“When Life Looks Like Easy Street, There is Danger at Your Door”
It has been an exceptionally busy couple of months preparing for the season. Our bodies are dead from the physical labor after a several month-long, sedentary winter. The heat has finally arrived and we just went from 0 to 60 mph in a day. Suddenly, everything needs to get done, all at once too! We struggle with guilt when we try to take a day off due to the never ending To-Do list. Quality vs. Quantity. Quality wins, Quantity is when mistakes are made. We’ve definitely made some quantities.
In March we were riding along Easy Street, lusting over our perfect trays of baby plants. They all were doing so well; safe and secure in their state-of-the-art heated atmospheres. Needless to say that humans error and forgetfulness could be the catalyst to ruining an entire crop if you aren’t too careful. By April, we moved our first round of transplants to the greenhouse so we could harden them off. This included the tomatoes which do NOT like the cold. The temps hit below 32 degrees that eve and we failed to cover them with frost cloth. We lost 50% of our tomato crop.
Human error wins again.
If AI takes over, will Error be obsolete….?
Thankfully, our small farming community is tight. That very morning we lamented over the frost bitten tomato fail, Boundless Farmstead in Bend, OR. sent a text on a group farm thread asking if anyone needed their extra tomatoes. If you don’t know, it’s not Small Farm vs. Small Farm, it’s Small Farm vs. Conventional Ag. What we do isn’t easy, it’s a lot of failure. So we work together to help each other continue to be successful, as we need as many small farms hustling vegetables as possible.
We strive to be perfect stewards of the land and the environment, making sure to consider our climate first when making any decision on the farm. But recently, we admittedly had to go against our values.
A big focus to our farming method is to not till the land. This releases carbon into the atmosphere, which you know, causes climate change. It’s real. It is also the way the majority of Big Ag farms work their land. Well, we tilled. Not because we are changing our values, but because you have to do that “first initial till” when taking on a new, un-farmed piece of land. Our plan is to utilize the acreage in front of our house to farm, but before that happens - we need to build up the soil. It looks like that area hasn’t been watered in several years and is all quack grass (the worst). To bring back those healthy nutrients into the ground, we need to cover-crop it. Clover and Buckwheat are two crops that we will seed into the soil, water and get it growing to start building healthy, thriving soil. We also have 4 new bee hives that were installed by our friends at Broadus Bees, one of the main producers of local honey in Bend. The bees will love that cover crop and will be beneficial to some of our crops like squash, tomatoes and strawberries, that need bees to create fruit.
To the South, we also tilled a 50’ x 100’ plot that will contain our winter squash, potatoes, corn and sunflowers. These crops can take up a lot of space, so we decided to plant those outside of our main garden this year to give them some room to grow. We still have to tarp, compost and transplant which will happen in the next couple weeks.
Another reason we don’t till is because you need a tractor to do it, which we don’t have nor did we have any plans of buying one.
Well, we got a tractor. The High Desert Food and Farm Alliance had word that someone was giving out a tractor they were just paying to store and didn’t use. We were actually in the market for a Riding Lawnmower, but, decided to move forward with this 1952 Massey Ferguson Tractor that could brush-hog the lawn AND till the field (and maybe hayrides for fun). Her name is Tina because of her patina skin and they say she will last forever.
We also FINALLY finished building our new 100 ft Caterpillar tunnel. The initial time allotted to complete the build was 2 days. It took us three weeks. :/ Between the lava rock we had to drill/ jackhammer/ concrete to get in the re-bar and the 6 day delay that occurred from our truck breaking down while picking up the tractor in Gresham, it took much longer than anticipated to get it done. Then we both got sick, with a terrible cough and fever and it has slowed us down even more. March and April are probably one of the busiest times on a farm, so it was quite inopportune for us to get sick.
The month of April is “transplant go-time”, May as well. Irrigation gets turned on mid-month and the race is on to get everything in the ground. At the same time, we had signed ourselves up for all these Spring Projects, “classic”. We did drop a few for sake of sanity. Having to move our farm/ home for the past three years sets us back every Spring. Having to redo jobs we’ve already built before for example our prop house, our grow-room, chicken coop , microgreen station, etc… is daunting. However, we are optimistic that next year’s Spring will be much easier on the eyes, in hopes to continuing to farm and live here for years to come.
The cold evenings are another contributor to slowing down the growth process. It is necessary for plants to really get their “grow-on” to live in temps above freezing in the evenings. All of March and the majority of April was below freezing. It just started getting warm and it snowed a lot this winter. Which is great because we all know we need precipitation. All of these factors that we’ve mentioned above has caused us to push out our CSA start date to the end of May. We will also be participating at the Bend Farmers Market on May 10th, a week later than expected.
“You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can’t predict the weather.” Ms. Jackson, Outkast
But it’s all good - All winter we dream for this time of year! Being able to see all of the preparation, physical labor and hard work literally come into fruition is incredible. There is still a lot to do on the farm before we float on that pink cloud of only harvesting instead of building stuff and we can take photos of pretty flowers and delicious fruits instead of dirt and chickens. The time when you can stop carb-loading and instead make yourself a big salad. When the farm is in peak season, it is the equivalent to the peak to your favorite song: (Dance Yourself Clean, LCD Soundsystem).
We look forward to seeing all of our CSA Members, and the rest of our community down at the farmers market and we can’t wait to see friends and family this Summer!
