Peach panic!

Help! I'm drowning in peaches and I can't get out!  Okay, not really, but it feels a bit like that.  After navigating our first pluots and nectarines, I thought I was getting the hang of orchard management, but I have been humbled by our peaches.  Both the pluots and nectarines came in small quantities thanks to low tree numbers, so we were able to find homes for them fairly easily between the CSA, farmers' markets, and a loyal restaurant account. 

Not so with the peaches.  Our 6 Redhaven yellow peach trees ripened faster than we expected, and all at once, such that we had close to 200 pounds of peaches to move, and move quickly.  Identifying the harvest window for fruit is an art, and one I have yet to master.  Having harvested many of our nectarines early, I vowed not to make this mistake again, telling myself to exercise patience.  So I waited patiently for the peaches, checking them by giving a few a gentle squeeze (which, it turns out, is not a good practice.  I should have read these peach picking tips first!).  Too firm.  I waited a few days and checked again.  Still too firm.  Then, as if someone flipped a switch, they were ripe.  Too ripe.  A gentle squeeze resulted in permanent fingerprints in the fruit.  Despite our best efforts to pick carefully and gently, they ripped open at the slightest touch, making about half of the peaches too damaged to sell (more on these in a minute).  Those that survived our picking went to the usual suspects, plus a few family, friends, and co-workers at case discounts.  But what to do with the rejects?  To let them go to waste would be a shame.  The flavor of these peaches...in a word, amazing.  Becca and I both agreed they were the best peaches we had ever eaten.  Soft, juicy, flavorful...everything you could want in a peach, minus durability.  Well, you know what they say: "When life gives you peaches...make peach jam!"

Boxes lined up for picking peaches.  Each holds 8-10 pounds of fruit. 

So make jam we did.  We were able to work with Harvest Sacramento's canning guru, Janet McDonald of The Good Stuff, in a commercial kitchen.  In one day, the three of us turned 75 pounds of damaged but delicious peaches into 71 half-pint jars of peach jam and peach butter.  By doing the work in a commercial kitchen, we can sell the jam at our farmers' markets, meaning that our "reject" peaches can bring in some funds to help us reach our revenue goal for the season, a goal that seems impossibly far away right now. 

Becca and Janet hard at work making jam.

The beginnings of a batch of peach jam.

Jars of peach jam cool down after canning. 

After surviving the attack of the Redhaven peaches, I could barely catch my breath before the next variety of peaches ripened.  Technically, these were peach-plums, but taste wise, at least to my untrained palette, they are 100% white peach.  The description provided by Dave Wilson Nursery notes of the Tri-Lite peach-plum, "A mild, classic white peach flavor and wonderful plum aftertaste make this fruit a unique treat.  Try as I might, and believe me, I tried plenty of these peach-plums, I could not detect any plum aftertaste.  Our 5 Tri-Lite trees set heavily this season, and apparently I was asleep on the job while thinning them, finding the ripe fruit much closer together than the requisite 6 inches apart.  Oops.  So we had lots of Tri-Lites, about 65 pounds per tree, for a total of 330 pounds of so.  That's a lot of peaches.  Although I did a better job getting this variety picked before they were too ripe, we still had a lot of seconds (fruit too damaged to sell).  So we made jam.  Again.  This time, we couldn't get into the commercial kitchen, so we settled for a home kitchen.  This jam would be for ourselves, our family, and our friends.  After working half a day at the farm on the 4th of July, we hit the kitchen for the afternoon, canning 50 or so half-pints of various peach jams (peach-lavender jam, low-sugar spiced peach jam, no-pectin peach jam).  This time, we got by with a little help from our friends--thanks, Michele and Sarah, for your hard work peeling, chopping, and jarring up peaches. 

Gorgeous Tri-Lite peach-plums for sale at the Swanston Park Farmers' Market.

Insufficiently thinned peach-plums on the tree.  Note the brace holding up the loaded branch to prevent breakage!

A Tri-Lite peach-plum in its native habitat.

Yesterday, I canned and froze the last of the Tri-Lite peaches, plus I baked a peach cobbler.  Although I love these peaches, if I don't eat another one for a long time, that will be okay.  My peach meter is past full.  Fortunately, we get a short break from peaches for a month or so before the next varieties will ripen, so I will have time to regain my peach appetite.  In the meantime, I'll be swimming in Dapple Dandy pluots.  The pluots are so good, but also so plentiful.  By my estimation there could be as much as 1000 pounds on our 10 trees, so we may have to get creative to find homes for all of these fruits.  If your stomach would make a good home for a pluot or two, let me know.  I know where you can get some for a good price. :)

The chickens also get their share of peaches.

