Notes from the Field - Endurance

Every year around this time I start to think about the Marge Piercy poem "To be of use."  "The people I love the best," she says, "jump into work head first/ without dallying in the shallows..../I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart/ who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,/ who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,/ who do what has to be done, again and again."  There is a time in every farming season when the harvest becomes the thing that has to be done, again and again.  You can take a day off from many other farm tasks, but a day off from harvest, once the season is underway, is an impossibility.  Zucchinis and cucumbers grow huge in the heat, and plants shut down as the fruits mature.  Tomatoes become overripe.  Carrots crowd each other, jostling for more space in the row.  As Piercy says, "the food must come in." 

This week, it was hard to do any work.  It was too dry in our fields to plant seeds unless we watered the empty beds first.  Fall carrot seeds germinated and then died in the intense heat at the soil surface.  We transplanted until Wednesday and then stopped, because everything we planted needed to be watered immediately and we just couldn't keep up.  We moved irrigation pipe.  We harvested garlic.  We seeded lettuce and spinach in the greenhouse for September harvest.  We moved irrigation pipe again.  We watched more things wilt in the increasing heat as the week went on.  And every day, we harvested. 

Every morning, the weed crew showed up on the farm to work.  This amazing crew has hoed and hand-weeded their way around the fields, keeping the pick-your-own crops pristine and the gnarly onion field under control.  They stood in the shade drinking water more than usual this week, but they were back out in the field again in a moment, kneeling in the row over and over again to make sure that the crops were clean. They are the unsung heroes of the farm, young men and women who spend five mornings a week making sure that our crops have enough space to grow, which on our particular farm is a monumental task.  We appreciate their work every day when we go into the fields to harvest and can find the crops.  Every day during this heat wave, they came to work to weed. 

Every morning, the field crew showed up to harvest.  Even though several of them jokingly threatened to go on strike, and one of them called our field in Weston "the Gateway to hell" because of how hot it is over there with no indoor relief, they came to work every day, to do what had to be done again and again.  They harvested new potatoes in a field where the south side of the potato hills burned our knees through our work pants.  They harvested beets that wilted even before they were picked.  They harvested, moved crops into the shade, harvested again, at all three of our fields, through the hottest part of the day.  

Every morning, Zannah arrived at Gateways to feed and water the pigs, to make them a cool mud wallow in the field, to get the harvest crates and knives ready.  Every day, Sutton biked to the farm early and stayed late to irrigate and fertilize the tomatoes at the Lyman field.  Volunteer groups from Genesis, Whole Foods and Thermo Fisher, led by Kim and Marla, weeded lettuce, chard, raspberries and tomatoes.  Dan cultivated until he had to stop because he was afraid it was doing too much damage to the crops.  Erinn continued to seed in the greenhouse and in the field.  The heat wave, although it set back plants and wiped us out, did not stop the harvest.  Or the crews.  They endured.     

On Friday afternoon, there was a point in the day when we all found ourselves sitting on the ground in the shade behind the barn. We were, beyond all effort of will, finished working for the day.  Dan and Erinn went back to work the next morning, moving irrigation pipe, hoping for the rain at the front of the cold front that never came.  Monday will be cooler, and Tuesday might bring rain.  For the moment, the heat is over, and the work of the season continues. 

Enjoy the harvest,
Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes from the Field - All Star Break

 

The short break for baseball is no break on the farm.  It's high season, and it always seems to be the week when it's over 90 degrees with no rain in the forecast. Our neighbors to the west and north have been slammed with rain, but the spot thunderstorms that have been popping up in eastern Massachusetts have missed us so far. The last week when we got over a half inch of rain was back in mid-June, and we've had less than a quarter inch in total so far this month. Vegetables need about an inch of water a week to grow the way we'd like them to. Do the math, and it quickly becomes clear that we've been doing a lot of irrigating.

As soon as the weed crew finishes a project, we scramble to move the big aluminum irrigation pipes to get water on the newly exposed plants so that they won't expire in the heat. As fast as we can harvest, we move the crops to the wash station to be plunged in cold water and packed in the 38 degree cooler. Zannah and Sutton fire up their pumps throughout the week to keep drip irrigation flowing to the peppers, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, melons and tomatoes at the Lyman and Gateways fields. It's hard weather to work in, but it's good weather for hot-weather crops, if they can get enough water. On the other hand, it is tough weather for crops like chard, lettuce and kale, as well as the broccoli and cauliflower we put in over the last two weeks. Our first planting of greens is suffering in the dry weather, but we're watering the second planting like crazy to try to get it to move along for an August harvest.

