Flying: our farm today and tomorrow

Farmer hands. Over-wintered sweet onions. Soon to bulb. Ah, spring.

I love to use these weekly newsletters to share specific stories and recent happenings here on the farm, but I realized that sometimes in all that specificity, folks may not always be up to date on the Big Picture of the farm out here at Oakhill Organics. So, this week, I want to write a Big Picture update on what’s going on out here right now and where we’re headed this season and beyond.

Twenty-two healthy lambs have been born to our ewes this spring.

Our farm today: finally flying

To backtrack just a bit in our farm’s recent history: in early 2011, we purchased the parcel adjacent to ours and agreed to rent the parcel adjacent to that — expanding our land base from 17 acres to 100+ acres. Since then we’ve been doing the hard work of diversifying our enterprises while managing that expanded land base and launching a new marketing venue: the Full Diet CSA (all while still doing our Vegetable CSA and selling to local restaurants and parenting and having a new baby!).

We visited another younger farm this weekend for a tour and farmer gathering, and one of the operators described “climbing the vertical ladder” of their farming learning curve. Hear hear — we understand. The last two years have been at least as challenging as starting the farm the first time, and there were many times along the way that I described the experience to listeners this way:

It feels as though we have jumped off an extremely tall cliff; and, we know we’re in the air right now, but we don’t know whether we’re still mid-fall on our way to a crash or actually flying.

Perhaps as of last week’s Big Decision, we are finally flying. More accurately, we’ve been flying the whole time, but perhaps awkwardly at times and with a lot more fear and uncertainty of it all. And, I’m sure there will still be occasional turbulence — we are farming after all — but we’re flying! We’re flying!

One of our first peach blossoms -- we just planted these trees two weeks ago.

So, today on the farm — a farm that is flying — it is early spring, and during a recent spell of warm dry weather we were able to plant (veggies and oats), making the subsequent very rainy weather welcome. Green is bursting everywhere, and we spend our days taking care of both crops and animals already here and planning for those to come this season. We have three people working out here besides Casey and me, and every day one of them tends primarily to our animals: milking our cows first thing, watering everyone, moving fences, etc. We just recently stopped feeding supplementary hay to our beef cows and sheep, who are now once again being moved quickly through our green fields. Our flock of hens is back in spring production and we hear their chorus of laying songs all day long. Sows and piglets run around, grunting and enjoying the sunshine.

This year we have been providing food to our customers year-round (with only a brief break for the Veggie CSA). After a winter of relying heavily on our storage crops, our harvest work is increasingly taking us to the field for fresh greens and other veggies — a welcome shift in the work and the foods on our plates. Each week, we have three main harvests we do: we focus our energy first on the Vegetable CSA, then on the local restaurants that we sell too, and finally on the Full Diet CSA. Our weekly rhythm turns on these harvests, and we fill in between with the other important work of the season: sowing seeds into flats, weeding the garlic, doing maintenance and repairs on farm vehicles.

Our designated theme of the winter and year has been “maintenance.” After those hard, sometimes topsy-turvy, years of starting up so many new projects, it seemed appropriate to focus our energy this year on loose ends and inefficiencies that are lingering from establishing so much new stuff. That theme has taken many forms — Casey has spent more time working with all our farm vehicles (an obvious kind of maintenance), but it has applied elsewhere as well. Everyone on the farm (and in our house) is simply aware and united in this goal of taking care of things well (not the least of which are bodies and souls). This is a perennial useful idea of course, but it is the focus of this year, and we hope it becomes a background value that inspires our rhythms and work into the future.

Vast planting of beautiful garlic. Oh. My. I love this field.

Already, we are seeing the results of this focus — this slowing down and catching up with everything we’ve got going out here. Many, many parts of the farm are looking tidier and more tended than they have in years, both around our infrastructure and in the fields. I’ve mentioned before how excited we are about this year’s garlic crop, which is growing beautifully right now. Very few weeds grew there this year, and it probably could have gone without any weeding at all and still be darn good. But we want to pay attention to everything, so part of the crew went out last week and hoed the whole thing, just to be sure. The plants are growing vigorously, with plenty of fertility and space, and we are just so excited about what is looking like it promises to be our best garlic crop yet.

