Grounded

 

As I drove the golf cart through the bottom gate back to Blueberry Hill, in the bright light of the moon that was full less than a week ago, I felt more grounded than I have felt in days. There was crispy white frost glittering on every blade of grass and I could hear the crunch of frozen gravel under the tires. I had just spent the last hour opening valves and draining pipes because the temperature was dropping into the 20s. None of us had thought to notice that until Jon saw the weather forecast on TV and called me at 10 PM. He was apologetic – this is really his job – but I didn’t mind at all as I pulled my heavy rain pants over my linen pants and shoved my arms into a too-warm down jacket. I wore my dressier gloves, which ended up being a mistake, but I hadn’t considered the digging part of the task.

 

Jon explained the sequence to me carefully, telling me which breakers to flip and which valves to open. First I went to Parents and headed to the electric box, turning off everything because I couldn’t read the words on the label and I knew we didn’t need any electricity there in the winter. Opened the valve at ground level and watched the rush of brown water but didn’t wait for it to empty the whole pressure tank. On to the valve underground in the cold frame – that’s when I regretted my choice of gloves as I dug through the mud that covered the lid of the box and then again more mud that was over the valve.  I went into the basement of the New House (the house is getting renovated so maybe it will be the New New House) and walked down the fancy new steps into the basement, found my way to the pressure tank and flipped that switch. Went to the 13 valves that are connected to that well and opened them all up, calmly and patiently even though it was dark and my flashlight was terrible. I even found the spigot that is attached to a random tree, one that my father taught Jon to install in the original waterline that went down to the stand for the first time in the early 1980s. 

 

This has never been my job, but I do know how the water is set up on the farm, so I am someone who is capable of doing this, I just don’t usually have to go on my knees and stick my hands down into the puddle and turn off the valve.  But this time I had to do it because Jon is strapped into a hospital bed, both of his arms with IV tubes running to various bags of antibiotics or saline solution or a steroid. And the other person who would naturally be called to turn off the water has actual Covid, in spite of her two vaccinations. So it was my job this time and I was fine with that.

 

Jon had been in the hospital for only about 24 hours when he saw the weather report on TV and was jolted out of the priorities that had allowed him to forget about frozen pipes. We had arrived at the emergency department the night before, after a series of uncertain decisions based on very little information (What in the world was wrong with him? He could not get a breath, but he had been Xrayed and EKGed and blood worked and there was nothing to see, so he had been sent home twice from Kaiser.). It felt like we barely made it. He could not get enough air to walk a step and was struggling to breathe while sitting in a chair.  The urgent care doctor told him to call 911 but Jon didn’t like that idea. We would just get ourselves where we needed to go.

 

In hindsight, we probably should have let the ambulance take him. However, we made it before anything really bad happened, so maybe he was right enough. For me the hardest minutes were waiting at red lights while no one else was using the intersection. And listening to him sound like he was drowning, that was bad. We didn’t really talk because he didn’t have the air to talk and I was focusing on driving without causing any more trouble. I kept thinking that we did not have time to have any side disasters. I was imagining what would happen if we had a flat tire or if someone crashed into us – then I would absolutely need to call an ambulance because we didn’t have time to cope with anything beyond the need for air.

 

After the hospital took responsibility for Jon’s well-being, I didn’t have to worry about my role anymore. I became the plus one, just company, the wife. I sat next to the bed and watched them work. Eventually they found the pneumonia that was somehow hiding in his lungs and then they knew what to do. The night in the hospital was disorienting because there was nowhere for me to sleep except on a bench next to the bed, but I figured it was just one night and then I would spend the rest of the nights at home in my own bed.

 

I went home that afternoon to gather my wits and get some sleep. Rebecca took over the role of plus one, company, the daughter. So when Jon called me to tell me I needed to go out into the cold and do some work, I was glad. I was glad to know just what to do. 

 

It is stabilizing to know what to do. That’s why I like my work so much. I solve problems based on a lot of experience and a lot of information. Solving these recent problems has been way outside of my experience and expertise.  And while in this case I wasn’t actually solving problems (I was following directions), it made me happy to have a clear task with a clear outcome.  I smiled as I closed the gate at 11:30 and looked up at the moon. I was that happy.

 

A Day In The Life

...from the middle of Monday to the middle of Tuesday.

Mondays are the one day of the week where we can plan off-farm activities, even if we have to fit them around the farm activities that thread through every day.  This was a typical 24 hour stretch in November...

After my piano lesson (where I focused so hard that it felt like smoke was coming out of my ears, and rusty iron filings were drifting to the floor), I decided to drive five minutes in the wrong direction to go to a CSA house and round up all the CSA bags that were empty and waiting. Usually we get them on Wednesdays but we have been running out, as people are neglecting to return them. While this may be important to us, it doesn't even make it onto their weekly mental radar. People have way too much to remember.

I got home in time for a quick lunch and some email work and then Rebecca and Jon and I went to get our covid booster shots.  It was so fast and easy -- they don't want you to have a moment of hesitation. They just grab your ID, enter everything into the computer while a nurse jabs you in the arm and slaps on a bandaid.  While Rebecca and I were waiting for Jon (different vaccine, different room), we were sitting around in the lobby and I saw an elderly man at the check-in kiosk -- and he was carrying a blue PVF bag. A nice, new one.  I almost jumped out of my seat. The lady next to me in the lobby was amused by my reaction. Now, I know it is good advertising to have our bags out in public, but those bags are supposed to circle right back to us so we can fill them up again. I did not say anything to the man, I let him walk away with his purloined bag. 

That night, after dinner, Jon and I tackled one more batch of venison. The hunter had left us some undetermined number of deer in three different plastic bags in three different baskets. This is a big task, disassembling a deer.  We used to stay at it for hours but now we just do a little bit each night. We have to separate the meat from the bone and then we have to carefully remove any connective pieces that will make the ground meat taste bad.  It is so tedious and now I have to wear my glasses so I can see all the detail.  When we are done it does look like a crime scene.  

I put the leg bones directly into a groundhog hole.  Those greedy groundhogs have been eating all the carrot tops, munching down the row. I make it a regular practice to mess with their hole and make it really unpleasant.

Carrie texted me in the evening to say that she had two sick kids who could not go to school the next day, and her wife was going to have to cancel the class she usually teaches on Tuesday morning.  Carrie  didn't like any of my suggestions until I said, why don't you and I get up at 6:00 and pack the CSA shares so you can take the kids in time for her to teach her class? Usually we start packing at 9:00 after the kids have gone to school, and when the workers arrive.

So that's what we did. We met in the 40 degree dark at 6 AM and we set up the CSA line and we had a companionable couple of hours, just the two of us. We got most of it done before everyone arrived to do the rest of the tasks and Carrie went back to her momma duties.

I went up for breakfast at about 9:30 and got sidetracked making phone calls and answering more emails.  I got a text from someone I didn't know, reminding me of our 10:00 appointment. I had no idea who he was or what he was talking about. He was waiting for me at the farm. Which farm?  That's often a problem -- which farm am I supposed to be at and what did I say I was going to do?  And then a tiny light began to glimmer in the back of my brain.  My mother had answered the phone at the stand last week and asked me if I would be around at 10:00 the next Tuesday.  Yes, I am always here at 10:00, packing bags (except for this really unusual Tuesday, whoops).  

Anyway, this was someone from the Farm Bureau who was visiting farms across Virginia, filming interviews with farmers.  It was for a PBS documentary that will have limited distribution (not in our metro area). He needed a farm in Fairfax County. Not a lot of choices there. So we spent an hour or so filming and talking and touring. This was all possible because we had finished packing the CSA early, by chance. I would never have said I had a free hour at that time on a normal Tuesday. No one told me that was going to be my job.  My part of this documentary might be one or two minutes. The funniest part was when he very gently suggested that I might want to change my shirt.  I had a wet, muddy sweatshirt on. I didn't really want to get changed. I took off the sweatshirt and asked if the next layer looked okay. He said it was better.

I have gotten good at speaking in complete sentences and telling stories, so I answered his questions in ways that I hope will not embarrass me later. 

Then I finally got in the van to go to Loudoun, loaded with a pile of used, soggy greenhouse plastic so Michael could start replacing the sides on the high tunnels.

And that was a semi-typical 24 hours in the life of this farmer.  Flexible, light on our feet, always ready for the unexpected, that's us. And always on the look-out for our precious $2 cloth bags

Paved Paradise, Right Up to the Parking Lot

Before I wrote the title to this post, I had a different topic in mind and I may just slide back into that one after I finish reporting on what is happening right in front of the stand.  It's all related, about the paving and paradise.

Since the beginning of this year, we have had a front row seat to all the construction work on Route 7. I can't count the number of times they have created a new traffic pattern, built a different lane, raised or lowered the elevation of the road, ripped out the existing infrastructure and put in newer and bigger pipes, widened and widened the outside edges, and the number of dump truck loads of dirt that has been moved is absolutely uncountable.  There is a 5 year project underway to add two more lanes to the highway, plus a walking/biking path on both sides, plus sound barriers. It was hard to imagine how they would squeeze all of that in, when Route 7 already appeared to be as wide as it could get in many places.

