By the Light of the Silvery Moon

(another piece written for the newsletter)

We pride ourselves on working only in the daylight.  Most of the time.  What I mean is, when we hear about other farmer friends who work with headlamps, or who are cleaning grain at midnight when the humidity is the least troublesome, we shake our heads and feel glad that we don’t have that life.

But, of course, sometimes we do.  There were the supremely memorable nights in our childhood when our parents shook us awake to go outside to cover tomato plants a few hours before dawn, just before the dew froze on the leaves.  Not just a few plants, but a whole field, thousands of plants.  In those days there were wax paper “hot caps” to cover individual plants, one at a time.  There was a bell-shaped metal implement that had a handle, and you placed it carefully on the hot cap so that the edges stuck out all around the bottom.  Then the adult would dump a couple of shovelfuls of dirt over the metal bell, the child would lift it up and move on to the next hot cap.  I always remember (not just on occasions like these) thinking that I was the only kid in my whole third grade class who was doing this.

And, nowadays, it is quite dark before 6 AM when we meet to load the market trucks.  So we have to turn on the lights.  That certainly counts as working in the dark.

Some evenings in September, I have to turn on the lights to finish packing the CSA tomatoes.  It just gets too dark to be able to tell a pink tomato from a red one, and I really have to be able to see every bit of the tomato in order to let it go into a CSA bag.

In mid July, when we were trying to avoid the hammering heat of the day, we started transplanting the kale and broccoli and cauliflower in the early evening. Ashley and I sat side by side on the transplanter, placing her precious seedlings into their individual puddles behind the water wheel. Jon was driving the tractor, keeping the rows straight, saying nothing about the growing darkness.  One night we pushed on for as long as we could, and the moon was high when we stopped.  Ashley said, “pretty soon the bats will be out.”  And we were amused at the thought, not appalled.

Just tonight I discovered that the streetlights along Beulah Road can be helpful to a farmer in the suburbs.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t ever have been on a tractor after dark, but I was feeling behind schedule and pressured by the possibility of a rainy weekend.  I had already spread the soil amendments on the field and it is wasteful to let that wash away in the rain.  So I started spading at 7:15, just as the sun was starting to go below the trees over Maymont.   It got dark pretty fast, but there is so much ambient light in the suburbs that I could still see the ground.  And I know that field like the back of my hand, truly.  I kept going.  And then the moon came up, bright, and there were shadows.  I could have kept going but my rational husband came to get me, so I reluctantly got off the tractor – finally understanding what my farmer friends who work in the dark are thinking when they put on their headlamps.

We still haven’t installed all the lights in the new barn in Loudoun because we believe in our hearts that we should not be washing vegetables in the night.  But sometimes on a dark, rainy day we wonder if we should just go ahead and put in a few lamps.  A couple lights over the sinks might be a good idea, especially in November when daylight is so rare.  Anything to avoid headlamps…

Saturday Afternoon in September

It happens that Saturday afternoon, Shabbat, is one of the only possible times of quiet during the week.  Sometimes there are beans to pick or unfinished tasks, but today I find myself with a few uncharted hours, and I am so out of practice that I am squandering my time.  I did just wake myself up with my own snoring, in the hammock.

People have been asking two questions, repeatedly.  Did Carrie have her baby yet?  Not yet.  She is a week past her due date and tired of the question.  Tomorrow they will induce her, which is too bad, but it will move things to the next chapter for sure.  I am so grateful that I never had to face that possibility.  Due dates can be a form of tyranny.  And so much close watching, by sonogram and other techno-means, is another form of tyranny.  You can't just be pregnant and have a baby when it comes.  The medical world has spoken. Carrie will become a patient tomorrow evening, if she doesn't go into labor by herself before that. She has been working, feeling good and strong, taking breaks whenever she wants, and appears to be super healthy.  Just a few days ago she picked 23 ponies of Italian tomatoes because they were there and she could not resist them. She has devised all sorts of ways to lift and carry things without straining her muscles.  But she is 35 years old, and that makes her a mature mom, and that makes the doctors worry about possible bad outcomes if she waits too long.

The other question: how has the season been?  A reasonable question, and hard to answer from the middle of the vortex. But I am getting ready to start reflecting on it, now that the tomatoes are done.  (We know they are done because the vines are empty and the most recently picked fruit does not taste good enough to wish for more.)

There have been more failures than I am used to,  but in a macro sense, it has been a good season. We have kept up all the usual routines -- not missing a beat with the CSA, going to seven markets a week, keeping the stands open and looking good -- and that is all excellent.  I am proud of us for that.

