Ready for winter

I’m still blown away by what all can happen on the farm in a week. Rains in the forecast. Blissfully sunny days. An unexpected frost over the weekend. A few sizable volunteer groups. We push, and rearrange projects, and let harvest fall off while we focus on the fields. We woefully sort all the peppers that got zapped by the light freeze, take turns on the tractor to turn in the blackened plants, water the last bits of parched soil to get the moisture right for tilling. We spread manure, chicken pellets, fish meal, or lime over neat mounds or entire sections of flat fields, till it all in, and have to remind ourselves that it’s fall— that these delightfully neat beds ready for planting are not the first of the season, but rather the very last.

Tilling under frost-bitten pepper plants

We plant garlic. The volunteer group on Thursday starts cracking heads into cloves while Sophie sorts out the bulbs we’ll sell over the next month. The group on Friday finishes cracking them all, and in the afternoon I sort out the small cloves— the ones that’ll make leggy plants and mini heads next summer— with the youth farmers. We’re left with six crates of fat cloves, three of each variety we grow (Youth Farm, a mix of everything over the years, and Nootka Rose, a bulky reddish softneck). And on Saturday, the crew starts laying out straight lines of cloves in those newly shaped beds, three rows per bed, six inches apart in the row. The morning volunteer group of environmental studies students pokes them into the ground, alarmingly fast it turns out, and it’s all planted before we know it. With so many extra cloves, we even plant an eighth bed. And that days-long project is done in a couple hours, garlic now just waiting for rain.

Poking cloves

Garlic planting

#block-yui_3_17_2_1_1540224147244_33444 .sqs-gallery-block-grid .sqs-gallery-design-grid { margin-right: -7px; }
#block-yui_3_17_2_1_1540224147244_33444 .sqs-gallery-block-grid .sqs-gallery-design-grid-slide .margin-wrapper { margin-right: 7px; margin-bottom: 7px; }

We convert every corner of the farm to cover crop. Ted comes in Friday as purely “tractor operator” to till under old crops, prepare all the greenhouse and outdoor beds that are ready to plant, and spread cover crop like crazy. I’m on the tractor after he leaves Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, keeping it running, racing the rains just like we do in spring. Once a significant rainfall occurs, we won’t be able to drive in the fields anymore, and it’s game over. So we race, every day until sunset, stretching into that final frontier of old infested winter squash. Remember when I wrote about the push to plant that section of the farm back in June? Well, it happened again this week: all the rest of the farm was tilled under, planted in cover crop, ready for winter, and there I was on the tractor, back and forth, back and forth, into and out of the shadows of the houses, the still-warm rays of sun only partially counteracting an evening chill raising the hairs on my arms, looking out to the west over a farm ready for cold wetness, undoing all our doing and giving it a new beginning for the darkest days of the year.

Tilling under the final frontier of winter squash beds

I finish tilling under the last of the squash beds after five o’clock on Saturday evening. The sound of the seed spreader rattles in from my arms as I walk briskly across the field, spinning the crank, watching for an even spray of rye, vetch, and field pea seeds flinging out from my center. The bag runs out a couple times, and I return to the totes in the tractor bucket to refill. The sun dips lower, the light turns everything orange, and finally I get to fly.

Pedal to the metal!

The tractor speeds under me. I’m going fast enough to swerve when I peek behind me to make sure the tines aren’t digging in too deep. Seed should be just covered, not buried deep. I get the hang of it after a few passes, drop the handle to a set number to keep it consistent each time, spin myself around at the edge of the field, over and over. The sunshine isn’t warm enough to feel anymore, and the coolness of evening races over my goosebumps as I step on the gas. The cold feels right now.

We’re ready.

Plowing flowers

“Odder than plowing flowers,” someday, will be a proverb. You’ll say it when you’re ripping down old wall paper that could eke by for another few years. When you’re cutting a friend’s hair that’s grown beautifully to their waist. When a spring ice storm splits open your full-in-bloom cherry trees. You’ll say it when a friend puts to sleep their cat that doesn’t seem that old or decrepit, and when your teenager cleans out the fridge and tosses a few bags of veggies that were still salvageable. It’ll be the perfect utterance when you’re sorting through all your children’s artwork you’ve saved over the years, and somehow, bittersweetly, choose which pieces to let go.

