Surveying the work

View of the lake at the west end of the farm

I was sending my financial advisor a note today to update him on developments, like renting the farm. As I read it through for the fourth time, I was wondering, “Is he going to think we’re crazy?” Then I read past my own signature to the Helen Keller quote that has gone out on every email I’ve sent from my laptop for the last several years,

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Helen Keller (emphasis added)

Boom! Just when I needed it, a reminder that I have been trying to live on the skinny branches of life, to not be kept in inaction because what I want is hard, or risky. Mitigate the risks where we can, yes, but I have said, “I want to farm,” and this opportunity is golden, and I’m running for it! Could we crash and burn? We sure could, but even if we do, we will still learn so much!

So what is the road map for this daring adventure that we have set out on?

Some good news, more than half of the larger block of rows is mostly accessible.

Control the blackberries!

And by blackberries, I mean all the weeds. There are blackberries for sure, at least three varieties, including the native pacific trailing blackberry, the cutleaf blackberry, and the insidious Himalayan blackberry (which is actually from Armenia).

The first species has thin relatively thornless canes that wind along the ground. They’re mostly a trip hazard, though we do occasionally find them up in the bushy rafters. The cutleaf is wicked looking when it sticks out of a blueberry bush, but their total population is relatively small.

When we talk about controlling blackberries, it’s the invasive Himalayan that has a target on its canes. They can grow very fast, and they grow straight up until they reach the direct sunlight. Eventually they run out of distance that their soft, fibrous cores can support and they flop over the top of whatever undergrowth they punched through. Over years of neglect in some areas of the farm, this has caused blueberry bushes to bow over with the weight of blackberries. Add in some other annoying species like spiraea, and you get the areas of the farm that may not have seen any sunlight at ground level for several years.

Shockingly, the blueberries in these areas with the heavy weeds have fought back. In our initial clearing to find the edges of the berry rows most of these plants, while not healthy by any stretch, have sent out their own canes to find the light, and they have some green shoots when they are detangled from the chaos.

In many areas of the farm, we’re not worried about what we will loose in terms of 2023 harvest if we weed and prune (or salvage) plants aggressively because no one has been able to reach what small amounts these plants have borne in several years anyway. What good is “saving” fruit for the birds? We might even be willing to burn or cut these whole areas to the ground, but our landlord wouldn’t like it, and we have a lot more sweat than capital assets available for this project.

There are blueberries in there, I promise!

Start the pruning process

The first day I went out to “get started” on the weeding, I discovered two things. 1. The blackberries often grow out of the center of the canes of the blueberry bushes. 2. The blueberry canes are so thick and overgrown that they provide protection from my pruners to the blackberries. So despite my best intentions of “starting the pruning next spring,” I can’t get though weeding without at least cutting off a few blueberry canes that are getting in the way of eradicating my enemies. Though early spring pruning is ideal for blueberries, given our scope of work, we can’t afford to have surgical pruning. As I’ve experienced with trees and other plants in my life, pruning now is better than never pruning.

Marketing
We’re going to need people to pick and pay for blueberries. We have plans to have a real website The farm does technically have a (stock) website, complete with a menu that says, “Get quote” and “Call now,” and a .business.site address. There are also plans in the works to get our listing updated on LocalHarvest and other sites people would go to if they were looking for us.

Then there’s the immediate neighborhood! This farm is on only a moderately busy road, but it is less than 200 meters from a busy neighborhood road that serves probably a square mile of homes and an elementary school! We’re definitely thinking bandit signs for other areas within a five minute drive to let people know we exist.

We thinking we could also sell some pre-picked berries. Pre-picked would mostly be a way to tell people we have a farm, since labor is expensive. But we could sell some out of our house, which is not especially close by, but has a lot of foot traffic out front and at the farmers market. I’m excited about an idea I had to put a little business card in the bottom of pre-picked pints that says something like, “Oh no, they’re gone! You’ll be ok, come pick some more,” and has a QR code for our website.