The disappointments have been about comparing this year to last year, as farmers who grow things.  We would get a spotty report card in Loudoun.  In Vienna, things went well except for onions and cilantro. We know how to grow things here, in general. We have internalized the calendar, we know when it is time to take action, and the soil is forgiving. In Loudoun there were so many crops that declined to germinate, repeatedly. But we had some very nice tomatoes, our sweet potatoes are awesome, the kale is looking beautiful, the winter squash had healthy, vigorous plants and the eggplant is a triumph.  Every single crop from that farm is a battle, and I am not used to that.  I am entirely spoiled by the farm that is home:  soil that holds moisture and nutrients, weeds that are managed by simple technology, tractors that make it possible to change crops one bed at a time, fields and gardens that can be maintained by just a few people.  That big farm is weedy and wild and full of bugs that want to eat everything that you just planted. There are far-flung little patches of order sprinkled around -- I feel like we are picking beets out in the open prairie. I have learned to feel more at home there, and some of it I love, but it is just too unwieldy and I am not in control enough to love it with all my heart.

The biggest challenge of all, and it will eventually fade away, has been the consistent comparison between the culture of this year and the culture of last year; this comparison is only made by the few who worked here before. Meaning, the culture of Stacey and Casey compared to the culture of Hana and Ellen. Mostly people are very happy with the changes that make our lives better (I am consciously trying to leave time for other activities at the end of the day, and giving people two days off a week, and encouraging people to make choices about their own work) but they are deeply disturbed by the resulting smaller market loads.  It torments them to disappoint some customers with a smaller display. While we all enjoy the benefits of working less, the resulting lack of diversity at the markets makes them growl and fret. And this is the one thing that torments me.  I understand that we made choices and they have consequences, and I don't feel so bad about the size of our loads.  But I do feel bad about about having unhappy workers because I think that is my primary job: keeper of morale.

Katherine says that, like everyone, I dwell on the negative feedback and I need to remember the good stuff. I am accustomed to having a pretty stellar report card, so I clearly am uncomfortable with grades that need improvement.  Anyone would tell me that this is all part of learning new things. I get it, of course.  And when we started this year, I was truly afraid that we might not actually be able to grow anything in Loudoun because I had never been responsible for much besides picking.  When we picked the first beet, I felt so victorious, and I am not kidding.

Speaking for just myself, I have had a chance to learn so much that it has been an amazing year. It was too much work, with not enough space for anything else (ironic, since I have been dedicated to making sure that the rest of the team had time to go to swimming lessons, visit with people, take trips) and I don't want to have this year again. But I had a chance to experiment with ideas that have not been tried and I got to build a new team from scratch and I learned how to use equipment that I have never used and I have enjoyed almost all of it.  I am tired.  But the good news is, we are done with the hardest part and the workers are all able to manage themselves without me for full days at a time (I think this is a huge triumph) and I slip back and forth between the two farms and it seems completely normal.

There are so many longstanding relationships that made it possible to survive this season. My mother and Michael have been solidly supportive, doing everything that is needed. Jon is still fixing things, enabling everyone to keep working, and thinking ahead to what else needs to happen.  Carrie and Becky have both been absolute rocks, every step of the way.  Ellen has done everything she can to prepare ground, be ready for the next plants, keep things watered, and keep track of her part of the system. And now Benjamin and Stephen are here, in their mildly complicated way (as adult children who have projects and priorities of their own), and it is very nice to have people who can do just about anything.

There, I have reflected.  This is more for me than anyone else, I guess, and once again I am sorry for all the non-farmers who have slogged through this.

On an entirely different note:  this is the anniversary of Hilary Planck's death.  She lived here on the farm with her family, Chip and Susan and Charles and Nina Planck, and she was coming home from ballet class when she was hit by a car.  This has been a defining event for many of us (especially Anna), and we have all learned so much from that loss.  One thing you learn, over a long time, is that you can adjust to loss. Once you get past the grief, you can live very well with loss, and you never forget the person who inhabited your world.  And that is an important lesson, that you don't forget.  It is scary to think about losing people, and part of the fear is that you will lose them, but you never do lose them because they are a part of you forever. Hilary was Anna's best friend, they were 14 years old, and Anna's professional life has grown out of losing Hilary in that traumatic way.

I have to go help close the stand. See what happens when I have uncharted hours? So many words, waiting to get out.

Written for the Newsletter

Some Things Don’t Change Much – Buildings, Roads, Memories

I think of my father several times a day, although he died in 1984, more than half of my lifetime ago. It is easy to revisit the memories, since we still walk and drive and work in the same spaces that he shared with us all those years ago.  We have acquired newer vehicles, but we are still driving the same tractors and tilling the same fields.  Some of the tools in the shop were his – the socket set, the wrenches, the bench grinder, the chain saw.

