Mother’s Day

From where do you draw your faith?  How do you learn the lessons that you need?  

These questions have been following me around this spring as the farm has faced some serious challenges.  Our commitment to maintain the most vibrantly living soil possible by drastically reducing our tillage, combined with bringing a whole new garden into production after years of being pasture, has been hard. We've questioned whether this faith in the almighty earthworms and the rest of the soil food web is a beautiful revolution, or if we are being just plain stupid by changing everything about how we make beds and plant. 

That faith was tested more than ever yesterday as we struggled to plant our onion block.  Despite weeks of tarping, and a smoothing out with the power harrow, the no-till beds were rough with clumps of old grass roots, making the transplanting tool that we have used for years catch, clog up, and basically simply not work.  Only through the determined effort of all four of us (Noah and I, and the two farm interns, putting in yet another day that lasted past sunset), did we manage to get most of the onions roots-down into the soil.  At dark, with three rows left, we just had to call it.  

This spring, one of testing faith and searching for our lessons, I've been thinking of my parents, especially my mom as mothers day comes this weekend. My folks, farmers of a different sort of farm than ours, have an ability to meet problems with a blend of quiet pragmatism and humor that I so admire. I've been remembering a small example of that good humor this spring, as for the first time I am wearing eyeglasses, especially for the close-up work of seeding and greenhouse propagation.  As I learn about condensation, yet am surprised every time a peek into the germination chamber fogs up my lenses, I keep having a memory of my mom, whose glasses came at a similar age, coming from the damp Oregon weather outside into our warm cozy house, or opening up the oven to check on a roasting turkey.  As her glasses went cloudy, she'd laugh.  I can hear it so vividly in my head:  "ooh!" little whoop, and then her delightful chuckle.  A surprise and an amusement, rather than annoyance; it's hard to know how accurate memory is, but I feel she might just laugh till the fog cleared. 

It's a good example, but I'm not always hitting it myself, at large or small scale. I'm trying, but I did throw a few planting trays in frustration yesterday during the most difficult onion planting in our years of farming.  My mom's examples aren't limited to the minor annoyance of steamy glasses.  When a medical diagnosis led a neurologist to tell her to "go home and put your affairs in order," she did in fact think through and decide details of the end of life at a much younger age than anyone would hope to.  And she summed up her decision to not be extended by ventilation machines or feeding tubes in the most succinct and characteristic way I can imagine.  Though it was as serious anything we've ever discussed, she had a bit of a spark and chuckle when she told me how she had decided where to draw the line: "I figure, when I can't enjoy the ice cream anymore, maybe I don't want to stick around."  

Though we can't have some of the conversations about fear, faith, learning, and confidence that I wish we could, anymore, I'm grateful that she can still enjoy the ice cream, and can ride along the waves of laughter of gathered friends and family.  We all learn some lessons from our mothers, I think, and this spring, I'm trying to pull up that lesson of meeting real problems with calm and humor. It's a work in progress of course.  And also to remember to appreciate what I am capable of: starting these plants, working with this soil, building this farm, tasting spinach so sweet it could almost make you cry. And of course, enjoying the ice cream. 

As we continue our spring, feeling our faith and our abilities tested so often, and knowing that there's a good chance that things could not work out as well as we need, we're trying to maintain that faith. The farm tries to support and teach us, I believe.  The plants and the biology and the place itself, and also you, the farm supporters.  The members who read the whole newsletter and said at market last week, "I"m coming for my hug!", the members and customers who were so happy to be back in spring, back to eating farm veggies, celebrating the greens. You help us keep the faith, and inspire us to learn the lessons that we need.  

This mothers' day, may you find the faith, growth, and humor that you need.  In grattitude for nurturing and lessons in all their forms, eat a giant salad, and then eat your ice cream, too.  

With love and living soil, 

Mary and Noah, SweetRoot

By All Accounts, the Latest Spring in 26 Years

What a week. We think it’s spring, but according to Luci at Lifeline Produce, the last time the crabapples bloomed this late was 26 years ago, so the slow spring is not just our imagination! So this morning at market, produce is lighter than we'd like, definitely less than this week in past years, even for crops that were planted on the same dates. 

Farms throughout the region have been comparing notes about being behind; our grower's co-op has been hungry for greens from anyone who can produce them, but we, like many of our colleagues have had to keep them waiting as the limited production goes first to farm membership and market customers.  (We have let a few local chefs start to buy a few greens, but have them on a much smaller trickle than most years at this time).  

We are in a funny state right now where the first rounds high tunnel crops are wrapping up to make way for summer crops like cucumbers and tomatoes. Yesterday, we turned over two of our high tunnels, from early spring crops to summer crops, but the field plantings (some of them seeded just one week after the beds in the high tunnels we've been harvesting for 3 weeks now).  High tunnels are what we call those unheated greenhouses with the big rolling doors that you see when you pull into the farm; this year is the first time the we're 3 weeks into May with the only harvest-able things coming out of those structures, rather than also the field.  

We are also in a funny state because we have a larger list of projects than usual. We are desperately waiting for the last shipment of drip tape and parts that will complete our watering needs for season, our intern cabins are slowly creeping towards a finishing state (but also the most expensive stage of building), and our new farming system - reduced tillage on all thirty inch beds is more work than we bargained for. One of our colleagues, in Bozeman, a vey successful farm by many many measures, just closed their doors, going out of business. And we’ve been talking about that a lot lately, trying to understand it, and it makes us worrisome of the viability of farms and the obligation we have to write, to talk, to grow this community, and to try and get better.  

We are grateful for the time at market to visit and those of you who remind us that farms are about people, our members, to all of you who come out to the farmstore or give us a smile as we are more frantic than, well, perhaps ever this year. 

It’ll just be Mary at market — I’m heading to Missoula to put one of our interns on a plane that will eventually head to another farm. We’ve brought what we can to market, in this odd season of shuffling, cold weather, building, and re-building this young farm of ours. One highlight is that we will have 3 varieties of our favorite tomatoe plants available for sale. They will also be at the farm, stating Sunday: Brandywine, Black Krim, and a few Sungold cherry tomatoes. 

