First Root Farm

We slaughtered the chickens yesterday. Chicken harvest, as folks call it, a term that’s always bothered me. Sure, it’s a harvest, but there’s a difference between harvesting kale and killing a bird. Killing a living creature with blood and lungs and a windpipe is significantly more complicated than snapping off a leaf of chard or picking a basket of peas. So let’s call things by their names.

The first time I killed a chicken it felt like a really big deal. It was back at the Farm School, and the day had a somber, important feeling about it. For many of us, it was the first time we’d purposely killed a creature we’d raised, with our own two hands. I was nervous about it, and the actual throat-slitting felt alien and difficult. Rightly so.

This time it felt entirely different. My good friend Monica, who has killed chickens many times in many different settings, came over to help out. It was the perfect day for it – not so cold that our fingers froze as we gutted and plucked, not so hot that it was gross and sticky. I’ve been giving away birds, so we only had seven left, which took us about three hours. A good morning’s work.

This is how we do it: We invert the chicken in a killing cone, attached to a tree, with her head hanging down toward the ground. We grasp her head firmly and make two clean slits on either side of the throat, letting the blood rush out. The quicker and sharper and deeper the stroke the better, as the aim is to kill as quickly and cleanly as possible. Sharp knives are essential.

I don’t enjoy killing chickens, and I’m certainly no expert. It’s not the kind of thing you pick up perfectly on the first try; the only way to get better is to keep practicing. It’s not fun, and it’s not pretty. It’s not romantic, the way planting and harvesting can be. There’s no easy way to spin it. Blood gushes onto your hands and gets on your pants. But it also isn’t a monumental thing. On small-scale diversified farms, killing is just as fundamental as putting seeds in the ground. A hard and practical part of life. In the scheme of things, killing chickens you’ve raised yourself, in the best way you know how, with some reverence for their small lives and some acknowledgment of exactly what you’re doing – well, it strikes me as a good idea.

There are a lot of important, complex, philosophical and ethical questions around the domestication and killing of animals. I’m not trying to belittle those, or ignore them. But here’s what I know: killing the chickens yesterday wasn’t that big of a deal. Those chickens have given us delicious eggs and plenty of entertainment for two years. But they’re not producing well anymore, or adding to the health and productivity of the farm. This is the part of the deal; this is what I signed up for.

For me, there is no emotional ambiguity, no guilt. There are six stew hens in the freezer, and they’ll make wonderful soup and stock. All the chicken innards we pulled out – lungs, hearts, intestines – are in the compost now, and eventually they’ll make new rich dirt, grow something. I don’t love slaughtering day the way I love pulling carrots and mulching beds with golden straw. That’s good; that’s the way it should be.

But there’s a satisfaction that comes from a job well done, a careful and thoughtful execution of a necessary task. It’s the same well-earned exhaustion, the same pride in good work, whether it’s after planting a quarter acre of tomatoes or slaughtering and gutting seven stew hens. Those chickens will feed me and my community for many months, and I can eat them knowing they were killed in the most humane way I know how, that they were plucked and gutted and cleaned with care and intention. Farming is dirty work, and there is nothing straightforward or simple about it. I’m glad it was me and Monica killing those birds behind the house yesterday morning, talking and laughing and trading stories, taking care, giving thanks, working hard under the grey March sky, sleeves rolled up in the raw early spring air.

Laura

It’s been a long time.

It’s grey and brisk as I write this. The muted browns and whites of the woods around the farm and the raw, open fields look like March – but it hasn’t felt much like March recently. It was upwards of 70 degrees in the greenhouse this week as I filled trays with leeks, scallions and onions. The first seeding of the season usually coincides with when I start getting sick of the snow. That ache for spring, and green, and long days working is usually building in my muscles about now.

What a strange non-winter it’s been. As a farmer, I’m especially attuned to the seasons. The deep cold, the dark days, the cover of snow – these things allow me to take a breath, to slow down, to turn my attention away from growing things for a little while. This year, the temperature hardly dropped below freezing for more than a few days at at a time, and the only real snow came at the beginning of March, and didn’t stick around for long. It felt like I was lost in time and space, unable to ground myself in the constancy of the turning of the seasons, the one thing that is always supposed to stay the same.

Of course, the seasons are no longer the steady natural calendar they used to be. I don’t know what the future will look like, but I’m pretty certain the weather is going to continue getting stranger and more extreme. Everything I read and observe about the world tells me that it is going to get harder to grow plants.

