Friday, August 19, 2011
Sigh.
A neighbor came by to return Farmer's cell phone yesterday. He had found it in the middle of the street, along with a plaid tablecloth. I don't think there's anything else to say about that, except that no one was surprised. Not me, not the neighbor, and not Farmer.
Monday, August 15, 2011
The Quotable Farmer
About the screened porch room off the kitchen: "I don't know why there are all these flies. I don't think there's anything dead in here."
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Someone Left the Cake Out in the Raaaain
And by "cake" I mean "seeds." As in, 20 or so packets of seeds, which aren't ever supposed to get wet except when you put them in the ground because otherwise they'll start sprouting and then you can't plant them and then you've wasted all your money. I wasn't here when this happened, of course, but at least Farmer had the sense to take the seeds inside at some point during the rains. The result is that I came back to a kitchen full of this:
To answer your inevitable questions: yes, that is a dinner plate; yes, it is sitting on the island in the middle of the kitchen with seeds drying on it due to Farmer's stupidity; and no, it was not alone. Not by a long shot.
The Potatoes, Part II
You may remember that we planted potatoes a little late. Nevertheless, Farmer was shocked when very few of them (like...1/16th of what we planted) came up. But he had a plan, of course. We would just plant something else in the rows of potatoes that hadn't germinated! Brilliant! So off he went to plow up the land. When he was done, what do you think we found? If you guessed "rotten, decaying pieces of potato with what appeared to be antlers growing out of them," congratulations. Shockingly, the potatoes we had put in the ground had not simply disappeared in the intervening month or so as Farmer had assumed, and this made planting something else in those rows seem a little stupid. The solution, of course, was to pick up the rotten, decaying potato pieces and their antlers (with our HANDS) and consolidate them all in one row, where of course they'll really grow this time. For real. Seriously. We mean it, guys. Come on.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
How Not to Determine If It's Limestone
I said, "Farmer, I think I found the limestone powder you were looking for," and handed him an unlabeled bucket of white powder that had been sitting in the greenhouse. What did he do? He looked confused for a second, told me thanks but that wasn't the bucket he was looking for, and then he ATE SOME to see what it was. Farmer's thanatos instinct appears to be overdeveloped.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Roundup of Ridiculousness
I know I haven't posted in a while, so here are some brief glimpses into farm life of late:
1. In the seven weeks that I've been here, Farmer has been to the grocery store twice. The first time was on a day when it was pouring rain, and I had to beg him to go grocery shopping by pointing out the (many) items we lacked. The second time was the other night, when Farmer decided to make lemon bars and realized we didn't have any unsalted butter. Lemon bars, of course, are an urgent matter, unlike feeding the chickens or watering the crops, so off he went to the supermarket at 9pm. By the time he got home, he realized it was too late to make the lemon bars anyway, so he made them the next morning. While I was working.
2. Farmer hasn't been going to farmer's markets to sell things. To be fair, this doesn't even seem to be about having more time for facebook--we legitimately don't have any vegetables to sell. Actually, that might be more pathetic than if he were skipping the markets to sit on facebook. Either way, Farmer pays for space at three farmer's markets for the season and he's been going to one of them. One day he's going to show up and they'll have given his space to some random busker they've found around the block.
3. Now, I know that this is a farm and things are going to be messy and dirty, sometimes even in the house. But there should not be mud in the bathtub when I go to take a shower. Repeatedly. Mud in the bathtub once? Fine, you cleaned something off in the tub (I don't necessarily want to know what, or why the hose outside was not the venue, but whatever) and forgot to clean up afterward. But multiple times? That makes me think it's some sort of house policy. And that's not even getting into the dog hair that's all over the tub. I'm pretty sure Farmer showers with his dog.
4. Farmer's Mother counts and analyzes the obituaries in the newspaper every week. I don't know the specifics, like whether she compares multiple newspapers' obituaries or whether there's some sort of Excel spreadsheet involved, but I know that if you go to dinner at her house on a Monday she'll tell you all about the people who died that week: "60% of them were over 75, 12% had more than three children, five died of loneliness," etc. The strangest part is that she manages to work this into conversation. Don't ask me how, because I don't know. Once the obituary talk has been introduced everything preceding it becomes a kind of blur. It's like some sort of conversational rufie--you come to and you're smack in the middle of this fucking Albee monologue and you have no idea how you got there, but you feel vaguely violated. One of these days I'll have to keep my wits about me and figure out how she's doing it.
