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.
Where have all the newsletters gone?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to write, intended to write, and have even gotten a few pages written—pages that ended up never being finished. Those of you who have been with us for a while know I like to write and are probably (rightly) suspicious that there are reasons for the lack of communication. The reasons have been many, but they all come down to the same thing. We have just been working such long hours that I haven’t had the time or energy to get an update out. Wendy and I haven’t had a day off since early spring, and many nights each week, like tonight, it is between nine and ten when I finally call it a day. This isn’t a complaint, by the way. We both are crazy about farming and excited about the new directions we are taking. But we are both very, very weary.
It’s midnight now, and I am resolved to get something off to Joe before I go to bed. So I won’t try to dredge up all the great thoughts I’ve had while working. Just let me say that in general, I think the farm is doing fine. We are now in the midst of a huge onslaught of weeds, and we’re behind in our weeding, but I think we’ll get caught up, and I guess that happens every year about this time.
The crops are coming along as they should. The season was, not surprisingly, set back a bit by the big late flood. The strawberries especially were hit hard. They were under water and then in very saturated soil for a long time, and I don’t know that we’ll have many strawberries this year. I think we need to move the strawberries next year. The spot where we’ve grown them doesn’t drain because of the county road, and if we keep getting late spring floods, we’re just going to have to find another place with better drainage.
Our tomatoes are doing very well again this year, and are ripening in large numbers right now. Many of you, I know, have been watching the heavily-laden plants as the tomatoes have been first larger and larger, and now are ripening into various shades of red, yellow, black and the mixtures. Again this year we planted about forty varieties of heirlooms. So the time is ready for the harvest!
The melons also look especially good this year, with both cantaloupe and watermelon setting a lot of fruit right now. And summer squash, cucumbers, beans, basil, carrots and beets will be ready either this week or next. Winter squash are still a long way off, but the area where we planted them this year got a generous composting and they look very impressive!
2.
Seasonal Eating
We’ve said this many times, but it bears repeating: something is lost when we gain the ability to satisfy any culinary desire at any time of the year. When I see watermelons at QFC (or even, sadly, at PCC) in the dead of winter I ask myself if we couldn’t just wait. I guess there is a novelty of eating melons when there is snow on the ground. But somehow it seems to me like a stolen pleasure—like extorting something good at a not-so-good time which diminishes the pleasure both then and also later, when the natural season for us to enjoy melons is here. “To every thing there is a season,” are words attributed to Solomon. In modernity, we boast that we can have anything, anytime we want. And to some degree that is true. But how boring life becomes when there is nothing to anticipate, nothing to wait for!
The discipline of “eating seasonally” teaches us that even though we can, so to speak, “cheat our (culinary) fate,” that there is greater joy in taking each crop as it is given to us. In the Pacific Northwest we can’t bring melons to fruition until August or September. But what joy there would be, if we waited for them, when they finally arrive!
I also am always shocked when I see the “fresh local corn” signs go up in May, before we’ve even planted corn. A friend of mine asked the produce manager just where this local corn came from. He didn’t know. The manager was called in, and he said he’d find out. The next day the signs were gone. We’d all have to grant that local doesn’t call forth an exact, quantifiable distance. But when Wendy and I went to Mexico last winter, we sure didn’t feel like we were traveling “locally”!
3. Flooding and Politics
One of the things that has cut into our time this spring has been the effort to get some immediate help for farmers in our area (Hmong farmers and others) who have no way to get their equipment out of harm’s way during flooding. On Tuesday of this week Kathy Lambert is introducing legislation that will lead to allowing more farmers to build “farm pads” (elevated “pads” to put equipment and animals on during floods). I will be giving testimony, as will several others. Most of you know we built a farm pad after the 1990 flood. That pad saved our animals, all our tractors, our vehicles, and all our equipment. Not all farmers were so fortunate, and many lost a lot of equipment because they had no place to get it up and out of the flood. It is now against the law to build a farm pad; the ordinance Kathy is proposing will change that.
Beyond the immediate relief of farm pads, the King County Council is also entertaining a motion that would direct Ron Sims to establish a task force to recommend specific measures to reduce flooding for the Snoqualmie Valley APD. It could happen that we will to need ask you to contact members of the Council to express your support for these measures. We hope you will all respond if that time comes.
