Stage Fright

 In high school, Alissa had piano recitals and competitions and she was always so calm about it, even while performing. I never understood it.  I asked her why she didn’t get nervous, and she said – as if this were the most obvious thing – I am ready. Why would I be nervous?

When I was in high school, the only thing that frazzled me was speaking in front of a group. By definition, I was never ready. My most painful memory is an 11^th grade English class toward the end of the year when we were practicing public speaking (in hindsight, I think the teacher had no lesson plan). The topic was a complete gimme: talk about yourself and what you like to do the most.  What could be easier?  I knew everyone in my class, this was the third year we were all together, we had established our roles in the group. I certainly felt at home in that classroom.  I started out okay but as my monologue went along, I could feel myself getting more and more anxious. By the end, there were actual tears rolling down my cheeks. I was mortified. No one ever said a word to me about it. We pretended it hadn’t happened.

This experience reinforced what I knew about myself. I hated talking in front of people.  As a result, I never did it. The only exception was giving tours to school groups. These were preschool kids with parents and we walked around the farm, interpreting what we were seeing. I was funny, relaxed, completely in charge.  The parents did not make me nervous.

For about ten years or so I was in and out of classrooms, as a college student and later as a substitute teacher. Never nervous around kids.  I felt comfortable in front of any group that knew less than I did.

In my late 30s and into my 40s, I was absorbed into the world of synagogue leadership, serving on the Board, leading committees. I was fine with all of my responsibilities, but we were required to make announcements in front of the congregation seven times a year. This just about killed me. But making innocuous announcements seven times a year for about ten years, that much practice helped me to be less anxious and more myself. By the time I became president of the congregation, I was not so afraid. I delivered speeches on many occasions, and it did not kill me.

Right about that time, we were building Blueberry Hill. There were times when we had to speak in front of large groups of people who didn’t know us. Anna and I would make low-tech presentations, relying on our natural charm and good humor, and it wasn’t scary. Over a two-year period after we built Blueberry Hill, I participated in a very intense series of quarterly workshops where we went to other cohousing communities and facilitated their real meetings – possibly the most intimidating public work I have ever done. It was terrifying. I learned so much.

What I was learning, one small success at a time, was that I can speak publicly without panic if I know the topic well. Teaching is never scary for me.  Leading workshops at farming conferences is also fine.  I would say that in the last 15 years or so, I have gone beyond the goal of No Panic and  learned to be myself in front of groups. I lead shiva minyans, I officiate weddings, I have delivered eulogies and led a burial service.

So when we learned recently that we were going to have to appear in person at a competition of grant finalists, I was not flustered. Our occasional grant writer, Katherine, made a last-minute decision to try for an innovation grant for our future farm kitchen a couple of months ago…we did not imagine we would ever come close to winning.  Yesterday we had to appear in front of a panel of six judges and present our project in ten minutes.  Amazingly, we were not nervous. There we were in an Executive Board Room in a fancy hotel, facing down some not very smiley people. We delivered our speeches, reading from notes and occasionally going off script. We noticed that when I spoke without the notes, they perked up, so when we prepared for the third round of competition this morning, we decided to do the whole thing without reading. This time we only had five minutes. We honed our message. I got even funnier.

The judges were pretty stone-faced. Not unfriendly, just inscrutable. There was some complicated rubric they needed to follow. Katherine was in charge of making sure our comments were  rubric-adjacent. I was unofficially in charge of giving our presentation some personality. We were the only women finalists and I was definitely the oldest of all of us.

We did not win the People’s Choice Award but a young entrepreneur did (I was rooting for him to win the big prize because $10,000 would have made a huge difference to his new oyster business). We did win the Runner Up (second place), a $5000 prize. The real winner was a company that had created a technology for making fertilizer out of air and electricity. If that invention can become an affordable reality, it would be good for everyone, not just a small region or the state of Virginia.  Each of the five finalists had a project that was completely unrelated to the others, and it was impossible to predict which one would appeal to the judges. Katherine and I felt bad for the two young people who didn’t win anything beyond the finalist prizes. One was a beginning hops grower and one had a safety curriculum he wanted to market. So random!

Anyway, the stage fright that caused me so much distress in my youth is a memory. My own piano recitals do make me nervous, but I am not in a panic and I don’t worry about melting down. I think that teaching, facilitating meetings, getting older, knowing more, lots of repetition and practice – all of those normal life activities helped. Being older than most people helps a lot.  Age gives me a lot more confidence. Being old makes me ready. If not now, when?

 

 

The Virginia State Fair

Jon loves fairs and wishes we could go to them more often, but they usually happen in August and it just doesn't fit in with the schedule. So when I heard that the Virginia State Fair was during the week of my birthday, and that we were asked to assemble an order for a special dinner at the fair, and that the dinner was on my real birthday an that we were invited as guests, I decided we should go.

The order was for lots of things that don't grow at this time of year, and we had to say no to most of the things they requested. I suggested that the next time the chefs should ask the farmers what was in season before they made their menus. But whatever. We saved and sorted out red onions, peewee potatoes (meaning the smallest potatoes we could find), beets, we dug some ginger special for this, we prayed that the basil would hold out into September, etc.  

