Big spring cleaning

Tractor implements moved and all lined up in a tidy row — a few there to prepare for selling. Note the newly worked up field in the background!

Tractor implements moved and all lined up in a tidy row — a few there to prepare for selling. Note the newly worked up field in the background!

The anniversary of our farm passed last month with only a minor tangential note in another newsletter. But here it is: as of March of this year, we’ve now been living and farming in Yamhill County for ten years!

I don’t think I could have ever pictured how much would happen in the first ten years of our farm — which could also be seen as the first ten years of our adult life as well (I’ll count the years in school and at Holden Village as our preparatory pre-lots-of-responsibility-plus-a-mortgage years). I also don’t think we could have anticipated how many different changes we would make on our farm, as we experimented with different enterprises and scale and marketing outlets.

A few things have stayed amazingly steady for us: the vegetable CSA, our home here on Grand Island, our commitment to selling only here in Yamhill County, our dedication to organic methods. But at the edges of those core values and goals, many different projects have been tried and many wonderful people have come and gone (off onto their own new adventures). It’s been a wild ride, folks.

This spring, perhaps timed with hitting our ten year mark, we’ve been feeling the “residues” of some of those come-and-gone-again projects and enterprises. Each little or big adventure on our farm has required an investment in infrastructure or equipment, and over the years those things have found their way into our farm spaces. I noted once in a farming article on infrastructure about the phenomenon of simply putting one innocuous item down on the ground, and how it will inevitably become a magnet for more detritus. In that article, I warned about choosing where you place those [inevitable] piles carefully so that they do not become eyesores for yourself, your neighbors or customers! These piles could include anything from old worn out starts flats (waiting to be taken to the plastic recycler), irrigation pipes needing fixing, tractor implements that simply haven’t been used in a few years, bits of fencing, t-posts, buckets, bits of greenhouse poly, and so much more. The contents will vary depending on the farm and its projects and people, of course! They do seem to be an inevitable part of the process, as it were.

But. At some point, they become clutter. And clutter can affect ability to function efficiently and have mental clarity about a space and its purposes. We have certainly tackled many such piles in the past, but at our ten year mark we were feeling a need to deal with more of these things — especially the items that were left-over from enterprises we’re no longer making the focus of our farm. A friend of mine recently spent several weeks camping with her family, and upon her “re-entry” to life on their rural homestead, she described feeling so many little psychic “strings” attaching her to different projects that need her attention on some level — this was in contrast to temporary life in a tent, which only offered immediate needs to be met and none of those bigger nagging kind of work to be done … eventually.

Her image of these “strings” stuck with me and helped me clarify what I was feeling a lot of this spring — certainly we had acquired a reasonable amount of actual physical stuff to deal with. But honestly the stuff itself was not so great — the mental nagging was more related to what it represented … little mental strings still linking us to projects that have passed or that no longer feel like they are consistent with our farm’s thriving present and future. Without a doubt, there is a lot of fun to be had during ten years of a farm’s growth and experimentation, but there are also a lot of leftover emotions from things that didn’t end up being a part of our farm’s long term plan. Pulling back from things can be hugely beneficial, but it can also be hard.

In the ten years that we’ve been operating our business in Yamhill County, we’ve actually seen many similar scaled businesses go through their own reinventions and experimentations with growing bigger — and then growing smaller again. I’m sure these models stand out to us because of their similarities to our own experience, but I think there is probably some natural course for a small family-operated business that involves initial success, followed by healthy growth until the business reaches a point of growth that stops feeling as beneficial — where the business stops feeling like it is the same beautiful sustainable scale that it began at. I imagine this represents a critical point for any business — to choose whether to listen to that message and how to respond.

At our “peak” of our scale, we were actively managing over 100 acres of land and employed half a dozen employees and were balancing many different enterprises (including a raw milk micro dairy, which is a huge enterprise in of itself!). In the last year, we’ve been pulling back from that scale significantly, returning to our “sweet” spot of what feels good for our family (and as a result good for our customers too!). I think part of what makes very small local businesses like ours is the attention the owners can put into their service or product. Now that we have no employees, I think it’s an understatement to say that we are very hands on with our vegetable production! In fact, we touch it all. With our hands. That kind of simple straight-forward business is what attracted us to this gig to begin with.