Don't Feed the Chickens
The chickens aren't laying as many eggs this week--they're down by almost a dozen, in fact. Farmer thinks it's because the heat is bothering them. I think it's because he didn't feed them for five days. Different farming styles, I suppose.
Monday, July 11, 2011
How Not to Irrigate
At my urging, we are setting up an irrigation system. Mainly because if I had to water one more 500-foot row of anything with a watering can, I was going to kill someone. This morning we measured out some pipe and, of course, realized it was too short because Farmer never takes care of anything and this pipe has been sitting out in the driveway for over a year, where it probably magically shrank. (Actually, Other Farmhand #2 tells me that the pipe was hit/run over with the tractor several times during the winter, so some parts of it got damaged and it had to be cut down. Of course.) Anyway, around 8:00 this morning we realized there were pieces we needed, and Farmer said he would go to the store and get them. At 4:30 in the afternoon he finally left to go buy the parts--and the hours in between were not spent outside, I assure you. So it's now 10pm and there's still no irrigation system.
Incidentally, last week when we started the irrigation project, Farmer told me that drip lines (thin plastic tubes that you put down along a row of plants so that water can drip out of the tubes and water them) could be found "near the hayfield," to which he pointed vaguely. I was supposed to get them and lay them out by the rows in the new fields. Now, I guess I haven't quite caught on yet because when he said this, I pictured the drip lines all in one place, ready to be used. I mean, I'm not an idiot, I didn't think they were organized neatly or anything crazy like that--I was picturing more of a tangled mess, but at least a tangled mess in one location. I did not assume that they were stretched out across 500 feet of ground in the fields where they were used last year--fields whose inhabitants were now weeds that came up to my shoulders. That's exactly where they were, though, and instead of simply sitting on top of the ground, they were buried underneath clumps of dirt and patches of weeds, so I had to rip them up and lay them on top of the weeds and hope I could find them again, and THEN measure them and cut them and drag them to the new fields. And that, my friends, is how not not to irrigate.
Incidentally, last week when we started the irrigation project, Farmer told me that drip lines (thin plastic tubes that you put down along a row of plants so that water can drip out of the tubes and water them) could be found "near the hayfield," to which he pointed vaguely. I was supposed to get them and lay them out by the rows in the new fields. Now, I guess I haven't quite caught on yet because when he said this, I pictured the drip lines all in one place, ready to be used. I mean, I'm not an idiot, I didn't think they were organized neatly or anything crazy like that--I was picturing more of a tangled mess, but at least a tangled mess in one location. I did not assume that they were stretched out across 500 feet of ground in the fields where they were used last year--fields whose inhabitants were now weeds that came up to my shoulders. That's exactly where they were, though, and instead of simply sitting on top of the ground, they were buried underneath clumps of dirt and patches of weeds, so I had to rip them up and lay them on top of the weeds and hope I could find them again, and THEN measure them and cut them and drag them to the new fields. And that, my friends, is how not not to irrigate.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Step Whatever Number: Run Over The Plants With Your Tractor
So normally you think of a tractor as a piece of machinery that helps the farmer cultivate crops. Or at least I did, until I spent some time here. Today I bring you two stories of battles between tractor and plant. And Farmer, who appears to be on the tractor's side.
1. I woke up one morning to find that dozens of the corn plants in our field had been violently severed from their roots. They lay in the dirt, no longer able to photosynthesize or absorb water or do any of the other things plants like to do. I was confused, as this didn't seem like the work of a rodent or other animal, and it certainly wasn't an insect or a disease. Then I remembered hearing Farmer out on the tractor at 10:30 the night before. You know, when it was dark. A time when one would be more likely to, say, run over some corn plants. It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that if he spent more daylight hours tractoring instead of facebooking, that corn would still be intact.
