physics, there is the idea of “entropy:” Everything under the sun and everywhere else inevitably tends toward disorganization, as the amount of energy available for work gets to be less and less over time. I'm sure I'm about to mis-apply the concept here because I'm not writing about some thermodynamic system, but that's okay—I'm no physicist either. The principle I take away is that it takes some energy to keep a particular biological system organized, and over time, disorder—entropy—rises as it seeks its natural equilibrium instead of the “unnatural” carefully ordered state. That natural state might be complex—look at the woods, and the cycles of plants growing, dying, being consumed by insects, bacteria, the fungi in the soil linking trees together in a web of biological communication – yet given this region's fundamental conditions it's the inevitable, characteristic result, absent any outside force.

The only reason there's a treeline by my field at all, of course, is that hundreds of years ago people put their energy towards clearing fields to farm, and it's only due to continued effort that they have remained clear and not reverted back to forest. People from elsewhere say this part of the country is beautiful, green and lush, and, as someone who grew up around here it's hard to appreciate: of course there are forests, of course there is undergrowth, of course highways are lined with trees and smaller gravel roads I drive near the farm are cut out from beneath the overhanging canopy of limbs. But this Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest is a product of our own climate, with four seasons and frequent rain. In another part of the country, the nature that would move in would be a product of that area's own climate and geology underlying its own natural system—the plains states, if left alone, would progress towards grassland. It's not that the area has never seen tree seeds, but that because of climate and geology and soil, trees just don't grow well there, apart from along the creekbeds. A forest of trees would take some effort to establish, and if left alone, would in time revert back to prairie.

And even our forest here—our characteristic Mid-Atlantic forest that grows by default without any particular attention—is itself changing rapidly. Recently I visited some friends nearby and we we walked through their woods. They noted the number of dead and fallen trees: all ash trees. When they moved here years ago, they told me, it was an elm forest. Once the elms died of Dutch Elm disease, it became an ash forest. It's only a matter of time until the last ash trees succumb to the emerald ash borer, and we don't know yet what will fill the space left by the departing ash. My old house is built of chestnut, whose original status as the dominant woodland species here is remembered only by its ubiquity in old buildings, barns, furniture, and how its nuts used to offer a subsistence living to people carving out their own ordered stability in the Shenandoah mountains.

Last January I drove up to Vermont to help a friend fell some trees to clear space for a building. Driving north through Pennsylvania, across into New York and up along the Hudson river, I looked for the transition out of my familiar, homey Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest. Even well into the Hudson valley, the roadside forest looked remarkably similar to what I'm used to around here. Finally, crossing east into Vermont, and with the Green Mountains on the horizon, I saw my first birch tree and soon enough, the ground became snow covered and the forests turned to birch and evergreen. Left to its own devices, nature had tended to create something different in response to different natural conditions.

I often think of Vermont as an agricultural state, with cows, Cabot cheese, and all the back-to-the-lander farming operations supplying fresh, fancy food to New York and Boston—and in fact I had gone up there in part to take a closer look at its rural, agricultural economy. The Hudson valley had been full of small farms, greenhouses, farmstands, but driving north through Vermont, it was only sawmills. I passed sawmills and firewood mills, little small-scale businesses, I passed logging trucks driving along the road—with hardly a farm to be seen. I can't tell you the last time I came across a sawmill here in VA, or passed a log truck on the road, but I can barely go anywhere around here without passing an agricultural operation of one sort or another. Just as with natural systems, the business enterprises that happen to do best as a result of an area's climate, geology, and economics are the ones that over time end up predominating.

The Loudoun Valley, where I am, has long been known for its good soil and agricultural promise—as opposed to the area east of the ridge, between Leesburg and Fairfax, which is remembered for its scrubby useless forest and poor soil. The thoroughly agricultural history of the valley here reflects that, as does the arrangement of farms—this area's rolling hills and creeks has made small-scale land-holding the predominate social arrangement, because unlike in the flat land to the south and west it would take too much work, too much energy, to have expansive plantations here.

My own, particular farm, as idiosyncratic as it is today, it too is shaped by the same forces of place, of geology, of climate, tending towards the low-energy state of this region's characteristic vegetable farming activity. I started off, in the beginning, growing the uncommon crops and storing root vegetables for sale over winter, because there was a better market for those items as a new farmer breaking in. The reason for that, of course, is that it takes more effort to grow spinach, carrots, and beets in this climate, and in this heavy soil. Those crops and that style of mechanized farming was not the characteristic operation well suited to this area. Indeed, I was copying systems familiar to the Northeast, which few people employ down here, to produce crops that were marketable precisely because few people grew them. I had learned to farm from my neighbors, but my farm didn't look anything like theirs.

