Farmer Dreams, Slumber Parties, and Broccoli's 3rd Grade Popularity

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Above: Around a campfire late one night in Crocker Range National Park, in Borneo, I share stories with farmers while kids tend to our campfire, conducting their own slumber-party dances.

Last weekend Mary and I ventured off our farm, together, overnight, for the first time in almost two years.  We left a three page typed list of instructions with our farm sitter, Hannah, with the level of detail probably common to the first time new parents leave their precious baby.  Everything from what to do if the pipes froze to where the kittens like to hide, to all the helpful phone numbers we could think of, and instructions of how to handle an emergency in the middle of the night. (Two different neighbors were on alert for potential 3 a.m. door knocking). 

We were headed to an invite-only gathering of small market farmers in Idaho. The three-day conference on the lake proved well worth the intensive departure prep and anxiety.  Although we never completely forgot about our own farm, and Mary had to stop me more than once from phoning to ask Hannah how the chickens were, we were quickly immersed in discussions with our fellow farmers. 

We heard inspiring tales of success and also massive crop failures.  One family shared how a combination of bad weather and bad luck meant a loss of $12,000 of winter squash this year.  But they also talked about how they were weathering that, and shared their strategies for containing three wild kids during full farming season.  We laughed as they described their 9-year-old girl driving the tractor.
 
"She's basically the weight on the seat to keep the cruise control activated while we all pitch pumpkins in the bin down the row."
 
We heard of buildings being added on to, in not the best of ways, and commiserated about our own building experiences. We shared some of our own failures, and our decision cook outdoors again for second winter so we could grow the farm.  We relished being in a group of peers: people who believed, like us, so wholly in the rightness of good food grown well that they did not think we were crazy at all.

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Above: In the shade and shadow lines, a farmer and I rest along a trail in Yunnan Province in China to exchange stories.

The first night, even after we dragged ourselves to bed exhausted, I couldn't stop "jaw-jacking," (a term I picked up there from farmer Sean). I was comparing ideas with Emily, a farmer from Sandpoint, in the next bunk from ours, about making a culti-packer, and seeding and care strategies for carrot plantings. Mary, knowing we had to start again early the next morning, kept elbowing me in the ribs. I just decided to take it because I was too excited about ideas, thoughts, and sharing, to stop and sleep. I'm stubborn, and I'm lucky she puts up with me.

It was just like a good old fashioned slumber party in that way, where you are too excited to sleep.  In some ways, it seems we are probably too old for slumber parties, but when we can make it happen, somehow we come away feeling younger, like both time and possibilities are on our side. Like maybe we are winning. 

Falling asleep, with a background of farmer voices, I thought back to years ago, when I traveled around Malaysia interviewing small farmers, learning about how they got started and challenges they overcame.  Back then, sleeping under the stars in papaya orchards and vegetable gardens all over Asia, I never thought I'd become a full-time farmer myself. But the seeds got in somewhere, added up and made part of me, part of the farm.

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Above: I spent weeks camping out in Malaysia on farms, interviewing farmers about their own struggles -- growing and figuring out how to make it. Papaya trees sway in the moonlight while star trails and clouds move across the sky over the campsite.

At the conference, conversations circled widely.  A topic on pest and disease could end up touching on what we consider the "mental parasites" of self-doubt and fear. How, we asked each other, do we recover from failures, learn, and move on, without becoming disheartened?  And how do we collectively educate and inspire, build new generations of organic food culture? 

I got into it directly at the Victor elementary school this past week, as I talked about the farmer spirit of learning to live, building, and making. I had one third grade class spell bound when I talked about our inventions.

'But can you grown heaps of broccoli?' one of them asked. And suddenly I was inundated with questions about broccoli.  When I got back to the farm I announced, "The kids in Victor all want broccoli!' Mary looked up skeptically from filling in our complex crop planning spreadsheets, so I had to elbow her in the ribs, just a bit, to get my point across:  "I mean it, whatever you have mapped out, triple it!" 

We laughed and we both needed it. The flip side of sweet farmer slumber party dreams are the creeping winter-dark worries.  Last night, I woke with a start, from a dream in which the roof of our chicken barn had blown off suddenly in a storm. Zukes, hearing me wake, did his best to smother my fears by draping his full 8-pound purring kitten self across my face.  I managed to convince myself we were all OK and drift back to sleep. 

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Above: Mary works on our crop planning, using one of many spreadsheets we've designed to track the location of crops, harvesting, and planting throughout the growing season. 

But worry is not just for the sleeping hours.  In the daylight, too, at this time of year, our complex mix of excitement and fear takes on many shapes.  We're buying seeds, potting soil, tools, and all kinds of building materials right now, with our first market income still far away.  In a huge step for us, we just took on our first bank loan this month: $20,000 for a tractor with enough power, and the capacity to start every week. We're not making these investments blindly. We have careful analyses, cash flow projections, and budgets based on real numbers from our past few years of sales.  But still, it can feel crazy. But we know, too, that if we don't make some improvements, some good investments in our systems, we will not hit our goals and will not produce enough to make our living. 

I joke to Mary that the more the ground thaws, the deeper our spending freeze should go, but my joke seems kind of lame and falls flat.  We know it's no joke that one credit card is filled, but we both snicker even if the joke is only OK, because maybe some jokes, some keeping it light is an important part of the slumber party feeling that helps keep the excitement up. 

The other thing we need, to be honest, are more farm members.  People willing to say "hey, I'm with you guys for the season, let's see what you can do."  The first spring payments from those memberships are what will get us through to the market season, but right now we mostly just need to know that you are on board; you can still reserve your membership with just a $20 deposit (and thank you, so much, to everyone who has done so already). 

We returned from the conference to find another great surprise: in addition to a few more members, an anonymous note had arrived in our mailbox, with a bank check for a donation to our eatership fund--enough to cover one peak-season share or large feed bag for a family in need. Whoever you are, we love you, and it will help! We have successfully raised about $1500 in Eatership funds, and have started making matches to families that need some help.  We need help spreading the word about our memberships and have tried to make the website as easy as possible to navigate and pay that deposit, whether you can cover the whole membership cost yourself, or if you need a boost.

