Three rules govern all farm work

Gene Logsdon says that three rules govern all farm work.  The first rule is: don’t do any work that nature will do for you.  Second: do work at the right time.  Third: keep things small.  And I would add a fourth I call the “Rule of Small Steps.”  I apply of of these tenets to my farm.

As described above, I give may plants very compact quarters.  Growing so closely together, they shade the soil.  This self-generated canopy accomplishes two important results.  First, it conserve moisture.  Secondly, it discourages weeds.  Close planting is a fine example of working with nature to accomplish a mutually agreeable result.  

Learning ways to apply lessons of timeliness has proven extremely helpful.  I first heard of the concept at a Farmers’ Conference sponsored by the Connecticut Department of Agriculture.  One lecturer, an artisan-farmer from up-state New York, said his farm had no problems with weeds.  No problem with weeds! I had to learn his secret.

“We don’t let weeds set seed.  In other words, pull them out before they reproduce.  Voila, no weeds next season.”  I was intrigued.  Can a correctly timed activity truly lead to a weed-free future?  Indeed, it can.

This is only my first lesson in timeliness.  I have found that, on the farm, there is always an optimum time and method to perform each task.  Annual weeds must be pulled before they set seed.  Perennial weeds must be pulled to lift the whole plant.  Use a Yankee weeded to tunnel beside the long taproot of a dandelion and nudge it from the soil.  Never gather the notched leaves that spread out from the base and pull.  The pant will willingly sacrifice its leaves for the sake of the root below.  Remember: this plant is driven by nature to populate the earth.  If you do not want this dandelion back, remove it entirely. 

Here are other examples of timeliness.  As an early spring chore, cut unwanted trees and cut, split and stack the wood. It will be ready for next year’s fires. Remove all fallen branches from the lawn. If you wait, grass will grow through the tangle and pickup will take twice as long.  Prepare planting beds in the fall. Winter’s free-thaw cycle will break down less-than-perfect compost.  Besides, there is no time to prepare beds during May.  By June, it will be too late.  

Growing Space Expands

As my growing space expanded, weeding walkways became unbearabley demanding.  Brown, spundbonded polyester landscape cloth provided an answer for pathways among my annual beds.  While air and water flower through the cloth, weeds rarely penetrate it.  Two-foot-wide strips laid in passageways now control the weeds.  I also use a limited amount of herbicide.  Two sprays per season keep brick and oyster-shell pathways between perennial borders weed-free.  This is the only chemical I use.  I use it sparingly and never around the blooms I harvest.  However, under organic rules, chemical herbicides are not allowed.  Consequently, my operation is not a certified organic operation.  

Weeding the perennial beds is interminable.  It’s May 25, and there are still five areas left.  But the weather is gorgeous.  The sunlight is soft and warm.  The air has a dewy feel as spring moves toward summer.  Rhubarb plants grow at the base of granite boulders.  Each plant erupts from the soil like a small Vesuvius and will soon sport huge, fan-shaped leaves suspended over bright red stalks.  Rhubarb is a staple on New England homesteads.  Generations of women prepared tart pies and jams from its stalks.    

A mocking bird has settled into other area.  I hear him.  Or her -- since both male and female mockers sing.  In most bird species, singing is a male specialty.  I scan the top-most branches of the maples and telephone poles along the road where they perch to sing.  But I see no bird, only hear its song.  A short passage ends with a rising note, as if to form a question.  There is a pause.  Then the singer gives a long ad complex answer as though it carries on a conversation with an invisible other.

Mocking birds sing in daylight hours and after dark, especially during a full moon. In fact, they sing so constantly and so loudly that much of the email to an Eastern Birds website is inquires as to  how to shut up them up.  They are indeed inventive songsters.  As mimics, they sing the songs of other birds.  Sitting on a high branch, they go on and on,  skipping and trilling with few repeats of the same melody.  A well-versed male will have a repertoire of up to 200 songs.

Link to Mocking birds song

Raised Beds and Water Wands

Along with compost and close planting, John Jeavons advocates growing in raised bed, building beds that are easily accessible from both sides (hence the standard four-foot width), and using open-pollinated seed rather than hybrid seed.  In addition, planting seed directly into beds is discouraged.  With small starter plats, it is easier to establish close planting patterns.  Jeavons’ system also recommends maintaining a part of each farm in a wild state, growing compost crops, double-digging all growing beds, and hand-watering.

