A Solstice Reflection

The summer solstice has just passed and the earth has begun its slow tilt back toward the winter solstice.  The days that have been lengthening since Christmas are now shortening again.  The change isn’t pronounced yet – the hottest weather of the year has yet to come and the sun still shines well into the evening – but for those that live in relationship with natural systems it means a subtle but real shift in the year.  The spring rush of growth is done and the trees and other plants have started storing their winter starches and ripening their fruit.  The greens turn from vibrant and light to darker and more deep.  The change isn’t just in the plants though.  

The humans in this system also know that a shift is happening.  The summer has only just begun but for the grower, winter is coming already.  The rush of spring planting and planning is over; the garden is growing; summer crops are getting their legs and setting first fruits while spring staples are fading.  For us, we will celebrate the start of summer with food – creamed peas and new potatoes are the meal that says summer for us and we have eaten it every year that we have had a garden big enough to grow them.  The meal is bittersweet and delicious – a celebration of the start of the harvest season and also a reminder that time is already running out to get food put up.  We are thankful that we don’t have to count only on what we grow for our annual nourishment.  The safety net of modern society and the grocery store make the rush to put up the harvest a little less pressing and stressful.  

I’m finding this year more than many others that the solstice is also bringing an introspection.  At 40, I relate to this time of year more deeply.  I am now at or just past the solstice of my life – I am not getting stronger or taller, I have spent my youthful energy and now am settled into my life’s pattern.  I feel much like the trees with my arms stretched to familiar sunshine enjoying the built up years of work already done while still trying to reach a little farther into the warmth.  It has been a good first 40 years by any measure, but the celebration is bittersweet.  My children will move on from me soon and the house will feel empty.  While I can still do a hard day’s work now, I know the time is coming where I will have to slow down.  My knees and shoulders already tell me that I am not the 25 year old that started this journey so many years ago.  I know my winter is coming even as I celebrate my life’s summer.

I think in some ways this is the greatest gift of living in relationship with the land.  The annual cycles of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death are comforting in their familiarity and humbling in their inevitability.  As I walk with my plants and animals through this cycle, I know that I too am going through the same cycle.  I know my own mortality deeply.  I know that there is no way out of my own physical decline and eventual death just as there is no way to avoid the coming winter.  I will celebrate the summer harvest as I celebrate my own growth to this point and all that it has created.  I will watch as each crop declines just as I will one day not be able to keep the pace I do now.  I will watch the leaves turn in the fall just as my hair and skin will change and are changing already.  I will see the first frost kill the last of the summer crops just as one day I will have to stop doing things I love.  The world will go to sleep under a blanket of snow and I too will sleep one day with only memories to remind those who know me of what I was once like.  

These changes are inevitable and ultimately welcome.  When we focus only on one time of year or of life, then we miss the beauty of the others.  I would not want to have a year without the autumn leaves or the crisp mornings of fall and I don’t think I would consider my life fully lived if I did not get to enjoy the young adulthood of my children and celebrate their life’s spring with them, perhaps offering some wisdom gained from my own spring and summer.  I look forward to the coming of age of the trees I plant this year.  I will walk more slowly under their shade than I do now and I will need help to care for them, but what a wonderful autumn to my life to see their flowers in the spring time and their leaves in the fall.  While I don’t look forward to the cold of winter, I do enjoy the wood stove and the time to rest with family.  I hope that the winter of my life will be filled with the warmth of love and the deep rest of a life well lived.  

As I stand on the farm on this year’s solstice and recognize my own life’s solstice, it is profoundly grounding and real.  I feel immersed in nature’s rhythm and I am enjoying my small part in this great dance.  

Happy solstice day to you all!

First fruits

Last weekend was the final weekend of KPI's first PDC at Heartland Farm in Pawnee Rock, KS.  The drive out early Friday morning was beautiful and peaceful.  I enjoyed several podcasts on the way.

Every group of students that comes through the PDC touches my heart in a new way.  This group was special in so many ways, each and every one.  Their design presentations and work on their designs was a great way to wrap up the course and I hope they are all as proud of what they have learned as I am.

We have been trying to wrap up some projects that have been lingering since last year.  The biggest of them is finishing the revamp of the garden area.  We put sides and mulched paths in about half of the garden last year and the result was well worth the effort.  We found that by burying wood in a trench alongside each bed and then putting deep wood mulch in the aisles, we watered significantly less last season than we would have normally.  To try and capture those benefits in the rest of the garden, Jeremy and Jacob spent a couple of days building bed sides for the remaining garden beds.  Now we need to finish shaping the beds into their new forms and then get the aisles mulched.  To that end, we had another load of wood chips dropped close to the garden.
 

