The Deluge

"Wow, you could go swimming in here", Lorenz said as we dodged some huge puddles up in the field this afternoon. Seeing as I had cut my weekend of paddling short because I was tired of being cold and wet, I was not inclined to test the idea and instead opted for the soggy but only ankle-deep mud route.

We were up in the field because Lorenz needed to pick the asparagus. That's the thing about asparagus, if you don't pick it, the shoots become ferns and there won't be any more to pick. So even if you have to stomp through mud to get to it, and even if it's a holiday Monday and you've given all of the staff the day off, you still need to get out of your dry house and go pick asparagus. Fortunately, the vague "you" in this case means "Lorenz", not me - but I tagged along anyway.

The asparagus here has been going for about two weeks. You pick it when it gets to a certain height, regardless of how thick the stalks are. If you get lots of skinny stalks, that's one of your indicators to stop picking it - the way it works (or at least the way I understood the asparagus wisdom Lorenz imparted today) is that energy and nutrients are stored in the root. While there is plenty of this, the roots will keep on sending up shoots. If you keep on picking them, they'll keep sending more. As the roots become depleted, the stalks get skinnier and skinnier - and you have to stop while it still looks like something you could harvest, because these last shoots become stalks which become ferns which then merrily synthesize away all summer and recharge the roots. The fertility is also helped along by generous applications of composted manure (though not while the shoots are coming up). The more vigorous your roots, the longer they can keep producing - so the first year you harvest, you may get a week out of the asparagus, but after a few years, you can get four or even more weeks of production. Obviously, asparagus is a perennial crop - and perennial crops are very susceptible to weeds. Unlike beds for annuals, you can't work the ground thoroughly to kill the weeds, so you end up doing things like mulching and Lorenz went over it with the cultivator just before it started producing too.

Besides the perennial crops being harvested right now (asparagus, rhubarb and chives) and the ubiquitous puddles, the field is full of things that are growing like weeds. Oh, wait, many of them are weeds. Between the weeds (and yes, I'm exaggerating, the farm crew has been working hard at keeping the weeds down) there are all sorts of things. Under the row covers, the brassicas and some lettuces are coming along nicely, safe from the flea beetles. Then, not under row covers, there's baby lettuce mix which is almost ready to be harvested, and spinach which will be ready in a couple of weeks or so. If the whole field doesn't disappear under a lake...
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The deluge didn't start until Saturday night. Until then, Lorenz had plenty of time to devote to his tractor - and of course you're going to get the gratuitous farmer on a tractor photo here. I think Lorenz is getting more tolerant of my buzzing around with the camera - when I decided to climb up into the bucket while he took a short break, he didn't automatically respond by tipping the bucket to dump me out.

Also before the deluge, the interns under Sean's leadership got the roof up on the farm stand. All who were loitering about the farm (and those who were working here too, I think I was the only loiterer) were commanded to help lift the roof up. I even put in a genuine effort, but very quickly ran out of height to help with the task and thus went back to my usual farm voyeur position behind the camera.

I think the farm stand looks great. They're going to put walls on it, obviously, and a steel roof - and then there is the potential of an awning. If that doesn't make people slam on the brakes and come check out what good things there are at Greenfields, I don't know what will. Ok, I have a few ideas of what would get people to slam on the brakes, but they don't grow those things here. In any case, the cops will hate it - they've been using the pad for the farm stand as a place to set up speed traps on the Guelph Line. No more! Besides, people can't speed if they're crowding around the spiffy new farm stand!
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Given the wet, the interns will be doing some seeding in the greenhouse tomorrow. I asked, hoping Lorenz would say that they won't have anything to do - in which case I would have suggested they build us an ark! If this keeps going the way they have been the last couple of days, we'll need it. While things are growing during these wet spells, field work grinds to a halt when the farm starts to resemble a sopping sponge. I think the only one who really doesn't mind the wet is Boris - after all, this dog decided to go for a swim today, when just walking through the fields (at his height) meant getting completely soaked.

A Girl and her Goose

There's a new Romeo in Ruth's life. He's terribly cute, but his vocabulary consists entirely of "me me me me me!", and he's not housetrained. Her slightly pigeon-toed gosling was rescued from the side of the road - he'd been abandoned by his Canada goose family, most likely because he couldn't keep up. Now, he's got the life: he gets fussed over by a beautiful blonde who dotes on him. Romeo has imprinted on humans, and he will waddle faster than you'd think to keep you in his sights. If he can't see or hear you, his "me me me me ME!" cheeps get pretty insistent, so Ruth gets HP or me or one of the kids to babysit him when she's with her horses. Goose-sitting has, however, been banished outside by a not-entirely-amused Lorenz when he found a pooping goose keeping me company in the kitchen. Soon, Romeo will get too messy even for Ruth, at which point she plans to send him to her parents' farm to keep the other exiled goose company.

