24 September 2009

Arugula, Eggplants, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Hakurei turnip, Acorn winter squash

You will have to forgive me if this newsletter occasionally lapses into complete (rather than its normal partial) incomprehensibility. At the same time I am writing this a small, insane kitten is using my desk and various parts of my body as a jungle gym. Despite being no larger than a completely unremarkable adult rat and weighing less than a pint of peas, it already possesses impressive speed and agility. I am full of admiration for its budding feline grace and overexuberant confidence. But it’s a little hard to keep your mind fully on your prose when at any moment a 1/10 scale cat might sprint up your legs and pounce on the keyboard (not to mention the fact that in so doing it add its own enigmatic comments to my writing, such as its most recent offering, eeeeeeeeeeeel.f,mas (which, coincidentally bears an uncanny resemblance to the noise I made as it ascended my leg on the way to typing that)).

Add to that the usual late season fatigue, and even without the kitten’s assistance I might not make sense. I don’t mean to make any special claims about how hard we work here on the farm. We are not, I like to think, slackers. But we do not meet the standards for real hard work set by our dairy farming neighbors. True, a fair amount of what they do takes place in the cab of some machine, but driving deafeningly loud piece of equipment with no real suspension system for hours at a time takes its toll. And that’s the relaxing part of their 16 hour day.

So we don’t work like dairy farmers. We still do enough in the course of a season, however, that towards the end we start to move a little slower. Fortunately, we have less to do. We seeded the last trays of lettuce two weeks ago and only have a few trays left to transplant. We brought in all the onions and winter squash, sowed the falls greens and roots, and have hardly any weeds in the late broccoli and carrot rows to deal with. There’s still enough work—pulling tomato stakes, spreading compost, sowing winter rye, cleaning the seedling house, plus of course picking and packing the shares—to keep us busy for the next month, but busy at our October speed. If we were still moving at a May pace we might run out of things to do.

Actually, you never run out of things to do on a farm. You might get through everything you absolutely have to do to keep the farm going, or everything that you want to do. But we have a long list of projects—redoing the floor in the hay mow, painting the shed, fixing the deer fence—waiting for those moments, should they ever occur, when we cannot think of anything else to do. Not that they often do occur because just when we think they might something breaks and we have to repair it. Which always takes at least an hour, no matter how minor, and requires at least two tools we cannot find. Tools everywhere tend to wander, and on a farm they have further to wander and better places to hide. Sometimes we discover them lurking in the oddest spots—though not of course when we need them.

Perhaps on Sunday we could have a tool finding competition, with a special prize to the person who can recover all the ¾” sockets that have taken off for various parts of the farm. Perhaps I can train Winston to be a tool retriever. If dogs can sniff out plastic explosives, surely they can track the scent of a crescent wrench. Or maybe I would have better luck using Mickey Boy. A tool pig rather than a truffle pig. He could learn to root for lost pruners. I guess we could also try being more organized, but it is probably easier to teach a pig to hunt down missing drill bits than to teach farmers to be more organized.

Of course, if we all managed to hang onto our tools, whether through our own efforts or with the aid of specially trained animals, we would destroy the tool business. When they sell you those sockets sets they count on the fact that within a matter of months you will be back for more, having misplaced all but the most obscure ones, the sizes you’d only ever need if you rebuilt Bulgarian self-propelled howitzers as a hobby. When you think of it that way you realize that losing tools is a small but important form of economic development—an obligation really. Instead of finding the tools we have lost, perhaps you would prefer to bring some of your own to the farm on Sunday to mislay. Maybe you have something you are having trouble losing track of—a neon green box cutter say, or a crowbar. Well, we have the space to lose it. That’s a promise. I’ve tested it. Oh, and if you happen upon my box cutter, you could just put it back on the bench in the shop.