Speaking of the garden!  The green peas are ready and oh so delicious!  We rarely grow very many of these because of the time required to shell them, but they are a real treat when they're in season.  Hopefully, we will have our summer meal of creamed peas and new potatoes this week sometime.  That seasonal meal signals the end of spring and the beginning of the summer garden bounty for us.

For only the second time in our gardening lives, we have a great crop of onions coming on!  Normally, we have very small bulbs but this year they look amazing.  We think the difference is using manure to amend the bed prior to planting.  Typically we use compost but going forward we will try to put manure in the root crop beds and see if that makes a difference.  These aren't quite ready to pull and put up, but they're getting really close. 

Another first, the orphaned grape plant in the garden has grapes set on!  Its hard to see in the picture, but there are several bunches of grapes growing on this vine.  While we aren't completely sure of the variety, we're pretty sure its a wine grape.  That will mean seeds, but that's not the end of the world.  I hope to have time to do some work in the main vineyard this year to see if we can revive some more of the survivors there. 

In an effort both to help the fruit trees develop and to smother out the lespedeza that is endemic to the top field, we are prepping for sheet mulch in both fruit tree areas.  This week Jacob mowed the pasture around our top field fruit trees.  Soon, we'll get cardboard and have another load of mulch dropped off to start sheet mulching under these trees.  That should rapidly convert the soil's structure to be more fungal which will support the health of these trees.  It will also let us inter-plant some more food plants with them like blackberries, raspberries and currants.   This space can't be cut for hay anyway due to not enough room between the trees and the property line, so a food forest planting is a much more productive use of the space than its current form.

Speaking of fruit trees in the top field, the 2 plum trees finally made plums!  These first ones are ripening early due to worms in them, but its still nice to see ripe fruit from the trees we planted back in 2015.  There are more on the tree that aren't showing signs of worms, so we're looking forward to some plum snacks soon.  The black ice plum in the lower orchard is absolutely loaded with fruit too!  It is an older and larger tree than the 2 that produced these.  We also have many plums set on both the Arkansas plum we grew from pits and the sandhill plums along our front swale.  I'm hopeful that we'll have enough to make plum jelly and syrup this year.  Plum jelly is a family favorite - sweet and tart and rich - and we haven't had the fruit to make it for several years.  Hopefully 2019 will be the year!

Plant sales are a weakness.  An advertised sale on chestnut tree seedlings led to 24 little trees getting planted into a garden bed for this year.  Aren't they cute?!  There are 3 each of 5 named varieties and then 9 chinese chestnut trees.  After these little guys get a year to put on some more size, they'll be moved into their final place on the farm.  Hopefully by then I'll know what that final place is...

The water garden continues to evolve as well.  We've added a floating lilly, some more fish and a floating fern to the ecosystem there.  It is wonderfully serene to sit and listen to the water, watch the fish swim and see the flowers around it bloom.  This lily is particularly beautiful right now.

The early summer is always a magical time on the farm.  The vegetables are growing - the spring crops are bearing and coming out, the summer crops are really getting their legs under them, the fruit is swelling on the trees and it isn't unbearably hot yet.  As we continue building the farm this season, there is so much to enjoy and be grateful for. 

Spring on the Farm

After rain that seemed like it would never end, things are getting into full swing here.  The house is basically done (very minor trim left) and we are fully focused on growing more food on the farm.

The first new thing for this year was trying to graft our own fruit trees.  Amber grafted 15 plum trees and 11 of them took!  Of the 5 pears, none made it though.  We did get to keep 2 grafted pears from the Permaculture Grafting workshop this spring, so we have 2 new pear varieties growing in the nursery.  Along the way, Amber managed to slice her finger pretty seriously also.  Pay attention to knife safety!  It matters!

Ouch! This is after super-gluing it closed.  :(

 Grafts right after they were completed above and scion wood leafing out of a successful graft to the right.







On April 27th, we hosted the last field session of the KU Permaculture class Amber teaches.  To prepare, Amber cleared out the southwest corner of the property in preparation for sheet mulch and planting as a food forest.  There was a lot of scrub sumac and wild grape to remove as well as weeding to do along the existing swale planting.  The area is marked by 3 volunteer mulberries along the fence line, the swale to the west, a black walnut and sandhill plum on the northwest and an Arkansas plum we grew from a plum pit on the northeast.  Once the area was mowed, it was ready for the field session!