The good news is that this upcoming week of hot, dry weather will help keep the late blight that was found in Western Massachusetts last week at bay; the organism that causes late blight, a devastating disease of tomatoes and potatoes, does not thrive in hot weather. Other diseases, like basil downy mildew, and pests, like onion thrips, Mexican bean beetle, flea beetle and potato leaf hopper, don't seem to mind the heat. This season, we've entered into a new relationship with the University of Massachusetts Extension Service in which they visit us every two weeks to scout the farm for pest and disease issues and make recommendations to help us deal with them. As a result, we know a great deal about all the issues our crops are having this year (onion maggot! cabbage root maggot! pythium! heat damage followed by alternaria spread by irrigation water! thrips! tomato fungal disease!) in a season in which we seem to have hit the jackpot of those issues. Our continuing education in plant pathology and entomology, while fascinating, is also a little discouraging, since it usually involves a recommendation to spray one of the two effective insecticides we're allowed to use as organic growers or to rotate the crop far away from its current location for many years.

This week also marks the beginning of our Outreach Market in downtown Waltham. The Market, now in its sixth year, is our most powerful tool for doing the important work for which the farm was founded -- helping provide access to healthy food for all people, regardless of income. With the help of donations from our members, including CSA shareholders, we work with local social service agencies who have connections with Waltham's low-income population to distribute vouchers to their clients for a free bag of vegetables at the Market. Folks who don't have vouchers can purchase a bag of vegetables for five dollars, filling it to the brim with their choice of whatever veggies we have available that week. People who happen by and are curious about the market get lots of information about the farm and the purpose of the market -- and if they still feel like they qualify for a five dollar bag of vegetables, they get one, no questions asked. Thanks to Martha Creedon and the Waltham Farmers' Market, we can also accept EBT payments for vegetables at the market. More than $45,000 worth of produce moved through the Outreach Market last season. It is a project of which we are very proud and to which we are deeply committed, even in a challenging season.

Weeds, water, diseases, markets, lots of plants waiting to go into the ground -- no, it's no break, it's mid-season. We're hopeful that soon the harvests will take off and we'll have less time to worry -- I mean, think. Until then, we'll enjoy this moment of midsummer when, as Hal Borland wrote, "the beat of time is like the throb of a healthy heart, strong, steady and reassuring...it is the richness and the ripeness of the earth again made manifest. And man participates, if he will, not as proprietor but as a participant in life itself."

Enjoy the harvest,
Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes From the Field - The Trickster

The coyote is the trickster king.  He makes a scene to attract your attention to one direction and while you are looking that way, he plays a trick behind your back. 

Some of you may remember the terrible woodchuck problems we used to have here on the farm.  The forest that lines three sides of the farm fields, while beautiful and filled with diverse wildlife, was also home to one of the largest, boldest, and most well-fed populations of groundhogs I have ever come across. These things were mammoth, fertile, and hungry.  They laid waste to plantings of broccoli, munched their way down rows of lettuce, chomped our melons and tomatoes, dug under fences, laughed at scarecrows, and thwarted every attempt to distract or dissuade them from the fields. The only solution to our woodchuck problem that worked even temporarily involved scouting the field edges in February armed with marking flags, a shovel, a lighter, and a bag of giant smoke bombs to take out the groundhogs in their winter dens. This was not our favorite job. It also seemed like even if we did manage to empty a burrow, a new resident would move in shortly as the surviving woodchuck families expanded in late spring.  It was a constant headache, and worse, a real issue for the productivity of the farm.   

One beautiful year, the woodchucks abruptly disappeared. In their place, we saw the tracks of a new farm resident: as big as a large dog, leaving a trail of dug-up burrrows and scattered fur and bones. Coyotes had returned to the urban wilds of Waltham, and while our apparently inexhaustible vole population continued to thrive with a new predator in town, the woodchucks were suddenly a thing of the past. The coyotes ranged over the green space from the Lyman Estate to the Beaver Brook Reservation. We were delighted. 

In the very dry season of 2010, something began eating our watermelons. At first, it looked like the melons had just been turned over by a curious paw; then teeth and claw marks appeared. Before long, the just-ripe melons were gnawed open, seeds and juice spilling out, cantaloupes and watermelons alike made unharvestable. Though it seemed impossible, there was no mistaking the distinctive shape of the canine tooth imprints in the rind. Coyote, always a trickster, had shape-shifted from a helper to a hindrance.   

The melon crop was almost a total loss in 2010 because of the thirsty coyotes.  2011, despite the fact that we put up an electric fence, sprinkled the melons with cayenne, and literally camped out on the farm, was not much better. Last season, we moved the melon crop to the Gateways field in Weston, where it grew unmolested by coyotes.  For a moment, at least, our relationship with the trickster was a truce.

