For the month of June, after Shannon, who’d been in the field just about every day in May, and while waiting for Lynn to start full-time for the rest of the season (July 1st!), I’ve been back working in solo mode, which has been, surprisingly to me, a little strange and…unfamiliar. Right now, there are several great people sharing the tiny farm experience (TFE ;) each week, but coming on single days. Here, with Lynn and Raechelle (Tuesdays!), we take an extended Endless Salad lunch break in the backyard. It’s as relaxed and fun as it looks. This, I think, is how it SHOULD BE, a laid back mix of fieldwork and practical leisure. It’s a lot different than the 10-12-hour, garden-obsessed days of the first 3-4 start-up years, when I worked largely alone. After working with Conall right through the season last year, I realized that my original solo mission, one-farmer-one-field mode had…changed. Evolved. To continue to grow on this tiny farm, it seems I’ve taken the path that needs not more production acreage or machinery or straight, head-down hours of labor, but simply more happily committed PEOPLE. Hmmm… Not a brand new discovery, but driven home over the last month. An interesting twist on tiny!
Raechelle
Weeding day
A cool, gray, peaceful day of WEEDING. Lynn and Raechelle combine hoeing and basic hand weeding to pull up a nice mix of pigweed and lamb’s quarters, with a little mallow and orchard grass for variety. I did paths with the wheel hoe. At the same time, we checked for Colorado potato beetle eggs (orange clusters on the undersides of leaves)—they’ve been here for a week or more, but so far not in troublesome numbers. It’s slow work, but satisfying in the end. The potatoes are growing abundantly with all of the moisture (which isn’t a problem so far), so much of what’s weeded now won’t be coming back under the expanding leaf cover. That’s nice.
The Endless Salad…
Lunch has turned into a collaborative cooking affair, built around the near-infinite possibilities of the Endless SALAD. Everyone who’s around pitches in: here, Lynn and Melissa chop. We build it from what’s available in the field, plus supplies from the farmers’ market and from the supermarket (with mixed feelings, I’m now buying mostly organic), a variety of raw nuts, and sometimes meat (turkey, chicken, fish, so far). We pick the ingredients, and there can be MANY, by whatever sounds good together. It always works! The salads started last month, when I asked to join Shannon in her vegetarian lunches, and Lynn and Raechelle would fill out the table on the days they were here. This direct connection between growing and cooking and eating and people started last season, with Friday evening dinners after harvest, and the first, occasional all-local-food mini-barbecues, and now it’s become part of everything…
Thinking about it now, this deepening food awareness is happening over what seems like a curiously loooong time, this being Year 6 in the garden. For the first couple of years, I was out in the field alone, spending 10-12 hour days at least six days a week during the main growing season. At the end of the day, I ate TONS of veggies. It was normal to harvest several types of greens for a salad, plus whatever was around for a sauteed side dish, and every three-four days, I’d roast a bunch of root crops. Meat was definitely in there, regular supermarket fare, but almost as a garnish, a small steak or a big pork chop or a chicken breast, on top of a mountain of veggies. I relished dinner every day, partly from the novelty of having grown the better part of my meal, a lot because I has HUNGRY, and mostly, as I remember it, because it simply attracted me: the taste, the super-simple preparation, but also the physical feeling of satisfaction these meals brought. Then, I wasn’t giving much personal thought to nutrition or “local food” or anything like that, it wasn’t a calculated, conscious enjoyment, it seemed simpler, more common sense. During the winters, in between gardens, my old eating habits didn’t change: not much junk food, no instant microwave meals, still, the regular parade of meat-and-starch industrial food type eating, straight from the convenience of the supermarket aisles. It seems a little odd now that this didn’t concern me. Then again, I wasn’t tiny farming to save my health or save the planet, this wasn’t any sort of cause, instead, something I had wandered into, seemingly by chance, that took hold: there was no agenda, only an unfolding path to somewhere cool…hopefully! And then came last year’s people in the field transition. While the garden stayed tiny in size, the intensity increased as really relying on others became a part of it all. Along with that, the food we’re growing has become linked to…daily living, plain and simple, whether it’s sharing meals from the field, or people stocking up on things to take home at the end of the day (not so different from the farmers’ market or CSA, but even more…personal). And this increasingly deeper connection to FOOD, not based on concepts or conscious direction but just on what’s happening, is surprisingly new to me, yet another part of the tiny farm experience, where what should be obvious to us all is revealed in unexpected ways… (Guest photo: Lynn laughing, me tasting, by Raechelle.)
