Notes from the Field: Gratitude

Greenhouse seeding plan in April

For many people in New England, spring is the most joyful time of the year. It's a time of rebirth, a spell of blooming, a return to verdant beauty after a season of stark simplicity. After winter, many of us are yearning to eat ice cream, have a picnic in the sunshine, or simply shed layers and appear in the world less muffled, laid bare.

For farmers, it's a little more complicated than that. Spring is a sea change in our sleepy winter state, the cozy time when our farm fields are perfect in our imaginations and our main tasks are selecting varieties from the multicolored, appetizing pages of seed catalogs, planning what new tools to buy and sprucing up our fleet of equipment for the upcoming season. Spring drags us kicking and screaming into the lengthening days, blinking like woodchucks on Ground Hog Day and cringing at the sight of our shadows, the meaning of which is clear: Get To Work.

Don't get me wrong. Growing food is work we love. It is work that we have chosen (or that chose us) and that we feel unendingly fortunate to choose again each spring. It's just that spring is so unpredictable, so up and down, and our moods, tasks, and physical bodies are yanked so abruptly from winter's comfortable tranquility into spring, that capricious trickster of a season. One day it's a balmy 70 degrees out, crops are growing, birds are singing, and you are feeling like you might finally have this spring thing down. Then you open up your tractor to change the hydraulic fluid and four large pieces of metal fall out into your hand. This is not a good thing. Your heart sinks. Your pulse rises. The beautiful day and all your long-term plans are forgotten in a new moment of shifting priorities, crisis management, and alternate arrangements. The amazing fact that the tractor turns out not to be destroying itself from the inside out does not take away from the emotional turmoil of the few days in which it seemed like it might be.

Or you spend two days making, fertilizing, and laying expensive biodegradable, corn-based 'plastic' mulch on beds destined to be planted with onions and leeks. The beds look beautiful. You feel on top of it. Then, for the next two weeks, cold, dry winds blow from the west, the east, the north and the south until all the soil that had been piled up on the edges of the plastic blows away and, bed by bed, the mulch begins to peel away. You get out the shovel. A few feet here, half a bed there, and suddenly you are spending four or five hours a week shoveling soil out of the pathways to try to keep the mulch down until you can plant the crops. After a few weeks of this, with no sign of any lessening of the wind, you finally decide that the constant shoveling is not time well spent and pull up all the mulch by hand, leaving the soil exposed and the weeds growing, and all the time in between lost.

Or you are finishing up a morning of disking a beautiful new field for eggplant and peppers when suddenly you notice a strong and distinct smell of sugar, and just as suddenly, the intense feeling of liquid spraying all over the back of the tractor and the disk from the broken valve stem of the loaded rear tractor tire. As the tractor sinks on one side, you scramble to drive it to a safe spot, check the damage, and figure out what the substance from inside the tire is that is now all over your tractor, your disk, your field and your self. Your relief at the discovery that the tractor tire was loaded with a biodegradable molasses-based filler is tempered by the loss of the tractor for more than a week at a busy time of year.

This is spring on the farm.

For all its beauty, spring is a turbulent season, and some of that natural turbulence inevitably rubs off on the farm and the farmers. No wonder we sometimes want to go back to sleep for another six weeks.

But we are fortunate farmers. We have irrigation at all three of our fields, thanks to the brand-new system we just installed at the Lyman Estate. We have tremendous agricultural soils. We have a good, solid crop plan to grow a lot of food, enough space to grow it on, and a dedicated, thoughtful team of people who farm with us and support us in every possible way.

Zannah scorches weeds (2012)

We are windburned, sunburned, achy as we start using those farming muscles again, tired to the bone (try watching a movie with us some evening and you'll see), brain-fatigued, never happy with the weather, and yes: grateful. The moments when we sit in the greenhouse on a warm, rainy spring day, planting seeds that will grow into food that will nourish folks we love, or look back on a straight row of onions that volunteers planted with us, or take weary pride in a cultivating job well done, are the moments when spring's intensity, like the never-ending wind, lets up for a moment and lets our gratitude shine through.

Spring is touch-and-go, stop-and-start, back and forth, hot and cold, but its ultimate, inevitable trajectory is summer, and the harvest. We'll get there if we can get our spring sea-legs to ride out the rough patches, and keep our eye on the distant horizon. And every once in a while, pause in our racing back and forth from field to greenhouse, tractor to truck, to admire a newly blooming tree, the song of the oriole, the persistent call of the killdeer, the return of nettles and other tasty wild treats in the edges and borders of the fields. This is spring on the farm too, and we are lucky to be here again to see it.

