Hi Everyone,
Our holiday update didn’t quite get written this year. I hope you’re not thinking that Wendy and I have run off to Mexico and forgotten about Jubilee. Not a chance! Actually, we’ve been thinking so much about the farm we just haven’t had time to write, nor have we quite known what to write. But it’s time now, and we want to share some thoughts, some news, and some information about CSA in 2006. Here’s a topical look at this update:
1. Why Wendy and Erick not only didn’t go to Mexico and forget about the farm, but why they didn’t even go at all
A week before Christmas we had a sad thing happen. I had gone down to help Julie get her car towed from where she had broken down on the freeway. She and her car had just left when I got a call from a neighbor. There had been some kind of accident. Wendy had been cut pretty badly, and he was on his way with her to Evergreen hospital. I was closer to Evergreen than they were, so I arrived first and nervously waited for them at the emergency room. When they arrived, Wendy was in a lot of pain. It turned out she had somehow gotten her hand in the blades of the blender. There was quite a bit of damage, but a couple of hours later she had 29 stitches and an appointment with a hand specialist for surgery the next day.
The surgery which was meant to have lasted one hour turned into a five hour ordeal. But the surgeon was able to reconnect cut nerves, tendons, and arteries. Thankfully he was (and still is) confident that in time there will be complete or near-complete healing. It’s the right hand (Wendy’s right-handed); primarily the index finger and thumb are affected. It became quickly clear to us, however, that carefully monitored rehabilitation was crucial to regaining use of her hand. So with some mixed feelings we canceled our trip to Oaxaca, and decided the prospects of Wendy’s full recovery, along with the privilege of experiencing twenty-seven straight days of rain, were more important than tracking down the homeland of the first corn plant. We’ll do that another time.
By the way, Wendy wants to make it clear that she wasn’t using her hand in an engaged blender instead of a wooden spoon! It was a pretty unusual situation. Somehow the blender became disengaged from the base, resulting in the spilling of the mixture all over the counter. Wendy thought she could salvage the little bit of juice in the base of the blender, and while turning it upside down to pour it into her glass, she must have hit the on switch. Fingers, tendons, arteries, and nerves are no match for a blender!
It’s now been five weeks since the accident. The hard cast has been removed, and the rehab work is slow but there is improvement. She is getting around pretty well, and even drove her truck alone to Monroe (a real trick with a standard transmission and only a left hand to shift with!). But it will be many weeks if not months before she gets use and strength back in her hand. What some people will do for a smoothie!
2. Every cloud has a silver lining
It’s hard to have hopes dashed, but I’m sure you’ve all experienced set-backs like ours. As with so many other things, they can be the occasion for despair or an opportunity for something unexpected to happen. The latter was our experience, and several good things have happened because we weren’t able to run off to Mexico and miss all that rain. One of those things was that we made a timely decision and acted upon that decision in a way we could never have done had we been out of the country: we decided to breed the three heifers we bought last year, and start a year-round beef herd. And being here, instead of there, we were able to hunt down a bull, and as of today, we have (I think) three bred heifers that should come fresh in early October.
One day not long after the accident Wendy and I went for a drive to our favorite “close” place—the Skagit valley. We never seem to tire of that area, and on this trip we stopped and visited a friend who is a very good organic farmer in the Skagit. Our Skagit meandering always seems to find us in LaConner, and once there we invariable spend time in the little bookstore/coffee shop at the south end of town. I’ve always been surprised at the nature of the selection of philosophical books at this bookstore, and on this occasion I found a book that was the book I’ve been waiting for someone to write. The book is about the theory of evolution, and the impact our acceptance of that theory has on the question of the “meaning of life.” More specifically, the book is an analysis of the writings of world’s leading expositor and popularizer of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Richard Dawkins (who himself is the author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, among other books). This book made a lot of things come together for me, and just in time to get a proposal together for a ten-credit course on this topic next year at BCC. The course hasn’t been approved yet, but I think it will be, and I know it would not even have been proposed from a beach in Mexico. That’s two!
In addition to the bull and the course, Wendy and I have had a lot of time for reading and digesting a lot of information we got at the National Conference in Indianapolis. I’ll have more to say about that in the next part of this update.
3. Report from the national Acres Organic Conference in Indianapolis
After attending the WA State Tilth Producer’s conference for the last many years, we decided this year to try something different, and travel to Indianapolis for the 35th annual Acres USA organic conference. One thing about making the trip that was especially attractive to me was that there was a three-day, pre-conference short-course on soil fertility with Neil Kinsey. Kinsey was a student of Dr. William Albrecht, the American soil scientist who has arguably made a greater contribution to the understanding of soil fertility and organic methods than any other person in modernity. Albrecht devised a system of soil testing and spent his life determining the ways not only to detect and quantify mineral deficiencies in the soil, but to establish a soil fertility program that balances minerals and micronutrients. Kinsey’s course was an intense presentation of the findings of Albrecht. It was grueling, tedious, and long to be sure. But I walked away from those three days with clarity of understanding regarding soils I had never had before.
