Melon mornings

“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.

A young farmer

Christopher’s slurping from the side of a green melon as I get up from my lunch time resting spot in the orchard.  He’s gnawing on it from the side, looking out over the youth farmer gardens.

“Is that melon from your garden?” I ask.

“Yeah, it is!” 

“Sweet, that’s awesome.”  He nods, keeps gnawing, looking kind of unsatisfied.  It looks a little underripe from the deep green of the exterior.  I was headed back to the picnic tables to start getting ready for the afternoon’s projects, but I decide to linger for a bit.

“Is this your plot?” I ask as I point to the plants next to us.

“Yes, it’s this whole section here in the corner.”  He swings his arm to expand my view beyond the two beds in front of us.  He’s got a whole patch of cabbages that are forming heads, a section of basil and bolting lettuce, a tomato jungle with a few jalapeño plants in back, and a neat row of tall broccoli plants.  I can’t see the melon plant from where we are– it must be hiding under the tomatoes.  I comment on how many cherry tomatoes he has, and how big the broccoli looks.

“Yeah, but it’s not making heads yet.  See only this one’s almost ready,” he says, pointing to the one on the end that I hadn’t noticed.  It’s almost fully beaded.  “But the rest don’t seem like they’re very happy.”

“Oh, they seem great to me,” I offer.  And really, they do.  Large, spreading leaves will surely give way to healthy heads in a couple weeks.  I bend closer and see the tiny beginnings of those flower buds forming at the center of the plants.  “See?  They’re already growing!”

Christopher looks down and smiles as I add, “I’m always tempted to eat those baby flowers.  There must be so much nutrition packed in them.”  He nods silently, still gazing out over his work.  He told me last week, when I asked if he’s interested in farming as a career, that he’d rather practice it as a hobby.  He wants to be an engineer: a good choice for keeping up a healthy gardening habit.  Despite a couple minor misgivings about plants not growing quite as well as he’d hoped, he looks mighty proud.  And he should be.  His plot is one of the healthiest in this whole garden.

I leave him there to keep taking it all in: a young farmer out standing in his field.

Animal encounters

Two animals ended up in black trash bags by the end of the day.  For all the plant life we nurture and control on the farm, there usually isn’t much animal life to speak of.  Richard’s two “guard” dogs that live on site might have something to do with it.  There are rodents off and on, lots of snakes, a stray cat or two that lay low and scurry away whenever I spot them, and all manner of spiders and insects.  But big animals (besides the human variety) are rare.  So to have two close encounters in one day overshadows any of the other highlights of the day I can imagine.

The first came right as we were about to leave for market.  Michael comes running, as usual, back from his lunch break and I hear him apologizing for being a few minutes late.  Then I look up and need a second or two to register what I’m seeing: he’s got a fresh Steelhead salmon hanging from his grip!

MIchael with his lunch break steelhead catch

This guy goes fishing almost every morning before work, on his lunch breaks, and in the evenings after work.  His love of salmonids is both inspiring and humorous: his favorite tomato variety is a Siletz because that’s the name of the river with great fishing, and his favorite bird is an osprey or eagle because of the way they catch fish so gracefully.  It’s an obsession, no doubt, but one that doesn’t worry anyone because it’s how he finds his flow, experiences nature every day, and feels peaceful and joyful on a regular basis.  So for him come back to the farm with a fish– finally!  after three years of lunch break fishing trips!– felt triumphant!  

No time to spare though: he slipped it into a large black plastic bag, bundled it up, and stuck it in the cooler until the end of the day, when he skipped off with the treasure under his arm.

The second animal encounter was, to say the least, not quite as triumphant.  So before we go down this dark rabbit hole, here are some beautiful images from the market zone to brighten this up a bit:

Making flower bouquets

The most perfect tomatoes!

Michael, Phil, Alex, and I spent a while after market set-up to tear out the oldest melon patch– fruit, plants, weeds, landscape fabric, and drip tape– so we can till and flip the area for new plantings.  The final task of the project was to put away the used fabric (which was likely infested with squash bug larvae and eggs) and pull out a couple unused-this-year-yet strips for our last planting of melons in the greenhouse. 

I won’t go into too many details about the little decrepit shed where we store the landscape fabric and old drip tape sections, but I will say that as we approached it, Michael and I joked with Phil about the names it’s acquired over the years: Opossum Shed, Rat Hotel, The Gross Shed, etc.   After pulling out the first “new” chunk of fabric, I squealed and jumped back toward the apple tree that overshadows the area.  I’m not normally squeamish about spiders, but the one that ran atop the other piece of fabric was bigger (and the context felt a whole lot creepier) than I could handle after a hot, muggy, dusty project.  

We hemmed and hawed about the spider situation: did that one hanging on the door look like a male black widow?  Was the one playing King of the Hill on the landscape fabric really a brown recluse?  And what about all the scurrying of large spiders we could spy up on the shelf and milk crates above?  It was one of those moments when the fear of the unknown amplified the size and danger of each little critter, and we almost gave up.

