Quincy Farm

This weekend’s market in Ballston Spa will mark the end of our first season’s marketing, as our supplies of delicious baby beets, sweet potatoes, turnips, cabbages, and more are running thin.

****

I heard recently on the radio that a groundhog’s heart beats only 4 times PER MINUTE during hibernation, and that his body temperature drops from 98*F down into the thirties! 

While those groundhogs snooze away the pleasingly slow days of winter, Cara and I have, in our more normal human fashion, crossed the dark and snowy solstice.  Now our days get longer, spring gets closer, and the lingering fatigue of summer blossoms into the growing itch of spring-fever.  Yes, the solstice was over a month ago, but due to off-farm employment and lack of luscious photo material, I’ve been kind of a lousy blogger.   I promise that when winter ends, I will be more diligent.

Except that, this year, winter hasn’t really come—instead of the feet upon feet of snow we had last year, we’ve had temperatures that are swinging up into the forties and higher almost weekly.  True, in between we’ve been down into (and below) the single digits, but somehow it still is feeling like The Winter That Wasn’t.  I still haven’t used the nice used snowblower we bought, haven’t gone skating on the pond that hasn’t really frozen, and haven’t gone sledding on the hills that aren’t snowy.  I wonder if the groundhogs have noticed, or if they’re still snoozing in their burrows below the frost line, indifferent and oblivious…  But I should watch my tongue—while reading back over these few blog entries of the last year, I couldn’t help laughing at a sentence I wrote back in May, as record spring flooding soaked our flats:  “At least we don’t have hurricanes,” I said.  Ha!

Anyway, here we are, surviving, thriving, and getting excited about the coming season.  We’ve been attending conferences, trying to catch up on the social connections we neglected all summer, and generally getting our bearings.  We’re nearly done with our seed order for this season, which for us seems to be the number one trigger for spring fever.  It’s exciting, yes, but also kind of terrifying—we’re upping our production by a pretty optimistic margin, yet we’re still financially committed to not taking a draw out of the farm profits to support ourselves.  This means we need to somehow work off-farm enough to pay the mortgage, health and car insurances, food, and miscellaneous expenses of normal life, AND increase production acreage and marketing.  It seems insane, honestly, given how perilously close to total calamity we pushed ourselves last year, but it also seems like the only viable path if we’re to expand the farm enough to support ourselves, and hopefully a family, before we lose whatever lingering sparks of youthfully wreckless determination we still lay claim to.  But with the help and support of the most kick-butt customers in the capital region, and our soon-to-be-faithful CSA, we can all make this work!

On that note, we’re excited to be sending out CSA enrollment forms any day now, even though the Ballston Spa distribution location isn’t quite 100% confirmed.  This is a big step towards realizing the farm we’ve always envisioned having, and while it’s a little bit daunting, I think we both feel that having a CSA base will be one of the most rewarding elements of having this farm.  We always envisioned Quincy Farm as a healthy balance between markets and CSA, and now we’re able to make that a reality!

So, to all of you who have expressed interest in joining the CSA, and to all of you who have supported Cara and me with your encouragement, feedback and grocery money at market all season:  THANK YOU.  A bunch of kale and an encouraging word may seem so trivial, but it’s your steady dedication and support that is helping us breathe life into this viable, sustainable, family farm, and into the common values we all hold.  Thanks for keeping us in mind when your stomach rumbles and demands fresh, delicious food; thanks for coming out to support us at market in the cold rain and the searing heat and icy winter mornings; and thanks to those of you who believe in Quincy Farm and are ready to sign on to the CSA and enjoy a season of staggering deliciousness!  2012, here we come!!!

I don't know if it's premature or tardy to say we've reached the end of Year 1...  it's not REALLY the end of the calendar year, yet...  but we're also a month past the point where we'd planned on being done.  Yesterday was our last "regular season" market, though--a fantastic turnout from our great customers in Glens Falls--and we're still alive, so we're declaring victory!