We haven't been to this fair since before we had kids, and I barely remembered anything about it. Jon has memories of the terrain, and the sheep dog demonstrations, and I do remember the dark and dusty display of melting vegetables with mysterious ribbons on them (how in the world do you judge a tomato or a handful of green beans?).

We walked all around the midway, looked at all the food options that have gotten fancier over the years, and more ethnically diverse. Still plenty of fried dough and deep fried stuff and cotton candy. We went to the barns and found not very much going on. No regular sized horses, no draft horses, no cows.  A lot of very clean and fluffy goats and a whole row of snoring pigs.We wondered where everyone was.  We found the row of vintage tractors -- which we love because we know some of those tractors very well. It amused us to see a rusty Farmall A with a blue ribbon on it. I guess we could enter any of our tractors, as they are, and they might get some recognition.

The other attendees were mostly schoolchildren, and some families, and a lot of retired-looking people. It was not Northern Virginia -- there were no Indian or Chinese or any kind of Asian kids. Not even a notable contingent of Central Americans. Just black kids and white kids. Really different from our part of Virginia. I loved seeing all the happy mixing and mingling and outright silliness of school kids.

Just because it would be something I would remember, I said I wanted to go on the Ferris wheel. Jon was surprised because I don't like leaving the ground for any amount of time, generally. Certainly not on a carnival ride, but also not on a boat or anything that moves differently from the earth I am standing on. It was perfectly fine, and Jon barely fussed about the expense at all. It was ridiculously expensive for five minutes of looking out over the fairgrounds, but I liked it.

About halfway through the day we went back to our car and had a good nap. We could do this because the tickets had been given to us, as well as the premium parking pass, so we weren't wasting our resources. It was free, and we needed a nap.

The best part of the day was the dinner, though.  We were recognized at the door because we were wearing our spiffy PVF sweatshirts, they welcomed us warmly and gave us a little wristband.  Contrary to what I expected, it was a walkaround and find your dinner kind of meal.  There were chefs posted in different rooms of this mansion event space, plating their bite-sized offerings. It was a great way to eat a fancy meal, actually. You could have as much or as little as you want, you didn't have to make conversation with anyone, and it was all delicious. About half of the stations were wine or beer, so we missed out on about half the point of the dinner but that's okay. Our farm name was posted on these little signs that announced the chef and the ingredient source, so we introduced ourselves to the chefs that had used our basil and potatoes, etc.  They were all very nice, saying appreciative things about the vegetables. One of them said, "you did a good job with the order." I thought that was funny. We had yummy fried rice, egg rolls, chicken salad sliders, pumpkin soup that Jon said didn't taste at all like pumpkin so he liked it a lot, tomato pie, roasted potatoes and beets, oysters, ice cream from the MooThru and the cutest little carrot cake cupcakes in the world.

It was a memorable way to spend a birthday and we got home to find that everything had gone exactly as planned while we were gone. Everyone did an excellent job doing all the work. That was the best present ever.  

We did take pictures and when we remember how to post them, we will do that.

Planting Grapes for the Ages

 

Jon and I bought the ten-acre property in 2013 – not because we really wanted it, but because we didn’t want anyone else to have it.  Its finest attribute was a magical blueberry patch that seemed huge. The bushes were taller than an average human and when the berries were in season, there were billions of them. I always imagined there were about 20 rows of blueberries, but in fact there were 8. 

It was Timothy who planted that blueberry patch, and it was his ten acres. He had bought it from my parents soon after the whole Loudoun property was purchased. My dad was trying to find a way to keep Timothy around, and also trying to find a way to help offset a small portion of the humongous mortgage payment for the other 180 acres.

Timothy’s ten acres was mostly woods and steep slopes, with maybe two acres of open space.  Timothy created a rustic country escape for himself and his wife Claudine. There was no running water, no electricity. He hired a carpenter to build a cabin with a big deck, an outhouse on the edge of the woods that could have been a tiny residence, and a little sleeping cabin in the woods.  He hosted a big blueberry picnic every July and invited all of his friends and associates to come and pick as many blueberries as they wanted.  He made barbecued chicken on a grill and the party went on for hours.  People camped in tents. By the time he sold the property to us, there were about 200 people coming to the Blue-B-Q.

After almost 40 years of blueberries and camping, Timothy and Claudine decided to move to Maine and divest themselves of their various real estate holdings, and leave their hosting duties behind.  They thought about selling the ten acres to the co-op that helped them to maintain the patch. When we heard about these ideas, we were horrified. This ten-acre piece was right in the middle of our farm, with a right of way that was about a half mile long, drawn  legally as a straight line from the highway to the property, not associated with any now-existing farm roads.  A new owner could insist on driving straight through our vegetable fields.

I told Timothy that I wanted to buy his property and asked him not to sell it to anyone else. He was glad to sell it to us. He financed it for us, and we sent him a check every February for 1/10 of the total price.  We were aiming to pay it off in ten years, but we managed to finish our mortgage payments earlier because of some money Jon inherited from his parents.

