“You’re having a melon morning!” I joke as I walk back toward the tool shed. I’ve left Casey near the farm stand with a pallet of cantaloupes, Israeli melons, and watermelons to wipe clean and set aside fifty more for our CSA boxes this week. First thing in the day, he got the pallet ready with empty crates and I drove it out to the melon patch, him running behind the dust and clatter of the tractor. He caught on fast to harvest: the skin color shifts from green to yellow on the green-fleshed Israeli melons, and the fruit easily falls off the stem with a small amount of pressure. We hunched down the rows, me in the cantaloupes, him in the other melons, and harvested a few crates of watermelons— which I insisted on choosing since they’re sticking to the vine even when they’re ripe— together. After a chaotic return among the hubbub of a large volunteer group of Willamalane (Springfield Parks and Rec) staff, Casey had a bucket of water, a rag to wipe down the melons, and a clear idea of which sizes to keep for CSA.
“I’m having a melon morning,” he repeats as I glance back once more. He’s crouched over the pallet, contemplating all that harvest, starting to rub the mud off each fruit, one by one.
Morning melon haul
If Casey had a melon morning, he most certainly had a purple potato afternoon. Michael brought out a short pallet of Purple Viking potatoes— the kind that look swirly and cosmic on their skins— to wash after lunch, and Casey ended up spraying them for hours. Their skins started to slough off with the pressure of the water jet, so we discussed how to keep them whole and whether it’s better to get them super clean but potentially rip off some skin, or to leave all the skin and potentially some mud.
“Just ride the line,” I say. “Do your best to keep from ripping them, but we need them nice and clean.”
“Ride the line,” Casey repeats. “Okay, I think I get it.”
And I leave him to spray while I sort carrots, deliver a couple forgotten CSA totes, and sort tomatoes in the farm stand. After everyone’s left, Ted and I go to put the pallet back in our “potato bunker” (a 20-foot shipping container), and they look perfect. Swirly pink and purple skins, brown all gone, and the white spots where the skin rubbed off aren’t noticeable on the whole. Yes, he did get it: that fuzzy line I’m always drawing for people on the farm, between edible and compost, sellable and edible, too big or just right, scarred but sellable and too damaged, underripe and just ripe enough to harvest, and on and on and on. Some people are fine with ambiguity, I’ve found. They jump in, have the background experience to “get the feel” for those types of decisions. They shift their decisions just the right amount when I give feedback. Others are lost, slow down to a chug, overcorrect with feedback, and still end up with soft peppers in the market totes.
Casey’s been wanting to work in agriculture since I met him last year. Tried his hand at university but came back to Eugene to help his mom, back to the farm to learn more, earn more money, get more experience for a full-time farm job. He’s getting it. And, with so many of our youth crew missing work for various reasons, we have the money to give him more hours, keep him on through the busy fall season, give him more and more opportunities to ride that line and get the feel for everything we do out here. Melon mornings and potato afternoons might be just the experience he needs to tune his mind to high-quality food production.
It’s almost six o’clock in the evening already, light turned golden, farm quieted after a bustling day. It’s flown by, as they do. Harvest kept me completely consumed for the entirety of the day, in and out of the fields gathering raw produce, back and forth from wash tubs and sorting tables, showing people quality standards, spraying techniques, and bunch sizes. A group from Young’s Market Northwest joined us for the whole day, but mostly I was was Sophie and a few youth farmers to get everything processed and ready for tomorrow’s big Farm Fest market.
Often I don’t keep track of the things I bring in from the field, and up until now this summer I’ve been delegating most harvest to others. One group goes to get carrots and beets, another to the cucumbers and zucchini, and on and on until it all trickles in and I’ve twist-tied dozens of bunches and the coolers are full. Today, I kept at it, going out there myself to harvest crop after crop: salad mix and spinach first, then celery and the first flush of delicate, tender fall kale. Then another trip out to pull up our first crate of fall leeks— beautiful, pearly white stalks!— Swiss chard plucked from our newest patch that’s suddenly struck with mildew, and a smattering of broccoli— another first flush for the fall. They’re back!