There’s a time even for turning underground the brightest beauties of the summer. A flurry of insects escaping the destruction, a puff of pollen shot out from the last inflorescences, a scattering of petal scraps behind the tiller’s path. I sweep through beforehand, snapping off a few miniature sunflower side shoots, snipping an armful of strawflowers to dry. I till perpendicular to the beds behind the greenhouses since they’re so short, and as I ride past the flower beds, over and over again, I pluck another flower here and there, hide them away in the tractor arm rest, tuck one into my braid for the first time all season. I want to rescue them all, but I see that they’re barely hanging on by a thread, anyway. It’s as good a time as any to let them go.

But still, doggone it: it feels odder than plowing flowers.

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

New partnership, old tractor

What a way to start a week.  Five well-dressed Trillium Community Health Plan representatives are waiting near the road when I pull up at 8:45am.  More arrive every minute as we discuss where to set up the canopy, podium, and catered spread.  They don’t waste any time getting organized and set up for the event we’re hosting: a new partnership announcement between Trillium and FOOD for Lane County to provide more fresh produce to local low-income patients.  The event seems kind of hyped up, like a public relations stunt, until I hear our board members, executive director, and people from Trillium speak about the programs we’re collaborating on.  They’re providing $120,000 over the next two years to expand our Produce Plus markets around the county, where people can get fresh fruits and veggies at convenient locations, institutionalize the “Screen and Intervene” program where medical providers ask whether patients worry about running out of food– then provide them with resources to access the food they need.  For the Youth Farm, the program means an extra $5,000 for diabetes prevention program participants who receive vouchers to spend exclusively at our farm stands.  These are the types of programs that anyone who cares about food insecurity have been dreaming of, that get to the root causes of hunger and the social determinants of health.  Finally, the funds to make it all happen are starting to flow.  

Trillium Community Health Plan and FFLC partnership celebration

Community health partnership announcement

I listen to the speakers with the interns and youth farmers who are at the farm this morning– some for a normal day, some to give tours of the farm to all the attendees.  Their reactions are genuine, encouraging, inspired.  They chat with the attendees, pose for photos and videos as we continue the harvest afterwards, exude more pride than last week in the work we’re doing.

Tuesday farm crew feelin’ proud

And I, as much as I want to schmooze and eat snacks, can’t wrench my attention away from the week’s to-do list for long.  I’m back to washing zucchini, harvesting turnips and fennel with Michael, getting all the CSA harvest under control before we stop again for lunch.  Watering the nursery, breaking away to switch up irrigation, walking the fields to get my bearings.  Taking out CSA totes to wash later, checking for weeds in various beds, going over the last of the harvest for the day.

We meet after lunch to make a plan for the afternoon.  Michael to lead up irrigation projects with Sophie and Phil, Alex and Rebecca to wash produce and totes, Joe’s out picking peas and tearing down trellises, and “I really need to get on the tractor, you guys,” I joke, “’cause remember, I’m playing Ted this week!”  So we break, and before long I’m cruising at a steady .7 mph up and down the final frontier. 

It’s a mind-numbingly slow pace.  So my mind tries to stay busy by formulating a plan for tomorrow, and the next day, and remembering over and over again all the random details I usually don’t have to worry about.  When to harvest that bolting spinach?  How to best utilize that group tomorrow afternoon?  Who’s going to lead up the tomato trellising, or the transplanting, or the onion weeding?  What about taking down the rest of the pea trellises?  I reach the end of the field, lift out the tiller, pull a five point turn to get back in line, start rolling and throw the tiller back down.  Look behind to make sure it’s lining up and going deep enough… How can we orchestrate prepping all these beds for plastic and transplanting?  Oh ya, the Surround.  Will there be enough beds in this space?  What irrigation lines should I turn on before I leave this evening?  Am I picking up the truck three days or just two?  Do any youth farmers know how to move PVC line and rototill so we can get that last greenhouse ready?  Don’t forget to harvest the rest of the zucchini outside tomorrow. Oh yeah, the harvest!!  And I laugh to myself– that I could forget about such an all-consuming daily project– and I let it all go, let my mind rest.  Buzzing, shaking, dirt clods flying, inhaling, exhaling, sipping water, straight line, hands on the wheel.  It’s nice, to let that big, slow-motion tractor have all my attention for a pass or two.  It’s all there really is, anyway.

