It’s spring, I think. As I write, it’s a brisk 42 degrees with a stout southwesterly wind blowing in yet another mountain of black clouds, probably bringing even more rain. What a turn-around this spring has been. But, that’s just one of the things that make farming (and life) interesting: we never know what will happen next. One way or another, things always seem to work out.
We’d like to share with you some of what we’ve been doing, and to share some information with you all. As usual, I will outline the topics so you won’t have to wade through a lot of verbiage if you’re looking for specific information:
1. May Day events planned for April 30th
2. First pick-up dates in June
3. Summer Session sign-ups
4. Farm Animals: update on cows, pigs, chickens, and all
5. Late Spring Session of CSA (last Session before Summer)
6. The “Egg Mobile”
7. The “Benefits” of being a CSA member
8. Farm Chatter
9. Salmon Safe riparian restoration
10. CSA Handbook
1. May Day Events:
The May Day/Earth Day event here at the farm has become a tradition that we find ourselves looking forward to each Spring. We know many of you do too. I’m thinking we are going to have a dramatic change of weather by the end of the month, and come Saturday, April 30, we’ll be basking in sunshine. At the very least, it’s unlikely to be colder or wetter! Let’s hope for the best.
Official hours are from noon to 4:00. The main “scheduled” event is the May Pole which will start promptly at 1:00. But there are many other things goingon throughout the day and some on scheduled times.
Prior to the May Pole, starting at 12:30, we’ll take any kids that would like to help with the animals to do chores and collect eggs. We’ll repeat this later in the day (2:30) for those who come later. At 1:30, we would like to meet with all our Work Share Members for the 2005 season. Following that (2:00), I will to lead a walking tour of the farm. Wendy will do a walking tour at 3:00 (my walk will focus on vegetables; Wendy’s will focus on fruit and berries).
We also will have a variety of activities going on all day. One of these is that the NW Vintage Iron Club will be doing plowing and disking demonstrations with their antique tractors. Last year they started at 6:00 AM (they are early birds!), and were finished before we started! This year they’ll be starting at noon, so we can all see them do what they do, not just see what they did while we were all just waking up in the morning!
We’ll also have Wayne, our resident teamster (and comedian), who will have his team of Belgium draft horses hitched and ready for rides throughout the day. Speaking of “ Wayne and hitching,” also at the helm of the teams will be his friend, Marcie— Wayne seems to have had a busy spring too. Is the winner of last’s years “most eligible Teamster” award in jeopardy of his “eligible” status? Speculation is running high!
We’re very pleased that George and Eiko, our friends from Skagit River Ranch, will be here again this year, serving “happy burgers.” Their farm continues to be an excellent example of how to raise beef responsibly, and they have helped us as we too have started raising cows again (on a much more limited scale then they do). There is a charge for the meal as an attempt to defray costs. But their coming down is an act of goodwill, friendship, support of our CSA, and letting people know about their farm and their excellent beef, chicken and eggs. We are so glad they’ll be joining us!
As in years past, we’ll be distributing tomato plants to members. This will go on all day, and will be in the same area where the kids are planting their seeds (which will also go on all day).
So, here is the itemized schedule:
12:00-4:00 Barbequed burgers from Skagit River Ranch
12:00-4:00 Tractor Hayrides
12:00-4:00 Horse drawn Hayrides
12:00-4:00 Plowing and Disking demonstrations (NW Vintage Iron)
12:00-4:00 Seed planting for the kids
12:00-4:00 Self-guided tours: you’re free to “browse”!
12:00-4:00 Pick up tomato plants (2/Couples Share, 3/Family Share)
12:30 Kids (and interested adults!) Animal Walk
1:00 May Pole
1:30 Meeting in barn of 2005 Work Share Members
2:00 Walking Tour with Farmer Erick (vegetables)
2:30 Repeat of Kids Animal Walk
3:00 Walking Tour with Farmer Wendy (fruits and berries)
4:00 Official ending time. But if the weather is good, and/or you’d like to linger, you’re more than welcome to do so.
2. First pick-up dates for Summer Session
This is always a little “iffy,” but we’re optimistic that better planning and more experience are beginning to mediate contingency. So we are planning our first pick-up to be the third week of June. For those of you picking up Tuesdays, that date is June 14. Friday’s first pick up will be Friday, June 17. Saturday’s will be June 18.
I’m feeling pretty good about those dates, especially since just today I noticed the first of our crop of snap and snow peas just beginning to stick their heads out of the ground (into a very cold and wet day!). I would love to have u-pick peas on the first day of the season, and think that 2 months from germination of directly sowed seed should do it. We’ll see, but the “spring snap pea” roulette wheel has been spun.
There will be additional updates (not as long as this one, I promise!) e-mailed later in May, and when we get close to the start of Summer Session.
