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Farmer/Gardener?

March 25, 2012 //
0

A.V. Walters

Farmer/Gardener?

I’m a gardener. Still, it’s an interesting question and not one so easily answered. I don’t think that it’s just a question of quantity. Measured by quantity alone, I border on farmer. Last season, the first where I had any meaningful and steady help, we produced (and gave away) at a rate that compared favorably to any farmer’s-market vender. One stellar week I distributed grocery bags of vegetables every day, at a rate that would have easily filled any market booth to overflowing. Indeed, an appraisal of the garden by visitors frequently elicited comments about how we could “do the market.” I like it the way it is. I know that some of our garden’s recipients would not have eaten so well without the garden’s bounty. With the economy flailing last year a good many hard working folks found themselves out of work. Here, we had plenty to share. Sharing food, quality food that I’ve grown, is one of the most satisfying and meaningful parts of rural living.

And then there’s the exchange of produce between folks who themselves have gardens or orchards. I call it the Petaluma Salute. I once met a woman from a craigslist ad, in a parking lot in town, where we stood talking politics and gardening as we exchanged zucchinis for pears, tomatoes for eggplants from the trunks of our respective cars. We haven’t seen each other since, but the experience of complete understanding remains a solid memory, as she bemoaned a recent infestation of white flies and I offered her my full repertoire of organic solutions. This summer we were walking down to the mailbox when our closest neighbor came up on a mule with boxes full of zucchini and peppers. He stopped and said he was on his way over to give Elmer some vegetables. We looked at each other and laughed. “It’s coals to Newcastle,” I said. “We’re full to our ears with these and more.” He nodded, and turned the mule around, calling out behind him, “I’ll just have to go find other homes for these.” I live in a world where neighbors leave bags of produce on your back porch, and I respond in kind.

Still, I am just a gardener. Farming is honest work, but it is work for pay, or at least the hope and expectation that the season will pay at the end. It is food as commodity. So far, I’m in it for the very real and sensory gratification I get from working with the soil and season. I note some other subtle differences between farmers and gardeners—which I find akin to the differences between the idea of livestock and pets. We gardeners sweat over the lives of our individual plants. It’s personal. We worry and try different solutions to plant troubles. We water and weed and coax. Dinner conversation can include concerns about what’s up with that last row of peppers. Bugs? Gophers? Or perhaps the long reach of the shadow of the tree-line. (Indeed, this season one whole garden will be repurposed because trees have grown and early afternoon shade dictates that that area will become the home of leafy greens.) Our gardens speak to our hearts.

One gardener/farmer test is how well one handles culling the excess plants that seed-starts yield. Farmers plant the best and dump the rest. It’s a healthy approach but one that eludes many gardeners. Every year I vow to keep the tomato crop down to no more than 24 plants. But there are always extra seedlings—what is one to do? And then there’s the problem of orphan seedlings. Elmer’s cousin starts a plethora of tomatoes every year. Come planting time she gives him the culls—leggy, pale babies. Whether or not I’ve kept to my own limits, these orphan tomatoes always manage to find homes in one of my garden plots. So I am doubly challenged; I have my own difficulties dispatching the less than hardy and I adopt the culls of other gardeners (who themselves cannot bear to waste even the most bedraggled of seedlings.) I have garden space. I take them. I give them their own buckets and water and even manure tea, until they are robust and productive. In my five seasons here I’ve never ended up with less than 36 tomato plants. Good thing for canning, eh? Now, it’s March and we’re still eating tomato sauce and whole, canned romas from the garden.

Farmers, out of necessity, have to deal in numbers. Plants are crops. It’s not the eggplants next to the potatoes–it’s the cornfield, it’s acres. They suffer the same indignities of weather and drought, of predation, but without the personal relationship. They do so on a huge scale, and with the highest of stakes. Still, the financial rewards are often slim and success is never guaranteed, regardless of how much you put into it. Nothing is guaranteed, until the crop is in, or the herd sold—and even then there are the unpredictable vagaries of price. A farmer requires some measure of armor. He cannot afford a personal relationship with his plants or animals. Sometimes, and especially with livestock, this comes off as callous. I have a little trouble with it at times–I bristle at the chickens in their crowded cages. Yet that scale and approach is what’s needed to feeds us all.

And so, I remain a gardener. I enjoy the bounty, but, beyond my pride, I don’t have skin in the game in the end result. I joke at the distinction, but my hat is off in respect to the farmer.

Elmer, my favorite farmer, has chickens and sheep. When it comes to plants, he’s no more farmer than me. When it comes to garden-starts, he has the opposite problem. He goes to the nursery and picks the largest starts he can find. You know the ones, nursery fed on fertilizers, the junkies of agriculture; these baby vegies are literally climbing out of their four-inch pots. They’re bushy, precocious, already sporting blossoms, or even small fruit. They boast of success and productivity. It’s too good a deal to be true! And so it is. These spoiled, root-bound prima-donnas don’t transplant so well. They, too, get their own buckets but the damage has been done; their growth is invariably stunted by their over-ambitious early beginnings. We coddle them, but as yet I don’t know the cure for root bound. It shows that once we’re out of our fields of specialty, we are all gardeners. It’s always personal. For the root-bound, I carefully separate and spread the roots out at replanting time. For the scrawny ones, there’s always the hope of recovery.  I think of this as a lesson, in and out of the garden. I was myself (and remain) a late bloomer.

 

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Categories agriculture, chores, farm life

Musings on Spring

March 18, 2012 //
0

A. V. Walters

Musings on Spring

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day and, with this week’s heavy rains, our corduroy hills have taken on that Irish, emerald green.  I call them corduroy because the ranchers cut the hay and leave it in rows on the hillside. The hills across from us are so steep that a tractor can only go strait up and down–any turn on the steep part of the slope and they’ll tumble. On that steep terrain they cut, but don’t bother to bail or collect the hay. So the cut hay lays on the hillside in stripes–stripes that echo, season after season, on the landscape. The week’s rains have washed the cows and today they stand out starkly–black and white, against the green. With the intense green and the equinox next week, we can’t help but think of spring.