As I write, the farm darkens. The chickens that I just checked are chortling on their roost bars. Malaya is snoring under my desk. Air from the open window wafts in; I smell spring coming, snowmelt, mud, compost. We are starting seeds so soon. I can hardly wait until I fall asleep, but I know I'll have late-night ideas to share. It'll take a few elbows I'm sure. But it's worth it.

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Above: Broccoli, above, in our washing station sink.

Firewood Confessions: Wood Elves and Seed Bombs

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Above: Back when I didn't know anything about weight limits, shock capacity, safe loads, or the utility of working brakes. Disclosure: before Mary. 

Back in graduate school, I spent one winter living in a remote cabin not far from the Blackfoot River.  I choose the location in order to focus and finish up my masters thesis, but like many new-to-Montanans, I became distracted with a rather serious addiciction.  From a used tool dealer, a mechanic working out of his shipping-container shop, I purchased a rebuilt Stihl chainsaw.  It was my first, and it was expensive.  To pay off the debt, I figured I'd sell some firewood. This began a descent into a rather unfortunate pattern. I'd drive up to the Potomac bar with large rented dump truck filled to the brim with freshly cut rounds; rather than make it back to the cabin (and back to that thesis), I'd wind up selling firewood right away, either while catching up with the locals at the gas pump or fueling up on free peanuts at the Highway 200 Bar. And before I knew it, I had a business with about 30 customers all demanding firewood during a harsh winter.  I didn't finish my thesis that winter (or even the next), but in the deliveries to home after home, I had a chance to see how an entire cross-section of people lived. While I certainly delivered to many well-equipped homes, I prided myself on giving good deals to those in need: people, well, like us: without enough insulation, some inadequate housing, and those in need. There was a time or two that I got more than I bargained for, for instance, when an elderly woman told me I had to stack all the three cords of wood; that was apparenetly what we agreed. On those nights I didn't even make the gas station, let alone last call at the bar. And, in driving around one valley, slowly, in a large truck, you hear things. You get to know how people are really doing. People whisper to you at the bar, or at the town pump, or when you are invited in, to warm up in someone's space, on a minus twenty degree day when either your bar oil won't flow or your dog (that's right, I had a husky then too) dug into your lunchbox and ate all the food in the truck.  

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Above: The lure of a ponderosa pine firewood forest, as a young transplant to Montana looking for a distraction, was pretty strong.

It started out as an innocent question, a business proposition, really. How does your neighbor get his firewood?, I'd ask.

That's when I'd start hearing of the people who just couldn't afford firewood. It shook me. These were people who I'd met. They'd hunt, fish, or eek out of a living doing logging or guiding, or welding, or building, or a combination of all of it. These were the people who taught me how to process food, sharpen a chainsaw just right, put on tire chains, and get out of any kind of jamb that rural living could offer up: how to put out an electrical fire on quick notice, how to jumpstart any vehicle, what glowplugs were, how to dismantle a building in short order, how to stack hay.  These were people who let me listen to them, hear their stories, and photograph them.

So, I did what anyone would do. I became a firewood elf of sorts, delivering a few rounds, a Suburu trunkfull of firewood here and there, quitely, well after dark when I needed a break from my thesis, or I just needed to get out.

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Above: Sanoma, my previous husky, and that old Subaru, before the business scaled up.

This cold winter, when Mary and I got the farm truck stuck four or five times in one day when trying to get wood up the West Fork, and then down Highway 43, somewhere over the pass between here and Wisdom, I thought of those jambs we've all been in, and those we got out of.  As any enterprising farmer may do, I got on facebook, and proceeded to make deals to trade my wood saw cutting time, to cut off other people's log decks, in return for some firewood. We had a hard run at this, cutting about 11 cords of firewood to get about 3 cords. Mary single-handedly stacked six cords of someone else's wood in one day. With our cold winter, and working in the shop, and keeping the barn warm, we are now again, a bit low.  We'll figure something out, as we always seem to. 

But let me be honest. During these darkest times of the year both Mary and I were in a bit of a funk. While we always fielded farm calls, and the egg hotline (as we call it), the voicemails from friends got harder to return. It's not just because we were probably fixing something, working on tractor wires or puzzling over projects. It's really because answering that question, 'How are you doing?' seemed harder and more complicated than it should be. And at times, when we were scared, or frustrated by our own living, thawing the pipes, or other projects, we didn't want to face the truth. We didn't have a good answer.

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Above: Sometimes gathering firewood with others, as in this case with friends in Borneo, is easier than answering the tough questions.

And get this: it turns out that in our own search and asking others what they do when they find themsleves in a dire firewood shortage, we found out that there are firewood elves right here, in our own valley. There's at least one community firewood bank, for those in need, and possibly more. There are neighbors who lend us their log splitters, and all you have to do is ask at the gas station about firewood or The Bitterroot Brewery and someone will share their coveted source with you. This makes us feel like deep Bitterrooters, like whatever we burn or what we believe, we are all in this darn melting pot of a valley together. It makes us proud really, to farm here.

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Above: This week, on the farm, we built a germination chamber that will enable seeds to sprout in precise temperature and humidly conditions, despite whatever temperature the barn (or greenhouse) may be at. We don't have a name for it yet, but we like to call it The Seed Bomb Machine. 

And lately, as we turn from gathering wood, we are in the shop and at the desk: making, building, designing, creating. From an appliance scrap yard, we purchased a standup freezer and wired in a temperature and hunidity controller to create a germination chamber.  We've organized the shop with oodles of bins, from salvaged plywood, for all kinds of farming hardware and tools. Our crop planning is deep underway, and we are doing germination trials.  We are busily designing the new garden and bed layout, and today, when we sat down with Dan at Bouilla over coffee to go over our growing plan, our varities, and announce another hoophouse build, we were all brimming with excitement. I could barely hold down my coffee. 

You see, we farm because it changes us. Before we knew anything and long before we became Bitterrooters, there was one weekend when we stopped neighbors from burning leaves, and brought the leaves (for mulch) over to our rented plot. That was the fall I knew I really wanted to farm with Mary; and back when we thought it was all much easier, I found myself falling in love with her wide eyed amazement of surprise harvests.

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Above: We might bring trucks of leaves to our farm now, but back on our old rented plot outside of Missoula, we convinced families to truck over their leaves rather than burning them. 

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Above: A surprise harvest, Painted Mountain corn. We grew it once, in a magical small plot we had with good soil and good luck, and we'll grow it again.

