Wildlife in My Row

I used to think that this happened to me more than to other people -- the wildlife that shows up in my row -- but now I have come to the conclusion that maybe I am just more often in a place where wildlife might be surprised to see me.  Ever since I was a teenager I have felt unusually blessed by suddenly finding a skunk or a snapping turtle or a sleeping deer in my path.

Just yesterday I was zipping around the farm, picking my list, all by myself.  I was in the home stretch, with just parsley and scallions left, the very easiest stuff. I was barely paying attention as I approached the parsley bed from the downhill side when I heard/felt a sudden WHUMP.  I thought it was a big frog or toad (they are always hiding under chard leaves or peeking out of the beans) but it was an agitated snake. I think it had actually jumped backwards out of my way, landing on the black plastic, making that sound. I asked it why it wasn't just moving on.  It was kind of balled up, staring at me, flicking its long red tongue over and over.  It definitely had an attitude.  I decided not to pick the parsley that was within reach of the snake but I picked systematically down the bed, keeping my eye on it.  Unlike most snakes, it held its ground, raising its head to keep watching me and flicking its tongue. Snakes don't protect their eggs or their young, so this snake just was in a mood. Then I remembered I had a phone with a camera so I tried to take pictures, but it was very hard to see the snake in the shadows. It was about three feet long, with a hefty girth, a small head (not triangular and deadly) and a pattern of grey and yellow. Not really a black snake, which is what I usually see. 

That evening we were at dinner at Paul and Cookie's and I told them about this snake. Paul immediately called our friend Nina, an actual herpetologist, and we forwarded one of my not-great photos to her phone. She said it was just a really big garter snake, nothing dangerous. Unusually large and feisty, but not a hazard.

I am not big on snakes, but they don't make me scream.  Lani and Mom pick them up and handle them. Not me.  Their smooth, slippery skin gives me the willies.  One year there were black snakes tightly tangled up in the bird netting that we took out of the shed to put over the blueberries.  My mother and I spent hours cutting the plastic that was wrapped tightly around the snakes (which were large).  She held the head so it wouldn't bite and I breathed through my mouth because they were so stinky, and I gently cut the netting that was cutting into the skin.  We rescued two snakes and one was dead.

Sometimes the story doesn't end so well.  I once hit a baby deer who are sitting very still in the tall grass, doing what its mom said (WAIT HERE). But I was driving a sickle bar mower and didn't see the deer until the mower had already sliced its legs.  I was so sad and so sorry. It was going to die but it was too big for me to kill it myself. I picked it up and carried it to the edge of the field and set it down, knowing that it wasn't going to survive that.

But most of the time the interactions are benign and glancing.  So often after a heavy rain, I am on my knees, moving down the field and earthworms are just LEAPING out of the ground ("Hey! Watch out, you big lummox.  You are smashing us down here!"). No one else seems to notice this phenomenon, but it happens all the time.

You wouldn't really think there would be this much wildlife in such a developed area.  The deer are all around -- I can feel their eyes on me when I am near the edge of a shady patch of trees. Jon thinks I am making it up, but I know they are there. 

It is possible that most people have just as much wildlife in their rows, but they don't notice it. I am acutely aware of the fauna that has left tracks in the night. From two hundred yards away, I know the profile of a groundhog doing its periscope-like check, as it sits up to see what's nearby, while it methodically munches down the row of beans.

It would be a barren world without all these critters, eating in the dusk, scampering all over the black plastic in the night, pooping on the bales (why do foxes like to poop on bales so much?), gnawing on the beets that are still in the ground.  We do pretty well co-existing. And when the raccoons and woodchucks get out of hand, Jon traps them in the Havahart trap and takes them for a ride. 

My favorite are the tree frogs that sing and holler in the dark when I am down at the stand, finishing up.  They make me smile every time.  So much noise from such a teeny weeny little frog, clinging to a post.  "All God's critters got a place in the choir, some sing low, some sing higher, some sing out loud on the telephone wire. Others clap their hands or paws or anything they got."

Juggling

I realize that all I ever write or think about is the farm now, and I do apologize to any readers who are not particularly curious about the ins and outs of this life.  But I can't really dream up any other topics right now, and I am not going anywhere interesting or doing anything different, so...

