8/24/18 - Week 12 - Work Song by Wendell Berry

Work Song Part II - A Vision (Epilogue)

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…

The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom

and indwelling light.

This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

-Wendell Berry

(From "New and Collected Poems", Counterpoint Press)

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See you in the fields,

Kayta and David

8/17/18 - Week 11 - All the Seasons are Present

We just got back (late!) from a sweet potluck next door with friends and neighbors (David), and from the Farmer's Market (Kayta), and we are both brimming with an afterglow of high-summer gratitude for you all, and for the amazing extended community that has supported and held us and the farm through another turn through the Spring and early Summer madness of planting.

For some reason this week feels like a milestone in the season. This time year is a complex time of year on the farm. Summer is here in full force, but Fall is everywhere. Even next season is in the works.

I looked back at the newsletter from this time last year, and, it is remarkable how rhythmically applicable the 2017 Farmer's Log is to this week, one turn around the sun later.

By early August, most of our planting work (half a years worth of planning, seed starting and plant tending) is already fruiting, or starting to reach maturity. We are all enjoying the set pieces of summer; the slow developing nightshades (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers) and their cucurbit comrades (melons, cucumbers, squash). We are in that special time of year where one can make fresh salsa straight from the farm (jalapeños, onions, tomatoes, and perennial or annual cilantro from the garden). The corn is high, all tassels and silks and ears forming. And, our potatoes, especially our red potatoes, are in flower... 6 or so inches below the surface of the soil those starchy tubers are filling out.

But in the the greenhouses and increasingly in the fields, it is all Fall. Our Fall brassica plantings (kales, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussells sprouts and the broccoli we will be picking off of on into December) are all coming into their own in their seeding trays and ready to go in the ground. We planted the Fall storage carrots a couple of weeks ago. Certain beds, you will notice this week, are bare and ready to be planted into or are in the process of being prepared for what's next. These beds provided our earliest farm meals (spring lettuces, mustard greens, turnips and radishes, the first carrots, beets, and first cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage) and, depending on what was in them before, these beds will see a second crop before being put to cover crop bed in the Fall or will be planted into a late summer cover crop now (note the tiny Buckwheat sprouts).

2019 is even in the works, as we are slowly transitioning the beds that will host next year's garlic.

Thank you for all your smiles and sweet encouragement on the farm over the last few weeks. We hope you are enjoying the summer bounty coming out of the fields and this season of transition on the farm.

See you in the fields,

David & Kayta

8/10/18 - Week 10 - Attack from Above!

Lucky to farm in a wild land! You never know what is around the next corner!

So one day, a couple of weeks ago, I was walking along the farm road through the meadow back home. Everything was just fine and dandy and I was whistling my tune. As I rounded the corner before the pear trees where the turkeys take cover in the heat of the day, a kerfuffle erupted in their midst like I had never heard before.

I ran toward the pear tree only to behold chaos: Turkeys flapping, flying, squawking and fleeing in every direction, downy feathers in the air. One almost ran through my legs!

"What is happening turkeys!?", I asked, but of course, they were too busy to reply.

All of a sudden, a little chick emerged from cloud running fast as lighting toward the thicket of the creek. 

And then I saw him.

One of the turkeys was not a turkey but a Golden Eagle bounding, swooping, and pouncing with his mighty talons, trying grab our little friend. 

The little chick ran so fast. Just as she was about to reach cover the Eagle leaped up with his furry legs, heaved his might wings, aimed his sharp talons and descended. The Eagles talons closed.

Air.

Chick darted to the right just in time, and skittered down into cover.

As quickly as it had begun, the turkeys were gone. Eagle was alone, standing in the road.

Just then, he noticed my presence. He looked out of the corner of his eye at me and I could almost hear him say, "Shucks." With a resigned sigh he looked aloft, and with one powerful stroke of his wings, he launched off the ground, two, three, four and he was a hundred feet in the air, where another Eagle was circling. A piercing scream lit the sky.

The nervous chatter of the mommy and daddy Turkeys could be heard from the shade of the thicket for some time. I imagined little chick huddling in there with them, smiling proudly, replaying her lightning escape.

To think of the stories she'll tell her little chickies someday.

See you in the fields,

David & Kayta