CSA Newsletter for May 17, 2014

Farm Update

The cherry trees are in bloom in
the orchard!  We're new to fruit trees,
so it will be a steep learning curve,
but if all goes well, we should have
cherries in early July.

This week was a good week to for harvesting some of our early spinach and lettuce.  With warmer temperatures in the beginning of the week it really spurred on some of our overwintered and coldframe greens.  The frosts so far have not hit us very badly (although Fred was really worried on Thursday night, and he went out in the middle of the night to cover the strawberries). Only a planting of spinach with very small leaves seems to have been affected so far. Most plantings are looking very good and healthy.  Our new cultivator that Fred designed and had constructed came to the farm this week, and it has been working out really well. This is good because we have been hand weeding more of the first plantings lately, and this new cultivator will help greatly in limiting our weeding time.  The orchard is also starting to bloom so we are hoping these cold, somewhat frosty mornings will be over soon.  The chickens are starting to lay more of their small pullet eggs.  This small size occurs for often a couple of weeks as the young hens begin laying for the first time.  They have had a good time roaming the yard, although Fred is going to build a fence soon since the chickens seem to enjoy walking on Michele’s flowers and pooping on the deck.  We are starting to get more of our summer crew at the farm, and it looks like the crew will primarily be Keegan, Nate, Joe, and Charlie, all of whom have worked for us in previous seasons.  We are really looking forward to the start of CSA season, which will be the second week of June, so mark your calendars!

Things are really coming up in the coldframes!
These are the greens of Easter Egg radishes, which
are fun and multicolored.

My Farming Story, or How I Got Here From Where I Thought I Was Going

            People often ask me how I got into farming.  Probably because, truth be told, I don’t look all that much like a farmer.  “Did you grow up on a farm?” they ask.  “No,” is the short answer.  The long answer is “Well, kind of.  I grew up next door to my grandparents’ farm, but I never thought in a million years I would end up farming myself.”

            We lived about a quarter of a mile from my grandparents’ farm, and my siblings and I were constantly running up and down the path that my grandpa kept mowed in the cornfield between our yard and theirs.  Most of my cousins also lived within running distance of the farm, so we were always playing together at Grandma and Grandpa’s.  I grew up playing in barns and empty silos, running around in the cow pen, falling out of trees, and getting lost in the tall corn more often than I care to admit.  It was pretty idyllic, actually.  But it never occurred to me that that would be what I would end up doing with my life.  In fact, by the time I was finishing high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and it was not farming.  I was to be a high school French teacher.  Ever since I started school myself, I knew I wanted to teach, and now I knew what I wanted to teach.  I was a girl with a plan.

            I started at MSU that fall.  I made some great friends, studied hard, worked part-time at the cafeteria, joined clubs, pulled all-nighters, wrote papers, and more papers, and more papers.  By the time I returned for my junior year after studying abroad, I was even more confirmed in my choice of a career, and I couldn’t wait to get out there and impact those young minds, and hopefully impart to them a love of the language and culture that I had come to love.

Fred in the coldframes at MSU's Student Organic Farm
Summer 2004.

            Then, as the story often goes, I met a young horticulture student.  He was cute in sort of a nerd-boy way, earnest and principled, intelligent, driven, and uncomplicated in a way I was not used to.  Within a few weeks we were dating, within a year we were married.  Our career plans were unchanged; we would finish school, he would start an organic farm, and I would teach until we had kids and then stay home with them.

            And that’s what we did, with a few tweaks to the plan.  Instead of starting our own farm immediately after graduation, Fred took a management position at a large vegetable farm in Ohio, because let’s face it, it’s hard to get land when you’re 22.  That turned out to be a great decision, because during the six growing seasons he worked there, he got a lot of experience and learned some invaluable lessons, both in how to grow things, and in what we did (and didn’t) want our farm to look like.  And just like we had planned, I got a job teaching high school French, and I loved it.  I loved my students, I loved the school, I loved the community, and I even didn’t hate all the endless hours of lesson planning, unit writing, preparing, writing assessments, and grading.  And since I didn’t have kids and Fred worked long hours, I had enough time to do all of this to my own extremely high standards.  It was perfect.

            We also had a great group of friends who had a standard biweekly Friday night get-together, and we often saw them in between our normally scheduled events.  The group was made up of a few married couples, a few dating couples, and a few single people.  During the time we were with this group of friends in Ohio, a few of the single people started dating and got engaged, a few of the dating couples got married, and a few of the married couples started having kids.  And then we found out we were pregnant. 

There were two things I had always known: that I did eventually want to have kids, and that once I did, I would stop working and stay home with them.  Part of the reason it took us so long to have kids (we had been married five years at this point) was that I was having so much fun teaching and didn’t want to give it up yet.  Also, the fact that we had two incomes and no kids allowed us to put away plenty of money for the one-income transition we knew was coming.  Once we found out we were pregnant for Jane, we knew it was time to move back to Michigan, get some land, and start our farm.  We spent those months planning, both for the baby and for the farm.  How would we structure the farm?  Where could we get some quality land that we could actually afford?  What would be do for equipment?  Where would we live?  And of course, there were also the usual fears that you get when you are about to step off the edge.  What if we didn’t make any money?  What if we lost everything we had worked so hard to save?  Were we, in fact, crazy to leave our stable jobs and start something that was by no means guaranteed to work?

Fred, Michele, and newborn baby Jane.  October 2010.

But we were committed to the plan.  So just a few weeks after Jane was born, we bought our house, moved back to Michigan, and started preparing for our first growing season.  You know, all those changes they tell you not to make when you’ve just had a baby.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Little Jane playing with the soil at the farm.
May 2012.

Now, three years and another baby later, I can barely remember that other life, when I was speaking primarily French for eight hours of the day, didn’t know the difference between a beet and a radish, and had the luxury of focusing on something for more than three minutes at a time without being interrupted.  (Case in point:  I wrote most of this while the girls were asleep.  Then they woke up, and I have written a total of seven sentences in the last half hour, in between diaper changes, sippy cup refills, rushing a toddler to the bathroom, and breaking up a few squabbles over toys.)  But I actually couldn’t be happier, because now I have a new mission.  It turns out that I am now as enthusiastic about providing people with (and helping educate them about) fresh organic produce as I used to be about teaching French.  I love talking with people at the CSA drop-offs and other events about what a joy it is to eat food made with quality fresh ingredients, and I love being able to promote healthy living in this small way.  So maybe when my kids are all grown up I’ll go back to my original dream job, but for right now, I’m really enjoying the job that’s in front of me, weeds, dirty diapers, and all.