10/26/18 - Week 21 - A Farm Ghost Story

Did you know, a ghastly little ghost lives amongst us here at peaceful Green Valley Community Farm?

It all began last season...

It was summer, and Kayta and I were marveling at the healthy, green Flint and Painted Mountain corn growing in the fields. "What stalks! What a canopy! What strong roots our corn must have!" thought we, proud of our magnificent horticultural skills.

The GVCFarm ghost is much scarier than these pumpkins

Summer waned. The corn grew taller and taller.

One late August morning, as we were passing by the beautiful corn, we noticed a couple had fallen over. "Hmmm", we thought, "a strong wind must have blown last night," and continued on our way thinking nothing of it.

A few days later we passed by the corn patch and noticed several more stalks lying flat on the ground. "Wow!" we exclaimed, "What a mighty wind must have blown last night!"

But we both knew the night had been still...

This continued. Every day we'd see a few more fallen stalks. We were perplexed. We analyzed the roots of the fallen and dug around in the soil. Various theories were concocted, but none of them felt like they explained the mystery of the falling corn. Last fall, we harvested a good crop of corn, but the fallen were missed.

Our attention turned to this season...

This year, we changed some things around and headed out of the gates with an even healthier looking stand of corn. But sure enough, in August, the phantom corn slayer returned, felling some of healthiest stalks we'd ever grown. At the same time, in another field, we were watering up our final and largest carrot planting, the fall carrot patch, but for some reason, we could not get a solid stand: It looked like the Death himself had passed over the middle of the beds. Even the weeds were missing.

We mentioned our plight to a visiting farmer friend one day. That was the first time we heard the word symphylan.

We had long been suspicious of these little, almost imperceptible white arthropods that abound in the soil here. We began to ask around. Word spread. We heard horror stories of fields laid waste. Lindsay Dailey, our new neighbor, connected us with Michelle Vesser: OAEC's former garden manager, a farm Medicine Woman, and a symphylan veteran. Michelle wasted no time in coming out.

She came to the farm last Wednesday armed with a manilla folder of literature and b-lined it to the fields. Upon first glance, her countenance brightened. "This doesn't look like symphylans. You still have weeds!" We presented her with a pumpkin and pointed to the swarm of white arthropods underneath. "These don't look like symphylans."

We walked to other problem spots on the farm but found no evidence. I was overjoyed! But in a quiet moment Michelle drifted to the bare spot in the Fall carrot patch. "Let's dig here." We dug up a stunted looking cauliflower and dropped the root ball in a bucket of water. 1, 2, 3.... 15 symphylans floated to the surface, squirming in the sunlight.

The next day I dug up the root ball of a fallen corn and sure enough, there they were.

Garden symphylans are a soil dwelling arthropod that are distantly related to centipedes. Adults are about a quarter inch long and they are very fast crawling. They are endemic to forrest soils, feeding on roots and decaying carbonaceous tissues. They cannot dig themselves, so they thrive in soils with good structure, earthworm holes, and high organic matter: All staples of well farmed soil. In a farm setting they eat the living roots of crops and can cause crop devastation.

But Michelle was generally encouraging: The relative success of our last two growing seasons shows us that we do not have them in great numbers. And there are farmers who have learned to live with ghostly symphylans.

Unfortunately, there is no cathartic ending to this ghost-story for there is no cure for symphylans. This ghost story will likely go on, in parallel to the joyful stories on this farm.

Alas, what are phantoms and ghosts and ghouls if not reminders to be grateful for who we have with us in the land of the living? Aye, the symphylans here will be a humbling reminder of the underworld below, right under our feet...

We'll do what we can, and say our farmer prayers, so that the symphylans here stay under-control. And we will be grateful for the harvests they allow us to reap in our time before we join them in the netherworld.

Happy Halloween!

David and Kayta

10/19/18 - Week 20 - Ahh, Fall...

Ahh, Fall...

We are smack dab in the middle of one of the major transition moments of the farm year. You can feel it in the air and see it in the fields. Almost all of the long-season crops have grown, and matured and been harvested by us all and are now curing in the greenhouses or stored away in the barn to be distributed to you over the next seven weeks!

Bed by bed, field by field, the farm is moving from summer mode (veggie crops) to winter mode (cover crop). We seed a nitrogen fixing, organic matter building mixture of Bell Beans, Magnus Peas, Dundale Peas, Common Vetch and Barley and Oats as our cover crop. Soon a green fuzz of Barley and Oats will cover the land and come spring a waist high sea of green will wave in the wind. This crop will feed, enrich, and build the soil next year and many years to come. (Indeed, a healthy cover crop stand can generate over 8,000lbs of biomass per acre. It's like growing compost!)

From seed to fruit, full circle. Winter squash drying in the greenhouse where they were seeded.