Last week, after two weeks with a threat of heavy rain every day in the forecast, the weather turned hot and steamy. It quickly became clear that, despite our feeling like it had rained every day for the past two weeks, and despite our making rain plans every day for the past two weeks, it had not, in fact, really rained much at all. Although June was a rainy month overall, by the time the heat hit in early July, the soil was dry and we were unprepared, distracted by the coyote forecast, worrying about late blight and rainy day activities instead of irrigation and hot-weather plant care. The crops were as surprised as we were.  We ran drip irrigation.  We moved aluminum overhead pipe to water thirsty kale and collards, bulbing onions, wilty lettuce and delicate transplants which gained a couple of hours from a little water from the transplanter but needed a major infusion by the end of each day.  We tied tomatoes up, dripping with sweat and unconcerned about late blight, which does not thrive in hot weather.  We transplanted cucumbers, squash, lettuce and fall kale.  We drank gallons of electrolyte beverages of every description. We killed weeds and they stayed dead in the heat.  Slowly, we cleared our heads of the rain clouds that the trickster forecast had brought and focused on the real season at hand:  the hot one.   

It was good growing weather for eggplant and peppers, tomatoes and melons and beans. We all made it through the hot weather, tired but unscathed. We got a lot of work done while it was not raining. We remembered the old saying "be careful what you wish for."  And late last week, we saw a big mother coyote walk along the edges of the field, stopping to look at us every once in awhile, her tongue lolling out of her mouth as she panted in the heat. She looked strong and healthy, with a shiny coat and very white teeth.  She paused at the treeline, looking behind her. We followed her glance to a movement in the grass-- a smaller coyote, with huge ears and paws, trotted behind her, pausing to sniff and scratch and explore.  The trickster's legacy continues on the farm.  Now if only the coyotes would eat up some of those bunnies...  

 

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes from the Field: the Zen Thread

There's a lot of mention of the weather in these Notes from the Field, most of it uncomplimentary. As many people have mentioned, farmers are never happy with the weather. Maybe it's because it affects us so powerfully, physically and mentally, both in our daily work conditions and also in the outcome of the work that we do. It is the most obvious manifestation of nature, the impersonal force with which we struggle to work in concert as organic farmers and by which we occasionally find ourselves blindsided and outwitted. Last week's forecast, beginning with the mini heat wave and ending with the ominous threat of rain, high humidity and cool temperatures (perfect for plant diseases like late blight) was a head-scratcher. Despite the warm weather and the rain, crops didn't jump the way we had expected them to. Scallions, onions, carrots and squash all stayed pretty small, victims of the drenching rains that washed all the fertility out of the soil two weeks ago. Each morning's harvest was an exercise in trying to make more from less.

While the rain held off in the afternoons, we transplanted successions of cucumbers, pumpkins, watermelons, lettuce, and beets, staked and started to tie tomatoes, spread compost to prepare the fields for our fall broccoli, cauliflower, kale and collard greens, and cultivated, cultivated, cultivated. Our wonderful field crew, only in their second week, held on through days of intense heat, sudden downpours, and tricky harvests.

Sutton told someone this spring that the only way to drive a tractor straight is to imagine a "zen thread" from your heart to a distant point on the horizon. You let go of all your attempts to micromanage the tractor's direction and simply sit, hold the wheel, and let the thread pull you forward. As may be painfully obvious from my fretting and storytelling in these field notes, I am the opposite of zen in most things, Irish by heritage and temperament. In farming, as in the rest of my life, I lean towards the messy attachments that lead to suffering and sometimes, to joy. Letting go of those attachments feels scary, like admitting helplessness or apathy. But the wisdom of the zen thread has surprised me this season. When you drive a tractor with the thread, it is not like closing your eyes and throwing up your hands; when you get it right, it is a moment of calm awareness that allows for a nearly effortless straight bed while at the same time allowing you to see the rest of what is happening around you on the farm with a remarkable clarity.

When weather conditions are so messy and confusing, it can feel difficult to move forward, to make good decisions on the farm. So often strategies and systems that worked last year seem to be failing us in this season's funny weather. That makes all my attachments appear in high relief and a deeply unflattering light. As I told Dan last week, "I'm trying to be smart, but I just don't have it in me." That's where the zen thread comes in. We can't control the weather. We have to have enough faith in the almost unconscious wisdom of our own experience and our own hearts to attach our vision to a point on the horizon and let it pull us forward, to the blue days of October. Then we can really be in the moment, responding to what the season asks of us, instead of scrambling around for logical answers in our tired brains. The season is underway. Its momentum will pull us forward, and we will do what we can. Wish us moments of clarity and beauty and calm in the midst of the storms.

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Photography courtesy of Saul Blumenthal.