Tomorrow: the farm later this season and beyond

But, perhaps even more exciting is looking at our garlic and thinking, “This is the season. This is how we operate. This is the foretaste of the feast to come.”

Because, thanks to the continued attention and efforts of everyone here, many parts of the farm are looking as abundant and well tended: raspberries, greenhouses, fruit trees, spring vegetables … and, the areas that have some challenges (such as pasture that has been consistently hammered by geese) have known solutions (start the fall with effective geese scare measures in place).

Our raspberries are leafing out. This should be our first significant harvest year from these.

In addition to hopefully keeping geese from landing here so regularly, we have other plans in the works to continually improve our farm and its offerings. Later this year, we plan to build another large hoophouse specifically to grow winter cooking greens. We want to provide kale, collards and chard to our many customers all through the winter, and the last two winters have proven that outdoor growing conditions are just too variable to rely upon consistently.

Later this year, we’ll start shifting into next year’s theme, which we’ve already decided will be “record keeping.” A wise mind would realize this is actually an extension of our “maintenance” theme but with a twist. Specifically, we want to bump up our record keeping habits with the thought of possibly becoming certified organic again! Yes! This is a question we must ponder this year, as all of our land is fully eligible as of this fall (I talked about the decision to drop our certification a few years ago here). For a farm as diverse as ours, getting certified organic is a Big Question indeed. Should we just certify the crops? Should we certify the livestock operations too? But a big question to answer first is: “why?” We need to sort through our goals for the farm to figure out what purpose certification would serve for us now and in the future, especially as our understanding of the process has complicated over the years. It’s complicated stuff, but it’s also exciting because it means we have the mental space and time to ponder the Big Questions that motivate our farming enterprise. Ultimately, having that mental space is critical for everything to thrive with our continued positive attention.

Season-by-season, year-by-year, we will slowly refine and work toward spreading our care to every inch of this 100+ acres. At first, it was so daunting — literally so big to be farming so much land! But now that we’ve worked on all the pieces, we can see how it is all fitting together — how we are flying gently through the air, soaring on the abundance of this magical place we call our farm home.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Quarterly payments due! Veggie CSA members paying quarterly — your next $270 payment is due this week! You can bring it to pick-up or mail to us: P.O. Bo 1698, McMinnville OR 97128. I emailed statements last week to folks who have a balance due, but if you have any other questions, please email me! farm (at) oakhillorganics (dot) org

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Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Turnip greens — These greens are cut from tiny baby turnips. They are similar to a mustard green but much milder and suitable for fresh eating as a slightly spicy salad or for quick cooking. We love these with eggs for breakfast!
• Salad mix
• Apples — Our apple trees have just begun to bloom in our orchards, and we are still eating apples from last season! The fruit trees that we planted years ago have been such a wonderful addition to the farm. Each harvest feels like a gift.
• Chard — Chard is a very simple green to prepare. We’ve found that it can have two distinct “personalities” depending on how you cook it. I tend to favor cooking it in a pan with lots of fat (butter or oil), slowly letting it wilt and soften. This method produces a green with more substance (somewhat similar to cooked kale). Casey favors cooking it in a pan with some fat but also broth. He puts a lid on it, and the chard wilts down much quicker and takes on a cooked spinach consistency. We eat it both ways, but I wonder if your household might try one or the other to see if you prefer one over the other???
• Beets — After a winter of beet abundance, our household still loves roasted beets. We eat them roasted at least once/week, the kids chowing down the beets before anything else on their plate. I think the key to delicious roasted beets is to cook them long enough. They take longer than carrots to be really cooked through. I roast them at 375° (usually using coconut oil). I stir a few times during the cooking and let them go until they are tender inside and crisp outside. After taking the out of the oven the final time, I stir a bit to get them coated in oil and then let them cook for a few minutes, allowing them to crisp up further. Yum yum!
• Carrots
• Green onions