Warmly,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes from the Field: Hail the Frost!

Hail the frost! Hail the blackened vine!"

-- Hal Borland, from Twelve Moons of the Year


It happens every year.  This year, we knew it was coming.  The radio and weather websites forecast it all week, the predicted low temperature dipping lower each day.  On Wednesday, in a cold rain, the farm crew harvested the last of the eggplant and peppers; volunteers helped pick the last green tomatoes.  On Thursday, it was clear and chilly; Friday morning there was a warning frost on the grass in the low spots.

After a cold, clear morning, it rained again on Friday.  Around 2 o'clock, the skies cleared, the sun came out, and we finished the harvest up.  At 3, we went to get the reemay to put a thin frost blanket over the vulnerable lettuce.  The wind began to blow, as it does whenever we get the reemay out (Dan says there ought to be some kind of scientific study).  We anchored the fragile fabric with black plastic bags filled with soil, and the wind died.  The farm was quiet.  All day, shareholders had been coming to pick their last basil and their last hot peppers, so we didn't think there would be much left.  We wandered over to the pepper patch and picked bags of our own cayennes, green aji dulce, fatalii and serranos, almost ceremonially -- then we split up for the night.  It was getting dark, and cold.  The sun came out from behind a cloud and blazed briefly on the flaming trees as I was picking a few of the last Mountain Magic tomatoes, still on the vine.  It was time to go. Saturday morning, crisp, damp, and blue, felt like a kind of farmer holiday.

Even though we'll continue to harvest, and this week's mild temperatures mean that crops continue to grow, there is a sweet finality to the first frost that is a joy and a relief to a farmer.  In a way, the frost is like a good cleaning for our farm.  The dead vines of tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and sweet potatoes don't need any more help from us this year, and won't survive to carry diseases into next year.  Our worst weed, galinsoga, does not survive cold temperatures, so it too falls away in the frost to leave the surviving vegetable crops green and beautiful in their rows.  There is a serenity to the bounty of the farm after the frost that is worth celebrating with fried green tomatoes, roasted green peppers, and the last of the eggplant on the grill.

Enjoy the real end of summer, and this beautiful time.

Amanda, for the farm crew


Images by Rebekah Carter (2012).

Notes from the Field: And Then There Were Five

28.

This high summer we love will pour its light

the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment

then before we're ready will crash into autumn
with a violence we can't accept

a bounty we can't forgive

Night frost will strike when the noons are warm

the pumpkins wildly glowing      the green tomatoes

straining huge on the vines

queen anne and blackened susan will straggle rusty
as the milkweed  stakes her claim

she who will stand at last      dark sticks barely rising

up through the snow      her testament of continuation
We'll dream of a longer summer
but this is the one we have:

I lay my sunburnt hand 

on your table:      this is the time we have

- Adrienne Rich (from Your Native Land, Your Life)

Now that the field crew is gone, it's pretty quiet on the farm.  With Andy away on paternity leave, it's just Sutton, Zannah, Dan, Erinn and me in the fields to harvest the vegetables and do whatever else we have time to do when the pick is done.  These days we are coming in around 8 AM, since the mornings are dark and cold.  We all put on rain bibs and boots against the heavy dew, drink another cup of coffee, and head out into the fields.  We harvest all morning, with one person in the wash station to rinse and process the food as it comes in and four picking and transporting the vegetables.

Occasionally, we are joined in the fields by a bird of prey.  Around the first of October, voles and field mice become bold and voracious as they stock up for the winter, and their predators follow suit.  Red-tailed hawks are very common in the trees around the farm, and often soar over the fields pursued by a noisy murder of crows.  Less often, a forest hawk appears silently and disappears as quickly as it came.  Last season, a great blue heron stalked the fields, and this year, for the first time, a northern harrier skimmed the tops of the tall weeds as it hunted. As the stresses of the season fall away, it is much easier to take the time to notice the diversity and beauty of the life in the fields that we never put there, and can never take away.  

If each month of the farming season could be summarized in a Big Life Lesson, they might look something like this:



April:  Rebirth is Hard.

May:  Anxiety Does Not Make Things Grow.
June:  Good Luck (see June CSA newsletter).
July:  You Are Not in Control.