As we pulled back starting at the beginning of last year, we didn’t want to “swerve” our business too hard in a different direction by contracting too quickly — “over-correct” as one might say. We didn’t want to make too many changes too quickly, including giving up on equipment or land that had been useful to us in those larger manifestations of our farm. We have more distance now and feel more properly settled into the idea of scaling back. So I suppose that’s why it’s only this spring, we’re finally seeing all those “strings” we still have connected to parts of our former bigger and more complicated farm. It feels like the right time to start cutting those, dealing with the literal piles, finding closure in areas where it is needed, and providing ourselves more mental clarity to focus on what we are doing and what we are loving right now.

Also, if I’m honest, we also want to cut these old strings in order to allow ourselves the freedom to tinker a bit more in the future, because really we will always continue to tinker on the periphery of our farm. Casey especially loves the challenge of learning about new things and seeing what might become a long-term part of our farm — and many of his projects have integrated into our farm in delightful ways: our fruit orchards are one example of something he took on as a new enterprise many years ago. And, I’m not immune to the excitement of new projects either — I’ll hold up this year’s cookbook project as a prime example! All these possibilities are part of what keeps us engaged in this farming endeavor, but we also need to clean up old projects before taking on any new ones! As I might say to our kids, it’s useful to put away the toys you are no longer playing with before taking out new ones! Either way, it was time to cut all those strings that nagged on us.

So, this week we tackled our Big Spring Cleaning, which included literal cleaning and moving of Things as well as some Big Letting Go of no longer necessary commitments. Not surprisingly, the cleaning up of The Stuff ended up going very quickly. Once we were acting in something akin to the popular “Konmari” mindset of clearing out the clutter, it was easy to sort through things and figure out where it should go that is not on our property. Some items will be given away to other farmers, some sold, and others just really needed to be taken into town for scrap metal. As the piles started disappearing, I realized how physically small they really were. But they felt huge, because they represented Things We Just Didn’t Need Anymore. Having them sorted through and on their way off the farm feels like the most amazing purge of clutter.

But there were other Big Strings to attend to as well. Notably, this weekend we decided to no longer rent the 54 acre parcel we’ve been leasing since 2012, which made up over half of our former 100 acres. Letting go of that land felt like a hard decision … until we made it. And then it felt like a relief. Our major motivation for holding onto it at this point was simply love and attachment. It’s gorgeous, and we’ve experienced so many things over there. We feel proud that we were able to transition it out of conventional chemical production and into organic growing. It is a giant parcel of Potential, and when we stand there we feel that Potential. It is a palpable experience to stand in the middle of an alive, healthy piece of prime farmland. One just wants to be there, to find out what that Potential can be. But, we realized, it’s no longer our Potential. We don’t see ourselves expanding our land base again in the near future. And so we’ve let it go, with gratitude for what it was for us. We still have loose ends to tie up concerning that land (including the moving of some of our perennial crops this winter), but this summer another farmer will be taking over its management. Can you hear the giant string being cut? Clip clip.

We also own 31 acres on the other side of our creek that we will not be farming this year either. Another organic grower is renting that parcel from us. Clip clip.

Which leaves us with the land here on our side of Skeeter Creek — our “home farm” of 17.5 acres, plus a few acres of my parents’ land next door. Which is plenty. I look out my office window now and see the bulk of that land. I have to admit that when we were at our peak of diversity and acreage and labor management, this was my most frequent daydream — to return to farming just our home farm, allowing us to pay attention to everything ourselves. Here we are.

I can’t speak for Casey on his inner experience, but our Spring cleaning has definitely been emotional for me. I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what I am feeling, because it is complex. On one hand, there is so much relief and satisfaction coming from dealing with those strings. But with the relief comes a sense that I can only describe as space or emptiness. Emptiness sounds negative, which isn’t how it feels to me. Perhaps it’s the creation of space, both on the farm and in our mental management of it. Things that had been hanging out in my head for years and years are gone (or on their way to being gone). I am very aware of the absence right now. It feels very quiet.

