Bugs are a big part of my job.

Depending on how well and how long you’ve known me, that sentence might have you guffawing.

I’m not sure how I went from girl-who-freaks-out-when-she-sees-ants to bug-lover. But somehow, every Friday I find myself staring at these big sticky traps, counting the still-wriggling olive fruit flies, soldier beetles, leafhoppers, and other little beasties.

I also maintain a dozen little gardens at three vineyards. These insectaries are full of flowers and a diversity of plants, there to lure in pollinators and provide habitat for beneficial insects like lacewings and ladybugs. I love spending mornings weeding or planting in these spots that are bursting with life of all kinds — not just the plants and bugs, but hummingbirds darting between flowers and blue-bellied lizards doing pushups in the sunny spots.

The garden is slowly taking shape.

The big area for row crops is tilled, and I’ve dug one of the beds (only nine to go). Now that bed is full of turnip, mâche, lettuce, radish, arugula, and basil seeds. Instant gratification crops.

That big patch o’ dirt behind the beds is getting filled in too. I seeded four long rows of calico popcorn on the west side, in hopes that when the plants are big they’ll give the rest of the garden a break from the harsh wind. And the first of the tomatoes are in the ground: sun gold, black cherry, mortgage lifter, pineapple, and Pierce’s pride.

I’m amazed at how much nicer the soil is than when I started last year. It’s soft, it smells good, and I found plenty of fat, juicy earthworms while I was digging the one bed. Last year the ground was as hard as concrete, and it wasn’t until halfway into summer that I started finding good bugs.

My garden to-do list keeps getting longer, but they days are stretching out too. And playing in the dirt is not a bad way to spend one’s free time.

I’m about to get cracking on my second season in the garden. There’s a mix of excitement, anxiety, and utter impatience that my favorite farming mentor once described as “fear of farming.”

Ernie is mowing and tilling my field over the weekend, so there’s nothing I can do for another few days. But as soon as the ground’s ready for planting, there will be SO MUCH to do: first a frenzy of setting up irrigation, translating my graph paper notes and maps into an actual garden plan, and lots of transplanting and seed sowing. Then there will be six months of daily (well, nearly daily) watering, weeding, harvesting, and attempts to keep up with succession planting. How can I not get nervous thinking about it?

At least this year I have a season behind me, and some solid data to draw from. There is still so much I have to learn, but it’s amazing to think back to all that I didn’t know when I started in my garden last year. (A week or so after I planted my first crop of beets — which I spent HOURS direct-seeding — I rejoiced at the bed full of happy little cotyledons springing up. It took me another couple weeks to realize that they were all weeds.) There were a few areas where I had big problems, so this year I’m trying out some new plans. Lots of them.

Tomatoes

Except for the popcorn (ugh), tomatoes were my biggest source of frustration in the garden last year. The harvest was very late, and almost all of the fruit were unusable because of worms, blossom-end rot, sunburn, mold, and critters eating them. There was only one planting, and only three varieties. What should have been the best crop of the summer was a constant annoyance, and though the shitty weather is partially to blame, it was really mostly farmer error. The much-improved game plan for this year includes:

• Wider spacing – Two feet between plants wasn’t nearly enough
• Succession planting – So the millions of tomatoes are spaced out, not coming at me all at once.
• Trellising/caging/pruning/training – Letting the plants sprawl out on the ground let the gophers get at them, caused the fruit to rot, and made harvesting a disgusting chore. I had planned to cage the plants but never got around to it; this year it’s a priority. I’m going to mess around with a few different methods to see which works best.
• Diversity – You should see my list of tomato seeds to buy. There will be at least a dozen heirloom varieties alone.

Windbreaks

The wind comes screaming through the little valley my garden is in, and on a bad day a couple hours in that kind of wind is enough to make you lose your mind. I’m not sure how much it affects the plants — nothing’s been blown over — but a little refuge would do this farmer a whole lot of good. I’m hoping that planting tall and sturdy plants like popcorn and sunchokes on the northwest side of the garden will cut down the windspeed.

