Circle M Farm

We’ve got a playground for the babies, and thanks to the many creative crew members who turned out for our first Circle M Work Day, we’ve got lots of other new things, too.

Lydia and Emma, small as these two young ladies are themselves, hauled the stumps and built this adorable gym for the bottle babies. (We’ve made a little shaded nook with chairs by the pen so we can enjoy their antics.) And when they were done, the girls worked hard for the rest of the morning, draining and packing the pile of salad greens, filling and planting flats with seeds for melons and hard squash, and finally, giving shaggy Shakespeare the horse a much-needed grooming. The nesting birds in the hedgerows are thrilled this morning to find his winter coat in clumps on the ground and Shakespeare himself is doubtless pleased to look less like a stray dog and more like the regal Arabian he is. Now if only we could catch that naughty filly Breva and tidy her hooves up… But that’s a project for after planting season!

“Can’t catch me!” says naughty Breva.

JD, who had a gorgeous day for a motorcycle ride in from Madison, and Sonia made quick morning work of cutting nearly 40 bags of lettuce greens, and the day was so cool we simply hydrated and then drained them on screens across the back porch. For me personally, the lettuce harvest was a momentous way to start our first work day. I’ve been quite nervous heading into my first season offering CSA (community supported agriculture) subscriptions, and seeing all of these luscious greens erupt out of my small patch was like watching Jesus multiply loaves and fishes. I think it’s going to be a quite fine year.

Lois and Emily spent the morning tidying up the front yard perennial bed where the chickens have wreaked havoc since the fall. I do so love pretty chickens rummaging around the farm, but I pay quite heavily for my refusal to confine or clip wings. Quite often we’ll spot part of the flock half a mile from the house, running full-tilt like little velociraptors through a neighbor farmer’s corn stubble. My teenager Eli calls them feral chickens, and indeed they are entirely out of control. I watch each new market crop with trepidation, wondering if the chickens will decide to scratch up an entire seedbed of carrots or beets in search of a few juicy worms. So far, so good on the row crops, but the perennial beds suffer greatly at the feet of the fowl. The plants look very happy now, weeded and cut back, those that chickens uprooted put back in their place and and all fed with a generous blanket of horse compost. We’ll have flowers after all.

Sonia, Emma, Lydia, Emily and Lois organize seed packets before hitting the furrows.

Kriss and Lois plant corn and squash.

The women then moved on to planting alternating rows of corn and summer squash in the lower garden, interspersing cheerful and beneficial nasturtiums along the way. One of the nice advantages of farming on a small scale is the opportunity to avoid the long, monotonous rows of single crops needed for mechanical harvesters. On a scale this small, you can interplant various families of plants and create biodiversity right in your plots, which confuses and deters pests, and mimics the health that nature creates. Nasturtiums, for instance, are a “trap crop” for flea beetles and aphids, which means these “bad bugs” will go first to the nasturtiums, and leave the brassicas and cucurbitae alone (at least for a little while!). A further asset is that the peppery flowers and leaves are a nice addition to salads.

Jake spent lots of the morning cutting brush for pea sticks. As a lazy farmer, I like to employ this old-fashioned method of trellising snow peas with branchy twigs, rather than building and removing stakes and netting. Eli and Walter, after assembling a free-standing hammock under the wild juniper, spent hours with the log splitter and built some tall and tidy stacks of firewood. They actually worked until they ran out of gas, stopping one log short of splitting all the wood in our pile. Jake went on to be the documentarist, taking pictures of the various groups working around the property, and the tender of a brush-wood fire in the back pasture.

Jake puts the squeeze on Eli, while Walter and Eli put the squeeze on the woodpile.

One of the day’s most tedious jobs went to JD, who wrestled the roto-tiller through a brand-new garden in the former pig pen. Half too-dry and half too-soggy, the plot clearly needs some French drains before we get the tomatoes, eggplants and edemame soybeans in there. JD not only got the job done, he also made some much needed adjustments to the roto-tiller that will make the next pass through that plot much easier for me.

Francis and Shannon get the gates in.

But Francis definitely gets the worst-job-of-the-day award. Stuck with Shannon working on the all-important electric fencing that keeps our pasture animals close to home, he hand-dug several post holes for gates. We didn’t find out until lunch that he knows how to drive tractors! That knowledge will come in very handing in planning the next work day, and I’m sure Francis will be relieved to be in the driver’s seat and off of shovel duty next time! I can’t say how thankful I am to have the fencing repaired, improved and turned on so we can take advantage of the all of the food now growing in our circle of pastures.

The crowning achievement of the work day was the pot luck lunch: barbequed beef, potato salad, baked beans, fresh fruit, lots of salad, rhubarb custard and some local beer. Maybe food just tastes better when you’ve been working hard in the sun. My kids, in addition to working with the crew, did a wonderful job of keeping dishes done, getting tables set, making drinks available and cleaning up afterwards.

Chenoa at the potting table.

Kelli and little Chenoa came after the main crew had left. They seeded the final flats of peppers and pumpkins and planted the two remaining rows of the lower garden in beets. By 3 pm, every inch of available space in the gardens and cold frames was planted. An excellent day of work! Shannon and I both spent some time in the evening checking out the new hammock, and this morning we woke to find everything watered in by last night’s 1 1/4 inch of moisture. A perfect night of rest and rain!