And while firewood, and the way it forces us to connect to the land, and to one another, has a certain magic, it's the realization that we all rely on natural resources that hits home. We all shape this community. This landscape is the real power and mystery. Our best endeavors make us foolish at the worst times, and while we stay young, these hard lessons help us grow, and we believe, help us grow up, better, stronger, to give us hope, heart, if not sore muscles and backbone.

Despite the fact that it's raining, stuff is outside and that our kitchen is literally freezing, there is a lot of innovation, planning and work here. It's a good work, and a good life. Even if it's rough right now, we see ever-increasing possibility of it all getting better, or making a good living, of providing good food, and being part of a community.

People like us: farmers, police, Bitterrooters

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A farm laborer in Albania shows me how he replaces sage plants to keep his perennial herb garden healthy.

Rather than spending most of my days in Turkey and Albania galavanting and celebrating with small farmers, I hate to admit, but I spent an enormous amount of time waiting, just stuck. Like farming, I have to improvise a lot on these sustainability certification trips. For example, when I tried to enter Albania, I was literally detained by the police. Something went horribly wrong with my passport, the lingering effects of some losing-and-replacement years ago, so I was stuck in police custody for four or five hours while I enlisted a small army of people to help try and sort my record straight: Mary, Interpool, and the US Embassy. It took so long that I persuaded the police officer charged with making sure I'd didn't try to make a run, out to a coffee bar. During the hours we waited, huddling with small cups of espresso like young chickens under a heat lamp, we talked farming and politics. I heard a lot about people have given up hope: years of farming that don't pay and uncertain markets. Mary and I know a lot about that, and I shared images of our life on my phone.  As often happens, I come away with a sense of greater solidarity.

And in Turkey, when I was working with small apple farmers, who were drying them in high mountain villages, I needed to put aside my favorite job-- of hiking farm to farm and getting to know the farming practices of farmers, to hunkering down in the the villages, around coal burning stoves, and drinking cup after cup of tea, to discuss problems with global prices and lack of farming equipment. Sometimes the hardest parts of farming are not the growing.  

My time in Turkey was one of the worst trips I've had: with the food politics so intense and the balance of small farmer power so seemingly at odds with everything that Mary and I hold dear about why we farm,  I was forced to start asking hard questions in one village: why people felt so defeated, disempowered. At one point, with goosebumps on my neck, I carefully asked if people around me had been threatened by some of the players. 

In some ways, the sustainable agriculture network, part of a large global group of NGOs and farmer organizations that I've been hired to work for, is a sham. Policies that are meant to promote small scale agriculture and farms don't often require long term investments and farms and trust building processes that global agricultural business are willing to make. So, while I get to hear about real successes, and there's always something to bring back to our farm in Montana, there are real setbacks: farmers I know that will never get the training they need, farmers that never get fair, living wage prices for their work, and worse, farmers that feel alone, lost because they can't get access to adequate startup capital, a market, land, or because of labor costs, they just can't manage their farm how they envision. Mary and I know a lot about that, partly because we've felt the same things.

On my trips to check in on practices, I see myself in the role of the other: the small marginalized farmer, someone who is familiar with all the challenges of building a business, and sometimes just feeling heard.

For all these reasons, Mary and I are still at work. While I'm away, I'm happy to report that no police showed up to the farm, even to inquire about the time I threatened this summer to blockade one of our neighbor's hired spray trucks. Mary just kept harvesting. I'm back on building tasks, many this year, and we are already deep into our planning process for next season. We will get the last batch of our soil samples, all 14 of them, off in the mail, to help us figure out how we are doing with some of those preparations.

It's been a tough season for us, and but we've had some good end of the season serious wins: 1. the farmstore, still open and stocked; 2.)our new hoophouse, still packed with greens and surprises; 3.) and, you members. Our members are our favorite people in our world. We will expand on the Feedbag program this year and our weekly vegetable subscritpions kept us going. Part of our big vision for next year, is being able to feed more families, regardless of income. Not only is this our vision for a thriving local healthy food culture, but we see it as a way for our small business to contribute to the economics of families, growing and struggling. 

In many ways, Mary and I are just like you. We've learned to see some of ourselves in all of you, both near and far. I like to think it's because you've made me such a strong farmer and person, over the past year that I was able to stand up, as a proud farmer and citizen back in Turkey, talk about what is right and come back to the Bitterroot stronger and more resolute than ever - the belief that farming permeates life; the belief that it's our communities, and commitments to one another that are our strongest allies.

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Social Working Wednesdays

A few weeks ago, our friend Samantha was visiting to pick up some produce for one of the O'Hara Commons Lunchtime Learning series events.  Looking at the two of us leaning on different corners of the washing station, clearly beat, and having heard already a little about our concerns of weeds and beds and plantings getting away from us, she skipped past the question of "how are you doing?" and straight to "So, what do you need right now?"  We both came up with about the same answer:  we need a serious work party--10 people for 6 hours would probably do it.  It has to happen within a week or so, or things get mowed.  We had just had to throw in the towel and mow one of our carrot beds that had gotten too weedy to save, and we knew we were on the brink of the same with beets, green beans, flowers, and more in the new field we had opened up this year.  

It seemed like an impossible task to us, to gather than many person-hours in a short time.  An oddity about needing a lot of help is that you often are too busy to reach out and recruit for that help.  But Samantha chewed on it for a minute, and said "I might be able to get that.  What days work best?"  Feeling a little encouraged, we agreed that Sunday or Wednesday could work, and that we would also try to get the word out.  In the end, that Wednesday was our first tackle-the-field work party day.  In the end there were 7 of us, including the two farmers, for the morning.  That, combined with big chunks of help from some other friends, got us at least caught up enough to keep those beds.

We are still behind, but feeling a bit more optimistic.  In addition to the plants freed from choking weeds, beans and flowers and beets starting to put on growth, we found that the conversations, the chance to settle into a task for a few hours side by side with some good people and time to talk, was also of huge benefit to us.  And so, we've realized, not just for the weeding but also for ourselves, we should make it a regular thing.  Wednesday mornings are now reserved for farm tasks that can be done with some good company and conversation: weeding, mulching, tending plants, cleaning garlic....there are all sorts of farm tasks that can also be social.  And that generated a new farm term:  Social-Working Wednesdays.  We hope you can join us this week, as we again desperately need a pulse of extra help within the next few days to help ensure healthy crops for late summer and fall, and allow us to tackle some key farm building projects.  If you can't make it this week, please keep it in mind for future Wednesdays.  Bring a friend you've been meaning to catch up with, and enjoy some quality time and satisfying work, as well as some farm treats.  

