A New Beginning with A New Partner

For many years, I've shunned any type of match-making service, even the few well-intentioned friends who've offered solutions to my choice to "travel solo" for the past few years. Pre-internet, no matter how lonely I was, I never even looked at the "Personal" ads, let alone wrote one. Especially not across state lines. If I was going to find a perfect partner, destiny/God/random chance was going to have to dump them in my lap; I wasn't going to go looking very hard. Too busy.

The internet and cell phones vastly increased the ease of long-distance communication, opening up myriad new possibilities for meeting people close and far. But I watched so many friends struggle with the also vastly increased possibilities for disaster, and quickly decided that's not for me.

It's not that I'm not willing to take risks and try new things; I just look to farming, not relationships, for my gambling fun. Some rewards are worth taking risks for. Some risks are just too horrible to think about. Some odds are just not that good. Farming, yes; blind dates, no way.

If there's anything life has taught me, it's that every year brings big changes that affect me and others, often in very different ways. Friendships, even partnerships, can melt away like winter snow yielding to a warm March wind. The person I meet one day is not the same person I know a year later. Impermanence has characterized my relationships, whether cohabiting or long distance. Year after year of losses to death, career changes, relationship changes. Year after year of people coming and going at the farm (let alone in my personal life) left me deeply weary, tired of beginning each farming season with a whole new cast of characters.

Measuring myself now against the yardstick of my past, I've become fairly cynical about relationships in general. I have become more social, yet more solo, as the years go by. I often forget to long for the enduring symbiotic relationship with someone else that I used to think mandatory for my happiness.

So it was quite improbable that one day in early October I would be sitting at my computer and have the name of a rather obscure match-making service come to mind. Even more improbable that I would look it up and go to the web site. But I did. God only knew why.

A profile immediately caught my eye. The next step, of course, was to write my own profile and send it in for consideration as a possible match. At least a sort of a change of pace from filling out job applications. Into the wee hours of the  morning, I typed away, answering the questionnaire, providing references, so many details to think about, so much soul searching.

I sat back in mild shock when I realized that I had pressed "send". Commitment...if not to a particular relationship, at least to the idea that I could consider another relationship. Ack! What was I thinking? God only knew!

The same night, others far away were busy at their screens. Within a few days, I received word that the face that had caught my eye initially had caught someone else's first. I was surprised to feel a little pang of disappointment. I hadn't been hoping for anything, remember?

But the day I sent in my profile for approval, someone else far away sent one in, also. The person processing the profiles decided to skip the formalities, and put us in touch with one another directly. There ensued a flurry of emails: questions, answers, stories, photos. Fear and hope, doubt and elation swirled inside me. Whatever had I been thinking to start down this road? It was definitely a slippery slope...and a long one: from Lawrence, KS to Springfield, MO.

Photos. Not for decades have I envisioned myself teaming up with a redhead with flashy sunglitzing. Yes, there was one major crush decades ago...SO not my type now! But by the time I saw the photo, I'd already been captivated by the text, and I mentally steeled my will to ignore the trendy look of this total stranger. Other things were much more important than that intriguing face--grinning from ear to ear, laughing eyes brimming over with golden glints.

Our work and travel schedules made it difficult to find a time to meet in person. Also I was adamant that I needed to finish the major interior renovations on my little home before gallivanting off to the next state to turn my entire life on its ear.

Then for a long time, the internet was silent, and I thought perhaps the opportunity to partner with this intriguing stranger had slipped away from me after all. I was busy in the ways October is always busy at the farm, riding the emotional and physical roller coaster of early freezing weather interspersed with beautiful weather, taking sheep to slaughter, picking green tomatoes the night of the first freeze, farm help bailing out at the most inopportune time, a million things to do to make the most of autumn and prepare for winter.

The matchmaker emailed to ask if I'd heard anything for awhile; she hadn't, either. We presumed that someone else more local had appeared on the scene, and jogged off into the sunset with that amazing athletic redhead. I promised myself a good little self-indulgent wallow in loneliness, self-pity and cynicism as soon as I had gotten the upper hand on the major rebuilding of the kitchen floor. There is nothing like washing dishes in the bathroom sink to remind oneself that sometimes "traveling solo" is actually a very good thing.

