The time has come,

' the Walrus said,

To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'

My mother, 95 in June, can still recite in their entirety many poems she learned in school. I can recite 1-4 lines of maybe a dozen poems that I've read or heard along the way; we didn't memorize poetry when I was in school. The lines above are the lines I know from The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll.

I'm sitting at Bill's computer in our farm office (my computer is currently downstairs in my quilting space). The office is a former dining room, with a sliding glass door out to the deck, and a view of the farm buildings where there is a lot of activity this morning.

Last year, when we weren't sure what would be possible for selling our produce during a pandemic, Bill only planted a few melons as an additional crop. Even so, the work of taking care of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and apples was at times overwhelming. It was rewarding, though, as he had a good strawberry season and an apple crop so good that he left apples on the trees because he ran out of cooler space for them. The melon crop was fine, but each crop adds a level of complexity - as well as more work - to the growing season.

In the fall, Bill told me he was putting his remaining hoop house/high tunnel up for sale at the auction site he uses. [A larger hoop house was severely damaged several years ago by high winds and had been dismantled and stored in the machine shed.] I was surprised and not surprised. We've been talking about retiring from farming - I retired from full-time work in December 2020 - selling up and moving to a house with less work and maybe closer to our children & new grandchild. Selling the hoop house meant no tomatoes or melons since that's where the plants went to harden off when he picked them up from the greenhouse.  And then last week the remaining pieces of the larger, damaged hoop house were sold and picked up by the new owner.

Today, there has been a steady stream of machinery and other equipment being loaded onto trailers and driven off to the auction house. A machine that made raised beds (to plant annual strawberries), a plastic layer, a planter that planted through the plastic, trusses for low tunnel coverings, posts for electric fencing (used around sweet corn fields to slow down the raccoons), electric fencing wire, battery-operated current transmitters, and more have been hauled out of the buildings. A pickup loaded with apple wood cut last spring stands ready to go to the Nerstrand butcher who uses it to smoke various meats.

So far Bill says it feels freeing - he can't imagine going back to trying to juggle so much work in maintaining so many different crops. Since he's retreated from the idea of selling the farm (for now - more on that later), I'm very glad to see that he hasn't retreated from the plan to simplify the operation.

Along the trail - Part 1

As I drive to work I often cogitate about the landmarks I pass. My commute is 38 miles each way. It's about 7 miles from the farm to the freeway, 25-odd miles on the freeway, and about 5 miles from the freeway to work.  There are several routes I take to and from the freeway, but one that I use most of the time and places along that route that I look for each day.

On Tuesdays I work the evening shift, which means I come through Faribault 9:15-9:30 p.m. - in the dark except about 6 weeks in mid-summer. Quite a few years ago now, there was a house on my path where a group of musicians would be playing or practicing in the front window every Tuesday night. It was fun to check for them and guess what piece they might be playing. When they stopped appearing in that window on Tuesday nights, I missed them, with an odd sense of loss, for a long time. I didn't and don't know the family living in that house, but it felt warm and welcoming to see the group playing their instruments as I passed by.

Another house on my usual path was home to an older couple. I would often see the woman of the couple out walking in the morning, or occasionally mowing the lawn. In the late afternoons and Tuesday nights, the television would be on, visible from the big living room picture window where the drapes were rarely pulled. I rarely saw the man of the couple, except a fleeting glimpse of someone sitting in a chair watching TV. About December 1st each year, a Christmas tree still goes up, and January 1st it comes down. For more than 2 years now the television has been dark most afternoons and evenings; sporadically at first but always over the past year or two. Until this past summer I still occasionally saw the woman in the yard or walking, but no man in the chair watching television. On weekends now different cars appear in the driveway. I assume the man died, his wife is still living in their longtime home, and children/grandchildren are taking turns coming to help out and visit on weekends. I expect the next big change will be seeing a 'for sale' sign go up.