Following Kinsey’s short course was a conference filled with nationally known speakers, and over one thousand organic farmers from all over the US and beyond. Because we were just finishing the last week of our Fall CSA distribution, Wendy stayed behind while I attended Kinsey’s course. Then she came and joined me for the three-day conference. I can’t begin to tell you the impact the conference had on us. Unlike a lot of conferences, this one had virtually nothing to do with marketing. It really wasn’t about how to run a CSA, or who to wholesale organic products, or anything like that; its singular focus was how to grow truly nutritional crops (and how to quantify and measure the nutritional value of those crops), and how to enrich the soil (and how to quantify and measure that enrichment). I know that I wouldn’t have been ready for a conference like this just a few years ago. But “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.” I really believe that.
Sometimes after an experience like we had in Indianapolis, you hardly know what to do or where to start. On the flight home, Wen and I made a 2006 “action list.” Before we were done, we had listed over thirty items we want to implement this year from the conference. Some of the changes are small but some are very significant. Most will be on-going. For example, the first thing we did when we got home was to pull soil samples from 28 different parts of the farm. We now have the results, and thanks to the short course with Kinsey and his clear teaching of the Albrecht system of soil fertility, some of the mysteries that have plagued me for years about the management of minerals and nutrients are being solved. We will certainly be amending our soils this year with both minerals and micronutrients.
I could go on and on here, but I’ll close this section with just this one more item from the “action list.” This has to do with the use of the refractometer. This is pretty typical of what this conference did for us. A refractometer is a testing tool that provides on a calibrated scale a reading that reflects the relative nutritional value of vegetables. It’s not that before the conference we didn’t know what a refractometer was. Not only did I know what it is, but I bought one five years ago. But I had hardly ever used it, and that for two reasons. First, I didn’t have time to do it, (and I didn’t have a partner like Wendy who was all over this and who, by the way, didn’t know we had one). Second, and more significantly, I didn’t really know what to do with the results. Not being confident in soil fertility issues, I knew I wouldn’t know what to do to improve my refractometer measurements (some of you are familiar with this scale—it’s popularly known as “brix-readings”) if they were low. And so, I just avoided the whole issue. But no more avoidance! And now, we do know what to do should our brix-readings indicate necessary soil remediation.
I think that years from now we will look back to our attendance at this conference as a significant turning point for our farm. It’s only going to get better.
4. Winter CSA: first delivery Wednesday, February 1st, in your neighborhood
After our largest-ever Fall CSA Session, and after the Indianapolis conference, and after our productive (non)vacation, and even as the days every-so-slowly begin to lengthen and the plum trees are beginning to break bud, well, we’re ready for the start of our Winter CSA Session. Eating wholesome, nutritional food is a year-round calling, and so is supporting your very own local organic farm and farmers. We’ve had our six-weeks off, now it’s time to get started again. We appreciate the many of you who have already signed up—it’s looking like we’ll have a significant membership increase over last winter. If you were in the Fall CSA, you will be getting a call from us this weekend (January 28th and 29th). If others of you want to get on board for the next six weeks, please send a note and we’ll be happy to let you know where our depots are (we have seventeen locations and are willing to set up more if we need to).
The first delivery of the Winter Session will be Wednesday February 1st (we always deliver on Wednesday). For those of you participating, please remember to save any egg cartons you’ve accumulated over the last six weeks. Although the coyotes and the eagles have done a little thinning of the flock, the survivors are producing more eggs all the time, and it helps us a lot to get those one-dozen egg cartons. Also, please remember to return your box(es) to your depot from last session on the first day of pick-up (Wed, Feb. 1st).
5. Rain, Rain, Rain—flooding and the spring outlook for the farm
Many of you have sent e-mails wondering how we’ve been making out here with all the rain we’ve had. Actually, it’s been a pretty easy year for us flooding-wise. The worst flood we had wasn’t in winter at all. In fact, it was still almost summer—well, the second week of fall: September 29th. Those of you who pick up on Fridays, and especially the few of you who we failed to make contact with to warn you that the roads were closed and Friday pick-up had to be cancelled (I could mention names, but you know who you are, and I hope you have forgiven us!)—you remember the 29th flood, our earliest ever. Since then, the river has been full most of the time, but not over its banks very much. We did have a little flood last week, with one day that we couldn’t get out. But other than that, it’s just been soggy and sloppy here, as it has been everywhere.
We’re hoping that we don’t get a repeat of last spring, the driest on record. It was just a year ago that we were beginning our drought. We had an extraordinarily wet spring, which impacted our early crops. I suppose it could happen again, but it seems unlikely. We’ve heard nothing other than a long-term forecast for average-to-slightly-above-average rainfall for the spring. We’ll take that!
6. Summer CSA delivery option available again in 2006
We have decided to resume our Summer Session CSA delivery option this year. I am painfully aware that this represents yet another flip-flop in our less-than-stable Summer Session delivery policy, but after a lot of thought and discussion, we’ve decided to do the deliveries again.