First fall broccoli coming on
Bunching, washing, lunching, delegating, and a few hours later I’m back in the field to harvest eggplants and peppers: again, my first time in the outdoor pepper patch in weeks. The Jimmy Nardellos and Anaheims haven’t been touched this season yet, and I easily fill up a couple small crates to fill out the selection at the farm stand. Jalapeños, golden and red roasters, red and yellow bells, and a stunning collection of ripening purple peppers, which gradually turn to orange and red, leaving streaks of purple to really trip people out.
Meanwhile, David and a crew from the volunteer group have harvested tomatillos, apples, and the “cukes and zukes” en masse, Sophie’s bunched a tote of new basil, and at the end of the day she goes out with David to harvest corn and sunflowers.
They come back with a colorful cart of floppy flowers, setting aside dried heads to save for seed for their home gardens. Goodbyes, finish sorting apples, tidy up around the picnic tables, and before long it’s almost six o’clock in the evening already, and I’m starting out over the old bed of sunflowers where they got their seeds. It’s past its prime, dried and browning, but there are still bright flowers in the forest of stalks. Bees are buzzing through them. Birds are perching on and off the seed heads, pecking roughly to extract food.
I sigh, breathe in the scent of rain that still lingers over the fields, and put on the ear muffs.
Under the long pallet forks of the tractor, flower stalks fall and disappear. The loud hum overpowers any sounds that they’re making, but I imagine the crack and crash of giant fir trees as they hit the ground. I see Daddy Long-Legs scurrying away into neighboring beds at my side. I wonder about all the things that don’t have time to escape.
Tilling in the sunflowers
And behind me, as if the chaos and destruction of my foreground were just a dream, the soil lays dark and still, scattered with chopped flower heads, stalks, and a few bright petals. I think of the flowers that Sophie harvested from the newer patch just an hour ago. She’d commented on how they’re starting to fade, too— stalks thinner, droopier, flowers smaller.
They come, they sing, and they go.
I think of the gorgeous kale we harvested this morning. Baby fresh, just uncovered from the protection of row cover sheets, juicy and soft. And the mildew-coated Swiss chard I harvested later in the morning, that had been astoundingly big and perfect just a few weeks ago. It had been such a joy to harvest after weeks of harvesting similarly old, aphid-infested chard from older beds. I’d been shocked to see how quickly it had faded.
They come, they sing, and they go.
And there’s a period in between that no one likes to think about: that period when they’re fading, succumbing to pests or disease or simply old age, leaves thick and gnarly, defenses raised, bitterness overcoming sweetness in their tissues. It sounds like a bummer— and it can certainly feel like it sometimes, especially when it’s premature— but it’s just as much a part of this cycle as the freshy fresh tender baby time. I’ve celebrated the first tastes, first harvests, vibrant colors, bursting sweetness of summer for months now, and in many ways it’s a relief to lay attention on the decline, if only for a few minutes as I drag a tiller through an old bed of sunflowers in the dim evening light. Ashes to ashes, petals to petals, dust to dust.
They were born in February and March. Single, grass-like cotyledons springing up from the cold, moist potting soil in the nursery. Thousands of them, soft and supple, forming a carpet of growing tips that I used to run my hand over as I walked through the winter greenhouse to check on all the babes. I love the way they come out folded over– creased right in the middle of that single fine stem– and hang on to their black seed coats for a while, giving them a brief ride toward the scattered daylight.
Monocots first sprouting
Green onion clusters thickening with some stray seeds still riding their tips
They sat in the nursery for what seemed like months, adding thin hollow layers to their stems. Pointy leaf after pointy leaf shot straight up toward the sky as we assessed their germination rate, counted our losses, planted a few more trays of scallions, and waited.
Onions take their sweet time to grow.
The first four beds went in before our first plant sale in early April: the scallions, a couple beds of dry sets of Walla Wallas and Ailsa Craigs from Texas, and a bed of early seeded Walla Wallas from the farm. That was back when the rain gave us only a couple days at a time to work in the fields, and we ended up hysterical and coated in thick mud as we poked the last sets in the ground under a darkening sky. The remaining sixteen-or-so beds for the onion patch were waiting next to us, protected from the rain under a sea of plastic, to dry down enough to till and amend.