But finally the floor was done, and out of the blue, an email came once again, as if weeks of silence had not passed. We decided to meet in a park halfway between Lawrence and Springfield: a public place, no one's home turf. Safe. But scary. After all, this stranger would probably be coming home with me, hopefully forever.

As I drove through the sun-drenched November hills on a impossibly warm, glorious afternoon, I thought about the millions of arranged marriages of the past millenia, and today in other corners of the globe. I thought about mail-order brides who left everything they knew to start a new life in a strange place, with strangers in unfamiliar lands. What would it be like for this stranger I was about to meet? Basic compatibility had been ascertained, a mutuality of goals--but there was no way to gage whether we would actually like each other. Can I learn to love a stranger, when my heart's been broken so many times? Can they love me? Can we live and work together if we end up not loving each other as much as in the fairy tales? What HAD I been thinking to Google that match-making service?

Pulling the car into the parking lot, seeing the truck parked off to the side, goodness, it's really happening! Fumbling with the seat belt, watching at a distance, being watched. I want to move faster, I want to move slower, now hands are reaching out to clasp across a diminishing distance in a vacant field, smiling eyes laughing in the sunlight.... I had meant to bring the camera to capture this moment forever, but perhaps it is too personal for that.

Clearly, a Power Greater than Myself has once again worked in mysterious ways, bringing us together. How else could we each have decided on the same night to contact the same match-maker? And how else could it ever have worked?

Home now, together, elated and exhausted. This will be fine, for all of us. We stand at the beginning of a long adventure, Sookie and me.

Thank you,  Mo-Kan Border Collie Rescue, for playing matchmaker. Thank you, A.M., for loving this beautiful dog enough to realize she needs a demanding job on a sheep farm instead of endless days off in a back yard. Thank you, God, for guiding us all.

Why Not Sell and Go?

I'm going through and finishing off some half-finished blog entries from the past couple years. This was written in 2010.

This essay belongs to both blogs, The Rainbow Covering and Reports from the Farm. My life belongs to both worlds, the natural world of the farm, and the spiritual world of my Christian journey. But wait--the farm is God's creation; that's spiritual...and my Christian journey is so deeply fed and supported by the practical day-in, day-out work of the farm. The "two" worlds are inseparable.

Today, for the umpteenth time, someone suggested "the solution" to "my problem".

"The problem", as usual, being that I am a) very land-poor at the moment and b) even more time-poor...a) in spite of and b) because of the fact that I am farming as well as working a full-time job off-farm, which is obviously too much for one person.

"The solution" usually begins with the person asking, "Look, I know it's none of my business, but how much equity do you have in this place? You're never going to win this [insert current regulatory/local politics struggle]; why don't you just sell the whole thing and buy a place in [insert name of more rural county that doesn't have such restrictive zoning regulations], and then you can live a nice, sane, peaceful life for a change?"

I really do try to keep an open mind. When folks make this suggestion, I don't necessarily try to rationalize my decision to stay and keep struggling to them (after all, it's my decision and my life; if they don't "get it" now they probably never will). But I do try to honestly, once again, put all the issues, assets, and liabilities on the table and give them a good looking-over.

Today it was one of my Old German Baptist acquaintances that suggested this, and for some reason that gave me some new insights.

He had offered to drop by and share his construction wisdom on the proposed remodeling project at 501 North St., the farm's "little brown house". We spent the better part of an hour going over the plans and fleshing out some of the details, but I could tell he was thinking grave thoughts about the whole thing.

"Why not just keep the big house, and sell this? Or better yet, sell the whole thing and move to Franklin County." My first response was to tell him what really special soil we have here...I often quip "I'd move to ____, but I just can't figure out how to take my soil and groundwater with me." Then I told him about my rock-solid understanding that God put me here to serve him in a way like Noah--building the farm as an ark for a multitude of species, safe from the pesticide-poisoned world out there.