Now, you might think that we immediately made that property our own, putting our own personal stamp on it.  Really, we did almost nothing.  Timothy had left a fair amount of stuff in the cabin – tools, boxes of blueberry-related equipment.  We just kept it there. When it was time to prune blueberries, we went into the cabin and got the loppers.  We used Timothy’s sewn-together netting to cover the patch when it was time, and we ignored the detritus that was stored underneath the cabin.  We started to sleep out there about once a week, sleeping in the bed that was built tall enough that we could look out the big windows in the morning and see the fields. It was like sleeping outdoors, but much more comfortable.

Because he is a plumber who loves a hot shower, Jon’s first project was to get water to the cabin. He extended the irrigation line from the field to our north, and he buried a line right to Timothy’s cabin.  He used that occasion to bring water to the blueberries at the same time. Then he installed an on-demand water heater.  In all his 40 years there, Timothy had collected water off the roof and hauled water for drinking and never had hot water. That wasn’t his priority.  Then Jon built an outdoor shower off the south side of the cabin. That is the best shower ever.

And that is pretty much the sum total of improvements we have made in the last ten years.  We still don’t have electricity, we have never repaired any of the screens. The siding is a disgrace: pieces of rough cut lumber that are twisting and getting unattached from the building. We do have some nice porch furniture that we inherited from someone. And there is a propane stove with a broken oven, but when would we ever have time to bake? Almost all of our meals are eaten in the half-dark after Jon has cooked them on the grill.

In all the years that we have owned that property, I have never walked down into the woods. Many people have told me how beautiful it is, down by the stream, but they warned me that the path was very steep and I might not be able to get back up, with my bad knee. So I never went. But I plan to walk down to the stream this summer, now that I have a new knee.

But the reason I am writing this long backstory is that last night, for the first time ever, Jon and I planted something with our own hands on our own land.  About a month ago, we went to a place called Edible Landscaping outside of Charlottesville because Jon loves Concord grapes so much. We decided to take a day off and buy some plants. But then we never had time to get them in the ground. Last week, Jon and Michael used a tractor and a big heavy implement that is like a huge tooth and they cut a furrow in the grass, parallel to the orchard that Casey planted almost ten years ago (forgot to mention that one).

We were eating dinner on the deck and it was about 8:00, and I said, “want to plant those grapes? We have to hurry, it’s almost dark.” I zoomed on my golf cart out to the compost pad and filled some buckets with the fancy compost, Jon went to get a tape measure. That amused me – I would never have thought to measure anything.  While he laid out the measuring tape, I started to dig holes. He said I was getting ahead of him, he hadn’t even done the measurements yet. I said it was getting dark.  We mixed compost into the holes and planted ten grapes, about ten feet apart.  Then we planted three kiwi trees in the next row. And it was all the way dark by then. I promised to water them first thing in the morning.

It felt like pioneer work, out in the prairie. We were working in sod, like Pa Ingalls. But we had really fancy compost, we had a golf cart to carry the compost, and the ripper had already made the job so much easier. It wasn’t really pioneer work.  But it still felt momentous because in ten years, we had never got down on our knees and planted one single thing ourselves. We had commissioned others to plant a second blueberry patch, just west of Timothy’s historic patch. And Casey had planted apples and Asian pears and persimmons and figs and pawpaws to the east of the legacy blueberries. We have maintained those trees minimally, and we have eaten fruit from most of them. 

This morning, the first thing I did was fill some buckets at the outdoor sink (which is for the blueberry picnics that have continued, at a more modest level) and – in my nightgown at dawn – I poured water on each of those little grapes and kiwis.  The odds of their survival are not very high as our attention to detail is pretty terrible if it isn’t part of the farm business, but I still think it could work.

I felt like Mika was looking over our shoulder, watching her grandparents digging in the dirt, planting something that might last longer than we do. She might someday eat these grapes. There may be children not born yet who might not ever know how unusual it was for Grana and Papa to be on their hands and knees at dark, fussing at each other but working fast, planting something that could last a long time.

Leaving Their Mark, Despite Their Untimely Demise

Longtime readers may remember the chicken massacre that happened 15 years ago or so. I went to feed the chickens and found a bloodbath has happened in the night. It took us a few weeks to figure out how the marauders got in and who they were -- it was probably some raccoons who figured out they could push a loose piece of roofing up and climb in over the wall.  From that day on, raccoons have been one of the lowest life forms, in my view. They kill for entertainment, not even eating the heads, just leaving dead birds strewn around. That time, there were 18 mangled chickens lying in a flurry of feathers, with the survivors wandering around in the battle zone.

So on Sunday morning when my mother was trying to get her chores done quickly before going to market, she found the same scene. She didn't have time to deal with it then so it was left to me to go and clean up, after finishing my CSA duties. This time was less shocking because I had seen this before. 

I fed the remaining chickens some leafy greens and went around picking up the bodies, holding them by their feet and putting them in a basket.  The killers had ripped off a piece of rotting plywood from the back wall and found a good-sized hole for coming and going.  There were 7 dead and 6 missing. That's a lot of chickens to take away. I wonder how many raccoons there were.

