Conference Call Not Holding My Attention

At this exact moment, I am on a conference call that has just completed its third hour, one hour to go. As so often happens, the system doesn't work perfectly. We were struggling with audio, the sound was garbled, people were talking along and we were only hearing some little piece of what they were saying.  My computer is just in spinning, spinning mode trying to retrieve its audio connection so I am listening on the phone.

I am feeling so stuck indoors.  I missed the weekly ritual of meeting the market trucks as they came in -- for the last time of the year for Takoma Park.  This week is usually a much busier and more exciting one than recent weeks as we are coming up to Thanksgiving and we are leaving for the winter.  So I was sad to miss all the reports and the party atmosphere.  I did get to be there while both trucks were loading up this morning, and they were full of carrots, which is just plain exciting.

Yesterday the snow had mostly melted and we knew there were lots of carrots out there in the mud. It felt really compelling to go back out there and pull some more carrots so everyone could have as much as they could possibly want. I put on two pairs of gloves and too many layers and went out to Loudoun to start pulling.  Got about a half an hour ahead of Sam before she came out to start bunching. As the morning wore on, the ground got wetter and wetter as the snow melted. By noon I could barely lift my feet out of the mud. Halfway through the morning, I called Carrie to tell her we needed help, the mud was slowing us down.

We rolled home in the early afternoon, triumphant, with 20 more crates of carrots that were coated with pounds and pounds of mud.  Carrie and I bundled up in aprons and gloves and put our heads down and washed all those carrots in 90 minutes of concentrated effort.

Here are the photos of the two markets today, with dueling carrot displays:



I am having a hard time focusing on this call, clearly.

The other memory that keeps floating through my mind is of the little pig that died last week. It was really cold on Saturday night, the pig was ailing with a terrible sounding cough, and it was certainly in trouble.  On Sunday morning I went to look for it and found it lying in its little food trough, dead.  Out of the corner of my eye I had seen a fox slipping out of the pen, so I knew something was up. I didn't want to leave the little pig in the pen to be eaten, so I just picked up the pan with the pig in it and looked for a place to put it.  I balanced it on the top of the fence, just under the barn roof, hoping no varmints would come to eat it.

And there the pig stayed for five days, surprising people who came to feed the pigs. It was a cold week, sort of like refrigerator temperatures. The pig didn't change.  Finally Michael came in from Loudoun for a meeting and I asked him to do something about that poor dead pig.  He could bury it or he could take it down into the woods. He took it on a golf cart and left it way down in the woods, for anyone to eat.  Since it wasn't a Jewish pig, it didn't get a quick burial, and once it had already had a five day period of viewing, it didn't seem so bad to let it be eaten by appreciative forest dwellers.

The conversation on the phone is about negative cash flow and budgeting and the financial stresses of our regional nonprofit that exists to support sustainable agriculture in the South. It is so much more interesting to think about my own sustainable ag topics.

Visiting Season

In the off-season, I look for opportunities to visit old people or people who are stuck at home.  I have the time and I like sitting around with people who have lived long lives and have lots of opinions, and often they really need the visits.  Sometimes they already have full days of visitors (like Billy Stalcup who had eight children who came to see him often) and sometimes they have long, quiet days (like Mrs. Beall with her soap operas) and sometimes they are struggling with their health and their families appreciate the visits too.  I have to be okay with knowing these people will die in the near future, or at least that they will continue to decline. It isn't really depressing or distressing, as long as they still like to be visited.  My last visit with Mrs. Beall was sad because I don't think she knew who I was, really, even though I talked to her as if she remembered me.

Anyway, there is a new chapter unfolding in the visiting season.  This time the people aren't old, but they are stuck at home.  My mother and I just went to see our long ago worker Carrie, who married Al, a long ago worker from Cox Farms. They live far from here, so it takes planning to make a visit, but the trip was well worth it.  Al is in bed because he has ALS and Carrie is his caregiver, day and night.  It is a tough situation but they are pragmatic, steady, confronting everything head on, and not giving up. Al will of course continue to decline but in the meantime, they are living their lives together.

We didn't know exactly how we would be able to be helpful, but we thought there would be opportunities.  Luckily it only took Carrie a few minutes to think of ways that we could make her life a little better -- without having to learn all the ins and outs of caring for Al. We were there to take care of Carrie, which takes much less training and is much less scary. 