It will work in much the same way as before, except that there will be a small delivery charge and a little more flexibility for members who use this option. Those of you who want delivery will sign up for the delivery option and select a depot. Unless we hear otherwise, we will deliver a box with your name on it to your depot each week. But should you chose, and if you contact us by noon Monday to let us know, you can come in and pick up at the farm on weeks when that works for you. The only thing we ask and must stick to is that we need to know no later than noon Monday, so we can prepare for our week’s harvest.
We also will charge a small delivery fee. The charge will be two dollars per week for a share (Couples or Family). Since there are 20 weeks in the Summer Session, everyone who signs up for delivery will be billed a total of $40 for the 20 week session. If you pick up every week at your depot, it will be two dollars a week. If you exercise the option to pick up at the farm, it will work out to a little more than that (depending on how often you come out). But everyone who signs up for the delivery option will be billed the $40 delivery charge.
I could go into a long explanation of why we have vacillated on the Summer Session deliveries, but I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say these two things: (l) we are more confident now that we can provide better quality control on our Summer Session boxes, and (2) we have listened to what a lot of you have said about having the option to have your boxes delivered. We believe at this point this will work for us, and we hope it will work well for many of you as well. If you have already signed up for a pick-up day at the farm, you can just send an email (jubileefarm@hotmail.com) and we’ll get you on the delivery list if you’d like to do that. We’ll handle the Summer Session deliveries just like the deliveries in the Fall/Winter/Spring Sessions. Deliveries will be on Wednesdays. We’ll call you all the weekend before we start to let you know for sure where your depot is and what hours you can pick up your boxes.
7. Farm Chatter
It’s been a wet but mild January. Two days ago I pruned the two Japanese plum trees that guard the apple orchard. They were already starting to break bud! Wendy and I went out to see how the new plum orchard is doing, and it was easy to see which of the graftings we used from those two Japanese plum trees had “taken”—they’re the ones whose buds are swelling and about to break. The rest of the plums will come along a few weeks later, which is good for us. Wendy has done all the grafting in the last couple of years, and we now have 36 good grafts out of our 50 trees. It will be up to me (second string grafter) to try to graft into the remaining 14 trees. Obviously, it’s too late to turn those trees into our yummie Japanese “Beauty” variety. But we still have plenty of scion wood we can “borrow” from other varieties that have taken, and we’ll use those scions for grafting onto the 14 two-year-old recalcitrants! I suspect a lot of you would agree that there is just something about those two-year-olds. Anyway, that’s my job for the next couple of days.
Now that we have a bull, and because our chickens don’t take vacations in the winter, we have daily animal chores to do. It takes about an hour to move the cows and care for the chickens. And that has to be done every day. Then there are eggs to wash. All this is what we consider daily chores, which is different from work. You can’t start work until your chores are done. For our work we’ve been slowly whacking away at three projects: cleaning the loafing shed of about ten years accumulation of “stuff,” getting the remaining tomato houses cover-cropped, and planting onions.
Those of you who have storage space know what happens to it—it tends to get filled up. One of the important reasons we got a bull and are now planning having a year-around herd is one not many of you might have guessed. What we really want is the cow manure. That might be surprising, or even sound silly, but it’s true. The long-term solution to unsustainable farm practices is to “produce” your own inputs. We need compost on this farm. One of the necessary components of compost is manure. Hence, we need manure. The way we get manure is to catch and stabilize it during the winter. During winter, the microbes are dormant in the soil, so having the cows on the fields is not only bad for the soil (compaction), the value of their manure is lost. So, during the worst months of winter, we bring them into the loafing shed (they don’t complain about that!). The future compost then falls on the concrete floor. Rather than scoop the, well, “poop” (is that technical enough?) up, we just cover it with straw and let it build. If you add enough straw, the straw will absorb the valuable urine, and the “rest.” It also stays clean by adding new bedding material, which the cows like. Layer by layer the stabilized manure and straw builds throughout the winter. Then in the spring, when the grass grows, and the microbes become active, and the cows hit the pasture—that’s when we scoop up the whole mixture, mix it with some clippings from that nice green grass (which at that time grows way faster than the cows can eat it), and make compost from our own resources—no outside inputs.
All the above is predicated, of course, on the loafing shed being able to house the cows, which is why one of the projects I’m working on is cleaning the loafing shed. I’m making some progress, but it’s slow. Sometimes it’s hard to part with things that you saved for some reason. But just how much stuff can we accumulate in life? At least we know what part of it all we’ll take with us.
Planting onions is a sure sign of spring. It’s been stretched out a bit this year, but we’re also planting more than last year. Last year’s onions were ok, but now looking at the soil sample from that area I realize that with just a little soil balancing and the addition of a couple minerals could have made all the work of doing an onion crop a lot more productive. It’s interesting that you can do all the work necessary for a great crop, but one deficiency can result in just an average crop.
There’s more to “chatter” about, but it’s time to get to busy. Another season is on its way, and we’ve got lots to do.
Erick and Wendy Haakenson