We are just about to add one more ball into the mix.  The first ball was just the one that goes up and down, up and down, in one hand. That was getting the season started.  Then we added the second ball: going to a couple of markets on the weekends.  Two weeks later we added the third ball, increasing the number of markets to five on a weekend.  While these balls were circling through our hands, we would continue to bend over and plant vegetables in between catching the balls and passing them along.  We increased the number of hands so we could increase the number of balls.

So we are up to three balls, pretty much the same size and shape, staying in the air.  Then we added a basketball: the CSA.  Four days a week here, twice a week out in Loudoun.  We shifted our feet so we could keep our balance.

Next week is the second to last ball, and it is a beach ball.  We open both stands, six days a week. It's a beach ball because it is not as challenging as the CSA but it takes attention and you have to notice when it is blowing away because you took your eyes off the ball.

The very last ball, the one that I dread the most, really, is the tomatoes. They are a bowling ball.  Soon we will have three nice easy balls of the same weight, a basketball, a beach ball and a bowling ball.  It takes a lot of hands and eyes and attention to keep all those balls moving between us. Every time I look at all the tomato plants -- which are uncommonly beautiful right now -- I cringe.  We are waiting for the blight that has been coming earlier each year. No sign yet, but it will inevitably arrive. And all those gorgeous plants will begin to die.  If we are lucky, we will get a few harvests off of each plant before they are just too diseased to pick any more.

And we will keep on juggling until the tomatoes implode, and we can drop that big heavy lump and feel the simplicity of one less ball in the air.

But when they are all moving in synchrony, it is so satisfying. On many a Saturday morning when all the market trucks have rolled out and I head out to pick for the next round, out in the wide open spaces, I feel so pleased and gratified that all the hands are catching and throwing those balls, barely noticing the difficulty of the task.  Everyone takes it for granted.  I doubt that most people who are doing the work have the time and perspective to enjoy the choreography.  It is one of my favorite parts -- imagining how it will all go, and then watching it all unfold.

And then, gradually, we will let each ball drop.  By December we will have just one tennis ball in one hand, and in January we will drop that one too.

It's Not All Peaches and Cream

First of all, this is the definition of delicious:  after dinner outside on the porch with Jon (for the first time this year, just because we forget that we have a porch) I took four steps over to the hammock and collapsed into an evening nap.  After some undetermined amount of time (when he washed all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen), Jon woke me up to say he was going dancing with Anna. And then I had the energy to roll out of the hammock and take a shower and sit down to write.  The true definition of delicious is having the time and energy to write.  If I had the bandwidth of my kids, I could also listen to one of my favorite radio shows right now, The Moth, but I can't do those two things at once.

What is most on my mind right now is that a worker quit today. He quit because I yelled at him. I yelled at him because I was impatient with his pace, which was snail-like. But what I failed to understand, and now I see a little bit more clearly, was that he was already struggling with being employed here. He had arrived on the scene last year, dropping by a market and introducing himself, and he came to volunteer about once a week. His connection to farming was that he had worked on a small farm for quite some time, a farm that used no tractors, only human power.  So it was a very intensive operation, with permaculture, and a completely different mission from ours, evidently. He said he wanted to work on a farm that used tractors to learn more about a different scale.

I am patient with volunteers, of course, and I actually had  little to do with him last year. It didn't matter if he wasn't getting much done.  But this year he asked if he could be a paid worker.  Against my better judgment, I said yes.  I asked Carrie if that was okay, and she agreed.  Most of the time I am not on the home farm anyway, so it didn't make a difference to me.

One day a week, I am home.  So by chance I was working with this young man and one other young man  I know pretty well and with whom I have a good relationship.  We were going to load bales out of a barn onto a trailer and take them to the field. It was a fifteen minute job, tops.  Within seconds, I was impatient.  I was standing on the trailer, poised to stack the bales, waiting for them to be thrown to me.  I waited. I waited. I asked if something was wrong. I tried to peer into the dark barn.  One bale arrived. I waited some more.  And so it went.  I asked again what was going on. No answers.

It went downhill from there.  After about five minutes of this pace, I told them we would switch places. I would go into the barn and throw the bales and they could stack the wagon (which is the skilled job). I threw bales to them, they couldn't keep up. I said this was unacceptable, that a 55 year old woman was doing all the work while they were standing around.

It continued to go downhill as each task we attempted together was an opportunity for me to see how inept this young man was. He just had no idea what we were doing, and he was flustered and upset that I was upset.  Eventually I apologized for losing my patience, and I tried to be more of a teacher and less of a tyrant. We were all hot and sweaty, but only two out of three of us understood the job we were trying to do.  He protested that he knew how to mulch, he had thrown bales hundreds of times, he knew what he was doing. This did not help his case a bit, in my eyes. 