In my Michigan hometown, up on Lake Superior, they’re thinking of spring, too. My mother, even in her mid-seventies, is a rabid gardener. As soon as the snow retreats she hustles to rake up the garden in preparation for spring planting. It’s a big job, one she tackles in stages that are measured by the progress of the snow’s melt. She races against time, knowing that when late May fades into June, it’ll be blackfly season–and she’ll want to be indoors for that. It’s been a mild winter in the North, too mild. This week they’re having a false spring. It was eighty degrees in the Harbor today–a record breaker by all accounts. Most of the snow is gone, or nearly so. I can picture my brother-in-law standing in the parking lot of their general store, broom in hand (his excuse for being outside) face tipped to the sun. In fact I’ll bet all the inhabitants of the Harbor were out today, drinking in the summer-like weather.

It’s not necessarily a good thing and they all know it. In separate calls to my family today, three of them mentioned the obvious danger of too early a spring. The trees can be fooled, lulled into an early bloom. Flowers have the same risk. When that happens, winter reaches her icy fingers back to what March should be and the bloom will fail, taking next summer’s fruit with it. And nothing is quite as winter-numbing as the sight of a daffodil in it’s crystal sheath, after a freezing rain. Still, standing outside in shirtsleeve weather has its own hooks, after months of cold and grey.

Today in Two Rock the rains gave way to blustery winds. The clouds have been chased away and the sun shines on new hills. The grass is growing faster than the sheep and cows can eat. Walking out to the road, to get the mail, I spooked a huge flock of black birds–invisible in the tall grass until the moment they launched, en masse, into the sky. I was startled and laughed out loud at the surprise of it.

During the worst of the rains I was scheduled to collect signatures for California’s referendum to require foods with genetically modified ingredients to be labeled as such. We were positioned at the door to Whole Foods. (Yes, I know–shooting fish in a barrel.) Still, it was interesting. The signatures flowed easily between cloudbursts but when the rains really came down, the shoppers hunched their backs, scrunched up their faces, avoided eye contact and ran for their cars. I can’t blame them, it was cold and wet. Some people stopped to say they’d already signed, and to thank us for being there. One well-dressed man shook my hand and told me he hoped it wasn’t too late already. I couldn’t help but agree.

It’s an early spring here, too. To a lesser extent we have a similar problem as my family back home. We’re not clear of the danger of frost, not until May. But the equinox is a milestone. I can start hardy seedlings indoors next week. Then, in the weeks after that I can start some of the more delicate vegetables. I struggle with the temptation to rush the process. I’m no different than the folks back home, who sweep parking lots in the sun, where only a week or so ago there was snow. We all yearn for spring, for planting and the promise of summer’s warmth. And that’s what’s up in Two Rock.

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Categories agriculture, chores, farm life, Uncategorized

Paradise

March 11, 2012 //
0

 

Paradise

 

I have lived

on the edge of paradise—

once in a small beach town

where you could smell

if not see, the ocean from every street,

walk to the beach from any part of town,

not wear shoes for days.

And later,

in an even smaller town

with only three side streets,

one gas station and seven bars,

mountain peaks so close

it looked as if you could touch

their smooth granite sides,

run your hand down

the soft curves of the forests

in their crevices.

And when you came out of the drugstore

with your aspirin or band-aids

you might see a single bison

staring at you, breathing white puffs

into the morning air

or a prong-horned antelope grazing

a few feet from where you parked your car

by the laundromat.

“You’re so lucky to actually live here!”

the tourists would say, their eyes shining.

Now I live in a place

surrounded by farms and  chickenhouses

where I sometimes have to stop my car

and wait, while dairy cows are escorted

across the road to milking barns.

No tourists here, no one

to tell me I’m lucky

except the voice in my head that says

you’re so lucky

to be alive, after the cancer,

the hospitals and doctors,

after waiting so many hours

in small curtained rooms

with sinks and needles,

stunned and mute.

And now a tourist myself

in a life I almost lost,

I walk outside

with my black and white dog,

move the sheep through the pasture,

watch the wind blow

through the tops of the pine trees,

look at the faces of my sheep

see the questioning look in their eyes

and the patience.

 

Copyright 2009 Ina Ray Scrocco

Ina Ray Scrocco lives in Two Rock. She is an award-winning poet from Sonoma County who has been published in several  anthologies, and is presently working on an upcoming book of poetry.  Her work has appeared in The Redbook, Brief Encounter and the Napa College “Conference ‘81” collection, among others.   She has given numerous readings in the area at Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University, Cinnabar Theatre, Copperfield’s Books, and the Vallejo Ferry Theatre in Sausalito.

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Categories agriculture, farm life, poetry, Uncategorized

Manzanita!!!

March 3, 2012 //
0

A. V. Walters

Manzanita!!!

Just a quick update to Snobs–we’ve run out of almond! Even with beautiful days, our cold nights have completely drawn down our store of seasoned firewood. It’s not that we’re wasteful; we keep the house at about 62 degrees. I’ve reached the point where I find a normal home’s (say 68 degrees) stifling.

I called my supplier and he couldn’t help us. Apparently the almond growers have been lured out of the firewood market by guaranteed sales to the biomass buyers. When they pull an orchard for rotation, these new buyers will immediately grind the entire lot for the co-generation of electric power. The growers recover a little less, but they don’t have to store the wood for seasoning. They can almost immediately re-plant with new trees. That is, after all, their business. They’re almond growers and the focus is on the nuts, not firewood.