I use most, but not all, of his ideas.  I prefer to grow at groundlevel but adding compost each year has naturally increased the height of each bed.  They are now boxed in.  Double-digging involves breaking up the soil to not one depth of a spade, but two.  This excavation even sounds exhausting!  I use a rototiller instead of a spade to turn over soil for new beds and let plants’ roots loosen deeper layers of soil.

In some cases I water by hand, but I also use “water wands.”  These clever tubes, invented by a California friend are made of 1/2 inch, schedule-40, plastic pipe drilled with tiny holes at 6 inch intervals.  I use two in each bed.  When hooked to the garden hose for ten minutes, the wands produces a slow soaking drizzle that supplies a week’s worth of water.

Since the Town of Stonigton has a vast leaf-composting project at the town dump, I do not grow composting crops.   Creating leaf compost takes six to eight months and begins as residents deliver their fall leaves in tarps, bags, or truck beds.  By December, individual loads of leaves gradually turn into four or five 100-foot long wind rows.  It’s leaves only here.  Brush and weed are delivered to a separate area.  

By spring, 1,500 tons of leaf compost are available for pick up.  Town residents flock to the pile, which is now the size of two semi-trailers parked end to end.  To screen or not to screen?  That’s an important question.  Sticks and stones and plastic pieces abound.  Fussier gardeners bring various homemade contraptions to eliminate rougher elements. For larger loads, if staff is available, a bucket loader will fill your pick-up truck.  For the rest of us, it’s five gallon buckets and a lot of trips.  

Compost and close planting

Soon, the real work of May resumes.  Weeding and planting. Planting and weeding.  Weeding is tedious work.  My world shrinks to a myopic routine as gloved hands move to the next weed.  And the next. And the next. 

Heavier work awaits me in the annual beds.  Here, I rake aside a layer of straw mulch to expose the soil.  Then I add an inch of compost.  I accomplish this annual ritual either fall or spring.  Compost plus organic soil amendments provide a rich growing environment.  With strong, healthy soil to sustain them, I can place large numbers of plants in very close quarters.  

 My annual garden resembles an old-style college dorm where students bunked in small rooms.  If a plant tag suggests 18” to 24” spacing, I reduce the gap to 6” to 8”. By the end of the season, my  close-planted zinnias will grow to six feet and produce hundreds of blooms.  

It is only after World War II  that industrial agriculture came into favor.  Farmers who are committed to sustainable and organic farm practices still maintain their commitment to the soil.

Over the course of 40,000 years, small farms throughout the world maintained and even increased, the vitality of their fields.  Instead of depleting the soil, then moving on to new sites, these growers worked the same small plot for generations.  How did they accomplished this amazing feat?  Retaining soil fertility was key.  Farmers in China, Greece, and early Europe cared for the land by preserving its balance.  Nutrients absorbed by plants were always returned to the soil.  Farmers gave back to the soil all building blocks used by their crops.  

Compost was indispensable.  Food crops were always followed by green compost crops.  Today we call them cover crops.  Early farmers also composted animal manure, including human waste, to spread on their field.  Modern sanitation ended the practice of collecting “night soil” from city households and introduced alternative means to dispose of human waste. 

In the 1850s, market gardeners near Paris added new twists to ancient systems of agriculture. On small plots, rarely larger than an acre, growers explored the possibilities of close planting to increase yields.  To meet the demands for produce in Paris, market gardeners also explored the use of glass cloches or bell jars to extend the season.  These mini-greenhouses sheltered plants from early and late frost, thus making lettuce available earlier in the spring and later in the fall.

There are two modern advocates of well-maintained soil and close planting. John Jeavons  advocates a system of mini-agriculture in his popular book How to Grow More Vegetables ... There are over a half a million copies in print world-wide. 

Mel Bartholomew, wrote the classic Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space, after an important insight.  Home gardeners aren't farmers!  They need a different system for planting and hand-tending small, productive plots. 

Buff the Cat

Back home, Liesbeth joins me for lunch.  We shed vests and jackets needed to say warm in the garden.  On the patio, a small banana plant looks anemic and windblown. I bring it indoors and place it beside six-packs of tomatoes, peppers and eggplant I took pity on last night.