As I farmed, year by year, making decisions about equipment, about crops and sales models, I tended (as anyone would) to drop the elements that were less successful, or less productive, or that I over time found to be less reliable than others. And as I adjusted towards what works best and grows most easily in this area, I can now look back over time to find that my farm, for some unseen reason, has less and less direct-seeded roots and greens, and more and more of the hot-season summer crops grown from transplants on plastic mulch. I realize that my farm is coming to look more and more like my neighboring vegetable farms I learned from in the beginning. Not because of any particular intention, or even awareness, but by following what produces with the least difficulty, the least energy. Which is, of course, what those other farmers had done, in their own day, regardless of their own interests, abilities, and skills—and they too happened to settle in to the same sort of farm that am being pulled toward today. Like any system in the world—in the universe, even—my farm can't resist the principles of entropy, bending towards the characteristic arrangement that arises with the least complexity, the least special intention.

Miracle of a mustard seed

Here's something I've had in my mind for a very long time, but not yet written about until now. Way back during my first year farming on my own—well, actually it was the fall before, a mini "trial season" of sorts where few things worked because I hadn't made enough mistakes yet to know what to do and not do—I was ready to plant my first crop: salad greens!

I'd seen the entire process and done every part of it as a worker on other people's farms, but it was my first time doing it all myself for my own farm. First I prepared the ground, as we always did, bringing the tractor to till up a patch of sod and find the soil underneath all those grass plants—just as, indeed, underneath every plant everywhere around here lies many feet of dirt, soil, ready to be turned from two-dimensional surface of the earth to three-dimensional space ready for useful activity: a field to plant in. I marked off rows and brought out my push seeder to help there become neat lines of new plants, useful to people, where there had been just weeds before. I poured in the round, hard, black orbs from a packet (quite literally they were "as small as a mustard seed"), ran the seeder back and forth straight as I could and just had to trust that those little seeds were dribbling down there, not too deep and not too shallow, being too small to even identify once covered with dirt.

After clearing those sod weeds, loosening the soil, and covering the tiny round kernels with the soil, I left, my work done. In three days I returned. Where there was nothing before but bare dirt, now there were visible faint lines of tiny mustard seedlings, each with its tender stem unfolding up and out of a crack in the seed up through the dirt, spreading into two-lobed seed leaves, and a little root pushing down into the soft earth. I had seen seeds before, of course—perhaps the first was in second grade, the bean seed in the paper towel, or perhaps before that the colorful marigolds in our flower garden at home, dying and drying to seed heads, surprising me with new marigolds the following summer sprouting up far from where we had planted them. I had planted thousands of seeds working for other people and tended the resulting crops. So now, off on my own, with my own field, my own seeder, my own seeds, I can't say I was surprised, as much as mystified, in the sense of beholding the mystery of what had happened.

Sure, through my own work, these plants had come into existence, for which I was responsible to grow and eventually (hopefully) sell, to support my own life. But how was it, really, that those seedlings came to be—that those seeds, seemingly inert for months or even years, at this particular moment had put forth plants? I didn't do that. Somehow, the seeds had done that. It felt as much a miracle as I had ever experienced.

With all our technology, with miniaturization, with all our science and engineering and "just add water!" hype, we can't come close—not even close—to making something that does anything near to what a little mustard seed can do. Just add water, something from nothing. I'm not sure we really even understand how it all works, though we know that it does. Some look to religion, for an answer in God; some find understanding in biology. Now and again someone from the CSA will offer an appreciative comment about how skilled I am at creating such good food or, from a religious perspective, how God has given me the skill of bringing food from the earth. And I appreciate the sentiment, I really do—but I know that it wasn't me who did the work of creating the vegetable. I don't have much of a hand in that. Somehow, it's the plants that did the job, that figured out how to create these things we eat. All I did was to spend my own day's work giving them the conditions necessary for them to do theirs.

Bill Moore, the welder

The news on the farm this time is more consequential than most. Bill Moore, the 3rd generation welder just up the road from me, passed away last week. His family kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years until his death, and his work tracked the development of farm machinery and farm land in this region. His repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm, and without him my farm would not be as it is now. He was 63 years old.

Twelve years ago I was a young twenty-four-year-old trying out vegetable farming, and I had an idea for a mechanical seeding contraption to run behind an old 1950s Farmall Cub tractor. I needed somebody to build it before the season began. I was sent—of course—to Bill Moore, the welder. Unusually, I called him on the phone, since he was at home recovering from his heart attack, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing he would love to do, but he'd need to stay out of the shop for another month or so. But he was happy to talk—of course—about the Cub tractor, and old-school machinery, and surely would have told me several of the stories of his own well-cared for Cub that I later heard him recount in his shop. He sent me to another local welder, with whom he'd gone to high school, who normally did an entirely different sort of metalwork but was helping people keep up and running while Bill was recovering. Later that season, with Bill back in the shop, he made me some clamps for a new cultivator setup, a design I later modeled my own work after, once I had learned to weld and began to build more of my own farming equipment.