However, my supplier did slyly indicate that he’d scored some manzanita–hot burning, dense, with as many BTUs as our favorite, almond. It’s a rare opportunity; he’s never seen it before in  quantity. I checked it out on the net and, sure enough, manzanita has the same BTU rating as almond. And it is beautiful wood. The interior looks like cherry. The smooth bark ranges from rust to burgundy. And it is heavy. We got a sample–a third of a cord to carry us until it warms up at night. So, this evening we’re sampling our new, exotic firewood. It’s lovely and it’s hot! The listings on the internet warned us not to overload the wood stove and they weren’t kidding. So, for those who thought we were firewood snobs before, eat your hearts out! We’ll finish out the season with manzanita and do next year with a blend of Walnut and what manzanita we have leftover from this season. Hopefully, beyond that, we’ll be able to get more almond.

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Categories chores, farm life, Uncategorized

Better Living Through Chemistry

March 3, 2012 //
0

A. V. Walters

Better Living Through Chemistry

The other day I woke to the sound of gas-fired weed whackers. It was a relief. We’ve had strange weather this winter. No rain. We rely on seasonal rains to recharge the wells and this season has been dry. Here in Two Rock it’s green; we get a lot of fog coming in from the ocean. The fog (and in this year’s weather, frost) provides enough moisture to keep the ground green, especially in the low-lying areas where the fog settles. Looking across the landscape you can see the contours of where the fog flows by the trail of green it leaves on the hills. But that moisture doesn’t go deep. If you dig, it’s damp down only a few inches. It’s green, but it’s not growing and that makes the farmers nervous. I know on our farm they’re working to keep the sheep moving, rotating from field to field so the sheep don’t damage the grass down to the roots. Sheep can do that. Usually in the winter I have to mow my lawn every week—or at least every ten days. This season I think we’ve mowed only three times.

And then there’s the cold. It’s been really cold here at night, for months now. Really cold for us is low thirties and high twenties. With nights like that the sheep need extra nourishment to keep warm. The days are lovely, with temperatures climbing sometimes well into the sixties. Even with those warm days though, the cold nights and low moisture keeps the plant growth rate down.

There’s a funny thing I learned about cows (and even some sheep) when I moved here. They sometimes suffer from a “the grass is greener on the other side” syndrome. Even if a cow is surrounded by lush pasture, it will lean out through a fence if there’s greenery on the other side. You need to keep grass at the edge of the fence-line short and groomed. If you don’t, the cows will cut their necks on the barb-wire fences trying to lean out for the grass on the outside of the fence. I live next to a dairy, so even though we don’t do cows here, we get to observe what is done in the world of cows. We share an access road and some fences.

A year ago last autumn, somebody decided not to mow (or more correctly, weed-whack) the fence lines along the dairy side of our single lane driveway. I guess someone figured it was faster and cheaper to spray with herbicides. They were certainly effective. Late that autumn they sprayed and everything green along the lane shriveled and died. Stripped of its protective vegetation, the shoulder of the lane soon began to crumble. The seasonal rains fell on that naked dirt and what little roots remained were not enough to hold the soil. Freed up from roots, the gophers made the little gully along the lane their alley and churned the soil mercilessly. More soil eroded into the gully and washed away with every rain. By mid-winter, our undermined road began to crumble at the edges.  To save the lane, they dug the gully deeper to funnel the water away. The gophers dug deeper, too.  The edge was hardpan, barren, clay; its organic matter had flushed away so no new grasses would grow there. Grasses have a fine and broad stabilizing root system. Weeds grew there though, but their long tap roots did little to hold our road edges.

Through our long dry summer the grasses did not return along the lane. A few weeds sprouted, but not many. Last fall they chopped down the weeds. The farmers had to dig another ditch, inboard fifteen feet or so from the fence, to divert the water away from the lane’s edge. The gully along the road edge was eroded and jagged. It could no longer carry excess water along the side of our lane, without causing further road damage. Like I said, it’s been a dry winter and so far the new diverter ditches have not been tested. Here and there, along the lane there are some patches of fog-fed green. We’re hoping they’ll spread, their roots working through the soil to rebuild that mat of living material that holds all that’s good in the soil.

So, in this case the annoying drone of weed-whackers is a relief. It means somebody’s learned a lesson and we won’t be spraying anytime soon. With any luck, the rains expected next week will be gentle and will nurture the right kind of growth to re-stabilize the soil and return our lane to its former secure state.

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Categories agriculture, chores, farm life

Spring?

February 28, 2012 //
0

A.V. Walters

Spring?

I may have spoken out of turn when I announced it was Spring in Two Rock. It’s something, but I’m not sure just what. Northern California seasons can be a little confusing, especially if, like me, you’re from areas that have real winter. I’ve been here over thirty years and I still get caught short by faux seasons.

So we’ve had gorgeous days in the 60s and 70s. We walk up to feed the emus and, from the vantage up the hill, the valley is beautiful. The daffodils are in bloom, even in Two Rock. (I say even because Two Rock is always a couple weeks behind Petaluma–and more when it comes to frost free nights.) The grass is lush, mostly from melting frost or fog, because we’ve had so little rain this season. I just barely got the peach tree pruned before the buds started to swell. A few of the blossoms have popped open like popcorn. Plum trees are in full bloom throughout the valley. Over the weekend we drove to Santa Rosa and saw them pruning the grape vines in the vineyards. The most dramatic and confusing thing is the mustard. Farmers put it in as a cover crop, sometimes mixed with rye grass. The mustard is in full bloom now. Whole fields of yellow, sloping with the contours of our rolling hills, take your breath away as you crest the hill and come down into the valley. How could it not be Spring with that display of yellow?

Three nights of sub-thirties temperatures is how. We still need to keep the fire burning to keep the house from slipping into the 50s. I’ve always thought that this mid-winter hesitation was a feature in the California winter. It’s too early to plant but you can still clean up the garden, prune (though you best hurry up on that at this point), plan, divide bulbs and generally get things ready. If you’re really old fashioned, you can clean and sharpen all the garden tools. (I always wished I could be that dedicated. Instead I sharpen on the fly, as needed, and almost never clean a shovel or spade.) My first Spring here I was chomping at the bit to plant. Elmer said, “No. We see frost until the first week of May.” Every year he’s been proved right. So I wait, leaf aimlessly through the seed catalogues and peer anxiously at the dwindling wood pile.