Legend of The Tree Frogs (First Market)

Some of today's harvest, left to right: baby kale, arugula spinach, salad mix. Radishes, bok choy, asian greens, microgreens, and eggs (not pictured).

Back before we went to market, long before we started a farm, and longer ago even still than I demanded to our realtor to stop the driving her car over our field, this year's new ground, the ground where I knew we'd farm, and back before Mary and I homesteaded, and harvested on other peoples' farms, there was the legend of the tree frogs.

It was spring, and Mary and I were madly in love. I'd write her letters from Madagascar, or Papua New Guinea, and send them off from coffee and spice or tea farms on my satelite phone. I loved my work, but something was missing. As I was writing her long distance love letters, before we really knew we were in love, I'd write about working with people who cared for land, soil, and community. I knew that I, and we, had to be part of that. She'd write me about her revelations of the natural world, her students minds, and everything else. One of the email letters she penned was titled the time of Tree Frogs. As she wrote, she'd hear the tree frogs singing out of one of her windows. She visited me one late spring, when I was caring for a friends small homestead gardens, and we'd seed his garden wildly, enough for dozens of families, maybe, out of our excitement and passion, and to burn off our energy, we'd go for long runs that turned into sometimes grueling four hour, river swimming adventures.  That was the time of tree frogs, when we'd fall asleep to that mysterious and magical cadence.

And that's how all this began, our love for one another, people, land, community. And now we are in the wild ride together. Another chapter starts tomorrow, with 2019 market and membership seasons.  There are a lot of new projects this year -- our new irrigation system, the intern cabins that we are literally working at every day so our team has solid housing (rather than, um, squeezing into living space with us), and our new approaches to soil. It's left us really, just as we began, with that mixture of passion, wonder and exhaustion building this farm. We'll be talking about that throughout the season in our newsletters, as we share stories and insights about this farming life, and what to do with our more than 50 crops. But tomorrow, is really about you. It's been a slower start to the spring, with both our infrastructure and the weather, but now our high tunnels are busting at the seams with early season greens.

Farm memberships start this week, and members can pickup their feedbag at market and start filling!  If market doesn't work for you this week, we encourage you to come to the farm on Tuesday, anytime after 3:00 pm, when we'll have one or both of us staffing the farmstore just for members.  Throughout the season you can fill your bag any day of the week, but in this first week, please shoot for one of those days if possible, or get in touch with us if those days don't work, so we know that you are sorted. Whether you are new or returning we really want to greet you and welcome the new season together, as well as just get a chance to make sure all the logistics are clear. 

We staff our farmstore on Tuesday afternoons so we can greet members, but the farmstore is open to anyone, all the time. We stock our farmstore several times a week now, and of course with eggs daily and have a few new surprises in store next week, starting Tuesday afternoon. 

I sit at my desk and take a deep breath. Wow, another season is upon us. We've got a warm hug for you at market and we are so grateful for you. We are at our same spot, on 2nd and Bedford. The new and improved market display we've been talking about is a few weeks from completion, so just look for our familiar well-worn used-to-be-white canopy, a big old pile of greens, and your smiling farmers.  

To get our cabins complete, farm members and friends have been literally bailing us out, one work party after another. We are planning on mudding and taping drywall on Sunday as we get our crew housed on farm. Travis helped take down our ugly and falling down pole building at the cabin site. Now he, and his sweetie Shelly help hang drywall. In the first image above, Chris shares a laugh after she and Alex hung drywall and stuffed insulation for hours on end.

Not quite ready to move in yet, but close to being dried-in, these little well-insulated cabins may be our strongest, tightest, and straightest buildings yet. To save cost and make for a better footprint, all the framing lumber, some rafters, floor joists, windows (except for two new ones at each peak), and the roof are all reclaimed. Market proceeds this week pretty much go right into the finishing of these structures.

Market Countdown

Spinach and Smooth Roads

Malaya yawns on a spring day as she gets ready to plant with us.

Happy spring! We thought we'd lift our heads up out of the mud and puddles for just a quick update from the farm. First and possibly most importantly: our neighbor Mike spent hours yesterday working out some of Bell Lane's impossible pot-holes, so you should no longer need to plan extra time in your day in order to drive that 1/4 mile to get your eggs and spinach.  Thank you to all who have braved the craters these last few weeks as the snow and mud melted. 

And yes, we did say spinach....there is a pulse of beautiful tasty spinach that over-wintered in one of our tunnels despite the many days of 18 (or more) below zero.  We cut it all to make way for spring seeding in that tunnel, so get it while it's here this week--the next wave of greens will be several weeks out (but they are coming--I just peeked on the lettuce and spinach germinating in the tunnel we planted last week). 

Our meadowlarks returned in force a few days ago, perched on the fenceposts and the hybrid poplars around the yurt. They joined the growing chorus of red-wing blackbirds that, in my mind, have been shrieking SEEEED! SEEEED! for at least a month already. And with the temperatures finally above zero, and with ground thawed out in our high tunnels we have finally been following their advice.

This spring, with late February and early March averaging more than 25 degrees below the seasonal norms, had us re-arranging our crop planning and calendars even before a single seed went in the ground. That March 8th round of greens seeding? Um, afraid not. And it's ok, we'll catch up. In the meantime, there are no shortage of building projects and farm tools to build, make, order, and learn. The well-house is almost finished, and the daunting but exciting steps of final wiring and plumbing are next on the docket, to have water ready to go on our tunnels and front field before the irrigation ditches come on in late April.

We've also been on the steep learning curve of our newest piece of equipment, a BCS walking tractor, as we prep ground in our tunnels. And not just raise-your-heart-rate-while-you-hike kind of steep. Steep as in maybe we should harness up and be on belay, kind of steep. We are excited about this tool, which will help us re-set beds and prepare them for seeding without nearly as much mechanized soil violence as our old tractor-mounted rototiller, and yet....let's just say that the experts demonstrating how to use it on YouTube are not showing you the first beds they ever built with it.  