No matter what I brought to him for repair or advice, Bill was always game to stop what he was doing to help the walk-up customer, whether it be a quick fix (“Five dollars”) or a discussion of design considerations told in stories of past machinery built, tried, broken. At that time there was almost always a line, a steady trickle of people stopping in to drop off, or pick up, according to the day of the week, or the weather. Bill never rushed through one person's work to wait on the next; mostly one person's appointment seemed to conclude when the next person walked up. I was never sure whether the work or the talk was the main purpose, and learned to block out at least 45 minutes for a visit to Bill Moore, most of that taken up with listening to Bill tell about mechanical history, local history, and his own family history, a deep repository—a catalog, really—of the activities, characters, relations, and deaths of the farm-based Lovettsville world. He remembered unnecessarily specific stories that even the people they were about had forgotten had ever happened. But of course, he had his old favorites: the one about the man who planted his corn in a spiral, cultivated his way around and around to the middle, then came back a couple weeks later with a can of gas and cultivated his way back out again (that was the first story I heard him tell to somebody else, that I had already heard), or others concerning the success or failure of an unusual idea (going bankrupt borrowing for a steam-powered thresher; industrial potato planting not earning more than to pay the freight, etc). And the humorous one about the new folks coming in from the city, the man who showed him a picture he took of something very exciting in his yard: “He had a photo of a deer. A deer!”

Bill Moore no doubt carried with him three generations of mechanical craftsmanship, but he wanted it understood that he hadn't just picked it all up from his father. “I learned from LOTS of people,” he impressed upon me, “I have a lot of books.” Bill developed the shop towards his own interest of practicing greater levels of craftsmanship, bringing in the mill, the lathe—even the press, a machine used every day—as new tools to access work his father didn't do, or to do the same work better. And he learned to use them—in fact the first thing made on the new lathe was a part to repair the new press. Other people, stopping in for a quick fix, might think that the machine does the work, but Bill he knew it was the craftsman. I made that mistake once, watching him cleanly melt a nut off of a bolt with a torch to fix my tillage disc, remarking in awe that the metal of the nut would just melt away from the bolt, leaving the threads intact. “You're not going to give me anything for skill?” I got his point. Like most people with high-level skill and knowledge, the layman can't appreciate even 10% of what's interesting to the craftsman. When I passed the standard welding test, I brought my bent pieces of metal to show him. Recognizing them immediately, Bill said I ought to be proud of my work and began describing his own time practicing at the Hobart welding school, perhaps glad to tell the story to someone who might understand something of what he was talking about, and would appreciate the skill he'd developed. “I still have all my own bend tests,” he said, “They're on a shelf in my basement.”

It was clear that Bill lived and breathed mechanical work, and I felt him to be so fortunate to have happened to grow up in his father's shop and to now be able to live his life walking down from his house every morning to do work he so clearly enjoyed—and then going back home to yet more mechanical projects. But like most people who work it was simply his profession, work which paid the bills and that he happened to be good at, and liked enough. And he understood that, at the most basic, he ran a customer-service business that played a vital role to the community of working people in the Lovettsville area—as had his father, and grandfather. People needed him to get back up and running, during haying, or harvest, or the snowplow season, and he prioritized his work according to how critical it would be to whomever needed his repair to get going again. He would tell me, as I stopped in to get his advice on some mechanical retrofit I was building, “I'm happy to help you, but I need to get a certain amount of work done,” gesturing to the repairs in progress around the shop, “And I don't know what might come in.” At first I thought he meant financially, that he needed to work a certain amount to make enough money, and of course offered to pay him for his time. But in fact he meant that he simply needed to get the work done, because other people were relying on him to do it.

Years ago, well before my time, in an era when the Lovettsville area was thoroughly a farming economy, and when now-outdated machinery was new technology, there was such call for the shop's services that they had a jig to set up a common repair on one particular part on the front wheel of one particular make of tricycle tractor. More recently, when I would stop in with a farm repair, there was no longer even a line at the shop. Bill would be able to talk for an hour or more without anyone arriving to interrupt. And the work had changed, too. “People bring me things that just aren't worth repairing, or aren't worth the time...and there's very little about it that's at all challenging, that tests my ability.” I remarked to him that his business these days seemed mostly to serve old people with old stuff—and, newly, landscapers and their trailers—which he confirmed was the case. The era of his work was coming to a close, as Lovettsville changed and his customer base aged. “Tractors and machinery just don't break down much anymore,” he explained, “And there just aren't many people around here anymore who are really farming.”