This week we will be working together with volunteers from 8:00 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, with a mid-morning coffee break around ten, including some delicious treats from our friends Dan and Mona at Bouilla.  Feel free to come for part or all of the morning, as works best for you and your schedule. 

Please let us know if you can make it by emailing farmers@sweetroot.farm, or by calling or texting 240-1050. 

Many thanks, Mary and Noah

A Little Less Broken: Coming Together at Market

Last week at market, rushing to set up as we had been up later than we should picking strawberries (yet again), I was tucked away behind our booth hastily arranging some boquets before I had to make a run back to the farm to feed chickens, cut more flowers, and make sure the sheep had not escaped yet (again).  

Kneeling on the sidewalk behind our booth, I was not in front-customer mode at all, a bit in a flower reverie even as I moved as fast as possible, parceling daisies and bachelor’s buttons between vases.  So I was surprised when a pair of feet advancing toward me from the side of our neighbor Lindsay’s booth were accompanied by a loud, rather gruff voice saying “Hey! Yeah, you, I was talking to you.  THAT’s what I have been looking for!”  As I looked up in surprise, I found the voice matched by a pointed finger on a long-haired grey-bearded man in a black sleeveless t-shirt who was fast approaching my little sidewalk flower workshop.  Trying to compute, I asked “flowers?” to confirm I was understanding correctly.  I know better than to judge what people might buy by their appearances, but this was certainly not the stereotypical bouquet customer.  His equally large and grizzled compatriot smiled amusedly at the scene from the other side of Lindsay’s booth, as the first man confirmed “yeah, I’ve been looking all over for flowers and nobody had ‘em yet.”  I explained I was just getting some ready to set out.  “Are any ready right now?”  “Well, if you can wait just a minute or two, I can finish one up for you right now.  Which do you like?”  I asked, pointing out the foundations of the 5 or 6 arrangements I had started.  “That one.”  He pointed to the sweet peas, and while I was internally noting that he certainly had some good judgement, he became less gruff and began to explain more:  “We come here every saturday, on our way to visit mom.  She has dementia, but she just loves her flowers.  We had to get her some.” 

A shiver ran through me and I froze, briefly, a calendula hanging in mid-air above the vase. Do I say it? Should I share? I snapped out of the freeze, stuffed flowers even more vigorously for a moment, then did quietly, a little shyly, explain that I too have watched dementia erode away parts of someone very close to me, over these last few years.  As I spoke, I choose the flowers even more carefully, though still moving fast.  She loves her flowers, she must need some daisies. Sweet peas for fragrance, old fashioned, that's good. Bachelor’s buttons, something blue, very bright blue, has to go in.  I was no longer building the boquet just for a table display, but for a woman, a mom who loves her flowers, whose days may be hazy now but flowers still are clear.  

I won't tell you who in my life has dementia, because it would become the only thing that most of you know about her.   Of all the traits and skills and experiences and wonderful facets of her life, it is the last one I want you to think of if you hear of her or meet her.  It dominates now, but it is not who she is.  Still, this man’s mother existed for me in only a handful of facts:  she had dementia, she loved flowers, and she had a son visiting her that morning.  I tried to put it all into that mason-jar boquet.  When it seemed full enough, I stood up and held it out to him, “How’s this?” I asked.  “It’s perfect.” he replied, then the question I had already been puzzling over: “How much?” 

I paused.  Given our shared experience, I wanted to give him these flowers.  Because really, I wanted that bouquet to fix it all.  To clear her mind, to ease his sadness, and solve my own.  To fix the thousand broken hurting things in all of us.  But I know that it can’t.  Instead, I mumbled a price half what I usually charge.  He raised his eyebrows, clearly on to me, and handed me a $20, saying, “just 10 back” accurately guessing the normal price.  I thanked him and took it, because of course, it won’t fix everything, and he wanted to help too.  

The flowers don’t fix the broken.  But if anything, the handoff, the interaction, the 4-minute conversation about a common experience, might have made the both of just a little less fallen-apart.  It was one of those moments that makes me so grateful for the market, for being a farmer, for direct sales to real people in my town. There have been a couple of articles circulating lately about how farmers are suffering because people treat the market more as a carnival or social hang-out than a place to buy food.  They lament the hipsters coming for coffee and pastries, wielding camera phones to feed their social media without buying any produce.  And while there can be real issues with that, worth going into another time, I think those articles were missing something good about the modern market atmosphere, too.  

Friday morning as I listened to the news over coffee and planning, a few tears fell onto the harvest sheet. I heard friends and communities mourning brokkennes and violence, crying out for a need to do something.  We have to do better.  We must fix this.  I wondered if I was selfish for just wanting to go out and harvest flowers, tend to carrots, plant more beans.  What am I doing, to help?  What am I doing, at all?  

But also I thought of community, of gathering, of how our market brings a range of ages, backgrounds, and viewpoints all together in a few blocks for a few hours each week.  Our favorite thing is when you talk to each other in our booth.  Sometimes is is old friends greeting each other in a surprise encounter at market, but often it is conversations between strangers, emboldened to talk to someone they have never met because we are all gathered here around the garlic scapes.  Sometimes it is a ringing endorsement of arugula pesto, or a fierce debate about how to best use beets, or whether our egg pice is a scandal or a steal of a deal.  But in any case, you are here, we are all out here together, connecting in some way.  And that makes our community, in the tiniest bits, over and over again a little less broken.  So bring it on: lattes and breakfast burritoes and baguettes and beets.  Whatever it is that brings you out, into your town and next to your neighbors.  Come join the gruff and grizzled dudes in their biker shirts and the sleekly manicured ladies cheek to jowl in the booth; just come on out and just be together.  

It won't fix everything.  It won’t undo anyone’s hurt or heal the families who are mourning someone lost because of the way they looked, the way they loved, or the uniform they wore.  Just like my flowers won’t fix it, the beautiful heads of romaine won’t fix it.  But gathering together, being people together may help keep us all just a little less fallen apart. And sometimes that, just that, is what we can do.  

Everybody eats.  Come on out and join us. 
 