I think the best comparable experience I can think of right now is the feelings I had upon graduating from high school and college. In both cases, there was a minor sense of nostalgia, but mostly I felt such a visceral sense of completion and openness in the future. There was this sense that I had worked very hard in the near past and that that work was finished for now.

But I would also compare how I am feeling to how I used to feel upon moving from one apartment to another — packing up our things and cleaning the old apartment and looking around with gratitude for what came, satisfaction in having our things dealt with, and anticipation for the next thing. I have always found that experience to be strange in how that old familiar place looked unfamiliar without its things, and yet beautiful too in its simplicity. The newly open spaces echo. I think in some ways our farm right now feels both like that old apartment that is being emptied and cleaned almost past the point of recognition and also like the new home, where one expects new dreams to grow and prosper.

Without a doubt, this spring feels like a passage. A transition. One of many in our life, to be sure. And one of many to come for the farm, to be sure. But, here we are, packing up old things and saying good-bye to what has been on the farm and is no more.

In other related news (and surely adding to the emotional experience), in our home life, we marked two important events this weekend. First, Casey finished a little bathroom remodel project that had been on our ‘to do’ list for about nine years. When we first built our house, we used some lower quality materials, and we almost immediately realized that our shower and bathroom fan were not going to work in the long-term for our house. Ultimately it didn’t take but the part of three weekends to replace the shower walls and fan (and fix drywall and paint), but marking it off our mental ‘to do’ list felt huge. Clip clip.

Also, this Sunday evening, an intimate group of friends and family joined us at our church for Rusty and Dottie’s baptisms. Casey and I spent many years of our farming life without a connection to a spiritual community, and it has been wonderful to revive that part of our life in the last year as we began attending Sunday services again at Lumen Christi here in McMinnville. Welcoming our children into that part of our life felt like a significant passage indeed, one filled with love and support.

So, we have had many opportunities for emotions and for feeling a sense of something “new” around here! I think it’s safe to say that Spring is sprung here on the farm — in our fields and orchards, and in our souls!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. That greenhouse in our opening photo? You might just want to have a peek inside:

Aye! Thar be SNAP PEAS in that thar greenhouse!

Ar! Thar be bloomin’ SNAP PEAS in that thar greenhouse!

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

  • Apples
  • Salad turnips
  • Fennel bulbs — A new flavor for your plates this week! We love fennel, but I have to admit that this is probably the #1 “stumping” vegetable we grow. By which I mean, it probably elicits the most questions along the line of, “So … what do you do with fennel bulbs?” Here’s what we do, and it’s quite simple. We just treat our fennel like we would any other vegetable in our kitchen. Which means that we chop it up and either throw it in the oven to roast with other items. Or throw it into a pan on the stovetop to sauté with leeks or other vegetables. Or, we chop it fine and toss it with a green salad. I think this is one of those vegetables that maybe just doesn’t really “make sense” until you are familiar with its texture and flavor. Once you are, it seems more obvious how to include it with other food. It brings a unique flavor to dishes that we love (and this is a time of year when new flavors are especially welcome!).
  • Head lettuce
  • Winter squash — We’ll have a mix available for you to choose from!
  • Leaf broccoli
  • Kale
  • Kale rapini — Enjoy the kale rapini while it lasts. This week’s unprecedented “early April heat wave” will be changing a lot of what is in our fields, including speeding up the flowering process on some of our over-wintered rapini crops. By next week, many of them will be much more mature, and it’s high likely many will no longer be tender enough to harvest for greens. We will see!
  • Chard
  • Carrots
  • Potatoes
  • Leeks

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

  • EggsWe have an abundance of eggs but a shortage of cartons! If you have a stack of cartons on your counter, this would be a great week for you to bring them to us! Having our members fill their own carton helps us keep our cost reasonable while still feeding our hens certified organic feed! $6/dozen
  • Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
  • Pork — We have roasts and shanks for $8/lb.
  • Ground lamb — $8/lb.
  • Ground beef — $8/lb
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