Spring stresses

(CSA Newsletter: Week 15)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

It’s been about five months since Casey and I had a real big stressful freak-out moment here on the farm, so I guess we were due for one soon. Today (Monday), we began the day with our usual field walk to check out how the crops are doing and decide the contents of this week’s CSA share. Unfortunately, the walk brought us frustration and worry rather than the usual excited delight.

In some ways, this spring has been both highly unique and also regrettably familiar in its patterns and tones. Some aspects of this season that set it apart from our previous three: we’ve been a lot less stressed about some aspects of the farm, especially water, systems, marketing, and infrastructure. After three years, many things are routine and established by now, which frees us up to focus on the immediate work at hand. That feels really good after three years of springs when we scrambled to figure out big components of our farm mid-stride.

However, this spring has also been unique in that we’ve had an abnormally high number of personal distractions from farm work. One hidden ‘benefit’ of our prior years’ stress is that it gave us a laser-like focus on the farm. The farm work invaded our every waking and sleeping thought.

Don’t misunderstand me here — the farm still occupies the vast majority of our thoughts and energy. But, a few important personal details have also rightfully demanded some of our attention: we lost a friend, experienced some up and down health stuff (we’re fine!!!!!), and dealt with a few other things. Each of these ‘things’ was important to us, but they each also forced us away from the fields physically or mentally more than once.

On the other hand, some parts of this spring are all too familiar. As much as we have learned and grown over the previous seasons, there are apparently still hard lessons to learn. This spring we finally realized that our basic ‘approach’ to early ground prep needs to be revised. In the past, we’ve designated some of our lowest and sandiest ground to be our early spring ground; however, this is also the ground that most readily floods in the winter. Therefore, we feel that it is important to get a firmly established cover crop on that ground going into winter … which means that we find ourselves in early spring with ground that dries out slower than we’d hope, even though it’s very well drained. Plus, once we can work it up, we have to wait for the cover crop to break down, which happens very slowly in the early cool wet weather.

Now, we’re thinking that instead we should designate some of our highest ground for early crops and intentionally work it up prior to fall so that it has very little cover. Hardy winter weeds will inevitably establish themselves on these bare fields, which will help prevent erosion, but we will be able to work up the field much earlier with better success. We will still drill a cover crops on most of our ground, leaving just an acre or so available for the earliest plantings. This technique is fairly common among organic market gardeners and works well on other farms. We’ve just been slow to realize the great wisdom in an intentionally bare winter field (unintentionally bare winter fields are a different matter entirely).

All this analysis and learning stems from the results of our unfortunate earliest planting this season. We are renting our neighbor’s lower ground for the first time this year, and because it dried out earlier than our earliest ground, we planted it very quickly this spring. What we didn’t anticipate, however, was how much of the leftover sod would regrow and how many weed seeds were in the soil. Both of these points should have been predictable, since this ground wasn’t carefully managed for the last two seasons — but somehow in our early spring rush to plant we both allowed ourselves to overlook things we’ve battled before many times. Unfortunately, this year we’re losing the battle more than in prior experiences. Which means that we’re going to lose and have dramatically reduced yields on at least half of our earliest crops. We’ve been working hard to rein in some of the problems when we can (again, those distractions I mentioned earlier), but we realized today that it’s definitely not looking good. And, that is — how do you say? — a huge bummer.

Especially when we’re looking forward to a significant increase in the size of the CSA next week.

As always, I think that our reaction is extreme. When faced with a big problem, we tend to think immediately of all the worse case scenarios. I think this is actually a good response, since a situation like this warrants action and decision-making. But it doesn’t feel good at the time.

The good news, however, is that the early field is not a total loss. We’ve already begun harvesting some yummy treats from there, including last week’s salad mix and this week’s lettuce and radishes.

Also, our later plantings on our own ground are thriving and look beautiful! We had a ground squirrel population that was turning some of our greens into a salad bar for awhile, but we’re hopeful that we’ve got that under control (through a combination of a electric net fencing and row cover). There’s hope that we will be able to continue filling CSA shares with only the slightest dip in volume and quality this spring.

Much from here on out depends on the weather. Continued warm weather could help us get to the nice, but less mature, plantings sooner. Either way, we will certainly survive. This hardly qualifies as a farm disaster. And, it isn’t even close to as disturbing as other big crises (such as when our well broke last summer). The effects of this languishing early planting will be felt for the next few weeks, but no longer than that.

Now that it’s dry again, we’re rushing frantically to continue field prep where we left off three weeks ago before the deluge began. And then we’ll frantically rush to continue planting where we left off.

In the meantime, we want to once again thank you all for your commitment to a different kind of agriculture. Although we feel downright stupid at times when we make mistakes, we are certainly not the only farmers to do so. The main difference between our mistakes and others’ mistakes is that we fumble within a supportive community of eaters who are patient and understanding. That support helps us to quickly recover, rather than to fail completely. And, thanks to the nature of the long CSA season, we know that a spring blip will not keep us from supplying many more weeks of quality, abundant vegetables.

This week’s share marks the one-third mark of the season: we’ve already had 15 weeks this year, and we have 30 more weeks to go!!!!!!! Between now and then we’ll experience some amazing flavors together.

So, again and again and again: thank you, thank you, thank you for being an integral part of our farm. You make local eating possible.

Thanks also to those of you who made it out to our first open house of the season on Saturday. It was a beautiful warm day, and many people came out to take a tour of the fields and snack on cookies and lemonade. For those of you who missed it this time around, our next open house will be on June 28.

Also, two more dates for your calendar: next Tuesday we move to our summer pick-up location at the First Baptist Church parking lot, on the corner of 1st Street and Cowls. Now that dry weather is here, I’m sure we’ll all enjoy the open-air pick-up again!

And, on Saturday, May 30, Casey and I will once again be doing our fall and winter vegetable gardening workshop at the library (2-4 pm). I’ll include more details in next week’s newsletter.

Whether you made it out to the farm or not this weekend, I hope everyone had the opportunity to enjoy the gorgeous warm weather. We sure did — I even have the first mosquito bites of the season to prove it! Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

Reminder! Next week’s pick-up will be at the First Baptist Church parking lot!

The parking lot is on the corner of 1st Street and Cowls Street, just down the 1st street from our current location at the food bank warehouse.

A big huge enormous thanks to YCAP for generously sharing their space again this winter! It’s been awesome to share the warehouse one afternoon a week with the food bank.