2. Today Farmer had to drive the tractor up over a row of tomatoes in order to secure some row cover* on the eggplants in the next row. Should be simple, right? Straddle the row with the tractor so you don't run over any of the plants. OR, you could do what Farmer did and get distracted (miraculously not by a cell phone, though his talking-while-tractoring rate is alarming. If he had a smart phone, I'll bet he'd be guilty of facebooking-while-tractoring too) and run over several tomato plants. He didn't notice until the other farmhand pointed it out to him; Buddhist detachment and Zen-like acceptance, or carelessness and half-assed farming? You be the judge. Either way, next time I won't worry about accidentally ripping up some arugula while I'm weeding.
*On the off-chance that you're interested in agricultural technology as well as humorous anecdotes about sad farms: row cover is a breathable, meshy fabric that you put over a row of crops to prevent bugs from eating them or to keep their temperature up so that they grow faster.
1. I woke up one morning to find that dozens of the corn plants in our field had been violently severed from their roots. They lay in the dirt, no longer able to photosynthesize or absorb water or do any of the other things plants like to do. I was confused, as this didn't seem like the work of a rodent or other animal, and it certainly wasn't an insect or a disease. Then I remembered hearing Farmer out on the tractor at 10:30 the night before. You know, when it was dark. A time when one would be more likely to, say, run over some corn plants. It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that if he spent more daylight hours tractoring instead of facebooking, that corn would still be intact.
2. Today Farmer had to drive the tractor up over a row of tomatoes in order to secure some row cover* on the eggplants in the next row. Should be simple, right? Straddle the row with the tractor so you don't run over any of the plants. OR, you could do what Farmer did and get distracted (miraculously not by a cell phone, though his talking-while-tractoring rate is alarming. If he had a smart phone, I'll bet he'd be guilty of facebooking-while-tractoring too) and run over several tomato plants. He didn't notice until the other farmhand pointed it out to him; Buddhist detachment and Zen-like acceptance, or carelessness and half-assed farming? You be the judge. Either way, next time I won't worry about accidentally ripping up some arugula while I'm weeding.
*On the off-chance that you're interested in agricultural technology as well as humorous anecdotes about sad farms: row cover is a breathable, meshy fabric that you put over a row of crops to prevent bugs from eating them or to keep their temperature up so that they grow faster.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
The Kitchen
This is not so much about how not to farm as how not to live like a civilized human.
I left last weekend on Friday night and there was not a single dish in the sink. I came back on Monday morning and I literally could not find a clean butter knife. Farmer seemed to have used enough dishes to cook for a family of four for a week, in one weekend, and not cleaned a single one. But that's pretty much par for the course, as are the dozens and dozens of flies that plague our kitchen and lead to conversations like this one:
Me: Farmer, I made some fly traps and set them up in the kitchen.
Farmer: What a good idea!
Me: ...Yeah. It was. And maybe we could NOT leave rotting compost around on the counters, since that probably attracts the flies in the first place.
Farmer: Yeah! What a good idea!
If you're playing along at home, you'll be able to guess exactly where the compost is at this very moment. I'll give you a hint: it's not in the compost pile outside, and it's certainly not in any sort of container with a lid. No, it is gathering flies in a plastic cup on the counter. Which brings me to the plastic cups.
For the first couple of weeks I barely noticed the plastic cups. Just to be clear, we're talking about the red Solo brand cups that you drink beer out of at a frat party. Farmer has a little collection of them, which he washes and reuses. At first I assumed they were for farm purposes, like soaking seeds or whatnot, and so I stacked them separately from the drinking cups when removing them from the drying rack. Then I asked, just to satisfy my curiosity. "Oh, those? I bought them one day when I ran out of clean cups and didn't feel like washing any."
...
Are we all on the same page? This is a 50-year-old man who ran out of clean cups and felt the appropriate solution was to BUY A PACKAGE OF PLASTIC CUPS. And we're not talking about a five-minute walk to a convenience store, or picking some up on your way home from work or something. No, the nearest place would be a good 15-minute drive, in a pickup truck, just for the plastic cups. And this man decided that that was preferable to washing a glass. That's the kind of mentality we're dealing with here.