3. Summer Session Sign-Ups
It seems that last year in October I said something in one of my wordy newsletters to the effect that if you had plans that were uncertain, or if money was tight, you could just wait to sign up in the spring. Well, right now as we look at our membership numbers, and compare them to previous years’, we’re running lower than usual. We’re hoping for a good “burst” of registrations in May. Of course you who read this are probably the “choir” that has already sent in your applications. But if you haven’t, please do so soon. If you know folks who haven’t rejoined but intend to, please let them know about May Day (this update will be posted on the web site) and remind them that it’s time to sign up. And if you have friends who might be interested, have them check out our web page, contact us, or, better yet, come visit us on May Day.
4. Farm Animals
Here’s an update on the animals. This week we got three adorable little pigs. They’re settling into their new home and are also hoping for warmer weather! The cows have been here for a little over a month now. We’re settled into a routine that all of us are getting used to. “Salad Bar” beef are raised differently than conventional beef. First, they aren’t wastefully stuffed with grain (which isn’t good for them anyway—cows are meant to eat grass, not grain!). Secondly, they are rotated religiously: every day. That’s the routine part. One of us goes out and opens the gate to their new “salad bar” each day. They are anxiously waiting, and dive in eagerly. Then we take down the front fence (previously their back fence), and move it to become tomorrow’s back fence. The whole process takes less than half an hour, and ensures fresh greens daily for animals that need fresh daily greens, and it keeps the animals from needlessly trampling already grazed pastures while they are regrowing. The cows seem happy and are growing rapidly on their diet of fresh spring greens.
The chickens have been faithfully laying eggs all winter, and are still cranking them out at a pretty good rate. We have 50 baby chicks that actually aren’t babies any more, and will be getting another batch of chicks early in May. We also ordered an incubator and will be hatching out some of our own eggs throughout the summer.
5. Late Spring Session
The recipients of our layers’ regular production of eggs have been our winter and Early Spring CSA. Next Wednesday (April 20) we wind up the Early Spring Session, and the following week starts our last six-week Session (Late Spring) before Summer Session. Any of you who would like to jump in for the Late Spring Session are welcome to do so. You can sign up on-line (just as you can sign up for Summer Session on-line) at www.jubileefarm.org, or drop us an e-mail at jubileefarm@hotmail.com, or give us a call at 425-222-4558.
6. The “Egg Mobile”
A variety of considerations has led us to the conclusion that we need an “Egg Mobile.” What, you ask, is an egg mobile? Well, it’s a chicken coup on wheels that can be pulled by a truck or tractor or even a couple of willing people. The idea was “hatched” during the first of two long, messy, and somewhat frustrating times spent trying to save our chickens from certain death during flooding. Both endeavors were successful, but it was a lot of work. If our chicken coup were on wheels, they could be easily shut into their coop the night before a flood (these things don’t happen without plenty of forewarning) and pulled to higher ground.
The other reasons for a mobile chicken coup are happier chickens and dramatic improvement in the quality of our eggs. There’s just no denying that chickens allowed to eat grass and scratch around in a pasture for bugs are contented. And there’s no denying that a diet of grass, organic feed, and whatever else chickens find on a fresh, clean pasture all contribute to the production of eggs that are vastly superior to any other eggs. So it’s a great arrangement.
Building the coup has been a great experience. I’ve done very little construction work myself. Wendy has more experience than I do, but both of us really needed a boost to get the project going. Our neighbor Van has been good enough to help us out a great deal, not only advising, but working alongside us the whole time (and at times when neither of us were there!). I have to say it has been a lot of fun in the building. We hope to have it finished and on display by May Day.
7. The Benefits of being a CSA member.
This past Monday we were visited by a group from Seattle University which is taking a course in Environmental Studies. The class is taught by Dr. Michael Boyd, who I met several years ago and has since made a visit to our farm a regular part of his course syllabus. The idea was that the students were going to do some work, but the weather suggested otherwise. A rainy morning turned into a downpour just about the time the students arrived, and we huddled in the barn to stay dry and get out of the wind.
Michael, of course, teacher that he is, sensed a “pedagogical moment” and after we talked about what a CSA farm is, he asked his students “what do you think would be the advantages to the Members of being in a CSA?”.
In answer to his question, it didn’t take long for someone to come up with “great fresh fruits and vegetables.” On the heals of that, someone noted the health benefits of eating organically. There was a short pause, and then another student suggested the “community” dimension of CSA as being a benefit. Then there was a longer pause, which I suspect Michael wasn’t hoping for, but which he was certainly prepared for.
