7/20/18 - Week 7 - Farmer Superhero Powers

As every Marvel superhero has an origin story, a nemesis, and a special superpower... so does every farmer.

And sometimes, when the task is large, these otherwise solitary rangers band together and combine their powers into an unstoppable weed busting, gopher bashing, flower, herb, and veggie growing squadron.

This year's farm crew is such a company...

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2018 GVCFarm crew:

Anna Dozor: A Santa Rosa native, Anna joined us in January and Gotham has never been safer. If anything looks or tastes good on the farm, we have Anna's hard, skilled work, and butt-kicking attitude to thank. She brings with her a wealth of experience on farms from New Hampshire to Humboldt and hopes to start a farm with her sister one day.

Super Power: Organization

Origin Story: Milking cows, as a girl, at Emandel in the golden Mendocino Hills

Tool Belt: Wheel Hoe, Japanese Hand Hoe, Clipboard

Nemesis: Disorganization

Sidekick: Anya the cow

Favorite Crop to Grow: Garlic

Theme song: Graceland by Paul Simon

Fun Fact: Once had Shabbat with Matisyahu

Favorite Spice Girl: Scary Spice

Kate Beilharz: Raised wild in a yurt outside of Austin, Texas, Kate has been helping Kayta fight crime at Russian River Vineyards since January. Her formidable farm super powers became legend and we head-hunted to help us fight the uptick in bindweed related crime. She brings with her a wealth of experience on farms from Boulder, Colorado to her family's beautiful new fairy homestead in the banana-belt up above Occidental.

Super Power: Communicating with and controlling soil biology (i.e. mycelium and mineral nutrients)

Origin Story: Sitting in the Naropa greenhouse eating figs and basil

Tool Belt: Felcos, Hori Hori knife, and earbuds for podcasts

Nemesis: Bindweed

Favorite Crop: Salad turnips baby!

Sidekick: Truffles the Russian River Farm cat

Theme song: Concerning Hobbits by Howard Shore

Fun Fact: Lived in a yurt, as a child, for six years

Favorite Spice Girl: Who are the Spice Girls? See answer above....

Kayta Brady: The one-and-only, femme-fatal leader of our farming squadron, she needs no introduction. Her powers have been unleashed on farms from Columbia, Missouri (her homeland) to the Back Forest of Germany. Along with her side-kick Bilbo the Cat, she crushes vegetable boringness.

Super Power: Crop-planning, Speed

Origin Story: Getting lost in the corn patch at her neighbor Bernice's

Tool Belt: Swiss made stirrup-hoe... the world's best. Excel Spreadsheets

Nemesis: Pigweed

Favorite Crop: Carrots

Sidekick: Bilbo

Theme song: Wild Bill Jones by Doc Watson

Fun Fact: Has a cookie named after her in Williamstown, Massachusetts

Favorite Spice Girl: Doc Watson

David Plescia: Spawned in the tranquil suburbs of the Santa Clara Valley and raised by an unsuspecting mathematician and a physical therapist, if you had told David he would be farming when he was 18, he would have spit out his Starbuck's caramel iced coffee. But a chance volcano explosion whilst WWOOFing on a farm in Argentina lead David to believe farming was the most epic thing ever.

Super Power: Making it rain from the sky
Origin Story: Cleaning leeks in Patagonia near said exploding volcano
Tool Belt: Framing Hammer. Impact Driver. 

Nemesis: Early mornings

Favorite Crop: Cover crop

Sidekick: Spady McSpaderton (a reciprocating spader)

Theme song: All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey

Fun Fact: Moonlights as a trance DJ. Open for bookings...

Favorite Spice Girl: David Beckham

7/13/18 - Week 6 - The Flight of the Owlets

The water saga continues. But thanks to the speedy attentiveness and generosity of the crew here and our neighbor and CSA member Chris L.S. Panym, we're getting good flow using the old irrigation set-up on the pond dam.

