10/5/18 - Week 18 - A Week in the Life

We often wax philosophically in these logs -- diving into the heart and mind of farming here in Green Valley. This week we thought we'd go strictly practical, which might possibly be the most philosophical thing.

Have you ever wondered what a week in the life of Green Valley Community Farm is like? Have you ever pondered what your famers eat for 2nd breakfast? Wonder no more...

A week in the life during harvest season on the farm is very rhythmic. The week (and days) are dictated by the harvest and have a very predictable shape. (During the shoulder seasons here, early Spring and Winter, before harvest starts, the weeks are much more random as they are defined by special projects and the project of preparing for or breaking down the seasonal infrastructure in the fields.) But harvest season has its own clock.

Thursdays: Because our CSA week begins on Saturday, Thursdays really feel like the start of the week around here. The day begins just like any other: Kayta and David eat their cereal (with Bramble Tail milk of course) and make their 2nd breakfast to-go: Usually a protein rich wrap or toast (with Gaby's break of course) and Aubrie's cheese, Temra's eggs, and veggies and greens from the farm. Kayta heads off to her day job, managing the farm at Russian River Vineyards, where she works with Kate. Anna rolls in here around 7:30, flushes the water filters, opens the greenhouses, and meets David at the barn. We turn their Walkie Talkies on and the day begins! Anna usually begins harvesting the "hot-crops" Squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. while David helps or is on the tractor prepping beds for the following week's transplanting. In the evening, Kayta and David walk the farm, look at each row, and design the share for the week ahead based on what is ready to harvest. The day ends with a big inventory and clean out of the cooler, a big bin washing, and the truck is loaded for the big day...

Fridays: Friday morning is our biggest harvest day. In high summer we start harvesting at 6:30 am for both CSA pickup on Saturday and the Occidental Farmer's Market, our only off-farm market. As the sun breaks the horizon, we each break off down the rows solo, harvesting crops that we've randomly specialized in this season: Kayta on loose greens; Anna on lettuces and kales; David on broccoli and cabbages. We meet up to bunch beets, carrots, and other roots together. The music is playing and it's festive. We break for coffee and eat 2nd breakfast off the tailgate of the truck around 9am. Their is much laughter and conversation over the rows as the harvest knives zing and twist ties twist. There is a certain satisfaction seeing the bins pile up in the shade of the Tacoma. When all the crops are checked off, we drive the truck back to the wash station. Kayta and Anna wash busily while David breaks away to water the farm and greenhouses, cook lunch, sort tomatoes, and prep the truck for Farmer's Market. 2:00 is curtain call, we load the truck chalk-full and Kayta heads off to slang vegetables at the Occidental Farmer's market! David stays homeside to keep the farm watered, clean the barn for CSA pick-up in the morning, and to write this very newsletter. Kayta returns around 9pm and we eat Lata's Indian Food and play with Bilbo the farm cat who missed us all day.

Saturdays: Saturday is a special day -- the rollout of a new CSA week! Kayta and David arrive at the barn and start laying out the week's harvest. It is so satisfying to see the produce all washed and on the table and to socialize with our members on Saturdays. We usually take it relatively easy that day; Kayta at the house or doing errands, and David making sure the harvest bins are full and abundant. Saturday evening we chill and share stories of CSA pick-up antics.

This crew makes the week fly by!

Sunday: Kayta spends Sunday tending her beautiful farm at Russian River Vineyards while David is off duty, puttering around the homestead, playing with Bilbo the cat, and keeping the farm watered.Monday: Monday is David's solo day on the farm as Kayta is making magic again at Russian River Vineyards. David starts the day with the daily ritual of cleaning of the irrigation filters and then does any errands that need doing (Harmony Farm Supply, bank, hardware store, etc.) and field work (clearing out harvested beds, fixing or tinkering with the irrigation system, doing any final bed prep for transplanting). In the evening Kayta does our greenhouse seeding for the week and preps bins and the truck for Tuesday morning harvest. We do the nightly irrigation filter cleaning and head home to dream of big broccoli heads.

Tuesday: Tuesday is our other big festive harvest morning. Because we don't have a Farmer's Market to harvest for, we harvest everything for Tuesday's CSA pickup that morning. Hopefully we remembered to download some new music for the boombox. We harvest until 10:30 am and then Kayta and Anna handle washing and CSA set-up. Anna usually takes over CSA once it is set-up while Kayta and David work the garden or fields. Sometimes Kate is with us on Tuesdays. We get another boost on Tuesdays chatting with CSA members and seeing you all interact with the farm. Kayta and David wrap up pick-up at 6pm and head in for a late dinner where we share stories of member antics and conversations.

Weeding Wednesday!

Wednesday: Wednesday is our biggest baddest field work day during harvest season. Lately, Kate has been with us all day and Kayta joins us just for the morning before heading to Russian River Vineyards. In the morning we are usually joined by a few volunteers for Weeding Wednesday. The farm crew is at its largest. We talk and laugh and kill weeds in the garden or on the farm. Once the volunteers leave, Kate, David and Anna focus on the week's big effort. Last week it was harvesting half the winter squash. This week is was harvesting storage onions. Earlier in the season it is usually a big planting. David usually seeds mustards, arugula, and other greens on this day. Anna and Kate head home around 5:30 just as Kayta is coming home. Kayta and David have a quiet moment looking out at the fields and anticipating the harvest week ahead. We are grateful. As the sun sets. We roll down the greenhouse sides, close the cold frame, close the gates, clean the filters and head home, where Bilbo greets us on the threshold.