October

A couple of times this past week I was standing out on the deck, at about 10:00 p.m.  The weather was chilly, but not really cold, with just a little bit of wind. That part of the deck faces south & normally on a quiet evening I can hear the Straight River as it winds its way along the southern-most edge of the farm, along with other nighttime sounds: owls, rustling that could be raccoon, skunk, or the neighbor's half-wild cat, dogs barking, etc. But this is October. On a clear October evening what I hear from my deck is the sound of combines. It's a low roaring sound that carries a long way. And as I looked south I spotted headlights across the river. Our farm flows downward more than a quarter mile towards the river, with the house on the highest spot. Then there's the river, a small bit of flat river bank on the other side (which belongs to our farm, according to the surveyors), then a steep hill up to a large field that is planted alternately in corn and soybeans. We've had a long stretch of mostly dry weather, but rain is predicted for the end of the week, and I'm sure every farmer who is able is out in their fields hoping to get their corn picked before the rain. It's possible I'm hearing the roar of multiple combines.

Night noises are one of my favorite things about living out in the country.  In spring after the snow melts the river runs fast and loud, and the frogs peep a loud, piercing chorus. In summer, the river is slower and quieter and insects make most of the nighttime noise - and the fireflies dance across the yards and fields (they don't make much noise but are really cool to watch). By late summer or early autumn the crickets are in full throat, and depending on the amount of rain we've had, can completely drown out the river sounds. The Great Horned Owls call all year round - although you won't hear them every night - but are particularly enchanting in the cold still of a winter's night. I've only seen an owl once in all the years we've been here, but I hear them often.  I never actually hear a skunk, but know one's been around occasionally.  There are bats who've taken up residence in our soffit on the north side of the house & I hear them scrabble as they fly out to hunt in the warm months; sometime we'll have to remove them and seal up their entry, but they eat so many mosquitoes... Late this summer I started hearing a new night sound that might be a fox - we've seen foxes around over the years - but it could be something else, since my naturalist skills are limited to what I know lives in our area and can find sounds for on the internet.  Occasionally coyotes will set up a ruckus, which of course makes every dog in the neighborhood go off. Sound carries a long way in the country - the neighborhood can be dogs (and coyotes) that are well over a mile away.

I hope the farmer, working long into the night this week, got his corn picked and into bins or delivered to the elevator before the rain.

Sweet corn, melons, and tomatoes, part 1

A couple of years into the farm experiment, Farmer Bill started planting melons and sweet corn. He's also experimented with tomatoes, peas (shelling peas, peapods, and sugar snap peas), and probably a few other things I have blocked from my memory.

Our strawberry fields have a rotation. The first year is the development year. We plant the plants and tend them - weeding, pulling blossoms off so they put their energy into growing strong plants, not fruit. Years two, three, and four are picking years. We try to keep the weeds and insects and diseases at bay and pick the fruit in June. At the end of the fourth year, the plants are tilled under and weed control done for the rest of the summer.  The entire next year the ground lies fallow - maybe planted with a nutrient-rich cover crop for plow-down. OR, you can plant melons, sweet corn, tomatoes, peas, or something else in that ground instead.

One year Farmer Bill made a lot of money on tomatoes.  Several years he's done really well with melons. But he's yet to show me a profit on sweet corn.  About the only positive thing I can say about sweet corn is it makes dinner really easy: boil some water, toss in 3-5 ears of corn (1 is for me), make him a BLT and he's happy as a hog in mud.  He'd eat that meal 3 or 4 times a week with no complaints.

I grudgingly admit that the corn does give us cash flow in July & August - when we're between berry and apple crops.  And it helps us keep staff busy (and employed).  But it's a lot of work for the return. And did I mention that the return has never yet been on the positive side of the ledgers?  I've heard our farm management consultant say that he doesn't think anyone makes money on sweet corn. For a number of years I've been campaigning for Farmer Bill to quit growing sweet corn and use the time spent on it to better care for his money-making crops. So far I haven't been successful - although in recent years I have gotten acknowledgment of my reasoning - and I doubt that I will ever be successful, so I limit my comments to the very occasional & try to imbue them with some humor.

And we do get to eat some really great sweet corn, as fresh as it can possibly be.

Blueberries and raspberries at Straight River Farm

In the spring of 2010, Farmer Bill bought 22 acres that adjoins the original 30-acre farm.  That piece had been planted in a rotation of corn and soybeans for years - about 17 acres of it is tillable. We purchased the land from a family named Van Erp, so I call it the Van Erp addition.  One of the first things to move into part of the new ground was the raspberries. Raspberries have always been the neglected stepchild of our farm, but Bill is sure that they can be a good crop if he can give them some time and attention.  A fellow fruit grower - Lorence Berry Farm in Northfield - has raised strawberries and raspberries for several generations.  But 2 years ago, Sean took out his summer raspberries and committed to fall raspberries only.  [Sean and his wife have school-age children and they decided that having a break between strawberries and fall raspberries to spend some summer time together as a family was important enough to make that change.]  So Farmer Bill decided he would grow only summer raspberries and began work on rebuilding the raspberry patch.  But he didn't reckon with the Spotted Wing Drosophila.