Farm surprises: strawberry avalanches and rascals at the front door

   

You never quite know what late June and the start of July can bring in on a farm.  From early smoke and heat, to an unplanned dunk in the irrigation ditch (with phone in pocket), to being greeted at 5:00 am by a lamb munching weeds from around the front steps of the barn, to the "Hey, Farmers!" call announcing the surprise return of some farm-family insiders, Margo Cilker and her sister Sarah.  It's been a wild week.  But as we look at the still-long list of things to harvest, a few plantings we need to sneak in today before market prep, and the hot and veggie-popping months of July and August rolling out in front of us, I remember one of the lines we used often last year during Margo's stay:  "It's gonna get wilder before it tames down."  None of us quite remembers the origin of that phrase, but it's often apt, one of the lines we use to brace ourselves to rally up and hang on.   

It really began last Friday, soon after the newsletter went out, and Noah began to pick strawberries "because we might have kind of a lot," he had wanted to start picking no later than 4:00 pm.  He did, and when he only moved a few feet down the row in the time it took me to move a batch of greens through the sinks, I had to check on him.  All that was wrong was that those few feet had already yielded rather a lot of pints.  His eyes were growing wide as he admitted there were more than just "kind of a lot."  By 9:00, he had a full garden cart loaded, and as I continued to work harvesting everything else, he called out with a slight note of panic "I've stopped counting pints. I just know we have cases and cases!"  In the end the berry harvest went till past 2:00 a.m., aided by headlamps and coffee, and we brought 170 pints of berries (we counted when we set up at market).  The overwhelming tide of berries appears to be beginning to ebb, but we should have a sizable abundance for market again this week, so come ready to stock up! 

On Thursday, halfway through the harvest for the grower's co-op we are a part of, Noah came in to find me flopped on the wood-chip covered floor of our washing station, stray bits of arugula stuck to my face, desperate for a nap there was no time for.  We'd been up butchering chickens past midnight then rose at 5 to fill a flower order for a wedding party, before beginning a sizable harvest for the co-op.  It's crazy, sometimes, this farming.  Just nuts.  In some moments, we wonder if we really can keep doing it--or we acknowledge that we cannot continue it indefinitely like this, and that some of this pace is in order to make enough this year to upgrade to things like an indoor kitchen and enough space for it all to feel just a little more sane.  

We aren't alone, though.  When we asked Ian (of Ian and Ellen's Produce, at the other end of Bedford) how he was doing as he passed by our booth a few weeks ago, he just raised his eyebrows, cocked his head, and appeared to weave a little on his feet.  We nodded, agreeing completely.  After a rare foray out of our booth to buy cookies from Peter and Helen (Kangaroo Gardens) last week, I slipped one onto our market-neighbor Lindsay's table, knowing she might be dragging as much as we were.  As we packed up after market she leaned over a stack of collapsed wax boxes to thank us--"that cookie, that was amazing."  

More and more as we scale up and grow more seriously, we forge relations with all our friends and colleagues trying to feed people here.  People ask us often at market, about competition between farmers.  We are never quite sure how to get across that the feeling is more of solidarity, of being on the same team. Farming is more athletic than you might think--not just sprinting for the escaped lamb or hefting the 60-pound tote of potatoes, but keeping going when you are just plain beat, feeling some days like it's been a marathon or two. The real competition is against the limited number of hours in the day, days in the week, and precious moments between our last and first frosts in a mountain valley that can make it hard to grow enough to feed the community and make a living.  And taking on that challenge, we are on the same team.  That's why, when we have a great recipe that calls for an herb we won't have at market, we text Linsday to see if we can send people to her for parsley.  It's why we call around to Leon, Randi, and others when we have more people interested in our leftover berries than we can actually supply.  And it's why, when we have a question about potato beetles, or how to get better at carrots, or a myriad of other things we need to learn, we have people to call. 

And whether you realize it or not, you are a part of that team, too.  None of us could keep doing this if you, the eaters, weren't willing to come to market, join our vegetable share programs, frequent the restaurants and stores that buy our produce, and continue to help us make progress.  So, thank you.  We haven't won yet, though, and we need you still.  Because we weren't able to get the word out enough in spring to meet our CSA vegetable subscription numbers, we know we may fall short of the income needed to do our next wave of building this fall, so Noah will be away for 4 days next week to do a sustainability audit of mint farms in Oregon.  It's tough to leave the farm for outside work in mid-summer, but critical to our future years of farming.   If you are interested in helping beyond your own purchases, we are still accepting donations for CSA vegetable shares, and have a handful of households in mind who could use them--some in the business of food themselves, in various different ways.

 As we look forward to potential waves of tomatoes, summer squash, and all the unexpected wildness of July and August, we continue to invite you to join in whatever ways you can.  But brace yourselves, folks.  As crazy as it is, it just might get wilder.   

Plane Crashes and Windfalls

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Coffee lands, Canyons, and Rivers of Mountains over Papua New Gunieau

As I write, it's windy. Not just a little windy, but the fifty and sixty mile per hour gusts that shake the barn and rustle the plastic on the hoop houses. Mary is picking flowers in the hoop house, and I have the special board wedged in the west barn door that keeps it closed in these gusts.  That kind of wind wears on us.  We have things battened down and have taken row cover off sensitive plants to avoid some of the damage, but it's still hard not to worry.  Years ago, riding in small planes in Indonesia and Borneo I'd feel the same worries, often caught out in storms.  And even on a transcontinental flight this winter, when I was working off-farm so we could continue building in the off season I worried. I have a fear plane crashes.  It's not because I have such a deep fear of the plane I'm in crashing, but a more general, deeper fear, one brought on by a story a friend once told me.

He, like I used to, traveled the world working in remote parts of the globe.  He spoke to me of a time when he was sure the  small plane he was in was about to go down.  He told me, 'so, I took out my phone and began scrolling through contacts, wondering who I would call. I didn't know.'  When the flight recovered and came down safely in the end, it was not that instance of physical danger that rattled him, but the realization that he wasn't certain who in his life was right to reach out to in a worst or potentially last moment of life.  I thought a lot, after that, about who might be on my "airplane crash list."  