Longtime readers may also remember that I have an ongoing eco-terrorist practice, filling groundhog holes with buckets of rotting vegetables and sour milk. Groundhogs like a tidy, clean hole so I try to keep trashing their residences, whenever I have a chance. It really slows them down. Sometimes it takes them days to get back to eating beans or endive while they dig out from the disgusting mess I have left -- I also plug the hole tightly with sticks and logs, making life extra difficult.

So these chickens who never did anything wrong in their lives, they were just being chickens, they had one more opportunity to leave their mark.  I took those baskets of dead chickens and I went tromping around in the underbrush, finding the active holes. I stuffed a dead chicken in each hole. Groundhogs are vegetarians but foxes and raccoons are not, and maybe the others will help to clean up, but in any case, this will change the patterns of the groundhogs for a while.

Jon put some more boards on the  back of that ramshackle chicken shed. I feel like chickens might not have too much memory. They might not dwell on that scary night, or I hope not. They did not appear to be traumatized.

In fact, these are the retired chickens, the ones who are being sold for soup, so they are nearing the end of their lives. I guess they don't have a choice or a preference between getting eaten by people or by raccoons, but it bothers me that they would be killed and wasted. And that is why I crawled around under all the pricker bushes, sliding down the hills, looking for the holes under the piles of brush. I know it's crazy but it makes me feel better.

Wrangling Pigs

We had a nice take-out dinner from Sweet Ginger, with sushi and Pad Thai, for our last dinner with Mika and Benjamin and Yael. Mika ate sushi with great enthusiasm, clearly an experienced sushi eater.  We were loading them in the car, having a calm farewell when Jon came out of the house, "Helen says there are four police at the farm and two pigs are out."  Oy.  Rebecca got on one golf cart and I got on mine, even though we had no idea what we were going to do.  The Israelis left, already forgotten in this moment of crisis. 

The pig pen has an overgrown, bramble-filled lot on the side that is bordered by the deer fence. I looked at the fence and saw where they might have wiggled under it.  A bored and hungry pig can squeeze through a pretty tight space.  The police said they had found two pigs at the dumpster at the school next door, on the other side of the lot.  They were looking for them because someone called in a report of two pigs on Route 7. Oy.  There were two policemen somewhat close to the pigs, but unable to reach them because it was too snarly with vines and prickers.  The other police officers were hanging out at the pigpen, watching us think about what to do.

I was wearing a tank top and skirt and crocs, but since I was the "owner" and I am responsible for the pigs, I plunged into the underbrush, where I have seen deer crashing through the corner where a tree fell on the fence, falling from the lot toward our side. I have never been over there before. Lots of English ivy, wineberries, brambles, vines. I stumbled through this mess, following some deer trails until I found the pigs, stuck between two parallel fences, running back and forth. Not at all clear how they got there, or how they were going to get out. The police told us to bring them some grain and they would try to lure them out to get them into a truck. We thought that was really unlikely. I couldn't figure out how they got into that no-man's-land alley. There were three parallel fences: our deer fence, a chain link dog fence three feet away, and then a four foot woven wire fence that was in crumpled condition. The pigs were stuck between the dog fence and the woven wire fence, trying to figure out how to get back home.

It seemed like the only way to get them back into their pen was to cut a hole in this fancy, secure old dog fence and get them closer to the deer fence and then coax them back underneath the deer fence. Rebecca had to go find a bolt cutter in the barn and hand it to me through the fence and across the gap through the next fence, Helen had to climb the poison ivy covered deer fence to pass a small bucket of grain to me, which I grabbed from them with the bolt cutter. I cut a pig-sized hole and then it took a while to convince them to go through there, with grain and pig-talk.  Then Helen and Rebecca put a lot of grain on the ground where the wiggle-hole was, and lifted the fence with some cinder blocks. Eventually the pigs ate their way back home. Getting back out of that forest tangle (reminded me of a fairy tale where a prince forces his way through the brambles and blinds himself) was harder than getting in. Jon blocked the hole with pallets, tying everything down with baler twine, flashlight held in his teeth.

We all went home to take showers. There was a lot of poison ivy involved. We all missed Peio.

Five Minutes of Fame

We all know about celebrity chefs and big-name attorneys and famous entertainers.  People get famous, and their names become known to those of us who know nothing about real life in the courtroom or what it is like to star in a movie.  We like knowing about these famous people. I might put politicians in a different category, but their lives also create a buzz. Not just because of what they do, but because of who they are.  

Maybe about 20 years ago or so, there started to be a category of celebrity farmers, mostly only known to other farmers. When farming started to be part of a movement, and not just a way to earn a living and produce food, some farmers started to become spokespeople for the movement. Like all celebrities, they were mostly self-appointed, and they had a certain charisma. The more famous ones were connected to well-known chefs or they lived in California where fame is in the water.

There are many paths to celebrity farmerdom.  You can write a book that gets noticed, you can be written about in a book that non-farmers read, you can be a big personality on the conference circuit, you can create and replicate a new and better way of doing something, or – in our case – you can just keep doing the same thing for so long that it starts to seem noteworthy.

