Oakhill Organics

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 13)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

The four-day heat spell finally broke with a bang early Sunday morning here at the farm — we awoke early to thunder, lightning, brief showers, and deliciously cooler weather. Finally!

We don’t need to tell you all how hot it was until then. From Wednesday through Saturday, we were baking here at the farm. Thursday was the hottest day we’ve ever worked at market: 102°! Even with the shade of our canopy and buildings, we were practically melting. Amazingly, the vegetables survived ok at market, and hardy customers came out to shop, in spite of the heat. Overall, it was a fine day, but definitely unpleasant. I think everyone bonded in the discomfort though: kids had water fights, adults moaned in unison, and we all sweated buckets. Seriously, in the age of air conditioning, you rarely see so many sweaty people in one place outside of a playing field. But there you have it: we all survived.

We spent most of Friday by the river — the radio that morning predicted hotter weather than Thursday, and we knew from experience that temperatures over 100° essentially prevent all productive work in the fields. When it gets that hot, we just try to irrigate plenty and keep ourselves comfortable. To that end, the heat wave provided a somewhat forced (and somewhat uncomfortable) vacation from our pressing tasks. Swimming in the river was pleasant and restful, even if accompanied by intense heat.

Today (Monday), we’re feeling even more relaxed, simply because another storm front has moved in, bringing with it even cooler temperatures and some welcome rain showers. Even in our third season, I’m still amazed at how the weather directly affects our moods and mental state. Wind makes us crazy; heat saps all our energy; and brief cool rainy periods cleanse and refresh. It isn’t psychological so much as immediate, physical, visceral. I suppose spending the majority of one’s waking hours outside does develop a sensitive, direct connection to the weather, but I’m still always blown away by how intense that connection can be. Regardless of what else is happening in our lives, weather is usually the dominating factor in our days. I’m sure that wouldn’t be surprising at all to the old-timers, but most of 21st century American life is securely buffered from all but the most dramatic weather events.

So, today we embraced our increased energy and positive outlook and spent the morning planting fourteen more beds of fall and winter cole crops: over-wintering cauliflower, cabbages, kale, collard greens, and broccoli! The weather was perfect for them as well — it rained as we planted, and I’m sure they’ll just chug along without even noticing that we disturbed their roots. Winter was on our minds as we worked, and we reminisced about last year’s rainy season crops. I looked at the tiny White Russian kale plants and remember how large they grew over the winter, eventually going to seed and growing a foot taller than me!

Life just keeps going: amidst heat waves, uncertainties with the well (update next week!), and other daily dramas. I was reading an essay by Ursula LeGuin today in which she quotes Walter Ong who said, “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.” LeGuin expands upon his point from a single sound creation to oral performances (speeches, stories, etc.), saying, ‘Oral performance is irreproducible.’ She continues:

It takes place in a time and place set apart; cyclic time, ritual time, or sacred time. Cyclical time is heartbeat, body-cycle time; lunar, seasonal, annual time: recurrent time, musical time, dancing time, rhythmic time. An event does not happen twice, yet regular recurrence is the essence of cyclic time. This year’s spring is not last year’s spring, yet spring returns always the same. A rite is performed anew, every year, at the same time, in the same way. A story is told again and again, and yet each new telling is a new event.

LeGuin’s connection between story-telling and seasonal cycles seemed so right today, as I realized that my weekly stories and letters to you CSA members are similarly connected to time and cycles. Each week, I write, sharing our experiences on the farm, which are always linked to the weather, the season, the heat, the cold. Last year I wrote about heat waves, as well as the year before.

Yet, each story is different — even though written rather than spoken, they too have a brief existence during which they are true rather than a memory of the past. We have now walked through two and half growing seasons together, and events have repeated themselves enough that it’s amazing any of us still find it interesting. And, yet. It’s all new, each time. How many heat waves have we survived, yet how real did this one feel nonetheless? We forget each time how the heat digs into our skin and slows our every movement, and then it returns, and we all want to talk about it again.