 I go into the walk-in cooler and remember his rants about how much it costs to open that door every time ($5). I park the John Deere in the Truck Shed, and sit there for a moment, gazing out at the Driveway Patch, just as I have seen him do so many times.  Often when I drive up the steep driveway toward the house we all lived in, I think of his purposefully exaggerated estimate of how many miles you take off the clutch when you stop and start on that hill (500 miles – I have since thought this one through and realized that he was way off base).

Dad was the designer and builder of so many spaces that we inhabit from dawn to after dark – and although most of the people now on this farm never knew him, they are living and working in parts of Tony Newcomb’s  world.  He figured out where the roads would go and he made them with an ancient road grader, he filled in some of the slopes and made flat fields.  We cleared brush, took out stumps, made a vegetable farm where there wasn’t one before.

 He designed and built the roadside stand on Leesburg Pike – a two story building with a steep roof and a sturdy concrete floor, completely different from the flat, temporary structures on the way to the beach.   It pleased him to have storage space upstairs, and to have a permanent building. The stand has had a few small renovations, but it looks almost the same as it did in the early 1970s.

In August, behind the stand we stored hundreds of baskets of tomatoes under the trees, and baskets of squash under other trees.  There was one long, lightly built shed that covered the tomato belt where we sorted tomatoes in the afternoons, singing and laughing and talking.

We had an air conditioned room (the Melon Cooler, which often sparked a laughing rendition of “Melancholy Baby” because he liked that kind of word play) that was just behind the walk-in cooler, with a sunken dirt floor.  When it rained, it flooded, since the stand is at one of the lowest points of the farm  (my father used to say, “the next time I build a stand, remind me not to put it at the bottom of a hill”).

From those early days we worked Behind the Stand.   Behind the Stand was a destination – all the vegetables arrived from the surrounding fields and the distant farms to be sorted and packaged and stored.   There was a lot of loading and unloading from July through October.

It was a major advance when Dad got running water to the stand.  And he was almost more excited when he paved the road that circled past the coolers and beyond.  Before that, the road was mud and gravel, and often rutted and reminiscent of a developing country.  I remember how he demonstrated his joy about the pavement by throwing a bucket of water on the asphalt and exclaiming, “See?!  It gets cleaner, not dirtier!”

About fifteen years after he died, I decided it was time to expand the covered areas Behind the Stand.  This new roof provided enough shade for  eating and hanging out, since we now had a collection of eight little kids (between three sets of parents) and these small people needed food and a place to be near their working parents.

We continued to add more sheds, more coolers, more covered spaces for CSA work. Now we have meetings and potlucks Behind the Stand – it is our outdoor living room, kitchen, office, storage room, the hub of the farm during the season.  We unload bins of corn in the same space that we sort tomatoes and bag lettuce.  We clear the table for Friday lunch, and then clear it again to bunch flowers on Friday afternoons.

CSA customers walk through this rustic, cluttered space to get to their special air conditioned room.  They wave to us, they stop to chat.  It is probably the most unusual area of its kind in all of Fairfax County – unpolished, unpretentious, purely functional, with no purchased furnishings.  We are just a few feet from our closest neighbors beyond the fence whose large houses loom over our outdoor headquarters, but we never notice those mansions. They are outside of our field of vision, tucked behind the gigantic crape myrtle trees and the bamboo that provides a bushy buffer.

Nothing stays the same on this farm, or anywhere, but Tony Newcomb is still with us, in the buildings, on the roads, with every reused tin roof, and whenever it floods at the stand.

Labor Day Weekend

In the olden days, Labor Day weekend was a big deal. We geared up for it, we figured out how to pick and sell as much as we could. Not any more. It is just a weekend that goes for three days and we have fewer workers than usual, as people are back at school and other people just want their regular days off (Sunday and Monday).  The days of peaks and lows are gone, we just keep on plugging.

So -- I am supposed to be at the CSA room setting up by myself, but I am waiting for my hot water to boil.  We loaded up a full truck for Takoma Park and Benjamin and Jon rolled away an hour ago. My mother and one other person will meet them there. It is too big a load for those four, but they will do their best.

The stand will be staffed today by Michael Lipsky and an elderly-ish lady who comes to work because it is too boring at home.

We are totally running on the most thready of fumes today, and we will get it done and it will be fine, but not optimal for sure. At least the people who are working are the most senior crew we have, and we know how to make the most of our minutes. Out in Loudoun it is Ellen and one other person, but they have no personal awareness of the Labor Day pace in here -- they are getting the carrots cultivated (I hope) and getting more ground ready for seeds.

My water is boiled and I can make my hot yucky and head down the hill for my first totally solo CSA set-up of 2015.  Will use every trick in my book.