Compost tea

Compost tea is such a weird and awesome idea. You take a small amount of good compost, full of nutrients and happy little microbes, and dump it in some water. You use a pump to aerate the water for 24 hours. The idea is that those happy little microbes swim around, feast on the yummy stuff in the compost, and procreate like crazy. When the time’s up, you strain out the solids, and use the resulting tea to give your plants a dose of microbial goodness. It’s not about giving them nutrients; that should already be in the soil. You’re giving them multitudes of healthy bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa that will invigorate the soil biology, making the soil’s nutrients more easily accessible to the plants.

You can spend a lot of money on a fancy compost tea brewer, but supposedly all you need to really need is a bucket and a pump. Water + compost + air = compost tea. So that’s my plan.

Gopher-proof irrigation

Those gorram gophers. Last year they treated my t-tape as their own personal water fountains. They easily chew through the thin plastic, creating leaks in the lines and plenty of headaches for me. And I’m sure giving them a steady water supply didn’t help with my general gophers-eating-my-plants problem either. I’m reluctant to abandon the t-tape (mostly because I still have half a roll left), but for the most part I’ll be switching to thicker drip tube for widely spaced veggies and sprinklers for greens.

I’m still new enough to farming that almost every part of it is exciting. But today was an exceptionally awesome day at the farm.

1. Baby carrots!

2. Baby beans!

3. Baby melons!

4. Baby heirloom tomatoes!

5. Baby butternut squash!

6. Baby broccoli!

7. Baby cucumber!

8. Ready-to-make-a-baby popcorn!

9. And finally, the height of my day, a sweet little frog chilling in a squash blossom.

Can we get a close-up?

Farming has got to be one of the least defined career paths out there. You can go to school for it, you can grow up with it, but you certainly don’t have to do either. Still, I can’t imagine many farmers out there have gone about it in such a backwards fashion as me. I’ve been running my own little farm (though really, I hesitate to even call it that — usually I tell people it’s between a big garden and a very small farm) for almost a month and a half now, but before that I’d never even had a garden before. No, really. I worked at a farm for a year and a half, most of that time as an assistant manager, helping plan and make decisions, but I’d never seen a plant through its whole life cycle before.

When I got started with my big garden/small farm a few weeks ago, there were several anxious days in which I was sure that none of my seeds would grow. I was amazed when almost everything came up without problems.

It’s been 44 days since I put the first seeds in the ground, and I’m sure I’ve learned at least one new thing each of those days. I’m listing some of them here hoping that someone will find them useful, or at least that I’ll get a real kick out of reading this after I’ve got a season under my belt.

1. Double-digging clay soil that’s never been cultivated is probably not the most efficient use of one’s time and energy.
2. Learning to broadcast seeds evenly is an incredibly useful skill.
3. Shop around for irrigation equipment; prices vary widely.
4. Keep small greens under row cover, or the flea beetles will eat them alive.
5. Write down everything, especially what’s planted where.
6. Skip the meager bags at the nursery and buy compost by the truckload.
7. Set a schedule for irrigating, and stick to it.
8. Plant radishes in the beginning for an early reward. Just not too many.
9. Weed a little bit every day, and for a few hours a couple times a week. Like the guys that paint the Golden Gate Bridge, just keep working through the weeds constantly.
10. Read about growing and talk to other growers. Talk about your problems and ask for help when you’re stumped.
11. Only interplant crops that have roughly the same water requirements. Astonishing that this one isn’t self-evident, huh?
12. If wind’s a problem, plant corn along the side of the garden where the wind comes from.
13. Direct seed instead of sowing in flats unless you’re really set up to take care of the babies.
14. Start planning how you’ll sell produce long before it’s ready.

Speaking of that last one, I’m collaborating with a few friends to open up a produce stand starting next month. Chris, Ernie, Julie, Megan, Ingrid, and I will have all our goodies up for sale outside of Ernie’s Tin Bar on Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll post more details here once we figure it all out.

