Let's All Do A Rain Dance!

As I see it now, the theme of the summer is easily summed up in two words: HOT and DRY.  It literally feels like the dust bowl out there and I can't really remember the last time we had a soaking rain.  The sun felt strong this week and although it's physically challenging work, I feel more connected to our Earth and our food through this challenging weather.  We as farmers spend most of our waking hours absorbed in the same environment as the food we grow and eat.  It feels similar to when you share a meal with someone and you are all eating the same thing.  Knowing that we as a crew and as a community share the same sun rays as the plants, the same temperature, and live on the same soil, keeps me going on those long, hot days.  There is a freedom in simply being in our environment in all weather and letting go of our comfort zones.  This is when I see the most growth and change in my life.      

Our morning routine this week has been to head straight for the water and in every direction possible.  We are using all the tricks we can.  Our aluminum pipe system has taken up residence in our newly planted west field, taking care of our fall brassicas, chard, lettuce, and beets.  This system which delivers the most water through overhead sprinklers requires us to move about 7 long aluminum pipes across the fields.  It feels as though you could pole vault with these - they are much lighter than one would think.  It's quite empowering to carry them on your shoulder and I must say that Erinn and Dan both do it with such grace, each able to carry two pipes at once. 

Second, we have the water reel (not to be confused with the water wheel which is used when transplanting).  This is just a couple years old now and let me tell you, it's a work out setting it up.  It is a retractable hose with a sprinkler attached that covers about 7 beds in either direction depending on the wind.  When Janelle and I pull it out at 7am, we debate over who will get the full body workout and who gets just intense arm strengthening.  It's a great way to wake up in the morning if you ever get a chance to try it.
Yet another way is our drip lines that remain under our biodegradable plastic used with our tomato, eggplant, and onion crops to name a few.  Although this takes more time and possibly more money upfront to lay down on the beds, it is ultimately a more efficient system and requires us only to turn the faucet or pump on for a few hours assuming the pump is working...  It does require time for setup and repairing of holes, but the water goes directly to the roots avoiding the pathways and foliage of the plants.  It also does not compact the soil as much as an overhead sprinkler system. 
Lastly, we are even using your run-of-the-mill home oscillating sprinkler which works great for directly seeded crops like our carrots, but also has saved the flowers which I will

add are STUNNING! Erinn has done an amazing job! With all of these methods of watering we must think strategically in order to be most efficient with our time and energy as well as conserving water where possible - which is what farming is all about.  We need to think about how long the water reel will take to run, which pipes have more pressure, what crops are in dire need, what covers the most amount of space, what will need transplanting next, etc.   

Last week marks the end of an era and the beginning of many others.  Summer education programs started last week and it's refreshing to have so many young people on the farm.  There is so much discovery and exploration happening and it puts a smile on my face.  A couple weeks ago a little girl asked me as I was in the wash station, "Are you a farmer?" and I replied "Yes I am, who are you?" and she proceeded to tell me her name.  It's such a delight to have so many levels of education happening in one place. 


We finished harvesting the garlic which had been in the ground since November, so it felt like a big deal.  This particular garlic really went through the ringer.  It sprouted in December and then we quickly mulched it with leaves.  It definitely experienced some deep frosts and did not receive much water or fertilization.  We didn't even need to weed it all season!  But to both Erinn's and my surprise it is some of the most beautiful garlic we have had in a few years.  The garlic will now cure in our greenhouse for a couple of weeks so that it will be able to store for the winter months.   

As for the summer vegetables, such as tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and carrots, they are moving along and should be ready very soon.  Luckily for these crops the heat and sunshine is perfect - we just need to keep watering.  The routine continues of seed, transplant, water, weed, water, harvest, and repeat.  And did I say water?      

I will leave you with a quote Amanda shared a few years back at this midsummer time. "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." -Hal Borland.

Enjoy the summer, the harvest, and the world around us,

Anna Kelchlin

Assistant Farm Manager

for the Farm

Notes from the Field: the Gratitude of Nothing Lacking

This one was a tough week.  It was hot, hot, hot, and dry, dry, dry.  The lettuce, in an unirrigated field, turned bitter and went to flower.  Our storage onions, in the same field, don't seem to be amounting to anything but big scallions.  The beets, kale, and napa cabbage just sat there, seemingly getting smaller.  It was difficult for the weed crew to weed, since the crops wilted as they pulled the weeds out from among the plants.  It was difficult to transplant, since even our robust Brussels sprout and cauliflower transplants wilted as soon as they touched the powdery-dry, 100+ degree soil. 