When you order a new farm tool, I think it's normal to imagine yourself using it smoothly and expertly, turning out a perfectly formed planting bed nicely under control, fingertips on the levers. The reality is perhaps more like learning to use clip-in bike shoes. I can still remember my first outing, when the quick little side twist and disconnect that looked so easy when my expert friend pulled up to a stop sign looked nothing like my ungainly slow-motion crash while trying to remember how exactly that little bit of metal had me locked to my bike pedals and how I was supposed to get out.  Similarly, rather than the easy perfect beds, we found ourselves slowly coming to understand the BCS, but not before first wrestling awkwardly with it, being pinned by the handlebars against the wall of the hoop house, or trying not to get bucked off the raised beds by the heavy machine as it slips and slides off of fluffy soil piled too high, and beds and pathways that simply were not adding up to the dimensions we needed. We're hopeful it will soon be a bit smoother (and building beds in the field, without walls at the end will be helpful practice), and advice from other farmers has been key. Little details, like "ignore the manual and set the wheels 6" narrower, or it definitely won't work."  

Editor’s Note: After 40 hours this past season it got a lot easier; and after 80 hours this past season it was a breeze. One of the tricks was adding 35 pounds of weight to the front and easier a heavier power harrow to make the machine handle better.

Every day a little bit more soil emerges from the field, and every day we get a few more things planted in the tunnels, in starter pots in the greenhouse, and we get a little closer to the start of market and farm member pickups.  We have a feeling that this spring that is starting slow is going to accelerate quickly, so hang on for the ride! 

Solve your fear of River Snakes: The Eatership

Washing Tapioca Leaves, Sarawak, Borneo (2009)

A lifetime ago, I waded through Malaysian government bureacracy and countless trips, meetings, and visits to work in a remote national park in the interior of Borneo. The process took weeks, and not every day of my time living with communities learning to farm on forest edges was smooth, or rewarding. Many days I slept shoulder to shoulder on the floors of forest huts before long days of planting. One night a wild boar ate my sandals.

But I will always remember one day: I walked far upriver along a trail that to harvest fruit tree seedlings - we called them wildlings. Rather than going back the same way, our party split. Part of the party left to go hunting; the other part jumped in long boats to glide back downriver to the community. The boats were a bit full, and though of course my friends would have made room for me, I elected instead to mostly float alongside the boats, sometimes grabbing on to the low-slung carved out hardwood hulls, but most of the time just drifting. Along the way we beached one of the boats, with help of a group of women, and scrambled up the steep embankment and collected tapioca leaves and forest ferns for dinner.

Back at camp, when we pulled up to the banks of the village, I realized that I was no longer afraid of river snakes that sometimes swam along side me, leeches, dengue. I had come to know them and lived. I was free, food secure, happy, without worry. This was so so different than my first years farming, here, digging in. I was often worried, scared, and not who I want to be.

This morning, on NPR, I woke up to some new predictions of climate change. By mid-century we may easily see a two degrees rise in temperature and by the end of the century, we could see up to four degrees. That's almost catastrophic, and it's certainly detrimental agricultrual options worldwide. While some of the physics of this equation we can't stop, we can focus on the human solutions, building a food secure community that is strong, resilent, and embraces one another just like it embraces new farming practices.

All new farms, including ours, place an emphasis on infrusturcture. We've been doing that these past years. But sometimes I feel that we all neglect our social infrusturcture.

That's why we have The Eatership. For the past several years, we've been steadily growing the amount of food we subsidize for members of our community. We believe that that everyone, regardless of income or status or lifestyle, should be able to have access to organic, fresh, local produce for our entire growing season.

Through farm donations, we raised $2200 last year to subsidize farm feedbags for seven farm members. We made the choice of who received membership assistance based on donations (our farm chipped in too) and our simple, self-reported, need based application. The majority of the Eatership applicants paid some share of their farm membership, so this money is just not an all out gift. We think of this as a partial scholarship.

As we mature, we'd like to expand this program, and we see this as a program that could be scaled, to eventually include all farms in the Bitterroot that offer a farm membership program. We have two local not for profit organizations in mind that would be suitable partners to manage this program, we have a starter grant in mind that would help fund some of the administrative fees for the management that our greater community could run.

Raising donations of $4000 this season can help prove to our community of supporters and businesses that this program is scaleable and deserves more capital - both the human capital to run it and the funds to help create a better world, with secure access. This is something that keeps me motivated to farm. It's something I think about every day, whether working on a tool tool, cultivating, seeding, working on our crop plan or encountering a snake in our gardens.

“Donations of $4000 this season could help fund 20 SweetRoot Farm Eaterships - impacting more than 40 community members.”

— Noah Jackson

“Nearly all the 2018 Eatership recipients paid a share of their farm membership so this money is just not an all out gift. We think of this as a partial scholarship.”

— SweetRoot Farm

Donate to the Eatership Now

Late one evening, in the forest of the Crocker Range, I was wandering the forest footpath back to the village after a community gathering. This was a forest island of fruit trees mixed with community lands, large trees and the surrounding park. Moonlight filtered down through the forest and clouds rolled up. Muffled laughter filtered down the hill from the church, through the forest, through the mist. Just years ago, a decade or two, men and women carried salt from the coastal areas to this community. Now, it’s flown in by helicopter when the bridges that span the rivers need to be repaired. To arrive under the moon, via logging road and the path that links the sea to the forest is to experience what this might be like -- years ago. Crossing a bridge under the moonlight with a loaded pack and a roaring river below is like reenacting the migration. In this forest, though, I heard bare feet pounding the forest path. The large canopy parts and moonlight and clouds pool. I set my camera back in the forest, well off the footpath and made a single exposure to illuminate the night forest and moonlight. In this same exposure, I managed to catch the the gang of kids, running home, with just one flash exposure using two remote flashes near the forest trail, firing at 1/20,000 of a second. The night was cold, fog passing through the forest created some condensation on my camera lens adding to the mystical effect and warmth of this image. Later that night, I fell asleep to the voices of river murmur and moonlight and things that blew down the forest path, past my sleeping hut and deeper in.