August:  Lift With Your Legs.

September:  Abundance.

October (two lessons):  Let Go and Savor.

The deeply dualistic nature of this time of the year on the farm, when we are letting go of the season while intently enjoying each beautiful fall day, helps balance the single-mindedness that can sometimes dominate our world view during the rest of the farming season.  This time of year, we watch one crop after another finish its life cycle.  Late last week, we mowed and disked the tomatoes; it was funny to watch a crop that we had spent so much time and effort trying to maintain, and then spent so many hours harvesting, disappear from the face of the farm.  One of the joys of farming:  all our efforts, all our successes and all our failures return to the soil equally.

Hope you are enjoying this beautiful time, and the harvest.



Amanda, for the farm crew

Images by Rebekah Carter (2012.)

Notes from the Field: Fall on the Farm

It’s really fall on the farm.  It seemed to happen overnight; cool nights and rainy days brought the summer crops like tomatoes, eggplant and peppers to a screeching halt and brought on massive harvests of autumnal crops like greens, roots, and squashes.  The trees are beginning to color, we drink more hot coffee in the mornings, and although there's still a lot of harvesting to do, there's a moment at this time of year when something heavy and invisible lifts from our shoulders.  Farmer Dan Kaplan of Brookfield Farm in Amherst describes it as "a big hammer hanging over our heads", the potential for great disaster which exists in our profession from March through about the end of September.  Seedling loss in the greenhouse.  Late frost that takes out tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons.  Pests, diseases, rain, human error; any one of these at the wrong time can mean a major loss on the farm.  As Dan Kaplan says, "Sounds extreme.  I mean, it's just vegetables, right?!"  And it is.  Unlike many of you, our job does not put human lives or big financial figures at stake.  It's just vegetables.  And it's a relief to remember that fact every October -- about the same time we realize that big hammer has disappeared for another season.

By this time of year, things are what they are.  By this time, we have a pretty good idea of which crops did well for us this season (tomatoes, cucumbers and melons) and which crops did poorly.  Onions, leeks and shallots were major failures for us in 2012; planted at the non-irrigated Lyman Estate field, they didn't get any rain during the time that was critical for sizing up in late July and early August and have been small and not of great quality. It has been an average year for us for green peppers and eggplant, lettuce and beets; cabbages have been out-of-control good; carrots have been hit-and-miss depending on the particular succession, since we plant them about every three weeks.  Strawberries got weedy, although we hand-weeded them twice; raspberries were hit hard by spotted-wing drosophila.  We have to decide with both of these crops whether we will continue to try to grow them next season, since we'll have to spray them pretty heavily and consistently with organic pesticides in order to make them yield well.   On the other hand, thanks to this year's great field crew, we began our sweet potato harvest a little earlier than usual, so we have a nice crop of those curing in the greenhouse.



In general, this season was one that included lots of sighs of relief.  There were many near-misses:  late blight and extreme weather loomed large throughout the season, but overall, despite the failures, our harvests have been pretty satisfying.  At the beginning of the year, we set goals for the value of the CSA share and our food access donations, which we track each week.  Last year, which was a pretty decent year for us, we met our food access goal in December.  This year, we met it by mid-September.  We met our planned CSA share value by October 1.  This growing season was one for the record books.  Don't worry, there's lots more food in the fields, and part of the CSA model is sharing in a bountiful year -- so there are three more weeks of summer share pickups to go after this week, and our donations will continue as well!  In the meantime, enjoy this season of completion and balance.  And enjoy the harvest.



Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes from the Field: Why We Farm Organically

Yardlong beans and morning glories in the Learning Garden

A recent Stanford University study made news by casting doubts upon whether organic food is, simply by being organic, healthier for us than non-organic food.  The news coverage of the story featured many people being surprised about the fact that organic farms do use pesticides and fertilizers (ones that are on a list approved by the Organic Materials Review Institute), and that organic food does not automatically provide more nutrition or health benefits to its consumers.  One radio report hinted at the fact that 'organic' might just be a ploy by some big companies to be able to charge unsuspecting customers more for healthier-sounding food.



B to F: tomatoes, broccoli, and turnips

I've been mulling over what troubles me about this the coverage of this study (actually a meta-study, which examined a large amount of data collected in experiments over the past couple of decades).  I've read Michael Pollan's response, as well as the argument from Marion Nestle (written prior to the Stanford study's publication) about the ongoing controversy over organic food, and I think I've figured out what it is: for many of us who farm organically, who are not associated with big companies or even big agriculture, organic is not just a consumer label.  In many ways, it has very little to do with how we market our products.