Michael and volunteers transplanting green onions
The future onion patch, staying just dry enough under plastic to till
Weeks passed. The plant sale caught us up for nearly a week, overwintered carrots and cauliflower flowed between our cold hands, and we potted up hundreds of peppers still cozy in the nursery. The onion field sat ready, and finally we unearthed it in late April, tilled it cleanly, tossed limestone and chicken pellets down its mounds, and ran over that chunk of earth now ready for transplants. The dozens of trays of onions, meanwhile, moved from the precious space of the main propagation house to the overflow nursery, where there was more space amongst the plant sale stock. We trimmed their tops to thicken their stems, weeded out the rogue sow thistles and pigweeds trying to overtake neighboring cells, and checked to make sure their plugs would pop out easily.
Onion beds awaiting soil amendments
Onions kept their spot, tomatoes got booted to the ground
And finally, amidst another wave of chaos during our summer plant sale, pruning and trellising the jungle of tomatoes in the greenhouses, coordinating group after group of eager volunteers, and welcoming our new youth farmer crew, the onions found their home in the soil. First with the interns, then with UO Environmental Studies students, and finally with the new youth crew, we taught hand after hand to pull the plugs from the trays. Lay out the measuring stick, line up each plug, make sure there’s one or two plants on the line, plop plop plop, straight across the bed, chatting and laughing and standing to stretch, trying not to look down the row to see how far’s still left to go. It’s a long, tedious process to transplant onions. It feels less long and tedious when you’re doing it with good people.
Phil feeling triumphant after a long day plugging in onions
And then? Then, after already three months of weeding and watering and waiting?
Then we waited. We watered. We weeded. Again, and again, and again.
Onion pairs settling in to the field in late May
Red onion standing tall
Those four early beds that we planted in April started, predictably, to mature first. The farm stands and CSA had shifted my entire focus on the farm, from field and nursery work to harvest and processing. I was in it completely by the time the first fresh Walla Wallas came out of the ground in early July. They were stunning: ginormous white globes, shining and pungent in the midsummer light. They reminded me of pearls, hiding behind the roughage of old brown leaves and dirt up to their necks, emerging astoundingly flawless under our processing canopy, unveiled by newly trained hands.
Fresh Walla Walla onions at market
And then I practically forgot about them. Yes, we kept pulling out crates of green onions until they were gone. We mined for the biggest Wallas for weeks into months, cutting their tops off if they got floppy, peeling off more and more layers to expose that pristine inner glow.
Meanwhile, the sunflowers and corn came on. The greenhouse tomatoes hemorrhaged thousands of pounds of fruit until the field tomatoes started ripening, and then we were strapped to harvest. Beans, strawberries, cucumbers: a never-ending stream of abundance that felt both burdensome and dazzling every week. Feels both burdensome and dazzling, as each week blends with the next, summer vacations come and go, the youth crew starts back at school, and this land just keeps pumping out produce.
Meanwhile, the onions kept growing. And, despite three thorough clean-ups, so did the weeds. The onion patch became a forest of onion tops, then pigweed stalks, then thistle seeds, blowing fancifully away in the breeze. It became the area of the farm I’d shield my eyes from when I walked by. A quick glance at the progress of the onions– yes, some are bulbing up beautifully, and yes, a huge swath of the patch seems stunted from symphylans, or something– and just as quickly eyes averted from the weeds, as if they weren’t even there. Nothing to do, no way to tame it with the youth crew about to leave, so just don’t think about it. And good heavens, no photos!
Until this week.
This week, all those onions– growing ever-so-slowly in that plot for three and a half months, getting just about ready to die back and gear up for flowering next spring– they all got yanked. First the shallots, then the early reds, then the yellows, then back to a sea of big reds. A few volunteers, a few youth farmers who aren’t in high school full time, a cycle of crates and pallets and tractor, back and forth to the propagation house to cure. Ted and Michael drove the train as the motley crew pulled each onion out, one by one, into crates and onto pallets to be ferried away.
Did they get to say their goodbyes to all the microbes and worms hugging their roots?