(A quick update: I left my job at that other farm last week, and after a few days of downtime, have started farming on a little almost-quarter-acre field on my friend Ernie’s property.)

Today I:

• finished double-digging my first 5′ x 20′ bed. Heck yeah John Jeavons! (233 minutes)
• set up my garden hose for watering the raised beds, and rolled out the header for watering the rows (12 minutes)
• planted chioggia beets. So many beets. (62 minutes! Gotta get faster!)
• enjoyed a horchata milkshake and got to see Riley’s new farm spot (’bout an hour)
• showed Riley my little patch o dirt, did an irrigation store run, decided on general bed/row layout, and took a break to walk the goats with Ernie (173 minutes)

(Don't worry, we drove nice and slow.)

I also sunburned my lower back, forearms, and face. I have cuts and blisters on my hands, and my palms are so sore that it hurts to high-five. Of course, everything else is sore too. And I’m tired, so tired. Two days of farming has totally kicked my pansy, used-to-parking-itself-on-a-padded-chair-all-day ASS.

But today when I walked into my favorite diner, my favorite cashier said, “You look happy!” I am SO happy, I can’t even tell you. I’ve never had a job where I was so elated at the end of the second day. In my last job, I read dozens of intern applications that waxed poetic on the soulful joys of farming. Now I’m finally feeling it.

On tomorrow’s to-do list: another irrigation errand run (I fear that this is going to become a theme), rolling out drip lines, planting (popcorn, dry beans, green beans, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, muskmelons, lettuce, more beets, and spinach) double-digging half of the next bed. And most importantly, visiting Mark and Velma, who I’ve barely seen in the last year and a half — largely because I’d been working so hard for a pretty crappy company. Hooray for my new independence!

If everything unfolds the way we’re hoping, by the end of spring Chris and I will be renting an acre of farmland in Petaluma from our favorite bartender. There’s still a bit of iffiness to that if, but … well, that’s not going to stop me from dreaming.

I’ve been reading Gene Logsdon’s Small Scale Grain Raising, and the more I learn about home-grown grains, the more I long for the freshest flour in the world. Imagine: freshly ground cornmeal for polenta, wheat for bread, and all manner of whole grains for rich, nutty pancakes. Mmmmm.

And Chris keeps acquiring books on beer brewing and whiskey distilling. His face already lights up with pride when he hands someone a well-made Manhattan – but if we grew the grain, harvested and threshed it, and made the liquor? Wowee, that’d really be something.

Over the last year-and-a-bit I’ve learned to have a greater respect and love for vegetables and eggs by getting involved in the production of them. I’m hoping that home-grown grains will leave the same impression. I get the feeling that compared to veggies, growing grains takes much more work, and is much less profitable. But I’m planning on setting aside a quarter of our little acre for corn, wheat, oats, barley, and other grainy goodies.

(Oh, we’re also going to plant tons of veggies for a mini/starter-CSA. Pretty soon I’m going to start soliciting for subscriptions — consider yourself warned.)

I just made seven pints of spicy pickled carrots with wild fennel, and I’ve got a box of rhubarb waiting to be preserved in syrup tomorrow. Setting aside some of the harvest is a big part of eating locally, and it’s fun! I’ve hardly done any preserving before, but now that we’re past the peak of summer production, it suddenly seems too important to put off.

I’m hoping to get a pressure canner in the next couple weeks so I can get low-acid goodies canned in addition to the pickles and jams. Just thinking about it has got me day-dreaming of a winter full of colorful jars.

A list to ease my excitement:

• pickled beets
• raspberry jelly
• pickled artichokes
• tomato jam
• preserved winter squash
• preserved green beans
• crushed tomatoes
• diced tomatoes
• tomato sauce
• tomato juice
• apple sauce
• apple butter
• pears in syrup
• dill pickles
• pickled watermelon rind
• plum jam
• grape jelly
• pickled lemon cucumbers
• preserved sweet corn
• pear juice
• hot sauce
• ketchup

Yum. What else?

Our farm is underway.

