A New Adventure Begins

Long story short, early in 2012 when Trillium Haven Farm closed their CSA and opened a restaurant, I took the opportunity to set off on my own. That summer, my wife and I started looking for a suitable property and were fortunate to find one in early 2013. We moved there in August and named the place Blackbird Farms. I squeezed in an abbreviated season that year, selling at the Fulton Street Farmers' Market, and I will be offering a limited number of shares of my own CSA for 2014.

All the details about the CSA and ongoing coverage of this new adventure are available on our web site: blackbirdfarms.net. Please come on over. There is a place at the table waiting for you.

High Winds.

I get nervous on days like today. The strong winds make the greenhouses shimmy in alarming ways. At the wind speeds we experienced yesterday and today, none of the houses were in any real danger of being damaged, but I like to keep an eye out. Every so often, Growing for Market will publish the photo of some poor soul’s greenhouse under which the wind swept, then lifted and crushed onto the roof of a nearby barn. These photos give me pause.

Of all the different kinds of weather we work in, I think the most irritating is the wind. Autumn’s cold and wet can be demoralizing, but when the wind flares out of the west, raising whitecaps on Maplewood Lake and scouring everything with the fine silt of the muck fields, stinging your eyes, infiltrating every seam in your clothing, filling your mouth with dust -- that gets old fast.

These winds are drying out the soil nicely, though. This week, our plan is to start planting in the fields, starting with fava beans and peas, and maybe some early salad greens.

Boon or Boondoggle?

After a short pause, we are back to seeding the CSA’s crops: early broccoli, the first round of lettuce, and the second of scallions. We needed to wait until the heater in the new greenhouse was hooked up, which happened this earlier this week. “New” in this case really means “not so new anymore,” since building this greenhouse has taken us over two years and no little amount of trouble. Finally, everything is installed, running, and ready to go -- electrical lines, ventilation system, air circulation fans, and, now, the new propane heater. Last spring, we used this house as an unheated space for hardening off seedlings before planting them out in the fields, and last winter we grew cold-hardy greens in it, but with it heated, we can now use it to start seedlings, which is a boon.

The cedar waxwings have returned.

There is a spot on the farm, just across the drive from one of the greenhouses, where Michael planted a few American cranberry bushes. Their fruit is not good for much other than attracting these lovely small, swift birds. When I walked past, the bushes were full of birds, and they were flying back and forth between the bushes and the greater shelter of the woods behind the greenhouse.

One of my field guides reads, “it is not unusual to see a row of them perched on a branch, passing a berry down the line and back again, bill to bill, in a ceremony that ends when one swallows the food.” It also claims that “the birds wander in flocks whose arrivals and departures are unpredictable,” though on the farm their coming is one more sign that the winter is truly ending.

Welcome to Spring!

I know that the weather forecast is calling for colder temperatures by the end of this week, but I think we have turned a corner on the season nonetheless. At the farm, even the largest of the snowdrifts melted away long ago. The garlic we planted in the fall is now pushing its green fingers through the thawing soil. A few days ago, I saw a red-winged blackbird, and today I saw a robin. Last month the farm slumbered. Now, I can feel it waking.

In the greenhouses, there is no question that spring is here. In the past month since we cleaned them out and switched on the heaters, we have seeded all the farm's leeks, shallots, and onions, as well as the celery and celeriac. This week's agenda includes parsley, kale, and the first round of frisee and radicchio. And before we know it, we will be out in the fields.

It begins.

Ask me around Halloween for my opinion of farming, and I will tell you the truth of it: It is a fool’s errand and a wholly improbable enterprise, and it is a wonder any of us have anything to eat at all. Ask me again around Groundhog Day, and I will tell you another truth, that I am thankful -- even eager -- for the chance to try it one more time. I do not know whether the change in my views is due to acquired perspective or willful ignorance. What I do know is we start tomorrow, and it feels like Christmas Eve.

As if the cool summer wasn't enough.

Now we have this to worry about -- though, truth be told, we do experience late blight in our tomatoes from time to time.

One interesting aspect of this story is how the disease seems to be especially widespread in plants purchased from garden centers of the big box stores -- another good reason to buy locally and to know your farmer.

Also, note how this outbreak highlights the danger of monoculture farming. As the article explains, late blight was also responsible for the infamous Irish potato famine. Again, I'm glad Trillium's success or failure doesn't hinge on only one crop.

I've got autumn on my mind.

This morning, we all bundled up in sweatshirts and knit caps, as though it was fall. With the cool temperatures and the sky a clear, crisp robin's egg blue, it felt to me more like mid-September than mid-July.

