These Things Really Bug Us

Ah, Spring on the farm. I love it. Everything is green and new and lustrous as life begins its annual cycle once again. Baby sheep and goats are bouncing around cute as can be. All kinds of beautiful leafy greens are popping up in gardens all across this great land just itching to share their vitamins and nutrients. It’s amazing how everything begins anew each and every year. Even bugs.

About this time each Spring, all attentive gardeners simultaneously realize that the honeymoon is officially over. After the first couple of welcome March and April showers, little baby weeds start popping up in carefully planned turnip or radish or carrot beds, and with them come the pests.

Weeds, though serious and stubborn, are essentially pretty easy to deal with if you are an organic gardener. It might take a little backache on our behalf, but no weed has ever been able to stand before the determination and might of a man and his hoe.

Insects, on the other hand, are a little bit trickier. By choosing to grow and market our produce as being Certified Organic, we are honor (and legally) bound to a strict set of rules pertaining to what we can and cannot do when dealing with weed cultivation and pest control. Sure, a little Round Up will surely wither that bind weed in your purple hull patch just as quickly as a spot or two of Seven Dust will knock a cucumber beetle on its derriere, but we choose to take a more genteel approach to our garden’s ever present problems.

There are several interesting approaches to dealing with pest management that steer clear of freely broadcasting poisonous chemicals all over your garden. Right now we are being pressured by bugs on several fronts, and our methods for dealing with each individual pest are as diverse as the bugs themselves.

The first invader that we found was that foolhardy standby, the Colorado potato beetle. This guy looks kind of pretty in his larval state if you think that red dog ticks are cute. We take care of ole Coly by plucking him off the potato plant’s leaves and dropping him into a bucket of soapy water. It’s also wise to look for his brightly colored yellow eggs on the bottom side of the same leaves. Smash them between your fingers in triumph if you are so inclined.

Next we noticed that our eggplant was being viciously attacked by flea beetles. These little guys are pretty easy to overlook. About the size of a pin head, they hop around like true fleas, and are pretty much impossible to catch with your bare hands. So we decided take a few minutes of our day to set up a neat little labor saving system to deal with these little nags. We pounded in some short rebar every 5 or 6 plants and stretched a special super sticky tape through the middle of the row so that little Bobby Beetle would get stuck when he decides to go hopping along to visit his cousin Randy a few plants down after he finishes his supper.

The last pest that we’ve identified is some thrips on our tomatoes. This bug is even smaller and more difficult to identify than the flea beetle and our friend Kevin Lawson from the Perry County Extension Service has advised us to apply a special garlic mixture to our tomatoes in the morning time. This organically acceptable spray serves a dual purpose as it helps to build up the plant’s immune system while repelling most pests. I guess it just goes to show that to the unenlightened, garlic just smells gross.

We know that pest management will always be before us. These bugs are more than annoying. If not properly dealt with, any one of the three insects mentioned above, along with a host of others we have yet to encounter, could effectively wipe out an entire planting of your crops. But through diligence and a little hard work, we are happy to say that we have our bug problems under control! (At least until those eggs hatch…)

A Day in the Life of Rick White or To Till Or Not to Till, It's Really No Longer a Question

If anyone is worried about us keeping ourselves busy out here on the farm (or having some fun while we work for that matter) then let me fill you in on a randomly selected day from the previous week leading up to the first harvest last Friday. Also, please allow me preface this little history lesson by saying that none of the facts or names of the workers have been changed so you can believe every word you’re about to read, and can trust me that it all happened.