It was in part because of that story that I dug in with Mary, back when I was still working abroad, and why eventually we started farming together in Montana. This third year, we are learning, still, how to hold our ground, trying to make it. We think of our mountain valley as where we've landed, not just crashed. There were a few deeply stormy nights this winter, when we woke to seventy mile per hour gusts, feeling the barn loft sway more than is comfortable, shaking in the winds.  Mary and I would hold onto each other tightly, and I'd remind her she was my plane crash list. That we have lists that are clear, long, and full--good community to reach out to and hang on with. 

I'd tell her my better plane story, too, about the time in Borneo when I asked the pilot to turn around, so I could make a picture of some of the coffee and farming valleys where we've worked. It's a reminder for us to think carefully about where we are headed, to remember we can turn, and to keep sight of some of those goals and dreams.   And, we'd remind one another of our dreams -- to dig in, to plant more windbreaks, to feed people and ourselves, to build a farm that is a growing place for us, and to build a better barn and be able to make enough of a living that we can build a home, and give more back to our community. we do it bit by bit, more often than not at tractor speed, not airplane speed.  And this week, we continue, by purchasing hundreds of dollars of pins and sandbags we will fill to hold down our row cover, and add tons of organic mulch to our gardens to hold soil moisture. 

On the other side of wind gusts, there is sometimes a windfall.  We are entering the time of year when crops do start to arrive, sometimes surprisingly, with a few new ones each week.  For tomorrow's market, we'll have several new crops and a new abundance of many the have been regulars so far this spring. If you can't make it to market, you can still get in on our CSA or our feedbag program. We'd love to have you.  In order to keep growing our farm, and to not have income shortfalls, we could still use about ten supporters--- either large feedbag or CSA members.

And that photograph above? I made that image of another farming valley, this one in Papua New Guinea, when I asked the pilot to turn around.  Even with a fear of plane crashes, and a deep one, there's a lot that's possible.

Farming with No Brakes, No Breaks

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Phil, behind the wheel in one of our farm gardens without brakes.

“I’ll just hang on!”  It’s the kind of phrase that might make anyone cock their ear towards their partner uttering it over the deep rumble of an old truck engine.  It broke my arugula-washing reverie that afternoon, snapping my head up away from the washing sink where I was trying to rush the process of triple-rinsing baby arugula leaves and plucking out the lamb’s-quarters weeds trying to masquerade as salad greens.

It might not have grabbed my attention so dramatically except that the rumble Noah was shouting over was the dump truck full of lawn clippings that our neighbor Phil had driven over, a huge gift of mulch loaded into the 1952 beast of a vehicle.  When he stopped by earlier to let us know he’d finally gotten something up and running to haul the grass over, Phil had casuallymentioned, regarding the now-running truck he’d repaired “Of course, it doesn’t have any brakes just now, but out here on the flat, you don’t need brakes so much.”  Eager to keep harvesting since we had just said “yes” to the largest order of greens mixes in our farm history, Noah and I both heard that statement, paused a moment, and then exchanged a glance that was basically a shrug of “well, ok.”  Phil is a good bit past 70 but has reigned as patriarch of our little dead-end gravel road for many years, and he's just the sort of guy you trust.  If he figured he could bring us a load of mulch with no brakes, I wasn’t going to let it get in the way of my greens packing.  

When I looked up from the washing sink, Noah was up in the top of the elevated dump truck bed, and Phil was climbing into the cab to pull the truck forward a bit to get more of the grass out.   It was the first time all day that I held still for a moment, trying to watch and judge just how precarious this “hang on” might be.  It is my fond hope that 30 or 40 years from now Noah will be the chatty helpful old-man-neighbor of Bell Lane who has every tool a couple of young upstarts might want to borrow, and is still showing off the chicken-plucker he built back in 2016.   I can picture it clearly, an older and greyer Noah still wiry and caffeinated and ambitious, hosting visitors with coffee in hand and cracking himself up with puns about chickens and spinach varieties. But some days it seems the main challenge is ensuring that he manages to live long enough for that vision to come to fruition.  

From the washing station, It was clear that there wasn’t much I could do to stop this “I’ll hang on” moment, but I still held my breath a little as I watched the pair of them finish the unload, Noah pushing grass out from the truck bed as Phil inched the brakeless dump truck forward.  It all came out fine, in the end—the grass clipping got dumped, no one got hurt, nothing was even dented, and we almost (just barely) got the harvest in in time to meet the Western Montana Grower’s Co-op truck. We don’t quite know yet if we can pull off a similar feat with our farm and life in general.  

Since that visit from Phil and his brakeless dump truck last week, we’ve joked often about being a farm with no brakes, and certainly no breaks. We’ve realized our farm and the season have been accelerating and at times it feels a good bit out of our control. We collapse into sleep sometime after dark each night, thoroughly spent but never quite caught up.  

Even though it made me a little nervous, I think Phil has a point about brakes.  When you are in flat, predictable, known terrain the brakes aren’t so crucial, really.  You know the speed, you can see where you are and where you are going, and you can push forward when needed and coast to a stop at the right place.  The problem with our brakeless farm at the moment is that we haven’t hit the flats yet. We have ideas of where we are and where we are going, but not enough experience to know for sure if we are on target.   The learning curve for new farmers is notoriously steep, maybe also curvy, and we feel it daily and weekly as we try out best to hang on for this wild ride.  Just barely beginning our third season of farming, not even on this land for three full years, we are just beginning to see the extent of what we do not know: balancing growing and tending and harvesting, direct sales and wholesales, volunteers, time, labor, effort and wear on both our own bodies and our equipment.  We hope that over time we get closer to a level place, and we can ride the acceleration of summer knowing that we’ll coast back down in fall and land right where we need to, but we aren’t there yet.  

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Mary harvests Asian greens - faster and cleaner than ever - with our new greens harvester.

A few days ago we barreled past our average last frost date and a host of planting goals like a runaway truck (or a herd of sheep over a weak point of fence, also a recent experience).  We wished that we could slow time down a little and catch up to the list of things due and overdue, but that isn’t how it works.  We can’t put brakes on the season—June comes, ready or not, every year.  And really, do we want to put the brakes on the farm?  If we want it to support us, we need to achieve a certain velocity.  I’ve had experience with old farm trucks, and I do know that the flip side of no brakes is the touchy brake that can send everyone pitching through the front window.  We could use a good deal more breaks on this farm, but I’m wondering if we just have to accept that there may not be brakes, if we want it to go.  