This, I suppose, is called living in the world. I love that we can live in the world by sharing our stories and that living in the world gives us stories to share. Talking about the weather has perhaps become the ultimate cliché of provincial life, but I never tire of it. We all experience the weather — it is common ground for every person. Some of us are more buffered by air conditioners and such, but ultimately we live in the same world.

Keep talking about the weather folks — as fleeting as talk and the weather both are, they’re what keep us connected. Enjoy the vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

This Saturday, August 23, join us for a CSA potluck here at the farm! We’ll begin to gather after 5 pm with the goal of finally digging in to the food by 6 pm.

If you arrive earlier, we can partake of some lemonade and/or wine, walk the fields, and visit. And if you arrive much later, that’s fine too! We’ll have plenty of green leafy salad and bread, but please bring a dish to share: main dish, side dish, beverage, dessert, etc. Also, if you can, please bring your own plate and utensils to use — we have extra but not enough for everyone, and we’d like to avoid using disposable!

For an extra special treat, folks from another CSA, 47th Avenue Farm, will be joining us for dinner. Many people associated with that farm will be on the island brainstorming with farmer Laura Masterson as she begins to develop the property she purchased just down the road from us. So, if you come out, you’ll have the opportunity to visit with us as well as other folks from another great farm in the area!

Also: the blackberries are ripe! Bring a container and pick from our hedge!

We hope to see you here! Please call us if you have questions: 503-474-7661.

Directions to farm: Head east out of Mac on Hwy-18. Turn right (south) onto Lafayette Hwy. Turn left (east) onto Fairview Rd (there will be a sign for Hauer of the Dauen winery). Stay on Fairview as it crosses Hwy 221-Wallace Rd, at which point Fairview will turn into Grand Island Rd. Stay on Grand Island Rd as it crosses the bridge. Turn right at the first intersection (there will be grapevines on your left & a cherry orchard on the right), onto Upper Island Rd. Our property is the second on the left — we have a gravel driveway we share with our neighbors. We’ll have signs to direct you to parking & the fields. Please be respectful of our neighbors as you come & go!

Wow. It is so hot. Our deep shade thermometer is reading 89 at almost 8 o’clock. Today was the third day to break 100 degrees, and right now we have the added bonus of humidity. We spent all yesterday afternoon at the river, which made the weather almost bearable, but Thursday PM was spent standing at market and today we drove to Woodland, WA and back in our un-airconditioned car. The Woodland event was worth the trip, but we’re ready for a break. So are the chickens and cats. Amazingly, the veggies seem to be doing fine. Thanks to Casey’s diligence in irrigating, we started the hot spell in good shape. Our second melon planting has doubled in size these last few days … Speaking of water, the new well construction is going fine so far. We received some tentative good news about the final product that makes us tentatively happy. We’ll share more details as they become certain — can you tell we’re still unbelieving that this will ever work out? I think it will, and I think we won’t really believe it until we’re actively irrigating from the well. Sometime soon-ish, I hope.

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 12)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

The big news in Yamhill County this week was that petitioners successfully gathered enough signatures for a ballot measure concerning the placement of landfills within designated flood plains. As you all probably know, this is timely because our local landfill (sited in a flood plain, next to the Yamhill River) is seeking to expand this year.

Regardless of the outcome of the ballot measure, the news has me thinking about a lot lately about garbage — where it comes from and how we deal with it as a society. Clearly, living in 21st century America is a pursuit that creates waste products. How we deal with those waste products is a question most often addressed only by ‘professionals’ — few individual Americans want to think too hard about where their waste goes once it leaves their residence.

Casey and I have been blessed with a high level of ‘garbage awareness,’ originating from our prior experiences living at Holden Village, a community located in a remote sensitive wilderness area.

Holden Village is located in central Wasington state, up Lake Chelan and 10 miles further into the mountains. Surrounded by wilderness area and national forest, the community has to ‘ship out’ all their waste products themselves: by truck to the lake and then on a commercial barge down lake. Four hundred plus people can create a lot of trash, so the community has dedicated itself to massively reducing the volume of that waste destined for landfills.

