Greetings!

It's been a while, eh?  Six months? Yikes.

Once, when we were much, much younger, my brother and I watched Braveheart on VHS. I'd never seen it before, and for whatever reason I/we didn't want to watch the whole thing...so he put it on fast-forward from the beginning and just told me everything that happened. 

I won't bore you with the details, but my last six months in fast-forward would look something like this:
Moved back to Ames. Got a job with the Iowa Farmers Union. Bought an adorable little car named Frida (yes, after my goat...plus she's red and was covered in leftist bumper stickers). Started volunteering at Practical Farmers of Iowa, then got offered a part time job doing office stuff for them. Went to some conferences on farming stuff. Fell in love with native pollinators.  Went to the dentist for the first time in I-won't-tell-you-how-long. Got new glasses, found several white hairs on my head and learned that I will need to get hearing aids sooner-than-later. Really.
...Then moved up to Kanawha, IA where I'm now working on a vegetable farm.

And there were no needlessly lengthy or gory fight scenes.

This farm is less than half the size of last year's farm.  It's less mechanized, far fewer members, noticeably more low-key and deeply committed to the farm as natural habitat.  I had more questions in the first two weeks here than I did in the first two months up north...I think mostly because I now have something to compare it to...But also because a lot of things are done really differently.  The tractors are also bigger, the land is less flat, and my awareness of my mortality has markedly increased.  Eek. 

I'm really excited about the season though...especially now that my goal of starting my own farm is surprisingly close to becoming reality.  I plan to start renting land beginning this fall...in preparation for starting my own small operation in spring of 2013.  Nothing like a deadline to make me realize how much I don't know and how incredibly unprepared I am.  Despite the doubts and insecurities, I'm working on a business plan, sending out feelers for potential market opportunities, and working on my budget.

I think last year's farm was an absolutely fabulous introduction to just about every major aspect of running a vegetable farm: learning good habits for solid production systems, getting familiar a wide array of machinery, setting up irrigation systems, and having super knowledgeable plant-people on hand to pester with horticultural and soil health questions.  Another huge thing was the ever-present 1%s: that when you're doing a task, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, thousands of times in a day - they add up to significant $$ in your business. I learned that I can weed with both hands...at the same time. Woah.  :) Plus, it was demanding enough that by the end of the season, the fact that I still wanted to farm meant that I did, in fact, want to farm.  And I do.  

So I'm going to. :) 

And this year is going to be a great fit for many other reasons.  My new farmer-mentors are really well connected to the local food goings-ons in Iowa, and have already been incredibly supportive of my goal to start this coming year.  They ask really great questions, and always seem open and interested in spurring my thinking into different possibilities for how to start up, what and how to grow, where to sell and all the things I need to be thinking about along the way.  They're also more familiar with this region's pests and growing issues, varieties that have worked better/worse for them, and the hurdles of direct marketing in a less populated/urban area.  Just from my first few weeks here, I also feel like they're pretty much experts on how to do a lot with a little.  Which will be a pretty important factor in my survival in these coming years...

So the season is off to a good start.  I don't know how much I'll be writing these days.  I have more time after work these days, but a lot more to do.  If anyone wants to be on my holy-crap-julia's-starting-a-business advisory team let me know. 

Eek. :)

<3julia

p.s. -> tomato jungle! :)

Meet your meat.

Well, I have another new experience for y'all.  This morning I went along with Farmer P and one of the other interns to help slaughter a pig down the road in preparation for our harvest party pig roast tomorrow.  It was a gorgeous fall morning, and she was big and lovely with white eyelashes and happy mud all over her back, munching on veggies in her pen.  We got the hose and knives and buckets all laid out, brought the skidloader around to the side of her pen.  The farmer approached, gun in hand, and she came right up to the fence looking up at him and he shot her in the forehead. 

...

You know?...there are worse ways to go.  I don't think I'd mind it myself one day when I'm very old and very very tired... There was not even a second of fear or anxiety...she had no hint that anything was wrong since people and machines go by her pen every day.  She'd had some extra helpings of compost the night before and seemed cheerful and content... and then it was over.  Farmer P hopped over the fence and cut her throat on each side, and she laid down and bled out.  When she was done twitching, they poked holes behind the tendons in her back heels, stuck the hooks through and chained the hooks to the skidloader, lifted her up and over the fence where we started to "dress" her (is anyone else weirded out by this term?).  The mood lightened a bit after the skinning began...as he says, he doesn't like to kill and nothing likes to die...I did cry for a moment...it's hard to see life leave a living thing.  You must feel it sometimes...even seeing a mosquito twitching on my arm after I've slapped it gives me a twinge of something...you know? 

