Hey, y’all! This is a handy masterpost of all(? that I could find of) my farming posts, neatly categorized for your perusal. Use it for writing references, farming references, whatever you need a farm reference for!
Your Fictional Farm is Wrong
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Asks
Farm Chores | Farm Stink | Farming Town | Greenhouses | Hawk | Order Seeds vs. Seedkeeping | Post-Harvest Farm Life | Starting a Garden | Superstitions/Farming Gothic | Summer Workwear | Sustainability Studies vs. Sustainable Ag | Symphylans
I’ve been thinking about talking a little about my day on the farm; what daily chores look like, what I get up to in between, what does it actually look like to be on a working farm midwinter in New England.
Really, I’ve been inspired by @lynnafred’s posts about the realities of farming, both gross and weird and occasionally aesthetic. I love hearing about other farmers days because we’re all doing things a little bit differently, maybe their farm is more on a produce production scale, or is more livestock, or in a totally different climate, or urban or rural area different from my own.
So let me know if you guys might be interested in that kind of content. If you are, great! If not, that’s fine I’m probably going to do it anyways. And if you’re a farmer, or backyard gardener, pet goat owner, eater of food whatever, maybe you want to do your own chore time/day in the life run through?
Episode Three: What the fuck have you been doing for a year and a half? (It’s a filler episode!)
Hi, everyone! It’s me, I’m back, and I have a bunch of news regarding YFFIW, where I wanted to take it, and where it actually went.
So back in April 2018 I wanted to make a fun and informational series of posts about what farming was like, or at least what I experience being a farm manager on a 30-acre orchard in Connecticut. The first post got way more interest than I expected, and I totally intended to keep going. I got lots of asks, I got lots of questions in reblogs, and I had a great time talking with the people who reblogged it! I met a lot of cool people through that post.
As the season picked up I really lost my ability to do more than one thing at once, and that meant that by June I was bogged down in more dumb and gross farm stuff than I’d originally intended. It was the usual: manage a bunch of teenagers, manage the daily operations of a place too big for one man to handle, spend all day picking eggplant, you get it.
Then, as the season started to slow and I thought I was going to get some more time to settle down, I got into a car accident while I was on the clock; I was heading to our biggest market of the week, actually. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t my fault. I ended up bruising ribs, breaking a finger, getting nerve damage in my left hand and arm, and tons of road rash on my arms, legs, and side because of it. And because I don’t have any sick time or days off (and my boss couldn’t handle managing my crew for awhile so I could recover) I was back to work in less than a week.
My plans for continuing this series faltered from there, and went steadily downhill as my care team and I kept finding more things wrong with me.
But, I’ve gotten tons of nice messages from people as the first entry in the series has picked up popularity again (thank you! I’m glad you like it!) and I’m going to try to bring this back, like a phoenix rising from the compost pile. Keep being patient with me, I’m going to do a proper new entry soon.
Thank you for all your messages and for your interest! I’m glad so many people want to keep seeing new entries. I’m going to do my best to keep them coming, albeit late.
A Very Special Edition of Your Fictional Farm is Wrong
When I was in uni, I took a class on global food systems. In one of the classes, someone asked about food shortages. The professor fell silent; she looked from person to person and asked, “Well, if there was a food shortage, what would you do as a food producer to combat it?”
At the time, I was confident in my answer. “Ration it. Try to ensure that everyone gets a fair share.”
As the conversation went on, a guy on the other side of the room huffed. “Whatever. This is America, we throw something like 40% of our food away, we’re never going to run out of food here.”
“Until the day we do,” a girl sitting next to me said.
Until the day we do.
Today was a hard day at work in the midst of a very uncertain time. Typically, we get between 5-10 orders for pickup a weekend. This weekend, we have over 30. It was a number we were completely unprepared for, with no additional marketing, social media presence, or advertising on our part.
But word of mouth is a strong factor, isn’t it? A happy customer talks about us to friends and family, and they slip that info into their back pocket for when they need something. And as grocery stores and stores like Walmart and Target run out of fresh and frozen produce, people turn to that info they’d had hidden away.
I watched as orders trickled in all week, taking note of what was coming in and in what amounts. Everything seemed normal. It wasn’t until Thursday when all hell broke loose, and before I could edit or alter the information on our website, people had ordered en masse. As I perused the orders, jotted them all down, I started to sweat.
I wasn’t going to have enough produce to fill every order, and no amount of luck could help me now.
So what do you do then? How do you take a fiasco and attempt to be fair, honest, and transparent to all of your customers?
How do you deal with a food shortage, as a small business and as a small farm?
Today, I started with the things I knew I wasn’t going to run out of: apples and an inventory of frozen fruit. With over a dozen apple varieties in cold storage, I knew what I had and what I could substitute to keep people happy. The root cellar was my next big task, and where everything started to get thorny.
The picture on the top is how many pounds of yellow cippolini and red cippolini onions I needed. The one on the bottom is a picture on the scale of how many yellow cippolini onions I actually had. So, how do you make this equal and even? Do you go by who ordered first? Do you use them for your regular and most loyal customers?
I did neither. Instead, I used rationing tactics, and calculated out how many pounds of onions each customer could get to keep things even. With 6.75 pounds of onions, that meant that each pound would be reduced to just a quarter pound each. The rest would have to be made up with something else.
So, each one pound order would have to receive a quarter pound of yellow onions, and three quarters of a pound of red. Two pound orders would get a half pound of onions, and so forth. But first, I also had to check and make sure that I had enough red onions to get me through. I had to weigh two different containers because I maxed out my scale.
Fuck.
So, I had to rearrange again. The last two orders of yellow onions ended up getting their allotted quarter pound, and was supplemented with the last of the red round onions, which thankfully hadn’t been ordered by anyone else this week. While certainly not ideal, it’s something that can be explained and—if I’m lucky—will be understood by our customers.
Storage items are a finite resource. You can’t just conjure more onions in March in Connecticut. Just like you can’t conjure more potatoes or winter squash. You have what you have, and you have to make due. Limited runs of fresh items are just as tricky.
On the top is a scale showing how much baby kale mix I harvested. It’s the last of the baby kale for the season. What’s there is there and there’s no more of it when it’s gone. It’s another item that didn’t start getting ordered until the one day that no one had the opportunity to watch the orders roll in. On the bottom, that’s how many half pound bags of it I need to fulfill my orders. I have just five pounds of kale, and I need seven. That’s not something that I can substitute out for something else. There’s no rationing this to make it even.
People know when they order that I can sub something out if I need to, and that most items are on a first-come, first-served basis, but I pride myself as a grower and a salesperson that I don’t have to rely on that often. But tomorrow, when people come to get their orders, I’m going to have to look at two customers and say, “I had a shortage of baby kale this week and can’t fulfill that for you. I can offer you these as replacements, but I can’t offer you this.”
And as a grower, that’s hard. And in times as uncertain as what we’re living, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying as a customer to be told by a grower that they’re fast running out of stock.
This weekend has wiped me out of potatoes, onions, kale, winter squash, and sweet potatoes. Just about the only things I have left to sell are apples, frozen berries, and spinach.
I am not in danger of running out of spinach.
But it’s stressful for a grower to have to juggle stock around to accommodate everyone. It’s scary for a consumer to run out of options for places to buy from. How do we make that judgement call to ration out resources with a clear conscience? (Hint: we do not, it’s not that easy, and I was naïve to think that in university.)
Times right now are uncertain, and they are stressful. As growers, we know. As growers, we’re struggling to meet demand and take care of our community the way our community takes care of us. But we need you to be patient with us as we adjust to new levels of demand, as we try our hardest to get you exactly what you need.
I love greenhouse growing. I do. In the winter, it's one of the only ways to grow things here in New England. But it comes with its own host of problems, and my hands-down least favorite is the green peach aphid.
The green peach aphid is a pest that typically targets peach trees, and other fruits in the same family, however they're opportunistic feeders and will also target beans, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, and cucurbits like cukes and squash.
They're also universal vectors for disease, which means that they can infect just about everything they feed on.
On the left we have some spinach that my coworker cut maybe 20 minutes ago. I just washed it and it looked great. On the right is a leaf of spinach cut from a second bin, from a different area of the greenhouse. Those guys are aphids.
They're voracious feeders that can wipe out an entire crop in just a matter of weeks, so scouting for them and taking action before their numbers build too high is key. The economic threshold (the amount of insects seen on a plant that affect marketability) for spinach is only 4 aphids per plant. When you see that photo up there, the situation seems pretty dire.
But all hope isn't lost. There's lots of ways to control them. Praying mantises eat them, as do ladybugs and some other varieties of beetle, as well as spiders and wasps. So there's lots of stuff that eat them during the season when the weather is nice.
But in the winter, in the greenhouse, we have to use chemical controls. Insecticidal soap is organic (meaning OMRI registered) and washes off easily when we wash spinach. It also has a very short re-entry interval (which is the amount of time that must pass after application before being able to go back into the treated area.) The downside is that the soap must hit the bosldy of the aphid to be effective. Since they live on the underside of the leaves, this can be tricky.
Other insecticides are more effective, but they're also more damaging to other organisms and have longer re-entry intervals. Systemic pesticides, can even amplify the effects of diseases in crops, so you have to decide what you're treating for before you decide to make a move.
Face masks are sold out all over the place here. It's so bad that the state has a shortage and they're looking for people to donate PPE so essential employees can be safe while they do their jobs.
So because of that, I decided to make my own face masks. They're not N95s, but they'll block droplets in the air, and thays what's important for us right now here on the farm.
COVID-19 has changed, overnight, the way we do business. We always wore gloves while we picked, washed, and packaged, but now we're wearing masks or respirators as well. We've minimized, in a matter of days, how we handle, treat, and sell our produce.
We handle customers differently. Right now, a customer pulls up, gives me their last name, and I plop their stuff in the back of their car. I sanitize my gloves between each guest. We're only accepting credit card payments so we don't have to handle cash.
Our business model has changed, and in due time, this may be our new normal. Right now, we're coping, adapting, and strategizing. My boss has left much of our COVID-19 strategies in my hands because of my educational background. I've been working very closely with state and local agencies to ensure the health and safety of our customers as well as ourselves.
Pretty soon, I'll be writing up another post about what the State of Connecticut is doing, as well as the info we've learned from our department of agriculture. Please stay tuned for it! I want to try to be as transparent as possible during this scary time so that my readers can see what small farms are doing to keep us (and you!) safe, as well as compile a little historical document of a very strange point in history.
Or, How to Write Life on a Farm
Episode 2: Crop Names
So, now you know that farming is gross and it’s weird as fuck. You know your characters are going to smell like sweat, dirt, and shit and you’re prepared for that.
Next, it’s time to figure out what the hell they’re growing and why.
In my little pocket of the US, most of the farms are small (”small” being defined as under 100 acres,) and they’re also heavily diversified. (That means that we grow more than one thing.) You’re very seldom going to find a farm that grows just sweet corn; you’re more likely that they’ll be growing some sweet corn, some tomatoes, some feed corn, and some peppers.
So, it’s important to think about where your story is set and why your character is there. For fantasy, this doesn’t really matter too much; you’re making the rest of the rules for the universe anyway, so the character’s motivations are entirely up to you. But if it’s supposed to be contemporary, you’ve got some research ahead of you.
For example, on under fifty acres, we grow apples, Asian pears, peaches, plums, nectarines, blueberries, summer and fall raspberries, herbs, cut flowers, and vegetables. We do that because we run a pick your own operation for (most of) the fruit, and use the vegetables to fuel our farmer’s market and CSA business. (Don’t worry, we’ll cover sales in a different entry.)
So knowing your character’s market is a big deal.
And knowing what they’re planting is also a big deal. If they’ve been farming a long time, when talking to characters who either work for them or who also farm, they’re going to use a lot of crop names. And crop names are fun as hell.
And I’m not talking about calling tomatoes just “tomatoes.” The longer you farm, the more oddly specific you get when you’re talking about your crops. “Yeah, we ran out of seeds for this red tomato, so we subbed it with this other one instead. Doesn’t taste very good, though,” isn’t something you’re going to hear. BUT, “Shit, that happened to us last year. We ran out of Primo Red seed, so we had to sub it out for Mountain Fresh. It looks real nice but damn does it taste like shit,” is something way more likely to be said. If the reader knows that the conversation is already about tomatoes, then knowing the variety names is going to help your reader know that the Primo is the better option. And before you ask, both of those names are real variety names.
Mountain Fresh is a nice looking tomato that stores and ships well, but its durability comes at the cost of its flavor. Primo Red is a nice, big, red tomato, but it’s delicate and doesn’t last long after you harvest it. Your character is going to have to know why they prefer one thing over the other. Are they doing a lot of wholesaling? They’re probably growing Mountain Fresh. Are they selling to local restaurants, who are using their product within the day? They’re probably growing Primo Red.
“But Lynn,” I hear you say, “I’m not clever enough to come up with names for my crops.”
That’s okay, because real crop names are hilarious and often themed.
I have cauliflower called “Amazing” and another called “Awesome.” The varieties of spinach seed I have in my seed storage include “Flamingo” and “Space,” and if you think for one damn second that I’m not going to label all my seed trays “SPAAAAACE” for the sake of me being a child you’re wrong.
Dead wrong.
One look at a seed catalog and you’re going to have the giggles for weeks. Carrots with names like “Romance” and “Goldfinger” and “Hercules” are common. (Romance is a good full size fall carrot; Hercules is a storage carrot that gets positively huge under the right conditions; Goldfinger is a great spring and early fall variety that’s slender and on the small side.) You can get a cucumber with the name “Excelsior.” Lettuce often has the names of ladies. “Nancy” and “Adriana” are both varieties we grow.
You won’t do that with everything, of course. If your character is growing herbs, you’re just calling them basil or cilantro or parsley. If you’re only growing one variety of something, you’ll call that vegetable by its name. (We only grow one variety of zucchini, so I’m not going to refer to it as “Reward.” But when we were growing two varieties, I did specify which one I was talking about. “Yo, it looks like Respect is getting obliterated with squash bugs. Reward is a couple beds over, it’s doing okay so far.”)
To wrap it up, seed names are hilarious, and each variety is unique and different in its own way, each good for a specific climate or use or bred for a certain trait. (There’s also patented seed varieties that, again, I’ll touch on in a different entry.) Your character will commonly call a vegetable by its variety name if they’re growing more than one of them, because it reduces confusion and helps ensure that everyone is on the same page. Look through a seed catalog or two and see what you find; you might even see something so laughably cool that you have to buy a packet of them for yourself!
Is there a topic that you’d like to see Your Fictional Farm is Wrong talk about? Send me an ask.
Do you like this series and want to see more of it? Consider buying me a ko-fi.