PYO husk cherries, also known as groundcherries

Organic farming is about how we grow, why we do what we do, and our desire to make a positive impact on the world.  I chose organic farming as a profession because I believe that organic production is a scientifically based attempt to create an agriculture that produces economically viable yields of beautiful, nutritious vegetables while remaining as beneficial to the environment, and to farmworkers, as possible.  While I often shorten it to "farmer" when I'm describing what I do, in my heart of hearts, I'm an organic farmer.

Okra flower and young pods

To me, organic doesn't mean boutique farming or baby vegetables, or getting the highest price we possibly can for our crops.  The higher price for organic food is only justified because sometimes it costs more money to grow in a way that is more environmentally thoughtful; composted dairy manure, for example, costs more than synthetic petrochemical fertilizers but is less likely to create pollution if it is well-managed.  (In an ideal world, the cows that produce that manure would also live on the organic farm, but our agricultural world, especially in our urban area, is very much less than ideal.)  Organic farming, to me as a grower, means that I can almost always eat what I grow right out of the ground; it means that my children, and our shareholders, and the people who work on the farm day in and day out, can walk through the fields, pick their own food, and generally eat from the land in a way that minimizes the amount of pesticides they are exposed to.  It means making a conscious effort, day in and day out, to farm in a way that builds healthy soil that grows healthy food.

B to F: carrots and bush beans (and some weeds)

Organic farming isn't perfect.  It can be fuel intensive, input-heavy, labor intensive, expensive, and heartbreaking.  Growing three rows of fennel on a four-foot-wide, two-hundred-foot long bed is certainly not mimicking any natural system I've ever come across.  The pesticides that we are allowed to use under the standards approved by the USDA are not harmless, non-toxic plant compounds; some of them are deadly chemicals that happen to be naturally derived.  Not only that, they are not as effective as the deadly synthetic chemicals that conventional farmers are allowed to use.

Tithonia, also known as Mexican sunflower

There is much that is still unknown about the way soil functions naturally and how we can build a functioning soil ecosystem that grows nutritious organic vegetables.  And the truth is that not all organic farmers are good farmers; some of us, while well-intentioned, are still learning -- farming, after all, is an art as much as a science, and organic farming takes years of practice to learn well.  A wise, experienced conventional farmer may well grow food with more nutritional value than a sloppy, inexperienced, or negligent organic farmer.  A master farmer -- of any stripe -- is one who grows bountiful yields of highly nutritious vegetables from highly functioning soil; I just happen to believe that organic methods are the road I want to take to get to that level, if I ever do.

Farm-to-plate: a late summer meal made from Waltham Fields' vegetables

There are very few things that I'm willing to say I believe in as I get older.  Even the Red Sox are not what they used to be.  And 'big organic'  is definitely not what 'organic' used to be.  For better or for worse, organic farming has come a long way from the  days of back-to-the-landers with their bug-riddled zucchini and kale.  But the fundamental idea of trying to grow healthy food -- and lots of it --  in a way that is kinder to the earth and to those who work it is one that I do believe in and try to manifest every day.  Making that food available to everyone in our society is another idea I believe in.  And I am truly grateful that, day in and day out, I can practice something that I deeply believe, regardless of the study of the day or the food fad of the week.  That's why we grow organically at Waltham Fields.



Hope you enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Images by Rebekah Carter (2012).

Notes from the Field: Abundance

All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound
of rain
from memory...
It is August
The flocks are beginning to form
                       -- WS Merwin, from Provision

It's everywhere in the natural world:  spider webs and seed heads, the slant of the sun ever further to the south, the deep colors of goldenrod and purple asters, young hawks riding the air currents over the farm all day, the small flocks of migrating geese already in the air at dawn and dusk.  Summer is maturing, beginning to give up the fight, but glorious in its decline.  The harvest is rolling in.

