Sunday evening, geese higher and faster than our local flocks, confirmed the forecast of coming cold.
Welcome to November, farm friends. I know that many of you have been thinking about us and our fellow growers with this early dose of winter. So first, we want you all to know that yes, we still have things to eat. The farmstore is open, members have two more weeks of filling their feedbags, and the local-eating season has not closed yet, by any means. Usually on the first Saturday after market we host some sort of farmstore shindig to entice people out to the farm. This week, though we had hoped to have some sort of winter squash festival (and open up some space in our shop by selling as many as possible!), we are, I'm afraid, going to have to be working every available non-frozen moment to try to get the last few things out of the field, and our garlic into the ground, before real winter arrives. But come on out, there will be plenty to eat. We took advantage of a short warm window of time this afternoon to grab some fresh green goodness, so there is baby spinach, baby boc choi, deep green tatsoi, and even fresh arugula to pack into the farmstore tomorow. They'll join the potatoes, onions, beets, radishes, and sweet peppers that were harvested and stored before the freezes. We hope you'll come out, and we're sorry we won't have time to visit, but we'll give our friendliest wave and great appreciation, from whatever work we are in the midst of.
And how has it been, for us, this unusual cold snap? Well, you know the old saying, "there is no bad weather, just inadequate clothing?" This past week, we experienced the farm-scale version of that, which we would phrase as "there is no bad weather, just inadequate labor and facilities." To be clear, I'm not saying that I consider 30 mph winds blowing 2-3 inches of snow, and a low of 4 degrees Farenheit to be great weather, espcially for October 28th. Nor was the sudden change to the forecast that droppd Tuesday night's low from 4 to negative 1 our idea of fun either.
But the hard thing to take, for us, was not so much the weather itself. It was more the fact that without quite enough people-power, and not quite the right equipment and facillities, we lost some crops that we think we could have saved if we were set up better.
And to be clear, we did save a lot. We came home from the final market and spent the rest of the daylight hours covering and double-covering crops in the field and in the tunnels, doing an extra harvest of some cabbage, kale, and chard. By Monday before the winds arrived, we had moved one of the caterpillar tunnels from its summer position over to a block of salad mix, arugula, and asian greens. In the face of the gusts, we wrestled a 30' x 120' peice of row cover over a block of carrots that we had not had time to harvest. My chronic insomnia and the fact that we had an extra backup "torpedo" propane heater to turn on in the nursery means 2,000 pounds of winter squash and pie pumpkins were saved from freezing, around 3:00 a.m. on Monday night after I walked over in p.j.'s and down coat, and found that the pellet stove and one propane heater were losing the battle with the cold. Noah has installed thermostat-controlled small heaters in so many spaces around the farm, including a dual-stage controller in our walk-in cooler that shuts off the cooling and adds some heat when needed, all automatically (in years past, we learned the hard way that single-digit nights mean frozen produce inside the walk-in cooler). We've grown up a lot as a farm, and we did manage to keep a lot of it safe. Our potates were all safely harvested before the previous winter storms, though half of them are still waiting to be washed, stacked in the shop.
But we couldn't get it all, and after so much effort goes into a crop from bed prep to seeding to watering, weeding, and tending, it can be heartbreaking to not bring in a harvest, to know that something may not reach the plates of our farm supporters and local eaters. Some of the losses were minor: a few more bins of nice re-growth cooking spinach and Asian mix that we couldn't get cut, two beds of radishes a little small but certainly delicious that froze in the ground (they are now the texture of water balloons). Some were big. We exist right now in an odd multiple reality in which we do not yet know if our remaining carrots, 7 beds worth, are a total loss, a mix of ruined and OK, or a sort of salvage harvest in which we have to snap the top 2" off of each individual root, because sub-zero temperatures turned the carrot texture to mush. Most likely it's a mix of all of those; we know just enough to know that "they are all ok" is not one of the possible scenarios. A block of beets is the same story, though we at least have a few big bags of those left in storage from a previous harvest.
Monday, 3:45 pm, the wind and snow hit and did not stop till the next morning. This layer of cover over the carrots was the last thing we managed to cover outside.
It's not the lost income that gets us down, though that is painful, especially when some of these crops were part of our plan for making up the income lost in the late-June hail. It's more just the loss of potential--the joy of farmstore customers at sweet farm carrots still in stock in January, or the feeling of abundance for ourselves, having a pile of beautiful gold roots to eat for our whole winter. And again, the knowledge that effort put in earlier in the season might not come to fruition. Taylor and Erin spent a hot, difficult day or two weeding all those carrot beds, and if they don't get harvested in the end, they might as well have been lounging by the river, right?
