Notes from the Field: Summer Solstice

The sun stood still last week at the northernmost point in its travels up the sky. The weekend full moon was huge, the closest to the earth it will come this year. A double rainbow graced the sky after a brutal thunderstorm pounded the fields with yet more rain. We plowed under the spring's cover crop, driving the tractors through fields of purple and white vetch and pea flowers under a perfect blue sky to prepare the way for the fall's broccoli and cauliflower. Must be summer.

The beautiful weather at week's end was a balm to farmers to whom the spiritual exercise of waiting and acceptance does not come easily in the rain. Dan, Sutton and Zannah jumped on the tractors to cultivate everything in sight, and the weed crew followed behind to clean up what was left. We were grateful once again for our well-drained sandy loam soils as the sun and light breeze quickly dried them out and left them perfect for planting and cultivating. The field crew, who had their first few days with us last week, proved that they are up to the task, picking beautiful bunches of greens and radishes and transplanting chard, rutabaga and beets for harvest later in the season. We ferried a thousand tomato stakes to the fields at the Lyman Estate, ready to tie up the robust, stout tomato plants that escaped their brush with the pythium soil fungus during the wet weather and now stand as tall as our knees. We released our first batch of beneficial parasitic wasps, to try again to cut down on the fuzzy yellow bean beetle larvae that can decimate a bean planting. We seeded a summer buckwheat cover crop on a fallow field even as we turned in our spring cover crops. Fava beans grew. Carrots and squashes lengthened and fattened. Pigs seemed hungrier than usual once the rain stopped and they could forage outside again. The sun stands still, but farmers and vegetables don't.

Still, there is a subtle shift in the tasks of the season at the solstice, despite the fact that weeding, planting, harvest and field preparation continue. The twin hurdles of the summer -- staking and tying tomatoes and planting the big block of fall brassicas -- are still before us. As those finish, we'll turn our thoughts and bodies to the summer's heavy harvests: summer squash and cucumbers in July, eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes in August. The fruiting crops remind us that the energy of summer is in ripening, maturing - the work of completion and fulfillment that tends towards the autumn seed. The quick growth of the crops (and weeds!) on sunny summer days is almost visible to the naked eye. Vegetable plants are building their framework, adding on daily, growing above and below the soil during these longest days, resting at night to prepare for more growth, more stretching, more expansion during the day. And although we farmers sometimes barely notice it in the full business of the season, the solstice is an immovable marker on the wheel of the year. It comes, and passes, whether we observe it or not. The crops tell us. The sun tells us. Our tired bodies remind us. Summer's work is upon us.

Enjoy the harvest,

Amanda, for the farm crew

Photos courtesy of Saul Blumenthal.

Notes from the Field: Resilience

Mid-June is a transitional time on the farm.  The big planting pushes of the spring are over.  While we'll keep putting in successions of carrots, lettuce, beets and greens until September, only one more big block of planting -- our fall broccoli and cauliflower -- stands between us and autumn.  The major tasks of the next few weeks are getting those plants in the ground, keeping everything as weed-free as we can, staking and tying our acre of tomatoes, and feeding the crops as they need it.  The harvests are manageable up until the first big pick of the season -- the garlic -- in early July.  At some point later this week, nighttime temperatures will climb out of the fifties and we will start picking squash and cucumbers three times a week.  The plan is in place, the die is cast, and a big part of what we have to do now is pay attention so that we know what to do when the time comes.

There is a lot of talk about resilience, in farming and out of it, these days.  A resilient small farm, in a somewhat dry dictionary sense of the word, is one that is able to respond to unexpected adversity with strength and flexibility.  This week, as I've been thinking hard about the ability to bounce back, to grow stronger through challenges, I realized that I have spent the better part of a decade trying to create a plan for a farm where nothing can go wrong.  This, of course, is nonsense.  Unexpected adversity is as much a part of farming as it is the rest of life.  Adversity, absurd or appalling, makes an appearance in every farm season whether we look for it or not.  It might be a pest that devours eighty percent of our spring peas.  It might be a tractor that stubbornly refuses to start no matter what we do on a day when the sun is shining and we need to cultivate, or a flood that washes away a crop and a field with it.  The challenges we take on ourselves -- the everyday hard work that is just part of farming, like training for an athletic endeavor -- are a very different thing from the sudden hailstorm, the unforeseen blight, the dry spell that becomes a drought before your eyes.  The real strength of the farm lies not in somehow, through superhuman effort, barring the door to these troubles; it is in realizing that there is no door.  All that we have is our ability to adapt, survive, and, if we are very lucky and very wise, build something new and beautiful from the aftermath.

We build a resilient small farm with three kinds of strength, woven together like warp and weft through the work of everyday.  One is an internal strength, the work that we do that's almost invisible.  It is soil building, team building, creating systems and practices that are both extremely effective and totally dispensable if need be. It is incorporating farming methods that we believe are good for the environment and adaptable to the vagaries of the new normal weather patterns -- cover crops, beneficial organisms, and all the old artistry of organic agriculture that it takes a lifetime to learn.  It is the constant work of maintaining a mental state that can create and believe in a complex plan -- for the day, the week, the season -- and let it go at a moment's notice.  This kind of strength has as its basis  the courage to be awake enough to see the thing you least want to see, whether it is trivial or tragic, and to let go of your former plans to begin your preparations for a new reality.  It is the strength to give up on a practice that you have come to rely on, that feels familiar and easy, because it is no longer serving the larger purpose of building a healthy farm. It is the fortitude to cut your losses, to turn in the crop that won't make it despite the work you have invested in it.

