2023 Season

I haven't written anything about this.  So, now, as 2024 starts up... a brief summary of the past year.

At this time last year, I had signed up 9 people for  my first attempt at a CSA--one with a modest fee and setting modest expectations, with hopes of surpassing what I had promised.

A late frost just after the "last frost date" caused considerable challenges as I had put in half of my tomatoes just days earlier.  Taking every available container in my house, I tried to cover them for the night, using row cover, and every other option that I thought might work.  I only lost maybe half of those and was able to replace them a couple of weeks later with extra starts I'd grown, in case of such an occurrence--not an effiencient way to go, but as a beginner, I wanted to deliver.  Every thing started producing just a bit later than I'd anticipated, so that my greens were not yet abundant when the share began, but I sent out a note to these very understanding shareholders who knowingly signed up with me, having seen what I'd done the year before and with full knowledge of my inexperience. I told them that I would still be able to deliver on the contracted number of weeks, but that those weeks would shift later into September than originally planned.  And I invited them to come get some of what I did have to offer.

Eventually, I had plenty of kale, chard, peas, spring onion, some lettuce and the strawberries were a joy.  Sparkle variety is small but so delicious!! We all really enjoyed the flavor and the bounty.  Things were coming along well.

The broccoli took 3 plantings before I got cardboard rings around them to create an obstacle for cutworms, and on the final planting of them, I hid them between parsley and cilantro in a 30 inch bed, and suddenly they took off, growing rapidly and without pests (different location too).  I had been training the cucs up the trellis, and it all looked pretty good, delicata growing, eggplant still under row cover, and I had managed to interrupt the Colorado Potato Beetle by carefully inspecting the undersides of each plant and removing their eggs.  I'd planted carrots 4 different ways, finding that a raised bed seemed to really  be working well and was quite manageable. Snow peas were everywhere. I couldn't keep up with picking them, even with telling my CSA people to take all they could use.

Then July 20th happened--the deluge-- with the water so deep I could see nothing of the 6 foot poles that had supported my fence. I thought they had all been swept away.  I watched from up the hill as a pallet with $100 of straw bales stacked 3 to a layer on it floated off across the field, headed for the Mill River.  My compost bins and everything I'd built washed away.  My shed, lifted up, even with 5 gallon buckets in it, filled variously with lime, blood meal, alfalfa meal, etc....hundreds of pounds of equipment, plus my small but very important library of books--Jesse Frost, Ben Hartman, Eliot Coleman...my resources, and my whole seed supply for succession planting and fall planting...all this floated 60 feet down the field and  when the waters receded, landed door side down at the end of the 3rd bed.  

It was heartbreaking. Just devastating.  And then there was also the knowledge later that this represented a 250 year flood (one that only happens around that often), so there was a kind of relief in that.

My shareholders in this first season are all my friends, and I sent them each their money back with a note saying that this event would make it impossible for me to deliver on my contract to provide food all summer.  And I was sooo disheartened.  This has been and is a  labor of love. I have learned that I have ZERO interest in the business side of this and that it is work I do willingly for no money for the joy of being able to produce food for myself, my household and my community.  And I had just sustained a significant loss!!

So much has happened since then!  Volunteers came out to GFN and many of them chose to help me do a clean up of my farm.  Maybe 15 people were there, removing ruined crops (the MA guidance was that you should not eat flooded crop and that you were prohibited from selling any flooded crop...so  everything was lost).  Grow Food Northampton provided seed for cover cropping and a generous check to cover my monetary losses, despite my unwillingness to start a go fund me campaign to recoup my costs and allow me to continue.  I chose not to apply for relief (and perhaps I wouldn't have received any) from the state, because my operation was so small and my revenue does not meet the threshold for assistance. Frankly, I did not feel I deserved the relief...after all, I am farming in a flood plain.  I am only in this space because I don't have another space to do it in. ...and I am looking for other options, so please reach out if you know of any.  I was helped by my across the street neighbor Lance, who with his machinery, lifted my empty shed in to the place I had prepared to receive it (having emptied it myself by taking off the roof and climbing in to throw everything to the outside).  Volunteers had helped  me to right it.  And Michael Skillicorn, with Lance, together put it back in the middle of the plot.  So much help from GFN and the people in the community.

As I was cleaning up one day (of many), Fred from Pie in the Sky berry farm walked over and we chatted.  He complimented my effort and industry and said, "you know, you need relentless optimism to farm. you have to believe that the future is going to be bright in spite of every setback or temporary obstacle.  You have to just keep going and believe that it is going to work." And I found that to be so helpful, because it's true about growing things.  There is so much potential activated in the act of planting and tending to plants.