“You may know,” he said thoughtfully, “that in the United States the food we eat travels an average of 1,500 miles before it gets to us. You may also know that every gallon of petroleum-based fuel produces twenty pounds of carbon dioxide. It’s hard to quantify exactly, but that is certainly a lot of both non-renewable fossil fuel expended to get that food to the consumer, and a lot of unwanted environmentally dangerous by-products that we have to deal with. We often don’t think about these things, but it would seem to me that saving fossil fuel and avoiding pollution would be significant benefits of being a member of a CSA.”
The students had obviously been challenged to think on a larger scale. I had mentioned to one of them before we went into the barn that this is our third year of using bio-diesel, and now this student spoke up. She pointed out that the benefits of saving fuel and avoiding pollution are much stronger when the farm itself does not use petroleum-based fuel in the equipment used to produce the food. This led Michael to remind us about the appalling and almost unbelievable fact that modern agribusiness farms, with their enormous state-of-the-art equipment and voluminous inputs of synthetic fertilizers, expend more energy to produce food than the food they produce provides. How “sustainable” is that?
As you might guess, Wendy and I were enjoying this conversation, and as the rain continued, Dr. Boyd took up another topic. After his students identified the Mississippi River as the repository of the waters from the largest drainage basin in the US, he said this: “At one time the confluence of that river and the Gulf of Mexico was teeming with fish, shellfish, and all forms of aquatic life. Today, within a one-hundred mile radius of that confluence, there is virtually no life. The river and ocean within that radius is completely dead. Why? Run-off water from the largest agri-business type farms in America, farms that have been using chemicals and synthetic fertilizers for decades, drain into the Mississippi River. This run-off has killed the river.” The sound of the pounding rain was an apt background for his point. That rain permeates the soil, absorbing either nutrients to feed and sustain aquatic ecosystems, or it can absorb residual herbicides, pesticides, and deadly synthetic fertilizers. He continued, “I think that membership in a local farm that contributes nutrition and health rather than poison to the public water systems would be another significant benefit of CSA membership.”
Well, I think you get the gist. Dr. Boyd continued to push the students to look beyond the immediate, obvious, and personal when considering benefits. I was pleased to observe this process for two reasons. The first is that this seems to me to be the essence of higher education—not to train students for jobs, nor to fill their heads full of irrelevant or even relevant “data,” but to demonstrate to them how to think beyond the parochial contexts of self-interest. The second reason is that it reinforces so much of what I have come to see CSA to really be about.
CSA is a hot topic now in the media. This week it made the front page the NewYork Times. Because of this media attention, we get lots of “curiosity contacts.” We received an e-mail recently that was sent to every CSA in King County. The author said she wanted her family to eat healthy food. Her question for us was “how much does your produce cost on an average per pound basis—I’m looking for the best deal.”
Well, I didn’t respond in the way I should have. I should have said, “If you’re really looking for the best deal, you’ve asked the wrong question. You should have asked: (l) are you organic? (2) Do you practice cover-cropping? (3) Do you make compost? (4) Do you rotate crops? (5) Do you use petroleum or bio-diesel in your equipment? (6) Do you pay your employees a living wage? (7) Do you attempt to educate your members and raise their consciousness about the real costs of ‘cheap food’?”
What I mentioned about “self-interest” is crucial here. Most of us who have grown up in America take self-interest as a universal element in the human condition. And, in some sense, that is not wrong. But what many of us fail to realize is that the particular understanding of (the possibly universal characteristic of) self-interest in the West has been shaped by the uniquely Western notion of “individualism.” That this concept of individualism is a cultural phenomenon is obvious once we look beyond our own, small part of the world and our own history: many cultures have and continue to give the good of the whole priority over that of the individual. It is also the case that many cultures do not live under the misguided heuristic principle that what is good for the individual is necessarily good for the whole. I’m not, by the way, trying to make a blanket condemnation of individualism. There are many good things about it (take existentialism, which is a benign version of individualism, as an example). But when it is not balanced with some real consideration (not real “lip service”) to the needs of others and to the value of preserving our environment, then we end up with the kind of political, economic and environmental exploitation that has became characteristic of the Western world in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries.
We need to recognize that the “best deal” is not always that which offers immediate gratification of our personal desires. Our personal desires do count, and shouldn’t (and cannot) be ignored. But a larger context must become a part of the equation. Eventually it will, that is inevitable. But why wait until our natural resources are depleted? Why wait until our lakes, rivers, oceans, and every corner of our earth is polluted? Why wait until the division between the “haves” and the have-nots” has created such enmity between human beings that peace is impossible?
Unfortunately, we often think that change starts at the top. But this is rarely the case. Nor is it the case that change starts with “big” decisions. Small decisions—the decision, for example to look at the larger context of sustainability and justice in determining the “best deal”—provide the real basis for lasting change. Maybe even the “small” decision about the food we eat. The best “deal” can never be determined simply by pecuniary considerations, nor is it one simply predicated on self-interest. One of the benefits of being a member of a CSA (and of being an organic farmer) is that it provides the occasion for us to exercise our freedom to choose to do what is right—what is the best action looking at an issue from the broadest perspective—even if, in the short term, it appears to be more costly. Something as simple as the choice we make about the food we eat can provide the foundation for changing our lives. And only changed lives can change the world.