We sweated all day, every day, in the rain boots we were wearing so that we wouldn't get our feet soaked by the irrigation.  The disease we found in the pick-your-own tomato plants was confirmed to be late blight, so overhead watering the tomato and tomatillo patches was out of the question, as water spreads the disease.  We watched tomatilloes and beans, planted between rows of tomatoes, shrivel up as the week went on.  The field crew moved pipe, flushed pipe, irrigated, moved pipe again, up and down the fields, all day long.  We had to irrigate empty fields in order to help the previous crop residue decompose so that we could plant a second crop there.  We drip irrigated sweet potatoes and field tomatoes, eggplant and cucumbers and peppers, for literally days at a time.  I spent most of one day on the tractor, spraying copper on the tomatoes to try to protect them from late blight, racing the thunderstorms that finally delivered an inch of rain to us on Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, we picked thousands of pounds of squash and cucumbers from our new field at Gateways Farm in Weston.  Our outreach market, which provides organic produce to low-income community members for free with a voucher or for $5 a bag, opened on Tuesday evening.  It was very well attended despite its move to a shady new location; Dan, Sutton, Katie and Martha distributed over 70 bags of produce in one two-hour session.  Our garlic dried down beautifully in the greenhouse, with no sign of mold or disease.  The tomatoes kept growing, kept flowering, and began, slowly, to set fruit and ripen.  We fertilized, irrigated, and hoed the kale and Swiss chard, and they began to slowly rebound.  By Friday morning, after a week of work and an inch of rain, the color and texture of the plants was completely different.  The field crew planted thousands of scallions, broccoli, cabbage, beets, lettuce, fennel and kohlrabi for fall harvest.  We seeded more cilantro, dill, and a round of edamame for harvest around Labor Day.  There was no sign of the Spotted Wing Drosophila (yet) as our raspberries began the run up to their autumn harvest.

Most of the time, when things are going well on the farm, we don't mind working hard.  We are grateful for the chance to do work we love, work with a purpose and a result that can be measured in pounds, row feet, the beauty of a working landscape that we know like the backs of our dirty hands.  When things are not going well, on the other hand, this work can feel like that classic definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.  Irrigating again, despite the crops that keep wilting.  Spraying the tomatoes again, knowing that the best tools in our organic belt really only give us about two weeks of additional harvest time once late blight takes hold.  Praying for rain for the crops.  Praying for no rain for the tomatoes.  Trying to remember that there are other crops on the farm besides tomatoes.  Trying to remember that there are other tasks on the farm besides weeding.  Continuing to do hard physical work in uncomfortable conditions, wondering why we didn't get a real job in a climate-controlled environment. 

Using our brains and our bodies as hard as we know how, doing our best to work with nature instead of opposing it, even as the rules that we once counted on seem to be changing, can feel a little crazy when the rewards are so uncertain.  After all this -- planting and fertilizing and staking and tying and tying again and watering and fertilizing and spraying and spraying and spraying -- we still might not get any tomatoes.  We might lose a crop -- or more than one -- in the field that desperately needs some irrigation next season.  We might not quite be able to keep up with the weeds despite all of our efforts.  These losses, like our successes, can be counted in pounds, row feet, sleepless nights, empty hands.  They can gnaw at you if you let them.  They can whittle away at your endurance until you are numb, unmotivated, uninspired, thinking about that real job.  That job job.  

After the rain last Wednesday night and a long day of harvesting and distributing food on Thursday, I had a moment of remembering how to feel the gratitude that, most days, keeps me going.  It was a perfect summer evening, with a few shareholders still wandering through the beans and basil.  There was plenty of food in the fields.  There was a little moisture in the soil, a bouquet of flowers on the table, a chance to stop and take a breath and drink it in before I raced home to my waiting children.  There it was -- nothing lacking.  Nothing wanting.  Not everything in its place, the way I would want it -- nature is too wild and unpredictable for that.  But everything in its place, the way it is.  And us -- us in our place too.  

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew


Images by Rebekah Carter (2012).