To meet this goal, Holden employs a full-time staff member, the ‘Garbologist,’ whose sole job is managing waste. The only waste products that ever reach the landfill from Holden are items that absolutely cannot be dealt with any other way: non-recyclable plastics and biohazard waste. All recyclable items are recycled; non-recyclable paper and non-compostable meats/oils (dangerous to compost in the wilderness because of bears) are burnt in a high-efficiency, low-output incinerator; and food scraps and kitchen waste are composted in a series of well-managed compost bins. (Importantly, Holden Village’s community begins the process by reducing unnecessary waste products as much as possible: re-using one-sided paper, using cloth diapers, eliminating products with excess packaging, etc.)

Living in such an aware community trained Casey and me thoroughly on our own personal waste management procedures. After we married, we set up our own household using these same principles. We eliminated waste by buying food in bulk, using cloth bags at the store, recycling, and composting.

Most people we know recycle, but not everyone is yet on board with household composting. Many of our friends seem daunted by composting — not surprisingly, since extension services offer ‘Master Composter’ courses and entire books cover the topic.

Such extensive courses and books are intended for gardeners who are looking to make their own fertility — composting of home scraps is simple and doable in almost any setting with outdoor space.

Even when we were first living on our own, in a small apartment, we had a little renegade compost pile we shared with a neighbor and stored on the dirt behind the building’s dumpster — it was a humble set-up: a large terra cotta planter pot with a plate for a lid. Every few days, we’d empty our kitchen scrap bucket into the pot, stir it a little with a trowel, add a few leaves , and put the plate back on. Simple, but it worked. We rarely had to empty it, because the volume decreased as the matter broke down. Worms found their way up through the hole and helped the process. Some days, there was a little smell close to the pot (which paled in comparison to the dumpster), but for the most part it was innocuous and no one noticed it was even there.

Many years later, our food scrap compost system at our farm is as simple as ever: a pile near the house that we occasionally turn and add extra ‘carbon’ to in the form of leaves or straw.

Many of our CSA members also have compost bins in their yards, but if you don’t have one yet, we encourage you to think about doing so. Veggie scraps are so highly compostable that there is no reason for them take up room in a garbage dump. But they apparently do: in 2006, 30.6 million tons of biodegradable food scraps went into U.S. landfills!

Unfortunately, when added to a municipal-sized garbage dump, food scraps breakdown slowly and unhealthily in the anaerobic environment, releasing methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more ‘powerful’ than carbon dioxide. In small oxygen-rich compost piles, food scraps do not create methane.

Hopefully Casey and my humble compost examples will inspire newbie composters to start their own. Here are a few tips for a successful start:

Begin by adding a compost bucket or bin to your kitchen waste disposal area so that composting becomes as easy as using your garbage can. An open container will usually smell less than a closed one (oxygen and air lead to a healthy, non-smelly kind of break-down). We keep an open bucket under the sink — it’s closed away enough that we can’t smell coffee grounds or onion skins, but it doesn’t begin anaerobic (stink!) breakdown.

Choose a location for your outdoor compost pile that is convenient to your kitchen so that you’ll use it, but far enough away that if it does occasionally smell, it won’t become burdensome. If you have room, a pile on the ground is an easy method — perhaps behind a tree or shed so that it’s not as visible. You can also build a simple bin out of wood slats (you can find plans on the Internet). A shovel or pitchfork to is useful for regularly turning the compost in order to introduce more air and aid in aerobic breakdown. Or, you can buy one of the plastic compost bins available at many garden centers that incorporate a ‘spinning’ feature, eliminating the need to manually turn.

Covering your compost pile in the rainy season can be beneficial, as we did with our plate on the terra cotta pot. Many of the purchased compost bins come with a built in cover system, or you can simply position your pile near a shed overhang. Our current pile is open, however, and we’ve had no problems.

Many of the problems present in very large scale composting and landfill systems — such as toxic leaching — are non-existent in household composting systems simply because of the incredibly small scale. So, even though a cover, an impermeable floor, and constant turning is necessary on a large scale, a very small household compost pile will remain healthy and biodegrade readily with very little management.