I left them in the field to mulch and went back to work with the CSA group. I told Carrie one or two of her workers might quit. She said okay.

Today he wrote Carrie a long note saying that he was not coming back to work because I yelled at him.  He thanked her for her excellent managerial skills and said that working on this farm made him feel like he was compromising his values (essentially) because we make choices that have to do with money, and not sustainability.  Good thing he wrote to Carrie and not to me because it would take me ten minutes to write a strong rebuttal.

But of course I am feeling bad that I lost my patience and scolded him. He is clearly a sensitive soul who was unprepared for any criticism at all, and had no idea that his pace was substandard.  He said as much in his note -- he said Hana thinks I am slow at everything but I keep up with the others.  He has no idea whether he keeps up with the others because he has never worked with anyone who has a pace to match.  Carrie keeps him on the no-need-for-speed team.

The next day I went out to Loudoun and watched a crew of six young women, most of them new to this farm, unload a wagon of hay expertly, mulch it slowly but with determination, and finish ready to go directly to the next task. I appreciated them so much. I appreciated their competence, their ability to learn a new skill quickly, their joy. No one really likes moving bales or mulching, especially when it is so hot (which is always is), but these women uttered not one word of complaint in my presence. I told them that I had lost my patience the day before, and they were shocked.

So, I am not proud of my behavior and we lost a worker who didn't really love it here, and we move on.  I won't be able to have a follow-up conversation because he told Carrie he is never ever coming back, and we should give his last paycheck to a coworker to deliver to him.

I misunderstood his attitude as talking back to me.  He was talking back, but in self-defense, trying to demonstrate that he had a position to defend. His position was that we are too focused on productivity/money and we make choices that are counter to his sensibilities.  I missed that completely. I just saw incompetence and an inability to try to do the work as requested.

What I regret is that he thinks that I am abusive boss, and he said so in his note.  I don't agree with his assessment, of course, but I regret that he feels that way.  Apparently he has experienced this before (no surprise, if he doesn't want to work the way people want him to work) and his response has been to avoid all workplaces where the bosses are abusive. Can't argue with that, I guess.

This brings me to another line of thinking, which is not productive since I won't be able to tell him myself. If you feel that your boss is abusive when s/he expresses her discontent with the quality of your work, then you are unprepared for any job that requires you to follow directions and learn skills as they are expected to be learned. So you had better find a way to be self-employed because I cannot imagine a job situation that was more lenient than this one, until the day you worked with me.

Yep, I am still mad.  But mostly because he got the last word.  I will have to live with that, and live with the fact that I lost my patience. I did not say anything cruel or untrue, I did not generalize, I just said he wasn't working fast enough and I did not have time to wait. But I was really energetic about it since I was still throwing bales, still hauling them into the field while I was expressing my discontent.

Sigh.

Circling the Globe

At the moment, Alissa is in Australia and Benjamin is in Israel and my mother and Michael and Anna and Gordon are in Hawaii and in two days Stephen heads off to Germany.  This is not the first time we have been spread all over the globe, but it is a remarkably wide and even sprinkling.

Alissa just sent a message while standing at a desk with an ancient computer, waiting for a car rental company to get its act together.  She and David are heading into the Kakadu National Forest for a week of touring.

Mom and Michael and Anna and Gordon have been in Hawaii for over a week, doing what we do in Hawaii: eating out, eating in, swimming, hiking, seeing aunts and uncles, eating out, eating in... A long time ago, my mother and I used to laugh a lot at the idea that we should make ourselves some T-shirts for visiting relatives: "Don't Feed Me...I'm Too Fat!"

I talked to Benjamin today. He is in the thick of his end of semester work: his first final exam is this week and he has projects underway.  He feels pressured about the grades since they matter a lot -- he needs to find a professor who will sponsor him, let him work in a lab, and his grades are the only ticket.  He will do what he can.

And in a few days, Stephen will head off to Berlin to be with his girlfriend.  If not for this relationship, he would be here for two more weeks since school doesn't start in Austria until July.  And then he would be able to focus on farming, finally, since his last paper is done for the semester.  But no, he may never be able to focus on farming.  Being a grad student and maintaining a long distance relationship leaves almost no space for paying attention to farm priorities.  It is not what I was imagining, but we are getting by with random bursts of Stephen work.