Even though it wasn't part of the plan, we're also going to be attending winter markets in Ballston Spa (first Saturdays in the CCE building on High St) and Glens Falls (every Saturday from 9-12 at Christ United Church on Bay St).  We don't have the fancy infrastructure some other growers have (yet!) but we're fighting the good fight against Old Man Winter as best we can, with multiple layers of remay on low tunnels, and of course we have delicious sweet potatoes, winter squash, beets, onions, leeks, etc.  We ended up losing an awful lot of our carrots to the funk after the rains in September, which is too bad, as they're super sweet and have proven quite popular.  A lot of other stuff just never recovered from the shock of all that rain and never really matured...  Nonetheless, we're looking forward to the opportunity to continue to be a part of those markets through the winter.

Also--and this is big news--we're excited to be organizing a CSA in Ballston Spa for 2012!  The details ought to be worked out any day now, but shoot us an email if you want to be kept in the loop.

Despite some really close calls, we ended up missing frosts here on the farm until the Snowpocalypse came in late October.  Actually, it was just a few inches of really wet snow, but it made a mess of things as it built up on the trees and wires.  Prior to that, we were still harvesting delicious eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers right up to Halowe'en.  After the frost, we were blessed with a pretty serious Indian Summer in early November, letting a beautiful crop of fall broccoli size up under row cover.  We're still harvesting spinach, swiss chard, radishes and broccoli...  So we're lucky, and grateful.

Theoretically things should have slowed down for Cara and me by now, but somehow they haven't.  Whatever slack the waning growing season offered has been snapped up by the pressure to milk the off-farm income streams for whatever they're worth.  We'd love to squirrel away enough money over the winter to allow one of us to not work off the farm next year.  It gets kind of taxing to be doing a 3 1/2 hour drive down to NYC to earn that cash, though.  Our fantastic friends in the city have been offering me a place to sleep when I'm down for multiple days, which has made it possible for me to work 3 or 4 days a week down there...  which is great...  but tears me away from the life (and the wife, dog, and home) that this is all about.  As fall slips into winter and I feel so little relief from the insanity that was this season, I'm sometimes afraid that I won't find time to recharge before next season hits...  but I'm sure it will happen.  When we planned this endeavor we knew it was going to tax us for all we were worth to make it through these first few seasons...  and Mother Nature didn't make it easy on us (or anyone else!) this season.  Having said all that, despite the inherent challenges of Year 1 and the unique ones of 2011, we not just met our financial goals, we exceeded them.  Yes, it's more a credit to our incredible conservatism (pessimism?) writing the business plan than a reflection of our prowess as farmer businessmen, but it's not too shabby for a start-up business.  And it gives on hope about the feasibility of the rest of the plan.

Even though this year's not done and we haven't even begun to do all of our winter maintenance, next year is already here: we're crunching numbers and searching for the things that will improve the weak links here at Quincy Farm.  We have lots of ideas of how to improve our efficiency, from little inventions to expensive implements.  We also need to update our irrigation scheme and figure out what we need and what we can afford if we're going to expand our acreage next season.  And, of course, we need to make a crop plan, figure out how much seed we need and when and where, and make that happen...  and figure out what additional inputs we need, and from where...  and maybe expand the greenhouse...  and get proper running water to the hydrant in the barn...  and about a zillion other little infrastructure crises...  and Cara said something about unpacking?

Looking back on Year 1, I really don't know how we pulled it off...  and I honestly don't think I have the fortitude to push myself *quite* that hard even one more season...  but there are fleeting moments, here and there, when we pause and take notice of each other and our life, and it seems like maybe, just maybe, this was a good idea.  Maybe.

A few weeks ago, the National Young Farmer Coalition asked if we would be interested in flying to Washington DC to lobby for a Regional and Local Food Act.  We were elbow deep in our Friday harvest and washing and without giving it much thought, I answered, “Well, why not?”  In the days that followed, I came to understand that this was a fly-in with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (Lindsey had mentioned this on the phone, but I don’t always absorb things well when I’m multi-tasking), I had lots of answers to why not as started to doubt whether I should try to represent sustainable agriculture or farmers from my region.  Like many beginning farmers, we are very small this year and our household income is generated off the farm while we try to use our farm income to capitalize.  Farms in my county are large, mostly dairy and run by farmers from farming backgrounds.  However, as I started to research my representatives’ districts, I became a bit more comfortable with my understanding of how the Local Food, Farms and Jobs Act would benefit all kinds of farms.

The Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act was introduced by Representative Chellie Pingree and Senator Sherrod Brown this month.  This act is suggestions for legislation that would tweak parts of the Farm Bill to address the needs of those of us who market our farm products within 250 miles of our farms. 

