It was everything and perfect, and absolutely terrible, all at once. That’s how I remember my last bout with a serious sickness. I was sneaking past logging tycoons on the island of Malaysian Borneo with a band of forest resisters, documenting illegal forest practices and then, in the evenings, or right at sunset, we’d get back to our camp by following the trails that mattered, walking and floating down and up rivers, catching fish along the way and snacking on fruits. And then, a day or two later, lumbering out of the forest on multi-hour river boats that droned so loudly you wish you had remembered ear plugs I remember the first wave of dengue fever hitting me. Fortunately, I had several friends that day that helped get me out of the forest, through airports, and to some medical care in Kuala Lumpur. I remember waking in fever dreams, swimming through the forest rivers, and wondering about the fate of the communities I used to work with. Would logging overtake the forest? Would semi-nomadic people become food secure? I spent years thinking about this question, and the journey took me to many continents and ultimately, despite all my optimism, the evidence didn’t look good.
I haven’t thought of that until just a few days ago, when it was time to harvest our garlic. A 3/4” thick slab of steel we farmers call an undercutter bar, with the help of a farmer’s weight on the back dives below dry rocky soil that we’ve been trying to get just right, just for years. I’ve been tuning up our tractor, because we’ve been tight on maintenance time all season, in the previous days. New air filters, battery, a couple of gallons of oil, one entire tube of grease, and a freshly cleaned out radiator were enough to get us by before the starter gets changed next week. The Kubota roars, loader than a small plane, and off Mary and I go, with that steel plunging, and the earth rippling behind us. With everything loosened, it’s an easy pull and it looks like a decent crop: 7 bins that we truck over to our farm member’s garage. We keep the crew working until they are exhausted at around 10:30 pm (we brought them back to work after a full day, at 6pm, to finish this push) and then it’s just us, debating about what to do with the last garlic: fretting that it’ll heat up in the bins overnight, breathing a sigh of relief, almost crying because two years ago, when the weed load was too high and the garlic couldn’t undercut, we missed all kinds of timing and the garlic, long after we had moved in many times, and many people had spent dozens and dozens of hours cleaning and tending to it, well, some of it rotted. That won’t happen this year; nor did it happen last year. Everything and nothing, all at once.
Looking at what we call our garlic warehouse, that honestly, if we hadn’t happened upon it by complete luck, we’d be in real real trouble, it’s amazing how many people it can feed. It’s enough pesto for a literal army, especially with this years’ back to back basil; Sabrina cutting loads and loads, just a seas of basil and a little knife flashing in the sun with a tint of purple hair in the green, moving, river.
But then I woke up, I muddled through tractor work and harvests on Friday, prepping that harvested garlic ground for cover crop (there’s just enough time to tarp and get in a fall cover crop), but not more than a week or two to spare, and then I kind of started collapsing when I was picking peas on Friday night. At some point, Mary trooper-ed past me; with bins of eggplant or peppers strapped to her. It was all terrible, all at once. I stopped, brought in my harvest, and went to bed. While I slept, she finished the harvests, and made 40 bouquets, before falling into bed beside me. My first COVID test was negative, and I drove the truck to market Saturday, but that was all I could manage, before I and went home and slept. By Saturday evening, I had tested positive and we knew that this would be a challenging week.
I spent the rest of the day sleeping, in a dreamy fever harvest river. I found myself worrying about the mountains of floating cucumbers, peas, zucchini that simply might not be picked — and if they aren’t — the way the plants can shut down, not tended to properly, relieved of their fruits, they often cannot make more. I’m not sure if our crew, the majority that don’t have any seasoned farming experience, understands this.
Our bounty is impressive, and it’s perhaps one reason we’ve been completely over-run at our used-to-be-small farmer’s market. We bring the market trailer loaded, the mini-van full of flowers, zucchini and cucumbers (we had to air up the tires recently to make sure they could support the load), we purchased more booth space from the market coop, but we were never prepared for the intensity and we wonder just how many more staff we’d have to add to make it seem manageable or sane.
We tell ourselves that you’ve got our back, we know you do. We tell ourselves that we will need to evolve, grow, and change. We spent long evenings talking about how to make the farm better, how to wonder if we could afford to double our crew size, and if we want that, and if you’d want that, and if they would want that. And we worry, in some kind of teary-fever dream, that we’ve just lost that magic, as we strive to be a real business.
But, we can still do some things. We still have that packshed to build — and that will solve a lot of our issues. We are afraid about how we will find the time to do that but we can build things, grow things, fix things, create things, bubbling ourselves out of fever dreams, better than we have imagined.
I’ll see you on the other side of Covid, but our crew is pulling in extra hours this week to bring in the harvest in full force. We’ll be stuffing the farmstore full tomorrow for the hosted hours, and member pickup, but will not be hosting in person, to minimize our risk of passing this to any of you. Though Mary has continued to test clear, if you see her she’ll be masked in case she is the next farmer to go down. We’ll be leaning on our crew more than ever this week, and it would mean everything to me if you come out to the field tomorrow to thank them tomorrow, since Mary and I are still learning how.
At the farm today, we will have a ton. Our crew is harvesting all morning, so for best results, do not come until about noon. We will have mountains of peas, onions, salad greens, basil, cucumbers, zucchini, salad turnips, about 40 other crops, and a real solid amount of tomatoes along with a decent amount of eggplant and even some peppers. We aren’t doing our regular Tuesday hosting today with Noah down from covid (today he’s symptom free), but someone from the farm crew will be stocking our farmstore constantly today. The field looks really great, so feel free to wander.
Noah motors down a bed of salad greens, adjacent to the garlic harvest, to stack one of 7 bins of garlic on to the farm trailer to head to the garlic curing warehouse.