Did they end up nestled in the prop-turned-curing house next to their long-time neighbors, or are they mixed up with strangers now?
The onion curing house
It’s easy to forget what they’ve been through. What we’ve all been through together, really, when peak harvest season approaches and there’s more food than ever on the farm, fewer trained people, less and less daylight. It’s easy to get consumed by the loads of potatoes and squashes yet to be harvested, the dozens of volunteer groups yet to be welcomed and trained, and the turning over of fields to the relief of winter cover crops. Even to get swept up by the need to trim and peel all these onions. Harvest, cure, trim, peel, sell. Done.
For a moment though, between teaching interns how to make sauerkraut and breaking down Thursday’s farm stand, turning on irrigation and cleaning up the day’s hubbub, I break away from that endless narrative, stand amongst these magnificent onions, and remember where they came from. It’s been a long, beautiful road. Wouldn’t you say?
Early mornings are becoming more golden as the summer wears off. This is a short photo journal of a Saturday morning of harvest for the farm stand.
I arrive before everyone else, unlock the sheds, roll the carts out of the farm stand, set some tables up and get a few more things set out to get the transformation underway.
Farm stand “BEFORE”
As a few youth farmers arrive, I’m washing out totes for lettuce harvest and filling the wash tubs with cool water to be ready for when the full cart returns. We check in briefly before the team heads out to harvest strawberries and the farm stand managers go after lettuce.
Washing totes at sunrise
Filling the wash tubs
I fill up some buckets of water and grab the pruners for flowers, make sure I have twist ties and totes for chard and eggplant, and head out to harvest. We started harvesting a new bed of Swiss chard last week, so it’s luscious, huge, vibrant, and thick-stemmed. It’s not hard to find twenty bunches, and I’m reminded of all the kale bunching in this area earlier this year.
Swiss chard reminding me of the human body
Next I’m into the sunflowers– another new patch that came on a week or two ago. It’s behind the greenhouses in between corn plantings, so I’m surrounded by tall, glowing leaves and flower stalks. I notice the moon still hanging in western sky beyond the dark red sunflowers, the sunshine dancing over the corn flowers, and I fill my buckets.
Waning moon over sunflowers
Early morning corn flowers
Sunrise in the sunflowers
Two full buckets of sunflowers
Sunlight catches the petals
I continue on to the mixed flower bed at the end of Field Two. It’s getting old, but there are still new flushes of statice, zinnias, strawflower, snapdragon, and scabiosa. I spend a while gathering two more buckets of these smaller stems, feeling the warmth of full sun on my shoulders. I’m just within ear shot of the farm stand, and I hear totes banging and voices floating through the orchard.
Mixed flowers ready for market
One more stop in the greenhouses to snip a small tote of giant eggplants, and I head to the tubs to quickly dunk the chard. They come out glistening. I roll my colorful cart toward the hubbub of produce and conversations at the stand, set out the chard, and get to work creating bouquets from all these flowers.
Swiss chard display
Bouquet display
The stand is nearly ready for customers, and I step back. As the golden dawn subsides to day, all our hard work is laid out plain for everyone to admire, take home, and pass over their tastebuds. Nothing wrong with the bright light of mid morning, but that sunrise sure does hit the heartstrings a little differently.
Farm stand “AFTER”
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
This is why I’ve been forcing myself to write every day: because when I set out to document and reflect on an entire week that’s somehow slipped past me, the task seems impossible. There are so many details and conversations and colors and projects that happen in one hour, let alone one day– and forget one whole week!– that to try to encompass the whole will be woefully inadequate. Nonetheless, I guess, I’ll persist.
Friday, August 17th. I’m at the FOOD for Lane County warehouse with Jen and the crew all morning, leading food preservation projects. We chop up and cook apples for sauce, trim green beans for dilly beans, and massage freshly shredded cabbage to make sauerkraut. The crew is lively, playful, eager to spend the hot day inside doing something fun. After we’re done, I head back to the farm with David to harvest for Saturday’s farm stand and keep irrigation running. A few kids, one by one, show up to help out, and we set them up to trim garlic. While David and I are manuring a couple beds so I can till and water the area, one of them stays, longer than I would expect any kid to stay and work, filling three crates of trimmed garlic and asking for more to do. I’m reminded to never underestimate someone new, no matter their age or appearance.