And so, I felt like a beaver rebuilding the dam...just workaday plugging away, redefining beds, getting everything in cover crop.  I harvested the garlic for seed when it was ready, selected the best of it and composted the rest. I weeded the cover crop to keep the weed seed from taking hold, established many more strawberry beds as these had done so well and there was obviously demand for them.  I rebuilt permanent composting bins in addition to the one dynamic pile I built. And I dealt with the  5 yards of wood chips deposited at the top of my plot un asked  for, re-defining paths and boundaries of bed.  So much work, with so much optimism.  And I told Michael, " Yeah, that was awful...heartbreaking, but I'm over it, and I'll keep going until/unless it happens again (what are the chances? I thought), but if that happens again, I'll have to stop.  I can't absorb the inordinate cost of of the loss, nor the very backbreaking work of starting fresh over and over."

And the December 20th flood, same thing all over again.  This time I had  about 300 row feet of  strawberries planted and 700 cloves of garlic, some kale, tatsoi and arugula all in the ground.   I had composted and covered the new berry plantings  and the garlic with expensive straw I had purchased and secured with help from Steve Ferguson's generous offer to take me in his truck to pick it up.  

The garlic was interesting.  I had tried different things when planting.  I wanted to see would the garlic grow well if planted directly into the mown cover crop, with no turning or soil prep.  I did about a quarter of it that way...into mown field peas and oats.  After the flood, the tops of the garlic were all exposed. They had been covered with compost, straw and then row cover....all of it gone.  The other garlic was also exposed, but this stuff planted through the living mulch seemed a little more protected.  It remained exposed like that until the snow covered it, and I will be surprised if much of it comes up in the spring, but I want to conduct that experiment again if I can get my hands on some garlic to try it with this next year.

The berries are also a mystery.  I had planted them early enough that they should have been able to settle in and prepare to set fruit the following June.  But the amount of sand that landed on them was substantial.  Quite a lot of big grained sand resulted from the second flood.  I doubt there will be many berries, but they might produce something.  What I'm  sure I will get is a LOT of weed seed.  With serious effort, I believed I was reducing the weed seed bank in the rows of my farm...the flood will have brought seed from even knot weed into the game.  All summer I'd been careful to remove anything that had that white mungbean like root that I associate with the start of knot weed, but spring will tell.  the nettles will also undoubtedly have spread everywhere.

And so my plan for the future?

I want to keep farming, and I want to develop the capacity to produce much of the food for my household and family, and I want to grow food to share with the community and to earn enough cash to fund doing it for the next year, knowing that I will also need a paying job to earn a living because I can't see that that is possible on 1/4 acre without a  lot more retail activity than I want to be involved in.  For the next year, I am going to scale way back on what I put in  to the cost of seed, compost, amendments, water, equipment, etc and  just grow vegetables in 1/4 and cover crop and  water breaks (plants that will slow the flow and catch anything coming downstream) for the rest of the plot.  I am looking for information on basket willow (not sure it will work here) as a potential water break  and source of material for  trying to build an experimental flood-resistant (floatable) bed of willow lined with hemp bags from the coffee roaster nearby.  I am exploring what kind of an anchor (ground screw) will be effective to keep the bed in place as it rises in a flood.

In the second flood, my shed stayed put.  After the first one, I had staked it in with four 4' pieces of rebar, each attached at opposing angles (to prevent lifting off) with  clamps to the side of the shed.  I wonder if on a small scale at least, I could keep some plants riding above the water when it comes up and falling back in place.  That seems like something I will carry out on a very small scale experiment, possibly, and possibly only if I can find some suitable material (fully biodegradable and free) to construct it with.

After the second flood, I was pretty depressed. My daughter was home and we were joking about a new farm name and logo.  We considered Bouyant Spirits farm...with the straw hat floating away on the waters while a  mostly empty liquor bottle bobs in the foreground near the farm sign.  But we liked Fire Farm in the end, Farm of IRrational Exuberance, a reminder of what it takes to keep farming in a flood plain.  The logo hasn't come to me yet.  But I bet it will!!!

Hah!

This is not much news.  I just wanted to account for how it went down in year 2.  I feel there were signs that I was making some progress and that I am doing lots of things right, but in the wrong place . So I need to find the right way to farm in this place, since that is what I have access to,  and I need to see if I can find a place to farm that will make it feasible to grown annual vegetables in the way I want, eventually.

If you read this far, thanks!