This Fall transition into cover crop, which takes place on many to most organic veggie farms in temperate climates, makes us think of one of the ways vegetable farming in Sonoma is very different than vegetable farming in New England and colder temperate climates Northward. In colder places, Old Man Winter mandates that you initiate this process; i.e. frost kills the tomatoes and peppers and other cold sensitive crops definitively in October. In our climate, hot crops can sometimes be let to to limp into November. Here, instead, we must end them in order to germinate a great stand of winter cover crop. (So, it is time to say farewell to tomatoes, summer squash, and peppers in the share!)

In Sonoma county, it is best to broadcast your cover crop seed by the middle of October. Any later and you risk colder temperatures inhibiting the germination of the cover crop seed and your fields laying relatively bare through the winter. Here, we are able to leverage our overhead irrigation to pre-irrigate our cover crop before the rains, to ensure a dense, lush cover crop stand.

We recommend taking a moment to appreciate the changing of the guard out there if you have a moment. The farm is at it's barest. The first blades of pre-irrigated oat and barley will be poke up out of the soil soon, at attention, waiting for the winter rains to transform the farm into a sea of green.

See you in the fields,

David & Kayta

10/12/18 - Week 19 - 2018 Corn

This year, we planted two heirloom corn varieties for the CSA (as well as a small patch of the Tzutujil Maya Corn of Birth and Death brought here by CSA member Joshua Harris.)

Many of you met the Painted Mountain corn last year. This gorgeous variety was developed in Montana by Dave Christensen, a farmer who dedicated his life to breeding corn that could survive the the conditions and high altitudes there. He did this by gathering heirloom seeds from Northern Native Americans tribes and homesteaders, planting them together, letting them naturally cross pollinate, and carefully selecting for hardiness and nutrition. The result is Painted Mountain corn.

This year, our Painted Mountain corn didn't do very well. We think we either a) planted it a few weeks too late and it got the solar signal to tassel too early and/or b) in was affected negatively by the symphylans in our soil (little centipedes that eat roots hairs). As such, we will not distribute the Painted Mountain to members as flour in this year; instead we will save all of the precious kernels we get so that we can plant again next year (earlier and in a different spot!) and/or we are also considering switching to a variety that will do better in these soils, and then continue our community heirloom saving tradition. Sometimes the road to abundance is restraint.

Kayta in our first Floriani field in 2013

Our other corn variety, drying out there in the fields, is Floriani Red Flint. The Floriani did quite well this year (hurray for diversity!) and we will be harvesting it together on Wednesday. Floriani Red Flint is a Northern Italian heirloom, saved for generations for the exceptional polenta it makes. Kayta and I have grown it in Sonoma County for 6 seasons now and we can confirm... it makes amazing polenta, especially when you add a little Bramble Tail cream to it. We’ll dry the ears in our greenhouse after we harvest them, and then grind the kernels it into a coarse flour and distribute it to the CSA late into the season.

Flint corn kernels are hard as flint, hence the name. They have a dense outer shell protecting the nutritious germ within. This shell, combined with the low water content of the kernels, make flint corns resistant to freezing and excellent for storage. Flint corns were the staff of life for Native American cultures in harsh climates on both hemispheres.

Indeed, since domestication in Southern Mexico some 10,000 years ago, maize has been the staff of life for much of humanity as we know it, from the Mississipian and Mayan civilizations to the supermarket aisles of today: Corn is king.

And a king demands an Ode...

Take it away, Pablo...

* * * * *

Ode to Maize

by Pablo Neruda

America, from a grain

of maize you grew

to crown

with spacious lands

the ocean foam.

A grain of maize was your geography.

From the grain

a green lance rose,

was covered with gold,

to grace the heights

of Peru with its yellow tassels.

But, poet, let

history rest in its shroud;

praise with your lyre

the grain in its granaries:

sing to the simple maize in

the kitchen.

First, a fine beard

fluttered in the field

above the tender teeth

of the young ear.

Then the husks parted

and fruitfulness burst its veils

of pale papyrus

that grains of laughter

might fall upon the earth.

To the stone,

in your journey,

you returned.

Not to the terrible stone,

the bloody

triangle of Mexican death,

but to the grinding stone

sacred

stone of your kitchens.

There, milk and matter,

strength-giving, nutritious

cornmeal pulp,

you were worked and patted

by the wondrous hands

of women.

Wherever you fall, maize,

whether into the

splendid pot of porridge, or among

country beans, you light up

the meal and lend it

your virginal flavor.

Oh, to bite into

the steaming ear beside the sea

of distant song and deepest waltz.

To boil you

as your aroma

spreads through

blue sierras.

But is there

no end

to your treasure?

In chalky, barren lands

bordered

by the sea, along

the rocky Chilean coast,

at times

only your radiance

reaches the empty

table of the miner.

Your light, your cornmeal,

your hope

pervades America’s solitudes,

and to hunger

your lances

are enemy legions.

Within your husks,

like gentle kernels,

our sober provincial

children’s hearts were

nurtured,

until life began

to shuck us from the ear.

* * * * *

See you in the corn fields,

David & Kayta