On the tractor

Snippets

Experimenting with a new format and combining two days into one post: a first, and a sign that both on- and off-farm lives have been stacked full this week.  There’s so much to share.  More prose coming soon 🙂

Killdeer eggs in the onion patch

I finally got close enough to snap a photo while the bird tried to distract me.

Interns learning to adjust sprinkler heads

Alex and I moved a couple irrigation lines, then she was able to show Sophie and Rebecca how to adjust the spray radius.

Tractor time

All the time. It’s real.

The biggest salad turnip

David and Chen burst out laughing when they discovered this monster.

Volunteers planting eggplants

This group was outstanding— they stayed most of the day, stayed energetic and positive, and blew through four big projects.

Covering tomato beds with plastic

Racing the rains with volunteer Isaac to get this secured so that we can plant tomatoes tomorrow. It will keep weeds under control all summer.

Red clover

Sparkling in my herb garden as I finally planted echinacea, ashwaganda, and monarda starts amongst the other beauties.

Learning agronomy

Here’s the trouble.  We have about eight new beds ready for planting tomorrow, and at least twenty beds worth of plants ready to get in the ground in the next week.  The cover crop in the Final Frontier field– the next hope for making plantable beds– was a jungle of tangled peas, vetch, and rye grass just a few days ago.  It’s now desiccating atop a rock-hard plate of dry soil, and all its nitrogen will continue rapidly escaping back into the atmosphere until we can till.  We can’t till until we irrigate to get the right moisture level, and then there’s a couple days’ window to incorporate the organic matter before the soil’s too dry again.  We missed the window in one section already, and we need to keep the process in motion– while keeping everything else on the farm watered with a limited number of irrigation lines– until all that crop is mixed underground.  And even then, we wait.  One to two weeks for the crop to decompose enough to make fine beds.  Hours and days while harvest takes priority, training new volunteers draws us away from the tractor, and broken sprinkler heads foil our plans to irrigate on time.  We’ll get there, but it’ll be close.

Agronomy, according to the Internet, is the science of soil management and the production of field crops.  It’s a fancy word for farming.

I don’t often need to have my head deep in the agronomy of the farm.  Ted does the planning, the mapping, the problem-solving.  It’s a relief to be able to understand what’s going on, and to let it go.  Not my responsibility to figure it out.  I spend more of my mental energy on people and food than on agronomy: how to train everyone, keep projects rolling, motivate and inspire.  How to manage the harvests, prepare each crop for market, make sure nothing goes to waste. 

But luckily, agronomy sneaks in.  My grasp of the seasonal cycles of crops and succession plantings is better than years past.  This season I can anticipate how quickly weeds will grow, keep track of where they’ll sprout next, know how moist the soil needs to be to effectively uproot them.  I’m seeing how quickly soil dries out in 14 hours of sunshine, what plants decompose the fastest once they’re mixed under, and how helping plants grow unchecked prevents pests and diseases from overtaking them.  Sometimes it happens intentionally, when I research a bug or nutrient or botanical term.  Mostly though, it happens unintentionally, every day, as I walk and look around the farm, talk about the plan with Ted, hear questions and observations from volunteers and interns.  Slower that way, but it seems like the right pace to really stick.  So maybe when I’m sixty four and wondering when to dig under my field peas, I’ll remember how I heard that the nitrogen increases as the plants age, but also how the long older vines get stuck in the tiller, and end up finding my own happy medium between what my head knows and what my hands have experienced.

