Thursday, May 21, 2009

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.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

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.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

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.