Just about a year ago, Chris and I left San Francisco to begin our farming adventure. It amazes me to think of our mindset back then; we were sick and tired of working crappy jobs that barely paid the rent for our equally crappy basement apartment, so we took off. We had heard of WWOOF through several friends, and figured we’d travel around and do farm work just to get by.

At that point it seemed like something we could handle, and maybe even something we’d enjoy, but I don’t think either of us expected to be totally sucked in by it. But halfway through our first semester at Green String interns, before the winter was over, it became clear that farming was IT for us.

Since we finished our internships in May, we’ve been f’real farm employees, working long hours six or seven days a week, and fantasizing about having our own little farm someday. We’re living on one of our boss’s properties, and part of his offer to us was that we’d set up a little market garden here, and get a mini-incubator farm going. But between our long hours (and resulting exhaustion) and a couple broken rototillers, it just hasn’t happened.

Well, it *hadn’t* happened. Now…

Now it’s happening! I can’t tell you how excited I am. We picked out the garden spot (maybe about an acre out of the 110 of the property) almost as soon as we moved in, and Chris has been watering it ocassionally to soften up the hard soil.

We’re going to get the rototiller out here next week (finally!), but I’m also doing a little experiment. I’ve planted part of the space this week with turnips (Chinese red round, Japanese shogoin, and French navet des vertus marteau, ho ho) and Italian sugarloaf chicory, because I have it on good authority that turnips and chicory plants will not only thrive in hard soil, they’ll actually bust it up! I’m going to plant another section with cover-crop varieties of daikon radish and chicory, which will probably do a lot more work on the soil but also won’t be particularly edible. The remainder of the garden will be tilled and planted with non-experimental crops — lots of brassicas, greens, root veggies, and herbs — and we’ll go from there.

If all goes well, we’ll start showing up at the Sonoma farmers market on Friday mornings with some goodies to sell. If it goes really well, we may start up a CSA by spring. Whatever form our little garden takes, we’ll be calling it Lazy Fox Farm, in honor of the adorable little bastards who ate our roosters — and probably watch our every move from the shadows.

It’s difficult to find the time to work on our own project when we’re so immersed in our jobs, but heading out there at sunset to rake, seed, and water doesn’t feel like work. Right now, those 8 rows of seed sitting in our beautiful, sweet-smelling soil feel likes new world of possibilities.

*Sigh* I wrote this on Saturday, back when they were all alive. Since then three (including my dear Bowie) have been dragged off by a fox — all in one night! — but the two that remain are being safely guarded, I assure you. Anyways.

We got chickens!

Hylla (the chicken lady at Green String) has been complaining about these five young roosters for a couple weeks. They were *supposed* to be hens, but 5 out of the batch of 75 day-old chicks we got in April turned out to be boys, and they’ve been harassing the poor ladies ever since they got their combs. When you walk into the henhouse where their group lives, you see lots of bare butts and feathers absolutely everywhere. For the first time, Hylla suggested to Bob and Ross that they harvest some chickens.

She wanted them gone right away, but they’re still so small! In another few weeks, they’ll be respectably sized roosters with a heck of a lot more meat on them. So yesterday, Ross, Katrina, and I loaded them into the truck (well, really I watched while Ross and Katrina did all the work. I still haven’t gotten the hang of catching chickens) and drove them up to our house. Ross helped Chris set up a makeshift home for them, and suddenly Chris and I were the proud owners of five beautiful young roosters!

Four of them are a local hybrid (egg and meat) breed, Sonoma somethingorother. When they’re big enough, I’ll finally learn how to kill, pluck, gut, and cook a chicken. Yup, I’m planning on interrupting my 11-year stint as a vegetarian soon. Just for these guys though. I really have no interest in eating meat, but I *do* know a ton of people who do, and I have a lot of interest in supplying people with healthy, decently raised birds. The commercial poultry situation is so sickening, even with a lot of the supposedly organic and sustainable local companies. I’d like to be part of the solution to that.