Last summer they "negotiated" an easement with us so they could use the stand parking lot and also the part of our entrance road that goes up to the deer fence. Negotiated is a polite term.  When VDOT needs to do something, they do it. They give you a few dollars and ask you to sign a lot of notarized papers but if you say no, then they just take it.  We decided that it wasn't at all worth fighting about (although we do know one business owner who took them all the way to court over something just like this and he won, but it took a lot of time and money). Even though they have an easement right through our stand garden so they can park trucks and equipment, we have continued to drive around the little marker sticks and plant the garden anyway because when I looked at the map, I did not see why they needed to drive on the garden.  So they have not actually driven on the garden because there were flowers planted there (a tiny piece of paradise).

Yesterday the project moved right to the edge of our parking lot. The earth movers and dump trucks and backhoes and smashing roller things rearranged every bit of space that would ordinarily have piles of pumpkins right now, and Christmas trees in about a month.  They brought in enough dirt to lift the road bed about five more feet, to match the other side (we had been wondering how everything was going to work, with a big steep slope between the eastbound and westbound lanes, but now we know).  Once they put the turn lane back in for the third time -- we have had a series of turn lanes allowing us to get in and out of our driveway, all of them quite entertaining and lovely -- the road will use up every bit of their easement.  In fact, we may be glad there is a sound barrier going up. We didn't want it before but now I see that we might prefer to have a sound barrier and have our stand be invisible from the road. The road noise will be incessant. Already we can barely hear each other when we are working behind the stand and one of those giant machines is backing up.

Before they got to this part of the project, I had already begun to visualize setting up the Christmas trees in the side stand garden, where the flowers were all summer. Ordinarily we would never allow anyone to stomp around in the garden and put in a bunch of posts and walk all over that sacred space (all gardens are sacred space, no walking in them). But I think it might be important to keep some small semblance of normalcy so the customers know we are still here, despite the havoc that is happening on the highway. The stand has suffered the most since only those who already know where we are can even get to us, but the CSA customers have toughed it out and followed all the signage and found their way in, week after week.

For at least a month this summer there was a big highway sign, the kind they make with lights, that said
NEWCOMBS FARM ROAD, NEXT RIGHT.  They actually spelled the road name three different ways on three different signs but it was fun to see our name on the highway. The last sign was spelled correctly, and it says Potomac Vegetable Farms with an arrow. We want that orange sign when this is all done. We will probably miss our chance to steal it since they move so fast.  Sometimes everything changes overnight.

Anyway, here is the real story I wanted to tell before I got distracted by current events:

Earlier this week there was a theatrical event put on by the folks at Rhizehome and there was an original song performed by Eric of Waterpenny. He repurposed the melody and lyrics to Joni Mitchell's song about paving paradise. In his version, they unpaved the parking lot and put back the paradise. It goes on from there, but the song reminded me that we had also unpaved a road and re-established our version of paradise.

When we built Blueberry Hill, we had to figure out how to get to the back corner of the farm where we were going to put all the houses. At the time, we were so focused on getting it built that we didn't think hard about the sacrifices that we were making from the farm side of things. Of course there were lots of sacrifices, but this one was the biggest, in the end.  The road used the original farm driveway, widened it by about four times, got us a turning lane (which we love), took out the hillside on the east side of the original driveway and generally rearranged everything all the way to the back of the farm. We lost access to the Route 7 hillside fields, there were steep slopes that bordered the 50 foot wide serpentine highway that cut through the farm. It was in fact a beautiful road. It had nice curves, it had farm fields on both sides, and it was so smooth and clean. In order to get through all the VDOT inspections, we had to do crazy things like pull all the weeds out of the gravel shoulders, both sides, for the whole two tenths of a mile.

When we first went to the County with this plan (the road), they saw that it was necessary for access but they knew they didn't like it in the long term. They knew that Route 7 would one day become a limited access highway and they wouldn't want 19 more households to be pulling out of a road at the bottom of a hill. They knew it was a bad idea in the future. So they said that we had to agree that if another solution came up when the property next door eventually got sold, we would build a new road.  We said yes, even though it was impossible to imagine how that would all come about.

In the end, that is what did happen. When we got the chance, we negotiated with the new owners. The developers had to agree to pay to  build us a new entrance. And we added a big request: take out the old road and put everything back.  It took them about six years to get around to it -- it was one of the last things they did as they finished building their development -- but they honored their commitment to put our farm back the way it was, as much as possible. I am sure I have already written about this at length -- in 2011 or so -- but the point is that we did manage to get back to a new version of paradise.  It never happens, I bet. No one ever takes out a state highway and puts gardens back in, but we did.  And while we miss the smooth swooping road that was good for bikes and roller skates and golf carts, and while we have been fighting erosion for 10 years because now water just pours down the valley that was dug for the paved road, it is so, so much better than it was.

Just because I can, I will indulge myself and make a list of all the ways that road made our farm life worse. Of course we didn't understand how much vehicle traffic is associated with 19 houses.  This was even before Amazon became such a ubiquitous presence. There were trash trucks and delivery vehicles and maintenance vans and visitors and residents driving through the middle of the farm, day and night. The farm was like a fishbowl. We picked flowers just a few feet away from the highway.  We waved to everyone as they went by, we liked those people, they were our neighbors, and we didn't think anything was that bad. But it got bad when car dealerships started to bring their customers to our nice curvy road and zoom up and down it, showing off the new car and its pickup. That was infuriating. 

So when the choice was raised about whether we would go through the commotion and disruption of taking out the road and replacing all the lost hills, I thought about it for a few minutes and said we would like to do that. All that we had agreed to originally was abandoning the road. No one had considered removing it, but that is what I asked for. I wanted our farm back.  Our neighbors at Blueberry Hill would have been glad to continue coming through the farm -- it was part of coming home for 11 years, after all -- but they let us decide to make that change.

It is a whole other story about what it took to get the 400 dump truck loads of soil to come back to life after the bulldozers stopped smashing the hills back into existence. 

Ten years later, I am so glad that we removed that 24 foot wide strip of pavement, and those wide gravel shoulders and now we have our bumpy farm road back. Since we took out the concrete V-ditch because it made it impossible to get up to the Route 7 patches, we have been fighting the river ever since. But it is still worth it. Flowers and beans and herbs and sunchokes and lettuce now grow where trash trucks once careened through. Life is so much better now.

By the Seat of Our Pants

I have been thinking lately that we are flying by the seat of our pants, or getting through by the skin of our teeth, and then I have been thinking that those phrases make almost no sense anymore and I should probably look them up to see what that really means.

Every fall, right about now, we make the transition between having a full crew of young people to having a smaller crew of folks who are going to take this train all the way to the end of the season. It's a different vibe when you only have three people instead of eight at the morning meeting.  For those of us who have done this so many times before, it feels fine. We just have to figure out strategies that make it possible for us to get everything done without wearing everyone out (hence the seat of our pants reference). Luckily, the sun comes up later and goes down earlier, so the days are shorter no matter what. But for those who are in their first year doing this, I am sure it feels a little scary to see how much still needs to be done, and to look around and wonder how it will all happen.

We have several tricks up our sleeve, of course. One of the main ones is my two nephews who have been working on this farm since the beginning of their useful lives. Both of them have moved on to roles that are of their own creation -- they get to choose what they do most of the time, and they both support the farm with their choices. Michael has taken on the task of grounds maintenance. This is a huge and important job: keeping the fencelines clear, mowing acres and acres of grass that is all around all the vegetable fields, cutting up fallen trees, cleaning up infrastucture, building more infrastructure (like staking tomatoes and then unstaking them at the end). And he is always available to be my right hand person when I go to Loudoun. I send him a text saying I want to lay plastic at 1:00 on Wednesday and he has the tractor hooked up and ready. I arrive in Loudoun, get on the tractor, and he helps me lay the plastic. It is incredibly efficient. His older brother Stephen has grown into the role of builder -- he has so many simultaneous projects going on that most of them will not be completely finished for several years. Each of his buildings is a creative masterpiece, never completely planned before it is started but always a coherent product when finished. Stephen is also ready to help whenever he is needed, and he does tractor work whenever the list gets ahead of me and Casey.  

So, when it became clear that there was more picking to do than this relatively new crew could manage, I asked Michael and Stephen to take on picking all the tomatoes. Not a small ask.  A big ask. And they have done it for four weeks now, many dozens of ponies ready for market every weekend. I think it's funny that no one has really remarked on this. They just take it for granted that two people can pick all the tomatoes for this farm.  The tomato season is winding down so they won't have to do that much more.  We are moving into sweet potatoes now, and they are the only ones who currently have the athletic ability and the availability to work behind the digger, lifting the sweet potatoes out of the ground as they get shaken loose. At the end of the first row of the season, Michael just lay down on his back, exhausted and panting. But by now they have both remembered how to do it without dying.

Other tricks for getting more out of all of us:  the three main managers (me and Carrie and Ciara) are doing more regular work than we did all summer. Ciara may end up picking all the peppers herself, rather than doing it with a crew.  I may just pick all the leafy greens for Sunday by myself because it's not that hard and I have so many ways of keeping myself from walking very far (I have left roadways in the fields I am likely to want to drive my golf cart through).  Carrie may spend the afternoon picking all the beans for Saturday. We get it done and it isn't too hard.

And the last card up our sleeve, so to speak: the old folks.  My mother sorts all the tomatoes and sets up the CSA tomatoes every time. This is a job that requires experience and she can do it easily.  If we need someone to drive somewhere to pick something up on short notice, I ask her husband Michael to go and he is happy to help. Both of these contributions are huge, saving us lots of time, and we don't have to worry about the quality of the work.

So, here's a recent example of skinning our teeth.  On Saturday morning, I got a call at 5:23.  Michael had not arrived to pick up a worker to come to Vienna for markets. That was most unusual.  He wasn't answering his phone (it turns out that it had been too cloudy for too long and his solar powered battery system was flagging and his phone ran out of juice in the middle of the night).  I called another worker who would be passing through that farm on the way to her market and asked her to wake him up. She woke him up at 5:45 but he still had to drive 30 miles to get to his market. I texted Gordon to ask him to bring my car to the Reston market.  We loaded the trucks as usual and I went to Reston with Michael's load.  The crew is experienced by now. I helped them put up the tarp and I went back to get my own work done.  The plan for the day included Michael bringing in a loaded van full of winter squash that would be unloaded by a small crew at 9:30 so the van could turn around and go get a load of corn.  That plan still worked because Gordon brought the van back to the farm from market in time.  In the end, we didn't miss a beat, all because we have a lot of people in the mix and some of our cell phones did work even if Michael's didn't. How did we function without the immediacy of cell phones before?

Yesterday morning we had just four of us to do a job that used to take a motley crew of 10 in the summer.  It just means we don't get to do all the extra stuff, we just focus on one thing: getting the CSA bags filled and loaded into the delivery vehicles. One of us was only in their second day of work. They had a lot of fast-paced directions to follow.  They did great. Carrie and I doggedly went back and forth, filling the customized bags while the new person did all the support work and the fourth person set up the whole market style area alone.  We were all very sweaty by the end. 

The secret to our success is, of course, a deep bench. We have so much duplication/redundancy in our system. There are several of us who can step in to do whatever needs to be done.  We just have to stay healthy.

It's all a lot of fun, really.

Micro-blogging

 The possibilities are endless for telling stories these days. I got off Facebook because it did not match my needs and I was mad about the politics during the last administration.  I have been an Instragram straggler for many years, though, watching my fellow farmers get their carrots in the ground, looking at pictures of other people's small children in the fields, and seeing what others think is interesting about their lives.  I only posted three myself in the last six years because it seemed daunting to try to take a photo worthy of Instagram. People work so hard at being artsy. 

This blog has gone the way of other storytelling efforts. I find I can't think of the right angle or topic that might be interesting to an audience I can't identify. I used to send letters directly to a group of readers: that was my favorite because I could visualize all of the people. But after a few years of that, I found myself boxed in to a certain expectation (of my own) that I couldn't meet. I ran out of thoughts for that group.

In the last couple of weeks, I have embarked on a lightweight and low effort form of storytelling. Since the first day of August, I have posted a picture on Instagram with a long caption every day.  It might not be interesting to most people but it doesn't matter  because there will be a new one tomorrow. The project was to push against the August doldrums that weigh on almost every vegetable grower I know.  August is a perennial drag. It goes on and on, it is hot, there are too many jobs that look just the same as yesterday's job, and it is hard to feel like we are moving forward. All the other months have a sort of forward motion to them, as we are preparing for the next thing. In August we are just picking and moving vegetables. So I have been looking for the stories that show the many facets of this month. I plan to stop on August 31 and change to another schedule or form of communication, but this micro-blogging thing is perfect for this time of year.  

If you want to see August through the eyes of a hot and sweaty farmer who does not want to be dragged down into the vortex of despair, you can poke around on Instagram. I was not clever with my name. I just used my own, with a dot in the middle.

Butterscotch Pudding CSA

We are in the part of the season where there is little time to do anything but move vegetables from one place to the next -- from truck to cooler, from basket to basket, from crate to table.  Collecting and moving, constantly.  Sometimes I wish that I could see all the week's vegetables in one giant pile, all at once. I bet I would not believe it, even though I probably touch most of the crates that come through here at least once. We all do.  It's only for these couple of months that the quantities are so huge. At the moment we have four cooler spaces filled pretty full, plus a lot of tomatoes sitting outside waiting to be sold in the next few days. By the middle of the week there will be nearly complete turn-over, and most of that food will be eaten, and we will start to fill the coolers again toward the end of the week.

I just had to get that out of my system before I get to the butterscotch pudding.  So, I have written many times over the years about where we live and how it all works, but I am pretty sure that I am the only person I know who gets a container of homemade butterscotch pudding delivered to her refrigerator nearly once a week. It all comes from knowing the right people -- for a lifetime. To be more precise, knowing the right person.

So now I can talk about my friend Betsy, the source of the pudding.  She and I share a lot of food affinities. We like custards and trifle and ginger snaps and fritattas and soups and casseroles that have good proportions of excellent vegetables in them.  She has been part of this informal milk buying group for at least a decade -- I order the milk from a local dairy that delivers to the refrigerator on our porch and I collect the money once a year from all the people who participate. Betsy always seems to have surplus milk, since the milk drinkers in her house come and go, and changing the order seems too cumbersome. Lately she has been making butterscotch pudding, too much of it, and I live right across the way from her and I win the pudding lottery.

Betsy and I go back all the way to elementary school.  We were in the same third/fourth grade class but I don't remember that, and then we were in the same fifth grade class with Mr. Fred Butler and that's when we started to be friends. In sixth grade our friendship solidified around writing for the school newspaper and other shared interests that I don't remember, but she did come out to the farm to work/play for days at a time.  We were never in school together after the sixth grade and yet we are friends today, 51 years later.  And you want to know the secret?  Letter writing. We were both good letter writers and we stayed in touch for long enough that we didn't forget each other.  After college she and her husband moved to DC and they started to invite us to their annual Christmas party.  Then we started a book club that lasted twenty years, and that really cemented this friendship.  Meanwhile we talked them into joining the group that created Blueberry Hill, and the rest is current events.  Current events:  helping to keep this neighborhood in good working order, cooking and eating, shared leftovers at our Wednesday lunches, a different book club, talking about our kids, talking about our work, talking about our husbands.  Just what people do who have known each other forever.

I could say a lot about Betsy but she is still alive and we are still making memories together so it's not time for a wrap-up.  She lost both her parents in the last year and has been working on creating memorial events for them, so the whole idea of a wrap-up is very much on her mind. We still have a lot more meals to share and jokes to enjoy. No eulogy yet. We will know each other until the end of our lives, and it is really not about the butterscotch pudding. That's a bonus, and she will probably start making something else soon because she likes to try new recipes.  Since we like the same foods, this can only be a good thing. 

There are a lot of people in my life that I have known for many decades, but Betsy is the only one who is still a friend from elementary school. She is the only person who remembers Mary Alice Farrell Jackson, our teacher who threw chalk when people were talking in the back of the room. We do remember quite a few of the characters from our sixth grade class, and this definitely makes our friendship unique, even if those memories don't come up very often.  It is a special thing to have a Betsy.

The Farmers of Wheatland, 1973 -- now

In the beginning, my parents rented many acres in the Tysons Corner area, fields that had been part of dairy farms, mostly. This was in the 1960s and 70s when this part of Northern Virginia was changing fast. These farms were no longer active and the aging owners were selling them to developers. They were glad to rent their fields to some new young farmers who would mow the weeds and watch over the property. We grew corn and pumpkins on fields that eventually turned into suburbs. It was just a brief interlude between cows and houses when those fields grew straw and beans and tomatoes. 

In the early 1970s, just about ten years into their farming career but only about two or three years after farming became a full time occupation, our parents started to look for a piece of property to buy that would secure this farm with some good land. They knew a real estate guy named Darryl Wright who searched for the right place, and he found it in Wheatland, 30 miles northwest of the home farm in Fairfax County.  There were four hundred acres owned by Stewart Petroleum, mostly open but with maybe 100 acres of woods.  The price was $873 per acre. Nowadays that much money would buy you a half a house in Fairfax County.

So my parents assembled a group of friends to make this purchase, since no one family had that kind of money.  My father's lifelong friend Charles Moutoux bought 44 acres with his new wife Sue. John and Melissa Graybeal, friends from college, bought 100 acres, and some new farmers named the Plancks bought 50 which later became 60.  There is something wrong with this math (I got these numbers from the Moutouxs) because the Newcombs ended up with 180 acres. Everyone else decided to buy what they could actually afford, or what they would be able to pay for even if everyone else dropped out. It was a balloon payment, five years interest only, everything to be paid after five years.  Pretty risky business, given that the Newcomb farm was only barely making a profit by this time.  But the idea was that the land would increase in value enough in those five years and the Newcombs would then have enough equity to borrow against, and would be able to make that payment. Dad did sell 10 acres to Timothy pretty early on, partly to decrease our debt and also to find a way to anchor Timothy in our midst. A legendary blueberry patch was planted and still has Timothy's name.

By now this was the third piece of property my parents had purchased. My father always said that you should never buy anything unless the soil was good.  The soil on the Wheatland farm was excellent for vegetables, if a little rocky and rolling.  Some parts were better than others, but all parts had good soil. I imagine that when they divided up the property, my dad had studied the soil maps and he picked out the 180 acres that he wanted the most. But as I say, all the different parcels had great attributes.

This property was immense.  It was one mile from the eastern edge to the western edge.  There were tenant houses sprinkled around in various states of disrepair.  There was one well at the house in the middle that became the Plancks' house, and there was a water pipe that went almost a half mile downhill to the Spangler house.  There was also a well at the Aronholt house on the northern border. All of these houses came with people in them.  

For the first 20 years or so, we mostly grew corn and string beans and pumpkins and we battled the waving fields of Johnsongrass.  The Moutouxs didn't really use their land at first since they had peaches growing on other farms. The Plancks started their farm about six years after the original purchase, and the Graybeals mostly used theirs as a country retreat.  The Plancks really settled in and started to build a whole farm. For us, Loudoun was an outpost, a destination, not a place to sleep overnight.

Dad used to conscript Mary Ann Spangler to ride the beanpicker. She never pretended to enjoy the work, but she was at home while her boys were at school and he knew she was underemployed. She had met her husband Johnny when he was stationed in Germany, and she had come to this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere. Johnny was a mechanic at a tractor dealership down  the road and the days were long and boring for Mary Ann, so she reluctantly got onto the back of that noisy beanpicker and watched for rocks and turtles and snakes as they came tumbling down the chute, along with the beans (and swore in German when they did fall down into her basket).

We drove out to Loudoun every morning in July and August to pick corn and haul it back to Fairfax County where the customers were. Western Loudoun was still mostly farms -- hay and Black Angus cattle and soybeans and miles and miles of field corn. Eastern Loudoun was quickly getting filled with houses and chain stores. In the early days, there were about six traffic lights between the Tysons farm and the Loudoun farm and there was very little traffic. Over the decades, the Virginia Beef fields turned into server farms and office centers and we could not count the number of traffic lights on Route 7 anymore.

Wheatland Vegetable Farms, owned by the Plancks, became a bustling business.  My dad died about ten years after the 400 acres were acquired. By then we were still growing row crops out there, and all the "small vegetables" were grown in Fairfax. We kept doing what we had been doing in Loudoun -- growing sweet corn and lots of  beans for another 6 years or so after he died, but we didn't have a clear plan.  I had a fateful conversation with a former worker, Ellen Polishuk, one October afternoon, when she was visiting after a few years working in California and some more time starting a small CSA operation near Charlottesville. She was despairing of every having the resources to be a real farmer. I asked her if she wanted to be the Loudoun farmer. It was a huge leap, and she made it.

After working and living on the Vienna farm for a season, getting re-inoculated with all the PVF culture and norms, she and her husband Hugh moved out to Loudoun to a house that we built for them and she started the huge job of reframing that farm.  It was a monumental task and she had to learn a lot every step of the way. About five years into it, she was joined by Heinz Thomet who came to help do the farming while Ellen had a baby. He made his mark by helping to lay out the fields in a new way, building miles of deer fence around all of the vegetable ground, building a concrete bridge that linked the vegetable fields to the equipment barn and shop, and planting windbreaks. He was trained to think in 50 year chunks, unlike the rest of us. Meanwhile Ellen learned about making high quality compost and led the way in making long term investments in equipment and infrastructure and she changed the way we entered the property (for years we drove through the Plancks' farm). The farm in Vienna kept on generating money while the Loudoun farm gained momentum and gradually started to make a real contribution to the financial health of the business.

The Johnsongrass was slowly beaten back and the cover crops and compost began to make a difference. Ellen built a greenhouse and started tomatoes and squash and sweet potatoes and many other crops, making everything more interesting. Eventually she stopped growing sweet corn because we were moving toward organic certification and corn was just hard.

It was never easy but it got easier.  You can only learn as fast as you can repeat a task, and sometimes you have to wait a whole year to get to try something again.  But other jobs are repeated weekly or monthly, and the learning happens more quickly. Ellen and the parade of workers continued to diversify the farm. We kept buying more equipment to support all the different crops.

Ellen began to want to move on to other work, so we hired and trained up two farm managers who brought our production and market totals to new heights. Meanwhile, over the fence rows, other farm businesses were growing up.  A flower farmer bought some of the Graybeal property. A new farmer bought ten acres from the Plancks. My sister Lani took over about 50 acres of Newcomb ground for horses and chickens and her fleet of trucks. Another new farmer wiggled himself into some rented ground north of the flower farm. Charles and Sue's youngest son and his wife started a year round full diet CSA, with dairy and vegetables and grains and meat. The 400 acres filled up with farms and farmers. We helped each other when help was needed. In recent years, two of my nephews have moved to the farm and are putting down roots in different corners, pursuing unique projects.  All the various farm enterprises have constructed buildings and greenhouses, some have animals, some are three season businesses. 

The Wheatland property is distinctive and unusual in the number of farms that are clustered together, holding their ground. Every time someone talks about selling land, we watch nervously to see what will happen. And so far everyone has sold their land to another farmer, or boundaries have been adjusted. After nearly 50 years of growing farms, our collective commitment to agriculture is well established. The Plancks did build a small hamlet on some of their property, but it has not interrupted the feeling of the farms, partly because it faces north to a road while the rest of us are linked by a network of internal farm roads.

After Ellen retired and the farm managers moved on, it became my turn to manage the farm. I came after my parents and Lani and Paul and Ellen and Heinz and Stacey and Casey, a long legacy of experienced farmers. I brought a team with me -- Jon, my nephews Stephen and Michael, and a few skilled and delightful workers who had worked in Vienna for years.  Six years into it, I know which fields I like best, what happens when it rains, how to manage the rotations and how big I want a tomato patch to be.  We have so much accumulated expertise now -- builders and mowers and mechanics and engineers and tractor drivers and soil managers and vegetable growers -- the farm has never looked more beautiful in the last 48 years. We are standing on the shoulders of all those who created this farm, and we are taking our turn doing the creating.

In fact, all of the Wheatland enterprises have accumulated a wealth of talent and all of the farms look beautiful. I don't know what will happen next. Perhaps this is the Golden Age of this farm community. Maybe we are at peak production and beauty. And maybe this era will last for another generation. But nothing stays the same for more than about a year, and the transitions are constant. Stay tuned.

It's Not Actually Chaos

Through all the years when we had young children and even for years after that, we went to the Big Apple Circus when it came to town. It was a highlight of September, getting ourselves to the big tent, wherever they had found space to rent for a few weeks. In this area, there is always a field that is going to be developed sometime soonish and there are big swaths of pavement -- roads that will someday have houses and businesses built on them but they are perfect for setting up a circus in the meantime.

In so many ways this circus was perfect. It had one ring, an entertaining ringmaster (who was the creator and visionary), lots of fast-paced acts, a few beloved clowns, and some amazing talent. We didn't have to think about what went on behind the scenes but I am sure there were the inevitable troubles that would come with a high pressure job performed by a crew of about 100 people and some dogs and horses, all traveling together for months at a time.

Often the act that stuck with me the most was the juggler. There was always something new that he devised in the off-season. The one with the hats just boggled the mind -- he somehow managed to juggle bowler hats that bounced off his head or his chin or his elbow, with increasing complexity as more tricks got introduced with each new hat that was added to the perpetual motion going through his hands.

I have often thought of the farm season as one of those juggling acts. I usually talk about adding more plates, keeping more and more plates in the air as the season goes on. But as I think about it now, I see that they aren't plates. It is more like those acts where the juggler starts with some tennis balls, then adds a grapefruit, then a shoe, then a hatchet and just keeps on going.

At a recent morning meeting (once a week we take time to sit together for longer than a couple of minutes, and we ponder something that is just interesting, but not about farming) we talked about the culture of this farm, and how chaotic it can be. One of the original thinkers, the founding visionary, my dad, was known for his undiagnosed ADHD. In his day, he was one of those students who frustrated his teachers and his parents with his lack of academic focus. Plenty of intellect, but not a lot of linear, organized learning.  

One of his college friends described my father this way: "Some people have “completion tension.”  Once started, they can’t think about anything else.  Tony had “incompletion tension.”  I don’t know anyone who had more simultaneous projects…half a dozen projects, unfinished." He could stay focused intensely, but was not focused on finishing things.

Sixty years into it, this farm is still deeply influenced by that trait. But we have added many more influences to the mix. If my dad were the juggler, some of those balls and shoes would drop and not get picked up again for months or years. My mother, on the other hand, would be someone who would pick up the dropped objects if it seemed necessary. She would put them back into the hands of the juggler. And over the years we have opened up the circle so that it is not just one person keeping all the objects in the air. The group that keeps its eyes and hands on those flying objects keeps expanding.

To be more specific (and here is where we might lose the non-farming reader), we are right now at the point in the season where we are about to add the last two unwieldy objects to the collection that is staying in motion.  We are about to add real vegetable picking and opening the stand for the summer, which includes buying stuff that we don't grow so there are logistical issues that need to be confronted. We need to get the sweet corn from one place and the peaches from another. 

Why do I say real vegetable picking? Because up until now we have been picking moderate quantities of leafy stuff,  just enough to fill the market trucks. Leafy stuff can be picked on Thursday and Friday and it can be gone by the end of Sunday, if all goes well. We are on the brink of harvesting. In my mind, there is a difference between picking and harvesting. Picking is something that happens over and over, day in and day out. Squash, lettuce, tomatoes, kale.  Harvesting is when you have to find a place to put all that stuff and keep it safe and at the right temperature. Harvesting is stressful for the person who has to think about all the issues. Picking is not stressful.

In the next few weeks we will harvest all the garlic. Last fall we planted a record-breaking 1000 pounds of garlic seed. That was easy compared to what is about to happen. Because I knew that this was going to be a huge task, we have been pecking away at the ends of the field, gathering up green garlic to sell, making the field just a little bit smaller.  We planted approximately the same amount of onions that we always do (so many) and those will need to be handled carefully so they don't just melt before we sell them.

But here is the real challenge, and I hope it goes away soon. About 10 days ago our trusty cooler died. This has taken juggling to a level never attempted before. We have learned a lot in the last 10 days, and we are doing the vegetable Tetris game in our tiny 8 x 12 coolbot, instead of in the much bigger walk-in.  We cannot harvest onions until that cooler is fixed. We need to stash dozens of crates of onions in a space that will keep them safe and cold.

As for the stand, we have opened the stand every year for the last 60 years, in one form or another, and it will happen again.  We have already opened quietly for Saturdays and Sundays in June (and nobody has noticed, since covid is no longer keeping people out of the grocery stores), but peaches and corn and tomatoes are the driving force there, and that happens in July.

When the original juggler was here, our circus involved three different farms and a lot of rented ground nearby. It was not chaos, but it was complicated and things were very weedy on all three farms. Now we are down to two farms and no rented ground. Much simpler, many fewer weeds. But we have a CSA that includes about four other farms and their vegetables. More complicated. And our two farms both have full crews, it's not one crew commuting between them.

Anyway, it's getting to the part where the last objects are getting added to the spinning mix, and if the cooler doesn't get fixed soon there are going to be a lot of tennis balls and hatchets sprinkled all over the ground. But I can guarantee you that we will always have a plan for getting them back into the air. There is always a way. This circus has more tricks up its sleeve, and lots of talent in its crew.

Anyone Want Some Lemon Tart?

Last night we got an email from a neighbor saying that they had made a big lemon tart and they had too much leftover. If anyone wanted some, bring a plate and come by before 9:00. I read my messages too late or I would have been down there with a clean plate, for sure.

There was another message yesterday afternoon from the newest neighbor, asking someone to water his tomato plants. It was done within minutes.

And an announcement from a recent college graduate, just home for a bit, letting us know they were setting up a movie in the Swale Theater and they would select the movie soon -- showtime was in 20 minutes.

Today we got a haiku from another new neighbor who couldn't find the lawn mower.  And he got a haiku in return, almost immediately.

In spite of all the best efforts of the techies in this community, we still communicate by email here.  They have set up online calendars and WhatsApp and message boards, but since we built this place in the time of email, that is who we are.  We have had to make some rules about what is appropriate, and all of those examples meet the requirements. We are not allowed to discuss issues of substance and we certainly are not allowed to be rude. It has taken some time and experience to be good email neighbors.

We have lived here at Blueberry Hill for a full 20 years now.  When we first moved in, it was pretty exciting.  We had spent a few years getting to know each other through a steady stream of meetings and potlucks and it was just amazing to be in one place together, living the dream.

A lot has changed in 20 years, but it is still amazing to live in a place that has so many homegrown traditions by now. Some of us feel like things have gone downhill and there is no way to re-capture what we had because the good old days are gone. Half of the original residents have moved by now. Others of us still believe in the dream and are willing to go with the unexpected downs and ups that are part of living with people.

The part that is disappointing is the number of houses that are occupied by people who do not really care that they live in a cohousing community.  Some of the people who sold their houses sold them to people who didn't even pay attention to the documents, and they have filled their houses with renters. We did not anticipate this, so we didn't make any rules to prevent it. We do our best to include these people in everything, inviting them to dinner, inviting them to meetings and workdays, but they really just don't care. It is hard not to be bitter about this, that we put so much effort into building an intentional community and we didn't imagine that people with different intentions (a desire for a good location and relatively inexpensive housing) would just move right into the middle of all this.  We have always had renters, trying to include people with different amounts of wealth, and the first renters were completely involved in everything. Many of the current renters are almost nameless, although they are on the email list and get the same invitations to have some lemon tart for dessert.

Anyway, all is not lost. On Memorial Day the whole community played together all day long, thanks to the momentum of tradition. One of the engaged renters of the present had introduced the idea of mini golf last year -- and this quickly became a goofy shared pastime.  The most motivated neighbors designed complex and entertaining holes using plumbing and croquet sets and steep hills and wind chimes.  People went from one yard to the next with their makeshift golf clubs.  Then that afternoon we had the annual recital which I have described before. It continues to be a well-attended event, focused on the performances of the youngest neighbors (lots of dancing, piano, some jokes) and I usually play the piano pieces that I have learned for my own adult recital that is around this time.  After that there was the all-community picnic where we each brought food to share and something to cook on the grill.  The weather was perfect after a weekend of cold rain.  

We got through the sad year of covid and it was hard. We had eaten together in the Common House at least twice a week for 19 years, and suddenly we couldn't cook or hang out together indoors. We did see each other outdoors but the effort of cooking and serving a meal outdoors overwhelmed us in the winter. There was a diehard, sturdy group that met every single evening on the greenway for Happy Hour, rain or shine, snow or sun all through spring, summer and winter. The group got small but it persevered. I fell off the wagon in the middle of summer when 6:00 was still the middle of the workday and I never got back into it, but I could hear the voices and the laughter every evening.

Our meetings were on Zoom.  In some ways it was better because more people attended and of course in some ways it just wasn't as good. But in recent months we have started to have common meals again and we are so glad to be together in person again. Everyone is vaccinated. It is so nice.

I remember the voices of the skeptics when we first built Blueberry Hill.  They were older and wiser and they had seen dreams come and go. But I think we have managed because we don't have so many rules, and we don't try to maintain something that isn't natural to us.  We just keep having meetings, building traditions, learning more about each other, eating together a lot, and singing some songs that we have learned over the years. Even though there are houses that are occupied by some uninterested folks, it is not hard to keep the dream alive.  Yesterday there was a BBH grandchild playing in a sprinkler in the shade, watched over by her doting grandfather and almost-grandmother (the grandparents will marry soon). Everyone knows the child's name, everyone knows the grandparents, and everyone knows the boy who grew up here and is now a father.  That is what happens when people spend years living in the same neighborhood, intentional community or not.  

I believe that we will still be a successful cohousing community, even another generation from now. It might not be just like this, but it will be something special. I know this because there are so many new people who live here who are part of building the traditions, and they have the little kids now. Those little kids are growing up in cohousing just like our kids did, and they are the craziest source of joy there is.  They climb trees and wear costumes and play instruments and ride bikes and dance with abandon, and they live in a cohousing community.  

All may not be well with the world, and perhaps there was never a time when all was well. But Blueberry Hill is doing a good job of keeping its part of the world functioning, with lemon tarts and sprinklers and decision making by consensus. This train is chugging along, in spite of the hazards along the way.

Going Places, Doing Things

That's kind of an exaggeration, that headline, but we did leave the farm on Saturday afternoon, and we spent the night away from home and we went to a different state on Sunday.  We had a little block of time that was suitable for an escape.  No one really needed us. We left Carrie to do the 6 AM send-off with the market trucks and that was about the only way anyone might have known we were gone.

Of course we didn't have a plan when we drove off, but since we had to turn around to come back and pick up some stuff we forgot -- and change cars because the new one suddenly had some kind of a hiccup and lost its turbo -- we ended up going to Frederick because I had already headed west on Rt 7 twice by then.  Frederick is a nice town with plenty of history and lots of small businesses and we almost never go there. We used to go to McCutcheons to get barrels of cider in the olden days, and in recent years we make a trip in the early summer to get jams and jellies, but that is about all we usually do in Frederick.

So we had a nice dinner INDOORS in a restaurant and we went to a bookstore and afterwards we went to Loudoun to visit Chip and Susan, also indoors.  We spent the night, practically outdoors, at Timothy's cabin.  It was chilly but we had a good comforter. 

The next morning we still had no plans but I wanted to go west on Route 9 because we haven't done that in over a year.  That road has been closed for construction during the week, as it goes through the tiny town of Hillsboro. Since it was a Sunday morning, we just dawdled through town and admired the new roundabouts and the classy brick sidewalks and wondered at the motivation behind such a massive amount of disruption. Whose idea was that, anyway?

We had to go all the way to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia to find a breakfast restaurant that wasn't a chain.  That was okay because we haven't been there in many years.  As it happened, we arrived just as the farmers market was opening. It was right downtown, the vendors were set up in an inward-facing square and it was the real deal:  nothing but radishes and lettuce and some honey and vegetable plants and eggs. We couldn't find anything to buy but everyone seemed happy, despite the light drizzle and chilly temperatures. At the corner that was closest to the main street we found the farmer who sells next to us in Reston and at the Leesburg market on Saturday mornings.  He was happy as a clam -- he is the biggest seller at that market and it is his hometown. He greeted us warmly, even though we are not  great friends. We are good market neighbors. He was glad to see us on his home turf. As we started to wander off toward breakfast, he said we should go and see his farm on our way out of town.

And so we did, after breakfast and a brief stroll through the tiny Berkeley Springs State Park (4.5 acres of historic parkland, with the hot springs as its main attraction).  We drove about ten miles up toward a ridge, on a winding road with lots of tidy little houses, some trailers, some political signage. He had said we would recognize his farm because his deer fence is exactly like ours, built by the same excellent company.

We found his farm at the top of the long valley, and we found his cousin tinkering with a machine. He stopped immediately and came to chat with us.  We probably talked for 45 minutes.  First we learned about the history of that farm -- their grandfather had bought over 600 acres, started with a dairy and eventually switched to apples grown for processing. The next generation had uneven interest in continuing the farm, but it has not yet been turned into something other than farmland, it is just divided up between more owners. Some are farming, some are not. The farmer we know didn't grow up there but he moved to West Virginia as an adult, and learned to grow peaches and vegetables, selling at the farmers markets near us. The cousin said he couldn't stand the customers at market anymore, so he just stays up on the farm.

After we learned about their methods for weed control -- nothing organic about their methods, they are perfecting the ways of applying Paraquat in between the plastic strips -- we heard about the ideas for hemp production.  I said, "there's so much regulation with hemp" and he said, "less and less."  He may have thought from my comment that I was against regulation.  Then he told us about the moonshine they make out of strawberries. It is legal in West Virginia to make 300 gallons of moonshine a year. And then I said something about what would you do with 300 gallons of moonshine?  And he said, "Have you TRIED farming without smoking pot or drinking?  It's boring!"  I burst out laughing because we have such different experiences. I did not admit that I have never tried to farm while smoking pot or drinking, and I have never been bored. 

He told us he had taught himself Spanish over the last 20 years, so he can talk to the Mexican workers. He did it the hard way, drawing pictures and asking them to tell him the word. He says he can now speak Spanish with an American accent but he doesn't have any tenses and it would be nice to know a few adverbs. Still, you have to admire his tenacity. He said the Rosetta Stone package costs $500 and he didn't want to spend that kind of money when he could do it himself.

Then the conversation started to wander into territory that we might have imagined, but had never fully experienced in real life. I don't know how we got there, but we heard about the hoax of the coronavirus, Obama and the Wuhan lab, Bill Gates trying to control overpopulation, the bad effects on your RNA when you get the vaccine, miscarriages, you know Ivermectin will cure us of the virus, why did everyone hate Trump he never did anything bad, he just had a big mouth, you know those BLM founders made 7 billion dollars and they finally came out and said that, you know they are Marxists, I worked for everything I ever got, and so on.  Jon began to wander toward the car.  It was an education, to hear it all linked together.  Just a monologue of facts that were learned somewhere different from where we get our facts.

And that is what we got from that part of the visit: we all get our facts from different places and we believe in our sources. His context is different from ours but we really can't prove, in one conversation, that our context has more validity than his.  We did not even try, not one bit. It was enough to be welcomed and educated about that farm, and to get a deeper understanding of how much we are all working to be good neighbors with each other at market every Saturday. We don't agree on much, but we know that we will be side by side for years to come, and that we need to take care of that relationship. It helped that he didn't ask us anything about ourselves or what we thought about the BLM founders.

I did have to say, at the end, when he was going on another tangent about how we all have to die sometime and he hadn't got cancer yet from spraying those chemicals -- he even knew that lymphoma can be a consequence of using those spray materials -- I did have to say that my father died of lymphoma after using Atrazine, and walking barefoot through recently sprayed fields of Paraquat.  He nodded, yeah, they took that corn herbicide off the market.  But it didn't give him much pause. He doesn't deny that people die, he just isn't that worried about it.

As we drove off, we decided that was going to be the high point of our 24 hour escape. It was so unexpected and unplanned. We never have a conversation with someone who lives in an alternate reality from ours. 

From the top of the mountain, we wandered back down toward our own safe haven.  We stopped to visit Katherine and Neil in their new house in Brunswick and got the full tour of the garden and the projects -- it was a sweet 180 turn from the West Virginia stop.  And then from there to the belated Greek Easter celebration in the beautiful stand garden at the northeast corner of our own farm. Small children ran free, happy together, safe inside the deer fence, squealing with joy.  The farm community gathered to eat delicious hummus and spanakopita and roasted goat and pita bread made in the traveling pizza oven (this community has unusual talents and resources).  We did nothing to help, and there were plenty of hands to bake the bread and cut the meat and serve the salad. It was a joy to be there. We didn't know everyone, but we could see how people were connected by the groups that sat down around picnic blankets.

When we got home, Jon had to start diagnosing all the stuff that got fried when our house got struck by lightning in a freak stormy event that afternoon. No one was hurt,  just electronics and internet, and eventually everything will be fixed.  

Our escape had all the elements of a real trip: eating out, traveling on big roads and small ones,  mountains and rivers, crossing state borders, visiting local attractions, seeing people.  And we did it without retracing our steps on any road except for the stretch between Brunswick and Wheatland.  Pretty great.

Wind is Frazzling for Farmers

Just after we got into bed on Thursday night, the wind began to blow. If we had been at home in our sturdy house we probably would have heard it but would have slept through it. But this was our first night in Loudoun in the shed with  just one layer of boards separating indoors from outdoors. Our bed is up high next to a window (just a screen, no glass) and when we wake up in the morning we have an expansive view of fields and horses and sky.  

It wasn't just a wind, it was a forceful loud gale that shook the trees, without stopping to take a breath..  And since just a week ago a tree fell right on the tractor I was driving on another windy day, I lay in bed and thought about the dead tree that was just on the other side of the wall. I could not sleep. Eventually I got up at 2:20 AM to look at that tree and make sure it was not truly a danger. It looked fine, it was just a dead pine tree and it would not land on our bed if it fell.  But still I couldn't sleep.

The next day the wind continued, battering and bashing the sides of the plastic tunnels, blowing stuff around and making it hard to stand up.  We picked as fast as we could, and stashed each crate of leafy greens inside the van as soon as it was full.  Working in the wind is exhausting, partly because we are  on edge, alert to disaster. And just pummeled by sound..

But we got through the day without injury. Another tree did fall in the afternoon, but it only fell across the road and hurt nothing.  In Vienna, we stood under our flimsy shed roof and watched tree bits rain down all around us as we stuffed lettuce into bags.  This is when we are glad we have had the tree guys come and take down all the big branches in the area where so many people work and shop.

On Saturday I had no plans to do anything in the fields. But as I was driving to Leesburg to deliver some stuff to the market I got a text from Casey reporting on what was flapping and what was uncovered in Loudoun, and he said he would try to fix things later, but he had a full day. Well, I was only fifteen minutes from the farm and I did not have a full day planned, so I headed out to see what was happening. The wind was still blowing but it wasn't nearly as intense.

On any other day, this would not have been my job, but everyone else was at market at 7:30 in the morning. This was our first day back at all the markets and there was no one on the farm at all.Well, Stephen was there with a chain saw cutting up the tree that had fallen on the road. I could have drafted him but he was doing good stuff already. The wind had been working to free up all the row cover that was protecting the squash and broccoli from bugs. We had done a pretty good job of tacking it all down with sandbags but over time the wind had managed to wiggle the white polyester fabric (called reemay, don't know why) out from under many of those weights.  I put them back and felt glad that the reemay was still mostly where it was supposed to be, and not in the trees.

I went from field to field, fixing problems. It made me feel like a real farmer because this is what a real farmer would do. She would just do what needed to be done, rather than finding someone else to do it (my preference, in a case like this).  I have never tackled a piece of reemay that is 150 feet long and 40 feet wide by myself, but I did it. Some of the sandbags had blown into the cover crop in the adjacent patch. That would have been something to see.

And while I was working, I certainly was thinking about why vegetables cost so much (or why we charge what we do, I am not sure in the greater scheme of things they really do cost so much).  These vegetables have to pay for everything that happens on a farm -- from the mundane and expected things like buying seed to the high level things like paying real estate taxes and insurance. They have to pay for much more than their own costs. These vegetables have to pay all the bills. It's no different from any other business except that people have a chance to tell us directly that our food is expensive, face to face. And we need to have sound bites for responses, ones that tell a story without being unsympathetic.

So while I was on my knees, piling dirt on the edges of the reemay (and feeling sorry about disrupting the recently sprouted cover crop that Casey had just planted), I was calculating the cost of my fixing all these issues myself. And I decided that it would pay for itself many, many times over, actually. I might have spent a hundred dollars worth of time putting dirt back onto plastic that was killing its own pepper plants by battering their little heads and in return we would get so much.  These thoughts helped me to be glad I was out there in that stupid wind.

Now I have one more thing to notice with gratitude -- a day without terrible wind. Most days are calm. I will remember to be glad.

The Art of Hiring

I was just thinking that I had already made every observation and recorded every thought about our life and  farming, and there was really nothing more to report. I was contemplating ending this blog and wondering how columnists manage to have new thoughts and opinions day after day, year after year,  And then I glanced through the New York Times opinion section and there was a topic that interested me and that I have some experience with. It was written by a man who advises students on writing their resumes. 

Well, I do have opinions on that. In the last 6 years I have inherited the role of gatekeeper for hiring on both farms.  Meaning, I get the inquiries and I decide whether to move forward to the next step with the applicant.  We almost always hire someone who gets over the first hurdle. It is simple to turn people away at the start, but I find it much harder to reject someone after I have started to have a conversation. Almost everyone has potential and we hire people who appear to have more complicated issues than potential value as a farm worker, sometimes, because we have multiple missions going on at once.

Off the farm I have served on a number of search committees, hiring cantors and rabbis and educators. It is really hard to decide who would be best, even after you meet the person.  People can look fantastic on paper, and they can do a great interview, make a deep and meaningful presentation to a large group of congregants and they can still surprise you in ways that you had never anticipated. Part of it is that people are always on their very best behavior when they are trying to get a job, and references will rarely tell you about the true weaknesses of an applicant. In fact, I scarcely believe in references except as a way of implying to the applicant that you will be checking their story. But once they get the job, other characteristics can surface, and you just hope that their good qualities far outweigh the bad ones.  

The first step in applying for a farm job is the basic test: can they follow directions of the simplest kind?  Our application process is clearly outlined on our website, and if someone doesn't read the directions and follow them, I turn them away at that point. And next: show me what kind of person you are. You don't have to know everything, you have to be able to learn everything.

Because we hire so many young people, it is hard for me to pay much attention to what they say on their resume.  It just doesn't really matter what retail jobs they have had, or what an excellent communicator they say they are.  Actually what matters more is how they decide to tell that story.  If they use every verb in the thesaurus, that is not a plus. If they try to fluff up a pretty minor experience, definitely not a plus. If the resume uses up more than one page, that's a minus. 

But this year we had already hired just about everyone we needed, and one more inquiry came in.  This person was studying environmental sustainability and I try to let anyone who is studying something relevant like that to come to work, if we have space. We can always squeeze in another part time worker.  What set him apart immediately (other than his gender) was what he wrote in a section called Awards/Activities. He said: "Proud stay at home parent for 10 years." This immediately set him apart from all other applicants -- I have never seen that before. I wanted to hire him on the spot.  And when he came for an interview, we all agreed that he had the right stuff.

I used to be incredibly picky about spelling and grammar.  Well, I still am, but there are times when it makes sense to look beyond that.  A few years ago I got an inquiry from someone who just could not spell. But then I noticed that her spelling errors really reminded me of Benjamin, my own kid. And I know that he has many fine qualities even if he can't spell consistently.  She also called herself an artist, and she had not quite graduated from college.  I pretty much think that anyone who is prepared to be an artist for a life calling has enough grit and determination to do almost anything.  And I was right. This young woman was a great worker. And she went on to continue her work as a professional artist.

Other passions and experiences that lend themselves to being a good candidate for working on this farm:  bakery work, restaurant work, theater, teacher or even substitute teacher (those are brave people), catering, team sports. Anything that requires a lot of fast-paced productivity, repetitious acitivity or a mindset for managing simultaneous priorities.  I don't pay a lot of attention when people say they have farm experience since it isn't always that helpful to inherit what was learned on other farms. Also, they often exaggerate their level of competence.  Like, always. 

I have a friend who immediately rejects any resume that includes sorority membership. I get that.  It's part of telling your story, and if that part of your story is that important to you that it goes on a job application, you might not be a great fit. But if someone has a particularly interesting turn of phrase or way of writing, that is a good flag. I do love good writing.

Our application can be daunting, I bet. It's four pages long and you really cannot google any of the answers.  They are mostly short answer questions that ask about a person's adaptibility, relationship to sustainable agriculture right now, what they want to be when they grow up.  We get a lot more applications from women than men here and my nephews think the application may be skewed toward women, just in the types of questions we ask.  I disagree, but I can see that sitting down to answer all those questions thoughtfully might exclude a certain population.  Which is partly the point, but mostly it is a way for us to let other people know what we care about and who we are. If someone fills it out and sends it back within one hour of receiving it, that is generally a sign of a lack of seriousness. Usually those answers are brief and useless. To me, the most illuminating question comes at the very end and it is what really makes the most difference in getting to the next step:  "Tell us three interesting things about yourself."  On so many levels, this is an important question.  We have actually had someone say, "I can't think of anything."  You can imagine how fast that application went into the trash.

A few years ago, before we took the question about age off the form (when we finally realized that it was illegal to ask that, for some reason), we got an application from an 80 year old man. This got my attention.  He was a marathon runner with a very long list of interesting life work and he wanted to learn about farming.  How could we resist that?  This man worked here for four seasons before he decided it was time to hit the road with his wife and start traveling.  He was an extraordinary addition to our team and much beloved. He became the person who was responsible for most of the annual infrastructure work -- building trellises, constructing fencing, working with irrigation. He also loved to pick cherry tomatoes (a job that is done standing up, not all crunched up on the ground) and sell at the stand. He was a civil engineer in an earlier career. He thought a lot about how to make things better around the farm.

One time I did an interview while driving between the Vienna farm and the Loudoun farm. The young man was applying to work in Loudoun but he was coming from Alexandria, and I needed to go out there for some reason anyway, so we rode together.  We had 45 minutes together, then we got a flat tire while on the farm, then we had to resolve that issue, then we had another 45 minutes. By the end of that shared experience, I knew that this guy was going to be a good fit.  We talked about so many interesting things on that car ride, although we didn't talk about farming much at all. He had worked at a friend's farm that was in its first year of existence the year before. I knew he hadn't acquired many skills there but that he was loyal and willing and full of life. On the first leg of the trip, we found ourselves talking about our relationships to Judaism, and even about God.  He did turn out to be a great worker.

Applying to work on a farm, usually without any farming experience, means that you have to be able to demonstrate that you have the capacity to learn to do this work and to bring somethiing good to the group. We work together for hours, in all kinds of weather, sometimes doing very hard and tedious stuff. If  you are a whiner, that's no good. If you have nothing interesting to say, that's no good. And if we always have to wait for you because you are late, that is really no good. And most importantly, if you don't like to keep working steadily, that is just bad.

I can't take all the credit for the successes of the last many years of hiring, but we keep assembling groups of interesting, hard working, smart, well-intentioned people.  This year we have an unusually high proportion of new folks, and it gives us another chance to teach them to do things the way we like them to be done.  We learn more every year about creating systems and communicating our standards and methods.  Farm work looks easy enough -- you can see perfectly well what needs to be done (get the weeds out) but in fact it takes a long time to learn to do anything effectively. Especially if you have spent most of your time at school, honing your brain skills.  Working with your hands and your body while you are using your brain -- that's harder than it looks.

I said earlier that we have several simultaneous missions when we hire people, but that is a whole different post, for another time. If anyone out there has any ideas for topics, send them along. I am beginning to feel like a broken record.

Atrophied Skills

It has been a full year of small groups, small gatherings, much quiet.  With a few major exceptions like Benjamin's wedding last October, we have not really exercised our hosting skills in the usual ways, and last week when we put together the outdoor seder, I noticed how out of shape I felt.

It wasn't that I personally worked that hard. Jon did almost all the cooking, Cookie did most of the Passover preparations including all the charoset and the salt water and the seder plate, Karen made a fantastic matzah ball soup.  We set up everything in the front yard at Mom's house (the new Outdoor Cafe since about the end of last summer), but we kept it pretty simple.  Jon moved more picnic tables over there with the loader, Alissa and I brought all the tablecloths (borrowed from Anna) and dishes (from the Common House) and created a festive space.

What struck me was the feeling afterward. Just an unusual amount of fatigue.  Even Rebecca went to bed early, noting that being social was tiring.  In the old days, we would barely have noticed that we had just created an event for twenty.  The next night we found ourselves making dinner for twelve, unexpectedly, and I was a little more prepared for the fatigue.  This is just family. It's not even people we don't know or have to impress.

We have become so accustomed to having lots of down time.  Couch time.  Quiet time. We have adopted the routine of happy introverts, barely ever needing to be sociable with more than ourselves.  I expect that our socializing muscles will start to be used more, pretty soon, and it will be interesting to see if we like that or if we just wish we could go back inside where there are only three of us.  As the summer unfolds, I expect that the potlucks and various annual gatherings and common meals will resume and we will remember what it was like to be friendly with multiple people simultaneously. 

It seems amazing that we live in this community that ate meals together at least twice a week for 20 years, and then we just stopped.  Our farm and family used to host fairly large scale events, and that ended.  It feels lucky that we planned and executed the PVF reunion in the fall of 2019, a three day extravaganza with meals and meeting and dancing with as many as 100 people at a time.

I wonder whether this pandemic year has changed our socializing capabilities or whether we have discovered that we like the quiet or whether this was just a blip and we will go back to our old ways.  I am pretty sure I will never attend the same number of meetings that I used to.  Those days are over.

Hiccuping Into The Season

It's like driving a car that has water in the gas tank. Sometimes you are cruising along at a nice steady speed and then you lose power and you find yourself on the side of the road.  Then you wait a bit and things settle, and you can limp along for another few miles, but there is always the looming possibility of another sputtering stop.

That's where we are, in terms of the season.  Last week we had a string of beautiful days and we got to go outside and work, getting ready for spring. But we knew it was too early for seeds since the ground is still cold, and the forecast was for rain and chilly temperatures.  In the greenhouse, which is artificially steady in its warmth and lack of wind, the plants are thriving, waiting to be let outdoors.  There are thousands of onions, kale, kohlrabi, cabbage plants chugging along. The other day we started the ginger and turmeric, which need tropical conditions to sprout.

In our own house, we are gradually moving back into the kitchen -- we moved every single thing out a couple of weeks ago so we could get all the way to the edges and repaint, install new floors and cabinets and counters. We didn't rearrange anything so it was a quick project (which we actually paid other people to help us with) and now it is shiny and fancy-feeling.  Of course the porch still has stacks of black crates full of stuff that needs to come back inside, or not.

And out in Loudoun a similar project is underway -- we took every single thing out of the kitchen in the Stone House, including the floor, and it is gradually coming back together. The timing was perfect for re-purposing the cabinets that came out of our house:  they loaded our cabinets into Dooley, I drove the van to Loudoun and parked it, and yesterday Stephen and Jon unloaded them into the Stone House.  No wasted motion.

Lots of transition and not so much forward motion yet, but that will all change as soon as the sun comes out and the soil warms up. 

But there is one type of progress, in addition to the greenhouse.  People are getting vaccinated.  In our extended family nearby, everyone has had at least one shot except for Rebecca who is too young and does not work in a hospital so is waiting her turn. Last Saturday night, for the first time in a full year, we sat down around the table inside of Anna and Gordon's house and we ate a take-out meal (before this year, we had never ever had a take-out meal at either of our houses). All winter long we have persisted with our weekly family dinners -- often in the middle of the day to try to be outside when it is "warm" -- on Anna's porch.  Hot pots of soup or stew with cornbread just out of the oven.  Everything cools off fast when you are eating in a 27 degree restaurant, but we have little electric blankets on our laps and a cup of tea in our hands, and doggedly cheerful hosts.  

With the change in administrations, we spend a lot less time going over the latest political crises. This is progress too.  

I have spots of paint on my hands from yesterday's work in the Stone House kitchen, I have unusually agressive welts of poison ivy on my forearms from last week's blueberry weeding, and I am glad to have a day to recuperate while it is raining, but this is actually not my favorite time of year. I have many favorites, and we are on the brink of April which is a peak season in my book, with all the blooming and exploding and new growth, but this particular moment is one of looking forward instead of just revelling in the here and now.  Here and now it is too soggy and cold to work and I am getting tired of indoor domesticity. And who wants to sort through all these crates of stuff that we might not really want in our house anymore.  

I am ready for someone to drain that gas tank and put some nice clean fuel in so we can accelerate into April.

The Spy Vs. The Farmer

There has been just about nothing to report from my own life in the last few months, which makes it hard to think about what to talk about here. I see no need to add to the public conversation about politics and current events. No one in my house has been vaccinated yet, so we are living the same sheltered life, getting very close to the one year anniversary of the last time I hosted book club in our livingroom.  During the off season I have been writing a bunch of short pieces, dug out of my memory, focusing on events that happened almost 50 years ago. I think this is like collecting up a box of old photos -- not held together by a narrative but just a pile of stories.  So, in the absence of any change of pace or venue or schedule, I will just write one of those snippets here.

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My father used to say (with glee), "I break about ten laws before getting out of bed every morning."  Of course, these were not new laws every day, these were the same laws as yesterday. And he didn't break them anew, he just kept on breaking them. Sometimes maybe they weren't actually laws, they may have been zoning rules or maybe vehicle inspection deadlines. 

There are so many examples of these non-flagrant nose-thumbings that I have a hard time choosing one, but we did have a bad, bad, evil neighbor who my father had to tangle with from time to time.  This nasty man also turned out to be a rule-breaker, but on an entirely different scale from my father. 

I just looked him up on Wikipedia to be sure that my memories were at least somewhat correct.  Edwin P. Wilson, CIA operative and double agent, convicted of selling arms to Libya, ended up spending over 20 years in prison before convincing a judge that he had been framed by the CIA. He was guilty, but the prosecution had been so anxious to convict him that they got sloppy. 

Anyway, this man -- who we did not know was a spy, we knew nothing about his work -- owned five wooded  landlocked acres adjacent to our farm and he had a right of way through our property to get to his hillside overlooking the Brooks Field.  Why he ever wanted to own five acres on a hill overlooking a swamp, with no direct access, we will never know.  It turns out he was a millionaire who owned property all over the world, with money he had accumulated through the companies he formed while working for the CIA. 

Mr. Wilson was very tall, with expressive eyebrows and a charismatic way about him, but he also could look fierce and scary. I remember seeing him come through the front door of our house once when he wanted to talk about the mess that was our farm.  He felt strongly that he should not have to go through such a chaotic place to get to his property.  I don't know where he was coming from, geographically, to get here but when he went to visit his 5 acres he came on his horse and rode up our driveway, past our house, down the gravel road and past a lot of agricultural junk. It irked him. He was so tall that I think he ducked his head a bit to come through the door.  My father was 5'10" and it seems to me he remained sitting at the table when Mr. Wilson came in. I remember Mr. Wilson's eyes. They were mean, even if he was smiling.  We knew that his smile was absolutely fake.  My father used to say that Edwin P. Wilson was pure evil.  Turns out he was right (he was arrested in 1983, a year before my father died, so at least Dad got to find out that Mr. Wilson was worse than we ever imagined).

Edwin P. Wilson sued my parents for having a messy farm. He lost the lawsuit. But he didn't give up. He sent the health department after us because he knew there were many buildings in the woods that did not meet the county code. I think he actually had his wife make these complaints because we all knew that Barbara Wilson was the one who was sending the inspectors (his obituary says that while he was in prison he tried to hire someone to kill his wife, and he wanted the wedding ring returned to him, on her finger preferably.).

For several years, we lived in the shadow of these health inspections.  But, remember, my father was not one to follow rules that didn't match his way of thinking, so he was not inclined to just clean up his act. 

On one occasion, he got a warning that the health inspector was coming to look at the buildings in the woods.  He cut down some pine trees and "planted them" in a hedge on the side of the Picnic Shed that would be most visible from the roadway.  He had the workers put piles of baskets in front of the windows of the Tractor Shed (where they slept, certainly illegally) so that from the outside it looked like a storage building.  Then when the inspector came, they took a walk down the road that Mr. Wilson rode his horse down to get to his lot. My dad could be an entertaining guy and he had plenty to talk about as they walked down that hill.  He showed the inspector that this was just a storage shed with tractors and supplies on the bottom floor and baskets upstairs.  I am sure the guy could not imagine anyone sleeping in such a structure, so he believed him.  Then on the way back up the hill (which was steep, with a rutted roadway so not that much of a stroll), just as they were getting to the spot where the Picnic Shed might be most visible in spite of the pine trees, Dad looked down and found a snake on the road. He picked it up and that just kept them very busy until they got all the way back up the hill.  The inspector saw nothing to report.

I am guessing that my parents were much more appealing (as college educated, personable, hard-working young farmers starting a business) than Mr. Wilson or his wife, and that the inspector was not inclined to try to shut us down.  Barbara Wilson had told the county that there were vagrants sleeping in the woods in tents. This was completely untrue. Our workers slept in sheds with roofs and floors. No plumbing, no cooling, but these were not tents. They had outhouses. 

When Edwin Wilson went to jail in 1983, he was suddenly in need of money and he wanted to sell his land.  My parents and the Moutouxs next door decided to divide that property in half, and they each bought  two and a half acres of relatively useless land (too steep to build on, in an environmental quality corridor). It did have a nice view of the woods but there were houses getting built within clear view of that slope by then.  

Now that we know that Mr. Wilson put a contract out on his wife, it is easy to speculate that my father could have been on a list too, but he died first.  The double agent was convicted of arranging to have many people killed while he was in prison.  This man certainly goes down in history as the worst neighbor ever. Pretty ironic that we built Blueberry Hill about a football field away from that piece of ground, creating a solid wave of good neighbor energy to combat those evil spirits.