My mom and I are a small scale, local version of celebrity farmers.  My mom is more famous, and rightly so. She is 88 and has been a role model for more than half of that time. She has been speaking publicly and serving on boards for years and years. I have had a quieter level of exposure, which is just fine. But in the last 30 years or so, I have lost my anxiety over public speaking – it always helps to speak about topics that I know more about than the audience does. 

A couple of months ago, I got an unusual phone call from Jacques Haeringer, the present owner and overlord of Chez Francois. Like me, he is a second-generation owner/operator of a local business. His parents started their restaurant in 1954.  My parents started farming in 1962.  Jacques is about ten years older than I am, so we are running sort of parallel lives. We have the same job, in different realms. We are linked by our connection to good vegetables.

He called because he had figured out that he wanted me to be the featured speaker at a farm-to-table dinner that he was hosting at Chez Francois, between his two gardens. He was all excited about it – the long table, the community feeling, eating outside – and he needed a farmer to give the whole experience some validity.  His event planner had just seen our website and watched the video and she thought I would be the perfect representative of sustainable agriculture and local farming.  They said they would give me dinner and I could bring a guest.

I said yes, thinking that there would be no conflicts on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of May.  As it turned out, I was double booked on that day, but I had said I would do the Chez Francois thing, so I had to make that my priority.  I did not fret about what I was going to say. I knew I had much more material than anyone really wanted to hear.

Jon and I arrived on time for the “run of show” conversation, and I watched Jacques splutter and complain about the way things were unfolding. He needed to watch over the main course as it was coming out of the kitchen and he thought the timing of the speeches was not going to work.  But he also gave Jon and me a tour of his garden because that has been his personal project for the last decade or so.  

Jacques is a confident, serious business owner and chef and he can choose everything about his life, pretty much. However, he can’t do anything about the placement of his septic field – which has to be huge because he runs a very busy restaurant with so much cooking and dishwashing – the septic field takes up the sunniest, most level and prime piece of his expensive Great Falls property. So the gardens are on either side of the grassy space that covers the septic field, and they are on slopes and in the shade.  Still, they give him great satisfaction and he loves to show them off. (The long table was set up right on top of that septic field, in full sun.)

I was introduced before the salad course and I got up and talked about being in business for a long time, growing and changing over the years, and about how the people who support our farm the most are our CSA customers who pay for their vegetables many months in advance. I told them that I had picked the salad myself, because Jacques asked me for salad.  Luckily, the salad was delicious, with an excellent dressing.

It was about five minutes of talking with a faulty microphone while people were eating, it was outdoors, and it was hard to be heard. It didn’t matter what I said, really. I was just being a farmer while everyone ate fancy French food in the sun. I had no illusions that anyone was listening particularly carefully, and it didn’t matter. It was a lovely event, the food was extremely nicely prepared, and the wine was excellent. Jon and I don’t know anything about wine, but this wine tasted so “smooth” (Jon’s word) and we both drank it happily. We had unexpectedly interesting conversations with rich foodies.

This is a small scale, local version of celebrity.  We ate a meal that cost others $275/plate, we met nice people, and we did our part to educate the public just a tiny bit more about the value of maintaining local farms. Some people got out their phones and started to figure out how to order a CSA share on the spot. This is about as famous as I need to be as a farmer. 

The flowers came from the farm. I was supposed to talk about them, but I forgot. There are kale blossoms and wheat grass and bachelor buttons and flowers from Anna's garden and roses from our yard. 

The owner of the wine business had a lot to say about each bottle of wine as it came out. In the background are artists painting the scene. The paintings got auctioned off at the end of the dinner, but we had already hit the road by then.

The Runway

Warning to readers: this is an extremely farm-centered set of reflections and is probably of very little interest to the average person. It is just what I was thinking about yesterday, that's all.

I was delighted to see how well the soil just fell apart, all soft and unclumpy. No rocks. It was delicious. I was disking up some ground that had grown a lovely cover crop over the winter -- a mix we get from Heinz that has rye and bachelor buttons and radishes and then we add in some crimson clover, so there is feathery green rye mixed with bright blue flowers and yellow (radish) flowers and dark red finger-sized blossoms.  The field had been out of crop production for over thirty years, and lately had been on the other side of a deer fence and used as a deluxe horse pasture.

About five years ago, I started to eye this field because we were starting to feel cramped on our 20 acres of crops, now that we were doing a long rotation of resting half of our fields every other year. I had not been part of the decisions three decades ago, when Ellen and Heinz laid out the fields in a new way, creating a diverse vegetable farm out of the vast fields of Johnsongrass and corn and green beans and pumpkins from my father's era. Before they re-drew the map, I don't think the fields even had real names. When they were done, there were half acre plots and some smaller ones and some larger ones.  Far Yonder A, B, and C.  Northwest A and B.  Diagonal West.  Telephone A and B. And when the big deer fence went up around those vegetable fields, everything got very permanent.

They decided to exclude the western-most 50 acres.  Enough was enough. We didn't even have irrigation back then. Those western acres were almost a mile away from the farm's center (the farm is one mile long and all the equipment was parked at the eastern end, in a barnyard). It made sense to keep most of the farming closer to the repair shop and the one well and the pole barn.