As a farmer, I’m learning to adapt. I’m paying attention to the weather in this particular place, trying to find patterns from year to year. I’m studying where and when the water drains in my fields, noting the length of the spring thaws, counting the number of warm nights we get in November and March. In other words, I’m doing everything a good farmer does anyway to take care of the land the best she can. But I’m working now with a different vision of what this land will look like in thirty years, and I’m thinking more about creating systems that will thrive through warm winters, heavy snows, big droughts, late springs. It’s a complicated challenge, and I’m not an expert. But this non-winter has left me with a sense of loss and urgency. Whether or not it was an odd fluke or a combination of typical variations in global weather patterns, it wasn’t normal, and it’s going to have consequences in the fields this season.

Still. It’s getting on toward the middle of March, and the fields have been fallow since November. The non-winter, the shortened period of rest, the changing climate – even future catastrophes and dire predictions – nothing changes how much I love this work. There is always a moment, walking into the greenhouse for the first time at the very edge of spring, when I fall in love all over again. It’s another sort of constancy, this certainty in my body, every spring, no matter how warm or difficult the winter has been, that this is where I want to be. It’s like the waning and growing of the light. The winter will always be the season of darkness, and the summer will always be full of light.

The greenhouse is about to burst open with thousands of tiny green seedlings – onions, leeks, shallots, kale, broccoli. Working in a tee-shirt, the sunlight pale and warm on my bare arms, the sound of tiny black seeds rushing out of their packets, the smell of potting soil, the familiar rhythm of the work – I felt full and blessed and deeply grateful for the beginning of another season, no matter the challenges it brings. This, I’m beginning to understand, is the only constancy I can really count on, this internal certainty of vocation.

Laura

Here’s the last farm news I wrote for our CSA newsletter. It sums up the season – a wild one! – pretty nicely.

Once again, I can’t believe the season is coming to a close. This happens every year – one moment we’re seeding onions in the greenhouse and the next we’re harvesting cabbage and rutabaga in hats and vests. In the next two weeks we’ll be wrapping up what’s left of the field work – planting more garlic, mulching the beds with leaves, and putting up low tunnels over chard, kale, and other greens. As deep fall settles in, with winter just around the corner, there’s time to enjoy the changing, falling leaves, sleep a little later, and begin dreaming and scheming and planning for next season.

With the coming frosts and the shorter days, farmers have more time to talk and visit. I’m making plans for the usual round of winter visits with farming friends and mentors. We always greet each other with the same question, “how was your season?”

If there is any constancy in farming, it is that no two seasons are ever alike, and that every season has its own triumphs and heartbreaks. I always answer the question the same way – it was great – with the caveat: it was interesting; it had its ups and downs. There’s no such thing as the perfect season: gorgeous stretches of sun broken by gentle soaking rain, disease-free, pest-free fields overflowing with bountiful crops. There is such thing as the not-perfect-but-totally-worthwhile season: 106 degree days in July, floods in September, more onions than we know what to do with, devastating crop failure in the tomatoes, 4-pound cabbages, sweet and enormous fall carrots.

This year we lost most of our tomato crop to hornworms and disease. After bringing in a gorgeous haul of winter squash, we lost a hefty chunk of it to the hungry clan of chipmunks living in the barn. We grew a total of 2000 pounds of onions, about twice as much as we were expecting. We’ve had the wettest fall I can remember, and flooding in our late field cost us a few beds of arugula and spinach. But the raised beds we’ve been building all summer and the burlap in the pathways is doing a great job. There’s standing water between the rows, but the enormous savoy cabbages, luscious lettuce, and beds of late radishes and spicy greens are growing splendidly.

We lost our leeks to weeds in the heart of summer when we just couldn’t keep up with all the work. Mexican bean beetles and the stifling July heat did in a few plantings of green beans. We grew a lot more lettuce than we did last year, planting more successions and harvesting them frequently. A woodchuck ate our Brussels sprouts. Our garlic grew beautiful heads the size of my fist. Our potato yield came out just about where we expected it. We’ve struggled with the unpredictability of our hens’ egg production. We had five wonderful community workdays with friends old and new, and many delightful Saturdays shoveling compost with dirt-loving volunteers.

Everything that’s happened this season has taught me something new about farming. In the coming months, I’ll be holed up cozy while the snow falls outside, planning for the new season by reliving the old: what worked and what didn’t, which systems are running smoothly and which need a complete overhaul.