If he was becoming bored by his work, he was becoming more excited about the projects he maintained in his home shop, projects that to most people would appear indistinguishable from his “work” activities, but which as far as I can tell he spent nearly all his time on after closing up for the day. That is, when he wasn't sharpening chainsaw chains, or helping out at the church—or at an auction. He often talked about the precision lathe he was working on setting up at home, and the clocks he was repairing, and their mechanisms; he told me about having such a delightful Christmas morning last year, sitting at home on a Saturday finally getting a difficult clockwork back together, and how he'd got it running so cleanly that it had only lost so many seconds over a long period of time. He had a lifetime of projects to work on up at the house, and Bill was so looking forward to having time to sit down with them. To work on things that really interested him, to have time to execute the craftsmanship that he liked, to whatever level of precision he desired. His dream was to someday use that precision lathe to build a complete copy of an old but innovative Canadian-made clock. Bill Moore, not designing something new, but enjoying the use of his skill and knowledge in reworking something old.

Most weekends, Bill could be found at an auction. He loved attending auctions, and especially enjoyed showing off what he had bought for a song at the last sale. “Guess what this went for! … Five dollars!” A motor, welding leads, buckets of pipe fittings (“Oh, I'll use them all eventually, to make bushings.”) Once I learned to attend auctions as well I brought him my own stories to share, and useful things to show him, some of which he was happy to buy for a few dollars, or to trade for some minor work. One time I'd ended up with a box lot of about half a dozen old brace hand drills, not very serviceable, and he went right to the one with the rounded-out chuck, the worn shaft, the handle re-wound with soldered wire—an unusual repair for such a drill. “Oh my,” he said, taking in the record of the tool's life. “This one's seen a lot of love. I would be glad to have it.” I'm sure it's still somewhere up at his house, with all the other things he cared about.

One more piece on Bill Moore — fiction writing on the topic of his upcoming auction, at which I ended up buying, among many, many other things, an old worn hand drill and some bent pieces of metal.

A Visit to Bill Moore

November 30, 2022

“I went to an auction last Saturday.” He pointed to something just over there, asking, “How much do you think I bought that for?” He waited for my guess, which was too high, as usual. “A dollar!” I acknowledged the good buy. “It was a great sale. You know, I go to a sale every weekend, somewhere or another. Even if I don't come away with anything, I just love going to an auction.” I nodded; that much was clear. “There used to be so many more auctions around here, back when there were more farms—somebody was always retiring, or dying, and having a sale.” I noted the bluntness of his description of the way of the world. “Well, that's how it works. People collect what they need over their life, and then when they no longer need it, it's dispersed to whoever can make use of it for their own lives.”

“There's a sale coming up in December—I'm not going to be able to go to it though. I wish I could, but I can't make it. It's going to be a really good one. Cochran's doing it. This man's family had a welding shop for at least 100 years—well, it was a blacksmith shop first—the two of them, with him on the truck and his father in the shop, they did work for just about everyone around here, kept everyone going. I mean, the machinery people needed in those days, to get their work done. Of course, that was back when this was truly an agricultural area, everywhere around here. There's hardly anybody who's really farming anymore, and things just don't break down the way they used to. He could repair anything, or make it from scratch—few people appreciated his skill, but me, I knew what he was capable of. It's been a while, though, since anything came through the shop that really tested his ability, not for a long time.”

“Well, I guess he'd finished up his work for the day, closed up the shop like usual, and walked on home—he lived just up the street, between his shop and the church—apparently he got as far as taking his shoes off and sitting down to rest by the television. Had a heart attack. Robert Jackson, actually, went to check on him since he didn't come down to open the shop the next morning—it's sort of a funny story—Robert called 911 when nobody answered the door, and the dispatcher said all the officers were busy, and someone would be there in a few hours. A few hours! So he called our friend who lives just north of town, he's an officer, and he had two police cars over to his house before Robert even hung up the phone. The TV was still on when they found him. No two ways about it, he had a heart attack and that was that. I mean, that was the end of him. He just—died.

He stood silent and shook his head for a moment, considering.

“He was 63 years old.” I didn't know whether to be surprised, or whether that was just a statement of fact. “Well, he was. His father lived to be 90, and his mother, she lived to be 92!” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, nobody knows how long he's got left. That's just how old I am now, 63.” I already knew his age, always surprised to hear he's so young. “One time Robert Jackson and I—you know him?” I nodded. “Well he and I'll often go to a sale together, and one time I was off looking at something or another and Robert was talking with someone, who must have seen me off in the distance, and he says to Robert, 'Look at that man work, over there, why, he must be 80!' And Robert shouts to me, 'Bill!' I was some distance away, you know. 'Bill! This man here thinks you're 80!' Well I stopped what I was doing and shouted back to him, 'I've never seen an 80-year-old work like this!'” I smiled. “Well, that's what I said to him.”

