Meet this week’s Mac veggies:
(Photo coming very very very soon! New computer coming this week!)
- Green beans — The summer flavors are increasing as we hit the mid-point of the season (this week marks the festival “Lammas,” the start of the harvest season and the halfway point between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox). Green beans are a staple for summer here in the Willamette Valley — pre-bush beans, they were all picked by hand, including by my mom in her youth growing up in Creswell. Of course, on our scale, we still pick them all by hand, a slow process that provides much time for conversation in the fields. These are tender enough to be eaten raw in salads, but they also hold up well for roasting or steaming.
- Fava beans — We keep hearing more and more reports of people eating these cooked whole, including by boiling in heavily salted water for 15-20 minutes and then popping out to eat once done (apparently, this is easier than shucking when raw, and the results are delicious and reminiscent of edamame — add to pasta or other dishes!).
- Cauliflower
- Basil — Another distinctly summer flavor … and smell! When the first of the basil germinates in the greenhouse in spring, even just a slight brush of the hand across the leaves while moving flats can send my entire being temporarily into intense summer memories. It is a powerful summer aroma and flavor! We typically chop our basil into thin strips (aka “chiffonade”) and toss with pasta (would be great with fava beans). Sometimes we just add leaves to cheese sandwiches too. Yum!
- Lettuce
- Carrots
- Cucumbers
- Summer squash & zucchini
- Sweet onions — This week’s sweet onions are pulled from our spring-planted crop and should be extra fresh tasting – perfect for eating raw diced on salads or in other dishes!
Late this morning, Rusty and I were on a slow walk back to the house after eating a handful of our first ripe plums in our orchard. The sun was shining overhead, and as we walked through drying grasses and weeds, I felt the joy of summer in my bones after many weeks of wondering when it would arrive.
And, then, as we passed our home flock of young ducks, I noticed that their three sources of water (small stock tank pond, tray, and font waterer) were all dry! How quickly a slow saunter can turn into a purposeful jog! Throwing Rusty on my back in a carrier, I started filling a water cooler and did several laps back and forth between the ducks in the field and the hose at the house.
When we first got our eleven ducklings late this spring, we kept them up by the house, where it was easy to tend to them. This was a good choice, because we learned quickly how different they are in temperament from chickens, especially in their strong love of water. We were filling their water containers three times a day almost immediately, until we started providing more and bigger vessels. They love to splash, drink, blow water through their nose — and it quickly needs to be refilled.
Ducks also seem to want more interesting things around than chickens (who often seem content just to eat and scratch), so we recently moved the ducks farther out from the house, onto fresh ground and with new sights. Of course, then we started experiencing that most perennial of all farm challenges: water moving.
Water is, obviously, necessary for all life. And all livestock and farm crops need it in abundance to grow healthily, therefore supplying water to animals and plants is necessary on most farms (some crops here in the valley are called unirrigated “dryland” crops simply because they can grow on the Oregon spring rainfall without further supplement during the dry months, but no crops can grow without water at all!).
However, water is a funny element. It’s extremely heavy (especially in ratio to how much of it is necessary), and it’s hard to handle (you know, that whole liquid thing). Even when put in a bucket, once a person starts walking, water likes to jump around and over the lip, meaning that a person carrying water could arrive at their destination with much less water than when they began.
In many poorer nations and cultures around the world, people (mainly women) continue to carry water in open vessels for domestic and agricultural purposes. In those places, water carrying is a consuming daily task, even when water is used with amazing frugality.
But most well established and relatively affluent peoples have developed more efficient systems for moving water from its source to where it is needed in fields or homes. Thus, you’d think that living in 2011 in an affluent society, water moving would be a cinch. And, for most of you, it is: turn on the tap, right?
But, once you move to bigger pieces of land and start adding animals and crops to areas away from a water source, water movement becomes a challenge again — one that always requires money, time, and thought to solve.
Because, realistically, it just doesn’t make sense to carry heavy sloshing buckets every time our thirsty ducks need their pond refilled. And, watering our seven acres of vegetable crops with buckets would be unfeasible, even with vast numbers of employees or workers.
We have solved the crop irrigation question by using above-ground 40’-long aluminum pipe with sprinkler risers (known by farmers as “hand lines” because they are light enough to move by hand). We use some large 3” diameter pipe without sprinklers to act as a “main” line, supplying water to the smaller 1.25” diameter pipe with sprinklers we run through our actual fields. This set-up works fairly well, but it’s one we’re rethinking as part of our expansion plans — the smaller pipe has a tendency to fall over, and the sprinklers have a tendency to “blow out” during use, causing unpredictable and dramatic geysers of water in our fields (which require Casey to drop everything to fix, or else risk some serious floods and erosion). Once we’re farming the land next-door, we won’t have an easy view of all our fields at once, so we’re considering buying more of the 3” style pipes, which are more stable in many ways.
Clearly, even our solutions to water movement are never finished or perfect. Water under pressure is, after all, a tricky substance that likes to find every possible hole or imperfection in a system that we’re always moving and fiddling with. The farmer we trained with in Bellingham reminded us regularly that irrigation rhymes with “irritation,” and he also taught us that “it isn’t irrigation if it isn’t leaking.” (Conservationists would probably cringe at that last truism, but the reality is that a system in use is also always breaking. We fix leaks everyday, and everyday there are new leaks where gaskets start to fail or fittings are not quite perfectly lodged together, etc.!)
The ducks (and our home flock of chickens) pose a different kind of problem to be solved, since we like to move them around on the farm, meaning that they’re never near a stable source of water or tap. Our recently solution was to buy a big tank that we can fill and put in the back of our field vehicle for supplying water wherever we need it.
Of course, we realized we also need that field vehicle for harvesting and other farm work, but once that tank is full it’s hard to move off! So, we’re still working on the details of how to make this new system work — perhaps we’ll fix up one of our garden carts and install the water tank there? I’m sure we’ll figure it out, but as always, the solution will take time, thought, money, and constant fiddling. But it’s not something we can ignore as long as we want to keep animals!
I have lately been trying to be more intentionally grateful about everything that is truly wonderful about our life here on the farm. And, I must say that although schlepping buckets of water is not my favorite work (especially in an emergency type of moment), I was actually filled with gratitude and joy today during my work.
Specifically, I was feeling grateful that the sun was shining enough to dry out the water containers (meaning that powerful heat was also hitting our plants, who have needed it lately) … grateful that even though water is hard to move, we have plenty of abundant clean fresh water to move from our wells … grateful that our son Rusty was patient with me and seemed to be interested in the task as he watched from my back … grateful that we have the time and energy to keep ducks, just for ourselves, just because we like them … for so many things!
The plants are growing (and being irrigated)! Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
P.S. Our CSA summer potluck is coming up! Reserve Saturday, August 27 to come celebrate the season with us here on the farm! More details to come! (Please note that this is a changed date from earlier notices!)