It was an absolutely fascinating process...made me wonder why I didn't go to med school (organs are SO AMAZING!), but so thankful I discovered this work...  It also made me even more horrified by the idea of raising a bunch of animals indoors with so little room, only to ship them off to a slaughterhouse in a matter of months...but I won't get into that...or how this is recalibrating my thoughts on being vegetarian.  Everything about the process this morning felt...good...or at least how it should be if you choose to take an animal's life.  I feel like it's something we should have to work for and invest ourselves in if we're going to take advantage of the benefits... like I shouldn't eat what I can't bring myself to kill and clean myself.  Anyways... I'll need to do some more thinking before I write more on this. 

I am so totally completely in love with fall.  The whole farm is still sighing a huge sigh of relief from August, and things are slowing down...We're still working hard, but the mood has shifted...patience has more or less returned along with our senses of humor and interest in actually spending non-work time together.  It's nice.  I give farming in the fall two thumbs up...maybe even three.

I'm heading home in two weeks to take a job with the Iowa Farmers Union for the winter.  I'm looking forward to several months of learning through reading and conversation instead of through callous-and-bicep-building. 

Here are some photos. Sorry for the disjointed entry. 

Heart of Darkness

They say we have survived the “heart of darkness” – that time in July and August when tired, anxious farming peoples hit a wall of a physical, mental, and spiritual sort.  A stretch of days when you just want to lie down in the bed of weeds that stand hip-high and forget about the whimpering, shaded carrots beneath. When you’d just as soon mow down the corn as pick it, or purchase a massive flame weeder with the sole purpose of torching every single last leaf and vine of that never-ending summer squash.  All of us, being in a similar state over the last few weeks, have been discussing our future CSAs… First was the Sans Squash CSA, a farm that takes a solemn oath to never ever ever put any summer squash of any kind in your box. None. A couple of us feel there may be a big market for that – thoughts?  Another intern decided on a mood-based CSA. If he was feeling motivated, you would, perhaps, get a potato and a bunch of carrots…perhaps an entire box of massive cucumbers – Just cucumbers.  And if he was in a bad mood, or simply tired, you could get any assortment of: rocks, dirt clumps, weeds, laying hens, compost from underneath the kitchen sink, worms, IOU notes or apples from Chile purchased at the nearest Walmart with the stickers still stuck on the skin. 

I apologize for not writing in so long…but anything that could have possibly managed to stumble from my brain in the last several weeks would have been to-do lists, profanities, or rambles in Wingdings font with photos of inch thick red rooted pigweed stems being dunked in some horrible, boiling acid...

But we’ve survived.  I think.  On a particularly bad day, someone said something about what really matters during the heart of darkness is staying positive.  Farmer P disagreed, saying that what really matters is that you keep working even when you’re feeling negative. That you’ve got to be able to make yourself do the work, even if it’s the last thing you want to do.  After thinking on this for a while, I think I agree…and that comment gave me hope that perhaps I could be cut out for this work after all, because for just a couple of those days I’m not sure that I’d ever felt so negative in my life…but here I am.  And I’m still loving the work, pigweed and all.

Apparently, the next few weeks will be a bit of a challenge to keep the boxes full and diverse with each delivery, but I suppose that’s the up-side of being just an intern…it’s not something I worry about or lose sleep over.  It feels like fairly smooth sailing from now until the third week of October.  Fresh crops are coming in, old empty (except for the weeds) beds are getting mowed and tilled under, and those fields being retired for the rest of the season are being sowed with cover crops.  The farm looks tidy again, or as tidy as a farm could look, and I like it. The mornings have been cool and are just beginning to hint at a crispness that sparks instant longing for cider, campfires, and pumpkin pie. I am ready for fall. 

And I’m ready to be home. I went on a walk this morning and realized that I’ve been here about as long as I was in China, and have been just about as homesick, though thousands of miles closer.  I feel my tether shortening, but with no need to resist it.  A friend from DC called yesterday to talk farms. As she described her plans, I could imagine the life she envisions for herself full of involvement and mission and well-being, and felt thrilled for her…and it brought to mind my own hopes paralleling hers, but a trajectory more rural and withdrawn.  And Iowan.  I think my most concrete goal right now is to someday have a  swing on a screened in, west-facing porch.

Cover Crops & thoughts on weeds... mid-August?

Farmer P gave us a talk about cover crops this week during a storm.  Another case of the more I know the more I realize I don’t know…

If you were to read a glossary definition of what a cover crop is, you’d probably feel like you have a decent handle on the concept.  But once you start talking about varieties and times of year and how densely they should be seeded and weather and climate factors and soil types and nurse crops and underseeding and your specific goals of organic matter and soil structure of your particular soil it’s all rather overwhelming.  Seriously overwhelming, actually. There is no formula for how to take care of your ground…no little handbook tailored specifically to each plot with timelines on when to do what…because every single year it will be different…And even parts of the same bed are different than every other part.  It makes sense that so many farmers head out and drill in their ammonia fertilizers around the same time each year and apply various amounts and types of synthetic pesticides and herbicides…to think about planning cover crops and nutrient amendments and 4 or 12 year rotations or serious investigation of organic matter and soil structure and intensive cultivation plans for the hundreds or thousands of acres many Midwestern farmers manage would make your head explode.  :/  No doubt. 

