Filling Out Forms

When Dave told me about the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops program, I immediately shrugged it off. I don’t like getting into the crowd of people who are looking for free money. And filling out forms from the government is just daunting. That is not my department.

Last year we applied for a grant to try to build a commercial kitchen (there is no way to imagine having enough money to do that project without help) and it took hours and hours of conversations and number-crunching and design revisions. I didn’t do it. Katherine did it – she has been doggedly trying to find a way to get this kitchen built. It seemed like we could be good candidates for this grant. We met the requirements. The Infrastructure and Jobs Act was practically written for us. We didn’t get the grant and we will never know why, but that was so much work that it reaffirmed my aversion to grant writing.

Dave insisted that this one was easy. It was designed for farmers like us, he said. The first thing I needed to do was find out if we are already in the system with the Farm Service Agency. He gave me the phone number and a link to the website and told me to do it. I looked at all the forms and decided to sit on it for a few days. Then I wrote to Katherine and asked her to look at it to see if it seemed like a good idea.  After a few days she wrote back to say it looked do-able and she could help. At the time, we were away on the annual Newcomb retreat, so I decided to wait until we got home before tackling it.

I have found that whenever something seems hard and I don’t want to do it – kind of like homework – if I sit on it for a while and do a little poking at it, and don’t try to really confront it right away, it gets easier. This might be the opposite approach from normal people, but I just need it to settle a little, stop looking so hard. When we were learning a whole new system for CSA registration – a really complicated, oversized system that wasn’t designed for us – I would wait a few days after each lesson before looking at the notes and instructions. And then it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and I could always ask for more help if I needed it. That’s really the lesson: I can always ask for more help, once I figure out the right questions.

The program opened on December 10. Apparently, they were trained to answer questions about it on the afternoon of December 9. The deadline is January 8. In between there was Christmas and a possible government shutdown and New Years and then a government-closing snow storm.

It’s true that the forms were not completely daunting, but they needed to be filled out in quadruplicate (not kidding) because we are a corporation with three owners. There were forms on Highly Erodible Land Conservation, one that certified that none of us earns more than $900,000 a year – hilarious – and a form that will allow them to look at our books for the last three years. I also needed to calculate how much of our earnings come from crops that we grow versus those that we buy for the CSA. That was a good exercise. Now I know exactly where the missing money is from 2024 – we grew and sold $100,000 fewer vegetables in 2024 than the year before.  That explains it. It’s not that we threw away lots of surplus food. We failed to produce it in that super heat, combined with drought. 

But I digress. Some of the forms were exempt from the Paperwork Reduction Act. Some were not.  Luckily, the FSA lady filled out the hardest ones for me by asking the questions in plain English and then checking the boxes on her computer. Completely different from homework, really. You can’t just call someone and ask them to do it for you when it is homework. Being a grown-up is much better.

I put on a few extra layers and trudged through the snow to get signatures from my mother and Carrie.  Came back and dumped the pile on Rebecca’s desk and she quickly scanned it all and I sent it off to join the rest of the applications that are coming in from all over the country on the last day.

It’s an unusual offer. They are specifically offering assistance to small farms that grow everything but corn and soybeans and hay. Cut flowers even count.  Apparently they have two billion dollars to divide up between all the farmers who somehow manage to get all the documents in during that chaotic month.  No one has said how they will decide how much to give to each farm but they warn us that the pie could get divided into very small slices. That’s okay. Who ever heard of even having a pie like this? But this is an example of government trying to do something useful for people like us. It doesn’t happen very often and we should take note, before the next administration comes in and tries to take the government apart.

There is no timeline attached to this. The whole thing is a little vague. But I appreciate that someone thought it was important to try to do something to support farmers like us.   And Dave said that he heard that they will be distributing the funds in January. That sounds unlikely. But stay tuned.

 

Wood Heat, A Long Story

For all the years that I have lived in Virginia (therefore, skipping the winters of 1976 - 1985), my house has been heated with a wood stove. I don't really mean "my" house, as I have never lived by myself in any house and therefore I have never been truly responsible for the firewood part of heating with wood.

Way, way back in the late 1960s, our family lived in the cottage. There were many discomforts of home, but when you are one of four children, aged 9-7-5-3, and your parents are in charge of everything, you don't really think about comfort or discomfort. They handled the heat. The cottage was very small, the wood stove was primitive, it got cold at night but there was always a spot to stand if you wanted to get warmed up. Our career as kindling collectors started there. It was a kiddie job to keep a supply of dry kindling ready. 