If we want to ride this farm to where it needs to get, we may need to concentrate on just steering and hanging on.  Hanging on with both hands and maybe anything else we can wrap around a foothold.  And that may be where we call on you all to help us hang on.  You help tighten our grip when you visit us at market, when you sign up for or tell friends about our feed bag and CSA programs, when you show up with a cold drink and an hour to pull weeds.  When the teenager in your family lights up at the thought that she gets a bag of salad mix of her very own this week.  And when we write and share, we remember all of that, all of the reasons to hang on tight.  

Most people would not fire up a truck with no brakes.  Most people do not start a farm. But you’ve met us, right?  We are not most people, and so far we are still hanging on.

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Malaya ushers the mulch truck into one of our gardens.

A Week of Work Parties and Planting

When we broke for lunch today and tried to decide what farm story to share in the newsletter this week, neither of us could alight on a single clear thread of thought.  From her sheepskin bed in the corner, Malaya let out a deep snore; even the farm-dog was tired just thinking about the whirlwind of a week we’d had, still sleeping off back to back visitors, work parties, and a day of chicken butchering.  

We’re still not sure if this week’s scorecard has Team SweetRoot pulling ahead or falling behind, but it does explain why we might all be happy to join the dog on the napping rug.  To give you a quick look at our week by the numbers:    

• Moved to new pasture:  196 chickens, 12 sheep, 1 moveable sheep barn, 5 chicken coops/ tractors, and 7 strands of electric fence netting.  
• Soaked:  4 pairs of work clothes on an epic rainy Monday harvest day
• Broken andRepaired:  one tractor clutch.  (requiring one new tool, two half days, two farmers, and 5 FaceTime calls to a farmer father.) 
• Opened:  just over one acre of new ground (former sheep pasture), for late-season crops and cover cropping. 
• Delayed:  onion planting, greens seedings, hoop house planting, farmstore finish work. 
• Recovered:  onion planting, courtesy of 8-person family work party, farmstore drywall mudding and taping, courtesy of after-work-party with two other friends.    
• Harvested:  149 lbs of greens (and rising), 18 young meat roosters. 
• Eaten:  9 lbs market leftovers, unknown during-harvest snacking greens. One roasting chicken (yum!) 
• Days since market:  almost 7!  

Bachelor Days at the Farm

On our farm, it's like the night before Christmas. Tomorrow is our first CSA day of the season.  The chickens are chortling as I write, chicken tractors - all four of them - are resting in good pasture. Malaya, fresh from a bath in the irrigation ditch, and tired from a day of greeting visitors and digging, is in the cab of the open truck, sleeping and waiting for Mary to get home.  She's been away, with family in Oregon for the past few days, and the farm has been in my hands.  At times, it's been disasterous. My voicemail filled up. All of my electronic communication dwindled and I resorted to texts and people relaying messages to me in other ways. I ran out of food (other than greens, of course) and I one low point in the past few days, I purchased some low-priced, terribly chewy pizza. The next morning, I succumbed to feeding it to our hungry laying flock. It's been an adventure.

Today, for example, in my rush to water plants in our greenhouse, and then get to harvesting, I toppled over a plywood table, spilling dozens of delicate plants. I potted them up, forty five minutes later.  I told Mary that I'd get to digging postholes for a clothesline for the washing machine we just plumbed as soon as she left.  And, while I picked up our shovels to mix potting soil with our own compost, I haven't gotten those holes dug even though it's been on my list for the past several days.

And yesterday, running the quacker through our field, one of our favorite no-till tractor tools, my foot got tangled in bailing twine on my dismount, and I went flying, face-first, right into the soft soil.  But then I tasted a bit of our soil, soil you've all helped build, with compost, and leaves, and I remembered how far we've come.  On these warm spring nights, where summer doesn't seem so far away, and the outdoor kitchen isn't so bad, I feel a great deal of hopefulness. Today, if you are reading this email Tuesday morning, is our first CSA pickup.

This is our early season, filled with abundant greens. We may one or two surprises from the field tomorrow, but most of the bounty comes from our no-till hoophouse, fertilized by our compost, help from the composting operation of Hulls Dairy, and our previous laying flock that moved out early last winter into some of your freezers.

We've been delivering to Bitterroot Brewery, The Western Montana Growers Cooperative, Bouilla, and snuck in one pre-season delivery to the Hamilton Marketplace and the Stock Farm but we cannot wait to get you our food. It's our community that our farm is really about, and it's our mission to get food to you, personally, and we finally have the chance to do it.  I can't wait to harvest our spinach early in the morning, spicy greens, and salad mix.  Mary is a pro at the radish bunching, and she'll be at it with me, early in the morning.

While Mary has been away, spending her last time with family before the market season starts up, I've been up to my own tricks, unsupervised with many unathorized initiatives. In no particular order, here are some highlights:

With our friend Leon, at his farm, I welded up the frame for our giant mobile chicken coop. I've never really helped weld anything, and like putting up a new hoophouse, wiring our greenhouse, and putting together an idler arm on our farm-built chicken plucker, this is yet another new skill that I never thought we'd be getting (or need) a couple of years ago. When Mary goes away, I always try to accomplish something big.  

This new chicken coop is our next step to raising a sustainably and healthy laying flock, and it's a huge step for us.  The frame of a 32 foot long mobile trailer, farm-made and fabricated, sits outside our workshop.  Tomorrow we'll have butcher paper and pencils so the young (or older) can add to the list of features we'd eventually like to have added. As we are still building the deck, design submissions are welcome! You can also find out about joining our flock share, and make arrangements for your first meat chickens which will be available this week. We'll have more information about that at the farm tomorrow and flock shares help make these projects possible.

I planted more potatoes than I should have. We had a workparty with our friends one evening last week, planting a bunch. Then volunteers showed up and we planted more on Sunday. Mary has yet no real idea of the scale of potatoes I've planted. It was a good excuse to mulch a large section of our field, but it's going to mean some careful inside planning, making some new bedspace on areas of our farm animals have been helping build for the past couple of years.  I've excited about this and dream about the possibilities of large quantities of dry corn, big dry bean harvests for soup making parties, but we are worried about the work and it's going to mean at least one - if not more -- calls for help later this spring.

