Megan, a zealous second-year farmer here at Old Plank, recently asked me to start writing again. She also suggested I take up running with burros, but there’s a donkey shortage around here and I’m not in the mood for running anyway. But I’ll humor the writing request.
Megan’s energy and passion for the farm is overflowing, as she returns to us for the start of the spring season (after wintering in California, where burros and jogging go hand in hand, apparently).
My energy hasn’t been overflowing yet; rather, it’s been leaking out of frozen and cracked pipes in the greenhouse. Which is nothing new. Spring on the farm is always hard, mostly because “spring” has to start long before the weather coughs up scenes of baby goats prancing in the sunshine on a carpet of green grass.
Spring for this vegetable operation starts with firing up heaters in the seedling greenhouse while below-freezing wind howls against the plastic walls and snow piles up around it. Where there isn’t snow, there’s ice or mud; there’s nothing green about the start of spring, until the first little onions poke out of their nursery trays. And then comes the challenge of keeping the thousands of baby onions and other seedlings warm and growing until the proverbial spring eventually decides to show up and then we can start planting the young veggies out in the field.
With the responsibilities of spring weighing heavily on me, my first reaction to Megan’s request for my blog was a sarcastic sure, followed by a run-on sentence in which I summarized farming as little more than a continuous stream of problems created by nature as it destroys everything we ever work on, right down to our crops that die each and every autumn and our greenhouses that seem to always be falling about our ears no matter how many precautions I've taken to safeguard them.
Well, she replied when I was done ranting, maybe it’s not a good time to pick up blogging, after all.
When, then, is a good time, I asked myself in the following days. Although my summary of farming was dramatically negative, it holds an element of truth. Fifteen years into farming, we still have problems here. I guess we always will. This time it was frozen pipes in the new, state-of-the-art seeding greenhouse that were the catalyst for my attitude and the run-on sentence.
But that’s only one side to the story of last week; the story of today. If you clomp along the path to our greenhouses in your muck boots and poke your head into the old seeding house (that’s the one on the end, on the north side, shorter than the other houses; rough around the edges and messy on the inside, but it works just fine), you’ll find that our early crops have never looked better, despite the set-backs of the season. The green babies will take your breath away. They take mine, and I see them everyday. The wonders of plant growth never cease to amaze me.
And so I decided to start blogging again, because part of our commitment to our farm members is to share what’s happening here. To share who we are as farmers. Angelica also does a lot of that in her weekly note, but I feel like I owe you a few of my own thoughts every week too, as I continue to be responsible for the farm’s crop production every year.
Megan wants to know a bit more about how things were in the beginning, and maybe you do too. That was fifteen years ago, I was the only one here then, and none of the greenhouses even existed. I’m happy to oblige, to meander between the now and then aspects of what makes Old Plank Farm what it is. Thanks, Megan, for making this request…and for seeding all the beets last week while I sat around grumbling (actually, let’s call it problem-solving) about frozen pipes.