When I moved into the role of managing the Loudoun farm, the fields had been established for 20 years already, and I didn't think about the choices that had been made. It was enough for me just to try to understand the rotations and which fields had what sorts of soil.  I did start to rename the fields because the A and B thing was just too confusing since I hadn't created it -- we went for North and South and I made the field names even more specific:  Below Barn, Barn, Barn West, Central North, Central South...

So, about five years ago I said to Lani (who had taken over the woods and pasture to the west and turned it into a civilized space for horses and chickens and people), we need more ground. I am looking at that horse pasture right there, the one closest to our other fields. She said she would check with her partner, but she was dubious.  A few days later, she came back with a solid no.  That was their best field in the winter, it drained the best, they needed it.

I decided to let that go for a while and continued to learn to work with the fields we had. Better to keep peace in the family.

But then last summer when I was just going back and forth and back and forth on a tractor, looking through the deer fence at what seemed to be a luscious field of grass, I wanted to restart negotiations. Lani happened to be driving by, delivering eggs, so I motioned to her to come and get on my tractor fender, and she did. While we crawled along (I was laying plastic with someone behind me, doing all the real work), I showed her my proposal for how we could take 1/3 of the horse pasture and leave them the rolling parts.  Since it had been 5 years since the last inquiry, I thought maybe we could try again.  She sent her partner out to hear my marketing schtick, riding back and forth some more on this slow-moving tractor, and we figured out what could work.  There was some reluctance but by now we had a more established relationship as good neighbors, and we struck a deal.

We hired the fence people to come and move the fence, giving us this square, beautiful, one acre field. And last fall Casey planted the cover crop.

It wasn't until yesterday that I finally noticed where this field really is. It is part of the Runway Patch. This was the one sacred piece of ground that had a name when Dad was planting the corn and beans and pumpkins way out in the hinterlands.  The Runway Patch was never tilled. It was a strip of grass about a hundred feet wide and probably about 1000 feet long -- big enough to land a small plane. Probably quite bumpy. It lined up with a gap in the trees which allows for a view of Short Hill in the middle distance. The runway was aspirational -- Dad had owned several airplanes in his youth and he wanted to have a runway, just on principle.  I think only Paul ever landed or took off from that field in his Cessna 140, maybe only a couple of times.

There is a point here!  The point is that the Runway Patch was never tilled or put in production.  And now we will finally use what might be the best soil on the whole farm to grow some vegetables.  I definitely remember fields of incredibly tall Silver Queen corn on both sides of the runway, so we knew the soil was good out there.

All of these thoughts went through my mind in the hour that I was disking. I hadn't put the whole thing together (the Wheatland farm was purchased 50 years ago, so this is 50 years of different people's priorities and choices to ponder). Mostly that soil just made my heart sing. My turn to set the priorities, and this will be a new adventure.

    Casey plowing last fall. We haven't used the plow in a very, very long time but it was just sitting in        the bushes, ready to go.

     Casey planting cover crop with our new no-till drill, planting into kind of roughly tilled soil. I wish I    had taken a picture of the field yesterday...

Greens With Bugs

This may not be fair, to create a whole post around a single, unique encounter. But it is an example of the kinds of interactions that happen all the time between people who are unprepared for natural world experiences and farmers.

This is a true story. I am not making anything up.

I got an email tonight:

Hope you are doing well. I purchased organic mixed greens for $5 on Saturday in courthouse at the farmers market. We opened the bag at home and noticed at least 15 small green alive bugs. As a result we had to toss the greens. I was wondering if you can issue me a refund due to this. Thank you!

Now, to be totally fair, no one really wants to find green alive bugs in their bag of lettuce.  I wonder whether dead bugs would be better, though. It seems like alive bugs would be much more reassuring. Just think of how fresh those greens must be!

A couple of comments, probably not that important.  We never ever say we are organic because that is illegal. So she was imprecise.  She had to toss the greens.  She was unimaginative. Or she has no water.  Issue her a refund -- how?  She didn't tell me how she spent the money but I am guessing she paid with a credit card.  Should I refund her the full amount or take out the credit card fee which we have already paid?  How should I figure out how to refund her the $5?

I wrote back:

I am sorry about the bugs. I bet they were aphids.  It would be simplest to give you a credit for your next purchase at the market unless you tell me how to send you a check. The next time you go to market, you can just tell them that Hana said you have a $5 credit or you could take this email with you if that seems easier.

If you would rather just have a check, please send me an address and I will get that out to you!

At this time of year, we have a lot of resident tiny bugs that have been hanging out in the warm tunnels.  The simplest thing to do is float the leaves in a sink until everything comes off.  That's what we have to do in our world of non-chemical farming -- we have to figure out how to eat the food even if bugs got there first. 

Before sending that, I had my current daughter-in-residence check it for tone/snarkiness. She said it was okay.  I figured I had given the customer a way to get her money back AND I had told her how to deal with bugs in lettuce.

To my surprise, she said:

Thanks so much!

Do you mind sending me a check? My address is: XXXXX

Appreciate it.