 I washed the dog. This may not sound like a big deal, but Malaya was recently coated in vegetable oil from a spill in our filtering operation -- since we run our Jetta on used fryer oil.  Many of you haven't seen this part of the farm tour, well, because it's a little greasy. All the oil is packed neatly in drums, but we are happy to show you the operation on a farm tour.  It took a full 90 minutes to wash Malaya, and I'm not saying how much shampoo it took. 

And today, I literally watched our field grow. We have nearly 1/4 acre of crops fully under row cover and today, I removed most of that row cover to give the plants additional light and breathing room. By dusk, as I was recovering the plants, a ritual we sometimes spend one hour doing with the full acre in the fall, I could literally measure the growth of spicy mix, arugula, and kale. I started estimating the amounts of pounds we will have for market this Saturday and, my immediate thought was that we'd have to hook up the tractor to the under-construction chicken coop. We like that feeling, it makes a feel rich, plentiful, and like we have more than just ourselves, our stories, and our love to share with one another and our community.

As I was running out of the field to greet our friend Scott, who came to pickup some of our farmer coffee, he saw me running and yelled 'Let's Go Team.' I like that and even if it was just me on the farm today, with the visitors, and with all of the chaos, it felt just like that, just right, with just the right amount of team. For me, who frets about fiances and leaves home -- twice now this spring for outside work - that's a good feeling and one that I will hold on to. And of course today, while I was running around and about to head off on a farm errand, Ed brought me tacos, which in my bachelor routine I had taken on my old ways, eating at odd hours. I added greens and dove on in.

Reuben declares the potato planting season officially open.

On the Farm: Catching the Currents

Small farmer, big dreams. Mary stands at the entrance to the newly built--and very large--sliding hoophouse doors.

Timing can be everything, on a farm. For most of last week I was solo here at SweetRoot. Noah had taken a 5-day work assignment in Oregon, as we had hit the common spring gap where last year's proceeds and the early spring sign-ups weren't enough to cover late spring bills. It wasn't ideal, some things will get to market a week or so later, but it's what we had to do.  

Weeding and prepping beds alone, I noticed I was muttering to myself, repeating a few words:  "white thread stage...white thread stage."  It was not the murmerings of a madwoman (or at least not only that), but a sort of farm mantra, both a search and a celebration. Because in fact, as I raked and hand-rubbed that bed to prepare it for boc choi transplans, I kept turning up the tiny just-germinated stage of weeds where they are almost all root.  They sparkle as they hit the surface little two and three inch strands of white, hence the name "white thread stage."  This is the ideal time to take out weeds, 10-14 days after germination, when they can be distrupted and rubbed out with just a gentle pass of hands, rake, or harrow. The white thread stage came up repeatedly last year when we grilled other more experienced farmers about how they had such clean and lovely weed-free beds and fields. It has become a bit of a holy grail for us, an attempt this year to hit the timing of weeding and cultivating right, so we do not have the waist-high thistles, the impenetrable mats of quack-grass, or the sea of lamb's-quarters hiding a tiny trickle of carrots.  

If you hit the timing right, with a variety of cultivation methods that try to pop that top layer of weed seeds before the intended crop emerges, we learned, we could save hours, days, weeks of hard hand-weeding through the summer.  As I worked my way down the bed, celebrating each sparkling white thread of a weed that would not be here in June, I thought of other skills, passtimes, passions I have had at other parts of my life, where timing, too, was everything.  
 
And that's how I found myself surrounded by mountains, 600 miles from the Pacific, thinking about sea kayaking despite our dry valley spring. Even now, hands and knees in the soil, I could feel the swell of waves, and the muscle memory of learning to roll a sea kayak, of finding my way to just how far to lean, when to plant the paddle and nudge into a current to turn a 17-foot kayak in a sweet fast pirouette.  I haven't paddled that boat much in the last few years.  Embarassingly, it has gathered a lot of dust, hanging in our shop in that time. But I can still feel the way the timing of one placement of the paddle, one gentle dip at exactly the moment time along the edge of the current could make the difference between feeling pulled into the eddy by a strong and graceful dance partner, or, if mis-timed, being pummeled, pushed, filled with water, and shoved back out to the unwanted rush, forced to paddle back upstream fighting hard to get nowhere.  

I thought, too, of mountains and learning to ski and that same difference between a gracefully carved turn and a fall that can somehow fill both face and pants with cold hard snow.  It's all in the timing.  And I realized that farming has that in common with these other adventures: we work with a huge, powerful, larger-than-us force. It's a little bit different, but also familiar.  Like pushing off into the current, or pointing the tips downslope, we launch our farm out into the wild ride of soil, wind, frost, rain, insects, pollinators, sun, and the finite number of hours in a day. We make plans, spreadsheets, calendars, and goals, but at the end of the day--or the start of the season--all we can do is try to line these plants up into the proper place and time to ride the current of this whole, huge, natural world we do not control.  If we do it right, time it well, we ride along on the force of that ecology so much more powerful than us. Things grow, bloom, and ripen before our eyes, pure farm magic.  If we miss, we struggle, fight against it, we paddle upstream, and we get the farming equivalent of a sinus-full of saltwater.  Trust me, we have had more than a few of those experiences.  

This is an exciting and a terrifying time of year.  We do not yet know how steep this summer's slope will be, or how swift the current.  We think we have gotten better at reading the waves, gotten a little bit smarter and more practiced, that this time might be easier.  But there is no way to know for sure untill we are out in the thick of it.  If you see us around town looking a little harried or dazed, just recognize that: we are launching again, still recovering from the last tumbles, and we do not yet know what is around the next bend.  But it's a good time for us to remember advice from fellow farmers, those with a few more seasons under their belts.  The ones who admit to that same mix of excitement and fear every single spring, 30 years into it.  The ones who explain "I have to be reminded sometimes, that that is part of my love for farming--the fact that it is a little wild, a little unpredictable. It's a serious adventure."  

We hope to hit our timings better this season--to sweep out weeds at the white thread stage, and enjoy a leasurely salad and summer drink with farm supporters, instead of only visiting with weeding tools in hand.  But we'll see.  Whatever the current season brings, we hope you'll be here with us on the wild ride.  

In the rest of the newsletter you'll find more updates on farm projects and programs, descriptions of our summer CSA shares, and even a recipe--perfect for the last of last year's frozen greens, or this year's first fresh ones.  And we'll see you soon, at the first farmer's market, just two weeks away!