Onions all day

They planted onions all day.  Patterson and Talon: yellow storage onions.  Michael, Phil, and Sophie, with Hao, Mo, and Huiyang helping until three o’clock.  Four beds that we’d prepped a couple weeks ago, covered with black plastic, and waited for the weeds to sprout and die off under the darkness.  Plants six inches apart, four rows in each bed: almost 5,000 onions.  Mo’s mother is visiting from China for the next month, and she explored the fields to take photos while everyone tucked in all those plugs, one by one and two by two.

Phil celebrating the end of onion planting for the day

I was on the tractor all day, tilling our potato field.  After lunch I made it over to a patch near the onions that needed a final till.  I apologized for the noise, carefully moved the plastic and sandbags away from the edge I’d be working, let the heavy tiller sink in deep.  Fluffy moist soil there, not like the dry patch where I killed cover crop for potatoes. Against the edge of the flowering cabbages, I was brushing against stalks dappled with honey bees.  Our neighbor Randy, who’s planted fruit trees and canes along the fence line, darted in a out with buckets of water for his blueberries, carrying his little poodle whenever I approached close to turn around the tractor.

Tilling up next to the overwintered cabbage that’s now in full bloom

And Ted was keeping everything else going all day.  Checking a leak in the tractor tire, setting up irrigation to get the overflow greenhouse (now empty!) ready for tilling, picking up more wax boxes at Organically Grown Company for all our food bank harvests, making calls, cleaning up, writing out restaurant orders while we talk about the week ahead.  Ten before five o’clock, Michael set out an impact sprinkler line to water in the new onions, and it was spraying from a leak when we turned it on.  He needed to leave, so Ted headed out to fix it.  Turns out it wasn’t only the connection between the fire hose and the aluminum pipe, but also a faulty gasket where two of the pipes fit into each other.  Ted tightened the hose, replaced the gasket with one from another line, and sped off once the sprinklers were running smoothly.

These hose clamps need to be super tight to keep the line from leaking under pressure

In the evening light, I easily pluck an armful of red Russian kale in a couple minutes.  The summer squash in the greenhouse is almost there, too, and I sneak in to harvest a couple of the bigger ones before leaving.  We’ve had a lean time on the farm the past several weeks, with overwintered crops gone and new crops not quite ready.  That’s coming to an end, and I feel a tinge of the sense of accomplish we’ll get once harvest season sets in.  They’re making it.

Reverse engineered to-do list

Thursday, April 26th: A reverse-engineered to-do list

• Thin and fill out trays of lettuce and Swiss chard for the plant sale (everyone)
• Prick out tiny ground cherry plants to pot up for the plant sale (Sophie and Alice)
• Pot up green onions that are left over from a farm planting for the plant sale (Alex and Kiya)
• Soak the trays we’ll be transplanting (me and Ted)
• Lay out spinach (me and Hao), plug it in (Kiya and Alice)
• Transplant lettuce, fennel, bok choy, broccoli, cabbage (everyone)
• Chat about how to get grandkids and nieces to eat foods they claim they don’t like (me and Alice)
• Direct seed salad mix (Ted)
• Water the nursery, once fully, a couple times to spot-water dry trays (me)
• Till under areas that were under plastic (Michael)
• Check out the farm in depth with a field walk (Ted and interns)

Ted leads a field walk with the intern crew (what we fondly call a Ted Talk)

• Set up irrigation for all those transplants (Ted and Phil)
• Harvest leeks, for the first time ever, by himself, for restaurant orders (Phil)
• Harvest, wash, and weigh produce (cauliflower, spinach, leeks, beets) for restaurant orders (me)
• Deliver to Ciao Pizza for the first time this year (Kiya)
• Deliver to 100 Mile Bakery (Michael)
• Till under cover crop in the rest of Field One (me)
• Shape, fertilize, and final till twelve more beds in the evening (Ted)
• Wonder why some spinach in the greenhouse never took, laugh at the random few baby bok choy plants that bolted before filling out, dig into unsprouted melon pots to see if the seeds rotted, worry that hardly any bees are in the apple blossoms on such a fine spring day, relish the zamboni-like satisfaction of making cover crop disappear systematically into the earth (me…. but I wonder what everyone else would add to this point)

Some spinach in the greenhouse failed to thrive…. my guess is a tiny critter called symphylans

Tilling under cover crop, one more swath to go, clouds rolling in

The tractor was running

While I was potting up tomatoes with volunteers, the tractors were running. 