Her first request was that we see why the vacuum cleaner wasn't working because she hadn't been able to vacuum for a long time. They have three cats, they used to have a big furry dog in the house, she herself has long hair, and the house was in need of some suctioning.  I am no mechanic but luckily the vacuum cleaner was a modern one, made of plastic and with lots of buttons to push to disassemble things. So I started to take it apart and find all the stuff that needed to be disentangled.  Success.  I vacuumed everywhere I could and it made us all feel better.

My mother broke down a hallway full of boxes that needed to be recycled, and packed them up in tidy piles for pickup.  I cleaned out drawers that had been left to the mice/rats and since it wasn't my stuff I threw lots of detritus away.  My mother gave Al a hand massage and melted him with a head massage too.  I made a big pot of chicken soup and we all had lunch together.  My mother and Carrie went on a quick march around their property, to observe the trees that had fallen and to see the state of the yard.  Al used to take care of the outdoors before he couldn't anymore, and Carrie just needed to see it all.

This is such an unusual opportunity, to be able to go and help without feeling like we are imposing or making work for the family.  I want to go again, and maybe someday I will be brave enough to learn to manage the machines that keep Al breathing and clear his chest.  They have another friend who comes sometimes and does make it possible for Carrie to leave the house because she has learned to do all those life maintenance tasks.  Carrie recently had to leave home for 24 hours when her father died, and this friend came to care for Al. For the most part, they are managing alone. There are visiting nurses who come to bathe Al and check on things and the insurance stuff is a nightmare. There are probably more services they could get but just figuring it all out is time consuming and complicated. Carrie also works full time on her computer, as a manager in a company that she has worked at for many years. She had three phone meetings while we were there. The whole thing is mind-boggling, really.

I don't have time to reflect on all of this now, but there is much to say.  I am humbled by all of it.  More later.

Just One Lap To Go

Yesterday as we moved the sweet potatoes one more time, getting them out of the greenhouse before the temperature outside got into the 20s, I had the feeling that we were rounding some bases, running some final laps, getting really close to the end. Those sweet potatoes had been out of the ground for about a month, they had been moved from the field to the greenhouse for curing and then they had to be sorted and moved again to a safe, warm space for storing.  It is hard to describe the volume of sweet potatoes we have moved in the last month.  Eight tons is how much weight, 650 baskets is how much volume.  They grow underground, of course, so they were coated with mud this year.  In addition to the weight of the potatoes, we were hauling many pounds of mud around.



This week has been full of those last big pushes.  Even though it is November and we tend to start late and end so much earlier than even a month ago, the tasks are chunky.  We had to wait for another round of rain to go by so we could finish mulching all the garlic.  In fact, it doesn't take very long to mulch ten beds of garlic, or about 1/3 of an acre.  It takes six people who are moving right along about two hours to unload the bales and spread them all out -- especially if we get Michael to help. He mulches about three times as fast as a normal person.



But we had so many other things to do on that day that we had to forcefully schedule a mulching date for 4 PM. And everyone had to leave what they were doing (picking for the weekend) and come to the field from all over the farm and switch gears so we could finish that task.

On both farms, we checked off tasks for the last time all week long.  Yesterday, before the next rain came, the crews dragged sandbags and row cover out, putting flimsy white material over acres of radishes and tatsoi and lettuce, keeping the leaves from the harshest frosts and keeping the ground below from freezing hard.  Personally I really dislike that task and I am fortunately old and gimpy enough to be able to assign myself other reasonably important things to do. By the time it started to rain really hard, the crops were covered (and today it is so windy that in half an hour Carrie and I have to go out and try again to secure the flapping, whipping row cover for the night).

We have one more market weekend to go, one more CSA week to go.  Then we pause and celebrate, have some meetings, switch gears again and start the winter season.  We can see the finish line.  There are carrots to pull, the last potatoes to scrabble out of the ground, parsnips to finally dig after six months of slow growing, and one more round of leafy greens to collect up.  All of these farm rituals are so cyclical and timeless.  And we know it is time to start hibernating because it is finally too cold to have any fun out there.  It's muddy and windy and slippery and frigid.  Time to sprint to the end.