The mention of Franklin county brought an odd sense of dissonance as I pondered his words. Mostly folks recommend I sell out and move to Leavenworth County, just north of the farm. Then I realized: he was suggesting his community, not mine. Many of the Old German Baptists live in Franklin County, south of Douglas county.

And that lead me to reflect on an increasingly real consideration for sticking it out and staying here: Here is where my people are.

Here is where my people are. And that is my greatest treasure.

Sustainable Farming in a Warm Winter

This post was written in early winter, 2012, and only now finished.

Good article on an important topic: http://grist.org/sustainable-farming/why-farms-want-cold-winters/

Long, sustained cold weather helps kill grasshopper eggs in the soil, as well as other types of insect eggs. But there are many countervailing forces at work; humidity encourages a killing fungus among grasshoppers, so a bumper crop of nymphs in the spring may fizzle in a hot, humid June before doing much damage. Likewise, we could constantly till the soil during a mild winter like this, to expose as many grasshopper eggs as possible to the killing cold of a sharp winter night, even if the days are mild. But that would dry out the soil, and expose it to erosion by the wind, and disturb the beneficial creatures sleeping beneath the surface, like the salamander we found a couple years ago and didn't kill because we weren't using a power tiller.

My choice to avoid even "certified organic" tampering with "God and Mother Nature" is based on the premise that if we grow a wide variety of stuff, some things will do well in any given year, even if some fail. I believe that true "sustainability" is found not in heroic measures to save a particular planting of a particular crop, but rather to use the least possible effort/inputs to raise the most we can of something, anything, everything. With the diversity of livestock and veggies, sheep eat weeds (if that's all we grow) and chickens eat grasshoppers (more profit there), so even total crop failure produces something.

"Least effort" means avoiding many conventional and organic practices: irrigation (unless we need wet soil to harvest carrots, for example), raised beds, double digging, biodynamic compost, pest control, fancy packaging, etc.--basically, anything that takes extra human or industrial energy. It means putting seeds or plants in the ground so that they grow naturally, and harvesting and marketing with a minimum of cosmetic "fuss" (trimming, bunching, and pre-packaging). We do rinse the dirt off our veggies, because we want to keep our dirt on the farm, and not transmit weed seeds off-farm. We also rinse veggies to remove "field heat" and slow the metabolism so that things store better.

We also tend to be sparing about "forcing the season" for most crops, despite our selective use of row covers and the high tunnel. Forced plants are not healthy, happy plants. Tomatoes planted outside from seed bear nearly as early as those started early in a greenhouse, grown too long in the pot, and set out in soil colder than they like. There is usually little return for extraordinary effort to keep tomato plants from freezing in the fall...the quality of fruit is declining rapidly as the day length shortens, and it's better to just pick all the green fruit and ripen indoors or make green tomato pickles. The plants we cover are ones that like the cold, and the covers keep the tips from frost-biting so that quality is better. We also cover crops for practical handling reasons, like keeping the silver maple and elm seeds and autumn leaves from ending up in your salad without tedious hand-sorting as we harvest.

Doing less work for each crop means we can do more work on other things...and a mild winter also gives us time to catch up on things we usually struggle to squeeze in during the growing season. We are glad for a mild winter this year, for having time to lay down wood chips on muddy paths, to begin clearing and mulching long-fallowed garden beds that will be put back in cultivation this year, to sort and repair tools and generally get ready for the coming season.

There is an emotional level to sustainability, as well as practical--our inner energy, as well as physical energy, should be conserved and used wisely. A great deal of that has to do with reducing occasions for resentment, frustration, disappointment, and anger that we often feel when things don't go well. A key to this is remembering that "expectations are pre-meditated resentments". If we farm with hopes instead of expectations, leaving room for different outcomes than we are hoping for, then it can be easier to accept gracefully that things have not worked out as we foresaw.