As far as what to put in your compost: any vegetable-based scraps will biodegrade easily. Eggshells, coffee grounds, breads and grains are also fine. Avoid adding highly processed foods and foods with lots of oils and fats, and meats. We’ve been known to successfully compost very small quantities of all of these, but a compost bin full of fat will not be pleasant. Essentially, a healthy compost bin should reflect a healthy diet: heavy in fresh veggie scraps/trimmings and very light on processed foods, meats, and oils.

If you find yourself with more processed foods and meats than greens, this might be an occasion to examine your diet and eating habits. Do you routinely prepare more food than your family can eat? Do you then throw away leftovers rather than saving and eating them at another meal? Although Casey and I cook with plenty of meats, dairy products and fat, those expensive ingredients usually end up in our bellies rather in the compost. Most of our compost material comes from preparing the meal rather than from the finished product, which is consistent with our values about cherishing the gift of food.

Adding extra carbon sources to your compost pile can help minimize the wetness sometimes attributed to food-based compost systems. Fallen leaves, grass clippings, and straw all make great occasional additions (and are readily available here in Yamhill County). We’ve never been very regular in our turnings and carbon additions, except to respond to the way the pile looks. If it looks wet or has a smell, that’s a signal to turn and/or add carbon.

As far as ‘using’ your compost — that’s entirely up to you. We’ve always found that our compost piles have a way of shrinking and shrinking to fit new additions without too much worry. But occasionally, we’ll abandon a pile to let it fully breakdown without new additions and then spread the resulting dark rich humus under a tree or on a flower bed. If you never add meat or dairy, the fully composted product should also be perfectly safe for adding to a vegetable bed.

Even though it’s simple, the composting process itself is in fact deserving of books, treatises, poetry, and other forms of praise. The miracle is its simplicity and the beauty of natural processes.

Americans have been taught (or sold?) the idea that only professionals can take care of certain regular needs, including waste management. That’s certainly true of non-biodegradable products, but food scraps are something we can all take responsibility for within our own households.

Perhaps someday more American cities will invest in municipal food scrap composting, much like we already have for yard waste with Greenlands. But, until that time, I hope we can learn to manage the easiest part of our daily trash flow.

As participants in the CSA, you are stepping ever closer to the source of your food. Composting it in your yard is a completion of that process, participating in the cycles that allow us to partake of food to begin with: the soil-building microbes and fungi that make life possible.

Embrace the process! Prevent compostable materials from becoming a toxic problem for the environment! Start a compost bin at home! And, when you’re done putting your trimmings into your compost bucket, enjoy this week’s tasty vegetables.

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 11)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

What a wonderful week we had here at the farm. After our well fiasco the week before, we were determined to take life’s obstacles in stride and keep enjoying the farm despite the continued uncertainties. And, enjoy we did. A few highlights from the week:

The weather, which was gorgeous — alternating between sunny and warm (but not hot!) and overcast and rainy. We received ‘measurable’ rainfall for the first time in 53 days (by our count here at the farm). The rain was more beautiful than overly useful, but I’m sure the wetness on the ground was appreciated by every growing thing on the farm, including us.

We made more progress towards a new well. The second driller came out again to ‘locate’ the new drilling location, just a few yards south of the old well. Of course, the actual drilling frightens us (so much uncertainty!), but we’re moving in a good direction anyway.

Some new and old friends came out the farm on Friday for a lovely potluck dinner followed by a walk through the fields during the ‘golden hour’ (when the sun peeks out below the clouds before setting and fills the world with rich glowing light). Just enough cherry tomatoes were ripe for us to taste on our way past the tomato houses. Delicious!

We participated in a very special dinner on Saturday night at Jacob Hart Vineyard outside of Newberg. The dinner was put on by Plate & Pitchfork, a project that aims to connect urban eaters to agriculture and create an awesome, memorable dining experience at the same time. The dinners are actually in the fields of farms around the Portland area, in this case between the rows of the vineyard. We were invited to provide produce and then speak about our farm (and then eat tasty food!) this weekend, and it was an honor and blast to participate. While we have the unique opportunity to experience dining in fields all the time, rarely do we do so with so many people — and we’re usually hosting too — so this was a beautiful, relaxing experience. We met fun new people, ate delicious food featuring some delicious pork, drank good wine, and watched the stars come out.