I worry about the weather. Though the surface is damp from the dew and frost-melt, too little rain has left the soil dry any deeper than that. I worry about the well and about whether the dry soils will be a challenge for the garden through the summer. Will this cold weather kill off the blossoms and spoil the fruit tree harvest? Can the peaches and plums pollinate so early–when the cool days and nights impede the bees? But I’m a worrier. Probably it’ll all be fine. By April I’ll be planting seed starts for transplanting when the soils warm up. In May we’ll be digging in buckets, and it will fall into place, like it does every year. In the meantime, I’d better throw another log on the fire.

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Categories agriculture, chores, farm life, Uncategorized

Food for Thought

February 18, 2012 //
1

A. V. Walters

Food for Thought

I don’t generally include my political beliefs in my blog. Please bear with me, this rant is related to the topics of the blog, and after I get this off my chest I’ll retreat to my usual, bucolic subjects.

My blog includes issues of rural living, gardening and the slower, and possibly richer, human dynamics that go with a rural lifestyle. I’ve confessed to years of organic gardening, even when I lived in the city. What I haven’t revealed is the depth and length of my interests in food issues.

Back in the late seventies I did my undergraduate thesis on World Food Scarcity and Sustainable Agriculture. Even back then it was apparent that our efforts to export “modern” agriculture were wreaking havoc in the third world. A closer examination of those same practices here, revealed the early cracks in the crumbling view of American agricultural invincibility.Doesn’t anyone remember the Dust Bowl? It was time to look in the mirror. Even then, soil erosion, pesticide contaminated underground water supplies and the dangers of widespread monoculture were beginning to illustrate cracks in our agribusiness model. Some changes and improvements did occur–university extension programs hailed crop rotation (like it was a new concept) and alternative tillage approaches. But the solutions offered all came in the form of agribusiness management models and, at the encouragement of government programs, our farms began to look less like farms and more like chemically dependent corporate entities. We continued to lose old-style and family farms to corporate agribusiness. I became a believer in the alternatives.

After college, I kept my convictions about having a smaller footprint on the planet. I’m not perfect, but I knew (and know) that one person can make a difference. I supported California’s early efforts to develop organic standards. I grew much of my own seasonal food in my postage-stamp sized, urban, back yard. When possible (and early on, it wasn’t easy) I sought out and supported local organic farmers. I rejected fast food. I believe deeply in the value of cooking for oneself and those you love. I think sharing a quality, home-cooked meal with friends and family is the essence of civilization and one of the most enjoyable forms of social intimacy. I tried to convey the essence of those pleasures in The Emma Caites Way, as the characters bonded, sharing common goals and great meals. I am a slow food advocate.

For a brief while, in the late seventies and early eighties, I supported the idea that the then-new concepts of agricultural recombinant DNA (now called GE or GMO crops) could revolutionize agriculture in a good way. I thought there was promise in the concept, much as the Ford Foundation’s advanced hybrids had brought us short stalked rice–a boon to food production on marginal lands and in resource poor countries. (Yeah, like some earlier folks had hailed the then-new technology of television as a boon to education!) As the science developed, I was horrified when, instead, the technology brought us Frankenfoods and pesticide-resistant (or worse, pesticide-containing) crops–and all without adequate testing–not only of the impact of those crops on the consuming public, but also on the environment. How can a crop be a good thing if planting it requires ever increasing amounts of chemicals to be flooded onto the soil? Even worse, the very licenses under which these GMO seeds are sold prohibit further scientific review. We, the consuming public, were advised that the intellectual property rights of the Corporate Agribusiness Elite were more important than public safety. We are the guinea pigs. And we are expected to be satisfied with Monsanto’s and Dow’s assurances that these products are safe.

In a warning shot across the bow, a decade ago we saw the Gen-Star debacle, in which strands of wheat DNA were inserted into corn. No need for testing, we were assured, because the products were intended for animal consumption only. Yeah, right. Sure enough, this restriction was ignored and human food products were manufactured from this FrankenCorn. People with wheat sensitivities reacted. Products were pulled from the shelves and the government of Mexico protested that the crop was grown, without disclosure or permission, in Mexico, where the original seed stock that made modern corn possible lives. I cannot begin to explain how important that fact is–because of the dangers of gene stock contamination.

I am one of those chemically sensitive people. I can’t tolerate scented products. I have food intolerances and serious food allergies. I can’t take most antibiotics. My life became much easier in the mid-nineties when food labeling meant that I could go to the grocery store, like a regular person, and read the labels to see whether I could eat the processed foods. Now everyone reads labels to check for vitamin content, or sodium, or sugar. Labeling empowers us to take control of our diets without having to grow all our foods in the backyard. (Not that it stopped me from doing so.) When food labeling was first proposed, the food industry screamed that it would be ruinously expensive, that it would result in lost trade secrets or secret recipes, that businesses would fail and that consumers weren’t sophisticated enough to use the information anyway! Pshaw! The world didn’t end. Millions of Americans assiduously read food labels today. We accept without question that we have the right to know what we’re eating.

Which brings me to my soapbox today. (What, you thought I was already on one?) We have the right to know. I want to know what I’m eating and I have that right. In my case, cross-contamination of foods could result in illness or life-threatening allergic reactions. The Gen-Star incident showed us that GMO crossed foods could result in triggering food allergies in unsuspecting sensitive people. You don’t have to be for, or against, GMO agriculture to recognize that Americans have the right to literally put their money where their mouths are. In my case, it is a critical question. But every consumer has the right to align their dollars with their convictions. To do so, you have to know. According to the average grocery cart, most Americans are already eating GMO foods, though polls show that under thirty percent of us think so. Today, over 50 countries (covering 40% of the world’s population) require GMO labeling. It’s shocking that we’re so far behind the curve.  A California initiative currently collecting signatures would require labeling of food products that contain GMO materials. It’s that simple–you disclose your ingredients and let the consumer decide. It’s a pretty American kind of solution to a thorny problem. I urge all Californians to sign the petition for The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act of 2012 and to support it in the election in November. It’s a no-brainer.

