My awesome friends Alana and Tom at the Champs Not Chumps audiopodcast show interviewed me last weekend.
We talk about learning to farm, First Root, farming with disability, farming while queer, and the Access to Agriculture project.
I am generally scared to be interviewed because I tend to feel clumsy or tactless when I am speaking under pressure, but I am really glad I did it.
Tune in and subscribe to their fantastic show.
Ariel
What do you do when you are stuck? Walk away, come back, walk away, come back.
We started filling in our whiteboard fields last week…
The pink stickies indicate vegetables that are single-cropped. That means that we know no matter how we slice it, we can’t count on anything else fitting into that bed this season. Tomatoes, eggplants, parsnips, are all examples of veggies who need a long time in the ground and aren’t willing to share. Green stickies indicate crops that can potentially share a bed – early arugula and summer squash, or spinach and carrots, crops whose days to maturity are short enough that we can fit them together.
You may notice that in the above picture there are legends of our field, with our main field divided into four sections – A, B, C and D. There are some green dots between A and C indicating weed country – another thing we need to keep in mind as we puzzle this out – what crops are we most and least comfortable putting in weed country? The conversation goes like this: Not Carrots! Not beets! Kale… well, we transplant it, it shades the weeds out as it gets bigger, it is pretty easy to hoe around since there is definitely room between every plant – and so decisions are made.
We started this problem last week, and tackled it this morning, too. Making everything fit seemed unlikely. We played with numbers and ideas – what if we grew enough for 5 more CSA shares, but only sold four crops at the farm stand? Crops got moved, successions were cut, and now, somehow, everything fits. It was looking pretty bleak for carrots and beets for a minute there.
The plan is like this, it is not a script for a play, or a score, it is an outline for us, as farmers, it tells us how much seed to buy and what we can hope to expect. So much is weather, and soil, and deer and weeds. No matter how precise our calculations, growing on a new piece of land is an adventure. We could end up overloaded with leeks but our scallions might fail, the tomatoes could be popping in August, but the peppers might not redden until October. It is exciting, and scary. The reality can make all this planning sound useless, but it is not. Farmers growing on small and large scales need to pay close attention to all of this detail to get the most out of their land, to make sure they are rotating crops effectively so as to not tax the soils, and to have a record of what does and does not work.
When I look at our land this week I imagine the lines I have drawn here, superimposed on the snow, a spring of bed-making, a summer in bloom, late fall harvests, and to bed again. Four seasons in food planned already, in the shortest days of the year.
Ariel
Here is what our field looks like on the shortest day of the year:
I am so thankful that the ground is frozen and that our field is covered with snow. Now we wait. There is nothing else we can do – no more fantasies of applying late-late-late fall compost, no more second-guessing myself about how much we did or didn’t disc. We can’t get on there and knock back any grasses. We can’t even out the corners of the field to the dimensions we want. There is absolutley nothing we can do until the ground thaws in spring.
The field is gorgeous in the snow. Clean and shimmering, layered with sharp blue shadows, quiet. Our row of garlic is a slight rise in the expanse of white.
Inside, our field map grows fuller by the day, as we lay out where we’ll plant next spring. Inside, our field is bursting with onions, tomatoes, peppers, greens, carrots, beets, lettuce. Inside, on the white-board Representation of our field, everything is getting more complex. But outside, everything is getting simpler. Our field is just a flat piece of land covered with a whole lot of snow. There’s nothing but a slight garlic-hump that even gives away it’s a farm.
There is something deeply calming about that. This is the way the world happens: we work and worry, and in the end, the ground always freezes, and the snow comes, and the field goes quiet for the long dark months. The well-being of our little farm, for now, is out of our hands: nature’s way of telling us to let the land be. We’ve done what we’ve done; now, like everything else does in the winter, we wait, and hope.
Laura
A friend recently asked me what was happening on the farm. I told him we’d been spending a lot of time crop planning. He then asked how you made a crop plan, so I told him: what crops should we grow, and how much of each, and when should we plant them, and how many successions, and where should we plant them, and how much seed will we need…
“Oh,” he said, “it’s like a word problem.”
Yes. Our crop plan word problem might go something like this:
Two delightful farmers, Laura and Ariel, are starting a CSA on an acre of land. If they want to give each of their 20 CSA members 2 pounds of summer squash every week for ten weeks, how much summer squash do they need to plant? Keep in mind the following details: the expected yield of the summer squash, which weeks they want to distribute it, its days to maturity, how long they can expect to harvest each planting, how many beds each planting will take up, and if they’ll be able to plant something else in the same spot before or after the squash. Oh, and by the way, there are about 25 other crops they are looking into growing. Keep that in mind. And they only have an acre. And it’s a good idea to plan for unexpected contingencies.
It’s a lot of work, especially on such a small and intensive scale, where we don’t have a lot of space to mess around with, and we’ll be doing a lot of double cropping. To make it manageable, we’ve broken the process down into several steps.
First we decided how to lay out our field. We’re going to make all of our beds 50 feet. There are a couple reasons for this. Because we have such a small CSA, we don’t need a huge amount of any crop at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to grow a 300′ bed of arugula when we’re only feeding 20-30 people! In 50′ beds, we can plant small amounts of a lot of different things. Small beds also make it easy to double crop. Double cropping is when you plant two different crops (not including cover crops) on the same piece of land over the course of a season. With only an acre, this is imperative – otherwise, we simply wouldn’t have enough space. Short 50′ beds allow for a quick turnover. We can plant a 50′ bed of arugula, harvest it for a week, and then prepare the land for something else the next week.
Because, when doing a word problem, it helps to draw a picture, we made a map of our field.
This is a map of our two plots of land – our main field, and the wetter field behind the farmstand, what we’re calling “Out Back”. We divided the main field in half, with a 3′ path down the middle. We then marked out the 50′ beds that would fit into our 200 x 150 foot rectangle. The long bed around the edge is our perimeter pick-your-own. We divided the Out Back into 3 sections, with 5′ paths between each section. Having our fields split up into sections will help us plan for crop rotation (we can put crops of the same families all in one section, for instance).
Here’s a close up of the map of our main field:
The hard part, of course, is filling the blank map. For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking each vegetable we might possibly grow and determining how much I think we’ll need. Based on my experience in other CSAs, I came up with how many weeks we’d like to give each vegetable to our CSA members, and how much we’d like to distribute each week. I then determined the total amount we’ll need per week, and the total amount for the whole season. Next I adjusted this number by 20% (most farmers adjust 10% to account for crop failure and other unexpected happenings). I figured for our first season running a farm on this land, we can’t have too big a cushion! Next step: how many total beds we’ll need of the vegetable, and how many successions to plant. For some crops, like tomatoes, we’ll only plant a few successions, about a week apart (early, main, and late.) For other crops, like head lettuce, we’ll plant every other week starting in April and going through August. For crops like lettuce, I had to figure out how many beds we’ll need per succession. Whew! Farming is feeling pretty math-heavy these days!
With all this information entered in a spreasheet, and a blank map of our field, we’re ready for the real fun of crop planning: solving the word problem. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.
Laura