Photos : From the Outside In. Chickens in Deep Winter

As many of you know, we took out a loan from a farm supporter this summer, to take down our large, somewhat failing mobile coop. After the demolition, and during the season, we built two structures. The first was a quick for our old farm flock; the second build was a much larger, and fully insulated mobile barn for the new flock. The first image in this series shows both new barns, in late fall, just as we moved our two flocks into our storage brassicas. The remaining images are all made in one day, February 9th. While our laying hens spend the majority of their days outside, these images of deep winter, when the temperatures drop to single digits, shows both the secret life of how we care of our chickens in deep winter and just what goes on, when the bulk of our two laying flocks spend a good part of the day inside: our chickens, behind the scenes, in deep winter.

To navigate this essay, simple click on an image and use your mouse or arrows. Captions will appear if you hover over the images.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

I’m deeply grateful to Mary, for encouraging me to keep our laying hens when the first big barn went south, literally, and for the farm supporter who gave us a $3000, no-interest loan in the spring of 2018. We spent a bit more on that on all of this infrastructure, but without that initial injection of cashflow, we wouldn’t have had the courage to continue this wild ride, deep into winter.

Winter: The Season for So Many Things

Above, our neighbor Mike places our new grain bin on cement-post legs we installed before freeze-up.

Winter is the season of rest. Winter is a busy season of work. If that seems contradictory, we understand. But like much of farming, it is just one of those "both-and" conditions we are starting to get used to. 

A lot of people think we take winter off. That maybe we sneak off to Bali to work with chocolate makers and coffee farmers we knew from life-before-farming (we'd like to do that at some point), or perhaps that we've taken a sojourn south to the high desert on a quest to find the best varieties of roasting peppers. We'd like to do that too. 

But we are mostly here, and that is good. We take time to rest, a little better this winter as we finally have a warm and cozy space in our yurt (a Kickstarter update is coming soon).  We get more sleep than in the growing season. We finally made it to dinner at the house of farm members who first invited us years ago. We've taken the time to bake some cookies, had enough friends visit to catch a whopper of a winter cold (and reminded ourselves as we slept it off that it's just another way of being connected to our community, embracing the common germs). 

We've been reading books. Or rather we've been devouring books as if we'd been starved of stories for far too long. Everything from sociological analysis of the southern border, to soil re-mineralization, to indigenous knowledge and local food, to straight-up entertaining novels and even at least one kid's book, we've been gulping it down by the woodstove in these dark evenings.  Winter is the season for stories.  

It's also the season for repairs. Old metal in a chicken waterer, and other the things, finally give out and burst at the seams. We take regular trips to the welder's shop, for old repairs and new collaborations. I spend time online ordering sprockets and stainless steel bolts. It's a time when things sometimes work and sometimes don't. After making space in the schedule for a full day of research, online orders, and online classes, we find the internet is sputtering worse than our late Russian tractor. We pivot and spend the day instead learning-by-trying, to replace a leaking radiator hose on the truck. We high-five the next morning when no drips are visible on the shop floor (and wow, do we appreciate that shop and its wood stove for winter repairs).  

It's a season for building and improving systems. A few weeks ago the project was a 5-ton grain bin, farm-built from extension plans from the 1960's. Feeding our chickens over the past weeks has gotten so much easier, faster, and cleaner. There's no chance of wild birds getting into our organic grain now. We can purchase enough bulk feed to last 5 months. Before that, we had a quick run of small carpentry projects: a compost shed for household composting, skirting and decking for the perimeter of the yurt. When we list them all we understand why we are tired. Pouring 45 bags of cement before freeze-up. It's our building season, which boggles our professional builder friends, whose busy time of framing and building is in summer. 

Jean-Martin Fortier, one of our mentors (and part of the online class we are taking this winter), says that winter is about turning up the heat. 'Getting everything right so the summer can go smoothly.  We hope it works. 

We adopted Malaya on a New Year's Eve 7 years ago, and she has loved every drive we've made together ever since. Here, she celebrates that anniversary by relishing the reverse direction of her first long trip with us, as we head up the Columbia Gorge and home after almost a week away, to attend family holidays and a dear friend's wedding.

We've also started hauling and shipping in supplies: combining big bulky orders with other farmers to save  on freight, picking up wax boxes by the truckload (we re-use used wax boxes for our chefs and co-op deliveries, and market), and lumber. Oh, the lumber. We use piles of it -- both new and a lot of reclaimed lumber.  We'll soon start the construction on one or two small cabins, pending cashflow, for seasonal help. And next week we’ll be hauling in the steel ribs for the fourth and most likely the final tunnel in our lineup. Before the government shut down, we got notice that we’d qualified for cost-sharing from the NRCS (National Resource Conservation Service), so we’ve commenced with material gathering for that. Winter is hauling-and-gathering season. It's also when our budget gets stretched thin, so we are thinking a lot about core things: the farm vision for 2019, our income needs, and balance. We spend hours each day in our barn loft office, working on getting this right. Much of the wood to heat the barn came from farm friends, and while we hear the coolers opening and closing downstairs while we work, we are reminded of all the farm magic this past year.

There's one special item of note. Just before Christmas  a mysterious card with a sweet greeting and a fold of cash appeared in the mail.  Mary and I used that for a Goodwill shopping spree, some yurt home finishing projects, and we still had enough left over to purchase bulk cookie making ingredients for friends and neighbors. The giver of the card wished to remain anonymous, and so we refrain from sleuthing or too much hypothesizing, to respect that wish.  And in a beautiful way, it casts a sweet wide glow of potential as we acknowledge how many wonderful people in our lives it could possibly have come from.  Other treats arrived, some with names and notes, and we are grateful for all.