It has been an unusually cool summer -- though nothing like 1816, I suppose. Still, I fear this year won't be a good one for heat-loving crops like peppers, eggplant, melons, and (alas!) tomatoes. But that's all right. Since we grow over fifty different kinds of vegetables, something is bound to do well. Our lettuce, for example, is thriving this year, the broccoli is beautiful, and the potato plants look quite robust. As Michael likes to say about such things, we shall see.

Since we've taken a sabbatical from the Fulton Street Farmers Market and moved our Forest Hills Foods delivery to Thursday, Fridays are now wide open. With the week's harvesting behind us, we were able to make good progress on the last big push of seeding and transplanting -- such good progress, in fact, that we emptied the greenhouse of plants ready for the fields and then filled it again with newly seeded trays. All were fall crops: cabbages, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and cauliflower in the fields; collards, kale, and more cabbages in the greenhouse. It's a good thing, too. We have only around seventy days until the first hard frost and the end of our growing season.

On throwing things together and calling it good.

When it comes to my farm share, sometimes I fill the week with thoughtfully considered meals that efficiently use the week's produce. More often than not, I look in the refrigerator the day before the pickup and realize I have a sack of vegetables I haven't even thought about using.

This week was about to be like that. Then I happened on the latest "Minimalist" column from Mark Bittman. The frittata -- like the quiche, the stratta, and the stir fry -- is one of those staple dishes in which you can throw a bunch of vegetables, use scattered leftovers and remnants, and generally clean out the crisper drawer.

So into a pan went last week's broccoli, scallions, frisee, a leftover roasted red pepper, and some fresh tarragon from the pot on my front porch, along with a couple of eggs and some grated Parmesan cheese. It turned out more like a scramble than a frittata (next time I think I'll use one or two additional eggs), but it was still delicious. What's more, I had a nice empty place in the fridge to put this week's share.

The test of scalability.

Emma Slager, a Trillium intern during the 2007 season, is this summer helping to run the new community garden at Calvin College. And she's writing a blog about it. Here's how she describes their project:

The Calvin College Community Garden is a new garden for students, faculty, staff, seminary families, and alumni of Calvin College. We’re in our first year and we’re still pretty small (18 6×4 foot raised beds) but learning as we go. We’re committed to sustainability, healthy living, education, and community. We want to celebrate God’s creation and learn more about how we can be responsible earth-keepers.

It's a good blog and a fine garden. And I like seeing how she's putting her Trillium experience to work, using the same methods we follow at Trillium, right down to how she stakes her tomatoes.

It strikes me that this business of scalability is important. In contrast to conventional agriculture -- where the only methodology is bigger, faster, and more -- our basic principles and practices can be scaled up or down depending on the local circumstances, whether a half-acre market garden or a 1,400 member CSA.

Kale: the vegetable that helped defeat Hitler.

As the farm's members may be noticing, kale is one of the staple vegetables of the share. I asked Michael about this the other day, and he explained he likes kale because it's easy to grow and a reliable producer throughout the season. What's more, due to a clerical error in the greenhouse, for which I have to be responsible, we planted more than we intended. So our shareholders can expect to see a lot of kale this season.

This is a good thing. Really, it is.

Kale is a member of the brassica family, which includes plants such as brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. In fact, it is considered to be the closest relative to wild cabbage. It has been cultivated for over two thousand years and was grown in the gardens of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Up through the end of the Middle Ages, it was one of the most common vegetables in Europe.

Kale is also nutrient dense. It contains high levels of vitamins A, C, and K, as well as important antioxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds. In addition, it is relatively high in dietary fiber and calcium. Kale's high nutritional value made it a staple vegetable in British victory gardens during World War II. "Those raised on a wartime diet," one study suggests, "were considerably healthier and fitter than their modern-day counterparts."

To store kale, wrap it in a paper towel, place it in a loosely sealed plastic bag, and put it in the vegetable drawer of your refrigerator. Stored this way, kale should keep well up to a week. For longer-term storage, it can be blanched and frozen. (You can find a helpful tutorial, with pictures, here.)

How to eat it? I tell people to memorize this formula: kale + potatoes + pig = deliciousness. This formula is very traditional, and variations include the Irish colcannon, the Portuguese caldo verde, and, my personal favorite, the Dutch stamppot.

The farm at sunrise.

Back in February when things were gearing up, this job was pretty much a nine-to-five gig. Since then, the start time has been creeping forward steadily. Michael gave word last week that harvest days would now start at six-thirty. That makes for a long day, but mornings like this morning compensate for it.

When we arrived at the farm, the sun had just risen, slanting across the mist-shrouded fields and firing the trees along the fencerows all golden. The cottonwood tree by the swing set in the yard was full of birds -- I couldn't tell what kind -- and they flew in and out of the branches in clusters and sang as they flew. The early coolness yet promised a hot afternoon, and, all around us, the fields rested, waiting for us to fill them with our work.

