It’s a big Tuesday coming up at the farm! Farmer’s Market opening day may be more dramatic (that kids’ parade, fantastic every year!), but at the farm it’s an exciting opening to the season too. As we delve into market and main-season membership time, we are re-starting our Tuesday afternoon hosted farmstore hours. From now through October, if you want to ask us some questions, take a little walk around, chat recipes or learn what that weird looking new vegetable is, we’ll have someone on hand to greet and visit, from 3:00-6:00 on Tuesdays.

This week, welcoming our new and returning “feedbag” members, we have a few extra fun things planned, including farm tours at 3:30 and 5:15. Farm members: if you haven’t picked up this year’s feedbag yet, come on out! New members can get the full orientation and returning members a big thanks and a great start to the season.

Spring is funny, as much as we try for a steady supply of all the produce, things come in waves….at market, we had harvested Friday from patches of greens here and there, worried about overall volume, and thought that 4 items this week was all that we could supply to the feedbags. But today’s harvest totes were heavy and the stack of bagged greens in the walk-in cooler is tall. Members who picked up over the weekend and got just 4 things, please feel free to swing by the farmstore this week and grab one more.

And if you are not a member, there’s plenty for you now too! Spinach, lettuce mix, arugula, tender butter chard, spicy mix, stir-fry mixes and bundles, chives, and a few (just a few but they are exciting), radishes and salad turnips (with more on deck for market this week as well).

Our meal of choice right now is any of those stir-fry type greens, sautéed with some garlic, maybe frozen sweet peppers or other veggies on hand, seasoned up with some curry paste and coconut milk or the favorite peanut sauce, and poured over rice or noodles. Fried egg on top if you are so lucky.

It was so wonderful to see so many familiar faces and trusty market baskets this Saturday at what was, believe it or not, our tenth opening day at the Hamilton Farmers Market. We hope to see you at the farm as well.

Yup, real radishes tokyo bekana (a great early season salad), and turnips!

Farmer thoughts on spring, from Noah

Spring is always wonderful on a farm, except when it is not. For a farm, it’s a season of re-awakening, of hopes and planning, and also a realization of daily battle between what is possible, what we dream, and biology.  We used to think mostly about the biology and the timing, when we were newer to this: the simple math of starting seeds in February, long winter nights of planning, reading new farming books punctuated by short days of winter harvests. The years have added many more layers to the mix.

In deep in winter, we start think hard about the themes and goals for the year, and we start the long process of interviewing crew and trying to build the team that can help us reach those goals. Ideally, (and I’m dreaming big here), it’s a series of talks over long hours skiing from mountain hut to mountain hut in the French alps or the wilderness of Idaho. Maybe while picking coffee in the Oaxaca forests with our old friends John and Holly and Thomas and Alvira. 

But we didn’t get that sort of time this year; though we started the winter with a good full team, one had to leave to tend to family medical issues out of state, and suddenly we were short handed and had to fudge and compress our quiet bit of time. And, it’s easy to forget too, we had about a 15-week non-stop building marathon-push on our wash pack shed before I just got, well, completely worn out and a little caught up in red tape, correcting some mistakes, and then writing our employee manual.

So, this year, the wondrous remix of spring seems hurried along by not only the winter came fast previously (and because of that our field conditions and challenges have been vastly different to other years) and even though it’s been an especially cool spring, it still seems a bit hurried.

But we didn’t scrimp on the weeks of interviews, reference calls, followup calls with our crew, and job offer letters. It consumes weeks, and I think to make sure we got things just right, I took a well needed break from building to handle all the zoom and facetime logistics.  It’s quite the thing, interviewing people who want to make a difference, and come to our valley, and our farm to make the world a better place.

We thought we did a real good job this year, actually doubling our crew size and making sure that without needing to buy too many building materials, and things in general, we could make it all work, even with some serious increased costs, of both supplies and both more crew and with also significant wage raises.

With these changes, we figured, we could have at least two well seasoned people in the greenhouse, an additional tractor expert, some real field experts, bring back the work-party shops that we trialed some years ago, and continue to improve our flower enterprise, not only with another harvest and bouquet expert, but with some on farm help to expand flower offerings,  permanent market help, and also give people some leadership roles. Sure, we said, with some good online mentorship we had this winter, we can do all of that. Our peers thought so too. We started off the season so well-staffed that we even arranged for some of our team members to help out on other local farms who were short-handed, in their first few weeks.

As I write, right now, we are starting to face a near-term future with a smaller team; one person out for the foreseeable future after a car crash, and other who has decided that this isn’t the best fit at this point, and gave us her two-week notice last week. While the two week notice is a courteous practice in the US, it doesn’t really work very well on a farm; the season is already off to the races, and it’s too late to recruit new hires for this seasonal work. it’s literally a race here to re-shuffle everyone’s positions, retrain, and figure out how we can be an employer of choice (and not a farm people want to leave), and also get a break from time to time. And while it does feel like we are winning a lot of the time, (with the most tender bright green spinach, or perfect baby arugula), we aren’t winning right now. Despite the best plans (and maybe it’s been simply lack of sleep), things aren’t quite going like we visioned. It’s so concerning, in fact, that we are bringing in some outside help, a facilitator to guide us all through the conversations about how to be a team.

An old friend, once wrote to me, in a recorded letter, before podcasts and the voice memos of millennials were a thing, that in their twenties they’d park their car, and run endlessly, lost into a large field of wheat or cover crop or cornfield until they couldn’t run anymore and they’d flop down, out of wonder of nature, love, and what people who are part of a community can grow for a community. We are craving that wonder now, trying to grow and continuously learn, but the field is large and we can get a bit lost.

What I’m learning is this. In order to win, you have to lose a little. You have to cry a lot. You have to be able to re-invent yourself, while diving deep, below the soil. We are literally digging dreams. We have to find a way to have more rest, even if parts of the farm fail. We also have to teach, a lot more than we thought. When we give feedback, it’s because we have a sense of obligation for our community, and the business of our farm.  We don’t make a lot, and there are things that may always haunt us because we’ve learned: those clouds of hail; that storm that destroyed our house build many years ago; the delicate balance of seedling conditions, plant spacing, crop protection, everything matters, how efficient we harvest, and how we grow and build a team.  And we aspire to lead and to gain enough respect to be recognized as leaders. And we don’t have that with our crew yet this year, and that’s terrible.

We are so tired of being strong and being scared. There are things that haunt farmers, soil diseases, challenges with building organic matter, issues with building our crop records and responding to changing conditions on the fly, and the infrastructure. Well, even though our new build isn’t quite yet done, we are well on the way to solving that.  I feel like we are solving them all of the problems of farming.  But some things remain elusive.

And while we continue to dream, we also continue to doubt; spring is the prime season of doubt for farmers, when we can remember vividly all the ways things haven’t worked out, even as we launch the ship again. We continue to be a little scared; that time of just barely making our farm work, just barely, well, many of us will never forget it.  And even though we try to impress that secret history on our team, we know it’s how we live each day that matters.  Your greetings, love, and support mean so much.

We’ve cleaned up the farm quite a bit yesterday, with the first big shifts of mowing and weed whacking, and while we haven’t quite taken all the recycled scrap metal out of the way, things are looking good and literally every day for a while now, and many days to come, more seeds and more transplants are going in. Somehow, despite it all, there is that: planting as the act of faith, the expression of hope, the best defense we know against the fear and doubt.