A long way from home

Since my apprenticeship ended last week, I am now officially on vacation, although some might call it unemployment. This break between farming seasons seemed a good opportunity to visit my brother and his family who recently moved to Virginia from Colorado, so I hopped on a plane to the East Coast. I visited the Washington, D.C. area when I was 6, but for all intents and purposes, this is my first real trip to Virginia. Flying on a prop plane from D.C. to the Shenandoah Valley, I survived a very bumpy, windy ride that had me worried I would throw up, pass out, or both, but I still managed to appreciate just how beautiful the area is: rolling hills, trees showing off their fall colors, and tons of green, open space.

My brother lives on a farm, but he is not a farmer. He and his family rent a 200-year-old house on a 300-acre plantation. The farm, managed by someone else, is home to twenty-something beef cattle who graze the rolling pastures, and a lot of soybeans, grown by another someone else. Having just spent 8 months on a small, diversified organic farm, seeing a vast expanse of a single crop is quite foreign. The soybeans must be tractor-planted, as they are lined up perfectly about 6 inches apart in rows about a foot-and-a-half apart and about a quarter-mile long, with no paths for walking. The beans are dried now and ready for harvest. I didn't even know dried soybeans were a crop, picturing plump green pods of edamame at my favorite sushi restaurant instead, but it turns out most soybeans are not grown for fresh eating. In fact, most soybeans aren't even grown for human consumption; rather, they are grown for animal feed, with soybean meal (what's left after you extract soybean oil with hexane) being the foundation of confined animal feeding operations.


A river of dried soybeans awaits harvest on the farm where my brother lives.

Okay, enough about soybeans. What I really want to talk about is Monticello. Yesterday, I visited Thomas Jefferson's mountaintop home outside Charlottesville. At 5,000 acres, Jefferson certainly had a large plantation. But then again, he also had about 200 slaves to help him get everything done. I'm not a history buff at all, but I was drawn to Monticello by its gardens, having seen a beautiful picture of the gardens in a recent magazine. While at Monticello, however, I gained new respect for Thomas Jefferson.  Did you know he was only 33 when he drafted the Declaration of Independence?  That happens to be my current age, so I find the feat particularly impressive as I try to imagine myself sitting down to write such a monumental, world-changing document instead of this simple blog.  In addition to being a founding father of the United States of America, Jefferson was a gardener.  And not a casual gardener who would just toss a few seeds in the ground and see what happened; he was quite methodical and kept detailed records of his plantings and harvests.  He grew 330 varieties of 99 vegetables on his 80-foot wide, 1000-foot-long terrace, growing both for food and fun, experimenting with seeds from other parts of the world.  Jefferson organized his crops based on which part of the plant was harvested: fruits, roots, or leaves, as shown in this page from his garden notebook, and I system I like, as it groups plants roughly by how long it takes them to mature:

 



Flipping through a facsimile of Jefferson's notebook in the Monticello visitor center, I was amazed that his planting records from 1812 looked nearly identical to a table in a recently published book on crop planning I had been reading just days before.  Jefferson had columns for recording where he planted a crop, the seeding and transplant dates, maturity dates, and date of final harvest.  I imagine he would have found each year's notes very helpful in planning the next year's garden.  

The garden is tended today by one full-time gardener year-round and a few seasonal assistants. They grow many of the same varieties grown by Jefferson and using 19th-century techniques, such as these wooden trellises:

Having been on the Monticello garden terrace yesterday, I think it may quite possibly be the most beautiful spot in the world to have a garden.  See for yourself:

 

 

I left Monticello yesterday inspired to garden/farm next year. Although the farm on Hurley Way is not as scenic as Monticello, it is beautiful, as anyone who attended this year's Equinox celebration can attest. And perhaps Mr. Jefferson's diligent record-keeping will inspire me to do likewise. We'll see...

 



Done!

After eight months of hard work, my apprenticeship is over. The end of the season could not have come soon enough for my left plantar fascia, which did not take well to me being on my feet all day, every day. Rest, probably the most effective treatment for plantar fasciitis, isn't really an option in the middle of a farming season, so I've been employing other modalities, none of which have worked well or for long. I did, however, enjoy four days of left-footed bliss after a cortisone injection into my heel, but the relief was all-too-fleeting, leaving me right back where I started. I'm hoping the end of the farming season will bring the chance to rest my foot so I can return to farming pain-free come spring.

Yes, that's right--I haven't been able to get this farming bug out of my system and am coming back for more! Starting sometime in the spring, I will be co-managing a 2-acre farm in the Arden-Arcade neighborhood with one of my apprentice colleagues from this year, Becca. We will technically be second-year apprentices at Soil Born, but will essentially run the farm on our own, deciding what to grow and where to sell it. The experience will be very different from this year, when I mostly did what I was told, seldom making decisions. Next year, every decision will be mine/ours: what to grow, when to plant, where to plant, when to water, when to weed, when to harvest.... I'm a bit scared of all this responsibility, but mostly really excited. I have so much to learn before the season starts, but no matter how much I read this winter, I will still have much more to learn. But then, that's the purpose of the apprenticeship--to learn.

Since my work at the farm on Hurley Way won't start until March or so, I now find myself with a few months off. I'm planning to fill my days with a lot of quilting and other sewing. I'm also hoping to work part time in the public health world, earning some doctor money to subsidize my farming habit. It's sad that I can earn as much working halftime for the state for 3 months as a doctor than I can in a full season of farming. I'm the same person, just using different skills. Why do we value doctors so much and farmers so little?