Meet this week’s Mac veggies:
- Broccoli
- Red butter lettuce
- Salad mix
- Chard
- Summer squash & zucchini
- Sugar snap peas
- Carrots
- Sweet onions
Recently, Casey was driving to town in the box truck with a crew member. He was pointing out recent fields and talking casually about different conventional farmers’ crop rotations in specific fields, and she asked how he knew what they had grown for so many seasons.
To Casey, the answer was obvious: we watch. We drive the same route from the farm to town several times per week, and each time we note what is growing where and how it is doing, and Casey and I regularly discuss what we see in context of what we’ve seen there in years past.
If my newsletters have had any particular theme in this, our sixth, growing season, it seems that I keep coming back to the idea of time and how our life has changed now that we have stayed in one place for five years and counting. I’ve already noted how much richer our life is now that we think of time in terms of trees and how much deeper our roots have grown into this place and the community.
But this is another beautiful and surprising element of staying put: we are able to know (and in a sense “read”) the stories that unfold in the fields around us.
Stories in fields? Yes, stories. As a former student of literature, I have great respect for narrative, and lately I’ve been realizing how natural it is for us humans to see and appreciate narratives everywhere. As I read board books to our toddler son Rusty, I am impressed by how bare bones narratives can be and still be a story. (In one particular very short board book, we see a boy with a cow, cow runs away, boy looks for cow, boy finds cow, boy finally milks the cow!)
Having lived and farmed here now for many years, I have more questions about the nature of narratives than I did as a student of books. I see narratives in every natural cycle — there are beginnings, dramatic middles, and endings. Is the day not a narrative in of itself? The year? The seasons? The cycle of seed to plant to seed? The question I have now is do we humans naturally impose those narrative structures on the world simply as a way to organize it? Or, are those cycles what naturally inspire our love for story and narrative?
Perhaps this is a question with no concrete answer. But either way, Casey and I have found stories everywhere as we watch our own fields up close, those of our close neighbors from walks along the road, and those of our distant neighbors on drives to-and-fro town. They are stories rich with the drama of the natural world (weeds overtaking intended crops, floods drowning out winter wheat, geese taking flight in massive flocks), but also of the human world (mistakes, errors in judgment, dedication, sweat, greed).
In some cases, we only learn the barest bones of the stories — the elements that we can see with our eyes in the years that we’ve lived here. The story might simply be the joy of watching winter wheat mature and dry to a golden yellow, only to see it disappear in strips behind a combine.
But, in other cases, we learn more about the people behind the field, the back-story, the intrigue.
There is a large field just north of ours that is also managed organically. We have learned much of the back-story of this field, since it also happens to be approved as a gravel quarry site. The former farmer, an organic grower, sold to the gravel company and moved himself to Hawaii to grow organic pineapples (or so “they” say). Since we’ve lived here, we’ve watched the field with interest to see how organics work (or don’t) on a much larger scale. We watched the renting farmer disk under a chard seed crop because of a conflict with a sugar beet seed crop planted miles away.
Then, we watched as he direct sowed peppers much later than we thought possible, and we watched as the fruit set and matured (in spite of our doubt). Then, we watched as he planted two squash of the same family for seed (a big no-no).
And, we watched as weeds overtook those squash plantings so that we could barely even see them even when standing right at the shoulder of the road. Then we heard through the farming grapevine how upset the seed companies were about both the seed contamination and the weeds. And, then we watched as other farmers started helping to farm his ground. And, then we watched as he and his family moved off the island.
The field, however, is still there and still being farmed organically. This spring, I’ve watched as they’ve diligently addressed the remaining weed problems with several kinds of mechanical cultivators (and a very slow working hoeing crew this morning). I watched as they disked in a large portion of their beans for a reason as yet unknown to me (poor germination? too many weeds?). I can watch these things unfold, but I don’t always know the “why” behind the actions — or sometimes we learn months or years later and the story makes more sense.
Perhaps to non-farmers the stories that interest Casey and me would never resemble stories at all. Perhaps watching a farmer set-up irrigation is not nearly as interesting to the average citizen as it is to us (especially on a hot day when the crop is wilting, and it looks as though there is no way the irrigation will finish the field before it is damaged). But, then again, some people follow soap operas with plots I find to be tiresome and boring (the daughter goes missing again? she’s actually married to two men? yawn.).
Of course, the stories of these fields begin and end on so many cycles. One could consider a day’s work the story, or the season, or the year, or several years … Even with the organic field I mentioned, we could start the story when the former farmer sold his fields or when the renting farmer stretched himself too far or when the new farmers took over. We find the overlapping narratives to be part of the fun and the richness of our home landscape.
Having lived in the city once, I know that narratives can truly be found in any place. I remember when our 10-unit box apartment was a fascinating place to me, full of mundane but true and interesting stories of people living real lives.
Perhaps the key to appreciating these hidden (or overlooked) stories is simply to pay attention. I worry sometimes that with so many distracting media outlets, I will lose my own sensitivity and awareness, and in losing my awareness lose a part of my own humanity. I must admit, even cloistered on the farm, Facebook and the rest of the social internet world (plus the radio) can be very drawing. I feel blessed that we don’t have a television, have a very slow internet connection, and don’t have “smart” phones. It’s good to have limits on distractions.
But, above all else, lately I am grateful for the farm and for our son Rusty, both of which force Casey and I to slow down to a different pace — one much better suited to paying attention. I have honestly never been so focused on one small stand of raspberries as I have since Rusty decided to visit it several times daily. These raspberry canes have my full attention regularly, and I have learned from Rusty that no matter what I initially think, there is always one more ripe raspberry. I just have to keep looking.
Similarly, as a writer, I am grateful for the stories in these fields. The people, the soil, the plants, the animals — my daily walks and observations are filling me with thoughts about how we all interact on different time scales and through different challenges.
I do think that someday the things I’ve had the pleasure of observing might just organize themselves into something bigger than CSA newsletters — more than one of you has mentioned to me the word “book” in the context of my writing. Honestly, I’m not there yet. Not even close. Writing good books takes tremendous time, attention, and energy; and with a growing farm and a growing boy on that farm, these little glimpses and opportunities to write down some thoughts are about all I’ve got these days.
But, now that we’re settled, Casey and I are both realizing how much opportunity is held in the future years and decades. Realizing how much we’ve done and seen just in the last five years, we can’t even begin to imagine how the farm will grow over the next five, ten, twenty years. Or to imagine how the stories around us will deepen, grow, develop over that time. And, someday, our kids will want to play outside without me. And, maybe I will have started to make greater sense out of the stories of the fields. We’ll see!
In the meantime, I’ll keep writing these little mini-stories and notes for your sake (and for mine — oh how I appreciate the weekly opportunity to write!).
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