Besides, living at Green String for six months changed the way I think about a lot of things. We saw a bigger part of the circle of life and death there than suburban kids like Chris and I usually do, even though it’s mainly a vegetable farm. Animals die all the time, whether they’re going to be someone’s dinner or not, and it’s a heck of a lot more useful for everyone involved if they can be dinner. And as I try more and more to only eat what’s grown locally and sustainably, and as I do real work more often, I feel less and less like I can meet my body’s needs through grains, legumes, and veggies alone. I haven’t had tofu in months! The eggs and dairy that have become a necessary part of my diet are locally and well-produced (and all the more delicious for it!), but they still have some death implicit in their production. What do you do with a hen who’s a few years old and has stopped producing? Wait until her sisters peck her to death? Or slaughter her a little earlier, throw her in the stew pot, and put her to good use? And what about the calf born to each dairy cow every year to keep her producing milk? How unsustainable (in the literal sense) would it be to to try to keep every one?

Anyways, back to our new chickens.

The other guy is a barred rock, and there’s no way we’re going to eat him anytime soon. He’s beautiful! My previous favorite rooster at Green String was a barred rock too. (See the story of his death for more on why I’m okay with killing chickens.) This guy looks a little bit like a hen, with his androgynously dinky comb, so we’ve named him Bowie. When we get hens, he’ll be the one in charge of fertilizing eggs and protecting our little ladies. But for now, he’s just the pretty one.

So we loaded them into a big cage that the previous tenants had left close (but not too close) to our house. Ross and Chris wrapped the three sides in some sheep fencing, since some of the gaps between the bars are a bit too wide. This held them for about an hour.

I went to check on the guys, and one of the little whiteys was cruising around outside the cage! I thought he must have squeezed through a gap, so I re-wrapped the sides with a roll of chicken wire I found, and resolved to catch the son of a bitch. Chris and I chased him around and around for half an hour, and when we finally got him close enough to the cage, I held the door open while Chris walked him toward it. That’s when the second rooster got out.

We tried in vain to herd them for a little while longer, and then decided to wait until it got dark for a second attempt. Chickens get so calm once it’s dark that you can pick them up easily and they’ll only cluck a little. We went back just after sunset, and one of the roosters was perched right on top of the cage — but the other one was no where in sight. We searched for the missing guy until we couldn’t see anymore (no flashlights, d’oh!), then shouted into the darkness that he was on his own, and returned to the cage.

I thought I could grab that one sitting there. He looked so peaceful! In fact, when I reached out to grab him, I was so surprised that he hadn’t reacted that I fumbled, and by the time he did start freaking out I could only grab his tail. He was flapping around like crazy, trying to run away, and I was holding onto his tail feathers. Unable to get a better hold, I let go (afterward, I realized I should have held his tail in one hand while I grabbed a leg in the other), and we lost another chicken to the night.

We did another quick walk to look for the two, and right before bed I checked for them again, but we couldn’t find them. I felt horrible for losing two-fifths of our flock within the first few hours, and was sure that between the mountain lion, bobcats, foxes, and other nocturnal predators we have prowling our woods, neither of them would survive the night.

At 5:30 this morning the sun came up, and holy CRAP were our roosters excited. Chris didn’t wake up, but I sure as hell did. I guess during the week it’ll be nice — we’re supposed to start work at 6 most days, so if we’re still in bed by the time the roosters get started, we’ll know that we’re running super late. For Saturday though? Ugh.

Luckily they calmed down quickly and I went back to sleep. Two hours later I was properly awake and went to check on them. I laughed as soon as I saw them.

The escaped roosters survived! And they came back! It looked like the two of them were visiting their brothers in jail. We’ve since let all of them out to roam for the day, figuring that they’ll come back when it gets dark and we can just let them in without having to herd and chase and catch the little bastards.

I’m looking forward to taking care of these funny little creatures, and it feels good to have animals again, even if they can be a pain in the ass. After the harvest we’re going to get a few hens so we can have our own eggs — and that’s the really exciting part. These guys are just practice.