We will be back to our regularly scheduled program of current farm musings soon. But this week, in honor of the new batch of screeching flying monkeys (baby Barn Owlets), whom we can hear screeching outside our window right now, here's our account of last year's brood.

The Flight of the Owlets

We farmers, out here rooting around in the muck all day, are sometimes chanced privy to the spectacularly goofy things wild creatures do. Such as today, when the wild turkeys got boggled out by the summer thunder, and couldn't help gobbling back at it. Every time.

And once in a blue moon, we are chanced privy to the mystical side of Mother Nature. To the occult. To moments where the cosmic world and the animal world of flesh and blood aline in such a way as to reveal the sources of fairy tales and superstitions.

Such a day, or night rather, was the full moon of July.

We told in these annals, just a few weeks past, of the family of Barn Owls growing up in the owl box near our house. Four owlets there were...

We first learned of their birth into this World by tiny, hideous, rasping noises coming from the previously vacant aery. This was in March. Every twilight thenceforth, when out to check the mail, or out to check the plums, or out returning in from out, their insistent rasps accompanied us, "Feed us, Mother! Feed us!"

And feed them she did.

Once in a while we would spy Mother Owl; silent and ghostly, hovering through the air as if suspended, she would alight upon the doorway, the rasps would increase in urgency for a moment, and then she would float away.

Weeks passed, moons passed, and the little rasps grew in power and potency. They became so loud that they entered our house, and became the constant soundtrack of our nocturnal lives. From dusk til dawn, cooking in the kitchen, turning over in between dreams, or at predawn toothbrushing , "Rasp. rasp. RASP!"

Sometime in early May, they started showing themselves. Far from the demons we expected to see, cute little monkey faces began popping out of the owl box. A few weeks later, be-winged fuzzy monkeys bravely perched upon the porch. Screeching for mommy.

In June, they got their driving permits and could be seen crash landing awkwardly into the nearest willows.

As the June moon waned and the July moon waxed the owlets came into their own. The nights brightened and their presence increasingly dominated the valley. They began flying powerfully, whipping lithely hither and thither, perching on Big Doug Firs across the road, piercing the air with chilling warning calls whenever we approached their nest box. But most of the time, the same infant screeching continued. “Rasp, rasp rasp!” We started to wonder how they all fit inside the nest box during the day? What power would compel them these grown-children to become the silent sentinels they were born to be?

The full moon of July 9th, the "Thunder Moon", was bright this year. On our bedtime walk to check on the irrigation, I remember the long shadows we cast on the silvery path and an eery feeling in the air. We remember tossing and turning in bed that night, bright window shades, shadows on the white walls, and something else strange…

Silence.

At morning tea we realized they were gone.

Since the night of the Thunder Moon we have not heard the owlets. They are out there: ghostly white phantoms in the twilight. A pellet consisting of the front half of a lizard and the back half a mouse happenstanced on our doorstep the other day.

They are owls now.

The awkward monkey faces are no more and it seems the giant monkey face in the heavens, the Thunder Moon of July, held the key.

See you in the midnight fields,

David & Kayta

7/6/18 - Week 5 - Neruda's Ode to the Onion

It's been a hectic week here on the farm even by July farm standards. We're having some technical difficulties with the filtration and flow on our gravity water feed system, which means we've been running around like crazy chickens micro-managing what precious water we have to make sure it gets to each plant, but as sparingly as possible. A very special thanks goes out to our neighbor and wizard Scott Kelley, who's been on the case so we can focus on the plants as much as possible. Save the best cauliflower head for him!)

It will all be OK, but the busyness has meant less time to craft newsletters! We had one all worked up in the old noggin about seasonality and the arc of growth and limits, but it will have to wait for next time.

So this week, in honor of this week's fresh torpedo onions, we'll leave you with the one-and-only... Pablo.

Blessed water!

* * * * * * *

Ode to the Onion

by Pablo Neruda

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

* * * * * * *
See you in the fields,

David and Kayta