Spotted Wing Drosophila - or SWD - is a fruit fly accidentally imported from Asia. It looks similar to the fruit flies you get around your bananas or your compost container in your house. The major difference is that SWD feeds on ripening fruit rather than overripe fruit. It burrows into a ripening raspberry and lays eggs, which hatch into tiny white larva that feed on the fruit and grow into flies and go off to repeat the process.  There are no OMRI-approved methods that effectively deal with this pest. So, in order to have any raspberry crop without fruit fly larva you must use a conventional spray. And, because the flies are not from around here, a really cold winter is good, too.  In other parts of the country the fly is even more of a problem because it gets into any soft-fleshed fruit: raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and grapes to name a few. The fly has about a 3-week life cycle in which a female can lay hundreds of eggs - so in warmer climates there can be anywhere from 4-7 generations.  SWD don't get into strawberries much in Minnesota because of the timing of the strawberry season, but they are definitely a problem for other fruit.  Our 2013 raspberry crop had to be abandoned when the SWD caught up to our farm and were in every raspberry within a week.  The 2014 crop was better, because we had a harsh winter 2013-14 and many SWD didn't survive. This year the raspberries are better yet, but there are still things for Farmer Bill to learn about them - e.g., tarnished plant bugs cause strange dried-up gray-brown spots on raspberries - they need to be treated at blossom.

In 2011 Bill planted about a 1/2-acre of blueberries out on the Van Erp addition.  Blueberries are currently a popular fruit for their health benefits as well as their taste. They need acidic soil to grow, and central and southern Minnesota soil tends to be alkaline so the soil has to be amended where they are planted, and the acidity has to be maintained. Peat is  acidic, so a large load of peat was brought to the farm.  A hole was dug for each blueberry plant, peat added to the hole, the plants put in and the hole filled.  If he'd been planting more area, some mechanization of that process would have been done, but since it was only 1/2-acre, Farmer Bill & the crew just did it by hand.  The blueberries have drip irrigation (as do the raspberries now) through which we can put soil nutrients as needed.  If necessary, overhead sprinkler irrigation can be set up in the blueberries and the raspberries for frost protection. Blueberries are very slow growing plants. This 4th year after planting is the first that we've had a consistent production of blueberries and so far the interest from the consumer seems to be there.

I don't know whether Bill will ever go to pick-your-own for the raspberries or the blueberries.  You have to have a very consistent crop to do PYO, and his patches aren't there yet.  They also might not be big enough to do open PYO as we do for the strawberries.  For example, it might have to be by appointment, which adds a whole other complication to the process.  We continue to toss around ideas on how to possibly manage PYO in the raspberries and blueberries, but so far no firm conclusions.

Personally, I am excited about the 'pretty good' crops of both fruit this year.  Raspberry jam is good stuff, and blueberries both in and on our pancakes and waffles are a treat.  My favorite is a fruit compote poured over angel food or pound cake, but I also like a bowl of lightly sweetened fruit all on its own.  Farmer Bill makes himself pancakes about 5 days out of 7 during the winter months, and fruit on top is just as popular with him as maple syrup.

Strawberry season comes around again

We had a long cool, wet May. It's often been a struggle for the farmers to get field work done in between rainstorms.  But the strawberries love this kind of weather; they grow lush and the berries develop good size and flavor when they develop slowly in cooler temperatures.  The first berries were picked today while I was at work.  Some of the berries that were picked will go up the freeway to Twin Cities Local Food for drop off at 6 locations in the Twin Cities.  The rest are going to the Burnsville Farmers' Market.