“I'm not as young as I used to be, everything's gotten heavier, and in the winter, the cold just comes up from the floor, but I can still get done everything I need to. Well, I can. I'm only 63, you know.” I nodded. “My father, he lived to be pretty old, older than a lot of people. But he lost his mind. To know how much my father knew, what he could accomplish—to look at him, you'd never guess what he was capable of. But like I say, he just got to where he was completely demented, lost his entire mind. Now that's a sorry way to go. That's a sorry way to go.”

“Anyway this sale, like I said I can't go to it, but it'll be a good one, a two-day sale, the first two Thursdays in December—you can look it up. Sort of unusual timing. But anyway one day will be in the shop, you know, what everybody saw driving past on the road, and the other day up at the house—had a whole other shop up at home, to work on his own projects...nevermind the amount of safes, guns, clocks. He just loved anything mechanical.”

“Cochran's listing says of him, by way of talking up the sale, you know—'He could do just about anything for anyone.' Now, they'll say that sort of thing about any number of people, but this man—now, I knew him—and that's an accurate description.” I nodded. “Well, it is.”

“There's going to be a couple welders—I mean, real welders—a precision lathe, like that you could use to make a clock, a great press, all manner of tools...everything, and I mean, everything. Really, there's probably everything there I'd ever need for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, it'll be a good sale. I'm real sorry I won't be able to go.”

"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.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween this week! Carving pumpkins don't make it into the CSA lineup owing to their inedibility, though they might be one of the most season-specific items out there! I'm sure you'll be seeing them all over town this week as we approach Halloween. This tradition began with the pagan holiday of Samhain, marking the beginning of the dark half the year at the midway point between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and its Christian counterpart, Halloween. Both holidays honor the deceased and involve the passage of spirits and ghosts from one realm to another. To ward away evil spirits, people practicing folk Christianity in the British Isles carved large turnips and beets into grotesque lanterns lit with lumps of coal, and, in the 19th century, Irish immigrants to this country found American pumpkins to be well suited to the tradition. Soon enough what we think of as “Halloween” began to be celebrated across the country, with carved jack-o'-lanterns set out on porches decorated with dried cornstalks and gourds.

It's no coincidence that pumpkins, potatoes, butternut squash, and other root vegetables are what we decorate with and eat during October and November—and that these are the traditional vegetables of Thanksgiving dinner. These are the vegetables that were stockpiled for winter in the root cellar, before the advent of easy shipping and the modern industrial food system; in a very real way, these are the vegetables that kept people alive during the dark half of the year. Drawing much of our cultural touchstones from regions with long winters, it is no surprise that they are so encoded in our cultural memory.

The fact that these vegetables in particular are our seasonal favorites is simply a product of the principle of evolution—everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. These fall vegetables are produced by frost-tender plants that have all figured out a way to use the sun's energy from the year's growing season to persist in some way over winter to get a head start next year—potatoes with their starchy tubers sending up shoots when the soil warms; turnips, beets, and carrots ready to sprout a seedstalk first thing in spring. These same strategies allow us to keep them over winter for food; the stored energy nourishing us humans instead of growing a new plant next year.

Cabbage and the other hardy brassica greens are also considered traditional fall vegetables because they grow well in cool weather and do keep a while over winter. However, this cultural memory doesn't account for the fact that different types of plants are at home in different climatic regions (take brussels sprouts, which only taste good when grown in cold climates, yet have made it onto Thanksgiving menus nationwide). There's a reason tomatoes are a big deal around here; likewise, New York and Wisconsin are major cabbage growing areas.

Although most plants CAN be grown in most places, different types of plants thrive in the types of weather patterns found in specific regions at specific times of year. The more out-of-season or the less ideal the growing conditions, the more attention required to keep the plant in its comfortable conditions and the more easily they are knocked off course by weather outside of their comfortable range. Tomatoes and peppers, they just grow here in Virginia's heat, no special attention required; same for the fall crops like squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, since they to do all their growing in the heat of the summer. Cabbage and greens, on the other hand, really would love to grow in New York, with a mild summer and long, beautiful fall. Here we get a blazing hot summer followed by a short period of nice October weather quickly becoming too cold and dark for plants to grow. And how many emails have I written over the years about waiting for the exact conditions to seed spinach or the trials and tribulations of growing carrots? They definitely CAN be grown here, and we have had amazing spinach or carrot seasons, but being ill-suited to Virginian conditions it takes some effort and attention to guide them through the times when weather just isn't what they're expecting. I'd say about half the years see reasonable success; and the other years, slim pickings or outright failure. In any case, these are not the crops that we rely on to get us through the lean times.