When we moved into the big house (which was not actually big, but compared to the cottage...), after we stopped renting it to other people, my parents switched from using the oil furnace to burning wood in an Ashley stove -- in those days it seemed kind of fancy because it had a finished metal sheath around it which made it impossible to burn yourself by touching it by mistake. The house had a homemade chimney (meaning, built by Dad) which was a stack of cinderblocks, cemented together, and a stovepipe went up the middle.  Not quite to code. It worked for four years and then we had a house fire when a crack formed in the ceramic collar that went through the wall to connect to the stove pipe. That was the end of that particular wood stove set-up.

The rebuilt house had a big central chimney with four heavy duty flues in it. One for the fireplace, one for the new woodstove, one for the woodburning water heater and one for a future woodburning device upstairs. Needless to say, our kindling collecting days were far from over. The water heater (Dad brought back a whole pickup truck load of $25 water heaters from Mexico and sold them, paying for his trip, or at least part of it), had a small firebox at the base and you had to light a fire for about 15 minutes if you wanted hot water for a shower. The woodstove was sophisticated enough to burn all night without needing a refill. The fireplace was big enough for chunky, long pieces of wood. The upstairs stove never materialized. All the bedrooms were unheated.

When I moved away from home, I thought I would never have to collect kindling or load firewood again.  But I didn't know who I would end up marrying.  

After a couple of years of cushy living in DC where heat just came out of the vents, Jon and I moved into a dilapidated little house in McLean that had running water and electricity but no heat. Timothy gave us his Ashley stove and we were right back in the wood cutting, wood hauling, wood stacking, wood burning game. Jon had never done all of that before but he was totally ready to do it. We learned which kinds of wood are easy to split and which are just impossible. Gum is truly impossible. Our house was never all that warm. Who knows if it actually had insulation. We were only paying $150 a month for rent, so we didn't feel the need to complain. We always say that Benjamin learned to walk very early because he wanted to get off the floor as soon as possible.

We bought a real house, solidly built, with all systems intact, after we had a second baby. But Jon was hooked on the wood heat and we ordered a big stove that could fit lots of wood and burn all night and heat the whole house, except under the eaves and down in the basement.   As soon as we signed the papers for the house, we ordered the stove from a one-of-a-kind business about three miles down the road, right next to Thelma's old store. He kept putting us off with a delivery date, even though he took all the money up front. Eventually, he got the stove for us and then he told us that he was going out of business but he had really wanted to get us that stove before he did. We were his last customers and he told us that my father had been his first customer -- that's why he didn't want to disappear with our money.

I mention "under the eaves" because two weeks after moving in we learned the limits of the wood stove when temperatures dropped below 10 degrees and froze some pipes.  We got lucky -- I walked into the kitchen just as the water started pouring through the kitchen ceiling and we had recently had a full house tour so I knew where to find the big valve that turned off all the water to the house. After that we used our furnace when things got frigid.

When we built the Blueberry Hill house, we chose the alcove and chimney that allowed for a wood stove in the living room. We felt constrained by the size of the stove, after living with a big Vermont Castings-type model, but we had no choice. We did choose one of the houses that was closest to the parking lot, knowing that we would be hauling firewood. That was one of the main reasons we chose this site. And for 20-some years, Jon continued to cut, split, and haul firewood. My main job has been to help to get it moved up onto the porch. 

In the last couple of years, this firewood work has been too much for Jon. We still have stacks of split wood stashed in sheds, but the inventory is shrinking. A firewood fairy appeared out of the blue.  A local landscaper with a long relationship to our farm (dumping leaves here instead of going to the dump) mentioned to me that he keeps his guys busy in the summer by cutting firewood and he has plenty. I paid a nominal amount for the first few loads but then he stopped accepting payment. He has saved a lot of money over the last 20 years, piling his leaves here, so I guess he just thinks of it as a trade. 

And then, in yet another firewood fairy twist, Jim decided today to move the recently-dumped firewood onto our porch before the snow. We have had a series of helpers in the last few winters, carrying wood up the stairs, but Jim took it to another level. We feel so rich. We know we don't need to burn wood -- we have geothermal heat and solar panels -- but we have stayed warm with a wood stove for 40 years and it is what makes winter so cozy.