So, I said it wasn't directly farm-related, but...how not to run a farm, step 4: make sure your apprentice is living in filth and therefore disgruntled.
I left last weekend on Friday night and there was not a single dish in the sink. I came back on Monday morning and I literally could not find a clean butter knife. Farmer seemed to have used enough dishes to cook for a family of four for a week, in one weekend, and not cleaned a single one. But that's pretty much par for the course, as are the dozens and dozens of flies that plague our kitchen and lead to conversations like this one:
Me: Farmer, I made some fly traps and set them up in the kitchen.
Farmer: What a good idea!
Me: ...Yeah. It was. And maybe we could NOT leave rotting compost around on the counters, since that probably attracts the flies in the first place.
Farmer: Yeah! What a good idea!
If you're playing along at home, you'll be able to guess exactly where the compost is at this very moment. I'll give you a hint: it's not in the compost pile outside, and it's certainly not in any sort of container with a lid. No, it is gathering flies in a plastic cup on the counter. Which brings me to the plastic cups.
For the first couple of weeks I barely noticed the plastic cups. Just to be clear, we're talking about the red Solo brand cups that you drink beer out of at a frat party. Farmer has a little collection of them, which he washes and reuses. At first I assumed they were for farm purposes, like soaking seeds or whatnot, and so I stacked them separately from the drinking cups when removing them from the drying rack. Then I asked, just to satisfy my curiosity. "Oh, those? I bought them one day when I ran out of clean cups and didn't feel like washing any."
...
Are we all on the same page? This is a 50-year-old man who ran out of clean cups and felt the appropriate solution was to BUY A PACKAGE OF PLASTIC CUPS. And we're not talking about a five-minute walk to a convenience store, or picking some up on your way home from work or something. No, the nearest place would be a good 15-minute drive, in a pickup truck, just for the plastic cups. And this man decided that that was preferable to washing a glass. That's the kind of mentality we're dealing with here.
So, I said it wasn't directly farm-related, but...how not to run a farm, step 4: make sure your apprentice is living in filth and therefore disgruntled.
Monday, June 27, 2011
The Potatoes
It's June 27th and we planted potatoes today.
If you google "when to plant potatoes," you get pretty much the same advice across the board. Here's a sampling:
"If you garden in areas that have hot summers[,] be sure to plant your potatoes early."(http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2007-04-01/When-and-How-to-Plant-Potatoes.aspx)
"Planting potatoes 2 – 3 weeks before your last frost date will produce the most satisfactory results." (http://www.growingpotatos.org/use-soil-thermometer-when-planting-vegetables/)
And on it goes--I won't bore you with more results but you get the idea. Plant potatoes in early spring, motherfucker, or they won't grow nicely and you'll get poor yields. Now, aside from planting them at the wrong time or infecting them with blight, it's pretty hard to fuck up potatoes. They're not too picky about where they grow or how good the soil is, and they don't need sustained high temperatures, making them practically foolproof. Also, people like to eat potatoes. They want to buy them from you because they're familiar and tasty and full of simple carbohydrates which increase blood serotonin levels and whatnot.
To review, we planted our potatoes a week after the fucking Summer Solstice. Will they grow? Sure, but they won't bulk up too well, they'll take forever to be ready, and many of them probably won't make it--meanwhile, other farmers will be selling potatoes like hotcakes because EVERYONE LIKES POTATOES. So congratulations, Farmer, you've just fucked up what is universally considered one of the easiest vegetables to grow, and one that is pretty much a guaranteed seller. Good job. How not to run a farm, step 3: fuck up the potatoes.
If you google "when to plant potatoes," you get pretty much the same advice across the board. Here's a sampling:
"If you garden in areas that have hot summers[,] be sure to plant your potatoes early."(http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2007-04-01/When-and-How-to-Plant-Potatoes.aspx)
"Planting potatoes 2 – 3 weeks before your last frost date will produce the most satisfactory results." (http://www.growingpotatos.org/use-soil-thermometer-when-planting-vegetables/)
And on it goes--I won't bore you with more results but you get the idea. Plant potatoes in early spring, motherfucker, or they won't grow nicely and you'll get poor yields. Now, aside from planting them at the wrong time or infecting them with blight, it's pretty hard to fuck up potatoes. They're not too picky about where they grow or how good the soil is, and they don't need sustained high temperatures, making them practically foolproof. Also, people like to eat potatoes. They want to buy them from you because they're familiar and tasty and full of simple carbohydrates which increase blood serotonin levels and whatnot.
