Читать книгу A Bushel's Worth - Kayann Short - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIn early spring, flats of seeds germinate quickly in the warm greenhouse.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
—Lao Tzu
The first workday with the bartering crew at Stonebridge Farm falls in early spring with snow almost invariably on the ground. But this year the day is uncharacteristically sunny, although the mountains had threatened to send snow our way the day before. We need moisture, but the warmth is welcome too on this first day as we set the new farm season in motion. Here we are again, ready to make soil and plant seeds and clean the winter-deadened debris from the land.
Before we get to work, we gather around the woodstove in the Sunflower Community Room with cups of tea and coffee, saying hello after a winter’s absence and sharing stories after four months of Saturdays not spent in the garden together. Sometimes a new baby, new job, travel overseas, or, sadly, the death of a loved one, have brought us to an altered phase of our lives, yet the farm and its cycles of care mark a continuity for all of us. Because Stonebridge is a community supported agricultural farm, we like to say we emphasize the “C” in “CSA” since the work we do here is as much about people as produce.
Spring at Stonebridge wasn’t always such a joyous return. In earlier years of the CSA, the fall fields were often left unturned and no cover crops were sown to prepare the soil for the next spring’s planting, as if the farmers had thrown down their tools one autumn day and wandered off for warmer climates. In those earlier times, before the barterers provided stability for the farm, the strain of finishing the season was so great, no one could imagine doing it again just a few months later. With full-time jobs outside of the farm, John and I couldn’t do all the work ourselves after the partners we’d had along the way left for jobs or farms of their own. We knew that we wanted to keep the community focus of Stonebridge, rather than market our produce off the farm, so we turned to that community for help.
In 2000, John and I initiated a bartering structure at Stonebridge that asked a handful of members to exchange farm work for their seasonal share of vegetables. We had read about bartering at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts, the first CSA in the United States, and it seemed to us the perfect way to build the social structure of the farm. To our surprise and delight, some exceptional people took us up on the offer and the bartering crew began. The barterers work four hours a week for eight months a year, from March through October, in exchange for their share of vegetables, starting two months before the official CSA season begins. Now a community has formed around the work, and, come mid-March, everyone is excited to farm together once more.
Hands and hearts warmed by fire and friends, we turn to the morning’s tasks. After we list the possibilities—some folks can do this, other folks can do that—one seven-year-old “barterer” adds, “And some people can climb the big tree over the ditch!” Chores chosen, we finish our last sips of coffee and head out in groups to begin the new season’s work of waking up the farm in the spring sunshine.
With the bright white peaks of the mountains to the west reassuring us that we will again have water to irrigate the fields, some of us set up a seed-starting assembly line in the cozy greenhouse. While Sarah, Andy, Mike, and Jenny make the mixture we use for starts by combining peat, sand, compost, and soil dug from the fields, Jay, Michelle, and Joe make blocks with a tool that compresses the moistened mix into four cubes that look like chocolate brownies with dimples on top to hold the seed. Last but not least in our assembly line, Julie, Eva, and Deirdre drop and cover the seeds in the dimples of the newly blocked flats.
Since we’ve already seeded the alliums in February, the earliest plants for the bartering crew to start each spring are the brassicas: cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, and cabbages. As we work, we can’t help but sing a line from our friend Coyote Joe’s song, “The Things You Do”: Kohlrabi just tastes a little bit funny. And it is funny-looking, like a round spaceship with antennaed leaves sprouting from its dome. Together, we fill 38 flats with 50 blocks per flat: 1900 new plants that will be transplanted when the weather warms. Before too many weeks have passed, flats will fill every nook and cranny, shelf and ledge, of the entire greenhouse. With our hands in the soil, we gain a first work morning’s satisfaction of creating nice, neat rows of starts that will provide food for us later in the season.
While some barterers get seeds started in the greenhouse, others work outside in the spring air. The “Garlic Apostles”—Peter, Paul, and Timothy—took a vow years ago to keep the garlic beds weed-free, so this first day they pull the hay mulch back from the shoots to open the field to sun and assess the garlic’s growth since planting it last fall. It’s a little slow to emerge this year after such a cold winter, the green tips just starting to poke through the soil. Some of the soft-necked bulbs will be harvested in early June for green garlic, while the hard-necked varieties will send up curly scapes, thick middle shoots that carry the plants’ seed heads, which we’ll harvest in mid-June.