So I wrote her a check, put a stamp on the envelope and thought of all the things I would still like to say.  It's not that she shouldn't complain if she finds bugs in her salad. I was actually hoping that she would say she wasn't ever going to shop at our stand again, and we would be done. But no. She is going to have to deposit this $5 check (I am paying both her credit card fees and her sales tax, without comment) and in the memo line it says:  "refund for greens with bugs."

A guest in the house, someone with skills, looked up this person on the internet.  She is a dermatologist who has worked at NIH.  She is not a medical student. Of course we don't know about how much debt she has. But we do know that she does not know how to float her unsprayed greens in a sink and that she is clear about her rights as a consumer.

This is just one example of many, but somehow it surprised me that she persisted.  

At the other end of the spectrum today: we have a longtime CSA customer who has been out of town for a few weeks and has missed two pickups.  They have been in touch, letting me know that they were returning today and hoped to get two shares. Their tone was warm and appreciative, as it always is.  Because the vegetables from the weekend looked so tired and droopy -- they were picked about five days ago and have been displayed for too long -- I decided to go and pick her some fresh vegetables. This is not normal but these people are so nice (I have no idea what they look like, but they are excellent communicators).  I picked a few heads of beautiful red lettuce, some gorgeous chard, some kale with aphids, and a handful of scallions. I ran some water over it but did not float it in the sink. I collected up some carrots and popcorn and tomato sauce and eggs to round out the share and put the whole thing in an open crate in the room with a note:  DOUBLE DELUXE SHARE.

Tonight I got this message: 

Thank you for the beautiful veggies! I feel like a kid with an Easter basket!

These are the people who make my heart sing. I will do anything for someone who pays full price, ahead of time, sends nice notes, and even sends a thank you note. She will never mention the aphids on the kale because all she saw was how beautiful the leaves were.

 

Guardian Angel, Working Overtime

Lani, my sister who is just 18 months younger than I am, turned 62 this week. This could be considered a miracle, given that she has at least one major brush with disaster each year. This sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. At least once a year she sends an email or a text -- after everything has been resolved enough that no one will panic -- detailing the most recent close call. I am not even sure she tells us all about all the incidents. Some probably don't feel interesting enough to report.

She is a great storyteller, relating everything in one long paragraph, judiciously using all caps from time to time to emphasize how the horse would have said this, or the raccoon, and she tends to minimize the parts where things got very scary.  She spends many hours on the road, often pulling horse trailers loaded with multiple horses. She spends countless hours riding horses, or getting dumped off by horses, or getting accidentally damaged by horses.  Last year she was innocently driving down the road in one of her huge heavy duty trucks and a giant tree fell directly on her cab, leaving branches both in front and behind. She drives a truck with a super reinforced bumper on the front because she has collided with so many deer over the years that she decided it was time to protect the truck from so many repeat trips to the body shop. This bumper may have played a role in deflecting the weight of the tree. She and her partner have stopped driving lightweight vehicles and have a fleet of the heaviest and most cumbersome trucks imaginable, partly because highway driving is so fraught. If you spend enough hours driving in the night, you learn that people do really crazy and dangerous things, like entering the highway on an on-ramp and getting confused and driving directly perpendicular to the flow of traffic.  Lani says her insurance man thinks she might be immortal but he will never ride with her.

Unlike me, but much like our father, Lani is a risk taker.  I must take after our mother as I am far more conservative about the way I move through space, and how I use my body. My mother and I are in it for the long haul.  Our father, Tony, was overconfident and fearless from a young age. His childhood friends describe dangerous escapades, near misses, a fair amount of gasoline, and driving down Beulah Road, using the snowbanks on the side to bounce from one side to the other.  Those are the genes that Lani has inherited and exploited, following in Dad's tracks to the point of owning an airplane when she was in her early 20s and continuing on through the years with horses and trucks, recklessly.

She doesn't think of herself as reckless. She is careful.  It's true that she pays attention and she keeps herself well equipped with safety gear and is also surrounded by a supportive crew. But she can't say that her choices are safe all the time -- she has had more concussions and broken collarbones than she has ever told us about. Her hair turned white long ago from all the times her helmet got cracked on impact. Last year when the EMTs were checking them over after a particularly horrendous accident, she told them the bruises on her face and body were pre-existing -- she had just finished an endurance ride, completing it after she had fallen and broken her collarbone. She was one big purple bruise and she didn't need to go to the hospital. Her injuries were unrelated to the current crash.

But the point of all this backstory is that Lani has come to believe that she has a guardian angel.  She doesn't think it is the guardian angel's job to rescue her, and she can't count on this angel always being attentive, but she is fortunate that this angel has been watching over her just enough.

Two years ago, when I was minding my own business on a tractor, driving on level ground very slowly, a large dead locust tree fell on me.  This was one of those times when Lani and I might possibly be sharing the same guardian angel (she thinks his name is Tony). This would make sense. I don't have so many occasions to require Tony, but I can believe that he would watch over both of us. This was an example of pure dumb luck. I easily could have died or been permanently maimed.  The tree fell all around me (it had many branches) and it dented the hood of the tractor, but I was not scratched.