Prepping for dilly beans
Packing cabbage for sauerkraut
David being a kid in the manure
Saturday, August 18th. The crew plows through a load of projects I thought would take all morning: manuring ten beds, harvesting zucchini, processing other crops for market. By lunch, I’m thinking they can plant a few beds before their day is over, so I set out beets and Chinese cabbage, escarole and radicchio and explain how to use up all the plants so they end up arranged well in the field. Evan seems to think they’ll finish in an hour, and they’re off. By one-thirty, they’re not even close and I ask Gerome to head out and push the project. Still not enough. A few of them end up staying late to finish getting the plants in, happy to see the project complete and earn a little extra money for the week. My afternoon turns out the same: I think I can finish seeding quickly and easily in an hour, but it ends up taking longer with irrigation and clean-up mixed in, so I stay. An extra hour, then push it back another, until finally I can set out the trays to water in, close up the sheds, let out a sigh of relief. I’m thankful that I’ve learned to let go of timelines on Saturdays when I’m alone– it always ends up being longer than I expect. And today, I feel accomplished for the week. Okay.
Sunday and Monday. I’m on irrigation for the next two weekends while Ted’s on vacation, so I come in late morning, turn on the cilantro sprinkler to keep the seeds moist for germination, and set about watering the nurseries, keeping busy for long enough for the cilantro area to wet down. As I walk around to turn on other lines, I can’t help but hear a mounting list of to-dos barrage my mind: gotta pull those potatoes, beds need planting, move that irrigation line, tame those weeds…. I try to let it pass, but my brain makes secret notes to itself to revisit later when I’m trying to plot out the week.
Tuesday, August 21. Chomping at the bit to get started in the morning, I have to tame my frenetic energy throughout the day to match the interns’ more laid back attitude. We harvest, and harvest, and harvest, and I break away to do the things I usually don’t need to think about: keeping irrigation going, flame weeding, checking on all the crops, texting this week’s availability to our restaurant accounts. It feels piled up still, this early in the week, and it’s hot and smokey.
Wednesday, August 22. The crew is back for the week, but it’s dwindling. Andrea is too affected by the smoke to come in the next two days, Kiya’s arm still aches and she has to be on light duty, three members have dropped off the crew for various reasons, and school registration has couple folks leaving early. Oh, well– nothing to do but forge ahead. Michael gets market harvest off the ground as I help get the CSA packing underway. After splitting up for a while for various projects, the crew finishes out the morning harvesting tomatoes. I drive the haul in on the truck, unload it near the farm stand where Jen is packing CSA shares, and laugh at how many stacks of tomato crates there are. I’ll be staying late tonight to sort them all, no doubt. And I do, and we end up with enough for markets, and the rest for the food bank go on a pallet in the new “potato bunker” storage container we’ve rented to keep them safe from critters. It’s incredibly satisfying to hear those doors echo shut at the end of the day. Clean red potatoes, newly dug Yukon Golds, and a few hundred pounds of tomatoes to send out to pantries later this week.
Relief to see new transplants getting water on a hot afternoon
Thursday, August 23. After the morning flows by, market’s set up, restaurant orders delivered, and we’ve strained and bottled last month’s tinctures to pass out among the interns, I sit down with Sophie, Rebecca, and Kadyn to talk about bugs. The beneficial kinds– the bugs that eat bugs or pollinate flowers– that have consumed my imagination and inspiration over the past week. I got jazzed to make an insectary hedgerow or two on the farm after wondering, while spraying another round of Neem oil on the new zucchini, what eats squash bugs. We just need more of whatever that is! And it turns out the answer is creating habitat for all kinds of beneficial insects, which has benefits beyond just pest control. More on that later. The workshop got cut short when I couldn’t ignore the tractor’s wheels spinning out in the compost pile. Michael had been trying to build more compost with David when it happened. We tried everything to get it out– digging, sand bags, using the other tractor to make a path to go forward through the pile instead of backing out…. Nothing. Not a damn thing. So we had to leave it, defeated, frustrated, worried that it might somehow break from the ordeal. As I drove to the food bank that night, I felt on edge for no apparent reason, until I remembered the tractor, wedged into that hot pile by its own back tiller sticking out and down too far. That day felt even longer than it was.