And, a final highlight for our week was the farm itself. August has arrived, which always marks yet another ‘turning point’ in the season. We’re reaching the end of our sowing and planting routines, and spending more and more fieldwork time maintaining plants in the field. We still have some fall garden stuff to get in over the next month, but for the most part, we’re just keeping things going: weeding, irrigating, harvesting.

Even though the season started out exceptionally slow, the fields are looking good. Every season is unique, of course; the ‘average’ season exists solely in statistics, even though we reference it all the time. (I’m not even sure we’d recognize average if we saw it!) Given that, we actually feel pretty good about what we’re seeing. Yes, the tomatoes are much later than last year, which were later than 2006 (which was of course the hottest summer on record) — but the plants are healthy and loaded with coloring fruit.

A few of our plantings look better than ever before too, which is exciting to us. The winter squash paths are a little weedy, but the plants are enormous and setting beautiful, healthy-looking fruit. This was our first year direct-seeding winter squash, and it looks like it was a good choice (last year the plants themselves were never very vigorous or full and consequently much of the fruit was scalded by the sun). Our beans are also looking drop-dead gorgeous. We have the healthiest beds of green, shelling, and soy beans we’ve ever seen. The edamame are chugging along, bright green and lush.

The first of the fall and winter cole crops are also doing well. We planted them out two and half weeks ago, and they’re already tripled in size. We didn’t end up row covering them this year, so we’ve had the ability to already cultivate them once. As usual, we’re staying on top of the fall plantings better than our summer ones (as is appropriate given how long they’ll be in the fields).

This week we’re looking forward to warmer weather (opportunities for river swimming!), a visit from some Katie’s extended family, and hopefully the start of our new well. Even though we still have two months of hard work left in the season, August is definitely the beginning of the ‘downhill slide’ to the finish.

And, before it’s all over, we promise you will have eaten your fill of sweet juicy summer fruits. Today’s green beans and tomatoes are just the beginning. Hoorah for August! Enjoy your summer vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. Your own opportunity to walk and dine in the fields is approaching: we’re having another CSA farm potluck Saturday, August 23, beginning at five-ish. More details will follow in future newsletters. Hope to see you here!

On planning a menu:

Sometimes others say things so perfectly that it is only necessary to quote them … Excerpted for your reading pleasure from Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, here are Marcella Hazan’s wise words:

“In simpler times, planning a menu did not require hard thought. Each season had its products, and cooks had a modest stock of reassuringly familiar recipes that could be arranged to suit most circumstances: a casual dinner for friends or a fancy one for important guests; a celebration; the everyday family meal, when it was still the custom to produce one.

“Today, in the market, it appears to be spring and summer all year long. Moreover; there is such an abundance of recipes available to Americans, most of them derived from other heritages, that picking one’s way among them is like sorting out the many and tangled strands of a thick skein. The trick is to find the principal thread, the one that, as it unwinds, shakes free all the others.

“When I am deciding on a menu, no matter if it is for the family, for guests, or for one of my demonstrations, I start thinking not of a specific dish, but of what ingredients may be timely. Nearly always, the first ones I look at are the vegetables. I know that now one can find almost all grown things almost all the time, but until one has seen them, no one can tell which are the freshest, ripest, youngest. No preparation, however skillful and elaborate, can compensate for indifferent produce, nor can the most brilliantly conceived menu divert attention from its shortcomings.

“Vegetables are the main line to which the several courses of an Italian meal connect. The choice of vegetable will determine with which pasta, risotto, or soup you will begin, which in turn affects the decision on the second course, the side dish, and, eventually, the salad. The process unrolls just as naturally from the other end, by the choosing the second course that is flattered best by the accompanying vegetable, then settling on a first course that will lead gracefully to the second.