And now, if someone could help me down off my soapbox…(that’s an unscented soap soapbox.)

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Categories "The Emma Caites Way", agricluture, farm life

Rural Living

February 11, 2012 //
0

A. V. Walters

Rural Living

(from August 7, 2009)

Mostly I love living here. There are a few drawbacks. Occasionally, if the wind is wrong (and especially if its damp) the smell of cows from the dairy next door can be cloying. My dad says I’m being polite–it’s not the smell of cows, it’s the smell of cow shit. Those are days when you don’t hang the laundry out, because if you do, folks in town will sniff and then look at you funny when you visit. From my end of the farm, I never smell chickens. We have a running debate as to what smells worse, cows or chickens. Those of us near the cows, think cows; those of them near the chickens, think chickens. What can I say, it’s part of rural living. Did I mention the views are incredible?

Sometimes, the people around the farm are amazingly clueless. Like earlier today when the feed truck leaving the dairy snagged the phone line and dragged it the better part of the half mile long driveway, popping it off the poles in line like tearing a perforated form. I guess he didn’t notice that he had the 20th century dragging along behind him. More curious still were the reactions of the farm hands who witnessed the event. They laughed their asses off, but it never occurred to them to call it in to The Phone Company. Despite the knowledge of what happened, nobody did, until I did it, many hours later (cause the phones were just too damn quiet so I checked, sure enough no dial tone. Which is how I found out about all this in the first place.) By then it was too late to get the service restored today. Actually, they say it could be up to a week–it’s a big repair and it affects only the residents of two farms. We’re not high on their priority list. I complained about it all and Elmer responded, “Yup, they’ll do that.”  Apparently, the hands did tell Elmer, but he didn’t call it in either because he’s at the County Fair in Santa Rosa. Today’s the day his grandsons show their cows and sheep. We all have our priorities. It’s why I’ve been elected (in a manner of speaking) to call PG& E when the power goes out after a tree limb falls or a power pole wanders out onto the road and gets hit. The others don’t seem to think it’s their job. I breathe deep and try to remember the view. I’m going out to get some blackberries. I might just as well. Jam and tart will go nicely with telephone silence.

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Categories farm life, humor

Crows

February 11, 2012 //
0

A.V. Walters

Crows

(from June 2008)

Elmer is killing crows. I heard the first blast early this morning and wondered if that might be the case. It was confirmed when, minutes later, the phone rang and Elmer said, “Humans 1, crows 0.” I laughed and he hung up. A while later, another report but no call. Not too surprising, given Elmer’s reputation as a marksman.

This is my doing. Yesterday, Elmer, Dorothy and I were discussing the garden and I complained about the crows eating my sprouting beans. Had they just made off with them, I wouldn’t have been so offended. What they’re doing though, is pulling them up, eating the bean parts and then tossing the ravaged seedling back on the soil. We get to count the victims. Elmer laughed and said he’d noticed that the crows had relocated from the crow tree on the dairy, over to his birches. They’re a noisy lot, so when their pattern changes, we notice. We discussed the possibility of a scarecrow, which didn’t impress Elmer. I suggested we make one out of Don’s clothes and give it a coffee cup before he gets back from Oregon, so as to offend both the crows and Don. Elmer liked that. Elmer said with crows you had to teach them a lesson, to which I only laughed.

Later there was another blast, and another call. Our score (Humans) is improving. I asked Elmer whether I was supposed to dress in black for the burial. He laughed and said no, we needed to leave the crow corpse out in the garden, to teach the lesson. I asked if he was making stew tonight and he really laughed. Elmer loves to walk into a straight line, “No, I try not to eat crow.”

It’s been funny, we’ll see if there’s any learning going on here. In any event, I’ll be more careful now about complaining about the neighbors.

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Categories farm life, humor

Good Enough

February 7, 2012 //
0

A. V. Walters

Good Enough

Our farm foreman is a hard-working man. I admire that, but I know from my own life that there has to be more. Sometimes I think there’s a bitter edge to his efforts. He is not a stupid man, but he sometimes takes obvious pride in backwards ways. When I first moved in, Elmer instructed him to seal the new tile floor in my kitchen. To me, work is work but I guess Don thought sealing the grout on a new tile floor was not proper ‘farm’ work. He grumbled.

He also wore his grubby farm boots while doing the job. And he applied sealer over his own footprints—making them a semi-permanent part of my interior. I left it the way it was for over a year—contemplating the meaning of footprint décor. Elmer saw it and shook his head. Guests noted it. Finally I took some ammonia and Elmer’s floor-scrubbing machine and stripped and resealed the floor. So, it’s not lost on me that with Don, you need to be careful what you ask for—you might just get it. It seems Don thinks that people spend too much time on unnecessary, “fancy” extras (like sealing grout.) If you were to send him to pick up materials to do finish carpentry, he’d come back with a pile of 2x4s.

Still, if there’s a problem, this guy is there. When the water went out last week and one problem cascaded into another, Elmer and Don were out there up to their ankles in it. And he knows the rhythms of the farm and the season. Regardless of what project is cooking, Don knows as well as Elmer what needs to be done generally—that we need to be cognizant of the danger of frost till mid-May, even when they can plant earlier in town, a scant 10 miles away; and that you need to check the fences in the slow times, early in the winter, before the lambs find the little gaps. (I’ve spent some time chasing escaped lambs and sheep—the fence checking is a really good idea.) You don’t always find that level of conscientiousness in hired hands.

I mentioned that to Elmer and he nodded. He and Don are friends since their teen years when they sheared sheep together. “Yup, Don is a straight shooter, alright and a damn good farmer.” Then, it was as though a cloud passed over his face, and he looked away.

“Elmer? You okay?”