I harvest lovage leaves for tuna-melt sandwiches.  This perennial herb reappears in early spring and combines the tastes of parsley and celery.  It gives a nice edge to fish.  In the 9th century, Charlemagne encouraged early economic development by circulating an approved list of plants for his subject to use in French gardens.  Lovage appears on his inventory, along with two better known and more pungent herbs -- garlic and mint.

After lunch, rain resumes and brings fog with it.  Suddenly I’m in Dr. Watson’s London.  Outside my window, an even shade of gray spreads from top to bottom.  No horizon reveals itself as a boundary of darker color.  I abandon farm work for the day and stay indoors. I clean the insides of cabinets, wash floors, and polish furniture until the Buff the Cat’s fur no longer skitters along the molding of the front hall. 

My well-loved cat is a perfect garden kitty.  She always stays in the pathways, never steps on a plant.  Buff was rescued by a lobster fisherman.  While waiting out a winter storm on Block Island, Richard found a kitten abandoned in a dumpster.  He named her after a deck paint (Barnegatt Buff which perfectly describes her ginger patches), tucked her into his pea jacket and brought the terrified creature home to his mother.  The first time I met Buff, she was skinny and scared and hiding in the Nelson’s bathroom.  When Bert Nelson retired to Pennsylvania, Buff’s care fell to me.

New England perfection

By the second week in May, my perennial borders look neater.  The lawn is clear of limbs blown down in winter storms.  The weather is New England perfection.  Dogwoods bloom. Apple trees are bedecked in pink and white.

Maple trees scatter fringes of red along their branches.  Weeding the lily bed, I find a white plastic stake standing as a gravestone to some frost-killed plant.

Two crows vie for the same top branch of the white pine. One lands, the other flies off. Caws accompany the game as one, then the other, dives and rises.  The sturdy-legged, stout-beaked, ebony-feathered birds are relatives to the blue jay.  Crows and jays are equally noisy, but crows are much smarter.  In fact, crows have the largest brain capacity of any bird -- the smartest winged species on the planet.  I wonder if this is a mating pair reaffirming a life-long bond?  Or it is a couple of last year’s brood hanging around to help out with the younger siblings this season?  Are they taking a break from guard duty to have a little fun?

Planting drives the month of May.  But cold, wet weather thwarts outdoor work.  I visit my wholesaler to pick up flats of snapdragons.  There I meet a landscaper stunned to think that she has lost yet another day of work.  The month of May is never long enough.  

As well as weeding my own beds, I help other open their borders.  My work with flowers entwines me in many lives.

Liesbeth and I arrive in the the Borough to weed two long perennial borders overlooking the harbor.  Stonington Borough is a unique part of the Town of Stonington.  A mile-long peninsula filled with well-kept period homes juts into Fisher’s Island Sound.  From the gazebo at DuBois Beach, people watch the sun rise or set over three states -- New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island. 

The McC’s, an elegant, older couple, own a home on Water Street.  Both are physically impaired but remain independent, even obstinate.  We arrive to find them mounting an assault on worms in their apple tree.  Mrs. McC is on a tall stepladder waving a broomstick at a triangular white nest just out of reach.  I scold them both for risking injury.

“I’m being your daughter now,”  I say. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“It’s OK. Stew holds my feet when I’m up the ladder.  He puts his head against my butt so I’m stable.”

The scene is indeed as she describes it.  I shake my head.  The nest continues to resist attack, and Mrs. McC soon dismounts.  They reluctantly agree to let me find a younger person to do the job.  As I go back to weeding, Mrs. McC follows me out to the border.

“You’re right, you know,” she says.  “My daughter would have told me the same thing.”

Farm education

Most people understand the complexity of a garden or farm.  There are some, however, who assume that no special knowledge is required.  Instead, they take it for granted that anyone can go into a field successfully plant a crop and bring it to harvest.  They assume humans are born with an innate ability to grow things.

For those of us who know better and want to learn how to grow plants, there are many options.  I envy Liesbeth’s opportunity as a teen to attend a specialized horticultural program in Holland. 