This short tunnel used to be a path between the rows of blueberries…

Record Keeping

Perhaps the least sexy, but most important thing we need to do this year is keep records. When we were arranging the lease, the landlord had no idea what we can expect to make from the farm. She said she hoped we make our money back. She did have a figure that highbush blueberries can make anywhere from 5 to 25 pounds of blueberries per season, and there are 2100 ish bushes, so if we could sell an average of 15 pounds per bush with a per pound around $3, we’re looking at a gross income north of $90,000.

Now, we recognize that that number is probably extremely generous given the state of the bushes, at least a third are not even accessible, and given the lack of pruning, I’m sure many bushes are at the very low end of their production capacity, and it will take several years to get them up to full production.

Added to that, I had an email conversation with a fellow u-pick business owner, who purchased their overgrown field in 2014. She mentioned their field is basically a community service. They maybe break even, despite many hours of labor by their family and volunteers. If their whole farm looked like what the worst parts of ours look like, then I can totally see that. If they have a mortgage to pay and a water bill, I can extra see it. We have really lucked out with our lakeside location, the field is right on the water table, so we’re more worried about a flood than watering. And we have a good arrangement where our landlord was going to pay her mortgage anyway, so we arranged to pay a nominal amount of the rental cost up front and the rest out of our profits.

All that to say, as far as we can tell, no one has kept any records of gross income from berry sales or net profits, so we are going into this blind. Whatever else we do, we will give the next person, be that the landlord taking back over or another person that we sell the (hopefully booming) business to, we will have good records of what was produced and sold to how many people each season.

As of today, we’re about 30 man-hours into the weeding, and we’re both reassured and overwhelmed. There’s a lot to do at the farm, but we’re going to get it done. Five blueberries extricated from the thorny jungle, less than 2095 to go.

An eerie wonderland I punched through to where the blueberries have successfully blocked enough sunlight to keep competitors down. This late in fall the old gray canes look ghostly.

We bought a zoo, er, rented a blueberry farm

A little twist of fate, and we rented a blueberry farm. It’s 5 acres, and it’s been well neglected over the years. In western Washington, that means we have a cold, wet battle with blackberry tangles in our future.

Blueberries turning red like fire in the fall. The front of the farm has seen a bit of care.

The front half of the farm is pretty nice, gratefully. It’s where the sun reaches closer than 8 feet from the ground. Tall patrons still need to lean down a bit if they want to avoid brushing the over-arching branches, and most of the picking is overhead.

Tunnels are created where the blueberries grow together above the isles.

That’s the nice areas. In some places the tunnels are short, so that even medium-short people are frequently ducking the large old canes. Other places, the tunnel suddenly disappears in a wall of blackberry briars. There are whole sections where you could shade your eyes and stand on your tiptoes to look over the brambles, and ask, “Are there really blueberries out there?” And then you see it! A hint of crimson leaves signaling that there are indeed blueberries lost in the tangled sea.

Despite it’s many challenges, there’s beauty to be found in this place.

How will we go to their rescue?

A few techniques are in order. We have some restrictions from the landlord, and we want to continue to have whatever production we can manage while we renovate, so cutting them all down is out. We might selectively try “to the ground” pruning for a few plants to compare, but mostly we plan to do heavy pruning along with a whole bunch of blackberry pulling.

Once we bring the bushes down to their proper size and scope, we’ll apply permaculture principles to stack some complimentary production. We’re looking forward to the eggs and spreading around the comfrey that already dots some areas.

Check back soon for updates!

If your farm goes out of business…

Can you say it was sustainable?

I recently sought out information about a local farm called Thundering Hooves that sold pasture finished meat after I saw them represented in an older video about holistic agriculture. What I found was a Postmortem by Bruce King for a company that on the surface seemed to be doing a lot of things right.

