Meet this week’s Mac veggies:
(Photo coming soon! Really! I promise!)
- Fava beans — The spring planted fava beans are on! We’ve been hearing rave reviews from folks who have roasted or grilled the beans whole. Apparently, they can be eaten just like a green bean and are delicious! Sounds like an easy way to enjoy fava beans to me!
- Head lettuce
- Salad mix
- Broccoli or cauliflower or cabbage
- Sugar snap peas — The pea harvest has finally hit its peak and is waning. This just might be a record smashing pea year!
- Summer squash
- Beets — Oh, how have we missed our beets! Finally, they are here again! Enjoy the greens cooked as you would chard, and eat the roots roasted or boiled or grated and fried like patties. Yum!
- Carrots
- Sweet onions
So, this week has been unseasonably rainy. As the rain continued to fall and fall on Sunday (totaling nearly 0.75 inch for the entire weekend), Casey and I wondered at what point in the season we determine whether this is one of those “years without summer” that we’ve always heard about from older farmers.
The farmer we worked for in Bellingham used to recall one such year (I think it was also a “La Niña” year) when every farmer in Western Washington lost their tomatoes to late blight. It was after that year that most of them started growing tomatoes (and sometimes other crops too) in poly-covered field hoop houses. It’s interesting how even one extremely different season can immediately affect choices over subsequent years.
This seems common in agriculture — one year sets a new norm, even if it itself was extreme or perhaps anomalous.
For example, our first year (2006) farming in the Willamette Valley was the hottest summer on record. The entire season was a series of heat waves, beginning with stretches of 90 degree weather in May and continuing with hot and dry weather through the end of October (rain began falling promptly on November 1 and continued falling at such a heavy rate that it turned into the rainiest fall on record even though the first bit was still dry — an extreme year all around!).
Since we’d previously been living and farming in far Northwest Washington state, that first hot and dry summer was a huge shift in perspective for us. Everything matured faster than we expected, and we certainly became extremely conscious of everything related to irrigation. We unconsciously internalized the lessons from that summer and have applied them in subsequent years.
The next few years of farming felt similar (hot and dry summers), but last year and now this year are feeling like almost completely different kinds of seasons. We are learning new lessons about the weather and how it affects all aspects of our operation: from spring tillage to weed control to pests to irrigation rates. It isn’t as though everything we’ve learned is wrong; we’re just continuing to learn and adapt and adjust. Just as a boatman steers by continually turning slightly back and forth to find course in changing currents, we too continually adjust and adapt how we farm to each season.
Of course, we never really know ahead of time what each season will bring, so our adjustments are never exactly perfect. Each winter, when we reflect on the prior season and plan for the next, we envision our farm unfolding perfectly — each bed prepped exactly when we need it, planted at exactly the right moment in the year, and harvested for maximum yields. Of course, we know that our “perfect” spring will only ever exist on paper — the season brings surprises and always holds unknowns.
The best skill we can learn is flexibility in all things. We often find ourselves scratching out our winter plans mid-spring and adding more beds of this or that, depending on how the weather patterns are developing and what we expect in the weeks to come. This year, Casey planted more potatoes than ever before, which may prove to have been prophetic since they are a crop well suited to cooler summers.
Planting diversely also helps us meet our farm commitments in spite of weather vagaries. We’re always amazed at how every unique season seems to favor one crop over another. This year, for example, has brought us our best sugar snap pea crop ever — a tribute to the mildness of the entire growing season so far.
Next summer, we might thoughtfully prepare for another cool season and then be surprised be another series of heat waves. But, we’ve also heard rumors and murmurs from various sources that this cool weather might be here to stay for a few more years.
Weather has many cycles — the yearly cycle of seasons is the most obvious on an immediate human scale. It’s harder from a strictly memory and perception standpoint for us humans to remember accurately more than a few years back. We might remember highlights or have a “sense” of how things were, but often we conflate the most recent weather events with “average” or “normal.” Which is why I’m glad people keep good records (many other farmers included) so that we can develop conceptually a sense of the bigger weather cycles, including those such as La Niña and El Niño that affect our region every few years.
Even bigger cycles occur too, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a fancy way of speaking to warm or cooler trends that oscillate on a multiple decade scale here in the Pacific. These are much bigger cycles, and actually something that Casey studied as part of his Master’s thesis (on forest ecology and trees).
As an example of the PDO in action, the mid-20th century brought Oregon cooler weather (which is why my mom remembers very cold days and lots of snow from growing up in Creswell), and the later decades brought Oregon warmer weather (which is what Casey and I grew up with — occasional snow, but overall mild winters and warmer summers).
It’s possible that we could be shifting again, which would bring the current generation of farmers weather trends unlike we’ve experienced before. The old timers might remember some similar weather, but for many years it might feel “abnormal” to us young folks — until of course it fills our recent memory bank and the mild winters of the past become something to be nostalgic about.
