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.