Notes from the Field: Transition and Irrigation

This week we woke up and it was August. It's another time of transition, this time moving from July's wild and vigorous growth to fruition, the result of all that heat and photosynthesis. Slowly, if we've done our job right, the burden of our work shifts from planting to harvest over the course of the month. Storage onions fall over and need to be brought in. Cantaloupes begin to net and turn orange. Watermelons size up, and if we can keep them from the coyotes who are already stalking them, ripen up. Over the course of the month, the sweet potatoes will use all that green foliage they put on over the past couple of weeks to make some roots under there. In the meantime, the harvests of peppers, eggplant and tomatoes will pick up, and late summer will be upon us.

Over the past month, our farm has gotten 1.45 inches of rain, mostly scattered throughout the month, never more than about a quarter inch at a time. A quarter inch of rain definitely helps wet the surface of the soil so that irrigation water can soak in (there's that capillary action again). It doesn't do much for soil that hasn't had much water in a month. In general, vegetables like an inch of water... a week. In hot weather, even more. On dry soils (like ours), even more. Add that up, subtract one and a half inches in little bits here and there, and you get a whole lot of water that we've needed to use to keep crops going over the past month. That's farmer math.

You can see the results most vividly in the pick-your-own crops, where we haven't been able to irrigate yet, and the fall broccoli and cauliflower in the east field, where we ran overhead irrigation as we were transplanting -- the middle of the beds are beautiful, and the ends of the beds, where the overhead didn't quite reach, not so much. The last planting push of the season, when we're supposed to seed fall greens and turnips, is upon us this next week, and we're going to have to play the water game to see when -- and where -- we can get these crops in. The same is true for cover crops (more about those next week).

We use two kinds of irrigation on the farm. Overhead, the big silver pipes with impressive jets of water that turn in circles and make a reassuring "swish-swish" sound, is moved around the farm and used for everything from carrots to broccoli. We set up a line, flush it, and run it for 2-3 hours to make sure that the water soaks down to the roots of the plants. In the meantime, we set up another line so that when the first one is done we can turn another one on immediately. Shut down the first, turn on the second, and begin the process of dismantling the first line and moving it down the field to water another thirsty section. It's hard physical work, carrying 16 foot lengths of pipe several times a day, and hard mental work to try to set up a watering schedule that hits both the most vulnerable crops (newly planted seedlings), those that will benefit most in yield this year if they get water now (carrots, celeriac, broccoli, for example) and those that will benefit in yield next year if they get water now (strawberries, for example).


For tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, eggplant, melons, sweet potatoes and raspberries, we use drip irrigation under biodegradable plastic mulch. Drip irrigation is more efficient than overhead, and it doesn't have the same effect of spreading soil borne diseases through splash onto leaves, since it delivers water right to the roots of the plants. We can also fertilize through the drip lines, sending regular doses of fish and kelp, beneficial bacteria, and necessary plant micronutrients to the crops in their irrigation water. Because it takes time to set up and take down, we only put drip irrigation on crops that will be in for the whole season and that we won't double crop, and we try to plant these crops in big blocks so that we can water them in cycles. Once this system is in place, it takes lots more mental than physical work to keep it going.

Now, here's the thing: a dry year is hard on us in many ways. It takes more labor to irrigate, it takes more mental gymnastics to figure out the timing of planting and cultivating, and it really does decrease yields at our Lyman Estate field, which is not irrigated. Plant nutrition is dramatically curtailed in very dry soils, so plants are not only stressed by the lack of water, they're stressed by the lack of nutrients as well. Insects sense the stress and move in, and... well, you can imagine the rest. It's not pretty. All of that being said, however, a dry year is much, much better for us in terms of lessening disease pressure in some key crops (tomatoes, anyone?). Chances for a beautiful crop of tomatoes and colored peppers are much higher in a dry year. There's always a bright side. And now that we're turning the corner into the late innings of the season, with the big fall brassica planting behind us, the weed fires beginning to subside, and the tomatoes staked and tied up, hopefully we can begin to see the good results of that side even as we continue to irrigate.

Dan and Erinn are on vacation at the beach this week. We are so happy that these two hardworking farmers are able to go away for a week at the height of the season. It makes all of us relax a little to imagine them eating salt water taffy, doing crossword puzzles, and watching the waves roll in. Wherever you are, hope you can relax and enjoy the transition to late summer. Enjoy the harvest.

-- Amanda, for Andy, Erinn, Dan, Larisa and Lauren

Images by Rebekah Carter (2011).