Cows, stock photo by Kat Jayne Pexels.com

The company went out of business in 2015 after several years of taking on more and more debt to grow, so they could make more money and take care of the families that the business supported (and service the debt). But ultimately, the business failed. Some of the people involved who, from my understanding, were not directly involved in the debt-ratio situation stepped into the aftermath and created new businesses that filled much of the gap left behind by Thundering Hooves, and seem to be doing a better job.

In the comments at the end of the blog, someone asked a question like, “If you go out of business, were you really sustainable?” Their point being, at least in part, that people who grow food “sustainably” like to point fingers at everyone else, but if their so-called sustainable production methods can’t be maintained over time, are they doing any good for the world?

This question has been bouncing around in my brain since I laid eyes on it, reiterating itself in ways like, “Am I willing to sacrifice some principles to save money and continue to offer value in the marketplace if that’s what’s required?” and “What lengths am I willing to go to to stay in business?”

Luckily, I’m not currently in business, so it’s all rhetorical preparatory decision work. The kind that’s good to mull over and work through because it could come up later. It draws me to three big points from two people far more experienced than myself and both running successful businesses.

Two ideas come from Dave Ramsey. They’re things I’ve heard variations on over and over as I’ve listened to his radio show over the years.

1. “Debt is risk.” People have become so normalized to it that they don’t always feel that way, but it is. It seems people are even more desensitized in the farming world where people say that debt will strangle you, but no one can’t farm without it. If you don’t think debt=risk, consider the prospects today (mid-pandemic) of a farm with no debt and 6 months of extra feed costs in the bank (put there by working hard, expanding slowly, and maybe an extra off-farm job) versus the same farm, but with debt equal to half the value (or more) of the farm and insignificant cash reserves. Which level of risk would you rather shoot for? I know my answer: the one that can weather a storm.
2. “Keep showing up for ten years and you’ll outlive most of your competitors.” To me this says you don’t need to abandon your principles to stay in business, but you might need to take deliberate, long-game actions (baby steps) that will move you in the direction you want to go. Just keep moving, however slowly, in the right direction and you’ll reach where you want to go eventually. I usually find it goes faster than I think it will if I stick to my game plan.
3. The third idea I’m mulling is Allan Savory’s Holistic Management Principles, which have every farm decision made with three factors in mind, the ecological, economic, and social needs of the farm. No part is more important than the other. As much as possible, things are considered with a holistic approach, rather than a reductionist approach (trying to solve one problem alone). I suspect that while Thundering Hooves was in name a holistically managed farm, that they had a breakdown in the holistic management that was never rectified and ultimately resulted in catastrophic failure of the business.

stock photo by Pixabay Pexels.com

The failure of a farm or business isn’t the end of the world. Just as I believe death in nature does not insult life, I think business death is not an insult to the “life” it had or of similar businesses. It can be a contribution even if it is short-lived. And just as I believe life is to be nurtured and cared for, so to, good businesses should be nourished and sustained as long as possible. And it’s ok to let go if that time comes, because even in business, the death of one thing usually gives life to something else.

I’ve come to the conclusion that while a good business staying in business is more sustainable, the unsustainablity of a single enterprise does not automatically reflect on the sustainability of the industry.

Quick update

After two years of pulling blackberries and cultivating in wood chips, we have set aside the permaculture backyard and moved into a regular house. It was a bittersweet parting. I am always on the lookout for the next best thing for our family, but a conflict with our landlord over the need for timely repairs to our central heater was the catalyst that put my husband and I both ready to (sadly) leave behind chickens and gardens again and move on.

Tulips in the well manicured back yard

The current move is to a house. We’re renting with a company called Loftium–yes, it’s a real company, not a scam. We live in the upstairs of the house and manage an Airbnb unit in the basement in exchange for reduced rent. Loftium and Airbnb have both been hard hit by the pandemic, but something about the timing of our move (no guests were already booked months in advance) and blessings from God have kept our unit very full considering. For the moment, we’re hosting a traveling nurse long-term, which is perfect since I also work in the emergency room (under nurses) and was worried about having guests who were uncomfortable with that, or no guests at all, during the pandemic.