Just another magnificent farm stand pepper display by Sophie
Friday, August 24. It’s morning, the crew is out weeding already, and I’m with Kevin near the compost pile. In one moment– a simple lift of that tiller from a chain attached to his tractor’s bucket– the whole week cascaded away into what felt like crystal smooth sailing waters. The tractor backed out of its wheel holes, the smoke that had been hovering oppressively all week had finally cleared into sunshine, and I felt like running everywhere I went. We hauled nearly two tons of the most gorgeous Yukon Gold potatoes out of the field before lunch. David was off and running on his own with the harvest list. The crew plugged away at the forest of weeds in the carrot and beet beds most of the day, feeling more and more triumphant as the day drifted along.
Rubber ducky Yukon Gold potato during the big harvest
Saturday, August 25. For all the details and running lists and sweat and grime built up over the week, I was once again feeling giddy once the farm stand began to take shape. Mountains of sweet corn, glistening Swiss chard, bulging eggplants and a sea of cherry tomatoes. The small crew that assembled for the day was eager as ever, ready for anything, thorough and considerate and laughing with each other from across the fields. Every week I feel victorious by Saturday afternoon, but this week even more so. I’d learned to fix new things, replace irrigation parts, ask for help, give positive feedback more often, and discover a whole new area of farming (entomology) that all of sudden has my enthusiasm and curiosity reignited. All that said, a good day off sure feels fantastic.
*For more photos, see our farm Instagram feed, which I’ve been posting to a lot more than usual this month!*
It’s rare that I get to have my hands in the dirt on a single project for more than a few minutes. I’m running from one crop to the next, harvesting a dozen or two bunches here and there, checking in on small groups scattered around the farm and coordinating whatever washing and processing needs to happen up front. I love that rhythm, of never getting stuck in one project too long. It can also feel frenetic sometimes, and even isolating since my conversations are usually cut short by the next task at hand.
So on mornings like this, when we’re just staff and interns and a short list of long harvests, I sink in. Literally, in this case. Alex, Phil, and I spent the better part of an hour harvesting the last sections of carrots in our second planting: one person sink the broadfork in parallel to one of the carrot rows, loosen them up, move down the bed, and continue on different areas to gradually unearth a large section. We pull them out into messy piles, snap off the greens two by two, and toss the carrots into large crates that fill slowly, steadily, heavily as we work.
Broadforking the carrot bed
Phil, who recently bought a house with his partner in Junction City, jokes about his inability to relax– there’s so much to do to turn the place into his vision!– and how his days off feel better when productive. Alex, who was recently gifted a car from her best friend, is learning to drive for the first time and blown away by how intense and difficult it is so far. They both came here to get their foot in the door of agriculture and outdoor work– Alex after five years as a youth farmer and then a year in the food service industry, Phil as an avid hiker in his mid thirties who’s always ended up with cubicle jobs– and are starting to think more seriously about how to move forward when this internship ends in October. Nursery work? Landscaping? Cannabis? Farmers markets? It’s a pretty wide world open to them, and though not the best timing to find agricultural work, I’m confident they’ll both a find a way to continue.
We finish the bed: seven full crates of orange and rainbow color carrots. The rest of the morning and afternoon we’re spraying them, washing other produce, doing enough harvest to fill the coolers. Phil stays on carrots for hours, until we’re finally nearing the finish line and he requests to join in on something else. I’m impressed he was into it for that long in the first place!
Phil with some super cool rainbow carrot lovers
So at the end of the day, Michael’s out in the beans with Phil and Alex, Rebecca and Ted are sorting tomatoes in the farm stand, and I’m cleaning up our harvest world while Kadyn finishes sorting those carrots. The standards have dropped since the bed got hit hard with carrot rust fly maggots, and the next plantings are sparse because of weed pressure. So I show her the current standard: rather than our normal flawless roots, a little brown spot is fine, let those small imperfections slide, but we still can’t sell anything with more than a spot or two.