Monday morning bloomed bright and crisp in a panorama of sunshine and sky. Intent to start the first day of our first harvest week in a flurry activity, Emily, Rick, and I shot out of the barn with furrowed brows. Vaulted praise and appreciation for the overwhelming beauty of this morning would have to fall upon someone else’s shoulder today. Also, we couldn’t let Rick off early today to go swimming because he was hot. There was a job to be done!
As it had rained a little at the end of last week, we were bound and determined to get some serious hoeing done while the ground was still soft. It’s a rare thing when these Arkansas weeds are vulnerable and you have to hit those little boogers at just the right time to take them out. While Emily and I furiously hacked and slashed our way up and down beds of kale and collards, Rick set himself behind our heavy duty Snapper tiller and promptly broke it.
Not to be deterred by such a minor setback, we all three loaded the dead beast into the back of our truck and high tailed it up to the Maintenance Shop for what we hoped would be a nice quick fix. We were excited about getting back in the field in order to ravage those cussed weeds.
Chris Jackson, a mechanical guru and the garden crew’s resident life saver (Rick simply can not go a day without breaking something), jokingly grimaced as we pulled up saying, “Oh no. What have you guys done now?”
“It was Rick again,” Emily and I chimed in unison.
“Boy Rick,” Chris quipped with a wink and a grin, “those two sure don’t give you much credit, do they?”
Rick looked at Emily and I both standing akimbo in matching overalls and mesh Razorback trucker hats with identical looks of amusement on our faces wondering why he ever thought working for us was a good idea.
“Man, they don’t give me any credit.”
As it turned out, something in the Snapper’s gear box had gone seriously wonky, and seeing as how Chris had his hands tied with more pressing jobs, we decided to borrow one of the tillers that the Education Department uses in their Global Village gardens. Not the quick fix we were hoping for, but a timely solution non-the-less.
After happily hoisting the new machine into the back of the truck, we tore back down the garden road intent once again on accomplishing our goal of eradicating all green foreigners from our happy fields. In mock disgrace Rick ardently yielded all tilling duties to me in light of my oh so copious amount of cultivation seasoning.
“Perhaps my labor would be better served in the form of appropriate accoutrements such as hand tools this morn, my Lord,” Rick mouthed, a model of simulated serfdom.
Ignoring yet another of Rick’s all too frequent ventures of insubordination I thought, All right Let’s see what you got, little tiller.
One furious tug later I was surprised to find myself holding the broken pull string like a wet noodle.
Emily’s impossible guffaw could be heard for miles up and down the river.

And now for the moment you've all been waiting for!

Our first delivery is this Friday. This exciting because we actually have grown food and now have enough to take to people. It's also exciting because Rick, Emily, and I will now be writing, compiling, and publishing a weekly newsletter consisting of funny farm stories, recipies, and instructions on how to can and stuff like that to be distributed via e-mail and tangibly to our shareholders at each week's pick-up.

This is especially exciting for the two of you that still check in to see if I've written anything in the last month and a half becasue now I am honor bound to write at least one article per week about the state of our garden to be included in the newsletter. I have decided to post these compositions here on My Garden Year in order to sate your unquenchable thirst for my silly little anecdotes. I promise that I will post here at least once a week from now until sometime in October, when our delivery schedule ends. This was my origional intention when creating this site a few months ago but I got busy. So sue me.

With that being said, I hope that everyone enjoys the farm news that's coming your way!

Hail Hath No Fury…

(…In This Case, If You Think About It)

“And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the Lord sent thunder and hail…” –Exodus 9:23

In the early morning hours of Thursday, April 20^th, we got a little more than the nice gentle shower we were expecting. Though nothing as serious or dire as that 7^th plague of yore, our garden received a surprisingly quick battering from the heavens in the form of 2 inch thick hail. I awoke to the sound of ice spoking and phuting off of my window at around 1:30 AM. Immediately, I knew what those sounds meant and cursed a little under my breath. I feared for the safety of your vegetables, and bemoaned the interruption of my highly coveted shut eye. (I had just fallen into that level of sleep in which, when your mind awakens prematurely yet is helpless but to act upon the need for action, your body refuses for a moment to acknowledge its job to move you.)

Dragging myself out of bed, I went into the living room to watch the deluge with my groggy housemates. Some were already talking about their cars and insurance coverage, but my mind was on what level of destruction I was about to behold down in the field. The hail only lasted for 10 or 15 minutes, but it crashed down violently the entire time. When there was only a steady rain falling, I grabbed a flashlight from my room and jumped in the garden truck to survey the damage.

As I was tearing down the garden road, another potential disaster struck me. We had forgotten to turn off the irrigation that evening! I slammed on my brakes and sloshed out to shut off the pump. Luckily, the irrigation was only on in one part of the field, and that part having been direct seeded with okra, peas, and such earlier that day. No plants would drown tonight. It was hard for me to really tell how much damage the hail had done, and being apprehensive to damage the field further by tromping through its muddy pathways, I resigned myself to performing a more thorough assessment of the damage at first light. So with a weary heart, I tore back up the hill through the storm to try to get some much needed sleep.

The next morning Emily and I gingerly treaded into the field. For the most part the lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, and eggplant were fine, suffering only minor damage. However, there were instances in which a direct hit had seemingly disintegrated an entire plant from the stem up. The kale and collards, on the other hand, were a different story. Most of the large, harvest-ready leaves had no chance at avoiding the previous night’s unwanted abuse, and upon close inspection resembled a sad patchwork of a frayed and tattered leafy battlefield. With heavy hearts we silently made our way through the patch, breaking off those destroyed appendages which we couldn’t help but feel guilty for not being able to save.

