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.