But Michael (maybe still fueled from his lunchtime excitement?) pushed ahead, yanking the last folded chunk out from the shed and preparing to hoist the ones we’d just folded back into their place.  We positioned ourselves to fling the first hunk over from the cart, when Michael suddenly recoiled in the same way I did earlier!  

“There’s an opossum!!”

And there was, indeed.  It’s fur was still intact, so we thought it might be fresh.  After much pacing, fake puking, groaning, wondering if we should just ignore it, and steeling ourselves, I grabbed an old pair of pruners we never use and extracted the body while Michael held up the pallet where it was laid to rest.  Desiccated, leathery, stiff, and stinky as hell, the forgotten marsupial specimen made its way into the second black trash bag of the day.   

On so many levels, I was purely disgusted, and happy it was over, and wished it had never happened.  Memories of that one time I bludgeoned a blind baby mouse in the compost flooded back as I carried the plastic-sheathed carcass to the garbage can.  I had sufficiently steeled myself to deal with the gross thing.  At the same time though, in some pocket of my consciousness that was hiding by the picnic tables as my body went through the motions of facing death and decay, I was remorseful.  I wanted to put it in the compost, to let it be recycled back into the land that once sustained it.  I wanted the disdain we have for these creatures to disappear for a while.  A proper burial.

Then I dropped the body bag into the trash can, dry heaved a few times for effect, and washed my hands.  The not-knowing– whether that baby mouse’s siblings would survive after my compost turning back in 2011, or whether that opossum lived a pleasant life or had a hard death– still sits okay with me.  I can let that one go.

Yes! Deep summer!

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.  

Yes, yes, yes.

The first melons, so sweet and juicy

Preparing for squash

It sounded so easy: “Transplant the winter squash.”  They’ve been ready for a week or two already, so what’s the big deal?  Just pop ’em in the ground.  

After a full week of trying to get such a seemingly simple project done, I am humbled.  Yes, amazed by how much zucchini is coming out of the fields, dumbfounded by how fast weeds are growing, impressed by the skill and pace of all the interns, and surprised by how much time irrigation management takes.  But mostly, I am humbled by this project that’s not even close to done on the eve of our last chance for the week.

Eleven beds were shaped and tilled before we started on Tuesday.  I finished the final till on the rest of the field that afternoon and gave myself a crash course in bed-shaping after everyone else had left.  I like to remember that this area was a forest of cover crop just a few weeks ago, was mowed mid June, tilled under maybe last week, and is now already being shaped.  I wonder how all the soil life is handling this rearrangement.

On Wednesday, the youth crew amended the eleven newly shaped beds with wheelbarrows and shovelfuls of dairy manure.  One of them spent the afternoon with a dust mask on, throwing handfuls of lime down the beds until they looked dusted with powdered sugar.  I must have tilled them in later that day, making less-than-straight lines for the drip tape atop perfectly flattened bed tops.

Newly amended beds before the final till: manure and limestone

Thursday I hoped to have them all ready to plant, but it wasn’t to be.  A few youth farmers pulled drip lines into the beds in the morning, and Michael and Phil spent all afternoon setting up the new system.  New header, lengthened lines, rebar at the head of each bed to hold the header in place, staples at the far ends to hold the lines in place, a few repairs once the lines were running.  There were a lot of spritzers, but seemingly nothing the plastic won’t contain.  I left the lines on for several hours in the evening to get the soil ready for transplanting. 

Drip tape spritzers sparkling

And today, the final step before planting: landscape fabric for the melons and plastic mulch on all the cucumber, zucchini, and winter squash beds.  They’re both projects that need my full involvement, and I take two focused youth farmers with me to start.  Forget harvest.  Kiya, David, and Jen can make it happen.  I’m out on the final frontier all day, spreading melon fabric, organizing plants, showing people how to care for the delicate root balls, on the tractor with two people pulling plastic down the bed.  Back at the nursery, measuring cupfuls of Surround (a clay-based squash bug barrier spray) into a giant spray tank I’ve never used, spraying the hell out of a truck full of melons as someone sways back and forth with the tank to keep the clay suspended.  Checking in with Kiya about radish bunch size, asking a couple more youth farmers if they’re available to come in tomorrow, handing out paychecks as they all leave.  Just like that, game over.

David and Isaac with one more bed to go!!

David, volunteer Isaac, and I finish the plastic after everyone else has left for the day.  David plugs in the last half bed of zucchini plants while I turn on more sprinklers.  I’m disappointed that we didn’t finish it today.  And at the same time, looking back at all the steps it’s taken to get to this point– the plants can just go in the ground now– finally, so simple!– I’m humbled by all the energy it takes.  Humbled by what we attempt, and proud of what we do.

Seven cucurbit beds down, fifteen to go