We have to confess, we did a bit of moping this week. Moping is not really our style, but it was hard to avoid for a little while as we took stock of what we had and hadn't managed, and wondered both how bad it really was, and what we could have done better. We felt a little stupid, and a little let down, though we knew we had worked just as long and as hard as we could. We've had some hard thinking and conversations about what decisions we made, how quickly some of the scenarious shifted, and what would have let us fare better if the very same situation were to happen again (though God help me if we are ever building yet another chicken barn for a rapidly growing flock of chicks in some future fall when winter arrives early).
So what is it that would have made this just a cold snap, not a major blow? The first and simplest thing was people-power. We have certainly reached a point in our growing where we need to be sure we have a full crew all the way through the end of October, plus some extra help for late-season cleanup. We'll be looking at our budget, what we can offer, and what we need, and have a goal of starting our hiring process in November and December this year, for the 2020 season. And we need to be able to budget for some extra, non-expert help, paid hourly, to get in some of these key work pushes when conditions change and everything must happen at once.
The other big thing that was missing in this event, and which will continue to hinder us through the rest of fall and winter, is a temperature-controlled washing, packing, and storage space. We have made do with our open-sided, outdoor packshed for years, even as we have moved towards growing deeper and deeper into the shoulder seasons. But as we have gotten better at growing, and are actually capable of producing these abundances of deep fall or early spring greens, or enough roots to get us all through the winter, the wash/ pack and storage space has lagged behind. Our hands are full of cracks from recent weeks of washing on Friday night until the water started to freeze. We have a lot of ideas for this, and have held off on building anything yet in part because we really want to make sure we do it right, and have a clear vision of how it fits into our farm--both the farm we have now, and the slightly better, more sane farm that we really want to be.
We need a space where we can turn on the water, even if it's 20 degrees (or 2 degrees) outside and dunk some boc choi or spinach, or scrub carrots. We need a place where winter storage crops can park and not be too hot or too cold, and not be in the way of critical farm tasks like building or repairing equipment. We need walk-in cooler space big enough to handle the volume of harvests we now do twice a week. It's pretty daunting to consider, and as weary as we are of building, we'll put some careful thought into this one. We have already made calls to a number of farmer colleagues who will come out this fall to walk around the farm with us and help think through what makes sense, what our needs and our options are, and how to get to what we need. We know some fresh, outside brains will help.
This problem with washing and packing impacts the availability of produce throughout this fall, and next spring, so we have to figure out something. And, at the same time, we have to get this right, because it's not quite clear how we'd fund such a warehouse, and especially one that accomplishes all the goals of the farm. It's not a simple, one year project.
This was a really hard week for us, a very strange end-but-it's-not-the-end to our season. But for me at least, there are some things that are reliably cheering: green leaves in the sun is the best, and I got to take the short un-frozen window of late afternoon to cut and wash spinach, tatsoi, boc choi and arugula that survived sub-zero temperatures in our unheated tunnels. The work to move the tunnel, to add layers of cover inside, was not wasted. There are fresh greens for you to eat. And tomorrow, for the first time in 6 months, I will get as much sleep as I want on Friday night (unless we stay up too late tonight splitting seed garlic while having our annual fall TV show binge, a distinct possibility).
For a farm, garlic is the crop that ties one year to the next. We plant next year's crop now, which in itself is a committment to our farm's future. We are still here. In all our hard conversations about how to change, neither of us ever suggested just eating the seed garlic and calling it quits, even though we had to spread old greenhouse plastic across our prepared garlic beds to ensure the soil will be warm enough to plant in the next few days. We are in deep, and we are so grateful for all of you who are in with us. As we bend hearts to the ground again this coming week, we'll appreciate the soil, we'll think of garlic scapes coming next June, and we'll officially begin the 2020 planting season. The crop planning, the seed orders, the membership signups will not be far behind. There is a lot of thinking, resting, recovery, repairs, and more to do over the non-market season that we are entering now, and it can take a little bit for us to adjust to the shift. But we thank you all, immensely, for being a part of this wild ride of season. If you keep eating, we'll keep growing.
With raw hands and raw hearts,
Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm.