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.
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