The miles Jon and I are accumulating each week, just bopping between the two farms, would probably get us to the Canadian border.  Not right now, but it's an entertaining idea.

Siesta Time

I am sitting at a makeshift desk in the airy, multi-purpose barn in western Loudoun County. One of the coolers is packed with the leafy greens that we picked and washed today, destined for Saturday markets, and another cooler has the overflow in it, headed for Vienna.  It is somewhere in the 90s outside, sunny and hazy.  I tried to get all the workers to stop working this afternoon and resume in the evening (optional) when it is cooler, but only one has taken me up on that plan. She is the oldest, and the one who has worked here the longest.  She knows about heat.  Brianne is washing crates at the east end of the barn, soaking wet, so she is cool enough in her bathing suit top and gym shorts.  Further out in the field there are two others setting up irrigation, and I think another dogged soul is weeding carrots.   If I were younger and more ambitious, maybe I would be out there too, but it just doesn't feel that important if we can put it off until a cooler time of day.

This has been a big week for us, the first week of the CSA, the first week of truly coordinating the picking on both farms.  The Tuesday pick list was daunting to me -- we were picking on two different farms for five different destinations:  the two on-farm CSA locations, two Wednesday markets, and the Wednesday CSA. I was not fully confident that we would be able to get it done before everything melted in the sun. But we did.  Carrie guided her crew at home and I led the dance out here. Our movements feel like an active braid to me. We work in teams, we start at the same time,  we keep going out, coming back in with a load, regrouping, heading out again to a different patch, bringing in the crates full of leaves, starting a new job, weaving in and out until we get to the end. It is constant motion, no rushing, just steadily moving.  These are young people, and they are flexible and strong, they don't even notice when they are getting up off the ground after spending an hour on their knees.

My goal is to keep the flow going without actually being a part of that flow.  We are not there yet, but we are making progress.  Sometimes I notice that I don't need to do the work, I need to set up the next job.  If I had gone to business school I would have the vocabulary to describe this management practice -- staying right in the middle of the action but not doing much at all.  Just strategizing. 

Our Thursday potluck lunches have become a milestone in the week.  Today there were 12 of us (11 women and Jon -- my hiring was super lopsided this year) sharing a banquet.  As I have said before, we are dedicated to this ritual. It is entirely new out here, but it is firmly established after just three months. I decided in the middle of last winter that we would build our week around being in Loudoun on Thursdays for lunch, as many of us as we could gather. This meant rearranging the whole CSA calendar, cramming the deliveries into two days instead of three.  It was a big change, just to be able to have lunch.  Our potluck lunches are on Fridays at the Vienna farm.  We started those just about exactly one year ago, and we never miss a week.  Even if we are in the middle of washing mountains of lettuce, we announce that is time for everyone to stop and clear the work table, spread the ceremonial tablecloth, and bring out the prepared dishes.  It feels Amish to me. Or maybe it reminds me of Heinz.  But Heinz would never have grocery store popsicles at his lunch table.

And today we started one more ritual.  We are having a half hour class after lunch every Thursday, taught by Ellen. She teaches at conferences and has clients and loves to talk about farming, so she is a resource not to be wasted. Last week I told her we should have a weekly class and she was willing and ready.  So we pulled up our chairs in the alley between the two coolers and learned about basic soil physics.   It was a sleepy time for a class but she is an energetic, passionate teacher and no one fell off her chair.

Look!  I took a picture of what I see from my chair.  Not very exciting but now I understand that I might be able to do that again.  

This is the view to the west of the barn.  No need to comment on my photographic non-skills, I am just discovering that this machine has the capacity to do this without my knowing anything at all.

And now I have used up my siesta time and it is time to go get the tractor ready to plant winter squash.  Perhaps I will be able to get everyone started and then I will wander off and take a nap...

Journal Entry: Thursday, June 4

We slept at Timothy's even though it has been a rainy and cool week, much more like April than June.  It seems like it has been raining forever -- I can't remember the last sunny day. I think it was Monday. But I am committed to being in Loudoun for any of the days the workers need me.  And in fact, rainy days are the days they might need me the most because it is hard to figure out what to do or how much to keep working on the bad weather days.  When it is nice out, there are fewer decisions to make.