Of course, Lorenz's lack of amusement at the pooping goose could perhaps have been due to the flu that took over his body in the past week. Apparently, if you sit on the tractor for more hours than most of us realize a day actually has, and then get off the tractor only to show the interns what to do and then go and cut micro mix in the greenhouse but also spend time with the kids and do laundry and get the order in for the market and deal with the van that, once again, doesn't start and then deal with your email and and and... (you get the picture), it may just be possible that you get run down and sick. Fortunately for all of us, his good humour and general functioning are back to normal, even if his breathing isn't. Which means that there is even more activity for me to spy on!

In the greenhouse, there is the micro mix harvesting. Micro mix is halfway between sprouts and baby greens, at least that's my description. It is full of good and good for you things like amaranth, and I feel healthier just thinking about eating it. It is a bit on the labour-intensive side, though - there's the denser-than-usual seeding in the flats, the endless watering, the cutting by hand (with scissors, no less!), the mixing it for that aesthetically pleasing effect, and the packaging in clamshells.

Besides the micro mix, the greenhouse if full of lots and lots of transplants - tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and rosemary and basil and all sorts of other good stuff that is too tender to go out so far. There are also less mouth-watering things in there: this is compost tea. No, it doesn't go on the micro mix. Just watering the plugs and refilling the water barrels, opening and closing greenhouse doors, and letting the interior curtain down or putting it back up, rolling up the sides or unrolling them, and turning the heater on - all of this depending on temperature, which of course can change every time the sun pops behind a cloud - can keep one person tied to the farm already. This past weekend, given the flu situation, HP and I kept an eye on the greenhouse, and clearly I am not relaxed enough to do this: I stressed myself out thinking that the poor plants were too hot or too cold or too thirsty (and then too soggy!). I was much better at sitting on the couch watching Coronation Street and letting Lorenz say he really did feel better and he'd check on it in a minute...

After that, he dragged himself up to the field to cultivate, and then to seed some spinach. And then to Milton to get Malcolm a new bike, and then up to the field again, and then... see what I mean about getting run down? Except (cough, wheeze) he's fine, (cough cough) really. When I got home from work today, I wandered up to the field and found Lorenz in one of his two most consistent spots (there are two tractor seats, so he can be found on either one of those at most times...), preparing more seedbeds. Sean, Justin and J.P. were hand-transplanting onions further up the hill, and Lorenz stopped to check on them (and no doubt issue another task list) while I was up there. I didn't stick around to find out what they had to do next, because I got distracted by the asparagus (which needed cutting, but I didn't do it) and the rhubarb (which needs to be divided at some point, Lorenz says, but a more immediate need is to take the flowers off to keep it producing).

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Last week, the boys (aka the interns, or JP, Sean and Justin) worked away at the new roadside stand. They got a frame up and standing by the weekend, but of course they haven't had time to get back to that project. And they won't until it rains, Lorenz is saying words like transplanter and wheelhoe (hey, at least he's not saying stone picking, though I'm pretty sure he'd be fine if any and all who hang out here in whatever capacity were overcome by the urge to pick stones).

Not even HP, who wants nothing more than to be able to ride the motorcycle but is caught in the endless hoops that the MTO and insurance companies like to put out, has been bored enough to resort to stone picking. Not only does he have the usual assortment of farm chores, he's been putting time into the garden, and now he's got a whole new discovery: on Sunday he tried out horseback riding. What do you think of that cowboy? I think he needs a hat...

Being here, it's never dull. I still can't get over how lucky I am to live in the middle of all of this. And hanging out on a farm during the busy times serves to remind me just how cheap our food is. All this beauty and all the stuff I eat, it comes at a price - with conventional produce, I believe it's not without cost to the environment, health and society as a whole (pay me now or pay me later). With locally grown organic food, I can feel better about it - but nothing is a perfect world. I'd like to believe that we pay enough to give these farmers a decent wage, but when I see the hours they're putting in, I wonder if that's the case.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

On the weekend, I was assembling another Adirondack chair on the concrete pad outside my apartment while Lorenz and his coffee cup kept me company when it started to hail. Lorenz's comment was "that's great, hail is just what those little plants in the field need". If I hadn't been sure that hail is not good for transplants, I wouldn't even have detected the sarcasm in that comment.

Farming is, by definition, tied to the weather, but horticultural crop farmers have it particularly tough. A week's difference in harvest dates can mean half the returns you would otherwise have. We seem to be willing to pay much more for the first Ontario tomatoes, new potatoes, early local brassicas, strawberries when they first come into season... so the challenge for the farmer is not just to get the plants to yield high quality produce, but to time it just right. When it looks like the brassicas under the row covers got a bit stressed, it doesn't mean that they won't bounce back or that the cabbages and kales won't be as beautiful as always, but it may mean that they mature a bit later, and that's a big deal.

