Posts from — May 2010

The past couple weeks have been transplant mania on the farm. It is starting to look less like spring and more like summer with every passing day. Many of the first rotations are approaching harvest time – I started to harvest this pac choi a few days ago for the restaurant kitchen. It will be followed by either cucumbers or yellow wax beans, whichever strikes my fancy when the row is empty.

Different people connect with different parts of field work – it’s part of what makes working on a field crew so interesting. I’ve worked with people who dream all winter of transplanting. I’m not one of them. It’s not in my top three, it’s not in my top ten. It’s something I do because in order to harvest, which I love and could do all day, I have to get out there and plant. Non-negotiable.

I have five or so rows – about a quarter of my field space at the bakehouse – under plastic mulch. Burying plastic mulch by hand is pretty bad. I always feel like an ant while i’m doing it, I don’t know why. I think it’s worth it – the mulch conserves soar heat and soil moisture, and heat-loving crops like tomatoes, peppers, and summer squash do much better in a bed of it, especially in our climate. And looking the the completed row is pretty great. But if i ever hit the big time, i’m buying a mulch laying implement for my little tiller, post haste. that’ll be the day my friends. that’ll be the day.

http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?25392

When people ask if I am doing the farm behind the Bakehouse, I say yes, but what I mean to say is that the farm is doing me.

Last week I stabbed myself in the leg with a utility knife. I was cutting pipe for irrigation. It was around seven in the morning – I had already been at work for an hour or two, watering the greenhouses and assembling drip tape components. I was tired and blurry and frustrated. I was using my leg as a cutting surface.

Any eighth grader who’s been to shop class can tell you not to use your leg as a cutting surface. But there I was. And then the obvious thing happened.

I knew right away it was bad. I hobbled to my truck and went to the er, where the doctor on call supervised a visiting medical student as she put three neat stitches in my left thigh. By ten am, I was back in the field, frustrated that I had lost most of the morning. I didn’t bother to change my jeans.

I couldn’t believe I did that. I just wasn’t thinking. Being beyond exhausted is a profound impairment, and it can make you do some pretty stupid things.

It’s hard to accept that my body is a resource with limits. There’s so much I need to do, so much I want to see done. But if I want to have a life in farming, I have to farm in a way that is sustainable not just for the plants, but for myself, and that’s hard to sit with.

Last night I cancelled my plans, stayed in and drank tea and slept. It’s a start.

thank you, ms meredith, for taking my vague and inarticulate directions (pretty, bold lettering, some sort of image) and somehow manifesting exactly what I wanted, when I didn’t even exactly know what I wanted.

not just an artist, but a mind reader as well. nifty lady to call a friend.

Yesterday my friend Marcus tilled down at the glassworks, where I will be growing cut flowers.

It was a really pretty morning, warm and clear – we’ve had a true spring this year on the island, daffodils and all, which is so glorious after the washout of 2009.

The soil there is gorgeous, dark and loamy, smells just right. I’ll have to make a pass or two more with the little bcs to break up the clumps, and then the bachelor buttons are ready to go in, soon to bloom in electric blue.

Fortunately, in a first year plot, I don’t have to contend with to many of these.

The sod keeps sprouting anew, even after two rounds with the tiller, but there are worse things. Such as pigweed. And mugwort. And nutgrass.

Over those, I’ll pick out clumps of sod any day of the week.