Hi Everyone,
I can’t believe it’s been five weeks since my last update. The reason is simply that we’ve been going non-stop, seven days a week since I wrote last. This is the time we really have to “get it done,” and I’m glad to report we did—but I’m sorry it was at the expense of newsletters. My guess is, though, that trading more and better boxes in July-October for a missed-update in May would be acceptable to most of you! What follows is only a fraction of the things I wish I had time to share with you all.
1.
Start of Summer Session
We are still on target to start our Summer Session CSA during the week of June 12th. If you are picking up on the farm you should come on your day during this week for your first pick-up. All delivery members pick up their boxes on Wednesday the thirteenth of June at their depots.
2.
May: the “quiet month”
When I fished in Alaska the radio was almost always alive with conversation. But there was one time each year when all conversation on the radio ended, and for hours at a time there were no transmissions—that was when the peak of the run hit. There was no time for chatter then. That’s the way this May was for us on the farm. We’ve just been so busy that there’s been no time to sit down and write a newsletter. This has been the first season in I-can’t-remember-how-many-years that we have worked with an entirely new crew. The crew is great, but I greatly underestimated just how much more work it would be to accomplish the necessary training! It’s been harder too because we are taking on a lot more this year—trying some new things and doing things in new ways. And the shift to BD (biodynamic farming) has taken some time and energy that used to be devoted to other things. But we’re doing well. I think you will all be pleased with how the farm looks and how it is functioning this year.
3.
Canning share
The “canning share” is still available. You can find information on the canning share on our web site at http://jubileefarm.org/newsletters/2007/20070314.html#canning. The deadline for signing up for a canning share is noon, Monday, June 25th.
4.
CSA Handbook
We just want to remind you that we have a CSA Handbook that answers a lot of the FAQs regarding Summer Session CSA. It is on our web page, http://jubileefarm.org/handbooks/summer.html.
5.
Early Summer Boxes
Coming off the abundance of the Late Spring Session, I always feel that I need to prepare people for the first couple of Summer Share boxes. And I feel the need to restate our growing policy: “when we can eat locally, we ought to eat locally.” That means, for us, that during our growing season (the 20 weeks of Summer Session), our boxes contain only what is grown on our farm. In our short “off-season” sessions we supplement our boxes with produce from warmer climates; but during our growing season, what you get is what is grown from our farm.
The first couple of boxes in Summer Session, when we make the break from getting some of that “produce from warmer climates” to getting only have what we grow, well, those first few boxes are a usually fairly small in size and pretty “green.” Sometimes people who have just joined our CSA say (or think), after getting their first box, “if this is what we’re going to get, there’s no way we’ll get our money’s worth on this.” That’s true. But we don’t even try to make each box worth exactly 1/20 of what you pay for a share. The first couple of boxes will be smaller and greener than others. That’s what “eating seasonally” is about; we eat what’s available. But the season comes on quickly, and before you know it, the boxes will be larger and more diverse. And then we get to the end of July, and we all forget about the smaller boxes of June. So, if you are new this year to CSA, or new to a farm that really does pack its main-season boxes 100% from what is grown on the premises, don’t jump to conclusions: it’s a long season and size, variety and value of the boxes have a way of at least evening out.
6. If you haven’t signed up for the Summer Session . . .
It always happens that some Members forget to sign up, or think they have but they didn’t. If you have not gotten a confirmation of your membership from us, although it’s logically possible we made a mistake, it’s just as likely that you didn’t sign up! We do allow people to jump in during the Session, and after week three we start pro-rating the cost. But if you haven’t signed up, and want to be a member, why not get in on the first three boxes? Sign up now! You can do it on line at www.jubileefarm.org, or give us a call at 425-222-4558.
7.
Work Share Needs
We are looking for some “specialty” work share members to help us out. We need someone to deliver boxes for us one half-day each week and someone to mow the lawn on the farm weekly (a JD riding mower, of course!). Please drop us a line if you are interested or have questions about what is involved (mailto:jubileefarm@hotmail.com).
8.