Farming IS "a slot machine, not a Coke machine". If we expect that we will get X volume of crop from planting Y volume of seed, we are sure to be stressed. Instead, we plant seeds (mainly for things that have grown well in the past under these circumstances) and offer basic amenities (superior soil, natural rain water, attempts at weed control, a blanketing mulch to moderate extremes), and have faith that something will come of those modest efforts. It usually does. With wonder, we watch new sprouts emerge from the ground. With anticipation, we watch luscious leaves unfurl into succulent salad greens. With gratitude, we reap a harvest that has grown mainly without any effort on our part. The wonder is that it happens season after season, year after year, way more reliable than a slot machine...except for those few rare years that just go wrong. Even then, likely something went right or got done...and next year will be different.

One of the hardest things for beginning farmers is to have faith in this process of trusting that on the whole, things will go right and a crop will result. And to let go of the mostly erroneous notion that if we intervene with every little thing that seems to be going wrong, we will turn the course of things in a significant way. It's easy to overlook the energy--physical and emotional--that can be invested in watering to "save a crop" during a drought season when no water can be enough, compared to the small investment in simply making a second planting, mulched well, so that hopefully one or the other will be at the right stage to produce despite the drought, and perhaps both will bear full fruit after all, doubling the crop.

Mabel and the Hog--a Slaughterhouse Experience

Time is flying so quickly! There have been so many wonderful things going on, so many huge things going on, so many intense and uncertain things going on, that it is hard to stop long enough to write them down.

What happened today was so amazing that it demands my full attention, documented by recording the experience in this post.

It was a pretty routine take-cull-ewes-to-the-processing-plant day. We got everything ready last night, loaded them at Oh-Dark-Thirty (a.k.a. 5 a.m.), remembered to check the gas gage and take appropriate action, and chugged down the road to Bowsers Meat Processing.

There was a short wait while they did the two hogs in line before us, starting the morning off at a leisurely pace. As we whiled away the time on the back loading dock, another batch of hogs came in. The folks wandered over to talk to us after they unloaded--unexpected until we realized they are fellow Farmer's Market vendors. We rarely see one another except across the lot or on the way to the port-a-potty on Saturday mornings, so it was nice to exchange a few words.

When we went back inside, they were skinning our first ewe. That left Mabel alone in the kill pen, but the market vendor's hogs were in the pen right beside her. She was a little anxious about being the only sheep (just as she is at home if  she is separated from the flock for some reason), and "bahhed" a couple half-hearted protests. We spoke soothingly to her from across the room, while focusing mostly on the   skinning operation with the other ewe. Seeing the carcasses is important to us, because only without the skin can we really fully understand the body condition of our animals...wool hides a lot of fat and/or bones.

I glanced over at Mabel, and saw that she had turned to face the hogs. In fact, she had stuck her head through the bars of the kill pen, into the hog pen. Then I saw the hog! He moved over and touched noses with her. I expected her to pull away, because hogs can be pretty predatory with non-hog animals that they perceive as "food", and sheep are pretty wary about ANY new animal, even if it's just a sheep they don't know yet (or a friend that's just been sheared).

But she didn't pull away. Not even when the hog began exploring her face. She held perfectly still, not panicked or afraid, while the hog's wiggly snout moved over her cheek from nose to ear. I was poised to shout an alarm if the hog bit her. I've skinned out hog heads, years ago when I worked for Bowser. They have very sharp omnivores' teeth. In my imagination, the hog suddenly turned into a bloodthirsty monster and ripped poor Mabel's face off. Not so far-fetched when you consider that by this time I'd seen most of Mabel's right ear disappear temporarily into the hog's mouth, only to be released when the hog suddenly became interested in her eye. It  worked its mouth around her eye, then moved back to the ear. The only thing that kept me from screaming was the fact that Mabel had not tried to back off or stop the hog's overtures in any way.

By this time, my co-farmer, BH, had moved to my side. "He's calming her down," he observed. He has an almost uncanny understanding of herd animals sometimes, a real gift. I realized how quiet she had become, after her initial complaints about being flock-less. I watched the hog with a more open mind. Maybe he wasn't sizing up a meal, after all.

I realized that Mabel was relaxed. She was perfectly free to withdraw her head from between the bars and move a long way from the hogs. But she didn't. She stood perfectly still, eyes soft and not scared, and let the hog's face move alongside hers.