Over about 3 hours, the group laid down cardboard, manure and wood chips over the entire area.  Then we planted oregano, rhubarb, irises, daylillies, fernleaf tansy, peony, echinacea and tulip bulbs.  An elderberry bush got added later to the center of the area (it didn't make it in time for the field session).  It was a wonderful end to a fun semester!

At the end of May, we hosted a graduation party for Jacob.  It is incredibly hard to believe that he is that old, but here we are!  Part of the preparation for the party was cleaning up some of the remnants from the house construction.  The space by the driveway that has been the wood yard since 2014 was at the top of the list because we needed parking space.  This is what it looked like when we started over the weekend of May 11th.

This is what it looked like when we finished.

It was an exhausting weekend moving all the remaining wood into consolidated piles elsewhere, stacking the pallets up on the pallet pile, cutting out all the sumac and dogwood saplings and then mowing the entire area.  It is wonderful to have it done though!  We didn't have enough time to take down the concrete form shed, but getting this area done makes a huge difference to how the house looks as you drive up.

 Our new graduate in his robes

Right now, we are enjoying the last of the spring lettuce and radishes, the first of the edible pod peas and watching the summer crops come into their own.  The strawberries have been delicious this year.  There are just enough for a small batch of jelly, but the rest has gone into fresh eating and desserts.

The cabbage is growing well under its row cover.  Hopefully we'll have some nice heads to make sour kraut from and eat over the next few months.  Here's a peak under the cloth at the end of May.

We finally found a tree service that will deliver wood chips to us at the farm.  We have so many projects planned that will need wood chips!  This really is a huge time saver for us.  The first load of wood chips got dumped by the house and is being used to mulch the "yard" and the new garden area.  The second load went to the area along the bottom of the drive way. The plan is to plant this narrow strip with fruit trees in the fall (the ones that were grafted this year hopefully).  

With the extra time now that we aren't milking, we finally got to do some landscaping around the house.  Amber and the kids built this flower bed with a small goldfish pond over the last couple of weeks.  The flowers are all perennials, so hopefully we can enjoy them for many years to come.  The pond pump is solar and seems to be doing very well so far.  We added a dozen feeder goldfish this past weekend and after a couple of losses, the rest are making themselves at home.

Last weekend, we stumbled onto a mother turtle laying eggs on the path down to the garden!  It was beyond cool to find.  I've also never seen a turtle that big that wasn't a snapping turtle!  It was a red-eared slider water turtle.  After consulting with a turtle expert I work with, we put a protective cage over the nest so that predators can't dig it up.  We kinda hope to catch the babies when they hatch and maybe get a pet turtle out of the deal too. 

This past weekend, along with finishing the flower bed, we also did some garden maintenance.  The unmulched paths in the garden were way overdue for mowing and the blackberries were getting smothered with weeds.  Jeremy spent Saturday morning mowing and Jacob and I attacked the blackberry row.  Here it is just as we got started.

And this is the finished product.  You can actually see the blackberries!  The piles of weeds in the aisle give some indication just how much stuff we pulled out of the row.

After we finished weeding, the 3 of us harvested mulberries from the new sheet mulched area.  We were pleasantly surprised to find that one of the three volunteer mulberries is a white mulberry!  Our neighbors have a white mulberry that must be the parent of this one.  The berries are so sweet and the trees were just covered in them.  It was a reminder of the natural bounty around us and how with just a little care, nature will provide in abundance.

Last night, I picked up 4 volunteer peach trees from a co-worker.  They were grown from pits of a naturalized peach tree on their property, so we don't exactly know what we'll get from them.  The parent trees are very hardy and produce tasty peaches, so we have hopes that these will do the same.  For the moment, they are heeled into an empty garden bed along with some irises that need a different home.  Eventually, they will help start a second row of fruit trees in the top field or they will go into the new area along the driveway.  In exchange, I will give her a pair of the plums I grafted this spring.  Yay fruit trees and barter!

As I walked back to the house from heeling in the peach trees, I was met with a gorgeous field of wild flowers.  Life on the farm is beautiful in so many ways and sometimes it just catches you when you don't expect it.  We hope you are enjoying the beautiful spring as much as we are!