The Full Strength of July

It seems as though the season is moving along at such a quick pace.  It's already the second week of July!  Cooler weather crops have come and gone, and we are settling surely into the summertime.  We are nearing the end of greenhouse seeding for the season (just two weeks left!)...thus closing the spring and looking ahead to the fall

as we start to plant autumnal brassicas.  I was amazed, standing in the field the other afternoon with Erinn and Anna as we checked on the recently transplanted broccoli seedlings: they're taking root so fast!

The crew seems to be mimicking that rooting behavior.  Last week we welcomed a fourth field crew member Andre to the team and it feels like we are really hummin' now.  The jokes and camaraderie are as plentiful as the harvest.  We've enjoyed fresh cucumber popsicles made by Stacey, and ended one Friday with an intense race to plant celery.  We split into two teams, and among all of us we planted two 200' beds in under fifteen minutes!  Imagine eight sweaty farmers at the end of their week, bent over planting, yelling, laughing, and moving faster than tractors, all within inches of each other.  Strategizing, competition and motivation were at an all-time high.  It was neck and neck to the end and totally incredible.  And, in case you were wondering, my team won...

            Despite the dry weather, the farm looks lush right now.  The squash and zucchini plants are deep green and huge, and I've never seen such consistently beautiful lettuce.  Both our Lyman and Weston fields are in the groove as well, and the potato plants are up to my knees! Some highlights of the past week have felt like benchmarks.  Dan and Erinn finished tying the first round of tomatoes, and we began the garlic harvest last week.  I won't say too much, but it's coming out of the ground and looking impressive.  The flower field is blooming and every day I fall more in love with the snapdragons.  We are watering nonstop.  I must say I am feeling the full strength of July now.

As we make our way into another warm week, I remind myself of the ebb and flow of this work.  There are patterns and rhythms, joys and frustrations.  Sweltering days and moments of reprieve.  It seems as though we are finding our stride now.  Erinn asked me the other day what my favorite thing to do on the farm is... I simply can't choose.  Since April, I have learned so much about farming, and while our days follow a pattern, there's always something new, whether it be a small victory or an interesting challenge.  The first harvest of the morning is always my favorite and I hope you enjoy it on your plates as much as I enjoy harvesting it from the field.

Until next time ~     Janelle, for the crew

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 - Summer Bounty

August on the farm brings a subtle shift in our work energy. Where two weeks ago we were still in high-season planting mode, the first of August is a marker beyond which we don't plant anything that needs to be in the ground for more than 50 days to mature. It means all our carrots are in, all our beets are in, all the fall turnips and rutabagas and leeks are in. The only things left to plant are lettuces and spinach, arugula and mixed greens, which we'll continue to put in the ground, and in the hoophouses, until early September. As fields slowly begin to come out of production, we'll also begin planting cover crops, including oats and peas, winter rye and hairy vetch, that can hold our soil over the winter and add organic matter when we turn them in in the spring.

Now the bulk of our energy turns to the harvest. Squash and cucumbers, peppers and eggplant at our Gateways fields in Weston will soon be joined by cantaloupes, though we'll need a few days of heat to ripen them up. The fields at the Lyman Estate will need the same in order to start really churning out the tomatoes. It's a race against disease in weather like this, where the (beautiful) cool days and nights are favorable to the spread of cucurbit and tomato fungi and bacteria, as well as the dreaded late blight oomycete. We've been spraying our field tomatoes with copper to protect against late blight whenever the "blitecast" website from Cornell tells us that weather conditions warrant it; since we haven't yet seen any on the farm, we haven't sprayed the pick-your-own tomatoes yet. We have started to spray the raspberries with spinosad, a compound made by bacteria that is approved for use in organic systems and is currently thought to be our best bet against the spotted-wing drosophila.

Last week the weed crew continued their swing through our fall broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, cleaning them up with hoes and hands while Dan worked the tractors. Sutton worked on her (hopefully) rabbit proof fence around the tomatoes before departing for her summer vacation. Andy was back from two weeks in Wisconsin with his family to help with the bountiful and beautiful harvest that the field crew and Zannah pulled in at Gateways. The pigs got bigger and bigger.