As chance would have it, rain is expected for tomorrow and the next day.  Originally the weather service was predicting torrential rains, with amounts as much as 5-6 inches over 2 days.  The numbers have since been scaled back to amounts from 2-4 inches and I'm pretty happy about that. For 5 years now, we've had water seep into our basement whenever we have more than 3 inches of rain in a week.  So tonight when I got home from work, the first order of business was cleaning the gutters and clearing all the downspouts in (possibly vain) hopes of avoiding having to vacuum up water in the basement.  We've ascertained that the water comes from the raised water table during unusually high rainfall periods.  There's no water damage on the walls so it's not running down the foundation and coming in through cracks in the walls.  It's coming in where the foundation walls meet the floor. We're working through a series of possible fixes, starting with the least intrusive and least expensive.

This spring I paid the farm crew to pull out all the foundation plantings, pull up the landscape fabric and the rock the previous owner had put down. I've hated that rock from the beginning, so I'm not unhappy to lose it - and many of the plantings had reached the end of their lives, so that's not a huge loss either.  It looks pretty rough right now, though.  A landscaper has been contracted to come and grade the dirt around the foundation - a huge pile of black dirt is sitting outside the house waiting for enough dry days in a row to do the job.  Once that's done, the plan is to cover it with natural mulch, keep those gutters clear, and see whether that solves our problem.  If not, we'll have to look at some other kind of drainage project.

I'm in favor of keeping the water out of the house by putting French drains or something similar outside the house.  It's expensive because it requires excavating to the foundation base to lay drain tile. The other option is to catch the water when it comes into the house, by putting a drain system around the perimeter of the house inside. That seems harder and more expensive since the basement walls are finished.  And it just seems wrong to deal with the water once it's already inside.  We'll see. It's definitely a problem we have to solve over the next couple of years. Spending days vacuuming up water and then 2-3 weeks dealing with mold and insect hatchings isn't much fun - I'd much rather do almost anything else.

So strawberry season begins with a few rainy days, but the extended forecast is for cool daytime and overnight temperatures, which is great.  Our live-in help arrives this weekend, so it behooves me to try to bring some order to the house by then. If I'm not vacuuming up water in the basement, I'll probably be able to do that.  Right now it behooves me to take a quick shower (cleaning gutters is dirty work), and try to get some sleep since I'll be up about 6:00 a.m. to take those berries north.

1st quarter 2015

In December, our son let us know that his marriage was ending.  He was married a bit over 5 years to a woman that we all knew and liked.  About 3 years ago they moved to Portland, Maine, where Aimee had gotten a new job that she was pretty excited about.  Will was working for the St. Paul Public Library, but was willing to let the job go.  Unfortunately, the economic slump hit Portland hard and continues to impact the area. Will was unable to find permanent full-time work while he was there. The stress of chronic under-employment took its toll on their marriage.  Will has since moved back to Minnesota, where he has both family and a network of friends. So far he hasn't found permanent employment, but is actively looking. He is also applying to colleges in the Twin Cities, looking to finish his baccalaueate degree in the next year or so.

In March my sister Laura's health deteriorated again. She's been ill with depression and chemical addiction for more than a decade, but her physical health had been pretty good - despite developing breast cancer, which she successfully fought and beat.  Over the past two years, Laura battled a series of serious health issues, coming to the brink of death more than once.  The fight in March was her last.  I loved Laura.  She was the sister closest in age to me - 22 months older - and we shared a room growing up. As children we often fought, but we mostly got along and spent a lot of time together.  We had our children at the same time, my son Will, then Laura's Sam, and then my daughter Ellen.  The 3 kids spent a lot of time together when they were young, at family gatherings and at each other's homes. When the kids hit the late elementary years, they started to drift apart a bit as their interests changed and their network of friends in their home communities grew.  And Laura and I drifted apart, too. In my partial defense, Laura lost many connections with family in those years, as depression and alcoholism took over her life.  [We come from a family with addiction and depression on both parental sides. Many of my siblings struggle with this to one degree or another.  My personal struggles are with tobacco and food.]

I miss my sister, but mostly I miss the Laura we knew before she got really ill. She was smart and funny. She cared about other people. But she wasn't perfect. She could be cutting, sharp words came with her sharp mind. She was progressive in her politics, and had many a heated argument with our conservative brothers. She embarrassed and angered her son, by sometimes being a falling-down drunk, and by not being able, or seemingly willing, to kick that addiction. She was unkind to and disparaged her husband, himself a recovering alcoholic, who nevertheless stuck by her and cared for her until she died.  But still, she was a sister, mother, aunt, wife and daughter and her place, her role, in our family dynamics cannot be replaced.