Kadyn and Rebecca, who joined us just for the summer, are suddenly about to end their internships. Two more weeks. Rebecca is going back to college on the east coast, and Kadyn, who was really unsure of her plans when she started, is moving briefly back to her parents’ in Bend. Then on to Europe for a graduation trip in the fall, and after the holidays, hopefully back to Spain to work and volunteer. With her strong convictions and mature thoughtfulness around how to approach her next step in life, Kadyn catches me off guard with my head in the muddy sinks. Her path is different from Alex’s, or Phil’s, or mine, or anyone else’s in the world, and it suddenly feels like such a privilege to share this brief period that our paths intertwine. She’s picking up carrot after carrot, sorting them into different containers bound for different places, and after I quickly show her the standard this week, she doesn’t ask for any more help deciding. If only all these pesky life decisions could be as simple as today’s carrot daze.
It’s finally fresh corn season on the farm. In just the week I was gone, our first planting came and (almost) went. Our next one is fully pumping now, and we have four more waiting after that. Imagine: the youth farmers were planting baby seedlings for our last round, just down the field from where others were harvesting from the first round last week. Field two, behind the greenhouses, is a microcosm of the summer season, with three successional rounds planted side by side, baby to kid to teenager corn stalks, all still waiting to tassel and reproduce. The crazy part of it all, I realized yesterday, is that each planting’s maturity brings us one week closer to the end of the crew’s season. By the time they say goodbye at the end of September, we’ll be closing in on those last plantings that today seem so far off from ever producing ears.
Second round of Sweet Rhythm sweet corn ready for harvest
Gorgeous ears
Maybe I’m putting too much weight on that corn. My mind flipped a bit during stretching circle this morning when Madison, rubbing her eyes as she chose a stretch to share, commented that she took it easy last weekend, tried to rest a lot, and with a whine, “just trying to get more sleep before school starts.”
“Less than a month!” someone else threw into the circle. August is their last hoorah not only for free time, but for spending more than just a weekend morning on the farm. And our last chance to get the space fully in shape, weeded, planted, and ready to tackle the abundant harvests of autumn with a skeleton crew and volunteer groups.
And while we’re pushing forward to finish plantings and tame weeds on the farm, people on the crew are going through their own lot of challenges in life. Being forced to move from their homes, dealing with domestic abuse, supporting themselves and living on their own for the first time, recovering from assault, warding off infections and illnesses, figuring out alternative modes of transportation, and the constant navigating of relationships that seems to fall most heavily on teenagers. Whenever I listen to someone’s story, I’m reminded that the farm is just a small piece of their complex life– that even the most dedicated of them will eventually let it all go and shift focus to school and friends and other jobs come wintertime.
But for now, the crew is in their late season groove, we still have weeks to share with one another, and that mighty corn is bumpin’. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp.
I went blueberry picking on Sunday with my dear friends Sherman and Matt. When some people say blueberry picking, they mean filling up a bowl with enough berries to make a pie or snack on for the week. When I say blueberry picking, I’m not messing around. We left with about 100 pounds of huge, ripe, mouth-watering fruits, my hatchback filled on all surfaces with boxes, our fingers stained and our bellies full.
Blueberries are best picked with buddies
I grew up picking berries and freezing them every summer. My sisters and I would go with my mom to local strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry fields, bring home buckets, wash and sort them onto towels on the kitchen counter, and let them dry before stuffing and labeling bags destined for our large chest freezer. Three years ago, I wanted to continue to tradition but didn’t have a big freezer in my new life in Eugene, so I just up and bought one, proceeded to pick 40 pounds by myself at the Blueberry Patch up the McKenzie Highway on a sweltering 95 degree day, and covered my kitchen counters in nostalgic piles of drying berries. I’ve kept that freezer more or less full of berries, tomatoes, corn, and other random farm delights ever since.