“… Of course, we all like to plan ahead as much as possible, drawing on experience to work out tentative choices. But once we are in the market [or CSA pick-up!], we must be willing to revise or abandon those choices. A menu ought never to be jammed into an arbitrarily established scheme. One takes one’s cues from what the ingredients themselves suggest, as though one were listening to a story unfold. A sensitively assembled Italian menu has no set pieces; it may be meticulously wrought, but conveys no sense of fabrication; it speaks not of the cleverness of the cook but of the character of its components; it is derived each time from a true, sweetly seasonal moment of which it is the faithful depiction.”

Our friends Carol & Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm (Gaston, OR) will be joining the McMinnville Farmers market beginning tomorrow. All their produce is certified organic by Oregon Tilth. This week they’ll have for sale:

Anthony & Carol have a strong following at the Hillsdale Market in Portland, and we’re fortunate to have them at our market for the rest of the season. Check out their booth, which I believe will be on ‘the lawn’! If you’d like to receive emails with weekly information about their market offerings, email them at: aboutard(at)orednet.org. You can also read about their farm in Michael Ableman’s recent book, Fields of Plenty.

It’s raining right now on the farm — the first time in 53 days by our count. Not enough to stop irrigating by any means, but we probably can skip our evening pump run tonight.

In other happy water news: we received an estimate from the new driller today and it’s much lower than we had expected based on high diesel prices, etc. Quite a reasonable bid, and it includes all the components we now know are important for our site. This is certainly just the beginning of this new well process, but it’s a good start.

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 10)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

Those of you who read our blog mid-week already know our very unfortunate news: the attempt to further develop our well ended in complete failure. Today (Monday), the well drillers are technically ‘abandoning’ the well — pulling out as much steel casing as possible and filling in the hole with concrete.

What exactly happened? This spring when we realized that the well was still not working (it was still sandy and throwing out small rocks that clogged our sprinkler heads), we called several drillers for possible solutions. The idea that appealed to us most was to drop a ‘telescoping screen’ to the bottom of the casing and then pull the casing out just enough to expose the screen. This seemed like the best option, and a local driller arrived last Tuesday to begin the process.

He special ordered a screen built to keep out the very fine sand at the bottom of our well, and we were optimistic that it would provide higher volumes of cleaner water. Installing these kinds of screens is a standard well development procedure, often done at the time of drilling, so we felt good about the prospects.

The only real possible complication or problem was the casing itself, specifically how well it was welded together by the original driller. It requires a lot of force to pull a 200’ long steel casing out of the ground, and each of the 10 or so welds would need to hold under that pressure.

A properly welded casing would be fine — the Oregon Water Resources Well Construction Standards mandate that joints be as strong as the casing material itself, in this case quarter-inch steel. So, we crossed our fingers and hoped.

By Wednesday morning, the day they dropped the beautiful stainless steel screen in the well, we were already dreaming about what we would do when this was all over. How much would we be able to properly irrigate at once? Would we maybe be able to get away for a weekend in the summer? Or, at least not worry about irrigation on Sundays?

Instead, the news we received Wednesday afternoon was a huge blow. A weld on the casing broke 100’ down the well, revealing about 30’ of unconsolidated material, which then partially caved in. In the driller’s words, the well was not ‘salvageable.’ Because the well was now technically in disrepair, we also had to pay to legally abandon it (the state doesn’t like non-functioning wells sitting around — understandable), and we’re officially without a well again.

Two years have passed since we started this process, and we never imagined that it would end this way. We’ve spent over $30,000 trying to get a functional well, and now we’re stuck in the middle of irrigation season looking at having to drill a new one. Drilling costs have tripled since last year, and we’re at the bottom of every driller’s priority list.

All because of a weld.

Needless to say, this situation feels terrible. To be so close to achieving a crucial goal and then lose it all — we feel battered, bruised, burned. And, of course, a second expensive well is not something that we’ve been budgeting for.

In fact, this was going to be the first year that we were projecting a real net profit from the farm. Each year, so far, the farm has earned a profit, but the majority of that money (beyond our basic living expenses) has gone right back into the farm and land for further capital improvements: tractors, sheds, implements, a house, the original well, etc. Because we’re invested so much so quickly, we were actually looking at the end of our list of ‘must haves’ for the farm — this year we had a few last little purchases we were hoping to make, and then the rest of the money we were planning to save. We’re not talking about gobs and gobs of profits here, but just enough to feel like we can start to relax and ease into our farm life with a little less stress in the day-to-day details.