One final note (literally):  packing all those peaches made me think of an old (1996) song about peaches.  Anyone else remember this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmaF6IOODFc?  The lyrics about millions of peaches struck a chord with me, no surprise.  (Dad, those puns are for you--hope you liked them!)

Fruits of our labor

Confession: I love fruit.  I eat it every morning for breakfast, usually with yogurt and granola.  I eat it as a snack throughout the day.  And I especially like to eat it in desserts like pies and crisps.  Plus, now that Weight Watchers made all fruit zero points under its PointsPlus system, I can fill up on fruit without guilt (although only the unadulterated kind, not the pie kind).  It's probably not surprising, then, that my favorite part about the farm I'm managing this year is its fruit.  We have quite a fruit salad growing at the farm, including strawberries, rhubarb, mulberries, pluots, peaches, nectarines, plums, figs, apples, grapes, pomegranates, and persimmons. 

Our strawberries, an everbearing Seascape variety, have had a tough year, being invaded by weeds and attacked by slugs, but they are still producing, albeit very little at the moment.  Last week, we only harvested one pint of sellable berries from 6 beds of plants, down from 24 pints at peak production.  Two very dedicated volunteers have been patiently and determinedly working their way through the strawberry beds, removing every weed they see.  Three rows down, three to go!

We have one very large rhubarb plant on the farm, probably of the Victoria variety, which produces stalks that are primarily green, rather than the classic bright red.  The plant is now done producing for the season, but when we had it, the rhubarb was very popular at the farmers' market.  If I were going to farm this site for another year, I would definitely plant more rhubarb.  Granted, customers are not flocking to the market in droves to buy rhubarb, but few local farmers grow it, so demand is high relative to supply.  Rhubarb is a perennial crop, so the same plant will produce for several years, but it takes at least a year after planting to become established enough to harvest stalks, leaving no incentive for a single-season farmer to invest time and money into planting rhubarb for the next farmer, who may not even want it. 

Right now, I am most excited about our tree fruits.  When Becca and I took over The Farm on Hurley Way, our first major task was to prune the fruit trees.  I've always enjoyed pruning, finding it a nice mix of thinking and doing: pruning is a physical activity that should be performed thoughtfully.  Once a branch has been cut, you can't undo it by clicking Ctrl-Z--it's gone for good.  So when it was time to prune the orchard this winter, I was excited to begin. What I didn't anticipate is how excited I would quickly become to stop.  Up until this season, my pruning experience was primarily confined to my own young backyard trees, which total 7 in number, are small in stature, and can easily be pruned in a single afternoon.  The orchard at Hurley, on the other hand, has at least 80 trees, some of which are over 15 feet tall.  As trees branch, the number of pruning cuts needed expands exponentially, such that an established peach tree has a lot of branches to trim back (heading cuts) or cut off (thinning cuts).  Add in height as a complicating factor requiring multiple ladder moves per tree, and you have a recipe for eating up a lot of a farmer's time, in this case several weeks! 

Once pruning was finished (finally!), we needed to spray our peach and nectarine trees with lime sulfur to control peach leaf curl.  Becca was my hero on this task, bravely facing the rotten egg smell for several days as she used a backpack sprayer to thoroughly apply a solution of lime sulfur to each tree.  Smelly though it was, the lime sulfur seemed to do the trick, and we had very few deformed leaves this season.

The next major orchard-related task was fruit thinning.  It is necessary to remove fruit from a tree for several reasons, including to prevent branch breakage from excess weight, as well as to allow the remaining fruit to grow larger.  Apples should be thinned to one per cluster, which for most of our trees meant cutting off about 5 baby apples for every one that I kept.  Peaches and nectarines should be thinned to one fruit every six inches or so. Our trees set fruit pretty heavily this year, and I ended up removing probably 3 out of every 4 peaches.  It was hard to pull perfectly good fruit off a tree and drop it on the ground, but I had to trust my reading and mentors that it would be better for the tree and the harvest in the end.  Pluots and plums need little thinning, thankfully, because the peaches took a lot longer than I anticipated, and time is always in short supply on a farm.

At present, our investment of time in pruning, spraying, and thinning seems to be paying off.  That's right, the tree fruit harvest has begun!  Flavor Supreme pluots were the first fruits to ripen, two weeks ahead of schedule, likely due to a hot spring.  I inherited little information on the orchard when I took over the farm, mostly just a map identifying what variety each tree is.  After stumbling upon a ripe pluot by accident, I realized that I needed more information about the orchard or we were going to miss the harvest window for our fruit.  I've since created documents listing our fruit varieties, anticipated ripening dates, fruit descriptions, and pictures of each ripe fruit, along with space to fill in when the fruit actually ripens in an effort to help both us and future farmers at the site. 



Pluot tree.  First came the flowers...

...then the leaves...



...and then the fruit.

The Flavor Supreme pluots were delicious, but they didn't last long.  Our three trees yielded around 80 pounds of fruit (not counting farmer snacks!), which we sold at the Midtown Farmers' Market and to our sister farm for their CSA, and have been picked clean.  While I mourn the end of these pluots, I know that peaches and nectarines are right around the corner!

Markets

Farming is hard work. The work starts long before a single seed is planted, with crop planning, ordering seeds, and prepping beds. It continues with planting, weeding, and watering, and culminates with harvesting. Harvesting is a great pleasure; it is the culmination of all that hard work, a time to literally reap the fruits of your labor.  It is deeply satisfying to look upon a crate of gorgeous lettuce mix and know that my hard work helped make it happen.  But as rewarding and satisfying as the harvest may be, it is far from the end of the hard work, because that gorgeous lettuce probably still needs to be sold.

As a farmer, I have many options available to me for selling my food, each with its own set of pros and cons. I could offer a CSA (community supported agriculture) program, having customers prepay for a box of produce every week. In that case, my produce would already be sold at the time of harvest, but I would probably be pretty stressed out every week about whether I had enough food to fill the boxes and enough variety to keep my customers happy ("Collard greens, again?  We got those last week!").

I could also sell to restaurants through established accounts, contacting the restaurants each week to let them know what and how much is available.  In this scenario, the produce may or may not be sold at the time of harvest.  Restaurants are picky, typically only wanting top-quality produce, which leaves any imperfect produce without a buyer.  In addition, while I would be proud to have my produce on the menu at a high-end restaurant, my goal of growing healthy food for those who need it would not be met.  A third option, selling to grocery stores, is very similar to the restaurant approach. 

Another option is to sell at a farmers' market.  I can bring whatever produce I have to the market, even imperfect produce, but I have to pay a fee to the market organizer for my booth space, set up and break down the display, and spend hours off the farm (but on my feet) at the market, hoping that people buy my produce.  If nobody buys my food, it will be too limp after sitting in the sun for hours to try to sell again.

Finally, I can sell my produce at a farmstand. Located on or near my own property, a farmstand allows me to sell whatever I have without having to pay a booth fee, but I have to do all the marketing myself. If I don't advertise well enough, there will be no customers to buy my fruits and veggies. 

So what is a farmer to do?  I've opted for a combination of numbers two through five above, trying not to put all my eggs in one basket.  We have a accounts with a couple of area restaurants, sell to a local grocery store that believes in supporting local growers, sell at the Midtown Farmers' Market on Saturdays, and host a farmstand right outside our gate on Tuesday afternoons.  Each week, we have to figure out which produce should go where.  Should the lettuce mix be sold to the grocery store on Thursday, or should we save it for the farmers' market on Saturday?  The grocery store gets wholesale pricing, so we make less per pound, but it's a guaranteed sale, unlike the farmers' market, where the lettuce might languish.  The decisions aren't easy, but we make them, trying to balance the sometimes competing goals of making money, improving access to healthy food, and not letting food go to waste.

As I write this post, feet aching from standing at three markets last week while my tomato plants desperately needed trellising, part of me wishes that I could shift the balance toward more restaurant and retail accounts so that I could spend more time on the farm tending to crops and less time standing behind a table hawking my wares. But then I wouldn't get to meet the customer who told me that my lettuce mix and arugula were amazing, or the little boy who got so excited about a bunch of radishes.  "What is a farmer to do?" indeed.



Our booth at the Midtown Farmers' Market.

Our Tuesday farmstand at the Farm on Hurley Way.

First Harvest

Today, I reached a milestone in my farming journey, the farmer's version of the first day of kindergarten--my first harvest!  Yes, I've harvested produce many times before today, but it was never really my produce--it was somebody else's crop that I was hired to help with. What I picked today I can rightfully call mine.  I chose the varieties from the seed catalog, I prepped the beds, I sowed the seeds, I weeded the seedlings, I harvested the crop, I washed it, I packed it into boxes, and I waved it goodbye as it climbed aboard the delivery van en route to the local chef who ordered it. 

I should actually say we, not I, and ours, not mine, as my partner Becca and I are jointly working the farm. In using "I," I do not intend to take more than my share of the credit, I am simply trying to convey the sense of ownership and pride that I feel towards what I grew.

Today's harvest was small, but a good warm-up for larger harvests to come.  I was working on my own, since Becca was at her second job at a neighborhood coffee shop, so I'm glad the harvest was not a big one--it took me long enough as it was.  Being the first harvest of the season, I had to spend time gathering and then cleaning the necessary supplies--harvest crate, harvest bucket, soap, scrub brush, knife, salad spinner, hose, spray nozzle, wash tub, drain plug, plastic bags, waxed cardboard boxes, labels, and an invoice.  Whew!  In all, I picked 4 pounds of lettuce mix, one-half pound of baby arugula, and one bunch of Easter Egg radishes.  The harvest supplies were heavier and more numerous than the actual crop!

I have never grown lettuce mix before, so I am learning about this crop as I go.  When it came time to sow the lettuce mix seeds one month ago, Becca and I spent some time on the Internet and reading seed catalogs to figure out how to plant it.  We settled on using our Earthway seeder and planting 8 rows per bed.  This is a fairly dense planting, with not enough room between rows to fit a hula hoe for weeding, but with enough room for weeds to grow (see photo below).  This leaves us with only one option for weeding the lettuce: by hand.  Yuck!  So Becca and I spent a couple of hours on our hands and knees yesterday afternoon, pulling up nut sedge, bermuda grass, lamb's quarters, and rogue tomato plants that seeded themselves from the tomatoes Eric and Sarah planted last year.  (Ironically, these volunteer, unidentified tomato seedlings actually looked better than the ones I intentionally planted yesterday on the other side of the farm, tempting me to dig them up and transplant them!)  We had no idea how much of the bed we would need to harvest to meet our order of 4 pounds, so we weeded our entire crop, 50 bed feet, just in case.  (It turns out that it only takes about 9 bed feet to yield 4 pounds of lettuce mix, so we didn't need to weed as much as we did, but now we know.)  As of this morning, I had no idea how to harvest the lettuce mix, so back to the Internet I went.  YouTube videos proved unhelpful (although I was entertained by one playing soothing music while showing a tractor harvesting lettuce mix on a slightly larger scale than my little farm) but luckily the company we ordered our lettuce seeds from had produced a great 2-page handout on lettuce mix, including how to harvest it.  Apparently, the mix should be harvested when 4-5 inches tall, using a sharp knife to cut about 1/2 inch above the soil level while holding the tops of the greens in the other hand.  This method ended up working pretty well for me. 

Once the greens were cut, it was time for their bath.  I used a large metal stock tank to wash the greens, at the same time picking out a few weeds that snuck past Becca and I yesterday.  Once the greens were washed, I transferred them to a high capacity salad spinner to dry them off, then packed them in plastic bags.  Once in bags, the bags were loaded into a box and the box placed in the cooler for short-term storage.  Mission accomplished! 

Next Friday, we will have a much larger harvest, as our first farmers' market is next Saturday.  We're hoping to bring lettuce mix, baby spinach, baby arugula, radishes, rhubarb, and strawberries to the market, so Friday will be a busy day of picking.  In the meantime, we'll stock up on harvest and packing supplies and get the packing area better organized so our next harvest will be more efficient.

Bed of lettuce mix, before weeding and harvest.

Bed of lettuce mix, after weeding and harvest.

4 pounds of just-harvested lettuce mix.

One-half pound of fresh, baby arugula.

Baby arugula going for a swim in the wash tub.

Easter Egg radishes.  So proud of my little babies!

5 + 7 + 5 = ?

On my drive to the farm one morning this week, NPR featured haiku about Washington DC's cherry blossoms.  The short, simple poems were intriguing, and got me counting syllables.  Haiku is perfect for me right now, since I feel too busy to write for very long, and the one other time I did sit down to write a blog post, I struggled to find the right words.  So here are a few farm haiku to kick off my second season of blogging.  I do realize that they probably won't make much sense to most of you, but as our local NPR host commented, the beauty of a simple haiku is lost if you have to explain it. 

Plastic pipe, wood, wire:
A new home for the chickens.
But where are the eggs?

Last year they raised pigs
Now the ground's too hard to till
Forking breaks my back

Sore throat, cough, stuffed up
NCIS entertains
No farm work for me

Blackberry Dave disks
Saving us a week's labor
Worth every cent

Oops, there goes a pipe
Could the doggies be to blame?
Off to Home Depot

The weeds grow like mad
Undoing hard work so fast
Hope the plants grow, too

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?