I realized the hog wasn't smacking his lips and salivating like some fiendish monster. He was gently lipping at Mabel's ear and face, caressing even. He withdrew slightly for a moment, and she stayed in place, apparently waiting for more of his exploration. He resumed after a pause, beginning with        sniffing her nose, then lipping at her eye and putting her ear in his mouth. He toyed with the plastic tag in her ear, and I held my breath, worried, that he might grab the tag and pull it out of her ear. But no, he  gently released her ear again.

After several minutes of this, she slowly withdrew her head from between the rails, and calmly waited for the rest of her time.

Usually, my sheep are afraid of the hogs--in fact, Mabel had NOT wanted to enter the building with the first few hogs in it, even though she had willingly stepped off the truck into the loading pen. It was very strange to see a sheep interact with a hog like this.

When I shared this novel experience with a friend later, they wondered whether it had changed my attitude about slaughtering my livestock. Now that I had witnessed this "act of compassion", would I have doubts about the ethics and morality of sending my sheep to be slaughtered.

Well, no. My thoughts on this haven't changed. Because my thoughts on this are very, very secure.

Mabel did not get to choose the time of her death. Well, I won't either. That means someone else (most likely God or a virus) will be choosing my death, just as I chose hers. Her death could also have been chosen by God or a virus, or a stomach worm, or a coyote. In most of those cases, it would have been much more drawn out and stressful for Mabel.

The death I chose for Mabel was mercifully quick, as always. A little stress from unfamiliar surroundings...probably akin to my experience of flying to Winnipeg about 7 years ago. A stranger stepping in to offer some unknowable sort of comfort or distraction. And then, in less than the blink of an eye, gone. I am not alone in thinking that I would wish this same death for myself were I suffering from a terminal ailment. Callous? Not the least. Pragmatic: "Natural causes" tend to be slow and full of pain and suffering. As I've said before, the slaughterhouse is the most humane end possible for a sheep life.

Signs of Summer

[ I have not written here for over a year. Farming solo AND renovating AND working full-time off the farm has taken their toll on a lot of things. I think I'm back now.]

Back in late February or early March, I stepped outside one day, and Nature shrieked at me: IT's THE MIDDLE OF APRIL!!!!" Something in the robins' song; some smell in the air; the first mosquito seeking my arm; a hundred little clues added up to only one possible conclusion: Spring was in full tilt, at least a month early.

Before that moment, we had been chugging along at the farm feeling very content with the work we were doing, cleaning up several year's worth of neglect. This year, finally, I have enough help and good help at that (another post). In fact, it seemed like we were ahead of the calendar with both training and action. But in that moment, I realized that we were suddenly a month behind.

In the past few days, I've seen dragonflies flying, fireflies hatching from their nymphs to light up the night, hot weather plants breaking dormancy. All the spring perennials have bloomed, and we're starting to see irises and soon peonies around town. All the fruit frees bloomed during March, when usually the trees are still bare and some late pruning can be done. The garter snakes have been active for weeks; scarcely a day goes by without seeing one in the garden or pasture. The praying mantis egg cases I'd intended to sell at Farmer's Market (still 2 weeks away) are hatching...next time I'll store them in the fridge. Some growers are harvesting asparagus already, weeks early. Morels, that May delight, are thronging in the woods.

Off the farm, I've seen pond turtles sunning, bullfrogs in the slough, herons fishing along the banks. One diligent farmer has his soybeans in, standing several inches tall now.

It's wrong. It's scary. What will summer be, if March is in the high 80s? Alternatively, if we get the least frost now, the magnitude of devastation will be unimaginable and will last for years.

The losses caused by this unseasonable weather are already mounting. Spring greens are our mainstay at Farmer's Market from April to early June. It's too hot to plant them, plus we're busy putting in hot weather crops now in case summer brings even hotter temperatures and drought. So we're missing an entire growing season this spring. The greens we have are growing too fast for us to harvest, even if we could market them.

Traditions are at risk. If peonies normally are the "Memorial Day flower", how barren the graves will be two months from now! My usual birthday treats, roses and asparagus, will have come and gone. Etc.

Keeping a record of this unusual season is a good reason for me to start blogging here again.