To review, we planted our potatoes a week after the fucking Summer Solstice. Will they grow? Sure, but they won't bulk up too well, they'll take forever to be ready, and many of them probably won't make it--meanwhile, other farmers will be selling potatoes like hotcakes because EVERYONE LIKES POTATOES. So congratulations, Farmer, you've just fucked up what is universally considered one of the easiest vegetables to grow, and one that is pretty much a guaranteed seller. Good job. How not to run a farm, step 3: fuck up the potatoes.
Mowing the Lawn
Farmer was outside by 10:00 this morning! (I had been weeding since 8:30, just by the by.) I was ready to applaud his efforts and initiative until it became clear that he was outside to mow the lawn. Which, to be fair, is a step closer to farming than facebook, since it's outdoors and involves plants, but...not exactly the idea. Good try, Farmer. Maybe next time you'll make it out to the field.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Farming and Farmville
Dear Farmer,
Since you use facebook quite a bit, I'm guessing you're familiar with a game called Farmville. Maybe you even play it. As a farmer, I guess it would be right up your alley, really. If you do play it, it's possible you've noticed some similarities between actual farming and the game. I'd like to explore this a little, as I think it could be instructive for you.
In Farmville, you have to tend to your crops within a certain amount of time, or else bad things happen. If, for instance, you don't water the plants, they wither and die. If you don't harvest them, they rot in the ground and you lose money.* These scenarios should sound familiar to you--in some cases, painfully so. But here's the crucial difference: Farmville notifies you when your crops are wilting, or when they're ready to harvest, or when a lost purple polka-dotted pig needs you to adopt it so it won't be made into glue or whatever. Now, as you may have noticed, your real-life farm does not provide these notifications on a handy homescreen or newsfeed. So how, you might ask, are you supposed to know if the plants need water?! How are you to know when the radishes are ready to pick?! How, indeed, are you to be aware of the lost, possibly radioactive, pig in need of a good home? Some suggestions, respectively: walk out to the field and check if the soil is dry; walk out to the field and check if they're big enough; purple polka-dotted pigs are probably not organic and you can't afford another animal anyway, so don't worry about it.
So your real-life farm does provide notifications--they're just a bit subtler than Farmville's. You have to, say, check a calendar, or walk around a little. Not as convenient as a newsfeed, but if farming were just a matter of checking facebook, you really wouldn't need any help.
Love,
Your Apprentice
*At least, I assume this happens in Farmville--I started to play once and got bored so I'm not 100% sure this is how it works, but it should be.
Since you use facebook quite a bit, I'm guessing you're familiar with a game called Farmville. Maybe you even play it. As a farmer, I guess it would be right up your alley, really. If you do play it, it's possible you've noticed some similarities between actual farming and the game. I'd like to explore this a little, as I think it could be instructive for you.
In Farmville, you have to tend to your crops within a certain amount of time, or else bad things happen. If, for instance, you don't water the plants, they wither and die. If you don't harvest them, they rot in the ground and you lose money.* These scenarios should sound familiar to you--in some cases, painfully so. But here's the crucial difference: Farmville notifies you when your crops are wilting, or when they're ready to harvest, or when a lost purple polka-dotted pig needs you to adopt it so it won't be made into glue or whatever. Now, as you may have noticed, your real-life farm does not provide these notifications on a handy homescreen or newsfeed. So how, you might ask, are you supposed to know if the plants need water?! How are you to know when the radishes are ready to pick?! How, indeed, are you to be aware of the lost, possibly radioactive, pig in need of a good home? Some suggestions, respectively: walk out to the field and check if the soil is dry; walk out to the field and check if they're big enough; purple polka-dotted pigs are probably not organic and you can't afford another animal anyway, so don't worry about it.