Scaling up the grass mulch
Not the nicest weather today, but good for gardening: not too hot (finally) and not too wet. The grass mulch experiment continues. With all of the recent rain, there’s been good growth, and I’ve cut and gathered quite a bit. Still, the volume of grass mulch available earlier in the season is still unknown, and it takes a lot to cover just one section. Here, Raechelle and Melissa (first time in the field) mulch tomatoes…
Great day in the field
Especially compared to yesterday, today’s mainly sunny, quite warm weather added up to a glorious day in the field. Lynn, Raechelle and Shannon were all on hand, plus the inadvertent pet chicken, Colonel Saunders (I guess there’s no going back to the flock for him now, he’s been separated for a few days and probably wouldn’t be welcome, but, uh, he will be eaten…). It’s so absolutely fun to do even the most potentially tedious tasks (like hand-weeding between tiny green onion seedlings—done!) in a group with such a happy vibe. Besides a good amount of weeding, and putting ALL the chickens outdoors for the first time (those White Rocks don’t seem to want to do anything chicken-normal on their own, except eat), we transplanted the first 100 tomatoes. These were the deluxe early starts (Juliet, Striped German, Big Beef, Stupice), and they got the best transplant treatment ever: a deep, dug hole with a generous amount of compost, burying to the topmost leaves, a thorough watering in, mulching with the oat straw, and then, floating row cover over top for the coming few cold nights—it’s hard to imagine this is a…commercial operation, especially when you’re selling toms for only $1.50-2/lb. :) We mulched directly around the plants with straw, I’ll fill out the rows with grass mulch as soon as there’s enough. On the marker stake, there’s the variety, seedlng start date, and today’s transplanting date. At the other end of the row, Raechelle and Lynn mulch (Shannon seems to mysteriously avoid the occasional snapshots most of the time…). With all of the recent cold, we’re definitely at least a week behind the last couple of years in transplanting and in growth, but with a few hot, sunny days to complement the decent amount of rain we’ve been getting (not usual in recent years at this point), we might even catch up… Anyhow, a fine day!
Photo shoot!
What a funny thing: an instant photo shoot in the field! A few days ago, I (reluctantly) did an interesting-people-in-the-community interview/profile for one of the local newspapers, and early today, I got an email asking for a photo, or the columnist could come out and snap one. They were on a same-day deadline. I said I’d send something along in a couple of hours. Shannon (who’s here every day till June) was working with Raechelle, here on her day-a-week, so I asked them to come up with the photo concept, location, and do the, uh, art/set direction—anything but a typical, kinda impersonal shot of a guy with a field in the background. Karen (Bob’s partner) had dropped by in a wheelchair, her first time at the farm in weeks since breaking her leg. She takes nice pics, so I asked her if she’d do the shoot, and wheeled her into the field with my camera. The concept was: S and R would pretend to mulch the garlic (the mulching’s done, but it’s the only really visible crop in the field), and I’d be around, holding a…well, digging fork (closest thing to a pitchfork, I guess). Anyhow, Karen snapped away, and for an alternate they came up with feet in the air. We emailed both, with a tighter cropping on the top one so it’s about square, with the left chopped out. I found it quite hilarious, because in a past life, I’ve attended and organized “real,” sometimes ridiculously expensive, studio and location photo shoots, with creative meetings, stylists, props, shooting permits and cops detouring traffic, the whole bit. Recreating all the basic parts in an hour or so, in the field, with whoever was around, was great! Devolution on the tiny farm… :) I wonder which one they’ll pick… (Guest photos by Karen.)