As I have said before, the bed is very high off the ground so it is a project to get in and out.  Because it rained all night and there is a tin roof about two feet over our heads, I was quite aware of the weather.  And since I was more awake than usual, of course I had to pee.  So eventually I had to wrestle my way out of bed, feeling around with my toes as I dangled my leg down toward the irrigation box that now serves as a safe stepping stone.  After I came back inside I had to dry off with a towel.  Anyway, it was hard to think about sleeping after all those shenanigans.  I had no idea what time it was, but I could see shapes in the dark so it was getting to be morning for sure.

So after about fifteen minutes of pondering the consequences of all this rain (I had told the workers to meet at 7:00 and it was too late to change that plan, and besides my phone was up in the barn getting charged so I couldn't send a text if I wanted to), I decided it was time to get up.  This time Jon woke up, and he asked what  time it was.  I said I thought it was about to be daytime.  He turned on a lantern and told me it was not quite 5:00.  Like I said, almost daytime.

When I am home and I wake up early I just come downstairs and get to work on the computer.  There is always something that needs doing. I am behind right this minute on preparing for the CSA which starts the day after tomorrow. Anyway, now there is wifi in the Green Barn so I can do sit-down work even when I am in the middle of that totally chaotic construction zone (Jon and Stephen are still working on the bathroom, now at the tiling phase, and their tools and detritus take up quite a big area. I have carved out a space for the rest of us by putting together a table made of boards and crates, and demanding a shelf for notebooks and rubber bands and computer stuff, but we have to step around a great deal of the work area to get to it.).

No hot yukky, no light except for a trouble lamp, no heat. Not perfect, but I got out the trusty iPad and got to work.  I knew there were other farmers awake out there. Sent a text to Zach asking him to let me know when he could talk.  Within minutes, he called me and we made a plan together. 

It was still misty and drizzling but I drove around to see whether we could still walk in any of the fields.  Most were too soft, but the one I was most interested in had been compacted just enough by tractor tires and I thought we might be able to manage.

At 7:00 it was touch and go, but we went.  It is not ideal in the least to mulch in the rain, but there was no way to know if it would rain more or stop, so I didn't let them know there was even a question.  And eventually it stopped raining and Amelia and I took off our outer layers because we were getting hot.  It is a cheerful group we have this year, and they are gelling into a very functional and friendly unit.  It is actually a joy to watch them.  They work hard and they like to learn and they laugh and they talk.  I feel like a proud mom.

The plan was to mulch until 8:15 and by then our shoes had five pounds of mud caked on and we could not have continued.  It started to rain hard and we headed inside for our meeting.

I am discovering that all those years of classroom management have made me a different sort of manager.  These are not fifth graders by any means, but I want to keep them interested, keep them moving from one thing to the next, allowing for some amount of socializing while I teach.  My classroom was always noisy. Part of the goal was to allow the group to like being a group.  The same is true on the farm, and especially on the Loudoun farm.  In Vienna, the group goes home by early afternoon, to separate lives.  In Loudoun, they live and work together, so it is really important for them to enjoy the whole package.

Anyway, all this rain was a challenge.  After a couple of days, you run out of appropriate tasks.  While I lay in bed contemplating the game plan, I decided to give up by noon.  So I had arranged with Zach that he could have two of our workers (his farm is two hours away, so it is not a small effort to send him help) overnight, and one person spent the day driving to Lancaster County to pick up a new implement, and there was enough work in the barn for three, and one person could head to Vienna.  And then I could go home to my warm house and get some dry clothes on. 

After our meeting where we divided up the tasks and talked about the afternoon plan, we had a fast-paced morning picking: four separate teams with short lists but big numbers.  They filled their golf carts with crates and bent their heads to keep the rain off their faces.  They did such a good job in every way.  After an hour and a half we all convened in the washing area and used all the sinks and the pressure sprayers, and we cleaned lettuce and beets and chard and kale and scallions and put them into sanitized crates (two of them were sanitizing crates outside, working like demons).  The new barn is a dream to work in.  Concrete floor, big spaces, huge cooler, lots of water pressure, a drain that we don't even think about because it is under the sinks, giant doors.  SO GOOD. 

And the morning was over. We always have a potluck lunch on Thursdays and I had asked Ellen if we could please come to her house because we needed a place to feel warm and dry.  She nicely made space for us all. Everyone changed into dry-ish clothes, although few of us had anything clean to wear, and we had hot chili and macaroni and cheese and salad and bread and rice krispie treats.  And as Carrie said, those girls (the workers) talked to each other as if they never get to see each other.

I am feeling very good about the season as it is unfolding.  A little less good about my aching muscles, but that's a different story.