So your real-life farm does provide notifications--they're just a bit subtler than Farmville's. You have to, say, check a calendar, or walk around a little. Not as convenient as a newsfeed, but if farming were just a matter of checking facebook, you really wouldn't need any help.
Love,
Your Apprentice
*At least, I assume this happens in Farmville--I started to play once and got bored so I'm not 100% sure this is how it works, but it should be.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Radishes Gone Woody
How not to run a farm, Step 2: Leave crops in the ground until they're inedible, then frantically harvest and sell.
"Just pick all the radishes!" the farmer said to me this morning. This in spite of the fact that we had several hundred radishes already harvested, most of which he'd failed to sell yesterday. But this post isn't going to be about my boss's utter failure to recognize what is an appropriate amount of a product for a particular market, or even about his frequent and misguided assumption that the best use of our time is to harvest ALL of one crop while nothing else gets done. No, this post is about woody radishes.
We picked them all, although I wasn't happy about it. I was putting them in bunches when Farmer walked over and picked one up, seemingly at random, and proceeded to slice it open with the box cutter he happened to be carrying. He examined it, took a bite, pronounced it "too woody," and threw it to the ground. I asked how he could tell from the outside, so that I might weed out the woody ones from the ones we could sell. There was a long pause during which his eyes remained fixed on the pile of freshly washed radishes. He finally replied that he wasn't sure, but it had something to do with dimples and pithiness and root formations. Or else it was completely random. He sliced another one open, grunted, and threw it to the ground near the first. When the mass radish grave reached several dozen deep, I told him he could bunch the radishes himself and went off to find something else to do. I still have no idea how to tell a woody radish from an edible one, though I do know not to leave radishes in the ground for two months before you harvest them.
"Just pick all the radishes!" the farmer said to me this morning. This in spite of the fact that we had several hundred radishes already harvested, most of which he'd failed to sell yesterday. But this post isn't going to be about my boss's utter failure to recognize what is an appropriate amount of a product for a particular market, or even about his frequent and misguided assumption that the best use of our time is to harvest ALL of one crop while nothing else gets done. No, this post is about woody radishes.
We picked them all, although I wasn't happy about it. I was putting them in bunches when Farmer walked over and picked one up, seemingly at random, and proceeded to slice it open with the box cutter he happened to be carrying. He examined it, took a bite, pronounced it "too woody," and threw it to the ground. I asked how he could tell from the outside, so that I might weed out the woody ones from the ones we could sell. There was a long pause during which his eyes remained fixed on the pile of freshly washed radishes. He finally replied that he wasn't sure, but it had something to do with dimples and pithiness and root formations. Or else it was completely random. He sliced another one open, grunted, and threw it to the ground near the first. When the mass radish grave reached several dozen deep, I told him he could bunch the radishes himself and went off to find something else to do. I still have no idea how to tell a woody radish from an edible one, though I do know not to leave radishes in the ground for two months before you harvest them.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Kind Words From Father
The farmer's father stopped by today and I was the only one at the house. He had this to say about his son's operation (completely unprompted, mind you): "[He's] not the world's greatest farmer, that's for sure. He's got some problems." When he asked me how I was enjoying my time here and I told him I've been learning a lot, he appeared not only skeptical but actually disgusted, possibly at the idea that I was blatantly lying to him.
The Consequences of Not Weeding
It's hard to harvest the chard if you can't see it.
That patch on the left where you can actually see the ground is where I did a bit of weeding mid-harvest. The right is what the rest of the row looks like. When I walked out there this morning it occurred to me that my boss might actually be playing a clever joke on me--at that very moment, perhaps, he was sitting inside laughing at my foolish attempts to harvest invisible chard. (He was certainly sitting inside when this picture was taken at 11:30, at which point I had been working for an hour and a half by myself.) But no, this Where's Waldo of a harvest was in fact a reality. In the end I got five and a half pounds of chard out of that fucking row, although it did take me the better part of an hour because I weeded as I went. I'm seeing it as an investment in my sanity.
