Farmer for a Week - A Weird One

It’s official. It’s been a weird one. We've crossed the line into the second half of our season this week, and while I hear that heat is in the forecast, the past two weeks have felt like fall. This is great for working -- we have lots of energy and we're sleeping well at night.

It's not, however, good for the warm-season crops that we planted in early June and depend on for this August-into-September harvest. Our fall crops are in the ground, but we're not ready for cabbages, cauliflower and winter squash yet; we want to eat tomatoes, melons and peppers and cucumbers and, yes, eggplant. We've been fortunate so far that the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant have continued to produce, but all of the plants are beginning to think it's autumn and slow down their flower and fruit production. On the other hand, the squash, zucchini, cucumbers and melons are not faring as well. These plants are very vulnerable to the cool nights and heavy dews, and in addition to just slowing down, they have succumbed to some of the many diseases that plague crops in this family in the fall. The melons are in another field close by, but their main issue so far seems to be lack of ripening rather than disease. So far, our fall broccoli and cauliflower are looking great, and we’re hoping that the abrupt switch to very hot weather later this week doesn't cause them to "button up", going to flower without producing a usable head. Flea beetles, the tiny black nemesis of the broccoli family, have been particularly virulent this season; they are laying waste to the arugula and braising greens we planted at the beginning of August, and spreading a disease called black rot through the larger members of the family. It's been an interesting season.

At this time of year, when the asters and the goldenrod fill the roadsides and field edges, we are usually able to take a breath and see the rest of the season laid out like a road map before us. The spring and summer can be turbulent, but generally, by late August we can see which of the season's battles we've won and which have been lost, and what the fall and winter will most likely look like. Usually, we can walk the fields at the beginning of September and make a list of what crops will be in through late October. Not this year. It's so hard to say how this stretch of cool weather, beautiful as it is for people, followed by this hot week, will affect the crops that define the harvest season -- broccoli, red peppers, melons, tomatoes, cauliflower, late roots, lettuce and spinach, cabbage and butternuts. It seems like our squash and cucumber season may be ending, but it's very hard to say what's ahead.

As we've said before, this intense lack of predictability seems to be the new normal for us vegetable growers. Last year's great growing season, which nonetheless saw many organic growers lose their tomatoes to late blight, was followed by one that some farmers are calling "the season from hell". It's a season when we feel like we're constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, when calamity feels like it's just around the corner. This is a feeling that we're used to in the springtime, when conditions can change so quickly from cool and wet to warm and dry, and we're used to making accommodations for the fickleness of that season. Over the past few years, though, the autumn has also become a volatile time of year, with powerful storms and fluctuating temperatures turning what was a celebratory season into one that we enter into with our fingers crossed, hoping that our crops will be healthy and stable in very unstable conditions.

There's nothing wrong with learning to be adaptable and agile as farmers, and the positive result of some of this craziness might be to help keep us from getting stale and stuck in our routines as growers. No, really, I mean it. Learning to cope with change is part of our life's work, some of us more than others. And it's clear that the folks who remain in this business and continue to be successful over the long term will be those who learn to make the changes that this new normal demands -it's just hard to see exactly what those will be right now. The big picture of farming in New England is very difficult to see, and the survival of many of the new small farms that have sprung up here in the last ten years may hang in the balance. If customers will hang in there with farmers old and new as we learn to manage this unpredictability, it will make a big difference in the ability of farmers to have the space and time they need to adapt. Survival and success in this season, and probably the seasons to come, will mean communication and understanding between customers and farmers in order to keep growers from being stuck between the rock of the season and the hard place of an unforgiving market.

Enjoy the return to summer weather this week. We'll be harvesting storage onions to cure in the greenhouse, planting spinach, and continuing to pick tomatoes, balancing on the edge of summer and fall. Let's see where this bumpy ride takes us next.

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm staff

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: 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