Our outreach market is in full swing, bringing bags of free and reduced-cost produce to about one hundred of our low-income neighbors every Tuesday evening. The farm is filled with young people participating in our summer Learning Garden programs. Our brand-new youth program got underway this past week; Sutton trained our youth crew in harvesting on Friday morning in preparation for their first trip to the Waltham Farmers' Market next Saturday. And we heard some great news on Monday -- the Lexington Community Farm Coalition’s proposal to operate the former Busa Farm in Lexington as a brand-new community farm in cooperation with Waltham Fields’ staff managing the farm operation, was selected by the town. Now, with LexFarm, we'll begin the work of bringing a new farm, responsive to its individual community, into being.

Beets and sweet fresh onions, carrots and potatoes, lettuce and swiss chard all continue to come in beautifully despite the cool nights. Our next succession of kale is almost ready to harvest, and we'll start picking shallots and storage onions as soon as their tops fall over. The sun has begun its inexorable swing to the south and autumn is around the corner. For now, we're hoping for a little warm weather to ripen up those melons and tomatoes, and we'll be all set.

 

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Notes from the Field - Careful What You Wish For

Last Monday when I walked out into the field, the tomatilloes, husk cherries, and chiles were hanging from their stems, wilted virtually to the point of death. In the irrigation frenzy of the week before, we had overlooked this field at the front of the farm, and even though it wasn't on my to-do list for the afternoon, I hurried to get a line of pipe into the field while the rest of the crew finished the garlic harvest. As the water arced over the rows of crops, I murmured the mantra we had been chanting for the past month: "a little rain, please, just a little rain."

Apparently the "little" part got lost in translation to the language used by the weather gods, because the rain that fell on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday was not a little. It was a lot. All of a sudden, everything that had been on hold during the past week was in high gear again. There was no more need for irrigation as we hurried to plant all the crops that had been waiting outside the greenhouse while it was too dry and hot to put them in the ground. Beans, broccoli, beets, carrots, bok choy, kohlrabi, lettuce, and the last of the summer squash went in the ground as fast as Erinn could make beds for them. The field crew planted in the rain. The weed crew weeded in the rain. We dug potatoes in the rain. Dan took advantage of the dry day on Wednesday to cultivate, now that he was not afraid to drive the tractor near the fragile, dry crops. The lettuce already in the ground doubled in size between Monday and Friday. Sutton started to build a fence around the ripening tomatoes to protect them from the horde of rabbits who had started to nibble on them.

On Friday the combination of hot weather and a little rain caught up with us, and we had to pick all day long to bring in the harvest. Eggplant and peppers, pushed along by the heat, were like enormous jewels in the harvest buckets. Zucchini, cucumbers, white onions and tender lettuces poured out of the fields. Everything that had been so hard to find a week before was suddenly abundant and delicious. The cool, rainy weather gave us tons of energy but also had us obsessively checking the late blight map.

Who knows what the next week will bring in this roller coaster of a season? It could be fire or flood, feast or famine, dust bowl or rain forest. This growing season has definitely become an exercise in rolling with the punches, cutting our losses, and looking for the silver linings, and last week's was the beautiful harvests that filled our harvest crates and our cooler. Just for this moment, we forgot about all the carrots and parsnips that didn't come up and the fennel that didn't make it through transplant, and enjoyed the peppers and eggplant and the first tomatoes. Just for this moment, we enjoyed the chance to plant anything without watering it immediately. We watched the fall kale grow and enjoyed the harvest.

Hope you do too, Amanda, for the farm staff

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: Poetry

The following poem, by Marge Piercy, is dedicated to the incredible farmers, year-round and seasonal, field and weed crews, who make it all possible.


To Be of Use


The people I love the best

jump into work head first 

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. 



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.



I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest 

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out. 



The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.


- Marge Piercy

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Image by Rebekah Carter (2012).