Kids’ activities on Wednesday and Saturday as Well as Tuesday and Friday
This year we will be having kids' activities on Wednesday and Saturday in addition to Tuesday and Friday. The activities for children are held each pick-up day during July and August. We have found that no time works for everyone, so we have selected different times on each day in hopes that days can be selected to coincide with nap schedules. The times are: Tuesday activities are at 12:30, Wednesday at 2:00, Friday at 3:30 and Saturday at noon. This information can also be found in the Summer Session CSA handbook that is on our web page at http://jubileefarm.org/handbooks/summer.html..
9.
Farm Chatter
Aside from getting the crops planted since our last update, we’ve accomplished three other significant things. We’ve made compost, made hay, and made significant steps politically toward our vision of establishing an “agricultural preserve” in the Snoqualmie Valley. Each of these projects is time and energy consuming, and are difficult to pull off during May. But we somehow (long hours) managed.
Because of the late flooding this year, we didn’t get the cows out of the barn until the first week in April. That meant the cows were in the loafing shed for five full months. People who like to quantify things have determined that on an average, each cow defecates and urinates a total of almost fifty pound each day. Perhaps new studies are soon to be released, but I haven’t seen any projected research projects on this subject—fifty pounds is the accepted figure. We had twelve cows this winter. Two of them were calves. So counting the two calves as one cow, I come up with the following: 11 times fifty is 550 lbs of manure per day, times 150 days is 82,500 pounds of manure. Added to that, of course, is the straw we used for bedding that was layered over the manure (and that serves to stabilize the nitrogen, which is why the manure has no odor). We used twenty bails of straw twice a week for bedding. Forty bails of straw at 75 pounds per bail weigh in at 3,000 pounds per week or another 66,000 pounds. The grand total of well-mixed straw and manure is just about 150,000 pounds, or 75 tons. From just eleven cows! Just think about the manure piles at feedlots which house thousands of cows!
What do we do with all that manure? Well, we don’t spread it on the fields--at least not yet. It needs to be composted. That’s where, on a farm our size, a large loader (a backhoe in our case) comes in handy. I estimate that I get about 800 pounds of manure in each bucket load, which means it takes about 200 trips from the barn to the compost pile. At the compost site (across the road and a little south of our barn), we mix the manure with a year's worth of old vegetables, old cut grass, old bails of hay, and anything else organic from the farm—usually one scoop of that sort of stuff for each scoop of manure. It is a big job. I didn’t get two straight days to work on it, but I’m sure it would have taken all of that if I could have done it straight through.
After the pile is finished, we treat it with a variety of Biodynamic preparations. This year we had to buy the preparations. But when you are on the farm this year, just south of the grape arbor, where we had our eggplants and peppers last year, you will notice that we have planted the herbs that are used in making the BD preps: yarrow, chamomile, valerian, stinging nettles, and others. Preps are also made from dandelion and horse tail, which grow naturally here in abundance. So the pile is treated with diluted quantities of the preparations, and then it starts to cook. That’s what our two piles are doing now. Last night I was working in the field just south of our piles in the evening, and just at dark I could see heat waves and steam from both piles. I haven’t been closely monitoring the temperature of the pile like I did last year, but I couldn’t resist going over and giving it the old “hand test.” I stuck my hand in about ten inches, and it was so hot I would have been burned if I had not quickly pulled it out! There’s a lot of life there!
We’ll turn the piles at least once. I wish we had the luxury of just letting them sit for a year, the way most biodynamic farmers do. But that doesn’t work here, and Steiner was wise enough to always qualify his indications with the observation that local conditions always take precedence over a formulaic way of doing things. In our case, we have the flooding to deal with. It seems to me that allowing the compost piles to be inundated with flood waters would be good for the valley, but not so good for our farm. Our compost pile would be like a giant tea bag, and the nutrients would all mix with the flood water and get distributed throughout the valley. I’m sorry, but we just can’t assume the responsibility for providing fertility for the entire valley! So, we will turn the compost at least once, spread it at the end of August, disk it in and immediately plant a cover crop. The cover crop quickly draws the nutrients in the compost into its cells as it grows. When we work the cover crop in next spring, we get the big pay-off! It’s a bit of a process, but it is the only way I know of to be truly sustainable—to grow our own fertility.