So as we are immersed in the pumpkin spice everything season, with gourds and winter squash turning up in every major supermarket, and as you get ready to carve those pumpkins, rest assured! You are not participating in the fad of the season. Quite the opposite—you are celebrating culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Tomato Tomtahto

Let's talk tomatoes! You may have noticed that there are two kinds of tomatoes in the bags this year: a regular firm, round, red, modern hybrid variety, and an heirloom-type that's dark, soft, oddly shaped, and very tasty. Although both are tomatoes just the same, we farmers and food writers somehow always talk about hybrid tomatoes vs heirloom tomatoes, with heirlooms definitely the gold standard in the tomato world. But what exactly is it to be an heirloom tomato?

The "social" definition of an heirloom tomato is one with a story: an open-pollinated variety cultivated year after year by careful seed saving which, because of superior quality, was kept in a family or achieved a measure of local or regional fame. Many heirloom types are from other parts of the world--cherished varieties that can be specifically tied to a group of people and were brought to America by early immigrants. The preservation of these seeds was not due to sentimentality, but because these were time-tested varieties bearing an implicit seal of approval. Heirlooms represent, quite literally, the interwoven fabric of both natural and human history.

But many backyard hobbyists and commercial breeders still create new open-pollinated varieties with standout "heirloom tomato" qualities even today. In fact, this year I'm growing out some seeds I saved from two fruits of unknown cross that turned up in the field a couple years ago. These new "heirloom" tomatoes have none of the lineage or history, but have all of the characteristic exciting stripes, colors, irregular shapes, and strong flavors we associate with other soft, thin-skinned "heirlooms." All these modern tomatoes meet the "aesthetic" definition for "heirloom tomatoes"--and yet, some of the historically kept heirloom varieties from 100 years ago or more were, in fact, plain red tomatoes, entirely uninteresting and which would never pass as heirlooms today on any restaurant menu or farmers market table.

Moreover, as much as the dark, soft, tasty tomatoes in your bags meet this definition of "heirloom tomato," they do not, in fact, meet the "scientific" definition--and, surely, science should be the one to settle all this confusion, right? Botanically, an heirloom tomato is simply any open-pollinated variety, as opposed to a hybrid variety of tomato. That is, pollinating the flower with pollen from the same tomato variety makes fruit containing seeds that will reproduce the tomato, true to type. Growers can save seed from their crop and sow again in following years. A hybrid variety, however, is grown from seeds produced by mating two open-pollinated varieties together.

And truth be told, the "heirloom" tomatoes in your bags today are in fact hybrid tomatoes produced by crossing two different heirloom tomatoes together. Scientifically, the heirloom tomatoes in your bags are just plain-ol' hybrids...but seeing them as heirlooms may offer a more useful understanding of culinary reality.

Some tomatoes are easily categorized, such as a hard red shipping hybrid from the grocery store or Radiator Charlie's storied heirloom Mortgage Lifter, but the more ambiguous the tomato, the more it pushes the boundaries of its label, the less these seemingly-intrinsic scientific categories help us understand the world.

And that might sound subjective and un-scientific but in fact, this is exactly how biological categories are applied even in biology itself. In conversation with a botanist friend once, I tried to pin down with them the essential features that scientists use to distinguish one plant species from another, and was quite disappointed to find my layman's understanding of science to be incorrect: plants are out there doing their plant thing, and nothing differentiates one species from another but scientists themselves, making up labels in their effort to describe and understand the world. Boundaries are ill defined, and, to my great consternation, the very same plant growing in two separate parts of the country may be called a different species, although they are otherwise identical!

In many scientific disciplines there is big debate between opposing factions of "Lumpers" and "Splitters" about how labels are best utilized; the lumpers feeling like putting similar-enough things together under the same label describes their world well, and the splitters feeling that slicing & dicing to fine-grained labels allows for better understanding.

This imperfect human interplay may be the real reason this whole idea of "what is an heirloom tomato" is so complicated in the first place--leaving us with, in the end, no "real" answer at all. All I can do, at this point, is to come down on the side of the lumpers for the weekly vegetable list and simply call them all "tomatoes."

Origins of seasonal culture

We are now deeply in the apple and pumpkin-craze season, which is what we have come to expect after the berry craze of late spring and early summer, and then the tomato frenzy of high summer. Have you stopped to wonder where these seemingly-recent seasonal fixations came from? It's not just the power of advertising.

Plants have over millions of years developed some pretty specialized strategies for getting a leg up on the competition. Some vegetables, like alliums (onions and garlic) form a bulb in the sun's summer energy to persist, alive, over winter, using that stored energy to beat the competition, and sending up a shoot first out of the gate when the weather warms. In spring they're some of the first vegetables we get.

In the summer, as you may know, most of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a part of a plant that contains seeds–surrounded with something tasty to help spread the seed or to decompose, offering fertility to the next year's germinating seed–such as a tomato, squash, strawberry, or apple. But it takes a lot of energy to grow a fruit (first the plant, then flowers, and finally the delicious fruit) and that's why these are our summer vegetables, needing a long time to accumulate enough growth and sunlight to produce the food we want to eat. Other fruits solve this problem by using stored energy from last year to get the job done earlier (strawberries) or have figured out how to survive year-to-year as bushes or trees.

