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.