This is what we plan for in January, poring over seed catalogs and spreadsheets.  Our seeding and transplanting for the season are almost complete, right on schedule -- just one more round of lettuce and bok choy and a couple more seedings of arugula and mustard greens to go.  There are a few more weeks of good growing weather left, but the sunsets are creeping ever earlier and time is growing short to have any impact on the crops, except for pulling them out of the field.  Some crops are coming in much better than we had planned -- cucumbers, tomatoes, and garlic, for example.  Some are not as good -- the leeks and onions in our unirrigated Lyman Estate field, for example.  It's becoming very clear that unless we can figure out a way to irrigate that field, we won't be able to continue to use it in future seasons.  There are successes and challenges in any season, but the general -- and beautiful -- impression of this time of year is that of abundance, of enough to go around.  Abundance is satisfying at a primal level, an old fulfillment of the promise of the spring, somehow related to the fleeting sadness we have in these cool, beautiful evenings.  It is satisfying to us as farmers because enough is our goal, the destination of every season in which we set seed into the earth.  Abundance is beautiful.  It is also backbreaking.

Now there are days when all we do is harvest.  In the mornings, the crops that benefit from being picked cool:  lettuce and greens, cabbage and broccoli.  In the afternoons, the crops that like to come in dry:  onions, curing in the greenhouse still, another round of melons, tomatoes.  Tomato picking at the end of July is a technical art:  hunting for ripe tomatoes in cascades of green leaves, working from newest planting to oldest in order to minimize the spread of disease, etc.  Tomato picking in early September is an endurance sport.  Two at a time, we fill two five-gallon buckets at a time, carry them to the ends of the rows, sort, repeat.  Abundance says:  did you think enough would be easy?   

On the rare afternoon when we don't have to harvest anything, we have tractor ballet.  Three or four tractors at a time get attached to the mower, the disk harrow, and cultivators and make their way around the farm, tidying up, turning in, and killing weeds in the beds and pathways of the tiny fall greens.  This is the other satisfying work of the late season:  putting the field to rights for the winter.  Turning in crops that are finished, preparing the fields for cover crop seeds later in the week, making neat and orderly what was bountiful and chaotic.

There's a lot of harvest still to come. But this fleeting moment of abundance, where tomatoes, basil and zucchini overlap with broccoli, radishes and fall cabbage, comes only once a year.

Enjoy the harvest.

Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes from the Field: Weed Crew Thanks

This is the last week that our 2012 Weed Crew, Annabelle, Becca, Katie and Meghan, will be with us and the sadness I feel is deep and real. As some of you may have noticed, this can be a weedy place. We are dealing with a legacy "weed seed bank" whose size would make Citigroup blush (see: "Too big to fail"). Some three years ago we decided that it was necessary to add a four-person crew that would be responsible expressly for hand weed control. This crew spends five mornings a week for three of our weediest months on their hands and knees pulling, prying, wrenching, levering, sometimes hoeing and occasionally, virtually tweezing weeds from the soil. All so that our crops might thrive. They bring airflow to congested beds where disease may have flourished, access to light, so that tender plants don't have to reach and become leggy, and limit competition, so that plants becoming established have their nutritive needs satisfied. They are also the people on the farm that direct our drop in volunteers during the week. They act as ambassadors for the farm, explaining the tasks for the day, keeping people moving and motivated during hot, dry, cold and wet weather. They answer questions about the farm and organization, all while focused on the task at hand: Kill Weeds.


This is no small feat. It is work that can be redundant and can feel thankless, particularly if one loses sight of its importance. It can be very difficult to remember that this work, done as maintenance between transplant and harvest, so significantly impacts our yields, ease of harvest and overall efficiency, and therefore our CSA share at the stand and ultimately the food access work that we do in our community.

We have been fortunate to have three crews in a row that were all fantastic. But this year's crew has set the bar very high for all Weed Crews to follow.


This bunch has been all business from day one; nose down, bell to bell, efficient, team driven and fastidious. They don't posses the level of hate for our weeds that some in the past have (I'm looking at you Kenny...) but these four have been the model of incredible consistency, always ready to go in the morning, always up for the task, no matter how daunting, always with a smile and a quick inquiry about the work they'd be doing or what else was going on that day on the farm. They quickly learned every technique we taught and applied them thoughtfully, efficiently and briskly, but most of all thoroughly. This crew does clean work, I mean immaculate.

It is hard for me to actually believe that they have been with us now for eleven of their twelve weeks. It is more difficult for me to picture life without them. Annabelle, Becca, Katie and Meghan - I thank you personally for your season of hard work and the spirit with which you toiled. You will be missed. Really.

Enjoy the harvest.

Dan, for the farm crew