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...