Scapes are one of the farm’s surprises: we didn’t figure out for many years that they can be pulled from the center of the plant and used in recipes instead of garlic cloves. Equally important, after the scape is removed, the plant then puts energy into larger bulbs below rather than into flowers at the tip of the scape’s curl. The barterers love to harvest the scapes as they compete to pull the longest scape straight out of the stalk with a pop before it breaks off. While the children make scape bracelets by curling them around their wrists, the adults cry, “Look at this one!” when they harvest one they think is the longest. Scapes are an extra gift from an already generous plant—we pick hundreds of them each June.
While some barterers have adopted the garlic, others have embraced the raspberries, which need yearly attention in our perennially grassy plots. Headed by Jan, our raspberry expert, the raspberry crew not only weeds, but prunes the old canes in anticipation of summer fruit. On that first cool spring day, in gloves and coats, Lisa, Emily, and Lindsay make another valiant attempt to clear the plot of the rhizome grass whose roots crisscross the entire farm.
March in Colorado is still intermittently winter; we get our heaviest snows this month, sometimes even into April. A spring snow is wetter than a snow in December or January; it’s the snow that ensures the mountains’ snowpack and readies our soil for the season. Our first gathering in March is usually snowy, but if the ground is clear of snow, some folks spend the morning raking the ubiquitous sticks scattered across the farm by winter winds. With three irrigation ditches running through our land, Stonebridge is thick in towering willows and cottonwoods that grow along the banks. Kunga and the two Amys fill wheelbarrows full of sticks to dump on the burn pile for a spring bonfire, and as they rake, they find new green grass stretching its blades toward the sun.
Before we know it, noon arrives and the first bartering day is done. We’ve achieved much this spring morning: flats of seeds will soon germinate in the warm greenhouse, garlic and raspberry beds are ready for new growth, and the farm has been tidied for another season. More planting, weeding, and watering must be done if we want fresh vegetables this season, but together, the work will be accomplished. Today we have found again the rhythm of the farm, a rhythm that does not hurry but reminds us why we do what we do here at Stonebridge.
In April, there’s mud. Mud cakes our boots as we work in the rain to ready the farm for the members’ first pick-up day in May. We clean the barn, cup up more tomatoes and peppers that were seeded in flats a few weeks earlier, and weed the bluehouse—so called to differentiate it from the greenhouse—where lettuces are slow to grow in the cold weather. Mud is everywhere. Paul carts wheelbarrows full of wood chips to spread in front of the entrances to the greenhouse and barn. The raspberry weeders kneel in mud and when we gather in the Sunflower Room after our morning’s work, everyone’s boots drag mud onto the (mostly) clean floor. April showers bring . . . mud, a part of spring I’m always happy to see pass.
The greenhouse toad came back at the end of April. We first spotted her on the last Sunday of the month, but we suspected her presence for a week before that from the toad-shaped imprint in the muddy spot between the water irises growing in a bucket in our greenhouse pond. We call it the toad throne because she likes to perch there above her kingdom of floating water lilies. Soon she was joined by another Woodhouse toad and, a couple weeks later, we found three baby toads in the pond as well. Each spring I look for toads in the greenhouse. They seem a lucky omen, a sure sign that spring is finally here.
One spring brought another auspicious pair of creatures to Stonebridge. In April, our daughters and son-in-law were at the farm to plant a Black Walnut tree in memory of John’s dad, Noel Martin, who died the Christmas before. As we walked toward the north end of the farm with our shovels and buckets of compost, I noticed wooly owl pellets on the ground under a cottonwood tree that towers over the garden. I scuffed the pellets with the toe of my shoe to find the skeletal remains of mice and voles and birds. Realizing that the pellets marked the presence of the pair of great-horned owls that have lived at the farm for many years, I looked up into the tree to spot a large owl nest of leaves in the crook of the towering limb. “Look, an owl nest,” I announced, pointing to the tree, but it didn’t occur to me that “nest” might mean “babies,” because we’d never seen any on the farm before.
A few days later, I was showing the nest to the Thursday morning bartering crew when suddenly we realized a baby owl was on the branch next to the nest—and then another came into view. Less than a foot tall, they were so still, like outcrops of the limb itself, that it took a moment to realize they weren’t made of bark, but rather feathers, fuzzy like a puppy’s fur, the owlets’ great round eyes staring at us without movement. As their mother watched protectively nearby, we left them alone and quietly picked spinach in the shade of their nested branch. I came out later to snap a few photos of the babies, hoping I wouldn’t disturb them, but unwilling not to document such astounding creatures. I knew that once grown, their parents would drive them off the farm in search of their own food, but for now, they seemed content to venture further up the tree.
