Tuckered Out

It seems to happen so suddenly.  We look longingly at the garden plot, hoping for the rains to stop and the soil to dry out.  Tending to seedlings is fun in the meantime, but putting stuff in the ground seems like the official start of the season.

We’ve got some stuff showing up, but nothing yet that we planted this spring in the dirt.  Some garlic overwintered and is looking nice.  “They” say you should plant garlic in the fall, but this was more of an accident.  Unharvested bulbs and/or cloves that got tilled back into the soil.  And I started a few snap peas in peat pots in the greenhouse to see how much faster they’d emerge.  Once they did, I planted them in the garden.  Also transplanted some greenhouse lettuce into the garden and some kale, arugula, and spinach into raised beds.  This is all exciting, but feels a little like cheating.  We don’t yet have anything poking its head out of the ground that was planted in the dirt this year.

That will change soon.  In the past week, it finally got dry enough to till the beds.  We’ve now planted onions, garlic, shallots, and peas.  Over the next week, I’m hoping to direct seed 6-8 varieties of lettuce, kale, other greens, more peas, and carrots.  Then it will be time to pick out potato varieties.  Let the season begin!

I received several emails this week from friends and customers warning me that a congressional bill (H.R. 875, Food Safety Modernization Act) is going to outlaw organic farming.  At first I thought it might be one of those overreacting, conspiracy-mongering emails I got all through the election (from both sides).   You know, where you click the source links and find out that what is said in the email doesn’t match the facts in the sources?

So I clicked the links, watched a few YouTube videos, read varying opinions, and then finally went to govtrack.us to read the bill text.  That’ll get us to the bottom of this!

Right.  Now I’m really confused.  And I understand why so many of our Congressional representatives don’t read bills before voting.  And I’m kinda depressed.  I can’t tell what the bill says but I’m afraid of it.  (I’d probably be afraid of any bill I read, even H.R. XOXOXO, Can’t We All Agree That Puppies Are Cute and Adorable Act).  I don’t consider myself a Democrat or Republican. I’m definitely anti-scale.  I learned in high school economics that big things are good because of “economies of scale.”  You know, purchasing power and all that.  But as I’ve gotten older, I don’t really believe that large-scale anything is necessarily good.  I’m not anti-government or anti-corporation.  Just anti-big.  Big things require hierarchical management and leave us little guys far removed from decision-making that controls our lives.  I believe in keeping the decisions as close to the people who make them as possible.  Decisions like what food to put in your mouth.

But I digress.  Outlaw Organic Farming.  At first it sounds cool, like a new renegade form of Organic Farming where we carry pistols and shoot down the weeds before they go to seed.  Or maybe we blare Outlaw Country music so we can pull pigweed while listening to Waylon Jennings.

I digress again.  Because it’s so unbelievable that anyone would truly want to outlaw organic farming practices in the name of food safety.  Is that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?  But after reading (ok, reading and then nodding off, and then scanning) the house bill, I see the concern.  A new federal food bureaucracy to ensure the safety of our food.  The power to inspect, track, mandate food safety compliance.  It all sounds so scary.  I’m sure the USDA has a similar mandate today.  Do we need another food bureaucracy? Why now?  There have obviously been some serious problems in food safety in recent years (peanuts, spinach, etc.)

We’ve seen that the food supply can be unsafe, even deadly.  What can we do about it?  I’ll tell you what I do about it.  A lot of the food I eat was grown right here on Riverside Dr.  Most of it comes from sources in the Northwest that I’ve researched.  Sure, I take my chances and eat in restaurants because I don’t want to take all of the fun out of eating.  One of the reasons we farm is to take control of our food supply and decide for ourselves how it should be grown and handled.  And we want to provide those of you who might not have the time or space to do so with the same opportunity.

One of the reasons  we aren’t certified organic is that we are so small, our customers know us personally and don’t need certification to assure them that we don’t use chemicals.  We give them our word, and they trust us.  And they can drop in (even unannounced, though preferably not when Zane is napping!) to inspect any aspect of our food production and handling.  Even better if they pull a few weeds while here.  It is our choice not to be certified (at this time) and their choice to buy from us in spite of, or because of, that decision.

Do these food bills threaten organic practices and small-scale farming?  Will I be forced to chemically treat my produce in the name of safety?  Are we saying people can’t be trusted to rinse off their vegetables anymore?  It sounds so ridiculous, surely it couldn’t happen.  As ridiculous as a farmer being sued by a seed company because their genetically-modified, patented seed blew into his crop.  (Oh yeah, that did happen.  Uh-oh.)  Here are the links to the bills.

House HR 875 Food Safety Modernization Act
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-875

Senate S 425 Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-425

Decide for yourself.  If you make any headway, let us know.  We’re concerned enough that this morning, Wrayal and I researched the bill and called our Congressman and Senators to express our concern. We asked that they read the bill, understand the concerns of small farms like us, and explain to us the impact of these bills to small farms before supporting them.

OR Congressman Peter DeFazio is a co-sponsor of the house legislation, so I’ve included his name as well. We have called all of the Washington offices and have been told they are getting many calls.

U.S. Congressman Greg Walden
202-225-6730

U.S. Congressman Peter DeFazio
202-252-6416

Sen. Jeff Merkley
202-224-3753

Sen. Ron Wyden
202-224-5244

Let us know anything you learn about these bills.

I’m hoping we can use this blog as an easy way to exchange recipes.  Over time, I’ll move the recipes and photos from the recipes section on our website to this category.  In the meantime, please contribute your favorites!

It’s really amazing when things work out the way they are supposed to.  Guess what arrived in the mail this week?  Seeds and seed money.  You see, we are a membership farm.  We take deposits (seed money) early in the year.  Seed money is exactly what it sounds like.  Your early deposits fund the early season parts of farming - buying seeds, seed starter soil, supplies, making necessary repairs.

I usually start scanning seed catalogs for ideas the weekend after New Year’s Day.  This year it seemed too soon.  Didn’t we just till under the garden?  But by the following weekend, I was ready.  I went over last year’s records, last year’s seeds, drew out the placement of the crops based on our crop rotation pattern, and ended up ordering about $200.00 worth of seed.  That’s a lot.  Probably way more than we need, and it will get saved for the following year.

I got so excited about purple carrots, striped beets, and new varieties of peppers, that I emailed our customers to find out who wants to renew membership, and offer our usual early-bird bonus.  We’ll make farm-fresh eggs available to you as soon as we get your deposit.

Then I got sick with a nasty cold.  That’s not all that important to this story, except that I had no energy or enthusiasm for over a week.  Could barely sit up at the computer, much less go outside.  That kind of sick.  We were intending to meet up with Wrayal’s brother to design the greenhouse we’re building this year, and I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm for that task.  I was a shell.

Yesterday I felt like I was feeling better.  I told Wrayal that I still wasn’t feeling 50%, but that my soul was back.  I was starting to think about the greenhouse, the farm, and other projects.  And just in time for the return of my soul, we received two important pieces of mail.  The first packet of seeds arrived from Seed Savers Exchange.  And our first renewal check for $200.00.

Let the farming begin!

What makes this a sustainable blog?  I have no idea, but it sounded better than saying “welcome” or “hey, Susan finally loaded the blog software onto the website.”

So now we have a blog.  It’s up to you (the reader, our customers) what becomes of it.  We still intend to use good ol’ fashioned email to let you know what we are delivering and so forth, but those emails will probably become shorter, and we’ll use this blog for the random musings that I used to tack onto your emails.