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.