“Yeah,” He shrugged

I didn’t understand what had just happened, and, in my usual way, I couldn’t help but press further, “Well, Elmer, I figure you’re a damn good farmer, too.”

He paused, looked down and then at me, “Well, I used to be.”

I nodded, “Well, you are getting on now, I guess you get to relax some.”

“It’s not that,” he continued, “I was a good farmer and took care of business. It was always something, you know—fences, chickens, minding the sheep. Then my wife got sick.” He shook his head, “I was waiting for her to get better. There were treatments and some adjustments in our lives. I didn’t know what was really going on. I should have been there but there was always something on the farm. By the time I understood how serious it was I’d lost a lot of time, you know, with her.”

I didn’t know how to respond. He had tears in his eyes.

“When she died I was a real mess. All I could think was that there she’d been, sick and sometimes alone—and I’d been off somewhere, tending to the farm. I lost that time. I’ve still got my girls and grandkids. I have friends. Hell, I’ve lived on this farm my whole life, I know everybody around here and that’s what’s important. I realized it after she died and I decided to change what comes first. It’s my kids and grandkids. And it’s people. From then on I was proud to be a good-enough farmer.” He nodded and looked up at me, “You have a good day now.” And he was on his way, down the drive.

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Categories farm life

Snobs

February 3, 2012 //
3

A. V. Walters

Snobs

Like many out here in West County, we burn wood to stay warm. Within legal limits, we try to meet our heating needs with a small wood stove and a sense of grit. It makes for a different rhythm of the day; first thing on waking, even before coffee, is seeing to the fire. Ours is a small stove, so, especially on a very cold night, the fire often doesn’t make it to morning. I’m the early riser around here, so I’m the one who breaks the still of the morning with fetching wood and lighting the stove. If lucky, I start the day with embers; it’s just a question of feeding a hot stove and nursing it into flames. If I sleep in, or if the night was particularly chilly, I can count on having to do a cold start—shoveling out the ashes and starting-up with a little paper, kindling, etc.

We’re wood scrounges. I watch craigslist and when a tree falls in a storm, or somebody is felling one, I try to be quick on the draw. This past fall we scored two walnut trees for a song. Granted it was several weekends, cutting them into manageable sized chunks and hauling them back to the farm for splitting.  It came in at just over two full cords. Next winter I’ll be curious to see how the walnut burns. (We’re hoping the two cords will carry us through most, if not all, the season.) This year we’re mostly burning almond and apple. The almond is incredible firewood. It burns hot and long, with lovely flames tinged with blue. And it smells good, with minimal ash. Almond is the exception to the scrounge rule—it’s so good I pay top dollar for it. Then I mix it with whatever I’ve got available. The apple smells good, too. But it burns fast with little in the way of lasting embers and leaves a ton of fluffy ashes. It was cheap though—fifty bucks for a truckload when we do all the cutting and loading ourselves.

I grew up in a wood-burning family. Back east the wood of choice is oak—or hornbeam, if you can find it. So I’m familiar with waking up to the slightly acrid bite of oak in the air. When I first came to the farm I scrounged for anything I could pick up free after a storm. There was a lot of bay, manzanita and oak. The varieties of oak we here in sunny California are not all as good as the ones back home. Some has a low BTU value—about the same as apple—better than pine, but not the good, all night burn I remember as a kid. But the smell is still the same—a distinctive edge to the smoke and the ash. You can tell when you walk into the house that there is oak in the woodstove. For that weirdly nostalgic smell, I try to pick the harder, longer burning oak. After all, if you must endure its oakyness, you should get the BTUs of good oak. But in the wet of a rainstorm (when trees fall they’re often offered free to anyone with a chainsaw who’ll haul them away,) I can’t tell what kind of oak is what—and free does not give one the opportunity to be picky. So oak it was, until somebody offered me a sample of almond.

Hot, sweet, long-burning almond. Renewable too, because almond growers in the Central Valley are always cycling out old trees to make way for new. I quickly became an almond snob. Then last fall we had the opportunity to pick up apple, cheap. Apple doesn’t have the heating value of almond (or a good oak) but it starts easy and burns hot. Mixed with almond, it’s a perfect fire. Right now I’m burning exactly that mix, with some oak late at night (when we keep the stove closed up and damped down.) My sister back home laughs. They stick with what grows local there, mostly oak, some maple and hornbeam. To hear me extol the virtues of fruitwood and nut-woods, well, she thinks it’s like Californians and their wine. You know, a little grassy with a hint of blackberry and a smooth finish. She and her husband are simultaneously intrigued and appalled that next season I’ll be burning walnut!

Walnut! That’s for furniture! I felt funny about it, too but by the time we arrived on the scene the tree-fellers had already cut it into 12 to 24 inch rounds, so my guilt was assuaged. At least I didn’t cut it that way. Cutting and hauling the walnut was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. (A good test for my new partner, who was game all the way.) He split most of it, too. (A neighbor joked that when you split your own wood, by hand, it warms you twice.) In true Michigan fashion, we were cutting wood for next year—to allow ample seasoning time. But here on the farm they don’t always plan out that far. Our growing woodpile became the talk of the farm. Finally, Elmer asked whether there was something about the upcoming winter that I knew, that maybe I should tell him. The relief was clear on his face when I said that much of it was for next year. It’s turned out to be a long and particularly cold winter here. And we were ready with our almond and apple. Even after months of nights in the 20s and 30s (I hope they’re not laughing back home—but that’s really cold for here) it looks as though we’ll just make it through—without having to dip into the walnut. (Though we have burned a few of the smaller scraps, mostly just to see how it performs. But you’ll have to wait until next year for that report.)

I guess my family is right. We’ve become wood snobs. We hew to the rituals and rhythms of ‘making wood’ but we’ve embellished it with a particularly Californian aesthetic, not just the heat, but the bouquet, the color of the flame and quality of ash. Okay, maybe they have something on us there. Burn appétit!