The move brings us more space inside (the hubs has a home office, which we are both so grateful for with him working from home full-time right now), a lovely large updated kitchen, and a lovely, professionally manicured, yard. For the first time since moving to Seattle, we are above ground level on all sides, and I must say the sun (when it shines) is lovely.

My sourdough starters, called “Fred” (levain liquid) and “George” (stiff dough levain). Fred became the croissants while George went into the big loaf.

As I knew would happen, moving away from the garden and chickens has rekindled my longing for those things and farming in general. We brought along our outdoor cat, King Charles the Rat Snatcher, and I think having him around has reduced the longing a little. This house fills a few purposes (besides getting us out of the unpleasant other situation):

1. We’ve long thought that short or long-term rental would be part of our long-term farm plan, so we’re getting more experience with that without bearing most of the risk.
2. We are paying nearly the same rent for more space.
3. That rent level allows us to make fast progress on getting the debt paid off and save up for a house/farm (We’re following The Total Money Makeover plan). We’ve got about 18 months to 2 years left with the debt snowball.
   

   Study table, cookbooks, scriptures, laptop, recipe cards, journals.

   

   Handmade croissant

   

   Sourdough bread

But always there’s that pesky longing in the background, so I’ve spent my house arrest time reading, baking, and making up plans for what that farm will look like. It’s motivating to make progress on the step I’m in. The sooner I finish this, the sooner I can move on to that (or whatever steps come next on the way to that). I’m happy here and grateful for everything this house, which we’ve affectionately named “the Pelly,” has to offer, and I have one eye on the future, making sure I’m headed that direction.

 

A Summer Update

We’ve just passed two years of living on a micro-farm in Seattle, so this is sure to be a long and newsy post. It’s been fun to remember what it looked like before we got started and how it is now. Unfortunately, we didn’t take many before photos, so the blackberry-ivy thicket that completely obscured the rock wall and the gravel walkways between the “raised”–maybe 12-inch tall, termite-infested–garden beds and the dirt the chickens used to scratch in live only in memory.

Approximation of how the yard looked before wood chips. Wood chip remains scraped to bare dirt to be put on the garden.

 

Nearly as soon as we moved in we got on the Chip Drop list, so we could try Back to Eden style deep mulch gardening. It took something like a month to get the wood chips delivered. Carl and I (mostly Carl) spent hours moving the wood chips onto the garden and chicken run. At first, the chickens freaked out about the new surface, and would run over the wood chips as fast as possible between islands of yet uncovered dirt.

Before the wood chips, the run area was packed dirt. the chickens scratched at it, but didn’t make much headway. It was dry and when a chicken pooped on it, you had to watch your step or get goop off your shoes. We put down about six to eight inches of wood chips across both run and garden.

Now the wood chips are about three inches deep in the higher places and eighteen inches deep at the bottom of the hill. Post wood chips, the chickens routinely “dig to China,” and we can walk across the run without as much fear of sticky goop. It can still happen, but the vast majority of the deposits are turned under within a few hours and absorbed by the mulch. I routinely walk across in the dark and my shoes look fine when I get back to the house.

The wood chips have gradually turned from a light wood color, with readily distinguished particles of wood and leaf material to a dark blackish-brown color that looks more like good soil with some dark, well rounded little chunks of bark that continually float to the surface.

Chickens scratching in wood chips

In the garden, we’ve learned a lot about growing in wood chips in two seasons. The first year, the wood chips were coarse and heavy, and the supply of nitrogen available for plants was low enough that I top dressed my hungry plants (zucchini) with some organic steer manure about half way through the season. They went from a bit yellow on the edges to bright green nearly overnight, and produced so much squash that even the chickens seemed to get tired of it.