The second kind of strength is the strength of patience and healing, the adaptability to move beyond the rift in the pattern we had planned and begin to weave a new one.  It is the ability to dig deep, to recognize that scar tissue can be strong.  It is the backbone both to grieve and to not take it personally.  This is the strength that turns the loss, after the initial shock is past, into an opportunity -- it is the ability to re-plant the empty bed, to know that if the soil is good, some other mystery will take root there to be harvested.

The third strength is the strength of community.   In all the work that we do on the farm, we are dependent upon the understanding and responsiveness of our community (you) to support us through the hard times, and we owe you a constant stream of explanation and education; in crisis, however, community support means freedom, the chance to take the time to reflect and make good decisions instead of responding based on debt and fear of loss.  The resilience that comes from community also means all of the other things that community brings with it -- conversation, connection, mutual learning and respect, shared meals, generations, friends of friends, mistakes and missteps, and, if we are very lucky and very wise, deepening knowledge and increasing flexibility.

As we move into this mid-season pattern of tending to the plants, watching the skies, and interacting with each other through our various programs, I am hopeful that our farm's strength is this kind -- not the strength of that barred imaginary door, but the strength of the open window that can't shatter, of those "prayers that are made out of grass."

Enjoy the harvest.


Amanda (for the farm crew)

Notes from the Field: Chisel Plows and Tomato Stakes

All of a sudden we turned around and it was July. The vigorous, weedy growth in our fields could have told us this, as could the newly disked and fertilized beds waiting for fall broccoli and cauliflower to be planted this week, or the tall, gangly tomatoes that need to be staked and twined. We get a little infusion of additional labor in the fields this week from our new field crew members, Rachel and Andy, recently back from their travels, and our fully staffed weed crew; we are at full strength now in the fields and will stay that way through August.

July may be the busiest time of year on our farm. We have quite a bit of seeding and transplanting of fall crops to do, and while it's not as many beds as the huge planting push of April and May, it's combined with ever-increasing harvests and other tasks, like cultivating, weeding, dealing with insects and diseases, and tying tomatoes, that make these weeks feel like the very peak of the roller-coaster ride of the season. Before July, it's plant, plant, plant. After July, it's harvest, harvest, harvest. For these brief four weeks in July,it's try to get it all done at once, hang in there and enjoy the ride. Ice cream helps with this.

It is interesting for me, after a year of being mostly away from the farm after the birth of my daughter Sadie, to notice which of our farm's large collection of tools feel particularly useful during this peak season. Some are old friends: the shade cloth that covers our greenhouse in the heat of the summer is the only reason we are able to germinate and grow lettuce transplants for our summer successions. Some are new purchases: our Schaper Brothers fertilizer spreader, built for us by hand in Pennsylvania this spring, has helped us eliminate the "hate labor" of pushing a heavy hand spreader over uneven field surfaces for hours at a time, one of my least favorite jobs when I was pregnant (or, really, at any time on the farm). Some are incidental purchases that turn out to be incredibly useful: our new cultivating tractor, which we've affectionately named "Li'l K", since it's the smaller of our farm's two Kubotas, happened to come with a three-point-hitch mounted rear cultivator that turns out to be almost the perfect tool for cultivating plastic pathways, though it's not for the faint of heart. Some are unexpectedly valuable far beyond their cost in dollars: a six-hundred-dollar mini-chisel plow, which can fit in the back of our pickup truck, has reshaped our tillage regimen, helping us make beds more quickly while minimizing compaction and soil layer inversion in our fields. Our tractor-mounted boom sprayer, despite its idiosyncracies, saves us hours and hours of time with a backpack sprayer applying fish emulsion or organic pesticides when we need to. And the funny little fertilizer injector that sends fish, kelp and micronutrients directly through the drip irrigation lines to the roots of the plants, which cost us less than $200 a couple of years ago, may be one of the most effective and important tools on the farm, though you may miss it if you walk around the fields.

Because labor is by far the biggest cost on our farm, when tools that are supposed to save us labor work the way they should, we feel it acutely -- we're able to direct our precious person-hours to tasks that no equipment can do as well as human hands. Hand weeding carrots and parsnips can't be avoided, despite our best efforts with the cultivating tractors and the flame weeder. Harvesting is highly skilled work that takes training and practice to perfect. And we haven't been able to find any machine that can pound posts or tie tomatoes.

Our farm is a funny size -- at eleven acres, we're big enough that wise purchases of equipment can have a big impact on our productivity, but we still require a large crew of people to make it all happen. Being able to afford all this -- both the ongoing development of our fleet of tools and the development of an efficient and manageable staffing model -- is something that is on our minds every day, even during this peak season. After seven years at Waltham Fields, I feel like these complex interactions between equipment and people are still one of the fascinating puzzles that make farming a constant learning process.

Meanwhile, the sun is shining, the weeds are growing, and it's time to get back to work. Enough chatter. Stay cool, everyone.

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

Getting our Hands Dirty

In action!

The beauty of the Children's Learning Garden rests not only in its luscious, green glory, but also in its ability to bring children together to learn about the land, farming, and food production.

Getting through the drought

Garden work, including seeding, transplanting, weeding, watering, and harvesting, helps kids develop an understanding of the plant world and its importance to humans, animals, and ecosystems all over our planet.

Collecting basil

By taking part in all aspects of the plant life cycle, the children gain a stronger appreciation for their food and the life-giving nutrients it provides us.

Food's more fun when you grow it yourself!

In the Learning Garden, we try to grow a variety of interesting fruits and vegetables like the ones that you 'll see highlighted in our blog, as well as a number of staples that kids (and adults!) love to eat. If you or your child have any suggestions for next year's crops, feel free to email your ideas to us at wfcfblog@gmail.com.

Media (text and image) created and published by Rebekah Carter 2010.