But it’s sad.  And a totally different approach and worldview to say you want no weeds in your fields versus seeing a diverse array of weeds as a sign of soil health – so long as you stay ahead of them so they don’t outcompete your crops or go to seed.  It seems that in organic production, it’s more about management, not about attempting to eliminate the competition.  Soil even benefits from weed cover sometimes – it protects silty soils from getting hard and compacted in heavy rains, prevents erosion, and when pulled up and left to mulch the crops, can trap needed moisture, so long as there’s enough air flow as well.  Their massive root systems benefit soil structure and add organic matter, and their long taproots are suspected of drawing up nutrients and minerals from deep in the soil that crop plants don’t live long enough to reach, which is left behind in top layers when they die and decompose.  Their foliage and flowers can be habitat for beneficial insects. 

The same goes for some pests – flea beetles, squash bugs, cucumber beetles, even potato beetles to an extent – have a role to play in helping plants develop a stronger immunity to pests.  It’s like letting your kid play in the dirt and occasionally eat without washing their hands – they need some of the bad stuff to get in their system so that they can fight it off – in the same way, plants need some pests and competition to be able to develop a healthy response in the future.  We’ve seen the first beds of kale and broccoli be almost completely chewed up by flea beetles…it looked like complete devastation…but the farmers told us to just wait, and soon we saw new leaves coming up that the flea beetles took no interest in.  The crops were perfectly healthy, and the leaves were beautiful.  It’s not always this way. The potato beetles got craaaazy out of control and almost destroyed half of the eggplants.  But we’re still getting enough eggplants for the boxes, and the potatoes have been just fine, and the frogs, snakes, and salamanders are absolutely thriving. 

Veggies! :)

My first attempt at strawberry preserves...

My first cherry pie from the cherries on the tree in the yard. :)

zucchini bowling.

Treadmill... written some time in late june...i think. : P

So…how do you combat the treadmill feeling when you think about life?

I’ve definitely escaped the whole rat race culture in DC, but perhaps even more than office work, the feeling of life passing is really intense on the farm. Our lives revolve around the growth and death of all these plants…And every time something is ready for harvest I am shocked and say “already?!?!” and when they are gone I say, “but they just GOT here!”  It blows my mind…and when I envision my life growing food I can flash forward to me being 55 and all the years between now and then just a blur of seeding flats and pulling weeds and washing beets.  I was telling my mom about it, and she said it sounds like what having children does to a person – you’re suddenly pregnant, there’s suddenly a baby waking you up every hour of the night, then suddenly a talking, running terror of a toddler, then a teenager learning to drive, then they’re getting married and having kids of their own -  and at every step she says, “wait, you were just born…how can you be doing this already?”  I’m sorry…I realize this is totally cliché…Like a montage out of Father of the Bride or something… But instead of children they’re little seeds that turn into squash plants that sprawl across the beds with irritating little spines and pound after pound of zucchini and yellow squash.  Sometimes you just want to walk up to a bed overrun by weeds or an generous spirited plant like the squash and just want to shout “WILL YOU JUST HOLD ON FOR A BLASTED MINUTE PLEASE?!?!?!”  But it doesn’t stop. Ever. It’s like dishes in the sink. You can wash all you want, but there will always be dishes to wash, always squash. There is no catching up. Sometimes I can accept that, and other times it makes me want to go sit on the porch and stare out into the trees and just…sit. 

But in the midst of the constant rush and activity, there are several moments every day when we’re working and I look up and just feel awed. No matter how many plants I see come out of the ground and no matter how many fruits I pull off of it, I can’t get over the miracle of it.  I dislike summer squash plants with a passion, but I can’t help but wonder at them…  And all of these tough little weeds that are so persistent and enthusiastic…Indomitable.  I can’t help but admire them…And all the frogs and toads and snakes and turtles and birds and bugs make this place a really exciting and magical place to be.  And when a storm is coming in and we see these massive…massive clouds approaching from miles away with flashes of lightning and low rumbles of thunder and we feel the electricity in the air… The sense of being incredibly small and insignificant and alive and IN the world is so overwhelming I just want to lay on the ground and feel it.   Of course we had to keep weeding, so I had to feel it while bending over the watermelons, pulling out pigweed with both hands. 

I know that sounds weird and perhaps a bit dramatic… but I also know that you know exactly the feeling I’m talking about. I don’t think you can be alive and not feel it sometimes.

sad news...