It's also, as every season is, chicken season. (This section from Mary's perspective, as Noah is too deeply embedded in the flocks for unbiased journalism). With just plants to tend, a farmer could choose to take a bit of complete winter down-time.  Chickens, not so much.  Noah manages the laying flock with a blend of deep affectionate caring (one could say fussing-over) and strictly regimented schedules.  It's an odd blend of pre-school teacher and drill sergeant that is hard to describe.  But believe me, nothing gets in the way of 10 am chicken hour, the appointed time for feeding and morning egg collection. Unless, of course, he has to drive over to Idaho to pick up a reworked mobile home frame to be the base of, you guessed it, yet another mobile chicken barn. In that case I offer of course to take on the chicken chores for the day, assuming I understood the basics given that I hear about every detail of chicken care every day. Bad move--this duty is not for amateurs, and apparently I have not been taking notes.  Through a slight misunderstanding (Noah had not done the morning feeding before he left like I assumed) and a few small mistakes in the order of things, I found myself trying to collect eggs amongst what can only be described as a mob. A mob of hungry, thirsty, rioting hens pecking at my every item of clothing, overturning egg baskets, and creating general mayhem.  I got it under control, but not before one small mental breakdown, one medium hip injury, two dozen broken eggs, and a concerned phone call from Noah in response to my furious chicken-blaming text message. Seriously folks, this laying hen business is harder than it looks. We agreed I'd get better training before the time I needed to fill in; after all, our farm-sitter Hannah got a 5-page manual and several days of drills before we were willing to leave the farm in her care to attend a friend's wedding and family festivities on the West Coast at the end of December.  

Despite my one rough day, the flocks are producing well right on through winter, and the farmstore is loaded with eggs. You might not see Noah, but he's likely hovering somewhere nearby: manning the rigging on the ventilation wings that regulate humidity and air flow in the movable barns, bringing more alfalfa hay for them to forage or straw to fluff up their bedding, or preparing to move them to new ground once again.

As we continue on in our winter season of so-many-things, you'll start to hear from us a bit more often.  We'll be reaching out to farm members to discuss how their experience was last year, making a few tweaks to our feedbag program, and opening up farm membership sign-ups in early February.  We're planning, ordering seeds and supplies, and trying to make the most of our season of learning and reflection.   

One of the biggest things we see whenever we pause to reflect is that none of this farming life would be possible without all of you.  And so, again, we thank you for your support in all seasons. We hope you are embracing your season too (and we provide, below, a recipe for squash pie to help you do so…), and we look forward to continuing to connect throughout the season.  

With warmth and winter squash, 

Noah and Mary

One Last Round of Friday Night Lights

The garlic is safely in and mulched. Of all the things on the list, we agreed that this was the most important.

A few weeks ago, relishing the way our schedule opened up with the end of markets and regular wholesale harvests, I made the bold statement that the switch from daylight savings time was a good chance to transition to a more sane work schedule.  I would no longer, I declared, be working by headlamp. It was fall, it was time to slow down, appreciate the seasonal changes, embrace the dark, be warm and cozy, etc., etc., etc..   That lasted about a day and a half. Two weeks into it, my headlamp is on even as I sit at the desk to write our newsletter, and I can hear Noah cutting metal by headlamp and work light out by the yurt (a final step in yurt platform beautification and wind-blocking).  It sounds contrary to my earlier declarations, but this week I have enjoyed a quiet, starry night harvesting radishes by headlamp, smelling the blessedly warm breeze coming into to give us one last shot at all the things that have to happen before freeze-up.  I've washed and bagged carrots by headlamp, and just tonight, bulk-harvesting the very last of the final bed of beets, I was struck into stillness by the beauty of a shiny rosette of beet leaves in the headlamp glow.  It's fall, but it's not over yet.  Tonight was, though, our final late-night headlamp harvest. We'll likely see single digit temperatures this weekend, so getting final rounds of greens and roots out of the field before the deep cold, and ready for your holiday meal required a little extra illumination.  

Balance, counterbalance, and stretch to capacity. Fall has something in common with unloading a borrowed auger. Mary steadies the bit as Noah lifts the auger out of the Stanley's truck with the tractor. We got our full value out of the 1950's auger we bought used last year, but had to admit we had finally worn it out. With a few more holes to dig, farm friends came to the rescue with the loan (again) of theirs. Thank you!

It's been a wild week, the double-deadlines of Thanksgiving and the ground freezing solid.  We had a scare earlier in the week when temperatures dipped near 10 degrees, and the top few inches of soil froze.  We worried we could be sunk; there were still holes to dig, fields to clean up, and 100 pounds of seed garlic to split and plant. The urgency of freeze-up as a deadline is real; we've been caught out before, assuming there would be one more thaw, and ended up with row cover and field gear frozen to the ground till March. We're always late on planting our garlic, but we've always made it....so far.  Our sense of urgency was heightened this year by news from a friend in Wisconsin who missed his window when their weather turned suddenly, and was left with only the option of planting it into his high tunnel.  The amount of garlic we plant would fill 2 out of our 3 high tunnels, and where would that leave the early season greens, the cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes?  We fretted, and watched the forecast, ready to pounce on two days in the 40's, to tackle all the things.  

And there were a lot of things.  So many that neither of us can clearly remember the beginning of the week....just flashes of a snowy harvest on Saturday, juggling heaters and temperature controllers into various spaces to prevent frozen produce on Sunday and Monday, a giant shuffle of winter squash, a big shift picking up and putting away wire hoops and sandbags and row cover.  A second move of chickens in one week, to prepare more gardens to put to bed.  Many rounds with the manure spreader full of leaves (then taking it to the welder across town for some repairs). Covering the garlic beds with row cover to help them not freeze deeper--it worked, they thawed completely and beautifully by Thursday. Harvesting out beds of radishes, beds of carrots, beds of beets, beds of greens. 

When a warm-up isn't guaranteed, you dig the carrots before the ground freezes any deeper. And sometimes you find secret carrot islands, the tip of the soil-iceberg. We're grateful for our tractor and under cutter bar this week, as the two of us harvested our last two beds of carrots in one afternoon, rather enjoying each other's company. With forks alone, that might not have been the case.

Cracking seed garlic to plant requires hours of time on a repetitive, not mentally tasking job.  It's the moment that, annually, we remember that there are movies and shows that we can watch, streaming through our laptop; and then immediately also remember we are out of practice at watching, and overwhelmed by the choices.  We swung far in both directions....first a thought-provoking and sobering documentary, then a suspenseful series that suckered us into staying up cracking garlic by the barn woodstove till 1:00 am two nights in a row.  We may all have an Amazon prime original series to thank for that sixth bed of garlic, since we had a bit more garlic separated than we'd thought. 