Around here, it feels like the farm team is in the starting blocks, muscles tense - but waiting. When there are two or three dry days in a row, Lorenz is welded to the tractor from dawn to dusk. But, without fail, a thunderstorm passes through and dumps a whole lot of rain. At this point, the timing of the rain is not good for this particular farm. When the fields are wet, you can't work them. The spinach has come up, but there are lots of weeds there too. It's a good idea to get the weeds while they're small, but not if it means stepping on a very wet bed and compacting soil. Driving the tractor to cultivate is out of the question until the fields are considerably more dry than they were on the weekend. Too much compaction would just make the problem worse, because then, when it rains, the water would pool on top (and the solution to that, apparently, is several years of cover crops).

But the warm days and lots of moisture are making things grow, and not just weeds. The asparagus is up, and will be ready for its first cutting sometime this week. The rhubarb patch is ready to give up its first bunches - I pulled off a stalk and ate it up in the field, and it tasted so good.... The peas are up and seem to be doing well, the garlic is growing vigorously, and the leeks have recovered from their overwintering.

A few dry days, and field operations kick into high gear. In the meantime, there is some greenhouse work to be done (the micro mix is coming along nicely, there are many transplants to take care of, including a second seeding of brassicas, and the guys transplanted some plants that I'm guessing are watermelons on the ground in the greenhouse) [note: I guessed wrong. Cucumbers]. There is also a lot of maintenance-type work to be done: the cooler repair guy was at the farm this week, the van got towed to Milton to get a new starter put in, Sean is working on plans for a farm stand, the electrician is wiring the garage... it's just a hive of activity. I sit in my Adirondack chair in the middle of it all, and watch. When it gets too busy, I go to the garden - which is safely hidden from most of this guilt-inducing beavering...

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There are a lot of people working on the farm now - besides Lorenz and Tara, there are three interns (J.P., Justin and Sean), and of course H.P. Given that there isn't that much to do until it dries up a bit, though, H.P. has been diverted. I've been puttering away in my garden with every spare minute, and I whined at Lorenz that he needed to fix the fence along the south wall. He thought that the crab-apple tree needed some pruning-type maintenance first, though, and sent H.P. down. It became obvious very quickly, though, that much of this tree is not doing well, and if it is to be saved at all, a lot of it needed to be cut. Lorenz ended up hauling out the chainsaw and going to work. H.P. turned his attention to replacing the fence section under the tree, and then he thought it would be good to have a second entrance along the north fence. After he did that, he started constructing a grilling pit (no fires, just briquets). And then he spent an afternoon hauling flat chunks of limestone out of the bush (though sometimes he helped the flatness along with hammer and chisel), and built a stone patio.

Me, I'm no dummy - when someone wants to join me in a project and does such great work, I happily deliver beer to keep him happy. I've been putting in some raised beds, and wood chip paths, and hauling chunks of logs for seats. I've planted some perennials (H.P. came home with some more the other day), and I'm going to overseed the patch of weedy grass I have now. I painted two of the Adirondack chairs with farm implement paint - Ford blue and Federal yellow. Lorenz kept lobbying for John Deere green, but I suspect this has less to do with thinking a green chair would be good and more with his two John Deere tractors and how useful a can of green implement paint would be... Me, I'm leaning toward picking up a can of Case red (or maybe Massey Ferguson red) for the last chair (I'm not even considering Kubota orange, even though the third tractor is a Kubota... is it my fault Lorenz doesn't select tractors by colour and went with all green and orange tractors?).

Most importantly, though, we've inaguarated the garden - we hauled a picnic table in there on Monday night, and grilled chunks of meat while adding to the beer cap collection I've got going in one of the plastic flowerpots that the perennials came in. I had forgotten just how much I love having a garden.

Day to Day

I love the look and comfort of wooden Adirondack chairs, and I wanted one. Bo told me he got his at TSC, and since Lorenz and I were passing a TSC the other day and TSC's are like candy stores to farmers, we stopped. I knew that the chairs come in boxes of parts and the rest is up to you, and I was prepared for that - but I was still a bit intimidated. Considering how not mechanically inclined I am, I have great tools (courtesy of my brother over several Christmases), but tools alone do not take care of assembly. Thus, the picture on the right is a source of pride - only twice did I smack my head at my own stupidity and have to undo something I did, and I got the sucker put together in under an hour! Interestingly enough, the kit calls it a "Cape Cod" chair - "Muskoka" chair I could understand since north of the border we like to Canadianize the "Adirondack" label (I so don't care) and the kit is clearly Canadian (it used #8 Robertson screws throughout), but "Cape Cod"? Regardless of the name, though, I love my new chair.