That's how my day started. It ended with me nearly tipping half our irrigation pipes and their trailer into the ditch. Sometimes, that's how things go.

Blogging the invincible summer.

Shane Folkertsma, a photographer and farm shareholder, has been running a photo blog of Trillium over at A Season in the Sun. His magnificent photography captures the farm's story far better than words. Be sure to check it out.

Apologies for the hiatus.

Over the past month, my weekdays have been full of farming and my weekends full of traveling here, here, and here. But I'm back now, at least for a little while.

In the time since my last post, the operations here at Trillium have become significantly more complicated. Aside from a handful of succession plantings for vegetables like scallions and lettuce, work in the greenhouses slows down at this point in the summer. All our attention is in the fields, as it better be by this time of year. We still have some transplanting to do, as well as some direct seeding. Though almost all the tomatoes are staked, they'll need to be strung as they grow. There's always cultivating and weeding to be done somewhere on the farm. And harvesting. Lots and lots of harvesting.

Since we're no longer working in the greenhouses on a large scale, my responsibilities have shifted from there to the wash station. I'm responsible for cleaning the produce as it's harvested, packing it in crates, and stacking and organizing it in the cooler.

The final touches have been put on the new, larger produce cooler that we assembled last winter, and we switched it on a couple of days ago. Glory and hallelujah, it's nice to have it up and running! Since I started working at Trillium a little over two years ago, the number of our shareholders has doubled. We've felt the growing pains of this increase each year. First, the trailer was too small to make the delivery to the Fulton Street pickup. That problem was solved when Michael bought the new delivery truck. Then, we maxed out what we could fit in the old cooler. That made the farm pickup tricky. At the high point of the season last year, everything simply wouldn't fit, and I had to get creative with keeping the vegetables cool by spraying them with water now and again as they sat stacked in the wash station. Again, tricky to do in the heat of August. Now that the new cooler is on line, there's plenty of room to keep the produce organized and accessible, and that makes things run so much more smoothly.

Managing the wash station also means that I get to help run the on-farm pickup on Thursday afternoon. This is the high point of my week. It's been great seeing the returning members and meeting the new ones. I also enjoy answering folks' questions about some of our goofier vegetables. Everything we do is oriented toward these pickups, and it's satisfying to lay the fruit of our labor out on the tables for the members to receive. It closes the long loop of the week's work, and it makes me immensely happy to be a part of it all.

The certified organic greenhouse is nearly empty.

This morning we made one of our final deliveries to our distributor, Luurtsema Sales. Since we started shipping, we've moved an incredible number of plants. Last year, the greenhouse didn't look this empty until early June.

Back in March, the high demand for seeds made us think vegetable plants would sell briskly, but how briskly they sold surprised us. Each time we backed up to the warehouse, we had to navigate a swarm of trucks. There must be a lot of new gardeners out there. I’m glad for this.

We do encourage our CSA members to try their hand at gardening, to grow at least a couple of vegetable plants. Why? One reason is to complement your share. Herbs, for example, are easy to grow, even in pots, and are useful for enlivening your cookery. Also, if you really like a certain vegetable -- tomatoes, for example -- you may find that you don’t receive enough in your share to satisfy you. Try growing some of those too.

But there’s another reason to grow your own. An important part of mindful eating is understanding how our food makes its way to our plates. Tending some vegetable plants teaches us how this happens. Wendell Berry, in his essay “The Pleasure of Eating,” encourages us to “participate in food production to the extent that you can.” In his words,

If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

If you don’t have a spot in your backyard sunny enough to grow vegetables, we sell a number of varieties that thrive in containers. We also carry some very ornamental vegetable plants that you could slip in your front flower beds, and no one would be the wiser. And if you were planning on buying some of our plants but haven’t yet, don’t worry. We made sure to set aside some of every variety we grow to sell at the market and to our shareholders. We also planted some small successions so that we can have fresh plants to sell later in the season. So there’s plenty to go around, for now. But I wouldn’t delay much longer.

Postcards of the transplanting.

The weather's been holding nicely, so we've been taking advantage of it to transplant as much as we can -- leeks and shallots, cabbages and kale, parsley and I've lost track of what all else. Transplanting is a straightforward operation, though everything we do aims at growing the healthiest -- and therefore most naturally pest- and disease-resistant --  plants we can.

As I mentioned in a previous post, tending our soil’s fertility is an essential part of our work. To see how this is so, it helps to contrast our approach with that of conventional agriculture. For conventional agriculture, the soil has little value. Decades of extensive farming practices have depleted much of the soil’s natural fertility, so crops require a massive amount of synthetic fertilizers to return nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to the soil.