Farming is hard work, deeply satisfying, often hilarious, often frustrating, always sustaining. It is never boring. Over and over again, there are new surprises and new challenges. Even when I’ve been doing this for twenty years, I know I’ll still learn something new each season.

Thank you all for sharing this season with us. For me, it was truly representative of the CSA model: you shared with us both in the bounties and the losses. As always, I’m grateful for the patience, fun, enthusiasm, and kindness of our CSA community. We couldn’t do it without you, and it wouldn’t be much fun. As for next season – who knows what it will bring?

Laura

Dear readers,

It is July – weed season. We have been so drowned in work that we have not gotten to update you on our progress. During this time our friend and First Root Farm supporter Aliza Shapiro had a cerebral hemorrhage. For those of you who have never heard of her awesomeness, Aliza is an organizer, artist, activist and event producer in Boston. Among hundreds of events, she produced the Urban Country Fair, and supported First Root in our first year and beyond. Please consider supporting her and check out http://alizabraintrust.org/

Thank you!

Ariel

It’s been wet. It’s been cold. I’ve been wearing my insulated boots this week, my warm fall coat, and my hat. That’s right, my warm wool hat. Welcome to spring in New England, where, apparently, anything can happen. There’s a whole lot to do on the farm right now, but a lot of it depends on the sun. The onions need hoeing, but without a hot, dry day to suck the life out of them, the weeds will just resprout. We need to rototill and bed-shape in our new field, but in this wet weather, the soil sticks to rake and rototiller tines, making the work slow and ineffectual.

So, we’re waiting. We’re doing what we can – handweeding the little beets and carrots, weed whacking the fence lines, painting signs, seeding in the greenhouse, catching up on emails and blog posts. Despite the rain and cold, which is getting a bit tiresome, and my restless muscles, which are dying to be making beds and planting tomatoes, the farm looks great. Eventually the rain will stop. We’ll get it all done like we always do – with a lot of help from our amazing community of farmers and friends, a bunch of superb folks always willing to shovel a load of compost, weed a bed of parsnips, hoe a row of onions, plant a flat of lettuce.

Hunt for the Elusive Month of May: A Photographic Journey through a Wet (but beautiful!) Spring

The New Field

Our beautiful new field, out back behind the barn. It’s a gorgeous piece of land, and my current favorite place on the farm.

Deer fence in the rain and mist. The soil in this field is clay, so unlike the sandy loam in our other two fields. It’ll be interesting to grow on two different soil types!

Currently home to potatoes. Soon to be home to tomatoes, eggplant, winter squash, popcorn, and more.

The Greenhouse

Basil and brussel sprouts.

Summer squash.

Tall tomatoes. These babies are ready to go in the ground!

Peppers.

Tomatillos. Really ready to go in the ground. We’ve been picking off their blossoms, and we’ll hopefully be planting them next week.

Arts and Crafts

We spent one rainy afternoon this week painting sings to put up in our fields. Art+farming=fun!

Variety signs. A bunch of awesome volunteers painted most of these beautiful signs. They’ll go up in the field to mark tomato, pepper, potato, and PYO bean varieties. This way, we’ll be able to tell red tomato varieties apart as we harvest them. Beautiful and useful at the same time!

The Outback

Baby buckwheat coming up in the outback, aka the fall field. We spread buckwheat in all 50 beds. It’s a quick spring cover, which will add organic matter to the soil and suppress weeds before we plant here in early July. Also, it’s really cute.

Absolutely breathtakingly beautiful spinach growing in our cold frame. Also it’s delicious. We built the cold frames last year thinking we’d harden off seedlings in them, but we soon discovered there is not nearly enough space to efficiently fit all our seedlings. So they’ve turned into a fun home-garden-esque place to experiment. Right now they are full of this beautiful spinach, some tasty kale we planted last fall, and some parsley leftover from planting in the field.

Still Life with Garlic (Three Ways)

Garlic with water droplets.

Garlic with barn.

Garlic with misty field and November-like tree.

The Main Field

Bean trellis.

View of the weedy onions through the pea trellis.

Nice neat rows of burlap.

Babies

Feathery fennel.

Tiny carrots. These are our second planting. We seeded our first carrots around April 10th. About 15 had come up by May 15th, so we hoed them under and planted arugula instead. This is the sort of thing that happens in cold, wet, springs. On the plus side, our first succession of beets, which we transplanted, are about 8″ tall and absolutley gorgeous.