On November 3rd, I rode Amtrak to DC and met the staff from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.  NSAC had gathered an impressive group of farmers and advocates from around the country to speak to their representatives.  With Steve Etka from the National Organic Coalition, Aisha Amuda and Kathy Mulvey from the Community Food Security Coalition, Daniel Bowman Simon from SNAP Gardens and Josephine Chu Master of Arts Candidate in Global Environmental Policy at American University, I met with two New York State Congressmen. 

Chris Gibson is the Congressman from my district; in fact, he’s from Kinderhook where we lived for two years.  He is also a new member of the Agriculture Committee, which meant that he was a high priority for this fly-in.  He was quite receptive, chatting with us about his support for farms in his district, his concerns about GMOs and his focus on solar power.  Rep. Gibson is politically conservative, but he listened to our concerns and seemed interested how the Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act could benefit his constituents.  This was a surprising moment for me—it felt as if by making our voices hear we actually might be able to change the direction of government. 

Our second meeting was with Rep. Bill Owens who is on the Agriculture Committee as well.  None of us were from Owen’s district, which includes lots of the Adirondacks and northern New York.  I’d say that the meeting felt a bit chilly, but I would add that I was impressed that both of these Congressmen met with us themselves.  Yes, staffers were present, too, but they both took time out of their days to meet with us face-to-face.  Owens signed onto the bill in the days following this meeting.  Perhaps he was expecting to co-sponsor prior to our meeting or maybe we had an impact!

I took the train back to Albany that day and was back at my house just 34 hours after leaving.  We’re pretty busy around here and I don’t spend much time thinking or reading about the Farm Bill.  I have always found the minutiae of the Farm Bill’s 1500 or so pages overwhelming.  However, in learning a bit about this act, I felt that almost all of the changes mentioned addressed parts of the Farm Bill that apply directly to our farm or farmers we know.  I was happy to have overcome my doubts about speaking to the politicians who represent me and I  hope to see more support for this Act in the following weeks, especially as the Farm Bill process is more confusing than ever with this year’s Super Committee process.

It's getting to be a bit of a monotonous refrain, but things have been busy here at Quincy Farm.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, our total rainfall for the months of June, July, August, and September combined is usually 14.2".   This year, our rain gauge here at the farm recorded more than that in just 30 days thanks to Irene, Lee, and the interminable rains that followed.  To say it has been wet is putting it very gently.

Fortunately, we finally caught a break in the form of a several days of dry, sunny weather this week.  A number of opportunities came and went for fall crops in all that rain, when it was too wet to prep beds or seed,but at least we've got a quick window now to put some last minute cover crops down before fall.  We also finally got to our sweet potatoes, which have been growing in the sandy upper fields and seem great despite the wet summer.  With a little luck we'll finish that harvest tomorrow morning and have a great crop curing in the greenhouse by evening! 

We're also counting our blessings on having narrowly missed another frost this past Wednesday--friends of ours just slightly north were a little less lucky, but all we experienced was some tip burn on the sweet potatoes' leaves and unhappy basil--neither of which matter too much.  It's a real blessing to still be harvesting tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants this late, and while it doesn't undo the season's setbacks, it sure helps.  On the other hand, rather than mellowing out, our harvest days have gotten even more hectic, as we've now got our fall crops stacked on top of the summer ones!  It's too dark to see much before 7 or after 6:30, which means we really have to hustle in between...  It's an alright problem to have, though.

In the midst of all this frantic cover-cropping and harvesting of warm weather crops, we're also walking a fine line on the cool weather vegetables growing in the flats--a portion of our fall carrots, which we usually don't harvest until after a good frost, are starting to rot in the ground from all the waterlogging.  The impact of constantly saturated soil on the plants has been far worse than the initial flooding.  Roots need oxygen, and when the soil is saturated with water, whether from actual flooding or just never-ending rain, they can't get it.  Plants get sick and things are unhappy.  We want the carrots to size up and sweeten, but we also want to provide high quality product to our customers...  and we want to not have this additional labor burden just yet!  So we're taking a gamble, harvesting the border areas immediately and hoping the beds on slightly higher ground will hold tight.  Other things, like cabbage, broccoli, and brussels sprouts, are a mixed bag--some plants are doing nicely, while further down the bed things seem very sad.  Even an inch or two of elevation makes a difference when things are that wet for that long.