Of course, there is also ample evidence that we are in the midst of a global scale climate change event, related to human causes (something that was also an aspect of Casey’s thesis). Climate change models for our region (and much of the world) predict above all else … less predictability and more extreme or anomalous weather.
So, during deluges in July (something neither of us Pacific Northwest natives had ever experienced before), Casey and I have to wonder: what weather is in store for us as we go forward with our farm? How can we best prepare for that weather (whatever it is) as we expand and evolve our farm in the process?
It’s an ongoing conversation here on the farm, part of a bigger conversation loosely titled “How will we farm when the sh*t hits the fan?” Both ends of the political spectrum seem to be preaching about some kind of collapse these days. The Left talks about “peak oil” and climate change. The Right talks about “currency collapse” and national debt. We hear valid concerns on both sides, and apparently many of our friends and employees also think about these things. Namely, we all think and talk (quite a bit) about how to build highly resilient lives (and in our case, also a resilient farm business).
Just as there are larger cycles in weather and temperature, there are also larger (and seemingly natural) cycles in societies. Casey and I have recently read two books that have provided us much food for thought on the notion of collapse and how societies do or don’t succeed: Collapse by Jared Diamond and 1491 by Charles Mann. I can’t do the books justice with summaries in such a short amount of space remaining, but I highly recommend both titles for thoughtful and paradigm-shifting analyses of the past (especially indigenous cultures around the world).
Even though neither book sets out to be a useful how-to manual for living or farming, both provide great insight into how people endured and even thrived during hardship (and especially in hard landscapes or during difficult natural events, such as extended droughts). To us, the answers seem to be simple and obvious and yet also complex and challenging.
Between our own experiences, our conversations, and insights such as in these and other books, it seems that to build a resilient farm, we need to:
* Emphasize biodiversity as much as possible — this is the lesson we’ve learned every year, as outlined above, but we imagine that it would be true over longer periods of time as well. On our farm, this means incorporating completely new crop types (dry beans and grain) as well as continuing to experiment with regionally adapted varieties of annual vegetables crops.
* Become as independent as possible — In any vision of a future hardship event, we imagine prices of goods going up. Or perhaps some goods just becoming very difficult to come by. We’ve been laying the groundwork (so far mostly through plans) to become increasingly independent as a farm. As an example, we’re working on a crop rotation that we hope will free us from needing an off-farm source of nitrogen fertilizer (which we currently add in the form of organic-approved natural sources such as feather meal — expensive today and we can only imagine that the price will go up over time).
* Be flexible & work with nature as much as possible — This is of course a huge goal that encompasses every decision we make. It means thinking about our soil type when we plant and choose crops so that we’re not fighting our ground; adjusting our yield expectations in hard years; and so much more.
Our goals of resiliency are of course for ourselves (in the best case scenario, we want to continue making a living; in the worst case scenario, we want to continue eating!), but we also have you all in mind too. We want to keep our farm viable in many conditions (weather, economic, etc.) so that we can continue producing food for you to eat at affordable prices. What good is it if we can grow carrots, if no one can afford to buy and eat them? So, the ongoing conversation encompasses many aspects of growing and farming, which is why it is such an engrossing one for us and our employees.
Perhaps next year’s summer will be back to “normal” (i.e. predictably warm and dry from May through September), and the dollar will maintain its value for decades to come, and oil will keep on rolling from the Middle East without ceasing, and we will all just continue getting along. That would be awesome, and I’m sure our farm would flourish in those conditions. But, standing at an apex of our farm’s development, we want to make sure that it will survive and thrive even if those things don’t quite happen the way we all might hope. Things don’t stand still for long — even “good” change can require adaptation and shifting expectations (in fact, we’ve had to adjust our own expectations a lot since deciding to expand!).
Hopefully none of this makes us sound too “crazy”! We just wanted to share some of these thoughts, especially at this turning point for our farm. Enjoy this week’s (rain kissed) vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Roasting veggies — do it!
Roasting generically refers to oven-baking veggies in a single layer at higher heat (375-425°). It’s a very simple and very satisfying preparation method that we love in our house.
We chop veggies, fill a baking sheet (usually one with a lip), drizzle oil and salt, and then bake (stirring occasionally) until starting to brown. Typically, we roast veggies more in the winter than in the summer (simply because we avoid using the oven when it is hot), but that has been less true this year.
If roasting isn’t in your routine yet, try it this week! Broccoli, cauliflower, peas, squash, beets, carrots, and onions all roast up delightfully. Each type of veggie will cook at a slightly different rate, but starting with even sized pieces is a good bet.
And, if you’ve never loved beets before, give them another go by roasting in chunks until super tender. A fully cooked beet is very mellow and sweet.