Pea Love

Does it get more beautiful than this?

The hunt for the elusive month of May continues. I’d like to find it, as would these gorgeous peas, baby carrots, happy beets and brassicas, and greenhouse-cramped tomatoes. But as for the view along the way, all things considered, I’ve got no complaints.

Laura

Some of you have probably heard of Equal Exchange, the worker owned coffee cooperative based in West Bridgewater, MA. I first found out about them because I was obsessed with their extra dark chocolate, as happens to me from time to time. They are well known for working with small farmers around the world to get good money for their product, but we small farmers on the other side also get support from this rocking cooperative. Instead of throwing the burlap bags that hold their raw beans into the garbage, they send them off with local farmers to completely reuse!

I have been over there three times in the last ten days, and so decided to write a tell-all/homage (with special thanks to Ian, Mallory and Dan who took time out of their busy work days to bring pallets of burlap to my bay and help me fill up my truck)!

Here is what it looks like when I go there:

Pallet after pallet of burlap bags filled with green (unroasted) beans are stacked.

The beans come from coop farmers all over the world. Each bag has the original location printed on it.

After the roasters have slit the bags and let the beans fall out they pile them back onto the pallets where they patiently wait for farmers like us to pick them up and re-purpose them.

Next time: burlap in the field – a weed suppression story!

Ariel

There is so much I love on the farm right now. The difference between this season and last season is astounding. Last season it felt like we’d never get it all done, everything felt like a rush, a race, we could work work work and there would always be something else, something we missed, something we forgot. This time around, I’m actually relaxed. It’s not that there isn’t a lot of work. The difference is that we have systems in place. We did the groundwork: building beds, building farm family, building community, building up the soil, building our muscles.

Today we spread buckwheat in our fall field, otherwise known as the outback. Buckwheat is a fast-growing cover crop which flowers in 4-5 weeks. It suppresses weeds, is very easy to incorporate (which is a big deal when you do most things by hand) and will add a whole lot of organic matter to the soil. It’s not only amazing that we’ve already been able to till the wet soil in the outback, but that we have the time to do something like spread cover crop. I was trying to remember what the outback looked like at this time last year, whether we had gotten on it yet. Ariel pointed out, “at this time last year, we weren’t really looking at this field.” Everything feels different.

Things I love:

1. Peas! Beautiful wonderful perfect adorable green rows of pea sprouts. I could look at them forever.

2. Garlic! Looking perky and healthy.

3. The pea trellis. Ariel is the trellis master, but it is a tedious job to do alone. We put this up on a gorgeous sunny afternoon with our awesome farm aunt Meg. We worked past quitting time, talking and laughing, and then we got ice cream to celebrate.

4. Overwintered kale! This stuff is sweet, tender, and delicious. We left last year’s kale stalks in the ground, and these plants two sprouted delicious new shoots. It’s the perfect field snack for a greens-starved farmer.

5. Baby beets. We decided to transplant our first succession of beets this season, to give them a head start and see if we could harvest them a bit earlier. So far, they are looking magical. I might decide to transplant all my beets in  the future.

6. Baby toscano kale. Yum!

7. The farm.  500′ row feet of peas, brassicas, beets, and chard under the remay, weed-free pathways lined with burlap, gorgeous raised beds. We’re finished making beds in this field already. We’ve composted, added amendments, reshaped, and finished them. All 60 of them. Last year we finished sometime in the  middle of June. This year, the last week in April. This might be my favorite thing.

I’ve been farming for long enough to know that this season will have its share of catastrophes. There will be crop failure – in fact, we’ve already had some. For the second year in a row, our celeriac refused to germinate in the greenhouse. This time around we started it on heat mats, but still, nothing growing. So, we’ll plant something else instead and try again next year. I’m not too worried about it.  I know other things will go wrong. I know there will be plenty of exhausted, what-am-I-doing-here moments. But this time around, I’m a little more prepared for it.

In the meantime, I’m loving the more-relaxed pace of this season, the beautiful plant babies, and how easily the rhythm of farming is sliding back into my bones. And when I notice myself getting agitated about something (still waiting for those carrots to come up, still waiting for a farmer friend to till our new field), I take a breath, talk my way through it, and remind myself that it’ll all work out. It’s a whole lot easier to believe than it was last May.

Laura