Halfway through this dreary work, Emily let out her patented goofy guffaw of enlightenment. I looked across the field at her, a question on my face. Smiling knowingly, she said, “You know, it’s probably a good thing this happened. We were going to have to go through and harvest all of these leaves soon any way. If we had left them on, they would have been too big and tough to take to the shareholders next Friday. Now these plants can get to work on sending out new baby shoots and growing the little guys that’re left!” It was in that moment that we felt okay.

For most of the morning, we had been nervous about the revelation of how ultimately we have little control over the success or failure of our crops in light of the awesome and unexpected power of Nature. But by acknowledging and accepting our small, yet important place in the overall picture of the Earth and its cycles served as a very inspirational moment as farmers for us. It is our job to be deeply in tune with the constantly changing needs of our garden, but to also to be ever humble in the face of a power that we can only slightly prompt, and never control.

We could not control the hail storm.

All we can do is pray for rain.

I cleaned my room

My room has only recently been getting cluttered enough to feel cozy. Essential books piled precariously upon my "guest bed" offset the inevitably full dirty clothes hamper with clean clothes waiting to be put up but mostly just being put off quite nicely. I walked in after work one day to find a ten foot long dried up tip of a bamboo shoot with limbs and all covered up in a blanket on my bed. Puzzled, I said, "What the hell," and promptly set it up in a corner like a Christmas tree. I liked the new homey feel as I've now been at the Ranch just long enough to collect and dump exactly the right amount of stuff in my room, however, this shit was in no order whatsoever and my Oxford American's were getting dog eared from all the ruffling I had to do in order to find anything. I decided to clean.

So today in that unplanned burst of inspiration with which all successful hosework is done, I put my room in order. I started by dissassembling the two bed frames, snuggling my matresses and box springs into opposite corners, and moved all of my bags and boxes into the wardrobe. Next, I did a little chest of drawers shitch-a-roo (which I quickly realized was necessitated to make the transformation complete). The back of the toilet became the perfect place for a Holstein-print doo rag I found above our washing machine and my cactus. The Mexican rug which has traveled with me to each and every room I have lived in since that fabled 10th grade Spanish Club trip of yore was turned at a dynamic 45 degree angle, and the job was complete.

My room is still cozy, but has much more space and feels, I don't know, fresh.

a new blog?

Okay, enough of this goofy crap.

For those few stragglers out there who missed the let's-diss-Cale boat by dropping trying to read my blog because I never really write in it but for some reason still check in from time to time to see if I've posted which I usually don't do, here's a special announcement.

But let me preface it first.

Our farm is looking really good. We've been transplanting cool weather crops like lettuce, kale, broccoli, cabbage, and collards along with 250 pounds of potatoes, and a couple thousand onions. Emily and I are having a lot of fun and work really well together. Also, our intern, young Rick White has stormed in with the novel idea of putting up a blog to complement our newsletter. We see it as a daily extention of our weekly newsletter in which we can post pictures and any random ramblings that cross our driven mad by the heat and humidity minds come up with. We still have to get it okayed by some heifer bigwigs but if all goes well, I'll pass our address on and every one of you out there can pop in and see how our season is going.

How's that sound?

to jeremy and ellen

boy howdy! guess what emily's doin? sittin' in a chair right now! i'm writin' in my blog! whoopdi-do! rick just walked in with his camera! he's our intern! shit fire! kelli's visiting from new york! she goes to cornell! whoo-wee! man it sure is rainin' here in arkansas! sweet lord above! jumpin jehosaphat! my word! i'm writin'! i'm a writer! i'm tellin' ya'll what's goin on!

Rome

Some of you continue to express your concern about my erratic publishing schedule. I know that I don't post as often as some of you would like, and for this I apologize. Hey, you're welcome to bug me all you want about this in the hopes of getting your Cale fix. I know some of you need it. But I think that there's a thing or two that some of you don't quite understand about me (Jeremy and Ellen). You see, I am what you call "an artist." And as "an artist" I experience what you might call "inspiration" in regards to what and when I write or draw or perform in one acts at the local Perry County Roscoe P. Coltrain Memorial Convocation Center. Now if this "inspiration" isn't happening, then I don't create art. I'm not going to write in my blog every day about how a cat shit in my floorboard when I left my back window open all night or about how I'm feeling crowded because all these hot chicks won't leave me alone when I go out in public just for the sake of writing every day. That kind of shit happens to me each and every day and if I was to write about such mundane, commonplace things, I think that we would all quickly become bored together and this blog would devolve into a blase bullet point daily journal. Uh uh. Ain't happenin.'

I do want to write a little more often, but I need time to actually live and experience all of the exciting and incitefull, inspirational and life affirming things that I have thus far written about. This blog will be great if you are just patient, Jeremy and Ellen.

Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.