A new week begins...

* * * * *

Hope to see you at the potato harvest tomorrow morning!

David and Kayta

9/28/18 - Week 17 - Potato Harvest Hype

Next Saturday morning, we'll come together as a community to perform a quintessential agricultural ritual: We'll harvest potatoes together. As we kneel down, on the Earth, digging through the soil, sifting the soil with our fingers and bagging the cool, bulbous tubers, we will join in concert thousands of people around the world performing the same act. We will also join untold millions of ancestors who, every Fall, knelt together and harvested potatoes. We will also be joined to a real living breathing chain of seed potatoes -- to hundreds of harvests in Europe and Asia and to ten thousand harvests in the Andes and Northeastern Bolivia and to those people who first knelt, harvested, and saved seed potatoes.

There is nothing quite like a potato harvest and the feeling, afterwards, of storing them away in a cool dark place, a hole, a cellar, a cave; in boxes, in sand, the potatoes themselves breathing slowly, living, promising food, promising life, as Fall turns to Winter.

The magic of digging potatoes with your friends!

The highest caloric food crop per-acre in the world (over maize, wheat, and rice) it is the only of these staple foods that forms (the food part, at least) deep in the Earth -- shrouded in darkness and mystery until we lift it up, into light, together in the Fall.

Many have known the feeling of incredible abundance that the potatoes can give, and sadly, many have known it's absence. In1845, due to limited potato genetics in the region and the cold shoulders of powerful men, a million people starved in poorer parts of Western Ireland and the Scottish highlands, as a blighted potato crop rotted in the fields. Aye, the potato has been a powerful, joyful, and also painful bond between people and Mother Earth, in feast and in famine, for millennia.

The poet Seamus Heaney speaks to this intense, mystic history in his poem, At a Potato Digging.

I.

A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.

Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand

Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.
Heads bow, trucks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf

Turns work to ritual. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

II.

Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
Like inflated pebbles. Native
to the blank hutch of clay
where the halved seed shot and clotted
these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.

Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.

III.

Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in 'forty-five,'
wolfed the blighted root and died.

The new potato, sound as stone,
putrified when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.

Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.

A people hungering from birth,
grubbing, like plants, in the earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.

Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus in filthy mounds:
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore.

IV.

Under a white flotilla of gulls
The rhythm deadens, the workers stop.
White bread and tea in bright canfuls
Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop

Down in the ditch and take their fill,
Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;
Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.

******

Join us as we "shower" up the living roots and scatter libations in remembrance and be thankful for the harvest together next Saturday, at our second community potato harvest.

See you in the potato fields,

David and Kayta

9/21/18 - Week 16 - Autumnal Equinox

Kate and Anna walking to the fields in the morning

Happy Equinox everyone and hello, Fall!

At 6:54 PM Saturday evening, the Earth's midline will line up straight with the sun... and at that moment a loud collective "WAAHOO!" will be heard, from space, coming from the Northern Hemisphere. That would be the farmers.

The coming of Fall is a special time on a farm for so many reasons. In our Mediterranean climate, the coming of Fall is like the breaking of winter and the coming of spring in a place like Maine. Rain is on the horizon and with it, the end of the high summer dormancy of many California flora. The Fall also brings with it big field harvests -- the joy and satisfaction of reaping a season's worth of work in the form of food (onions, potatoes, corn, winter squash) that will sustain and nourish us throughout the winter. (The potato harvest is about 2 weeks away, we'll let you know!) Fall also signifies farmer rest! The soft Fall light feels like balm on a sun-scorched skin. The long fall shadows play beautifully on the curing corn. The mornings are crisp. The nights are longer. While there are big pushes to be made bringing in these harvests and putting the fields to bed, R&R is near.

Change is afoot in the plant and animal worlds as well. This past week, a mysterious internal switch seems to have been flipped in our summer crops; Tomatoes, cucumbers, summer and winter squash all know what time it is (Equinox time!), and seem content to let themselves wind down and finish setting their final fruits. Take heed! One by one the sweet, tangy, cacophonic flavors and colors of the summer share will be replaced by the rich earthy tones of Fall. In the animal kingdom, the baby Turkeys we first glimpsed as tiny fluff balls in June have matured into birds nearly indistinguishable from their parents -- with corresponding appetites. Indeed, Turkey, Deer, and Hare all have developed a voracious appetite for succulent farm fare lately as they forage for sustenance in this, the driest, hungriest season between late summer and the life and greenery giving first rains. We're lucky to have Ingrid the Egret and our Great Horned owl sentinel to keep the gophers in check. And keep your eyes open for Monarch butterflies, those Autumnal travelers, in the garden. They love zinnias!

We're so glad we'll get to share this fall, and the special magic the fall brings, with each of you this year.

See you in the fields,

David and Kayta