Before the subscription season officially starts the second Saturday in May, the barterers plant two big crops on our early spring Saturdays: alliums and brassicas. It takes the whole crew to transplant these crops from the starts in the greenhouse. Planting in the early spring isn’t easy because we’re not in farming shape yet—especially our knees as we bend and stoop to tuck the plants into the ground. Since most of us are decidedly middle-aged, we joke that in a couple years we’ll be making the dimples that mark our planting spots with our walkers instead of with the tractor.
In the early part of the season, getting started on Saturday mornings is a little like revving up an old engine after a sub-zero night. It takes a few turns of the crank before the gas is flowing again. As if coming out of hibernation, everyone moves slowly in a haze of deliberation, contemplating the work to come. The younger barterers arrive with coffee cups in hand; we all agree we’re not officially awake until the caffeine has kicked in and our bodies have adjusted to the sharp morning air. Kneeling next to each other in the cold fields, the conversation doesn’t start until we shake ourselves awake enough to ask, “What’d you do this week? How are the kids? How’s your shoulder/back/ankle?”
Eventually our muscles loosen and the chatter spills across the bed of tiny onions as we squat, plant, and scoot. We discuss roads not taken, our plans for the summer, money worries, and health. And then, because we’re getting close to lunch-time, the talk turns to the vegetables we’re growing and what delicious dishes we’ll make from them. As we warm up to the work, the spring sunshine, and the soil that’s perfect for planting, we’re thrilled to see such a huge job accomplished in a single morning. We’ve planted 8,000 alliums—several varieties each of leeks and onions, each as tiny as a new blade of grass.
A couple Saturdays later, we transplant the next big crop, the brassicas—broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and kohlrabi. Since these are shorter-season vegetables, we plant fewer brassica starts than alliums, so transplanting goes more quickly, but they need the added step of covering with gauzy row cover to guard them from flea beetles, the garden’s earliest pest. We finish in record time and stand back to survey the fields full of plants we’ll begin to harvest in a few weeks. Now all the transplanting is done until early June when the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and basil go out to the fields, accompanied by the marigolds that help repel undesirable insects and attract the desirable ones. The Thursday crew has already transplanted the annual herbs—dill, cilantro, parsley, and chervil—that we started in the greenhouse this year to beat the weeds rather than seeding directly into the fields.
On opening day, rain was predicted but the sun rises strong and clear. Picking vegetables on opening day follows the same routine every year. After we stand around a few minutes saying good morning and “Here we go!”, we load bikes and bike trailers for transporting vegetables from the fields to the barn with multi-colored plastic picking baskets called trugs and the tools we’ll need for harvesting: forks for digging Jerusalem artichokes and a pocketed bucket with the horis—Japanese digging tools—and clippers.
We start the morning by observing the owl twins and their mom, who has flown off into the trees across the field, perhaps to lead us off the trail from the babies. Then we dig green garlic bulbs that have “volunteered” by planting themselves in last fall’s garden and pick spinach, taking the biggest leaves from the fall-planted bed. Picking spinach elicits our yearly debate: should it be picked quickly, pulling the leaves by the handful, or slowly and deliberately, picking each leaf individually? As always, we say, “Pick it how you’d like to eat it,” so eventually the more discerning manner wins. However it’s picked, all Stonebridge spinach is a delicacy this time of year, sweet, crisp, and very, very green. Spinach is the reason we start our season earlier than other CSAs in our area—it grows well this close to the foothills. Many of our members say they don’t care if we give anything else on opening day. After a long winter, they’re ready for spinach, and lots of it.
As the trugs are filled, the veggies are biked into the barn by the intrepid bikers with a trailer hitched to the back. We used to truck in the produce, but, years ago, decided bicycles were safer and more ecological for trips between field and barn, and the vegetables stay fresher because they’re transported more quickly. Sometimes, though, we get a little ambitious about how much a trailer can hold. You can always tell when a rider has taken the corner on the downhill side of the bridge too quickly from the spinach left in the middle of the road. Walking back to check on the progress in the barn, I follow a Hansel and Gretel trail of spinach leaves, gathering as I go. Spring spinach is so sweet and delicious, I hate to waste a single leaf.