At more than one point, checking in as we crossed paths in different rushes, I could tell Noah had been downing spoonfuls of peanut butter. We needed the fuel. We didn't get it all done, everything from the list.  But we got a lot done--and enough that there are plenty of things in the farmstore for you, enough to be able to clean up the rest of the field on Saturday.  Enough that we're pretty much guaranteed to be back at it again next year. 

What many people don't realize is that all of next year's growing starts now.  The garlic is the most obvious, the crop we plant as the last thing in the fall, the first thing that will show its green next year.  Garlic ties one season to the next, but so much of what we're doing now is about the next year.  We suffered this spring from quack grass and other weeds, when last fall we couldn't get to that critical field prep around so much building.  Slowly, slowly, we get a little bit smarter and better prepared each year.  But the building that fall was also worth it; with that cozy yurt to return to, to make real meals in, between the peanut butter and apple binges, we're reminded every day of the support of our entire community, that keeps this farm going.  As we had towards Thanksgiving, one of our favorite holidays, we'll take a little time to turn off the headlamps, embrace the dark and the season change and the coziness.  And we'll be grateful for all of you.  We'll also eat something other than peanut butter, we promise.  

Still Standing

This week, while the farm harvests chugged on, I spent all day Monday re-doing the roof on our smaller, three season chicken barn. Yup, the one I built this past summer for our older, aging flock.  As I fabricated awnings for the new fabric roof on Sunday, cutting out one by pine on a jigsaw with the pattern I traced, and then glueing and mounting it to a mitered piece of fir lumber, I ponderded the misinterpretation of my builder-friend's advice when I checked in with him about the curved roof and using the reclaimed trusses: I wondered how the roof went so wrong. We've made a lot of building mistakes, and our projects are just large enough, to get in big trouble. That little carpentry issue, to fix the leaking metal roof with a new 10-year fabric roof, that could bend to the curve of the trailer trusses, was creating some wet chickens, certainly not helping to add to the production of our older flock. The wet chickens were also making wet bedding, and that can lead to a variety of problems, both with the chickens and barn.  

But, by noon on Monday, I had torn off the old roof, installed the oiled awnings, added a perlin to the ridge, reinforced one of the old trailer trusses, and just as it was getting dark, I pulled the fabric roof over the new reflective metallic insulation from our neighbor Brian and, as it was getting dark, I fastened on the fabric with a bit of Mary's help using ladders and our tractor forks as a scaffold.
 

The next days of mine were spent grilling irrigation experts from around the country as we make decisions on getting water to our crops this season (after our ditch water shuts off on Sunday): putting that new well we had drilled this summer into service. There are hundreds of decisions. I grilled Benjamin, our sales guy from Dripworks for a hour and 45 minutes on the phone. I talked to a local pump expert who wanted me to hire out the project to him at the rate of $115 an hour.  I talked to farmes who had re-done parts of their own irrigation. I spoke to my friend Leon, naturally, and when I explained to Bob Gingrich this afternoon, when I was picking up 80 bales of straw for farm projects (including winter chicken bedding), that we still have crops to irrigate through November, he raised his eyebrows -- all the conventional wisdom alfalfa growers have in our valley is different from our vision of feeding people, and the income requirements for a market farm like ours. I came to the conclusion that we'll need a whole new pumphouse and a variety of frost protection strategies for our new system. I filled a notebook, talked to more people on the phone, and we have another 10 or 20 hours of desk work this weekend before we start ordering and gathering parts and pieces for this new engine of the farm that will help us reduce our labor, weeds, and help us farm on the shoulders, on the edges, and find a model that works for us -- and, of course, you.

Having salad greens into December -- and all we have at market is a feat. We are tired, but we love it all, mostly, and desperately need the income. The parts and pieces of this irrigation system, not inlducing the insulated, very small building, will be in excess of $4000 by the time we are finished. But to do it well, and sustainably, we've learned that we need to put good systems in place. And I'm so fearful of failure. Because we've rebuilt chicken barns; and a new roof; so many things. And becuase people give the best advice, but our systems are new, and sometimes even untested. So, back to my mis-understanding of my friend's advice that led to some of my accidental, but planned carpentry this week. You, and all of us, had made us grow up a bit this season. I don't always like the cautious farmer I'm becoming -- sometimes I even doubt Mary's wisdom too much -- but you've all made us grow wiser and stronger.

Come on out to market tomorrow. We've been hard at work this week, uncovering crops that we've protected with frost cloth for the harvest, and then spending hours re-covering them. And sometimes, making mistakes, covering them again, because we didn't add enough pins or sandbags to keep the cover from blowing off. To keep our peppers from freezing we ran backup heat in one of our tunnels this week and dillengetly made sure that the last of the curing winter squash were protected. This, was a real feat since we are pretty much out of space, with some onions and potatoes under our barn lean to, almost out of the weather, but they are in line behind other stuff that needs space to get into our walkin cooler. The chickens, both barns, also got a solar light setup - a necessity, we've learned, for winter egg production. Given so many out of power in our country, without backup systems, the irony of this didn't escape me.This was the last big item on the barn construction list and I keep telling Mary that we'll need to have a celebration. Don't wait for that though -- come on out and see your farmers today.

Annual Friday Night Skunking

Our colleague Lindsay declared the month of August to be the time of farmer-grumpies, but Mary and I think it's really this time of year. As the light ebbs, and I wake up, sometimes before the chickens, we look to the rooflines of our hightunnels for signs of frost. As we start the coffee, and listen to our country's divisiveness on NPR, we look at our task list, and like a Senate committee arguing, make hard choices about what vision of the day to cut: what valuable repairs that need to wait. And we put off the conversation, for another day, about how to get a better packshed, and build the farm so it's a well-oiled machine, a place for all of us. And then all of you. And then it's tonight. I'm harvesting cherry tomatoes, and grumbling about the additional transplants to add to some of the rows, and bits of tools not where they should be, Mary calls me on the phone.