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Categories farm life, Uncategorized

The Evolution of Buckets

February 1, 2012 //
0

A. V. Walters

The Evolution of Buckets

Give. You learn to recognize it very quickly, once its import becomes clear. While sometimes it’s obvious, with loose piles of dirt in evidence of the travesty, you soon learn to tell even when it’s the most imperceptible shift, a softness underfoot, not quite spongy, but the ground seems to pull away as you place your weight. You learn to see the signs, a slight rise, or cracking on the surface of the soil. You test it with your foot and there it is, the slightest give, and you know you’ve got gophers. Maybe they’re just passing by. But maybe your favorite pepper plant has some wilt at its extremities. Tomorrow the plant will be gone. I mean, completely gone! Pulled down a gopher hole with no trace except, perhaps, a slightly sifted loamy texture to the soil. Kiss those artichoke plants goodbye; they haven’t got a chance.

Buckets started as a way to save water. Initially we lopped off the bottoms of the buckets and used them as half buried tubes to direct the watering to the roots of our pampered vegetables. This really works—plus it offers some protection from wind (here we can have some pretty fierce winds) and as a ‘curb’ from dragging hoses. But our magic system offers no protection from the underground menace. (Right about now you should be hearing the theme song to Jaws.)

A few weeks into my first year gardening here, I got the shocking introduction to the reality of our biggest downside. We have gophers, big time. I’ve never lived anywhere where there were gophers. I’ve had deer problems, the scourge of many insect pests, even the occasional bunny, but never gophers. One day, one of my baby artichoke plants seemed a little droopy. It was a warm day, so I gave it a little extra water, figuring it would recover by the next day. There was no next day. It was gone! The next week saw the end of artichokes, each day another one limp and then dragged down to the zombie underground. I began to rethink buckets.

Buckets are perfect for the kinds of vegetables that, a) gophers don’t like; and b) grow large enough to not be well suited to garden beds. So tomatoes are a bucket natural. So are the various squashes, winter and summer. I’ve only ever lost one tomato plant to a gopher. When you figure that we might have thirty to forty tomato plants in the community garden (we weren’t kidding about the community part) that’s an acceptable level of loss. Squashes are similarly gopher hardy. Granted they gave the delicatas a run for the money but the hardy ones prevailed. The peppers do well in buckets, except for the damn gophers. So, I started changing the bucket configuration.

Initially we used clean five gallon paint buckets. These are nicely sized, but they get brittle in the sunshine after the first season. By year two, we’d graduated to black nursery buckets, in various sizes. These are easier to cut and they remain flexible for years. Our first effort was to put heavy duty screens in the bottoms. The screens worked well, but had sharp edges. Planting and pulling resulted in gardener injuries. We looked for a gardener friendly option.

Instead of just chopping off the bottom, we started to experiment with cutting holes in the bottom—sized to keep out gophers. A couple seasons later we’re drilling six to eight holes in the bottom and a row or two up the sides. With fewer holes, we were having trouble with wet feet—essentially root rot. These perforated buckets are more difficult than the bottomless ones to pull at the end of the season—they have to be “dug” out. But so far they appear to be gopher-proof.

Where buckets are less helpful are for lettuces or things that really grow nicely in rows (like radishes, beets or onions.) Unfortunately, and surprisingly, these are all prime targets for gopher predation. Buckets do work, but they aren’t sized well for leafies or root vegetables. This year we’re planning a section of raised beds—with gopher screens across the bottoms. We plan to build them out of used metal roofing. We’ll have plenty of row vegies for the full season.

We don’t really approve of gopher poisons—they just end up in the cats (which tells you that our cats, especially Bob, are doing their jobs.) We’ve heard stories about the Rodenator. It’s a gopher zapping contraction that fills their burrows with propane gas and then detonates! I’ve even gone on line to watch the videos. Quite impressive. It’s tempting, expensive but tempting. The Landlord is not so thrilled with the idea though. A bad experience with a similar solution left him wary. He’s afraid we’ll blow the whole place up. I understand why—his experience with trying to address the gopher problem was perhaps more successful than he’d planned. He started out with a home-made version of the Rodenator, filling the gopher holes with propane. But he and a buddy decided (for some reason) to set it off with a stick of dynamite! We can’t be sure if the problem was the dynamite or too much gas (probably both), certainly it had something to do with beer, but he blew-up his mother’s back yard and cracked the foundation of her house. For us, at the moment, it’s buckets and raised beds.

So, now when Bob and I walk in the garden and feel that give—I know my plants are safe in their buckets, and smile. And Bob will have to make some minor adjustments to his gopher catching techniques.

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Ah, Monday. . .

January 23, 2012 //
0

Ah, Monday…

A.V. Walters

This weekend was a cavalcade of problems on the farm. Our long dry winter has finally decided to normalize. The storms are welcome; we really need the water. Naturally though, the change brings its own set of issues.

Indirectly the weather change brought on a well emergency. The farm straddles a major road, with the old section on the west side and the newer part on the east. Our side, the old part, is mostly devoted to chickens (and tenants), and some sheep. The other side, about 60 acres, is all about sheep. It’s also where Elmer keeps the emus. (Yes, emus. A long story, for another day.) So, Saturday in a sunny break between squalls, we walked over to visit Mr. and Mrs. Emu. They’ve become quite attached to us, in their ‘big-bird-feed-us’ kind of way. Yesterday when they spotted us coming up the hill, they headed our way at a full trot. It’s quite a sight to see, 120 pound birds running at you; it warms our hearts, even if it is just about apples. So, while there, we noticed that the big water tank at the wellhead, was sitting kind of catawampus at its moorings. While we were walking back down the hill, Elmer flew past us at a full gallop on one of the mules (mechanical, not hoofed ) with his cell phone pressed to his ear. Once home I heard an odd, water-running kind of noise under the house — all the water in our pipes was being sucked back into the system as the pressure failed. Apparently a temperamental switch failed and the tank didn’t fill. That would not usually be a big deal, but with all the recent rain, the hydrostatic pressure in the soil was pretty high and that tank, sans water, was too light to hold its semi-buried place. In an unfortunate “Rube Goldberg” scenario, the tank literally popped up out of the soil like a wet bar of soap from a firm grip, snapping the attached pipes as it went. It must have happened just minutes before we got there. Well, Poor Elmer was in a state–it wiped out our whole water system. There he was as night fell, storm rolling in, jerry-rigging a connection to his daughter’s neighboring well. We’re limping along on a severe conservation alert so I quickly rinsed the dishes, but left them sitting in the sink.