Now, in the fall, we are back to brassica greens–biennial plants gaining a foothold in the cool, meager growing conditions of fall where other plants decline, in order to grow just enough to survive the winter and send up a seedstalk at the first hint of spring. And of course, we have the fall storage crops like potatoes, carrots, squash and, yes, pumpkin spice.

Seasonality is no accident, but a product of the principle of evolution--everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. Why pumpkins for Halloween? Why potatoes and butternut squash for Thanksgiving? These are the plants that arrive in this season, and these are the fruits and tubers developed to last through the cold months–surviving without rotting to keep people alive during the dead of winter, just as they would otherwise survive to put up new plants in spring. Of course, it's not to the squash's plan to produce a butternut only to be eaten up in December... but isn't that, in fact, botanical success, to be cultivated on purpose, grown with care year after year, its genetics persisting for having found the niche of sustaining human life? As we take in the Halloween displays since September, pumpkin spice for weeks yet to come, then turkeys, everywhere, it's a small comfort to know that all this amped-up insanity of the advertising world is based entirely upon pre-industrial agricultural reality. It's merely marketing finding its niche.

So, enjoy your Halloween pumpkins and your butternut squash at Thanksgiving, and even your pumpkin spice. You're not just being trendy after all! The opposite of recent fad, this is culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Seasons on a farm

We've turned the corner to autumn, as you might have noticed by the slight color changing of a few leaves, the blissfully cooler nights, or maybe the the dramatic influx of pumpkin spice everything flooding the advertising space around us--nevermind the first winter squash and salad mix in the CSA shares and the obvious decline of tomatoes.

It's funny how the onset of September evokes such images of autumn and change for so many of us--back to school, the end of carefree summer, the beginning of sweater weather; the time to pick apples, resume baking, and cook hearty meals rich with winter squash. Even though astronomical fall begins three whole weeks from now on the 22nd at the equinox, perhaps our sociological Fall begins this weekend, at Labor Day.

But there's no conflict in that; even though spring, summer, fall, and winter seem integral to our understanding of yearly time, even though they're based on something as scientific as the celestial equinox/solstice cycle, our culture pretty much just made them up. In ancient Japan the year was divided into 24 seasonal stages and 72 microseasons, each lasting a few days, with names like, "mist starts to linger," "wild geese fly north," "first lotus blossoms," and "deer shed antlers." The Cree and Hindu calendars each recognize six seasons; Thai divide the year into three seasons. Science writer Ferris Jabr takes a big-picture view: “If we zoom way out, we can see certain global rhythms: the ebb and flow of light; the bloom and wither of plants; the expansion and retreat of ice. Earth has a million seasons, or just one, depending on your perspective." Jabr even suggests, what if we imagined seasons from the perspective of creatures other than ourselves?

Popular supposition might be that we farmers, being outside all the time, would see the shifts between the four seasons more keenly than most. However, the truth is just the opposite: we're zoomed in so close that we see such detail as to obscure the lines between the "four seasons,” leading us to mark time in the year based on small changes rather than quarter-year shifts. The culturally assigned seasonal categories are fairly irrelevant in our day-to-day experience of farm life; we have our own markers in the farm year, no doubt invisible and meaningless to others (just as you may have, in your own lives). Our year begins with the Groovy Bird singing “GROOvy GROOvy GROOvy” in April as we plant onions, then when it gets hot the June Bugs arrive, dozens of them buzzing slowly about. In Late July, around brassica-planting time, the Curious Wasps swarm low to the ground circling circling circling, never threatening, just curious to see what's going on, and then, now, we hear the first of many geese honking through at dusk as they look for a place to spend the night on their way South.

Seasons allow us to know not only where we are, but what's coming next. Those who have been with the CSA for a while may mark time in the CSA year, knowing that the season of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes declines and then gives way to the season of storage roots and greens, culinary seasons eliding one to the next without clear division--except to notice in retrospect that we no longer see the vegetables we used to, the food once rare and fresh now our common staple, letting us know that next season is on the way.

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.

Eat like a farmer

Right about now is the point in the season when some folks start feeling like they're "falling behind" on keeping up with the vegetables. Many people join a CSA with goals to up their cooking games and try a new recipe every week. And even longtime CSA folks tend to earmark the farm vegetables as "special ingredients" instead of basic staples, wait for the perfect special recipe to use them, and end up with the dreaded vegetable stackup (or worse, waste). Moreover, this local-farm CSA thing is not the same as standard market shopping, since there is no way to meal plan when you don't even know what you're getting until the night before! But regardless of the reason--self-imposed goals or CSA-imposed vegetables--this decidedly different cooking experience can get overwhelming.