"Malaya's been skunked!" she murmed. This wasn't the first time this has happened on a friday, and while I gathered buckets of warm water, Mary mixed our recipe of baking soda, dish soap, and hyrodgen peroxide. Our dog whines in protest, then vomits and then, everything was fine. We smile. We eat second dinner. First dinner, I'll confess, was fruit, crackers, and ice cream bars.

I wish as I write, I could say all the harvest was in. But it's not, and we'll be up early, gathering the last things.  Our salad greens are in full swing. Our summer squash is all in, and this is the very last of it (the last beds will be mowed on Sunday). Some fall crops, like turnips and kale and radishes and leeks are in abundance. We have more peppers than is possible to bring to market; so if you can't see us at market, you can always visit the farm store.  And those potatoes in the cooler that froze last week were cooked and fed to chickens, along with hundreds of pounds of radishes that got too big. The eggs should have the best flavor of the season yet.  Some come out and load up. We've been perfecting our hot sauce recipe all week too -- Mary has got it down to a science, and that will be our featured meal kit this week. Our hot sauce is very hot, but it's good on absolutly everything, and we have good ways to make it mild too. If Mary and I agree on a good transport method, we'll be bringing some of the first gourds to market, too, part of the winter squash wave, that's been curing and sweetening, to come.

And finally, thanks for all the replies about our newsletter last week. They meant a lot; during these final series of markets (I think there are 5), all the income counts for us.  On Sunday we must finish the fall plantings for the last November farm member pickups and our early winter plantings -- which mean we can stock the farmstore nearly all winter, so we are bracing for that. And in the background, I've been doing the last, um, painful carpentry on the new chicken barn and growing pains of managing two flocks with overlapping ages. The new barn is 40' long, dwarfes the 20' long three season coop (housing the older flock). It's nearly perfect and it's been moved several times, each move successful, easy, and to new pasture. But there's the small matter of making some painful and expensive final adjustments to make sure the moveable barn makes an ideal home for our new flock and  and it's rock solid, not only all winter, but for future generations of Sweetroot Hens. I'll be writing about it when it's all done. Our primary irrigation will shut off in just two weeks, so we are working on a very important, time sensitive project to get fall irrigation to crops: it's part of making the home farm future ready, and it's a big learning curve, more than we want to take on at this point in the season, but we are digging in deep.

So come see us. Share a joke, coffee (I don't think we'll be bringing any, sorry, it had to get cut from the list), pick up our hot sauce kit, and all else you can handle.

The Chickens Have Landed.

There's so much to say about that photo above, the larger of the two new mobile chicken barns we built this summer to replace the single larger barn that failed this spring.  So many people to thank along every step of the way, stories to tell of late nights, intense negotiations for time and resources, all the orders of new gear (complete with jokes about chickens having discovered the poultry supply catalogs and online ordering), and the relief of finally settling the young pullets in late this week, and pulling them out to the back pasture to begin their new era as the main laying flock. Hopefully we'll return to those stories, to properly thank all the hands that pitched in on everything from stuffing insulation to welding the 3-point hitch that lets one person easily hook up and tow these barns.  

This was a major project, with "get chickens into new housing" identified as the #1 priority for the week.  It marked the third week in a row, though, that some major long-term project was top priority, meaning some chefs had to put up with late deliveries, some items occasionally ran out in the farmstore, and we had to judge carefully what and how much we could push to bring to market, and what might have to get cut at 2:00 am from the harvest list (sweet Italian peppers made it, brewed coffee did not, I'm sorry).  

Two weeks ago the top-even-above-market priority was to seed cover crop in an area that had this far been only pasture--that final market of August, I remember picking peppers in our high tunnel by headlamp, while Noah ran the tractor, tilling in the seeds we had spent hours of Friday scattering across the soil, our first fall-established cover crop, a huge and necessary step in giving our first field a chance to rest and keeping our soil and plants happy and healthy, but still difficult to fit in to a busy summer.  As I picked, around 11:00 I heard the tiller start to hit rocks, and thought "ok, he's at least 3/4 done."  It dawned on me that I knew that because I knew that there were only two rocky patches in the field, which meant I knew where he was. He later told me that he heard me start up the truck to pick up peppers and tomatoes, and knew from that sound that despite the goal of taking a modest harvest to market, it must have been quite a haul, too much for the garden cart.  

Those two parallel recognitions of what was going on on the other side of the farm, from subtle noises and cues, stick with me as I remember these intense weeks of trying to manage a hyper-productive vegetable operation at the same time as building up our basic infrastructure.  We so often feel like we don't know what we are doing, like we fly by the seat of our pants on things we should have much more dialed in by now; sometimes it feels like each year we farm we only discover that we have more to learn, know less about all this than we thought.  And yet, we are getting to know our place, and each other, and you, bit by bit.  Four years ago at this time, I didn't know there was a 30-foot wide rocky patch at that point on our land, nor that things would grow there, with a bit of rock-picking, despite that; I didn't know that poblano chilies grew surprisingly well despite our cold nights, and that they are incredibly delicious; I didn't know that you all could eat *so many* eggs.  I didn't know that my farming partner would be so skilled, so resourceful, so determined, so aggravating and inspiring (at the same time) in his dedication to constantly improving and returning to the big picture goals. We didn't know the community that would grow to want, even need, the food we produce, and how much you all would support us.  We are learning. Slowly, sometimes painfully, but we are learning.  

This week, we'll be at market with, um, almost everything.  We'll likely continue the pattern of one farmer man/womaning the booth, while the other returns home to get a few more things, check the chickens, and run a delivery.  Please be patient....whichever farmer it is will certainly have had too little sleep last night.  But do come see us, please, because despite efforts to scale back the harvest in the wee hours of the morning, there is so much good food!  We suggest that you put hot chilies, tomatoes, and kale into your scrambled eggs, that you roast potatoes with onions and garlic, that you dive into the newly ripening sweet Italian peppers (Jimmy Nardello is ripe!), enjoy the newest batch of baby carrots, and stock up on garlic for the season.  We'll bring probably the last of this year's melon crop to market, which have been just delicious.  Please, some see us there! 

