Is it October yet?

This phrase became a running joke during the most brutal days of summer last year at the River Ranch. "Is it October yet?"  During the time when most of our time--nearly every day--was spent harvesting endless rows of tomatoes, the weeks stretched on interminably, and it seemed there was no end in sight.  "Is it October yet?" was code for, I need a friggin' break.  October, we were told, was when things finally slow down.  Days are shorter, so the workday starts later, the weather is pleasant, and the bulk of the harvesting is in the past.

That phrase definitely came up a few times this summer between Eric and I.  The weeks before the Fall Equinox Fundraiser at the Hurley Farm, on September 22, were frenetic, with extra hands on the farm helping to mow, weed-wack, weed, and beautify the place for the big party.  It felt great to see the place all spiffed up, and so gratifying to have so many people come that evening, and to join them in eating great food, drinking free microbrews and celebrating a great season.

Michele and Hurley, all dressed up for the Fall Equinox.

And then, it was October.  After the fundraiser, I really started to feel like the season was ending. Most of our plants had been pulled, our tomatoes were slowing down, and we're due to finish now in less than two weeks!  We've spent the past couple of weeks slowing down, treating our sore bodies to yoga classes again for the first time since spring, waking up a little later, and enjoying the lack of stress and the absence of that feeling of too-much-to-do.

I thought taking the tomatoes down last week would be bittersweet, but it turns out, it wasn't so hard to see them go.  Eric and I were finally sick of tomatoes--even the giant, tangy heirlooms--and have rediscovered our love for winter squash, kale, and arugula.   Eating seasonally is great in this way, because each seasonal change brings newness and excitement at the return of the vegetables six months ago you never wanted to eat again.  It's kind of like the first day of school, except instead of homework, you get to cook delicious food :).

Some of the winter squash, pre-harvest.

Fall out here is nothing like fall in the Northeast.  It was 87 degrees today.  It still hasn't rained since May, and the only fall colors we have are the golds and rusts of dried out grasses and shrubs.  Fall is more like spring in the way that, despite the lack of rain, new growth comes from cool nights and dew lingering longer in the morning.  Spring crops come back--our rhubarb plant has exploded with the cooler weather, and the strawberries have picked up again (for real!).  There are still apples and pears and pumpkins.  I kind of like the Central Valley autumn, even without the leaf peeping and sweaters.

Tomatoes are down, and pigs are enjoying their "last meal."
(You can see their cute ears peeking from behind the white tent, on the right.)

In a couple of weeks, the field and garden at the Hurley Farm will be tucked in for the winter under a blanket of cover crop, Boda the pig will be "harvested" and in the freezer, and Eric and I will be closing the door on this little adventure in hand-scale farming.  At some point this winter, we'll move back to the River Ranch, into "the duplex," over there, into one of the two staff apartments (the cozier side), and I'll be moving into a couple of new roles at Soil Born.   I'm excited about winter at the Ranch.  It's lambing time, and three little babies have been born this week.  There will be two calves, in February and March, which means fresh raw milk again!  The farm is beautiful and quiet in the winter, with everything green and damp, the animals fattening up on lush winter pasture.  It will be such a gift to have the river and the parkway next door, and a bit more of a buffer from the concrete jungle of "parking lot-landia," that is outer Sacramento.  I couldn't be happier that it's October, and that finally, the dog days are over.

 Here are some of the ways I've taken advantage of "October":

Eric and I played hooky and went to the beach in Half Moon Bay

Ian and Anila came for the weekend and we visited the Ranch....

....and then we visited Meg in San Francisco

I went on a gorgeous solo overnight hike in Desolation Wilderness, near Tahoe.

This is how happy it made me.

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.

The Sweetest Fruit

I ate a ripe peach off a tree on Monday. This morning we harvested our first gorgeous, multi-colored potatoes for a restaurant order. And this afternoon I reached down into the depths of the tomato plant jungle I was trellising and plucked the first burstingly juicy, ripe Sungold cherry tomato. The lunch Emily and I made today had summer squash in every dish. It's official: summer is HERE!!

It's been months since I last wrote. For a while I felt a nagging twinge of guilt whenever I'd think about how long it'd been since I last wrote a blog post. But then I got over it. I'd write again when I felt like it! In the meantime, I was busy living (and loving) the life I wasn't writing about. Nothing wrong with that!

Admittedly, there are weeks that have been harder to savor than others, days when I find myself glancing at my watch, living from break to break, losing patience with the endless weeding stretching from here to October. But then the fruit started coming, and I now understand how unspeakably precious this food is, for the patience and the dedication and the sweat and the sore backs and the love and the sore feet and the sunburns and the blisters that made it possible. Growing food is hard! Growing good food, in a way that leaves the earth you use and the people you feed better than they were before, is REALLY hard. And indescribably important. I'm so blessed to be able to help out.


The L-R-B (Leaf/Root Block)


Weeding the Squishes.

Our first pepper, just hangin' out.



My first tiny-tomato bite.



And finally, some potato portraits....


Greg.

Guy.

Cristina.

Eric.
Emily.


And Me.