Another anecdote, not directly farm-related but symptomatic of the general dysfunction around here: The kitchen is an absolute pig sty as usual (more on that to come), and on his way out to peddle our wares at the market today the farmer mentioned that he "should probably clean up a bit" before leaving. My eyes lit up and it's possible I danced and sang and became slightly aroused, all at the possibility of him doing some dishes. It turned out he meant he was going to change his shirt. Ah, well. A girl can dream.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Time Management
Dear Farmer,
When your two farmhands are ready to work at 9am and no one gets out into the field until 10:45, it should be clear that there is a problem.
Love,
Me
We had about 1500 plants to transplant. The ideal spacing between plants varies depending on the crop, so Farmer wasn't sure how much space we needed and whether we had that space in one field. So that hour and 45 minutes was spent counting up plants, looking at seed catalogues to determine the appropriate spacing for each crop, and multiplying. All by hand. If I hadn't brought out a clipboard and sheets of paper I'm convinced my boss would have written it all on his hands, or on patches of his clothing. I'm not convinced that his current record-keeping system is anything more advanced than that anyway.
After we got the spacing figured out, he insisted on doing time trials: testing how long it took us to transplant a tray of tomatoes using one shovel versus another. (Shocker: it was about the same, and we wasted quite a bit of time just switching tools.) Once we had determined absolutely nothing from that experiment and planted maybe 200 plants, we ate lunch and he announced that he was going to go and rent a water-wheel transplanter, an awesome piece of machinery that would have saved us oodles of time that morning. Leaving us to transplant onions by hand, he spent three hours on a trip that could have been done in half the time and arrived back at the farm with the transplanter right at the end of the workday. The lesson here? If you're trying to be unsuccessful at farming, do not prepare or test anything out in advance; that way, you wind up paying people to stand around and twiddle their thumbs, and if you keep it up long enough, the entire workday is over!
(Also, the next day, we transplanted everything else in like three hours using the water-wheel. Time management.)
When your two farmhands are ready to work at 9am and no one gets out into the field until 10:45, it should be clear that there is a problem.
Love,
Me
We had about 1500 plants to transplant. The ideal spacing between plants varies depending on the crop, so Farmer wasn't sure how much space we needed and whether we had that space in one field. So that hour and 45 minutes was spent counting up plants, looking at seed catalogues to determine the appropriate spacing for each crop, and multiplying. All by hand. If I hadn't brought out a clipboard and sheets of paper I'm convinced my boss would have written it all on his hands, or on patches of his clothing. I'm not convinced that his current record-keeping system is anything more advanced than that anyway.
After we got the spacing figured out, he insisted on doing time trials: testing how long it took us to transplant a tray of tomatoes using one shovel versus another. (Shocker: it was about the same, and we wasted quite a bit of time just switching tools.) Once we had determined absolutely nothing from that experiment and planted maybe 200 plants, we ate lunch and he announced that he was going to go and rent a water-wheel transplanter, an awesome piece of machinery that would have saved us oodles of time that morning. Leaving us to transplant onions by hand, he spent three hours on a trip that could have been done in half the time and arrived back at the farm with the transplanter right at the end of the workday. The lesson here? If you're trying to be unsuccessful at farming, do not prepare or test anything out in advance; that way, you wind up paying people to stand around and twiddle their thumbs, and if you keep it up long enough, the entire workday is over!
(Also, the next day, we transplanted everything else in like three hours using the water-wheel. Time management.)
Step 1
How not to run a farm, Step 1: Never weed any of your crops.
Not weeding saves time and manpower. It leaves you free to browse facebook all afternoon, and as a 50-year-old farmer with almost 200 acres of land to care for, it makes perfect sense that you'd want to maximize your facebook time. Don't let weeding get in the way of that. And don't worry that your apprentice is out transplanting onions in the hot sun (a month after they should have been put in the ground, but that's another post). Definitely just keep facebooking. Throw in a phone call or two to your neighbors to find out the answer to a question you could have answered more accurately and efficiently by googling. Anything but weeding.