We drove all the way to Anderson’s Blues, a farm north of Corvallis that happens to be Sherman’s family’s favorite spot and the farm down our street where I grew up picking. As we started harvesting and commenting on the sweetness and size of the berries, I told my friends about how when we were little in this patch, we would find berries wider than a quarter and insist that they needed to be sent in to the Guinness Book of World Records, and we would be forever famous as the pickers of the world’s biggest blueberries.
I don’t think we ever actually got any in the mail, but the memory remains vivid.
Taste testing highly encouraged
A couple more buckets and many handfuls of soft berries stuffed into our mouths later, a family comes within earshot of us a few rows away. The little girl is chattering away at her parents, and we hear her voice drifting playfully through the weighted branches: “Look!! This is the biggest blueberry in the whole world!”
We laugh, and time once again spirals around itself to find me, twenty five years ago, running past these same bushes with the biggest blueberry in the whole world cupped in the palm of my hand, tugging on my sister’s shirt to show her and prove that I, too, can find the big ones. It’s me over there, chattering in the afternoon heat, and it will be that girl again in twenty five years, marveling and relishing the cool pop and sweet drop of big blueberries in the bottom of our buckets.
Sherman in the blueberries
Blueberry haul
Ah yes! In reality it’s Mama who is right: tanks are perishable, pears are eternal
– Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
I woke up super early on Saturday, excited. Excited about feeling love, excited for a weekend to come, excited to get the farm stand up and running, excited to work with a small crew of motivated youth farmers. I’ve learned again and again that the world gives me back what I bring to it, and today was no exception. I brought excitement, and the day proved generous and full to meet me.
Yes, we got the market set up in time, with beautiful mounds of vegetables, glistening deep red strawberries, buckets of flower bouquets. Yes, we harvested everything we needed to harvest before break time, weeded an overgrown bed of leeks, tilled up a new area to be planted. Yes, timing was right to get beds shaped, amended with manure and lime, and re-tilled flat for planting. Yes, enough youth farmers knew how to work with drip tape that I could just explain the goal of finishing the onion field and they were off and running with it without much help. Yes, the two volunteers that showed up could blend right in with the crew.
Morning market load, ten degrees prettier than last week
The farm is starting to manage itself. Yes, yes, yes.
And then it was 2pm, and the stand was closing, and the beds were just starting to get planted with only two people, and the onion drip tape project was still not complete, and there were tomatoes nearly dropping off the vines that should get picked, and I started having visions of getting stuck for hours after closing, by myself, desperately trying to finish it all and start my weekend.
So I go to Edith and Jane, who are laying out corn plants half way down the first of four beds, and ask if they want to stay until their project is done. “Yes, definitely! I was just going to ask you about that!” says Edith. Yes, yes, yes. I thank them and head over to the onions. Evan, Christopher, and Casey are still pulling lines taut and making sure they’re long enough– soon to turn the system on and repair leaks. I ask them the same thing.
Yes, yes, yes. They all want to stay. And the day turns fantastic again as I head up to help break down the market. Madison and Gerome are almost done when I get there, ten minutes to spare, and we button things up by their shift’s end at 2:30pm. They both need to leave, but I’m still elated that we still have five crew members.
They finish their projects, and when it’s time to call it and they ask whether there’s anything else they can do, I pause. Well, yes. Yes, always. So we push it to 3:30 and salvage the reddest tomatoes that will be overripe by next week’s CSA, load them into the truck for the food bank, and finally decide that we’ve done enough for the week.
As they’re packing up and filling out time cards, they ask about leftover produce from the market. “Of course! Always! Take some home with you!” I say. They ask about the leftover flower bouquets, too, and the answer is the same. Yes, yes, yes.
I make one more round of the farm for irrigation while they’re gathering what they want. I had noticed a couple yellow-ripe honeydew melons in the field earlier in the day, and snatch up the only four fall-off-the-vine fruits on my way back: the first melons of the season! There are four youth farmers with flowers in their hair, laughing and chatting, about to leave as I walk up to the toolshed. I present each of them with a melon, and the laughter continues. Edith tries to smack hers open one-handed, giggling hysterically, until Evan takes the knife and uses both hands to cut one open. We all let the warm juice drip down our chins, spit out the goopy seeds, revel in the taste of deep summer.
the shape of milk 