The smallest, biggest thing we did this summer: winter rye germinating to prepare the way for next year's summer crops.

Harvest Rituals

"Let's bring it in for a minute," I said to our crew of Hannah, Kayla, and Mary.  I shut off the tractor and meet the group, standing with harvest knives, Felco pruners, gloves, and pallet bins at the ready.  We are  about to begin.

I set about explaining about how this tradition, of putting up harvests, we started years ago, like farmers I've worked with in  China, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, Egypt, and Turkey. We all have a harvest to put up, a need to feed people. When I got to the part about how we feed 50 families, and each squash might feed a neighbor, or two, or three, how many meals it can all be through the winter and into the spring -- and how we touch lives -- if we get our curing right and get the harvest done....and somewhere in there I lose it. 

I wasn't sure why I started crying in front of the crew. I kind of shocked them; I shocked myself.   

This time of the year, Mary and I are exhausted; we've been burning long, days for many months now, and it's not over yet. That's partly why I broke down in tears. This past week our full helper, Hannah, was  out sick, so we were behind about 30-harvest hours by the time we hit the end-of-week market harvests. One night when we got a frost, and we didn't have time to cut all of our last basil, I ran backup heat in one of our tunnels to save it. I put it all in huge bags in the farmstore the next day, having successfully gotten it through the cold.  But by the next night one of the coolers misfunctioned and it all froze, right there in the farmstore fridge.  I tried to convince Mary that we had to pull levers (our codeword for canceling some things or doing something crazy), and I think I had her considering more seriously than she ever has, to bow out of market this Saturday. But in the end we decided we couldn't skip a market, missing out on both income, and letting down the people who depend on our farm food -- especially our members.  Letting people down seemed more crazy. I reminded her that I had carpentry projects, and the cooler project to start on, and water lines and an updated irrigation system to put in place before our ditch water shuts off. I reminded her that we probably have more than one acre of salad greens planted. She reminded me that those salad greens are planted, after all, for people to eat, and that we'd never get through to our 50 farm members on the phone to let them know of a change, and just  how many people would show up expecting to find us, and our need to get income from these last six Saturday markets. She's right.  So we agreed to harvest what we could, and declare that it was enough. 

Is it enough? I find myself asking that a lot these days. While I use my body as a tool, and focus on efficiency, I still have to figure out how to fix that cooler, source a part (and I'm so tired of sourcing parts), or buy a new $3800 one. Mary and I are currently turning over two tunnels -- one with dwindling tomato produciton and another with cucumbers that have finished for the season.  I'll be clear about this. We do have great transplants ready for the two tunnels, and we're exctied for the deep fall and winter greens they could provide.  But, if we could right now, we'd just let the tunnels freeze out, and clean them up, well, at our leasuire . We are going hard, partly because despite all we do, we aren't sure if it's all enough.  This time of year, this year in particular, we crave a change of pace, of focus; we want to can salsa and fill all of our freezers with summer bounty, curl up with cups of tea and start recovering. We want to craft a life, and create a harvest season that involves stories, community, and love. Sometimes it's not enough-- this farm that we've all started isn't achieving some of our biggest goals quite yet, even as it produces more and more food.  We worry that some of our farm members -- and cusomters -- come with a shopping list pulled from magazine recipes rather than an open mind about what they could cook from the 50 types of vegetables we have right now. There are days when it doesn't seem enough. And, in the evenings, when we sneak in admin to pay bills, make sure supplies get ordered, plan, we dream about reorganizing the barn so we have a workable packshed, sometimes we just have to call it at 1 or 2 am and  fall asleep exhausted.
 

But also there are days when piles of gifted firewood are delivered by friends, days when our extension agent comes to us (with an engineer) to give us ideas about that irrigation system, and a farm member drops off beer and cider. Nights when a friend brings by second dinner when the first dinner was Brewery takeout that on the invoice just said FARMERS, in all caps. The fall harvest light shines off two chicken barn roofs in managed pasture and across cover crop and it seems like we are so close to getting things right. And then a cooler breaks. Or I have to rebuild a tractor hub. Or a neighbor lets me know, in their own way, somehow in the mele of the season: the texts to chefs, all the work trying to get people out to the farmstore (our most reliable and stable source of farm-income), that somehow I've crossed him, done wrong with the world.

We love large harvests. That's why we grow bulk salad greens for months on end, not just a few patches in the spring. It's why I have 80 puounds of that spoiled cooler zucchini I fed to the chickens today. It's why we have buckets of eggs. It's why we can fill half a walk-in with storage crops and it's why every year Mary and I look at all the winter squash and even as we feel a deep satisfaction at the piles of sweet stored sunshine, we also feel a pull to next year, perhaps, grow even more. We love it. Partly and mostly.

And sometimes, when we lie in bed at night, in our yurt, I tell Mary of how stupid I used to be, working with farmers in Borneo, planting upland rice.  I had no idea how worried they were: just like me. When I interviewed then, in the evenings, during the weeks of planting and harvest, they talked about how the varieties were important; and the impact of bad germination. But I think, as I press in those spinanch seeds, trying to eak out one last field planting, and I press in the seeds with a roller I've made, on a bed of soil that I've been preparring for weeks, I finally know. 

And I shake my head and lie down in that little row pathway, or the tomatoes, or the zucchini that I kept alive in the field, with cover and incantations, that combination of science, knowledge, gut and luck that we are on the cusp of finding and losing, I realize deep, that this harvest we are both winning and failing.

And I cry. Out of control, out of worry for failures that we have, failures that we do not yet know we have, all we have grown, and all this farm makes us grow up to be. We both long to be better and you make us better, all at the same time. We'll connect those waterlines and get a pump and wire it and run lines the best way we've studied on our secret farm dream map. I cry because even as I grow, some days I barely can give Mary the support she needs for her own growing and getting through. And I cry because we know no matter what, you all care, love deeply, you trust us, you share your own confessions, and have hopes and dreams for this place, everything that the farm touches. Everything we all touch.

See you at market. Or at the farm. Or both.