Plan B Planted
Like so many of you offering moral support this past week, a lovely friend recently posted a message of sympathy for our flood trials and closed with a surprisingly shocking admonition: “Remember to breathe.” Wow. And so I am, today. Thanks to a heroic outpouring of effort from both neighbors and our dedicated crew of WorkShare farm members this weekend, Plan B is now planted and the gardens are off and growing for the second time this season.
This is the corn field next to our house that keeps flooding over the road – pretty now, but really inconvenient!
First thing on Saturday morning, a neighbor drove his old tractor an hour to get to us, taking an extra-curvy back route, because our road has been closed with the river flowing over it for a week. He ploughed up 1/3 of our horse pasture, which is on our highest ground, so that we could have several more gardens in a safe spot. There we planted out peppers, sweet corn and rows upon rows of cucumbers, summer squash, winter squash and pumpkins. We also re-planted beets and onions to replace those lost in the flooded lower plots.
Up in our early spring gardens, where the cold season crops have held up remarkably well to the windstorms and downpours, we had quite a bit of space still too soggy to be planted. So there we filled in large puddles with topsoil and rototilled the sodden tilth to kick-start the drying-out process. We generally eschew rototilling for hand cultivation in our established gardens, as repeated tilling seriously disturbs the fragile and slow-growing colonies of bugs and micro-organisms that make the dirt live. Tilling also really dries out the soil, which in a normal year is a negative in our sandy gardens. But this year! We tilled.
So the sum total of this long week of destruction and rebuilding is that we’re in quite good shape. We’ve got more food growing now than we did before the flooding started, because we want to hedge our bets should more stress hit the farm in the form of hail or drought. In terms of providing for our CSA customers, we’ll have some small boxes right here at the beginning of the season, missing some of the greens and beets we’d anticipated harvesting from the first plantings that flooded or got shredded by rains. But we can fill in with meat from our spring butchering and buy a few early crops from other local organic farms who might have surpluses. By the middle of the summer, we’ll be reaping a huge harvest from the replanting and by fall we’ll be rolling in pumpkins and winter squash.
In the midst of this past week, when I was busy floating my protesting animals out of the flooded barn into the high pasture and when I was watching the river rise two and three times to cover onion transplants I’d nurtured since February, I had some serious moments of panic and despair. It probably didn’t help that in the rush of clean-up, I sometimes ate only a Klondike bar for lunch and a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. But at some point as I walked among the battered plants, I suddenly felt assured that I could trust this land. We’ve been taking good care of it, adding animals for fertilizer, treading lightly on the soil and gently coaxing harvests of vegetables and meat from the earth. And now, I felt assured it would take care of us. Thus, we have pressed on with cultivating and replanting, and in the end I’ve gained almost double the gardens I had at the beginning of season. It’s really quite thrilling, and I do trust that what we’ve planted will grow to produce a delicious harvest.
Our brand-new garden in the horse pasture – we’ve more than doubled the size of our operation in one week!