Unfortunately, that nice financial plan has been thrown out the window and instead we’re looking at having to borrow money for the first time (besides our mortgage) to cover the costs of a well. We’ve worked so hard to avoid borrowing that we’re pretty discouraged.

The good news for the farm is that a well driller from the Salem area heard our pleas (technically my mom’s pleas, since she’s the one who called him to beg on our behalf unsolicited by us — thanks, Mom!) — he’s offered to fit us in sometime in the immediate future. Wow. While the financial reality of drilling a new well still daunts us, the prospect of running out of slough water is still our dominating worry, so this is very good news.

The other good news is that we now know a whole lot more about well construction and what we really need to have an adequate irrigation well on our sandy soil. Initially, we hadn’t actually intended to drill an irrigation well last year, but the test pump yields and driller reports led us to believe that we could use it that way. Turns out we couldn’t. But now we know exactly what needs to be done to build a well that can supply consistent, clean irrigation water, and we have a driller who’s willing to drill us a well to meet those goals.

It’s been a long haul to get to this point. I’d love to report that we’re still feeling hopeful, but quite frankly at the moment we’re not. We know from experience that perseverance can get us through most farm crises, but this is probably the biggest blow we’ve had so far. We’re holding together ok, considering — we showed up at market on Thursday, despite wanting to just crawl into a hole after receiving the bad news Wednesday. And we managed to have a good weekend with a visiting friend — a healthy distraction from moping around the farm.

So, that’s the big farm news for the week. I’m sorry that it’s such a bummer — I know that our stresses with water stuff have spilled over into some of your consciousness too. But, so you can rest easy, we’re certainly not giving up over this.

On some levels, it feels big enough to be a deal breaker, but we’re not going to let it be. Thanks to our careful financial planning, we will be able to proceed without bankrupting the farm (although it will be tight). And, we still want to do this work. Yes — we still want to farm. So, not to worry, we’re not going away or giving up.

Apparently we’re more persistent (stubborn?) than we even knew, because this is tough stuff. Once again, we are more grateful than ever for each other. (On hearing the news, we reflected that this was yet another ‘good’ marriage building moment, and then we both agreed that we wouldn’t mind just going for a romantic walk on the beach instead.) We are also so grateful for the community that surrounds and supports our farm efforts: my mom, for being our advocate when were too beaten to do so ourselves; and our regular blog readers who have sent us kind encouraging words through email and at market.

Sometimes I wonder how we got so lucky to have such support, but then I remember that this really isn’t just about us — our farm is a community farm. We are certainly the ones who bear the biggest risks, but all of you are connected as well. This is the story of agriculture: workers and land that feed a community of people, all connected and dependent upon each other for sustenance and survival. In our case, that farm story and connection is simply more tangible and transparent via our direct connection to you our eaters through the CSA, market, and my farm communications. What makes our farm unique isn’t the connectivity, it’s the fact that we all openly acknowledge and celebrate those connections.

As always, thank you for joining us on this specific farming adventure. It is a continual pleasure serving you by tending our little piece of land. We hope that knowing your farm’s story better deepens your appreciation and enjoyment of this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. Vacation season reminder: If you ever miss a pick-up, all the veggies left at the stand go to good use. We take home a few to eat ourselves, but the vast majority are donated to the YCAP food bank!

The worse case scenario happened this afternoon — the welds on the casing broke. We now have NO well.

Not sure how to respond to this. We’re back to where we were in 2006. Two years of work, time, stress, waiting, and A LOT of money down the tube.

It was a difficult well from the get-go, but we kept trying to make it work. Two years later and we’re in the middle of irrigation season with no well and drilling costs have sky-rocketed. We’re not even sure if we could afford a new one now. Of course we’re at the bottom of every driller’s list, so any new well wouldn’t be for this year– we’re talking about 2009 now.

Breathe.

Ok. Time to harvest for market. Somehow the show must go on, but we’re feeling as low as you can imagine.