8. Farm Chatter
What a busy time of the year. Because the weather’s been “off and on,” we’ve been taking care of tasks that can be done when it’s wet. We now have finished pruning all the apple trees, and most of the grapes. We’re also done grafting apples and plums. We won’t graft again until August, when we hope to do more bud grafts on peach root stock. We’re still a few years out on the peaches, and a couple on the plums, but the day will come...
This has been a season where some of the “knocks” we’ve taken before are, I think, beginning to pay dividends (they’ve got to be good for something!). This is a “window of opportunity” kind of year—or at least it has been so far. In past years I usually figured that out after the fact. But this year has been different. We got most of our plowing done in the end of February when we were having our “spring” during the winter. Then we were able to work primarily on non-field work when the rains came—greenhouse propagation, rebuilding the hand washing station, building the egg-mobile, cleaning and organizing the barn, and all the fruit work I mentioned. But we’ve also had those “windows.” Sometimes they’ve come when we really didn’t want them. Last weekend Wendy and I thought we’d get a day off (since we didn’t take one the weekend before). But we had two dry days in a row on Friday and Saturday, and by Sunday it was dry enough to direct seed. So, that’s what we spent Sunday doing. This week’s been mostly wet, so we are now able to look back at that “window” and be very glad we utilized it.
The same thing happened the night we planted peas. I felt it was about time to get them in the ground (last year we were a bit early, the year before a bit late). It had been wet for several days in a row, but one day it didn’t rain, and the next afternoon it threatened, but the squall swung to the south of us. At 5:00 we could see we’d been spared (that’s the same shower, of course, we’ll pray for in July—how fickle we are!). So, even though it was late, we went for it. It was pitch black when we finished. But later that evening, when we did get rain, we knew we’d done the right thing for this season. The peas, by the way, are germinating now, and looking pretty good. We did them a little differently this year, using a different planter and running two parallel rows 9 inches apart. We’ll train both rows up the same trellis. Peas are great plants. As legumes, they are “givers” rather than “takers,” and can take being bunched together.
We did some “fun” planting yesterday. This is going to sound odd after all the work we’ve done trying to get rid of our invasive, Himalayan blackberries, but we planted blackberries. But not regular blackberries; we planted some blackberry varieties that are native to our area (I used to pick them when I was young, but I haven’t seen them around in a long time). We also planted some of the thorn-less varieties. We planted them just south of the grape arbors, in rows that run east and west. They should start producing next year. We also planted a northern variety of kiwi. We’ll have to see how they do, but hopefully in a few years they will start producing too.
9. Salmon Safe
You probably remember that last year our farm was designated a “Salmon Safe” farm. We’ve now, in conjunction with the Salmon Safe organization and King County, undertaken a riparian restoration project. One goal is to provide habitat for birds and small mammals on a corridor along the river. You will see when you come out that about one-third of the project is complete, with a twenty-five foot deep strip having been planted in indigenous trees (willows, cedars, spruce) and brush (snowberry, Oregon grape, and others).
The other goal is improvement of the growth of trees, especially willows on the bank and overhanging the river. This is important on our side of the river, as it is deep along most of our bank and overhanging trees would provide cooler water and shade which salmon prefer to travel through (for adults and even more for downriver smolt migrations). It’s sad that the Himalayan blackberries were introduced, and proved invasive enough to out-compete native plants. They are hard to get rid of, but they’ve been mowed, tilled, and now covered with landscape mat. There will still be a lot of hand work to do over the next few years, but they can eventually be eliminated, and a native habitat restored to encourage native birds, mammals, and fish (and Wendy wants to add “bugs”).
10. CSA Handbook - Helpers Requested
You may remember that one of the things that came up from many members in our surveys from last year was the need to create a handbook which would explain and clarify details regarding the “finer points” about how the CSA works here at Jubilee Farm. Wendy and I have brain-stormed and tried to come up with what we see to be the main topics that need to be included. We’ve chosen a FAQ (frequently asked questions) format. At this point we have the questions, and have written answers to a little over half of them. We hope to have it done by May Day.
The reason I mention this is that possibly some of you who have an interest in this would be willing to help us by editing the handbook as we work on it. We’d be glad to e-mail a copy of the document (Word format) to any of you who would be willing to check for coherency and typos, and also to see if we’ve missed anything. Obviously, this will be a work that will be revised a great deal even after we’re “finished” with it. But we would value the input of members now, as it is first being written. If you would like to help out, please drop us as note at jubileefarm@hotmail.com.