One Small Step for Pinwheel, and Mankind, and the Planet

About 11 years ago, we enrolled 2.3 acres of our approximately 12-acre farm in the USDA's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) as a Riparian Buffer Strip. Setting aside some adjacent odd corners that weren't eligible for the program gave us a total of about 2.5 A (20% of the farm!) that is "set aside". We receive a modest annual lease payment for maintaining this land by keeping it free of noxious weeds and cedar trees, and by mostly just leaving it alone. We are not even supposed to walk in the same place all the time, but the deer don't know that, and we tend to follow their trails on the rare occasions we traipse around out there. We do sometimes mow a path along the slope that isn't in the CRP proper.

In aerial views (try Google Earth for 1480 N. 1700 Rd., Lawrence, KS 66044), you see a shaggy-looking diagonal band on the west of the pasture, and along the north. It is 150 feet wide: 50 feet we planted to trees that would look beautiful, while providing food for wildlife, and eventually for us, and 100 feet we planted to native Kansas tallgrass prairie grasses and forbs (wildflowers) that would provide excellent habitat for wild creatures of all kinds, while slowing any run-off (and erosion) from our farm into the Maple Grove Tributary to the west, and the unnamed drainage channel to the north.

This land was eligible for the CRP program because it had been in row crops--corn and soybeans--when we bought it. On a certain sloping area, in a 100' diameter circle, not even weeds would grow, and the corn would get maybe a foot or two tall, producing nothing. The ruts between rows of corn were as deep as the plants were tall. Old-timers tell us that the 1951 flood left a "sand boil" there--like a sinkhole, but filled with pure sand. Indeed, the soil there is nearly pure sand. No wonder nothing grows.

Not even the trees we planted took hold there, but a few species of the tallgrass mix we planted made themselves right at home. Amidst the little prairie of 10' tall Big Bluestem and Indian Grass, there is a circular amphitheatre of Little Bluestem and Sideoats Grama, spanning both the 50' "tree" band and the 100' "grass" band.

In another part of the area seeded to grasses--near the south end, the highest ground--the taller grasses have done well, but thousands of elm trees have sprouted into an impenetrable woods.

On the low north end, many different tree species that we didn't plant have found their way to the farm by wind and birds: ash, sycamore, ornamental pear, mulberry and cottonwood. The pears are lovely in the spring, provide flowers for bees, and produce lots of tiny, inedible fruit that the birds love in late winter.

Our planted trees and shrubs include wild plum, redbud, buffalo currant, burr oak, walnut, and pecan.

Periodically, the Farm Service Agency or Conservation Service folks have come out for an inspection. We always have a nice hike, and they have approved what they saw. Our "management plan", as far as I knew, was "natural succession", which means that instead of trying to keep it the same for ever and ever, we would let nature take its course and "evolve" into whatever the land wanted its ecosystem to be (minus noxious weeds).

This year heralded a change: satellite imaging good enough that they could sit in the office and "walk around" the farm. I received a satellite photo in the mail with angry red circles: trees in the area that was supposed to be grass.

But I thought we were doing "natural succession"????

"No, you are not, not in the grassland, only in the tree band," I was told. After all these years, cutting down about an acre of trees would take longer than the April 15 deadline "or we will demand a refund of all payments plus penalties and interest"...even if I didn't have sheep shearing, lambing, spring planting, plumbing, policy work, and a full-time off-farm job.

They grudgingly offered that maybe they could change the management plan, if the board approved the change.

After a week on pins and needles, I found out today that they approved the change! The trees can live!

This is great news for me, just in terms of not having to do the work of cutting them down to avoid a payback I couldn't afford. But it's really much bigger than that.

Compared with the original corn/soybeans, or even with the tallgrass, those trees have sequestered a LOT of carbon...meaning that they have taken it out of the atmosphere and stored it in their trunks and roots. CO2 (carbon dioxide) is the "greenhouse gas" that is causing global climate change. Our atmosphere currently has about 388 parts per million (ppm) CO2. Scientists have said for decades, and continue to affirm, that this is TOO MUCH CO2 for life as we know it to continue. We need to get the CO2 level down...down to 350 ppm or below. We need to do this as soon as possible. (for more information see www.350.org.)