We also learned that the coarse wood chips were too coarse for many seeds to be planted in, even when we (attempted to) push the wood chips aside and plant in the dirt.  Things with big seeds or plant parts, like corn, beans, potatoes, and transplants did great as a rule. Things with tiny seeds especially carrots, onions, and the like disappeared into the wood chips never to be seen or heard from again, despite our efforts to keep the wood chips at bay while they germinated.

One of the amazing things that first year was how juicy everything was. We had a typically wet Seattle June, followed by a nearly rain-free July. We watered when things were seedlings, then left them to do their thing. We went on vacation for a week in early July and when we returned, the garden had not withered in the heat, but exploded in a furry of green activity.

In our second growing season, this spring, we scrapped the wood chips back where we wanted to plant carrots and sifted a few gallons of “dirt” from the chicken run to put on top of the cleared area. This worked out great (except for an escaped chicken that thought it a good place to dig a hole), and we will definitely be using sifted chicken yard compost in the garden more in the future. In fact, we’re on the list for a refresher chip drop, and the plan is to move the material that is currently in the chicken run onto the garden and give the chickens fresh wood chips to play in.

King Charles the Rat Snatcher

Charles on the straw that was added with the last batch of wood chips.

Charles

Second major chip drop

Wood chips from the people who cut our trees away from the power lines.

When I start over again (it’s bound to happen eventually as a renter), I may start in the fall with a large area of chicken run with wood chips and initially not worry about putting deep mulch on the garden, then put the well-composted chicken compost on the bottom of the garden area followed by fresh wood chips if they’re available.

Every time we’ve gardened in the past, weeding has been my least favorite thing and it eats time like crazy! With the wood chips, I mostly don’t have weeds, and when I do have a weed, I usually wait for it to be big enough to feed to the chickens (and get a good grip on) before I pull it up. Things come right out of the ground. There’s so little weeding that I almost miss it. I also seem to do most of the weeding when I’m out harvesting anyway. Pick a cucumber, oh, pull that weed and throw it to the chickens, pick a zucchini.

This year, we had a hot dry June, and I think May was also dry. Despite the wood chips, things have started to look limp and tired a few times, so I’ve watered when it needed it.

A Deep Breath, and here we go again, just in time for winter!

Kestrel tries to digging to China if she has to just to find some grub!

Hello, everyone!

It’s been a while, and I’m back! This summer My husband, Carl, and I moved into a shared house (an unofficial duplex) with a yard and we adopted some chickens that the previous tenant couldn’t take along. Who knew when I started this blog I’d try out urban micro-farming less than five miles from Seattle’s concrete core? I guess that’s half the excitement of an odyssey!

Since there’s no way for me to say this isn’t a step in the right direction, I think it’s time to go back to writing about it. Anything related to farming + writing! Why wouldn’t I?

I’ll be back soon with some before and after photos of our garden (we’re trying out deep mulch, and we already love it), a full tour of the yard, and introductions to my chickens. In the meantime, here are a couple more teaser photos. Enjoy!

Laura

Carl and the wood chip truck

Sunrise in the background and cinder up front.

“Homeward Bound” A Book Review

I just finished Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity by Emily Matchar. As suggested by the title, the Book discusses why women are thronging back to the hearth in an age when the glass ceiling has been at least cracked, if not shattered by our mothers.

Letter to a Land Owner Try Two

Last February, upon discovering that 1) There wasn’t a community garden in my new apartment complex (or room for one) and 2) about 500 yards down the road is an 18-acre late 1800s farm, I wrote a letter to the land owner.

The Soappy Road

I’ve going down a road of making my own soap. It started with a bar of “shaving” soap at a farmer’s market almost five years ago. My husband said, “I’ve always wanted to try shaving with soap,” and he hasn’t shaved with shaving cream more than a handful of times since.

Soap Bubbles (What to name a soap company: part 2)

The blog took a summer vacation since I wrote part one. I couldn’t even remember what I called it, so the title of this follow-up post is completely unrelated (oh well). Here are some things I’ve learned about soap and selling on Etsy since part 1: