FAIL.
"It's baffling to me that something beyond your control can make you feel like a failure. But welcome to the life of a farmer."-Courtney Lowery CowgillA couple weeks ago Hannah and I received a wonderful book in the mail from our friend Pam in New York...a gift to young farmers, about young farmers. The book is called "Greenhorns: the next generation of American farmers," a compilation of essays by young farmers whose experiences are eerily similar to our own.
The drought has been hard on us, which I know we've let on a little in our blogs, but not fully. Hannah and I want nothing more than to give our shareholders heaping baskets of food to the point in which they are refusing veggies. We want to have so much food leftover the local food pantry and even our compost pile are getting their own large shares! Yet, week after week, we've been struggling to get enough food picked to even satisfy our small CSA.This is our fault and it's not, but that doesn't mean we don't feel all the guilt. 100% of it. We started our tomatoes the very day we got to Danville in March, and got them in the ground as soon as we could and yet, they are still not ready, two weeks into July, seven weeks into our deliveries. But it's hard not to feel like that's our fault. All of the cucurbits––cucumbers, squash and zucchini––are suffering and appear to be slowing their growth. Many of our lettuce attempts have failed. Our herbs got hit hard over the high heat. The peppers haven't had one rain that didn't come from a watering can. Our first two bean plantings have not had good germination or been productive (yesterday was literally planting number five). Things have been stressful, even if we have almost no control over them.
That's where the book comes in. It's helped us to be realistic, that things are not always going to go our way or be under our control, but that we will learn from what mistakes we make, and learn to accept and adjust to nature's whims. In the essay I quoted at the beginning of this post, the farmer, Courtney, writes "No matter how much control our business model gives us, we are still farmers and farming is mostly an exercise in managing chaos––an attempt to control the uncontrollable. No method or scale marketing strategy can change that." This book has helped keep things in perspective, to divide what we are doing wrong and what we can realistically consider nature's hand.The drought continues, and we're actively fighting it. We're gaining confidence to stop feeling so guilty and keep working hard at it. We're increasingly feeling better about the rest of the season, it's just the right now that is hard. If the drought is not going to let up, we're just going to ignore it, and learn where we can. Next year, we'll be able to get tomatoes started several weeks earlier, getting them in the ground in time to benefit from the spring soaking. We'll plant more, of everything. And when the weather doesn't go our way, we'll accept it, adjust and make the most of the things we can control. Nature is not one of them.- Jesse.