Stories for a Rainy Day

Monsoon season seems to have visited Hawk's Hill Farm.  With the changing weather, I joke that our farm is like the floating island of Hugh Lofting's imagining in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.  Now we find ourselves floating in the Pacific Northwest.  Where will this weather ship go next?

One rainy Saturday at market, I stopped at the neighboring booth to chat with David, a septuagenarian  farmer who has been at the market for years. Probably longer than anyone else.  A woman farmer friend had told me that David outlined for her how to grow potatoes that would last through the winter in storage.  My potatoes never make it through February before softening and growing gangly white sprouts.

 "You have to plant your potatoes on June 20th." David instructed intently in his soft, hoarse voice, dark eyes peering through the thick, dusty lenses of his glasses.  "And when the tops die back, you have to leave them in the grahnd until the soil temperature drops to 50 degrees."  Every word was carefully considered and enunciated in his aged and whispery voice.  As he talked, his eyes glittered, and I could tell he was revisiting his childhood, farming with his father.
"What if I have potatoes that I started in May?  Can I leave them in the ground until the soil cools to 50 degrees?"
"You'd have to leave them in the grahnd too long.  You shutn't leave potatoes in the grahnd longer 'n abot 3 weeks."

We talked a little about growing fall broccoli, and he said that for spring broccoli and cauliflower, his dad had started the seeds in a cold frame outdoors, and when the seedlings had grown big enough, he and his dad would carefully pull the seedlings from the soil, dip the roots in a wet clay mixture and then plant them in the field. He smiled up at me as he described this method, delighting in its cleverness, and I smiled back, the recipient of a great secret.

 The clay slip protected the roots from drying out while they were being handled.  I relished the ingenuity and simplicity practiced by these farmers from back in the day.  They didn't buy soil mix, they didn't heat a greenhouse with propane, they simply used the earth's and sun's heat to start their Cole crops.

In just a few words, David had outlined for me the way that farming used to be done before the proliferation of consumer culture, before one large corporation dominated the seedling business.

This past spring, the mercurial weather wreaked havoc on our onion starts.  As we planted -- one day wearing parkas against the cold, another day in the same week more comfortable in Daisy Dukes and a tank top -- we cheered on our little green buddies, and watered the bejjeebers out of them against the heat.  All our care couldn't keep about 30% of the onion starts from keeling over in the sudden heat.  I considered ordering replacements, but our vendor was sold out.  The only other source was a larger farm that had sent us onion plants complete with several fat onion maggots that fell out of the plant bundles once several years ago.  I didn't order replacements.

As we attempt to move into a more self-sufficient cycle on our farm, I keep asking how to make the big picture work out.  How to provide for our own seed and plant needs when the weather gets increasingly squirrely.  We just keep putting our best effort out there, and listening to the voices of the past, like old David's, and hoping to be a fraction as clever as they were back in the day.

May your floating island drift into a gentle weather cycle,
Betsy