Last night, while the storm was blowing, Bob brought in a mouse. It’s one of the little known secret about cats–not only will they hunt mice in your house, if they perceive a shortage they’ll bring some in for entertainment (and to show us that they’re on the job, rain or shine.) Bob wouldn’t give it up. I was chasing him but he’s quick. He growled every time I came near. Finally I just chased him outside and closed the cat door. Kilo stood by complaining that he didn’t have a mouse. I hated to leave Bob out in the pouring rain, but rules are rules. It was really raining, too. In a really hard downpour the internet cuts out. It’s satellite service. I don’t understand it, but in the paper-scissors-rock game of the powers of the universe, rain-beats-satellite-signal. Finally I gave up and went to bed, but it was raining hard enough to wake me repeatedly from a deep sleep. Finally, in the middle of the night, in a guilty funk, I got up and reopened the cat door.

This morning I woke up to the sound of a cat retching. Yup, Bob was back and apparently the mouse didn’t agree with him. Bob’s a farm cat with a sensitive stomach. Not one to be sick alone, Bob was in from the rain and throwing up on the kitchen floor. Oh yeah, and there were ants. Thousands of them. Ants are not unusual here, they make a run at it a couple of times a year and are held at bay by good housekeeping and Grant’s Ant Stakes. (They’re the only relatively benign thing that works. “That’s right folks, ask for them by name.”) The rains have flooded the ants out and they’re looking to take up residence in the house. Of course, the ants have found the sink full of dirty dishes. The house is cold; the fire is out. It’s Monday. I have work to do, but in the heavy rains the internet keeps cutting out. I really need coffee. Did I mention that there’s no water?

These, too, are the joys of rural living.

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Categories farm life, humor

Bucket Farm

January 17, 2012 //
1

Bucket Farm

A. V. Walters

Let me just say at the outset that this is not a dirt farm. It’s about livestock. And gone are the days when the average farm had a big garden that provided the fresh food and canned goods for the family. Farmers get their groceries from Costco now, like the rest of us. More often these days, family farms run on such a thin margin that one or both of the resident farmers have to work off-farm jobs to support the lifestyle. At the end of the day, there just isn’t enough in them leftover to keep a garden, too. And so it goes, the almost audible last sighs of rural living.

Today’s farms, by necessity, are specialty operations. This one is a chicken farm. We produce eggs. We have some sheep, too. Elmer, the good-enough farmer who owns this place would prefer that I call it a ranch. But somehow in my mind a ranch is a big spread with cattle, and, well, maybe cowboys. I just can’t see it as a ranch, and every time he says it, I picture our farmhands out lassoing chickens.

I’m no farmer. I’m merely an urban transplant—a tenant who occupies the old original farmhouse from the turn of the last century. From my vantage here at the top of the hill, I witness most of the goings on around this place.

We’re out in west county, which were we one county over, would bring connotations of Birkenstocks, solar panels, gourmet cheese and oysters. Here though, it’s a proud lot of hard-scrabble ranchers and dairymen, land-rich and sometimes cash-poor. The area is peopled with second and third generation cattle, sheep and chicken farmers. At least so far, we’ve been spared the headlong rush that’s infected most of our county–to cover every slope with upscale vineyards. Our microclimate here is, thankfully, too cool for that.

Elmer, used to have a garden. But his wife passed away and with her went the warmth of the homemaking arts and the tradition of canning. When I arrived he was still planting every year, but all too frequently the vegetables hung neglected on the vines.

One of the attractions of the farm when I first applied as a tenant here was the promise of a community garden. Elmer had let the garden go, its decline symbolic of his losses.  He almost decided to let it go entirely, but I would have nothing of that; I didn’t relocate to this country setting to buy my tomatoes by the case at Grocery Outlet.  So I took charge of the farm’s community garden.

I’m a vegetable gardener from way back. Even when I lived in Oakland my postage stamp-sized backyard was a lush cornucopia of the season. There, limited space pushed me into French Intensive and Square Foot gardening. I had a library of back issues of Organic Gardening and every February I’d thumb through them to plan the year’s approach. Several years ago I suffered some reversals in my life so I repaired to the country to lick my wounds and reconnect with the me of me. Gardening was one link to who I’d always been and I needed the challenge of the community garden. And it was a challenge. Accustomed to tiny quarters, I was daunted by the expanse of it. Though, thankfully that first year it was just the one garden. Now there are actually three gardens on the farm, combined they are just over a tenth of an acre. My first spring I was given what we now call the main garden, an equilateral triangle of dirt of about 800 square feet. Oh, and there was a catch, water.

That winter’s scant rains had Elmer nervous. When he turned the garden over to me he was already worried that our wells would run dry before the rains started up again in October. We have the usual Northern California seasons—no rain from May until Halloween. Elmer said that the three water priorities on the farm, in order, were—chickens, tenants and only then, watering. So, in my assignment, the largest garden I’d ever dug and the prospect of drought, I had to be creative.

There was one more mother-of-invention factor. I was broke. Sure, I could afford seeds, and a few starts, but otherwise I couldn’t count on drip irrigation or any other fancy water-saving gimmicks. I had to figure a way to minimize my watering footprint. Typical of most farmers, Elmer rarely throws anything away and nothing goes to waste. The older barns are full of, well, stuff. We joke about it now, but that first year Elmer just waved in the direction of a barn we call Number Four, and said I’d find stuff in there that might help. And that’s how we came to buckets.

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