But how? Well, all the yucky stuff about using less energy in our daily lives, of course. And switching to renewable energy...but not just any renewable. Burning anything releases CO2 into the atmosphere, so though it conserves fossil fuels, burning firewood to heat our homes and ethanol or bio-diesel to run our cars isn't going to solve the problem. Solar and wind--and ironically, nuclear--are good energy alternatives, as well as hydroelectric and geothermal where they can be effectively used.

There's a happier, really green side of getting the CO2 levels down, too: trees. We all need to plant lots and lots of trees, and preserve the older trees we have! Trees to reforest lands slashed and burned to produce lumber and increase conventional cropland. Trees to fill vacant lots and odd corners of land, like the slope along the west edge of my land. Trees around our houses and along our streets.

Trees do so much more than just capture CO2! The CRP trees have nearly obscured most of the lights and much of the noise from commercial and industrial areas nearby, as well as the highways. Lumber is one way of sequestering carbon...using trees without burning them to release their carbon back to the atmosphere. Trees can also reduce energy needs by cooling our houses and slowing wild winter winds. And they can provide food for us and the rest of creation.

I don't know whether the FSA board took all this into account when they decided to let my CRP keep its trees. But these are many of the happy outcomes of their decision. Long live the trees! So that if we're lucky, long live us!

Drowsy Winter, Beginning Spring

Winter turns me more nocturnal than usual, and this winter especially since I've put so many late nights in working on the house project. Nary an end in sight there, though much progress has been made...I've resigned to not being "done" before the farming season starts, and continuing to plug along at it while doing all the usual farm stuff as well.

No idea how that will "work". It's not like I have enough time as it is, without lambs and planting and harvesting and Farmer's Market...but I trust that I will figure it out as I go along.

Today, though, I've realized that I'm beginning to feel "spring", and that means more energy, more interest in poking around in the dirt, more enthusiasm for getting out there and doing stuff. A dim remembrance grows in the back of my brain...oh, that's why I've been so ineffective and slow at getting stuff done this winter. I've been in the cold-induced stupor of the goldfish at the bottom of the stock tanks: alive, and essentially thriving, but in suspended animation.

So, in a few minutes this morning before work, I pulled enough weeds in the high tunnel to direct seed some broccoli and cauliflower transplants, and weeded out a few of the many volunteer Upland Cress and arugula plants. Pesto, anyone? The garlic and regular chives are sprouting, ditto the chard. Lots of Ruby Streaks mustard greens, too.

Chard is amazing! The plants in the high tunnel are now 1 1/2 years old...we harvested for 2 seasons last year, and looks like at least one more season this year. Who knows how long they'll keep going? And all this with no irrigation, inside the high tunnel! There are some new plants, too, germinated by the 1/2 inch of rain last fall when we took the high tunnel cover off for a week.

Outside, there is kale and mustard and other greens under row covers. The sorrel is sprouting up, and there are fresh green leaves hugging the ground under the dead branches of lemon balm.

As I wander, investigating, taking a census of the survivors, I nibble little bits of this and that. The leaves are thick and dense and bursting with flavor, nothing at all like the vegetables in their usual main-season form. I suspect the tiny handful I browsed today had more nutrients than a couple bags of grocery store salad put together. I want to do some research on that, to document that really, even small bits of really intensely healthy plants can make a significant contribution to a balanced diet.

So much to study, experiment, learn and do! Full of ideas this year, as always. Track soil temperatures and learn what the parameters are for various weeds, so I can better use them as indicators. Effects of rain and high tunnel on soil temperatures. How to make the high tunnel cover easier to take off and put on (alone). How to capture and re-direct and store the rainwater that runs off the barn and high tunnel so I can grow more in the high tunnel without

irrigating. How to replicate and manage the micro-climate effect of the barrels of water at the back of the high tunnel.

I visited Mom and Dad in Manhattan, KS, recently: like looking in a mirror! They are dreaming and plotting and planning as well, along the lines of integrated tilapia/vegetable production in their high tunnel. So many possibilities!