Last year I was minding my own business on a tractor, driving on level ground very slowly, and trying to figure out why the spader was leaving such unusual tracks behind me. Usually the ground is left without a tire track, but something was unexplainably weird. I kept looking at the spader to try to figure it out.  Finally I glanced down to my left and, in an instant, had my doubts that I remembered what I was supposed to be seeing. Nothing looked right.  I stopped, put the tractor in neutral and got off. The rear tire (taller than I am, full of water, weighing maybe 2000 pounds but that is a wild guess) had worked its way to the end of the axle and was within moments of coming off the end. I did not get back on the tractor. I reached up and turned off the key and walked away.

That is what I was taught to do, 50 years ago. When something goes wrong, turn off the tractor, get off and go for help.  You might think that in all these years I would have a more nuanced response. But I don't. Our dad has been gone for 39 years now, and some of the lessons of my youth have not been revised in the interim. My guardian angel has kept me from getting crushed, and now it is my job to get help.

If you spend enough time on a tractor, eventually almost everything that can fall off will fall off. That's what I decided yesterday when a pin fell off, disconnecting an arm way underneath me where I couldn't see. I could see, once again, that something was terribly wonky behind me. I turned off the tractor, got off, looked at the problem, and started walking.  (You would think in this day and age I would just use my cell phone, but I didn't have it with me.) This was not one of those times I really required a guardian angel, but it did bring him to mind. Before he became our guardian angel, he taught us as much as he could -- mostly about being attentive.

He didn't teach Lani anything about avoiding risk, but so far the two of them have managed to keep her going.  They are like two peas in a pod, even though Lani would never say that herself.  And somehow she has lived to be 13 years older than he ever did, so maybe our mother's genes are helping to balance the equation.

Mom's Piano

Some of my very earliest memories happened underneath the piano.  Our box of blocks was down there, and we played in the little cave below the soundboard, on the other side of the pedals.  Sometimes we played while my mother practiced above our heads. It was loud.  Mozart and Beethoven and Debussy were the soundtrack of our youngest years.

This piano has been part of our lives since before my siblings and I can remember.  Our mother was a pianist from childhood, our father felt strongly that she should have a piano, they found one in a classified ad in the newspaper and they spent as much on the piano as six months of mortgage payments for the house they bought around that time. We all understood how special Mom's piano was.

We will always remember the house fire, 48 years ago, when our parents rescued the piano after our father cut the legs off with a chain saw so they could get it through the front door.  For a day, the piano sat in the front yard, on its sawed-off legs, before it was moved to Harvey Helms' barn for safekeeping.

After the house was rebuilt, the piano returned (with legs that were a different color from the body), although I don't have a memory of where it was in the house because I went to college soon after. When my youngest sister had ballet recitals, my mother was pressed into service as an accompanist, and there was a flurry of practicing around those events.

The household gradually disbanded as the rest of my siblings went off to college and our parents split up. Charles, the most sentimental one of all, moved the dusty piano to the Moutoux Barn for his wedding ceremony ten years later.

Fast forward another 5 years or so, and there were now two young cousins taking piano lessons and other cousins playing string instruments. From time to time, my mother (Grandma) was recruited as an accompanist to the next generation.  

By the time we moved to Blueberry Hill, our middle child was the most dedicated pianist in the bunch. My mother said that our daughter could inherit her piano, and this seemed like a good time to trade Mom's baby grand for the spinet we had.  So Mom's piano moved into our living room.

When the pianist daughter was soon to leave for college, I realized there would be a very large and silent instrument taking up a serious amount of real estate in our crowded house.  I needed to do something. I began to take piano lessons.

I don't know why I thought I would ever be like my mother or my daughter, but I will never get to their level. Never ever.  It is possible I have some of their aptitude, but I do not practice nearly as much as either of them ever did. By now I have been taking piano lessons for 16 winters and I can read music, I can count, I am good with scales, I have some very rudimentary understanding of music theory, and I am probably as good as a fifth grader who doesn't practice much but who has a good ear.

But I have reached the place where practicing is fun. I want to practice whenever I get a chance, I love my lessons, and it is so satisfying to be learning something all the time. And the best part is that I have a duet partner and we always have a duet to work on. Somehow, even though I am mostly a winter pianist, I have managed to keep up well enough to play with my duet partner -- we are a perfect match. 

Today we sat down together at her piano and we diligently used every practice method our wonderful teacher has tried to drill into us. We went backwards by measure, we blocked and bounced, we counted aloud, we did two measures at a time over and over, we breathed in unison. And after an hour, smoke was coming out of our ears and we had mastered some more sections of our duet.

My mother's piano will go to our middle child when she has a place that is big enough, and in the meantime, I will keep playing this precious instrument.  I feel like I am keeping it warm until it gets back to a real pianist. And I don't care anymore that I will never play anything long and complicated. When I started my lessons back when I was 47 years old, I had three goals: to read music, to be able to sightread something, and to play musically.  Those goals were so realistic, and I didn't even know that the real goal was to play duets. That is the best of all.

Playing duets with my mother is actually the very best of all, but I have to practice for about four months before I tell her I am ready for her to sit down with me. It takes her about 15 minutes to catch up to me.  For a few years now, we have played a duet at the Blueberry Hill recital every June, and that is about as good as it gets.