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Today, despite bright sunshine, is a dark day on the biodynamic calendar. That means that it's not a good day to seed, transplant or harvest - and thus J.P. is relieved of the sunchoke digging that has become his constant. H.P., however, has decided that he needs to conduct his own test, and vowed last night that he'd dig a bucket of sunchokes and plant a test strip of dark day sunchokes just to see.

Last week, not being particularly dark either meteorologically or astrologically, Lorenz and J.P. spent loads of time transplanting early brassicas (cabbage, kale, broccoli) and staking row covers over the new transplants to keep them protected from bugs. So far, it hasn't been a particularly dry spring, and while Lorenz has been driving on the fields to till, it's too early to use the transplanter. When you're tilling, you're loosening up the soil you just drove on with the heavy tractor behind you. When you're transplanting, you have no chance to loosen up the soil you just compacted, and the machinery is heavier because you're also carrying a lot of water for the transplants as they go in - so the fields need to be that much drier to do this task without undesirable compaction. Unfortunately for the backs and knees of J.P. and Lorenz, this meant a lot of crouching as they became the human transplanters. Lorenz is really, really fast at it - he opens up the hole for the plug with the transplanting tool, drops the plug in with the other, and closes the hole again in one swift motion.

Less swift is the row cover job. The floating row covers are wide enough to do four rows, and go the full length. They're made of a light mesh which gets caught by the wind easily - so while you're rolling out the row cover, you need to stake it down, and stake it down in such a way that the plants have spare room to row and still have it float while keeping the edges tight enough so the wind doesn't grab them and rip the whole thing off. This is obviously a bit difficult with only two people, so when they did one row while I was poking around the field, I grabbed a bucket of stakes and did one side while J.P. did the other.

Much of Lorenz's view of the world lately has been from the seat of a tractor (but one of the tractors has a new seat, courtesy of the TSC visit. Not to be outdone by my new Adirondack seat, Lorenz walked out with a new tractor seat!). Not only is there a lot of bed preparation for seeding and transplanting, but there are jobs like cultivating among the asparagus bed before the shoots emerge to keep the weeds down. He's also been using the tractor to move things like flats of transplants up to the field. The hill is not dry enough to take the tractor up directly, so right now, getting to the field means driving along the roads. At this time of year, a beater four-wheel drive farm truck would be a handy thing to have, but you can't have everything.

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Also last week, the goose and the bunny went to live a better life at a different farm. Sounds like a gentle way of saying they became dinner, doesn't it? I would suspect as much, except they really did get put in the van and Ruth really did drive them to her parents' farm. So now we're down to chickens, a donkey, many cats, a dog and a barn full of horses at the farm. The bunny and goose needed to go because Lorenz needs the room - the bunny had a whole stall, and the pigs will have to go somewhere when they come. They were outside for a large chunk of last year, but that spot is now reverting to chicken coop for the cockerels.

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I bought some perennials for my garden, but haven't done anything about it yet. I have big ideas, but don't seem to be putting in the time. Putting the chair together was a start, though! And I have a great offer of perennials from an existing garden from a friend, I just have to wait until they've had a bit of a chance to grow before I can dig chunks of them up. I have not lost enthusiasm for my secret garden project, just the opposite. I went to a big nursery to scope out the plants the same day as the TSC escapade, and came home with three hostas, two cardinal flowers (which apparently are lobelias) and one blue lobelia. I want to have Virginia creeper going up the heritage building, lots more hostas, and a row of sunflowers (if they will grow in there, there may not be enough sun). Also, a bunch of native plants, and I'm going to transplant the bulbs I saved from the forced tulips and hyacinths I had in the apartment over the winter in the faint hope that they may survive.

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And so goes my day-to-day life. Work is chaotic, since my office has been taken over by contractors and I am essentially officeless for a few days. Home life is full of the usual stuff, including the farm picture-taking thing. You'd think I'd get bored of poking around the farm and documenting everything Lorenz, Tara, J.P. and H.P. (and soon Sean and Justin) do, but nope, not bored. Not bored at all, actually - there is always something new when things are growing so quickly. No regrets at all about deciding to live in the middle of all this activity.

Oh, and you know what? I'm challenged by grade five math! Malcolm is doing long division in school, and it took me about ten minutes (with Malcolm impatiently explaining it to me) to figure out what he was doing before I could help him. Between the two of us, we figured it out - he knew about the "backing up" part to bring numbers down, but I had him beat on knowing that there's got to be a remainder in the divisions he was doing. It takes a ten-year-old to get me understanding it!