While I was watering in the heirloom tomatoes, dousing the brassicas that’d been wilting, and unfixing a swath of plastic to let more air flow into the nursery, the tractors were running.

While our program manager, Jen, and I were giving short tours to our youth crew applicants, asking them the same set of questions eleven times over, and thanking them for their time, the tractors were running.

As I closed the nursery back up at the end of the day, spot watered a few trays that looked especially dry, locked up all but one shed, and packed my baseball cap into my bike bag to head home, the tractor was running.

On a day like today, eighty degrees after a week of dry weather and a smattering of rain coming toward us in the next few days, every minute counts.  Our two tractors spent the day with Ted and Michael, one tilling in cover crop as deeply as possible, the other chisel plowing up any hard pan that’s formed at the base of the tilled layer, and the first going back over to finely till in preparation for bed shaping.  It’s a long process.  It took all day to prep fifteen or so beds with the extra step of the chisel plow, which we’d normally leave out.  The tillers need to be in the ground as many minutes as humanly possible, to beat the rains and get ahead of bed preparation so that we can sit comfortably with enough beds for the next succession or two of plantings.   

Beds amended with limestone and chicken pellets, ready for the final till

Today I had to keep other projects running: plant sale preparations, nursery care, youth farmer interviews.  I joined the bed preparation party just at the tail end of the day, to help Ted spread chicken pellets on a dozen onion beds before the final till.  No tractor time for me, though.  Not today.  With the season stretching long ahead of us and late springtime weather finally kicking in, I know my tractor time will come.  There’s still a few acres to go.

Spreading chicken pellets on future onion beds

The Black Wave

“Woooohoo!  Who’s ready to surf the waaaaaave?!?”  

We’ve run the rainwater off to the side, straightened the sheet out, spread out to each corner, and it’s time.  The Black Wave comes to life just a few times in the spring: when the sky’s dry but the fields are still mucky, and the sun plans to stay out for at least a few days.  It’s a joyous time of year.  The rains are abetting and we’ll be able to get the tractor rolling soon, there’s a team of people sprinting up and down the 150-foot-long fields, and the sun is bound to be shining.  We spread out more plastic just a couple weeks ago over the onion field, and the plan seems to have worked.  With no rain in the extended forecast, we can remove all the plastic on the farm, let things dry out until next week, and then start another push to get swaths of land ready for planting.  (This is all such a big deal because tilling when the soil’s too wetcreates hard chunks that aren’t porous for water, air, and roots, and tilling when it’s too dry pulverizes it to dust, which destroys the tiny aggregates that support soil ecology and therefore plant health.  We care about plant health because of course we want abundant crop harvests, so tilling under the right moisture conditions is no joke.  It all starts with healthy soil.  Just sayin’.)

For now, we just get to ride the Wave.  

Watching from the far corner that’s on the receiving end of the plastic, it reminds me of a cartoon demon.  Billowing in the breeze and flying straight at me.  Often it dips under its own weight after twenty or thirty feet, and the folding edge becomes a giant bulge creeping along the field.  The runners that are clinging to the corners hand them to the receivers, we pass the torch, and now I’m hopping through decaying cover crop to find the folded end.  We run with one more wave, then fold it again, and again, and another time, and one last heavy heave, then tidy it up to end up on a pallet on the side of the field.  This folding system allows us to move the plastic around easily in five clear sets, and unfold it with one easy jog down the field.  The sets combined cover twenty beds, or about a quarter acre, enough for our first plantings of onions, potatoes, brassicas, peas, and some other greens and carrots.  

This year, it looks like we might get lucky and not have to race the rains for our next plantings.  Although it’s a lot of work to lay them out, secure them with sandbags or shovelfuls of mud, and undo it all once the rains cease, I wouldn’t mind another round.  It’d just mean we’d get to ride the Black Wave one more time before next spring rolls around.