The problem with this approach is not so much that it’s wrong but that it’s incomplete. We are beginning to understand that plant health depends on more than just a handful of nutrients that can be manufactured and injected into the soil. A whole host of micronutrients and trace minerals play a role in plant health, as well as all the microorganisms, earthworms, and other creatures that live in the soil. Using things like animal manures, compost, and fish- and kelp-based fertilizers develops all the soil’s components and builds up the soil’s health. Healthy soil means healthy plants, and healthy plants better resist pests and diseases.

So after the fields are prepared and the beds made, we spray them with a combination of concentrated fish and kelp emulsion diluted in water. In the meantime, the rest of the crew pulls the plants from the greenhouse, loads them on a wagon, and gives them a thorough watering, which helps them endure the shock of transplanting. From there, it’s a simple matter of hauling the wagon to the beds and putting the plants in the ground. While some larger operations mechanize this process with sophisticated -- and expensive -- planting machines, we do all this work by hand. Though it can be tough on one's back, it's not distasteful work. There's even a measure of leisure to it, with the freedom to talk and watch and listen without the howl and whine of machines ringing in our ears.

What twenty tons of manure looks like.

At the beginning of each season, Michael has soil samples analyzed to assess the state of the farm's fertility. Based on the results, he places an order for minerals to spread around the farm. Earlier this week, Michael took delivery of a dump-truck load of well-composted manure premixed with these minerals, and he has spent a couple of afternoons applying this mix to the fields.

This is a critical yearly task. One of the central principles of the way we farm is that the health of the soil is all. The early-twentieth-century English agronomist Sir Albert Howard -- who is considered one of the fathers of organic farming -- promoted the idea that we should view the "whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject." The health of our plants -- and the health of our shareholders -- depend on the health of our soil. We therefore do all we can to ensure that our soil is fertile, nutrient-dense, and teeming with worms and beneficial microorganisms. And sometimes creating healthy soil means spreading twenty tons of manure.

It was a good day to be a duck.

Though yesterday was a fine dry day, in the morning we had to fulfill some large plant orders -- over three thousand units.  The crew didn't get out in the fields to plant most of the onions until later in the day.

This morning, as we prepared to plant the last bed and a half, the rain started, gently at first, then more steadily. The sky thundered a couple of times, but not close enough to send us for cover. We put on our rain gear and kept planting, which was fine. If I can stay dry, I don't mind being in the rain. (But, once I'm wet, I get cranky fast.) It's a quiet and peaceful way to work. Just as we finished the last bed, the rain really started to come down, ending the fieldwork for the day.

Michael had been gone much of the morning running errands, and, when he returned at lunchtime, he brought with him a cardboard box of ducklings. Tractor Supply Company was running a clearance sale, two bucks a duck. He figured that, since we were already set up for chickens, adding a few ducks to the poultry mix wouldn't be much more work. He bought six.

They're lively, inquisitive little things. At the end of the day, we let them out for a while to explore the wet world. They took to it ... well, like a duck takes to water.

Stalking the wild leek.

Over at Mark Bittman's blog, a couple of guest contributors are extolling the virtues of ramps. A member of the allium family (along with onions, leeks, chives, garlic, and scallions), ramps are a wild, native perennial that appears in the woods around here this time of year.

I'd never heard of ramps until I started working at Trillium. Though some may think of them as haute cuisine -- ramps often appear on the menus of tonier restaurants and on cooking shows of celebrity chefs -- their culinary roots are quite humble. Which is what you would expect, as country people scoured their local woods and fields for something green to carry them through the lean early spring.

When Michael and Anja started farming here, ramps grew naturally in a few spots in the woods. They've since planted several more patches, with an eye toward developing them for sale as a specialty crop. We're waiting for them to become established so they can be harvested sustainably. I don't know if we'll harvest any this year, but I hope so. I'd like to try them.

Or I could just plant my own. As an experiment, Michael bought a box of ramp starts from a farm in West Virginia. We've been planting them in four-inch pots to sell along with our other vegetable plants. It's been a bit of a trick learning how to grow them. We planted the first batch too soon, and now they're past their prime, so we'll plant those in the woods. But the next couple of rounds are looking pretty good. Look for them at the market. 

This is what vegetable gridlock looks like.

As soon as I say the weather is cooperating, it doesn't. Of course. All this rain -- over three inches so far -- is keeping us out of the fields. Not that we can't work in the rain. We'll stay out so long as there isn't lightning, and sometimes even then. But if the fields are too wet, moving tractors and wagons and feet through them only compacts the soil. So we're waiting for the fields to dry out some. And waiting.

To make room in the greenhouse for more seeding, we've been moving seedlings that are ready for transplanting out onto the wagons. Well, all the wagons are all full now, and the greenhouse is still filled wall to wall. Muck fields drain pretty quickly, though, and today was a dry and sunny day, so there's a good chance we'll but putting a lot of things in the ground tomorrow. If the weather cooperates.