Crescent Moon Organic Farm - January 17

Monday, Jan. 11, 2010 - The drive to Jack's place takes about an hour from Tallahassee, it's due south and then west to get to Sopchoppy, then further west outside of town to an unpaved county road. Then north for a couple of twisting turning miles until you get to his driveway ... then the fun begins. The driveway is eight tenths of a mile long per the odometer in my truck, twisting like a bowl of spaghetti, driving over live tree roots and assorted plant life brushing up against the side of the truck, there's even a wet muddy stretch that goes over an underground creek ... this place is waaaaay out there. On arrival I'm introduced to Dave, the single permanent intern and the three of us sit down for dinner. After a good meal and some good discussion we all three go our separate ways, we'll start the next day at 9:00 am at breakfast.

Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 - This farm is an old place, the bathtub in the main bath is an original claw foot type so I'm thinking the main house was built in the twenties or thirties, and it's all original. There are three other structures, the woofer housing which is on the second level over the biodiesel lab, a large covered work shed which is about 50' square and the cutting shed where the veggies are cleaned, weighed, bagged and put on ice in preparation for the market. Today Jack is driving to Tallahassee to meet with someone at FAMU about a proposal and before leaving describes to Dave and I what he wants done for the day. On the north side of the farm are nine new garden rows that are being prepared for seeding. In the morning we will spread amendments, which is another word for fertilizers over two of these rows. This doesn't sound like much but when you're doing everything by hand things add up quickly. There are four types of fertilizers and they are each in large bags, about 40 or 50 pounds each. We wheel these over to the rows with two wheel barrels and then scoop the material into a large round tin about six inches deep. Then you just walk along each row and spread the fertilizer out by hand with a scoop or plastic bowl. After all four treatments are down then we load up the wheel barrels with a concoction of manure and wheat stalks and spread that over each row using a shovel. Later, and I mean much later when all the rows are treated Jack will till the mixtures into the soil with one of the tractors and they will be ready for planting. There's a small greenhouse on the south side of the cutting shed where the seedlings are already growing in advance. While we're busy with that Carmen shows up and let's us know she is in the main house making soup and it will be ready shortly. It takes the two of us about three hours to finish the two rows then we break for lunch. Salad, soup, buttered homemade bread and cranberry juice are the menu for the day and it's all good. Both Jack and Carmen are vegetarian, so while I'm here that makes me a vegetarian as well, and I'm already feeling the pounds melt away even more. After lunch we pre-pick crops for Wednesday's farmer market at Lake Ella in Tallahassee. Florida has been having an incredible freeze this year, so for protection Jack has covered the entire crop with a translucent, permeable plastic cover that breaths well and keeps the temperature about nine degrees warmer. First thing is to remove this cover from the rows we will be picking from, then I need to pick four pounds of arugula. On top of the freeze damage we find that some kind of worm has been eating on some of the rows of chinese lettuce and there's a virus in some of the savanna mustard. The arugula just has some damage from the cold, some of the leaves on the outside of the row are wilted and won't be usable. So I go through carefully and I start picking one leaf at a time thinking this is going to take a lifetime, but Carmen tells me to just grab the entire bunch of each plant and cut with a pair of scissors and they will sort the good stuff out in the cutting shed. This will speed things up a bit. I'm using a pair of scissors and a large oval tin about two feet long and one foot wide and ten inches deep and when it's full I will have about a pound and a half. We finish out the early afternoon with the picking, using the warmest part of the day and then return to spreading the amendments until five.

Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010 - Today is hurried in the morning, we have to finish picking and get everything weighed, bagged and put on ice in the coolers for the trip to the market. A new helper shows up for this effort, her name is Mary and I learn that she works part time for Jack, on the days he goes to market. We have a quick breakfast of oatmeal and coffee prepared on the wood burning stove in the cutting shed then we're off to work. It's Dave, Mary and myself picking and then Carmen and Jack in the cutting shed doing the sorting, weighing and bagging. In addition to the farmers market Jack has started a CSA and he sells to a restaurant, so all the produce has to be bagged and packed accordingly. Things go smoothly and around 1:00 he and Mary leave, he drives straight to the Tallahassee market and Mary delivers the CSA bags first on her way in. Dave, Carmen and I break for lunch, we have leftover soup and bread that Carmen made the night before and we top that with some salad fresh from the garden. After lunch we spend the rest of the day removing the damaged crop from the areas we uncovered. I put three or four heaping wheel barrels full on the compost piles, the same for Dave.

Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010 - This morning we have a new weather forecast, there's rain expected on Saturday and it's bringing warmer air into the area. There's no freezing temperatures expected tonight so Jack decides to uncover the entire crop and review the damage. This takes Dave and I about an hour, we aren't removing the cover material from the garden, we're just uncovering the crop and laying the material in the walkway between each row. Between the freeze, the worms and the virus about a third of the crop is bad and will have to be removed. All morning we're stooping and bending over, move a couple of feet and stoop and bend over. On top of the damage some of the crop has flowered, which means the stalk in the middle has grown pretty thick and Jack considers this too old, he says it gives the leaf a woody taste so he wants us to pull any of those plants. I'm standing in the garden looking at what is left of the crop and I'm astonished at all the obstacles in the way of getting a crop to the market. All considered we have easily thrown three times or more as much produce on the compost piles than went to market. Is there anything else that can get in the way? Now I'm really interested to see how the spring and summer will be when the days will be almost twice the length and no freezing temperatures. In the afternoon we break things up and change from picking bad produce to spreading another row of amendments.

Friday, Jan. 15, 2010 - There's a new farmers market on Friday evenings at a store called Bread and Roses and Jacks sources in the information grapevine say that a television crew will be there tonight, so we change our plans for the day and do more picking this morning. This is a small market so Jack and Mary do the picking and get everything ready while Dave and I continue cleaning out all the bad produce. With that almost out of the way Jack prepares a new amendment to be applied to the crops. This is a liquid application, he has a separate irrigation system that consists of a large water tank, a pump and some piping and then enough green garden hose to spray it on every corner of the gardens. Into the large water tank we mix together a gallon of liquid kelp and a gallon of liquid fish guts and then let the pump run to mix it completely. The difficult part is handling the miles of hose, it has to be arranged so you can walk between two rows and then moved to the next pair and so on. After the initial demonstration Jack and Mary leave for the market and then we finish out the day between removing the last of the bad crop and spraying the liquid amendments.

Changes

Well, things are slow right now and Renee has let me know she won't be needing any help for a while. I was fully expecting to go back for another two or three weeks to see the new chicks and ducklings and learn what it takes to get them from little chickies to say a teenage hen, but that's not to be. But I did get to see them, I went out to the farm to pick up the rest of my stuff and the chicks are in a small pen which consists of a small wading pool bordered by a cardboard fence with two heat lamps hanging above them to keep things comfortable. It's hard to imagine that these little chicks will go from two or three in the palm of your hand to fully grown and weighing three to five pounds in around eleven short weeks. Maybe Renee will need some help in the future and I'll get to see the full cycle.

Now, it's on to the next adventure. Today is Saturday, Jan. 10, 2010 and I drove down to Sopchoppy, Florida and met Jack Simmons of Crescent Moon Farm, you can check out his website at http://www.crescentmoonorganicfarm.com Jack has a permanent intern and in two more weeks another permanent intern will arrive, but he can use some help for these two weeks, so I will start on Monday around 11:00 am. The really cool thing about his place is he makes biodiesel from waste vegetable oil, and he makes it in 150 gallon batches!! This is something I've been interested in for some time and I'm really looking forward to it. The down side is that he uses a dial up connection so for me there's no internet. So I'll be doing my posts on the weekend when I come into Tallahassee.