4. Biodynamic update
Many of you have either seen or heard of the film, “The Real Dirt on Farmer John.” I’ve been told so many times I should see that film, that I almost developed an attitude that I didn’t want to see it. What little I knew about “Farmer John” had made me think he was more of a promoter than a farmer. Shame on me! We came across his cookbook (I think one of you gave it to us), and, lo and behold, there are quotations from Rudolf Steiner on almost every page! Farmer John is a biodynamic farmer! The quotation that brought us a great deal of solace is his observation that after practicing Biodynamic farming for 20 years, he still feels he is in transition!
BD is not something one just slips into. My feeling, having farmed organically for fourteen years, and now transitioning to BD, is this: engaging an academic metaphor, I would say that the comparison of organic farming (under current standards) to BD farming is like the difference between enrolling in kindergarten and enrolling in a PhD program. Maintaining the same metaphor, conventional farming (what I would call “farming by number”—in which “farming by number” bears the same relationship to farming that “painting by number” bears to art) is down there at the level of pre-school. Believe me, there is a lot to learn when one ventures beyond the narrow definition of organic, a life-time of learning in fact. So I completely understand when “Farmer John” says, after 20 years, he feels like he’s just beginning to be a BD farmer!
During the first week of our Summer Session there was a very comprehensive BD seminar given on Lopez Island. Wendy attended, and she came back just bubbling with what she had learned. Even so, we’re both a bit overwhelmed.
In my own very simple analysis, I have come to think of BD as having four components: (1) total sustainability, (2) foliar preparations, (3) soil treatment, and (4) cosmic forces (like gravity) and ontology. We are making strides in each of these categories. Regarding sustainability, we have taken on “growing our own fertility” in a big way by starting our herd, learning to manage manure, and graduating from the lower levels of “how to compost” to a much more sophisticated level. We now have 21 cows, and although we will butcher four animals in a month or so, we should have six calves born this fall. We are also developing better means for handling the cows, and better ways to do their daily rotations to new fields. All this takes time. We have also found that we need a perimeter fence in addition to their “daily fence.” When Wendy was at the BD conference, I was awakened by cows mooing outside my bedroom window (they know where we sleep, they really do!). As I chased, called, pleaded, and finally watched in dismay while they frolicked through the winter squash, I knew we needed a security fence. It’s one of those hard lessons.
The famous (or infamous!) BD preparations take some time to develop on site. We have planted perennial beds of the most of the herbs we need—many of you have seen these (just south of the grape arbor). They are chamomile, valerian, yarrow, and stinging nettle. Dandelion and horse tail we have plenty of. Each of these plants is used in making tinctures that are then applied to the fields either directly, through “barrel compost,” or added to the compost piles that then get added to the fields. At this point we have been drying the flowers and will make the tinctures later.
We’ve done very well on soil treatment this year. We did a very shallow plowing this year rather than plowing deeply. And best of all, we have almost retired our rototiller. The spader that I talked about so much in the winter updates, though slower and much more expensive, is so much kinder to the soil—preserving soil tilth and water-holding capacity, and retaining soil structure that is conducive to microbial colonizing.
When it comes to the metaphysical component of BD, well, we’re all over that one. We converse with garden devas daily, and are in a constant state of communion with the cosmos. Well, that might be a bit of hyperbole. As I’ve said before, I’m not really sure garden devas exist. But I am sure that I don’t know for sure that they don’t exist. And I am totally convinced that the world would be a better if we could come to believe the earth is a living being (so long as we don’t project on “it” our own moral code which we then impose on our fellow human beings!).
5. Farm Chatter
I’ve probably done enough “chattering” already. I failed at my resolve to get this to Joe before bed last night. At one o’clock I just couldn’t go on. But I can’t fail today. Monday is our day off, and this will be my last chance for a while. It’s almost time for the Monday farm walk, during which we decide what we can/should harvest for the shares this week. At the same time I make the list of chores we need to accomplish for the week. This latter list diminishes a bit what would otherwise be the pure joy of the farm walk. But it’s still a lot of fun. It usually takes an hour and a half or so, and I try to cover every crop we have. I’d rather do it in the cool of the evening, but tonight some kind of County group is coming by for me to talk to about farm, so the walk is going to have to happen in the middle of the day. I feel sorry for Wendy having to handle the harvest tomorrow (Tuesday) without me—I’ll be at the courthouse in Seattle. But hopefully this will be the only day this year I miss.
Please feel free to pass on to us any comments, ideas, or questions you may have about the farm.
Erick and Wendy