Last night Wendy made burgers (from our cow which we shared with a couple of you) using a recipe she found in The Grass-fed gourmet cookbook (by Shannon Hayes) that results in the best burgers I’ve ever tasted. Comparing the burger I ate last night to what I used to eat from fast-food places twenty years ago is like comparing a preschooler’s finger-painting to the Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment! After dinner we were talking about the huge recall of ground beef that’s going on right now. It seemed ironic in a way. We had just enjoyed a great meal from a cow raised on our farm, and a cow that contributed to the fertility of our farm. And we did so without the slightest concern about e-coli tainted meat. Wendell Berry gave the agricultural epitaph of the twentieth century when he noted that in the UW we took one solution, having cows on the farm, and turned that solution into two problems by removing cows from the farms and putting them into industrial feedlots. The solution was that cows on the farm brought fertility to the farm and health to the cows. With the modern phenomenon of “feedlots,” the fertility of the farm has been lost, and the health of the cows (and the safety of the meat we get from them) has been compromised. And what is our twenty-first century solution to these problems? Irradiation! As we move further away from the ways of nature, the solutions to the problems we cause likewise become more and more unnatural. Who knows where it all will end, but I think the solution is to get the cows back on the farm in herds that are appropriate to its size.
Our second big May undertaking was making “May hay.” In the Pacific Northwest putting up hay in May is pretty risky. Everyone loves May hay (especially the cows!), because it is young, tender, full of nutrients, and I think tastes good too (to cows, who go crazy for it in the winter). But it is risky to cut your grass, hoping you’ll get the five or six hot days in May that you need to cure it, bale it, and get it into the barn. You know how often the weather forecasts change during May. All it takes is one rainy day in the week and the hay is ruined. But on the strength of a good intuition that it would be warm and dry, we cut the hay, and then had five straight ninety degree days—just what we needed. But we didn’t have any extra time to spare. As we picked up the last bales of hay late Sunday night, the storm clouds were gathering, and before we got out of the field with the last hay wagon, we were in a serious electrical storm, which, of course, was followed by rain. It was close, but we won this time.
In all, we put up almost a thousand bales of hay out of this first cutting. We need about five hundred more, and should get that easily from the second cutting. The second cutting will also be much better because of the early cutting we already made, as the re-growth is also young and tender. So, you win all the way around by getting an early spring cutting. And although it was a lot of sweat to get it done, once done, we’re set for next winter. It’s a good feeling.
The third “big project” in May has been our on-going political work to try to develop some solutions to the problems facing agriculture in our valley. Wendy and I and other farmers have been busy trying to get both short-term and long-term flood remediation. We have met with Kathy Lambert and with Sharon Nelson, Dow Constantine’s chief-of-staff, and believe we have made good progress toward the immediate needs of farmers in the coming flood seasons if we are going to survive being the repository for the storm water for growing developments and cities. We have also taken significant steps toward long-term flood control. Achieving flood control will require many years, and a lot of hard work. But we are now teaming up with environmental groups (Salmon Safe, and the Cascade Land Conservancy, for example) and many other groups, all of whom recognize that (1) local agriculture is a value that we need to preserve, (2) the preservation of local and especially organic (biodynamic) agriculture is good for the environment, (3) the “mega floods” that we have been experiencing are not good for farmers, or for the ecosystem in the Snoqualmie Valley, (4) the large floods are especially damaging to the Chinook Salmon runs (which are on the Federal Endangered Species list) as they scour the spawning areas between our farm and the mouth of the Raging River, and (5) water is going to become our most precious resource—one we can’t allow to simply wash out to the sea without wise and careful management. I don’t know if flood control will happen in my lifetime, but I believe it is a worthy goal and the sine qua non for the stabilization and growth of a productive agricultural community in our valley.
More could be said, but I need to go plant edamame (second rotation). We look forward to seeing most of you next week. Things are different for us from here on out, and we are eager to share our farm and its productivity with you all.
Erick and Wendy