However, having a larger quantity of vegetables around than you would ordinarily purchase isn't necessarily the same thing as too many vegetables--it just takes a different strategy to eat them than you would normally employ. Now, I've had some practice at eating vegetables, and so I thought I would offer a few tips: First, don't treat these vegetables as special. They aren't. They're just fresh, good-tasting, regular-old vegetables, and you have my permission to eat them up without any special preparation or special occasion. And second, although we love to send you new recipes, a focus on recipes can lead to a backlog of vegetables not yet assigned to the perfect meal plan. So here is my tried-and-true farmer-approved method for eating ridiculous quantities of vegetables: CUT THEM UP AND EAT THEM.

Yup. That's right. The busier the season gets, the simpler a farmer's meals get. Any cookable vegetables (like zucchini and cabbage) plus salt, oil, and a protein (meat or beans) will likely taste great. Any raw vegetables will also taste great together, like cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes. By all means, try that delicious new recipe, but if you feel like you're falling behind...just eat them up.

In fact, to help you breathe easier, I'll share with you my summer cooking process:
1. Pick a base: rice, tortilla, pizza crust, corn chips, pasta, etc.
2. Saute the cookables: squash, onion, garlic, some greens like chard/kale/cabbage, + beans/meat. Literally cut up as many vegetables as will fit in the pan (do not skip this step). Be sure to include something acidic, like a tomato or some lemon juice, and cook until well done and just starting to brown and stick, adding a little water when necessary.
3. Pile that onto the base and add some fat (cheese, sour cream, etc).
4. Voila, you've got stir fry, quesadillas, pizza, loaded (and I mean loaded) nachos, or pasta. Just put as much vegetable on as you can stand--tis the season for vegetable luxury!
5. If it fits your dish, cut up the raw vegetables (tomato, cucumber, onion, + raw corn cut from the cob), along with salt and olive oil to make a fresh salsa. Or experiment with fresh salads -- canned beans, rice, or tuna all combine with a fat (sour cream, olive oil, etc.) and any raw vegetables in various proportions to yield various dishes.

This method will work for everything else we've seen so far. It may not be as exciting or nuanced as seeking out that special recipe, but if you are looking to go through a quantity of vegetables, I recommend process over recipe:
1. Cut Vegetables;
2. Eat Them Up.

Farm Shark Tank

Have you ever thought about how ridiculous a business idea the local CSA farm is? Generally commercial farmers have always focused on growing large volumes of shippable commodities for the essentially limitless regional or national market. Which is to say, they focus on what grows the best at their particular location at any particular time of year. Why would a farmer choose to grow a crop that grew less well than some other crop, or to plant something at a time of year when it clearly might have trouble?

I mean, if I went to a bunch of average farmers and pitched the business plan of "grow a big variety of crops for six months out of the year, and have them all look good," they would think that's nuts! The farmer from the Northeast would say, "Why plant brassicas with such hot weather down there, when you could focus on peppers and eggplant?" The farmer from the south would say, "If you want early tomatoes, why don't you just buy them from us instead of trying so hard with your hoophouses and rowcover?" And someone else would remark that cucumbers grow great in Virginia but why are you trying to plant them past June--it's too hot! The big organic grower Lady Moon Farms (you've seen their stuff in the supermarket) even has land in three different regions--Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida--so they can maintain a greater variety of produce all grown at the optimal time and location.

And here we are deliberately putting ourselves on the hook for pushing out 6 different vegetables every Friday for 6 months out of the year, week in and week out. We keep high standards, given the constraints we're working with, but in a very real way we are competing with perfect-looking grocery store vegetables since the "global marketplace" can provide any vegetable 52 weeks out of the year, all grown in ideal conditions somewhere in the world. That's what most people are used to in their lives.

But, unlike those commercial farmers, we are constantly pushing the envelope--trying to get a crop to come in earlier or extend the season later--in order to have enough variety at every time of year. We pitch "eating seasonally," but what does that mean when farmers push the boundaries of the ideal vegetable season? I suppose what we really mean is not to eat seasonally, but in fact to eat locally--to eat the food that is produced nearby, rather than produced around the world. (If you think about it, everything in the grocery store is seasonal--it's all in peak season somewhere!)

The real answer for those skeptical farmers is that no, this business makes no sense at all from a production standpoint. But it's how I learned to farm and what I've practiced doing, not because it is a simple idea but because it is an endlessly fascinating and confounding one. What ties it together and makes it successful are the local eaters (that's you) who are drawn to the idea of getting the bulk of their vegetables from a single farm for most of the year. As a production farm, there is no WAY we could make it, even competing on just the regional scale. On a local scale though, given the sort of vegetables we can turn out, it seems like there are enough people who appreciate what we do for this to be quite a good idea after all.