Maintenance????? What is that?

(CSA Newsletter: Summer Week 5)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

For most of our adult lives, we here at Oakhill Organics (i.e. Casey & Katie) have lived a mostly transient existence. We moved from one endeavor/place to the next before they ever became familiar or routine. For example, we worked for one year at a mountain retreat center: Katie as a food service coordinator and Casey as a plumber. In just the one year, we had barely seen our jobs in every season before it was time to move on to the next thing (in that case, working at Cedarville Farm).

Change, as such, kept us in constant motion and provided little opportunity for comfortable rhythms or routines. And, moving so much mandated frequent ‘life cleansings’ (big cleans and sorting through all of our belongings).

This last year, as you know, has been no different: we’ve started not one but two farms in two different locations with two different layouts, sets of equipment, irrigation systems, etc. The motion of change has continued through to now.

And, as you know from our previous blog posts and newsletters, we are only just now realizing that the crazy train is finally slowing down. Now that our spring farm work is complete, we are realizing that next year we don’t have to reinvent everything again. The work we have done now is the foundation of our future farming here.

That’s all good news. The harder part of this new permanence is that we don’t really know what it means yet to sustain something. We’ve been building, moving, starting new things for so long that we haven’t had to follow through for more than a year with any one endeavor or project.

Don’t get worried: we’re not about to change our minds. We continue to have plenty of energy and excitement about the farm—that part isn’t difficult.

So, what is? Maintenance. I can’t think of a more accurate word to describe what we are presently learning to do. We’ve never owned much more than our car—let alone a farm, a house, and everything else that goes with both of these. Building the farm and house were one challenge, and now maintaining them in good condition is another one.

You see, after moving around for so long, maintenance is not part of our thought process. I think that good upkeep is necessarily an aspect of staying put. So until now we’ve relied upon our oil change window sticker to remind us of the one big maintenance task we had in our lives. And now we have much more to manage.

What brings this up now? Several things, all related to the long-term sustainability of the farm. Financially, we’re realizing for ourselves the lessons learned by many young farmers (and young people) before us: purchasing inexpensive options over quality doesn’t pay off in the long run. You may have noticed that we have a different set of canopies at the CSA pick-up these days. That’s because the new one we purchased at a ‘great price’ broke within five weeks of use. Lesson learned.

Similarly, we realized another obvious lesson about preventative maintenance. This spring we set up a pump to pull irrigation water from our slough, and it’s been functioning reliably for three months. Our biggest concerns have been related to the quantity of water in the slough, and we never gave a second thought to the pump itself. We completely neglected any routine maintenance, and this weekend it shut off after finally burning off all the original oil we put in.

… I know, I know—duh. I only share this humiliatingly painful story because I trust that all of you will be compassionate anyway. We were lucky; the pump still works and we’ve given it much love and tender caring since realizing our big mistake. Small engines are still new to us, so we just honestly never ever thought about it. Plus, having water at all was a much more frightening concern than our method of moving it.

So, we’re taking these two lessons to heart right now and talking through how to best continue forward. Neither was terribly significant in terms of actual money or time lost, but we see them as warnings for the future. Most significantly to us: that pump could have been us. What are we doing to maintain ourselves: our backs, knees, joints, or even our spirits?

Yes, it’s impossible for us to think about the way we have been treating our equipment without relating it to ourselves. At the end of it all, we are the most important tools on the farm, especially since it’s still just the two of us who harvest.

So, we’ve discussed at length what immediate steps we can take towards sustaining our bodies and spirits in this work. We have many long-term goals that we will pursue, including incorporating more intentional stretching/yoga into our daily routines, and we will continue healthy diversions such as bike trips to the river.

But we also decided to prioritize one immediate solution to our most common pain. We have both experienced infrequent but notable back aches this summer, and we can attribute many of those aches to our current method of hauling vegetables to the wash station in hand-pulled wagons. We both regularly pull and push anywhere from 100 to 300 lbs of weight—on harvest days, multiple times a day. We have known all along that using our bodies this way is not a suitable long-term plan, but it took our series of realizations to finally move towards buying an alternative.

So, today (Monday) we finally purchased our back-saver: a used John Deere Gator. Hoorah! We put much thought into this decision, especially since we could purchase a used truck for half the price. But since we plan to harvest 11 months of the year, a vehicle that can get onto our fields in rainy November and March will be well worth the difference in price. Plus, it’s a diesel, so we can run it on biodiesel (which we already run in our tractors and veggie van)!

That’s our biggest (and most expensive) news of the week, but we’ve made progress towards other similar goals as well. As we prioritized our spending for the next few months, we decided to more fully utilize the downstairs portion of our house for long-term veggie storage (thus saving us the cost of a putting up a quick pole building, which we had been considering recently). We spent all of Sunday cleaning out the downstairs to prepare, and we’re ordering doors to finish off the east wall. Hopefully we’ll be able to fit most if not all of our winter storage veggies down there!

Either way, cleaning it out gave us both a much needed burst of sanity—a clean garage is a beautiful thing. And, in our garage cleaning frenzy, we also ended up cleaning our house and fixing various little things around the area. We puttered, in other words, something we’ve rarely done before. It was wonderful and helped us moved further in our realization that we actually get to stay here for a long time.

All in all, as you might imagine from reading the newsletters, this has been a year full of hard-work and new experiences. In that way, it’s been a tough year. We knew going into it 2007 would be rough, and if anything we’re delighted at how well everything has worked out considering what we’ve attempted in such a brief period. Now we just need to keep sustaining what we’ve started—a new role for us, but one we’re liking the feel of so far.

And, as always, thank you for your support as we learn and grow. Your choice to support two young farmers is astounding: we feel so young and naïve that it’s hard sometimes to believe you all would commit to our farm so early on. But we are forever grateful that you have. We say it frequently, but it’s true. The vegetables are their own reward, but what really inspires us on rough days is you, our community of eaters. Thank you for joining us in this eating and farming adventure! Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics