For me life always feels good as the first hints of fall touch the crisp morning air. And hints of fall are in the air. So after waiting and waiting for our tomatoes to begin to ripen I am now starting to plan how to protect them from the first fall frost. We dug a bed of potatoes last week and I was trying to figure out what to put in next when I realized it was almost September and I would not be putting anything in except a cover crop to overwinter. I think that is when it really hit me. No more sowing of food crops this year except the garlic in late October.

As we harvest the crops this next month (and hopefully October as well) we will begin to prep the garden beds for the early sowings of peas, carrots, spinach, onions, chard, kale, radish, turnips, and on and on. While the beds destined for tomatoes and beans and the like will get sowed with a hairy vetch for overwintering. So in my mind its mid August tomato harvest season, mid September, late October and mid March all at once.  Not to mention the thoughts of what might be hatching this evening at my favorite fishing hole. No wonder I get so much mixed up.

Its both wondrous, joy filled, and sad to pull the crops that have been growing all season. They have been my life the past few months and I will miss them – at least until tonights dinner or until that cold December evening when Dava and I pull out a jar of tomatoes, a few potatoes, and a winter squash for dinner. This summer in the garden will come back to us again and again this winter.

Soon I will be rising in the dark, cold morning to go hike up to some ridge to ski fresh powder. Soon I will be staring tomatoes in flats. Soon I will be planting peas. Soon I will be wishing I hadn’t planted soooo many squash plants. Soon I will be sensing those first hints of  fall in the air. Somehow, someway, I no longer fear this passing of the seasons. This has been one of the many gifts the garden has given to me this year.

New ground. There is alot of that in my life these days. And there ain’t nothing like it. Its hard cursing sweating work at first. Clearing the land of decades of trash and rumble. Trying to brake into the hard crusts with the tiller and then just finding more rocks and debris then you ever thought could be in one place. So you curse a few more times and get back at it. Tilling more and more. Each pass getting a bit deeper into the soil. Each time turning up more junk.

But soon you begin to see through the rocks and rumble and see the soil -  neglected, bone dry, and almost lifeless but not dead yet. So you hop in the truck and fill it with some horse manure and spread that around. Then you throw on the meals – cottonseed, alfalfa, bone, kelp – and some greensand and start tilling some more. Now the soil is starting to look like it might grow something other than bindweed. Finally you rake and form it into raised beds and top it all off with some beautiful rich compost, and  water it all in. Then you let it sit. It needs a week or two to rest and begin to restructure itself.  And you could use a cold beer and a swim in the river to wash off the dust caked sweat and clear the head abit. In a couple weeks seeds will be planted which will hopefully grow into beautiful fruit and vegetables for Dava.

We’re all about new ground here at Dava’s place. Be it the expansions of the gardens into every bit of ground I can find, to the whole Slow Food/Money movements, to an environment created and held here for folks to come and work out whatever it is they need to let go of. Be it the stress from a long hard week or a long hard life.  Be they guest, our hard working help, or our neighbors and friends dropping in to say hey. The wonderful food that Dava prepares here helps all of us replenish and re-nourish ourselves.

The new ground here is very old ground. We are just doing our best to reestablish lost connections.

I planted the first corn seed in the ground on May 5th. Three weeks too early for this climate.  It was a new open pollinated variety called Festivity I was excited to try out. This new variety would supposedly germinate in cool soils and survive frosts so I sowed early. By the end of May it was 3-4″ tall and ready to get tested by our late frosts. Two frosts in 4 days burned the potatoes planted in an adjacent bed but only 4 out of 100 Festivity plants were killed. Amazing! We got our first harvest of this beautiful and great tasting corn on August 12th.

We will always be trying out and testing new varieties here at Fresh & Wyld Farms. Trying to find the best matches for our soils and our little microclimate as well as finding new great tasting veggies for our customers. Next year Festivity will be a main crop not just a test plot.

Corn is not a cash crop but a vital crop in all gardens. We have a long and sacred history with corn here in the Americas. I believe that corn should be planted as a offering and as a blessing. Then it should be devoured with gratitude and joy – hard not to when its this colorful and delicious.

Tomorrow we will do a final harvest of the Festivity and pull the stalks and add them to the ever growing compost pile where they will breakdown into a beautiful humus to be feed to next year’s crop.

Most of my days start the evening prior. After the sun has slipped below the ridge I venture back out into the  garden and set the water for the morning. I turn on the pump by the pond and then go around turning on and off valves, moving sprinklers about, and set pressures on the drip tapes I want to come on in the morning. The sprinklers around the farmhouse come on each morning at 5am long before I even begin to think about getting out of bed. The sprinkler control box turns the pump on and water starts to flow to all of the irrigation system including the garden. And thus everything I set up last night is on and watering. Pretty boring stuff, huh?

Boring sure but vital. I’m always thinking about water -always.  Constantly gauging the moisture of the soils in the different beds and the different areas of the gardens. I don’t think I ever stop thinking about it. And then there is the irrigation system itself. There is always a leak to fix, a broken pressure gauge, a split fitting, a new filter to add, a drip line to run to a new bed. And that is if the water is even flowing on to the property.  First thing I do each morning is check the flow into the pond – do we have water today? If not I have to jump in the truck and go check all the various splitter boxes and headgates for clogs, unwarranted diversions, or unexplained dryness. What happened to the water??? Sh_t!

Water. Can’t grow food without it.

I used to be a biologist, an ecologist, an environmentalist, a 20 year old know-it-all intellectual idiot, a flyfisherman. I still fish. I used to get pissed off at all the irrigation water pulled out of the streams leaving them dry and dead. I still do but I see the other sides of it now as well. We still pull too much water out of the streams. We could use it all so much more efficiently and leave some for the fish, the birds, the insects, the rivers.

2o years ago before everything was connected via the Internet I worked on a baseline study of the health of the Dolores River. Our second trip of our second summer of looking at the river we caught two Colorado Squawfish ( now called the Pikeminnow) two miles up into the Dolores from the Colorado River. It was end of the day, getting dark, when Bill called our boss in Logan Utah to tell him the news. We went back to camp and slept. Very early the next morning we broke camp and drove over to Dove Creek and stopped in a diner for breakfast before first light. We sat down next to a table of local farmers. Guess what they were talking about – the Squawfish we caught the night before. The Pikeminnow is an endangered species and if it had ventured back into the Dolores then these farmers would very possibly loose their water to ensure in-stream flows to protect the fish. They were not happy at the prospect. I sat at the next table on another side of the world and listened to them voice their concern for their livelihood while we ate. I got up from that table a much wiser kid.

A neighbor of mine is the water commissioner. He described his job as trying to prevent people from killing each other over water.

Would I give up my water to save a native fish???? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it is all about water.

Everything.

Second to getting a truck load of horse manure the most satisfying thing about growing food for Dava is watching people eat it. As most of you know Dava cooks up an amazing meal every Friday evening using fresh foods and wines produced by the framers, ranchers,  and vintners in the valley.

In the summers the meal is served outside on the lawn under the giant cottonwoods. I usually sneak in the side door of the farmhouse and watch the folks eat from inside the house. That way I can linger and watch their reactions and expressions as they eat. Everyone is happy of course – good food, good wine, good company, a beautiful evening. There is something more going on at these meals however. There is a glow about the place that goes beyond that produced by a beautiful summer evening or the smiles and laughter. I’m not able to tell you what I am seeing cause I simply don’t know. But as I work the garden here and grow some of this food that gets cooked up I’m starting to think it is all the love and care that goes into the growing of the vegetables, the raising of the animals, and the creation of the wine that is somehow shinning through it all – the whole thing.

There is just something right about what is happening during these meals. Something right about what we are all trying to do in regaining our relationship to our food. I promised myself when I started writing this blog I would not talk about the whole “movement” thing. I have never liked social “movements” only personal ones. I think we get lazy in our catch phrases and cute language. If we can say a few of the right phrases now and then then we can feel OK about ourselves and our excessive lifestyles. I think we need to learn to feel OK about ourselves without the need for cute, cool phrases. The language allows us to stop – to not develop further, go farther, dive deeper. Now I’m on a soapbox so please excuse me.

If anything we as humans beings are doing these days is at all worthwhile and helpful it is eating good clean food. The food will clean us out and perhaps we’ll all start behaving a bit better towards ourselves and others. So get out and dig in the dirt, plant some seeds, raise a pig or a few chickens. And, of course, drop by the farmhouse for one of Dava’s dinners. She sure can cook.

Today was a good day. There have been a lot of hard, difficult days lately. But today was a good day.

It has been raining for two and a half weeks. Raining a lot. Hailing some and then raining some more. But today was a classic sun filled late summer day in SW Colorado. They hold a beauty that is hard to surpass. And it was a day of ease. Not of no work. There is always work on a farm. And then there is a lot more work.  But I was not fighting the work today and thus the ease. None of this is what really made the day for me however. Today I hopped in the old Ford truck and drove a quarter mile – don’t think I would want to drive that truck any farther than I could walk home – to our friend and neighbors place to pick up some horse manure.

Over the years of working with gardens here and there I have come to know that nothing is more satisfying to me than seeing the compost pile grow. I had been waiting two weeks through all the rain for Tom and Andy’s field to dry out enough to get to the pile. Today the sun provided the dryness and the truck made it the quarrter mile and back and our compost pile got a new layer of hay, cottonwood leaves, a thick layer weeds we have been pulling out of the rows, and then a good coating of good old horse manure. I watered in the new layer with some Biodynamic compost preps and stood back and smiled feeling everything was alright in the world.

Rain, rain, rain. Its mid August here in Paonia and we should be having highs near 90 and dry dry weather. We are lucky to get a short afternoon shower. Yet last night I went to bed early and the storm was lighting up the sky and pouring down rain and hail and more rain. 4:00 this morning the thunder started to blast away again. The sky lit up with blinding flashes right on top of us. Then it let loose again – more rain. This morning the skies were clear and I pulled out baskets to wade into a soggy garden to start harvest. We have squash growing an inch a minute out there. The cucumbers are multiplying faster than fruit flies. The beans are coming on strong and if the chard didn’t get blasted by last night’s hail there will be plenty of beautiful leaves to harvest as well. So I got my baskets and boxes and knife and cutting shears and was ready to go. I decided another cup of coffee would be good before I waded in – let the mud dry abit I told myself. I got caught up in a short conversation with a guest and by the time I got back out to the garden the thunder was rumbling over the flank of Lamborn heading north and fast. And once again it opened up.  So here I sit writing this instead of pulling out those ever growing squash.

This has been going on for close to 3 weeks now. Or so it seems. With weather, like most things, we humans seem to exaggerate the severity and the longevity of any particular pattern. So it may have only been 2 weeks. I could look it up but I don’t want to spoil my illusion right now. On the bright side of things if there had not been so much rain lately last nights lighting storms would of set this whole place ablaze and the juniper and cedar covering the hills would be gone in a day. So there is much to be grateful for. Just have to look a bit sideways to find it somedays.

Just a few short years ago I didn’t think I could ever work again. A flood had roared down on me and swept me up and deposited me in an entirely new landscape. I fought those flood waters with everything I had and to no avail. After the flood passed I stood up and looked around. I was god awful tired, beaten up, and downright broken. But I saw soon enough that the new place was a good place. A place I had always wanted to be. But I was still broken.

Just a few short years ago these fields I now work also lay fallow and beaten. Uncared for, dumped on, trampled, flooded and starved. Three years ago Dava bought the farm and the fields started to get cared for by some loving hands and souls. Now they are in my care. I am still god awful tired but now from good hard labor. For the past 4 months I’ve been tilling dirt, raking dirt, hoeing dirt, piling dirt up, digging dirt down, moving dirt from here to there, hoeing dirt some more, and on  and on and on.  All in the effort to give the dirt what it needs to be healthy and perhaps happy. I don’t know if I’ve done right by the soil but I do know my intentions are good. Its felt good to be able to work hard once again even though I’ve complained plenty about it. I’m not yet beyond complaining about a good thing. I’ve even had a few melt downs and been awfully close to crying once or twice. Yet I couldn’t be happier with how I spend my days.

I want to do right by this soil and this garden. And I believe it will do right by me in return. We are care-taking each other. We are both getting a lot of help by some really loving people, worms, bugs and spirits galore. I thank all of them and am grateful.