Mid Season

Road to the Sankanac CSA garden

It's July. It's July, and the farm is in full swing. The fields and greenhouses are full of food, the propagation room and hardening tables with seedling, the fruit trees and bushes with ripening bliss, and the days with hard, delightful, sweaty work. Since the video tour, I've become an agricultural apprentice, so I'm full time in the garden and just evenings and a half day on Saturday in Serena House. Deepening my involvement and responsibilities in this way has been amazing. I'm learning so much about all aspects, it'd take some time just to list it all. We'll skip that, save to say I feel more capable every day and see myself carrying on with the agricultural lifestyle for some time. There's so much purpose infused into every day I spend on the farm, such direct connection of work to outcome to reason, the why of it all. It's good stuff, and I dig it.

Clearing weeds

I'm also super fortunate that the folks I work with are tremendous people. The two other apprentices, Brady and Anna, are hardworking, intelligent, down to earth folks with great passion for farming. We all come to the garden for different reasons, but they compliment, converge, rather than drive apart. Also, we have two interns, Shay and Nikki who are excellent. Shay was actually an apprentice for nearly two years, about half her time overlapping with the beginning of mine. To have her back as part of the full time crew is unbelievably great. Then there's the head gardener Todd and his wife Mary, our villager crew, Beth, Andy, Lisa and Nathaniel, and our two regular workshop leaders (young village coworkers who lead the villager crew) Joelle (mornings) and Eliza (afternoons). Finally, we have a number of coworkers who are in the garden for one or two mornings/afternoons a week. It's a pretty sizable crew and we've really started to knock out some good projects.

Italian Dwarf Shelling beans and amaranth

Red Garnet Amaranth

We've been dealing with a very wet summer out here, the wettest June on record and so far July is following the trend. So keeping on top of field work and weeds has been a challenge. Weeds keep slipping past the hoe-able stage and fields sit, needing plowed, disced, beds formed, what-have-you and then trays of seedlings sit on the hardening table or in the greenhouse. But, we have found some windows, made a pretty good push on planting and seeding this past week. With the aid of some school and summer program groups we've pulled at least even with the weeds as well. Celery looks to be going down to early blight, possibly taking celeriac with it, our lettuce situation could get sad in a couple weeks, and winter squash is at the perfect point to go in the ground, but it's field needs rows made first. Our cooler's been jammed full with cukes, zukes, summer squash and cabbage, the tomatoes are coming on the board for next week, as are early red potatoes and carrots. The blackberries are coming ripe along with our peaches and red raspberries. The cherry tomatoes are kicking major fruit, and the peppers and eggplant look gorgeous. So many jalapenos already! The backlog of work has put our horses out at pasture more than in the field, which is a bummer. They must be pretty bored, but I did get out a couple of times with our riding cultivator to hill potatoes, strawberries and sweet potatoes. That was amazing. It's definitely our most demanding riding implement (the walk-behind plow was at least as challenging) and it's just a blast... when everything's working right. We brought in four feeder pigs to raise up over the season, too, which replaced the three we raised over the winter and had butchered this spring. Otherwise, I've been getting some solid tractor time in, part of which has been prepping a new five-acre field the dairy here turned over to us. That's going to be a really exciting project, give us some new and crucial rotational options and practice at growing feed for the cows/horses.

Basil, sunflowers and thyme

Beyond the main garden, I keep a couple personal garden plots. One is behind Serena and mostly herbs, though I do have some garlic, potatoes, three types of beans, tomatoes, amaranth (kind of like spinach and quinoa combined) and flowers in there as well. The other is up in our hilltop vineyard, growing shelling beans, amaranth, winter squash, sunflowers, scallions, chives, basil, oregano and thyme. The smelly stuff is mostly to deter deer from descending upon my beans, but we'll see how that works out. The gardens are something I get into during my off-time, maybe an evening here and a Sunday there. So far they're turning out real nicely. My main interest with them is for the storage crops--shelling beans and amaranth for seed grain. I want to get an idea of what it takes to grow food for winter, as well as what challenges come along the way (growing, processing, storing). It's been a blast so far.

Kabocha and Butternut winter squash

Basil

Life's pretty quiet else wise. After work on Saturday evenings, I tend to get up into my amaranth/bean/squash garden for some weeding and thinning. Coffee, breakfast and the paper Sunday mornings. Maybe another trip to the main garden to do this or that thing we missed during the week. Did get into Philly to visit my buddy Brian and his wife Sheila last weekend, which was great, and I got out to a concert with most the garden crew this past Friday evening. Took Eleanor (a villager in Serena House) out for ice cream yesterday and Karen (the householder in Serena--kinda my boss) to coffee today for her birthday. So my social calendar is reasonably full, too. It's a good life. Hope you're all lovin' yours and living the Dream.

Romain surprise