To keep it interesting, Cara and I finally got married this past month!  Yes, after 8 years, 2 houses, 2 apartments, 3 cities/towns, a tank of fish and now a dog, we finally tied the knot here on our farm on September 24th!  It seemed like we'd have plenty of extra time our first season farming, so why not throw our own wedding?!  We'll try to put up some photos of that once there's a moment to breathe...  it's not exactly farm business, but we value the personal connection we have with all you who loyally come to us each market, and this is a big deal for us!

I sometimes feel a bit like the itsy-bitsy spider from the kids' rhyme--you know, the one who gets flushed out of the water pipe by the rain, only to go crawling back up again?  Sometimes literally, like earlier this spring or last week with Irene, and sometimes a bit more metaphorically.  It sure would be nice to just get to the top of the darn pipe and relax in the sun a moment.

The floodwaters finally crested here late Monday, somewhere around 5 or 6 feet above flood stage...  which means the river rose around 10 feet from it's pre-Irene level.  That's a lot of water for a river that big.  We lost a good portion of a number of things, but only a few plantings entirely.  A lot of recently seeded crops--lettuces, arugula, etc--have been drowned or washed away, but at least we didn't have greenhouse and transplanting costs invested in them.  By Tuesday morning I was able to walk out to the fields in regular knee-high boots as long as I was gentle, and on Wednesday we could get out with vehicles.  It took most of the week for the worst of the ponding to soak out, during which time the clover mix in those spots surely died...  unfortunate since those low compacted spots are where we most need the clovers' aggressive root system to open up that compaction.  We made it to market with a reasonable harvest this weekend, as the affected crops were not yet ready for harvest.  We'll see how the fall plays out.

As things settled down, we began to learn more of the damage on other farms.  Many growers in the Schoharie Valley are all but wiped out, as the waters overflowed dams and inundated the valley.  Nearer to home, neighbors Brian and Justine Denison in Schaghticoke had a rushing torrent destroy their field, taking not only much of their crops but a good portion of the soil, too.  Over in Vermont, the folks at Evening Song Farm saw the flood recede to leave a river rerouted directly through their fields, with rocks and debris where the beds of veggies had been.  Aside from such sensational examples, it can be pretty much assumed that anyone farming the fertile bottomlands pretty much lost all or a portion of their crop last weekend. 

We're not going anywhere, but it certainly make you reconsider the sanity of growing on river bottoms.  Yes, it's some of the most fertile ground in the northeast, but with so much at stake, maybe it DOES make more sense to just pump water and dump fertility onto higher ground and sandier soils.  Hard not to wonder.

In other news, we finally fixed our flail mower, whose roller bearings had blown.  The parts people sent us the wrong part, then took a while to get the right one out.  I got it buttoned back up, did about an hour of MUCH needed mowing, and then the 2750 blew a steel fuel injection line, drizzling diesel everywhere and thwarting me.  Out came the rain and washed the spider out.  Now the first tentacles of tropical storm Lee are snaking up, giving us 1.4" last night and forecasted heavy rain for the next several days.  Like the little spider, we're optimistic:  The worst of last night's rains looks to have pushed up the St. Lawrence to the north of us.  Hopefully the bulk of the storm does like-wise. 

In the meantime, we're grateful to have so much of our crops spared by Irene.  We did a tomato tasting in Glens Falls last weekend with TWELVE kinds of tomatoes, to rave reviews.  Eggplants and peppers are producing like mad; the tomatoes are remarkably healthy, all things considered; we've got arugula and mesclun and lots of other crops coming out our ears.  What's left of fall cabbages and kales look good, and the broccoli and cauliflower that didn't get Irene'd are bigger every time I glance over.  The flats didn't need that rain last night, but our oats-and-peas and rye-and-vetch up top loved it, as their roots hadn't yet found moisture below the sandy upper fields.  Rain isn't a great follow up to flooding, but things are on the upswing here at Quincy Farm.