The study of sustainable agriculture practices has expanded over the years to include not just hands-on skills but also concepts from the fields of sociology, environmental science and economics.  The new field of agroecology includes both the practices and principles of sustainable food production and distribution. The  University of California at Santa Cruz has pioneered in the field since the early 1970's. A two acre garden named after Alan Chadwick began as a vibrant project to showcase organic gardening techniques.  The university now offers both undergraduate and graduate programs.

Sara, a recent garden apprentice, is studying agroecology at the University of New Hampshire. I wish could drop thirty years and go back to school!  

For adult learners, Master Gardener Programs are available in all states, usually through a university extension program.  These programs combine serious classroom training with hands-on experience. 

Personally, I avoided garden/farming classes.  Instead, I scoured books and internet sources for information and watched the results of my own handiwork.  I became an unofficial scientist, setting up tests and watching for results.

The accumulated literacy of a small farm is often passed from one generation to the next, usually from father to son.  A local farmer, John Davis, kept annual logs of his plantings and weather observations.  Those records are held as treasures at the Stonington Historical Society. Mr. Davis, no doubt, also explained his methods to his sons as they worked together in the fields.  Whenever someone visit my garden, I feel compelled to pass on what I have learned.  For years, I have raised flowers with a sense of passion and observation, always recording successes and failures.  I have added much to my repertoire and want to pass it along.

May: I like to sweat!

On the other hand, in a family whose women prefer lace curtains to dirty jeans, I am an anomaly.  I like to sweat.  I like the feel of sweat oozing from my pores and stinging my eyes.  I like the fine crust of salts it leaves on my skin.  I like the way sweat coats my scalp, give body to my hair and makes it curl.  I like the brackish taste as it drips toward my mouth, and I lick it from my lips.  At the end of a farming workday, I am content and satisfied as I wash the effects of my efforts down the drain under the welcome cascade of a hot shower.  I groan, content like my cat as she scratches her back on the cement patio, actively seeking her pleasure.  

There is, alas, yet another icon of the farmer.  This vision is a slightly embarrassing, older, rumpled, country bumpkin who talks kinda funny and tells tall tales.  None of the above pictures convey the entire truth.  Thomas Jefferson called farmers “cultivators of the earth.”  I have come to understand that each of us has our own tale to tell.

The small farms I’ve visited are far from picture postcards.  The farmers are more intent on growth and harvest than on aesthetics  Consequently, on a Friday afternoon, neat squares of squash -- green, yellow, orange -- checker a front yard like a bright quilt as field hands pick vegetables and sort them for tomorrow’s sales.  But a rusty van sits in the drive, and a coil of unused irrigation hose is stashed under an apple tree.  It’s a picture of priorities rather than a sentimental photo opportunity.  The rural reality is this: necessities of getting a crop to market trump the niceties of neatness. 

May: To some, farmers lack cachet ...

To many Americans, farmers lack cachet.  I come from a third-generation Irish immigrant family.  Though I have never investigated the specifics of my Irish ancestors, I know that education and rising up the social ladder were the primary concerns of the family.  Farmers appear as slightly embarrassing necessities -- who, thank god, live far away.  The smells they generate are legion and repugnant.  Cow manure. Pig wallows.  Their own sweat.  Farming activities produce an indelicate picture of too much exercise.  Farmers are a little too earthy and a little too dirty for immigrant families intent on reaching beyond their farming roots.

Of course, confronted with this description, a Yankee farmer will grin and say, “eh, yup.” The rising note at the end of the phrase becomes both a polite non-commitment to that opinion and an indication there is another story that is complicated and would take much too long to share. 

My friend Liesbeth comes from yet another agricultural heritage -- different from mine and different from our Yankee neighbors.  Born in Holland just after Wold War II, Liesbeth says, “I am Dutch and I am a horticulturalist.”  The statement is bold and unequivocal.  Liesbeth embraces with pride the long, successful growing traditions and practices of her people.  Before marrying an American, she studied at a horticultural school and supervised children’s gardens in Utrecht.  Her home, her flower and food gardens reflect Liesbeth’s continuation of her Dutch agricultural legacy. There is not an iota of hesitation or embarrassment when she picks up a spade and heads to the garden.

May: I am a flower farmer...

I watch closely when I announce that I am a flower farmer.  In general, people respond with a wide smile or a sigh.  I often detect hints of envy.  But can I rightly claim the title of farmer?  I think so.  I cultivate fields.  I grow flowers.  Though some would require animals to make mine a proper farm, the Random House unabridged dictionary allows animals to remain a farmer’s option.  A far less frequent response to my declaration is that flower farming must be a lot of work. 