After we finish harvesting the spinach, we dig the walking onions, pungent enough to scent the whole barn, and all the Jerusalem artichokes we can find. We like them sliced and fried in olive oil with a touch of butter, like the “fresh-fried” potatoes my mom makes, a special treat because they demand constant attention to brown without burning. One of our first shared Stonebridge recipes was Jerusalem Artichoke Soup, a response to our members asking, “What do we do with this?” It’s still an early spring favorite among our longest-standing members.
We finish up the pick with rhubarb, harvesting the red stems and slicing off the huge leaves, which shouldn’t be eaten because they contain toxins. This year the crop is a little sparse, but we give enough for a small rhubarb crisp and we’ll pick more in a couple weeks. Maybe the cold, dry winter affected the size and quantity of the rhubarb. Who knows? What we do know is that the same conditions aren’t favorable for every crop. If the spring is cool and long, the broccoli will be happy, but the tomatoes and peppers will be transplanted late. If the spring is short and hot, we can transplant those crops earlier, but the fall-planted spinach will go to seed not long after the season begins. Today we are giving beautiful spinach, walking onions, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb, and gourds we dried over the winter. Most years, radishes, lettuce, and Asian greens join the list; with this year’s cool spring, they’re on their way. In just two weeks, we’ll give twice that variety of vegetables, and by August, three times that again, but for this first pick, the real share is a welcome to another season at Stonebridge.
By ten o’clock, we shed our sweatshirts and are soon down to our shirtsleeves. With the pick biked in for our barn boss, Eva, to count, weigh, and arrange in the barn, we weed the strawberries and the rose garden until it is time to meet the new members at eleven o’clock by the barn. John gives his annual safety talk: be careful near the ditches, stay with your children at all times, don’t play on the equipment, watch for “leaves of three, let them be” poison ivy. Following his talk, I lead the tour to familiarize new members with the fields and the layout of the farm. As we walk out toward the largest field, I don’t intend to mention the new owls because I’m concerned that a large group of people might frighten the mother into abandoning the babies, but someone spots some barterers pointing at the nest in the tree, so the owlets become the stars of the tour after all. I’m secretly glad everyone sees them—how often does anyone get to see twin great-horned owlets that close?—and the owls don’t seem too disturbed at the uninvited attention.
Soon the farm is full of happy people welcoming the first vegetables of the season and revisiting their favorite Stonebridge spots. While I’m chatting with new members, I hear squawking; some young boys have let the chickens out of the coop and I have to shoo them (the chickens, not the boys) back inside. Slippy, our irascible black goat, butts the fence next to a couple children who have been inviting her to play. “That means NO!” exclaims the little girl to her littler brother, interpreting the body language of goats with a giggle. A returning member has brought a friend and their children for a picnic and they share the delicious “friendship bread” she baked. In the barn, Eva helps new members figure out the scales. If the weights aren’t set correctly, one pound of spinach might end up filling a whole bag. “That must be too much,” announces one subscriber. He’s right: the pound weight was set on “one” to start rather than “zero.” Weighing vegetables is a great way to teach kids mathematical skills and some common sense as well. What does a pound of spinach look like? Feel like? Taste like?
Opening day marks a new beginning on the farm, one that enlivens the land with the busyness of many more humans. Once the pick-up season begins on that second Saturday in May, time changes too. Each week is now marked by Saturdays, when the farm bustles with people walking and talking, slowing down their city ways, and noticing the natural world around them. Asking people to walk from the parking area below rather than drive up to the barn doesn’t just increase safety on the driveway and the bridge, but creates a transitional space as they stroll up the gravel drive and cross the irrigation ditch to the barn. That walk is an invitation to enter the natural pace of the farm.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. From the water streaming in the ditches to the grass growing in the meadow and the birds chirping in the trees, nothing on the farm says, “Hurry.” We have to slow down to match nature’s pace. To live and work on the farm, we must come to a different understanding of “accomplishment,” one not measured by our résumés or awards or bank accounts, but by how well we care for this land and each other, our small part in sustaining the greater world around us.
After we’ve picked and counted and greeted and welcomed and toured and talked, John and I walk back to the house for lunch and naps. Opening day has been perfect this year, the kind of spring day when working outside feels like play. We are grateful for the community of Stonebridge members that returns us to the fields each day. The start of another farm season has begun with its familiar rhythm: We work, we wait, and the earth gives again.