Yesterday afternoon, as the storm was winding down into a dismal grey funk from the howling deluge we'd had earlier, the phone rang.  It was a farming friend from Columbia County calling to check in and see how we were doing with the rain and flooding.  It's not like any of us can do anything to help each other when Mother Nature gets cross, but there's some solace in sharing.  The creek at his place hadn't quite come out of its banks, but he shared the bad news that several of our other farming friends were sitting under a foot or more of flood water.  Getting ponded with rain is bad, but when a creek or river floods a vegetable field, it renders most crops unsaleable, and brings huge disease pressure to the ones remaining. Depending on the crop, those farmers might have gotten some or even all of the harvest to market by now...  but for others, they're right at the sour point where all the season's resources had gone into something that was nearly marketable, and now those expenses are just soaking in river mud, waiting to drain away.

At the time of this conversation yesterdat, I had just come back from a walk through our fields.  Yes, there was horrible ponding all over the place...  but with a full six inches of rain in less than 24 hours, that's normal.  The river, though, was scary high, and definitely above flood stage.  The only question was, would it go up or down, and by how much?  As it got dark we had a friend over for dinner, enjoyed some warm company, and tried not to worry.

This morning the sun broke clean and clear, with none of the fog and mist we so often get here at Quincy Farm.  And the river was UP. 

We went down to check it out and had to strip out of our pants and wade across to the higher ground.  As of this morning, NOAA was calling for a peak at 96 feet, which is a full six feet of flood water... counted after the river had risen a good 5 or 6 feet to reach flood stage from its normal mid-summer level. 

Things are not good...  but they're not horrible.  As I type this, the river is right at the balancing point where it could screw us or go back down.  It's way, way, way out of the ditches, but has just barely come up out of its banks directly onto the field.  It's swamped some of our carrots and a little of the brussels sprouts, but that's all.  To be sure, the rest of the carrots are very unhappy with their saturated muck beds, but if the river goes back down they ought to hopefully be alright and not rot.  Aside from the flood, though, the 65+ mph rain has destroyed most of the lettuce on the farm--it all looks like someone shot it with a pressure washer...  so even though those beds aren't underwater, the product is likely not salvageable.  Pretty much everything that isn't trellised has blown over, but most of it should perk up with some sun, and we're prepared to go trellis the lodged eggplants and peppers as soon as we can get a vehicle out there with supplies.

The 8 acres of mixed clover we have down as a cover crop isn't going to be happy with all the ponding...  but that's why we sowed the mix:  yellow clover is a stronger cover, sending down deep aggressive tap-roots to open up subsoil, but isn't too tolerant of flooding.  Red clover is less aggressive, but much more tolerant of flooding.  So hopefully we'll hold onto some decent amount of something there.

All there is to do now is wait, fingers crossed, and hope that the river goes down, and soon.  With a forecast of sunny weather all week, if the water table drops a bit then the crops that aren't actually submerged should be salvageable and we can move forward with the season.  Rough as it is, we're keeping our heads up and being grateful that things weren't worse.

But jeez--what a first year.

Edit:  At 1:30pm Tucker and I went back down to reinvestigate.  NOAA says the river has crested, but they must be asleep at the switch or something, because it's obviously still rising.  The Hudson has topped its bank into the field pretty badly, swamping at least part of a lot of crops.  At this point, every inch is critical.  While I was down there, I also saw a ~30 foot piece of floating dock drift by, with the patio furniture still set up on it!  Maybe a boatload of money will wash up in our fennel?  A man can hope.

...and some days, the bear eats you.

It's August.  It's racing season in Saratoga and Cara's working 4 shifts a week, trying to stockpile funds.  I'm still taking days in the city as an electrician (had a doozy of an 18 hour day the other week, before counting the commute!).  And of course, we're trying to run this farm.  And we're supposed to get married here in a handful of weeks.  And did I mention it's August?

Despite the fact that we're hanging on by the very last shreds of super deep reserve energy we didn't even know we had, Cara and I both feel like we're over the hump and control is in sight.  The days are shorter and shorter, which means fewer workable hours but also fewer weed-growing hours.  We're running out of energy, but so are other things.  We can talk optimistically about getting caught up (even if we're still doing triage on the to-do list).  I finally found us an affordable chisel plow, which I've been searching for since January.  The tomatoes and pepper and eggplants are finally coming in, and we're getting nothing but great feedback at our markets, and we're meeting our targets for the business.

Every time we feel like we're getting our balance, though, something pops up:  First, we had a surprise visit from a particularly nasty bug that is threatening to destroy our otherwise thriving winter squash.  Even conventional guys have few defenses to this one, and we're hard-pressed to save things.  Then our hard-drive fried itself (which I hadn't backed up in months, because I didn't want to leave the backup drive connected to protect it from surges and lightning).  Amazingly we were able to salvage enough information off it to keep moving, though a lot of our applications are wacked out now.  The guy at the "genius" bar showed me how to make our computer run entirely off an external hard-drive, so it's a nearly seamless fix and hugely cheaper than a new computer. 

The clincher, though, came this afternoon--I'd been in the van all day on a mix of highway and back roads, hauling a borrowed trailer to pick up this new chisel plow and a load of fall cover crop seeds.  At the end of this long high speed day, mostly on I-90 and in heavy traffic with the commuters, as I was backing into position here on the farm to unload the plow...  I stepped on the brake, heard a loud PSSSST!, and lost the brakes entirely.  A quick inspection showed brake fluid pouring from two different ruptures, one in the front circuit and and another in the rear.  I haven't yet figured out how or why it blew two spots at once...  and am terrified of a more complex problem that over-pressurized the system, making it a more difficult and expensive fix... 

While it's hard to be happy about a massive brake failure on the only market vehicle on a vegetable farm in August, I'm keeping in mind how absolutely more horrible it would have been to suddenly lose all brakes at 65mph on the highway with a loaded trailer. 

Now, having been up since 4, I'm headed back out to the shop to soak everything in PB Blaster before turning in for the night.  Tomorrow I'll wrestle with Chucho's rusty brakes instead of doing my obligatory half-day-a-week of wedding planning, then we'll either rent a van for this week's markets or run to the DMV and plate/title/register the 82 F250 we have sitting out by the barn...  and then I somehow need to return this trailer that was so kindly lent to me.

While this brake thing has very definitely trashed any hope we had of getting on top of things, at the end of the day, I think that we ate the bear on this one...  but it was a tough, nasty, over-cooked bear.  I would've much preferred a BLT.

I keep meaning to update this blog with at least a picture, and keep not doing it.  Today I got rained out of the field and figured I might as well poke my head into the “blogosphere” for a moment before I put on dry clothes and rain gear and get back out there.

Life has been insanely busy, as anyone who knows anything about farming would imagine.  There was a point in mid-June when it occurred to me that eventually the days would start getting shorter, and we’d *have* to work a little less.  I don’t know why I thought that, since we were working much longer than daylight hours back in March, but I did.  Now, though, I feel like the shrinking days are a noose around my neck—a few weeks ago, it was totally light at 5am.  Now the horizon’s just lightening…  and while before I could work in the field til 9:30 or even 10, now it’s too dark to do much after 8:30.  Yes, it’s forcing us to work a little less, but at the cost of getting less done.  Kind of a lame trade-off…  and the couple weeks of scorching weather we got in exchange wiped out any relief there may have been.

 

In the spring, when it was constantly cold and rainy, I wondered what in the world we’d been thinking to spend a squillion dollars on the Frankenstein patchwork irrigation scheme we have.  We put together something in between hard-set and a traveling gun-- we have a massive run of 3” layflat with camlock joints every 100’.  We have a single tripod with a gun on it, and we run it an hour at the end of the line, stop, move it down to the next joint, hook it up, run it an hour, stop, etc.  I was supposed to build a pallet-mounted reel to hold the hose so we could move the system from one field to another efficiently, but it never happened.  It’s a nuisance compared to a spendy traveling gun, but it’s saved our butts, and it lets us get away with a tiny little pump.

Learning new ground is not just learning new soil, but also flora and fauna.  We’ve been greeted by the usual cast of vegetable weeds (purslane, chickweed, pigweed, lambs’ quarter, weirdly small and sporadic bursts of galinzoga, velvet leaf, bind weed, wild mustards and radish, etc).  Bind weed, which we have some experience with, is rampant here.  It regenerates when its roots are cut by cultivation, and it climbs neighboring plants, making it hard to pull.  It's in close competetion for Public Enemy #1.  We also have some new weeds, the chief of which is dog fennel: 

This guy looks like the Christmas tree from a Charlie Brown special, and grows up and down with uncomfortable speed.  The Christmas tree part outcompetes crops, and when it’s small cuts easily along with salad mix, where it is thin and hard to see and fish out.  The tap root makes it a pain to pull out of the beds and impossible to effectively hoe.  I hate you, Dog Fennel.

