Many mentors of ours visited the farm last week, making for lively conversation during field walks/tour.
First of all: good news — our tractor is running again! Just thought I’d give an update on that bit of the farm. On to this week’s ponderings …
As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, the universe brought us a rare (and possibly intentional) pair of visits. In one week, both sets of our farm mentors from Washington came to visit. In the same week. Did I mention that this might be intentional?
The visits themselves were more than lovely. Old friends are just the best. After so many years of rich lives lived apart, we were all full of stories and news and ideas and much to share. Twice we stayed up later than we have in months, just trying to catch up (impossible!).
Yes, it was simply lovely. And, again, Casey and I couldn’t help but wonder: why now? What is the message for us from these visits?
In the meantime, I’ve also been reading Joel Salatin’s latest book, Fields of Farmers: Interning, Mentoring, Partnering, Germinating. As the title suggests, it’s a book about passing on the knowledge of farming. Salatin directs parts of it to potential interns and parts of it to potential mentors. It’s all fascinating, especially coming from a farmer who has decades of experience working with interns (and more than that farming).
So, I suppose the theme of the week has been the lineage of farming. We’ve revisited the starting points of our own farming path, remembering how extremely “green” we were when we spent a week working at Jeff and Josette’s homestead in Chelan (and by “green,” I don’t just mean that we were environmentalists!). I can honestly see ourselves in Salatin’s depictions of the well-intentioned but totally ignorant interns who join him on his farm. You can’t even know what you don’t know when that young and inexperienced. (Perhaps the biggest change from then to now is that Casey and I do know what we don’t know! Ha!)
While it was fun and humorous to reflect on ourselves as interns once-upon-a-time, our visits with our own mentors really turned our minds to the future in a big way. Both couples have recently turned into “empty nesters,” and they both also shared what appeared to be renewed enthusiasm and energy for their own agricultural pursuits now that a bit of work has been taken off their plates elsewhere. New projects and analyses were on the table, and it was so exciting to talk through their ideas with them.
Watching our mentors continue to evolve and grow in their own farming path inspired a few important realizations for us:
1. Our children are also going to grow up and move on. Sooner than we expect. We remember these farmers’ children being children! And, now they are adults! So fast! With a one year-old and a four year-old in the house, it’s easy for us to lose sight of how brief this phase of life really is. We can get so bogged down in the intensity of it all — between the demands of the farm and the kids, we can feel sucked completely dry by the end of many days. There is very little room to think or be quiet.
2. As a result, we constantly discuss cutting back some part of the farm, just to build in more space. I often long for our farm to hit some kind of comfortable “groove” so that we can coast (ha!). But visiting with our mentors helped us realize that we love this work, and we love the never-ending opportunities it provides for growth and creativity. I think that is part of what draws certain personalities to gardening and farming to begin with. Each season provides fresh opportunities. What feels vaguely like a burden today is more a matter of perspective than anything else.
3. Perhaps we are getting close to ready to become mentors ourselves. This is funny to question, because we’ve employed people on our farm for five seasons now. But with the exception of our first year (when we were very “green” employers, to be sure — our first employees put up with us so nicely!), we’ve never used the word “intern,” and we have never formalized a teaching component of working here. Generally we have looked for folks who we think are ready to jump into the fray, and we know they learn plenty along the way. But thinking of our employees as “farm workers” has prevented us from intentionally hiring people as novice and ignorant about farming as we once were. Which is probably ok for now, because our farm has had a lot of growth to do over the last eight seasons. Given how often we are adjusting and tweaking our systems, we probably haven’t been the best “classroom” opportunity for a newbie farmer. Looking ahead though, we could see that changing. We still feel like we have so much to learn that it is hard to imagine having real “interns” on our farm just yet. But we’re going to let the seeds of those ideas settle in and see what comes. (As it is, many of our former employees are actively operating their own farms now!)
But, for now, we are grateful for these late winter visits. It’s been such a very winter-y winter, and we are so ready for spring. Right now, we have several vases of daffodils on our kitchen counter, picked from our yard. Casey announced today that it has begun; spring is here. It does feel that way. Of course, the water is coming back up on the island this next week — the current forecast for the high is the same as last time. Hopefully this is it for winter!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Apples!
- Salad mix!
- Carrots
- Beets
- Sunchokes
- Green onions
- Garlic