I'm sorry to share some very sad news this week... A Bike & Builder was killed while riding through Alabama two days ago - her second time across the country.  http://www.xtinag.com/post/6323263618/june-6 

While it seems surprising that it hasn't happened more often...it's even more shocking when it actually does...  Jeremy's entry ends with "Be happy, because she was happy!"  It doesn't fix it, but it helps.

I hope that as you're reading this you are doing what you love...  And I hope that very soon I will be able to do what I love near the people I love most.  Things like this accident make me wonder why I'm so far away, as much as I adore the people here on the farm.   

... Not sure how to transition, but just to update you a bit - things are growing!!  Swiss chardbroccolilettuceradishescarrotspotatoeskohlrabistrawberriesrhubarbasparaguskaleartichokestomatoessquash, cucumberseggplantsleeksonionsscallionsmelonssweetcornpopcornfieldcorncabbageturnipspeasbeanscelery....and more. :P  I have seen/collected/squashed/fedtochickens my first cucumber and potato beetles, learned to drive another tractor and the rototiller, set up the drip line irrigation system, and the proper use of a hoe.  I have decided that my feelings on tractors are much like those towards algebra: when I get it, I like it. If it starts to get complicated, or not going smoothly, I think it's stupid.  Our CSA deliveries begin next week...so tomorrow will be almost entirely focused on cultivating as much as possible before we shift into primarily harvest mode for the next few months. I can't believe it's already June...and I'm starting to see how overwhelming this is...each crop just does what it wants at its own pace...and it doesn't care when your first delivery is or whether you have ten other things on your list...they're ready when they're ready. The reverse is true, too...Rar!  It's been good though. Still loving it.

Also, just want to share that we've seen a lot of cool wildlife around... frogs and toads, all sorts of crazy insects and butterflies, snakes, a bear broke into the beehives...raccoons, too! and a turtle crawled across the field while I was driving the Kubota yesterday...there are groundhogs in a few spots, sandhill cranes, a blue heron, blad eagles, bats, owls, and just today a doe ran across the field with a little fawn following her.  Farmers C&P have birdfeeders by their house and we see hummingbirds, boston orioles, goldfinches, chickadees, and a bunch of other ones I don't know the names of... And yesterday afternoon there was a baby robin perched on the windowsill outside the kitchen looking somewhat bewildered. 

The problem with only writing once a month is that so much has happened that I don't even know where to start... and when I do, I just ramble...

This is me and Olive. :) 

Paul teaching us about the cultivating tractors...

 Nailing on the roof of the "casita"...to hold all the tools.  FarmerP says I can paint it. :)

Not all that interesting, but that's all I can do for now. Much love.

spring has sprung...finally.

So much has been happening and I've hardly written anything in the last month it seems. I'm getting comfortable with the stick shift on field roads, transplanting at a decent pace with minimal seedling casualties, and milking Willow more easily every time...we've been assisting in the barn restoration by digging ridiculously deep holes - like 5ft deep by 3ft diameter - which is deep and wide enough to get down into them and have a terrible time trying to get out of it.

I've made cheese once and dulce de leche - that thick caramel common in Argentina...that I brought back with me in the form of about 15 extra (glorious) pounds.

I've been going for long walks, watching birds, playing with the goats, experimenting with various arts and crafts... and discovering a new-found affection for tractors.

When I got here I kind of liked the idea of knowing how to drive a tractor, but had little to no interest in ever using one on my own operation...and definitely no hint of genuine interest in the whole machine-side... you know... like, how they actually work.  But, dude. Tractors are kind of awesome.  :)

I first drove the Kubota across the yard a week or two ago, and with the help of a couple interns, removed the front wheels, turned them around and adjusted the width of the axle thing in front so they lined up-ish with the back tires. Then I drove it back across the yard. Woot!  Friday, however, I got to drive the Kubota with the transplanter attachment...with people on the back...over freshly spaded beds. This might not sound very exciting to most of you...but it was a pretty big deal. Especially since nobody was injured.

And my rows aren't too bad.

:)

The seedlings are getting bigger and happier by the day...we're getting loads of things out into the field - most of the squash - summer and winter - today, tomatoes, most of the direct seeding stuff, lettuce, kohlrabi, broccoli, beets, fennel, herbs... it's endless. :) And delightful. The trees are filling out with leaves and the fields are sprouting up. We ate fresh asparagus yesterday, and I almost cried I was so happy to eat them.

One evening last week we all sat out on the front porch and watched a storm come through. It was spectacular. I didn't even miss not watching Glee. :P

Pear tree = most spectacularly fragrant tree of all time. Smitten.

I have some more cute olive pictures. I might just make a separate blog post later with those. <3

Hope you're all well.