Americans have many unexamined opinions about farmers, farming, and physical work.  Our attitudes are both varied and ambivalent. “The prestige carried by people in modern industrial society,” E. F. Schumacher points out, “varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual production.”  Here is one man’s opinion as to why farmers, those who are most closely connected to their output, are held in the least esteem.

Conversely, farmers are viewed as heroic figures.  In this politically correct vision, farmers are stalwart fellows who own mythic family farms.  We romanticize them on butter cartons where farms shout the joy of a sun rising over pristine barns and rolling hills.  However, neither the contented cows not the diligent farmer -- the actual workers in the story -- intrude upon the advertising images of pastoral bliss. 

May: Small farm chores

To most of my peers, neither hoe handles nor manual labor hold much appeal, but I have enjoyed acquiring hoe-handle skills.  How to work safely tops the list.  I have learned to lift a bale of straw without hurting my back.  I respond to my legs when they say they are too tired for another hour of weeding. 

Other manual skills include how to use pruning sheers or when to choose a spade instead of a shovel. Then there are essential damage-control and identification skills.  Is that a nibble of an earwig or a chomp from a slug destroying the leaves of newly planted zinnias?  Should I remove the straw mulch or put out a bowl of beer?  Developing a weather eye and nose is important.  Maple leaves flip in a west wind that smells moist as a thunderstorm approaches.  Should I bring those flats into the shelter of the patio?

The daily life of a small farm is chores.  Most of them require physical labor.  There are always more chores than hours to do them.  Today’s list doubtless contains yesterday’s leftovers.  The only sane attitude toward chores is resignation: accept the fact that you’ll never get everything done. 

May: "Hoe handle" garden skills

Gene Logsdon wrote The Contrary Farmer.  He says, “The ability to manage manual labor efficiently require a list of attitudes and skills as long as a hoe handle.” 

In the early 21st century most people prefer jobs that are clean, sedentary, and housed in an interior, climate-controlled environment.  We live in an era of information-age workers who stare at computer screens all day and then go to the gym for some exercise.  We live in a culture that glorifies abstract work and classifies physical work on the land as an unpleasant, sweaty option.  In many people’s eyes, farmers have condemned themselves to a life of drudgery.  On the other hand, a farmer who works his or her own fields doesn’t need a gym or an aerobics class to get exercise.  

Manual labor is not much in evidence any more.  People tend to avoid bodily effort rather than embrace it -- unless, of course, you are a top-flight athlete.  To hit a chip shot onto the green or to smash a forehand down the line are well-regarded physical activities.  In our modern world, playing fields are far removed from growing fields, but I like to think that my sense of body placement and timing, honed by my farming practice, replicates the work of a quarterback as he throws for a touchdown.  

May: Local flowers at work

Over the years, my acre has become a working landscape, just as productive as a corn field or a peach orchard.  The former yard is now divided into two separate flower growing areas.  There are large spaces devoted to perennials.  The tops of such plants die back each fall and re-sprout in the spring from roots that winter over.  Reliable and hardy, perennials include such familiar flowers as peonies, roses, and lilies.  I also grow less familiar flowers such as speedwell, Joe Pye weed, liatris and Russian sage.

I have not really counted but I estimate I grow 
50 different varieties of perennials.  They thrive in mixed decorative borders along the driveway, in front of the barn, in two tiers that curve around the main house, and in a lazy semi-circle around a terrace partially shaded by a wild cherry tree.  These beds produce flowers for bouquets in late May, June and July.  If rain fall dwindles later in the season, as it frequently does, flower production falls, since there is no irrigation here.

I restrain my annual flowers in raised beds four feet wide and 15 feet long. Since annuals grow from seed each season, they have fewer resources to survive a dry summer.  I equip each bed with plastic irrigation pipes just in case the summer lacks rain.  Years of added compost has improved the capacity of the soil to hold moisture and dry spells are seldom a worry. 

This season there are 27 beds in production. Here I plant zinnias, snapdragons, Queen Anne’s lace, along with calla lilies, canna and dahlias. I rely on my annual beds to produce late-season flowers for August, September and October.