We also have a crazy menagerie of wildlife.  The pond is packed with frogs (as are both the upper and lower fields—don’t they need to be near water?  What the heck?) and we have more different songbirds that you can shake a stick at, perhaps because of the river.  It’s nice right now, but when we one day grow sweet corn I expect to loathe them.  We also have the usual boring mammals.  The cold-blooded guys are the stars, though—one day there were several huge snapping turtles sunning themselves on our black mulch…  or so I thought, until Cara saw one of them lay an egg!  We left that bed be for a while, so hopefully Turtle Jr. got off to a safe start.  When we went to turn on the irrigation, though, we saw the hell Momma had wrought:

Another cold-blooded guy we met was a squiggly little fellow the dog turned up.  He didn’t seem interested in playing with Tucker, maybe for the best.  I didn’t know we had these up here!

Otherwise things are great here at Quincy Farm.  We’re feeling the effects of the fields’ not being limed last fall (there was standing corn into late fall, and standing water into early summer) which is having textbook effects on some crops, especially cucurbits.  While it’s a bummer to see the plants struggling, we’re still managing to get enough harvest out for market…  we just don’t expect each planting to produce as long as we’d want.  Other crops are thriving despite the low pH and calcium issues, though, and we keep getting great feedback at market.  We're burning the wick at both ends, and in the middle for good measure, but it's almost August, which means it's almost Sepetmber, too.  Weeds are growing more slowly, but they're setting seed, so it's still a war out there.

In the flats, we have a mix of sunn hemp and sudex growing as soil-building summer covers in what will be our mid-season ground next year.  The dry weather gave us a window to use a neighbor's subsoiler ahead of a broad swath of red and yellow clover, which will go in shortly.

The upper fields have buckwheat that’s about to plow down in preparation for oats and peas for the fall.  The last of the upper ground that isn’t yet plowed has just been limed and will be broken in anticipation of sweet clover shortly.  I keep saying this, but I really mean it—if we can just get on top of the weeds right now, I think we can hang on through the end of the summer. Honestly, though, for a first-year I think we’re doing alright.

A couple weeks ago a woman from the Young Farmers' Coalition asked me a for a photo of Cara and me farming together.  Photos of us together are pretty rare, and finding one of us farming together is even rarer.  Somehow, in the insanity that is summer on a vegetable farm, there's just not many pictures taken.

While searching, though, I found just such a photo from our first year at Roxbury--it was early fall and I'd decided to carry a camera for a couple days.  I don't recall what I'd been up to here at Quincy Farm the day that I was looking back at that photo, but I was beat and demoralized...  it just kind of happens sometimes when you work as hard and long as you can every single day, and never quite reach your expectations.  Anyway, in this photo from four seasons ago, everyone looks like they're having so much fun!  I thought, man, working for someone else (provided it's the right someone else of course) is such a good time, everybody's laughing and enjoying themselves.  Starting out on your own is just masochistic. 

One of the many challenges of this year has been finding ways to do what we want to do when we're lacking the "right" tools for the job--how to stale seedbed efficiently, how to set up a good wash station without a fixed water supply in the barn, how to run irrigation up a hill without a high-powered pump.  One of these struggles has been how to form nice, clean raised beds to seed and transplant onto.  With soil like ours, raised beds can really be the difference between a good crop and a mess--they allow heavy rainfall to gather somewhere other than right around the plants' roots.  The soil right around the plants stays moist but rarely saturated, so even heavier ground performs nicely.  But we don't have a bed former.  So instead we've been trying to misuse other tools into forming beds for us. 

Today, at last, I think we've hit upon success:  We misadjusted the disc and then carried it through the field very crooked so it formed long lumps of beds ("rough forming" them).  Then we took our plastic mulch layer, removed a bunch of stuff, and used some purchased brackets and scraps of wood to mount the shovels backwards out where they're not meant to be.  We'd used a similar combo earlier to force our flat-bed mulch layer to lay raised beds of plastic, but it wasn't quite working for forming dirt beds.  Today we got the tweaks just right and it worked!   With this rig and very careful use of the tractor's draft control (usually used for plowing) we were able to form pretty decent beds!  It's nice when things work out like that...