We harvested some dill today. "Some" is a most appropriate modifier there because approximately 90% of the dill was shorter than the weeds around it, and therefore impossible to get to without wasting all our time (and we wouldn't want to do that--see above). We also weeded in the corn, but only because people are coming to visit the farm tomorrow, and the corn plot in particular. Yes, here at our farm, we only weed when people are coming to see the place. Just like when your house is messy and you clean up right before guests arrive. Only instead of being messy, your house is covered in nutrient-leaching plants that ensure that, come harvest time, you'll have nothing to sell to anyone and you'll be a sad, crappy farmer who can barely making a living. So my analogy breaks down a bit, but you get the idea. Weeding. It's important. If you want your farm to suck, don't do it. Facebook instead.
Not weeding saves time and manpower. It leaves you free to browse facebook all afternoon, and as a 50-year-old farmer with almost 200 acres of land to care for, it makes perfect sense that you'd want to maximize your facebook time. Don't let weeding get in the way of that. And don't worry that your apprentice is out transplanting onions in the hot sun (a month after they should have been put in the ground, but that's another post). Definitely just keep facebooking. Throw in a phone call or two to your neighbors to find out the answer to a question you could have answered more accurately and efficiently by googling. Anything but weeding.
We harvested some dill today. "Some" is a most appropriate modifier there because approximately 90% of the dill was shorter than the weeds around it, and therefore impossible to get to without wasting all our time (and we wouldn't want to do that--see above). We also weeded in the corn, but only because people are coming to visit the farm tomorrow, and the corn plot in particular. Yes, here at our farm, we only weed when people are coming to see the place. Just like when your house is messy and you clean up right before guests arrive. Only instead of being messy, your house is covered in nutrient-leaching plants that ensure that, come harvest time, you'll have nothing to sell to anyone and you'll be a sad, crappy farmer who can barely making a living. So my analogy breaks down a bit, but you get the idea. Weeding. It's important. If you want your farm to suck, don't do it. Facebook instead.
How Not to Farm
Greetings, and welcome to my adventures in learning how not to run a farm. I’m working as an apprentice this summer on a small farm in New York, which shall remain nameless. I should have realized when I first visited said farm that the boxes of crap all over the kitchen floor and counters, not to mention the distinct smell of cat urine, were warning signs.
“But all farms look disorganized at first!” I reasoned, thinking of the piles of garbage strewn about the land of other farms I had worked on. Those piles of garbage often came in handy, providing scrap metal that became a barn roof or rotting newspaper that we used for mulch. So I’ve come to tolerate, and even respect, what appears to be an instinct common to all farmers to save every piece of crap that has ever come into their possession. As you can imagine, acting on this instinct means that a certain messiness pervades the farmer’s life and property. I figured that was the case here, agreed to the apprenticeship, and looked forward to my summer tenure as farmer-in-training.
As you may have guessed from this blog’s title, this is not working out quite as I’d expected. When my boss mentions that he has an apprentice, people literally laugh in his face. At the farmer’s market, other vendors take me aside, look at me with pity, and ask how I’m dealing with this place. I think one of them was close to kidnapping me and giving me a better life on her farm.
Now, of course, learning what not to do is just as valid as learning from someone’s positive example, blah blah blah. But it can get frustrating. And tragic. And funny. So I’m writing about it, possibly in the format of a series of open letters to my farmer boss. Enjoy.
“But all farms look disorganized at first!” I reasoned, thinking of the piles of garbage strewn about the land of other farms I had worked on. Those piles of garbage often came in handy, providing scrap metal that became a barn roof or rotting newspaper that we used for mulch. So I’ve come to tolerate, and even respect, what appears to be an instinct common to all farmers to save every piece of crap that has ever come into their possession. As you can imagine, acting on this instinct means that a certain messiness pervades the farmer’s life and property. I figured that was the case here, agreed to the apprenticeship, and looked forward to my summer tenure as farmer-in-training.
As you may have guessed from this blog’s title, this is not working out quite as I’d expected. When my boss mentions that he has an apprentice, people literally laugh in his face. At the farmer’s market, other vendors take me aside, look at me with pity, and ask how I’m dealing with this place. I think one of them was close to kidnapping me and giving me a better life on her farm.
Now, of course, learning what not to do is just as valid as learning from someone’s positive example, blah blah blah. But it can get frustrating. And tragic. And funny. So I’m writing about it, possibly in the format of a series of open letters to my farmer boss. Enjoy.
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