Slow is Smooth...

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but "forgot" to publish it.  Also, pictures don't correspond with writing. Sorry!)  

Certainly, the weather affects everyone.  But as a farmer, it goes beyond just affecting your mood.  It started raining on Tuesday, and is expected to continue, on and off, for (Yikes!) the next two weeks.  When it rains, we can't till, we can't dig, we can't weed.  We can't even walk around in the garden very much.  We're basically paralyzed, work-wise. 

In the Central Valley, winter is usually the rainy season.  Typically, it rains from October through February, and then dries up and doesn't rain at all between April and September.  At the Hurley Farm, this prevents the farmers from fall planting.  The soil is heavy with clay and has a shallow hardpan, which means it is slow to dry out and floods easily.  So a slow winter is expected, with lots of opportunities to cozy up in front of the glow of the computer screen and set up budgets and plans. 

This winter, not surprisingly, has not been typical.  Except for a week of rain in December, it's been dry all the way through.  Hence, Eric and I have gotten ahead in the garden, shaping beds and planting our first successions, planned for early March, in late January.  We've been busy, and I had started to believe that the rain would never come.  But then it did.  And while it comes at a thoroughly inconvenient time, there's nothing we can do about it.  No matter what we'd like to do, we're at the mercy of the rain gods.

A view of the Hurley Farm during brighter times.

So this week I've spent a lot of Q.T. in front of the old MacBook, trying out different coffee shops in town and finally getting through the daunting task of estimating our monthly profits and losses for the season.  Eric has midterms, so he's able to hunker down and study. 

Our first harvest!

With this forced break from busily 'doing' in the garden, some unexpected but important revelations have come up in both of us.  They've manifested themselves in different ways, but ultimately boil down to, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast," a military saying easily applied to most things in life.  Slowing down means you're more likely not to make mistakes, which makes things smoother and ultimately faster.  Eric and I are eerily similar in certain respects.  We are both impulsive and tend to jump into tasks without fully thinking them through.  This has already resulted in many "learning opportunities.”  This is not a bad thing, as we are learning an enormous amount from our mistakes, and have the amazing opportunity to learn this way through this second year of training.  But it is true that the real stress is just around the corner, with summer harvest season bringing with it more to do than there is time in the day.  Soon we won't have time to spend hours fixing mistakes we could have avoided by slowing down and thinking things through.  

So I spent part of my rainy-day time yesterday adding all of our seeding, sowing, and transplanting dates to our main wall calendar, a no-brainer maybe for those of you planning-oriented folks, but an oversight to yours truly, causing a frantic afternoon and evening of bed shaping yesterday (until 8pm) before the rain started, so that they'll be ready for their scheduled planting (hopefully) during a break from the rain next week. 

I'm so proud of these leafy little greens.

I’ve been trying to take the “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” mantra to work with me at OneSpeed.  My shifts are often super busy, with more customers to get to than I can reach as quickly as I’d like.  The mistakes I’ve made have been during these busiest shifts, when I failed to take the time to double-check my order pad before sending the order through the computer to the kitchen.  I seem to trust my memory more than I should.  Luckily nothing dire has happened yet, but nothing will change if I don’t change the way I operate, remembering the carpenter’s motto of “Measure twice, cut once” and taking the time to double-check my orders before I send them to the kitchen.  I can only afford to buy the guys in the kitchen so many rounds of drinks for putting up with me :).

The proud, nerdy farmers.

Fortunately, the rain won’t last forever.  The ground will dry up, and all of the “getting ahead” we’ve done this winter will have vanished, replaced by more tasks than we have time to complete.  But hopefully the lesson will stick, and we’ll end up with less time lost to fixing mistakes and more time to revel in the beautiful life we get to tend this year.  

Coming back

I've had itchy fingers for a while now.  I've had lots of time to think, and I've found bits of narrative floating through my brain, just begging to be written down.  A few weeks ago, I listened to the audiobook version of David Sedaris's  When You are Engulfed in Flames, which he narrates in his delightfully dry, nasal voice.  That week David Sedaris narrated my thoughts.  It was awesome.

But I haven't written a post since last June, and, though these fingers have been itching since at least January, it's taken me until now to take the plunge.  To be honest, I've struggled the most with the question of honesty and audience.  I am so eager to share what I'm doing and thinking, but at the same time, I'm scared to death of just that.  My written self is way more revealing than my spoken self; it's scary to think about how much I'm exposing through these posts.  On the other hand, I love having an audience,  and I think that, however uncomfortable, the vulnerability I feel because of what I share with "the world" is ultimately a good thing.

And while I also struggle do decide who I want to write for (for me? or for you?  Both, I think, but who more?), I know that I often feel very, very far away from many of the most important people in my life, and I want so badly for them to know about my life on the other side of the country.

So my (growing) season resolution will be to sit down and write, every now and again.  I'm not going to fuss with finding the perfect words, or the perfect photo to fit the post, because those details, I find, have more often kept me away from the keyboard.  I will sit, I will write, I will click the "Publish" button, and I will share my stories with whoever wants to read them.  Starting now.

There is SO much to tell, and I just can't let it pile up anymore!  One month ago, Eric and I moved from "The Ranch" where we had lived for eleven months (first in tents, then, starting in December, in a room in "The Duplex" with the rest of the farm staff), to the Hurley Farm, or more precisely, "The Farm on Hurley Way."  This is the one and a half-acre backyard farm that the founders of Soil Born Farms took over twelve years ago and slowly transformed into a Garden of Eden in the middle of a sprawly, shopping plaza-filled neighborhood.  Eric and I have been given the amazing opportunity to farm this little jewel for Soil Born as contractors through a farmer training grant from the USDA.  After learning the ropes last season on the ranch, this year we will attempt to apply what we've learned and see what it's like to be new farmers, with the bonus support of our mentors at Soil Born.   We live on-site at the Hurley Farm, and have a significant amount of autonomy, which is both liberating and scary.

So far, things are going really well.  Winter has skipped the Central Valley this season, and instead of the rain cloud that usually camps out over Sacramento from November through February, we've had nothing but blue skies and mild weather.  Which means that instead of starting planting in early March (this week), we started back in January, and have been shaping garden beds and readying the farm for the season ever since.  We're going to grow a range of produce this season, which we'll sell to Soil Born for the CSA and farm stand, as well as to a few restaurants in Sacramento, including my new employer, OneSpeed Pizza, which makes ridiculously delicious pizzas out of high-quality, responsibly-sourced ingredients.  I started serving there two nights a week in January, which has been a great complement to the farm bubble.


One of the exciting projects we're taking on this year is raising ducks!  We now have twelve hilarious Indian Runner ducks, most of which are much bigger than they were in this photo, and happily living outside in their own little house, spending their days running around in a cluster and munching on grass.  We will move them around on some of our garden beds when they get a little bigger, eating up the slugs and aphids and weeds, and will lay yummy eggs for us to eat and maybe sell.  We also snagged a bunch of hens from the Ranch, so we are poultry farmers now, doing morning "animal chores" and deriving entertainment from watching these little ones and wrangling chickens when they get out of their "paddock."  (I've got to get Eric tackling a chicken on video one of these days, it's hilarious!).

Much more to tell, but I'm spent! Also satisfied to be at it again.  Thanks for reading!  It feels good to be back.