Getting Ready for Winter

Hi fellow members, my name is Anna Laura and I was hired to help part-time at Care of the Earth this fall. I’d visited before, but getting to know Megan & Lalo, Evan Shea, and the farm over the past months has been a formative experience for me. My husband and I are now members, and I’m going to be writing for the blog now and then. So happy to be part of this community.

I wanted to write a blog post about the process of the farm moving into winter. Before I knew anything about farming, I imagined that fall and winter were “down time” for farmers—at least the ones who don’t grow year-round in greenhouses. But as September ended and October started ushering in cooler temperatures and shorter days, I saw the farm moving forward into the next year, actively preparing for the future. Lalo and I plowed and tilled cropland, Lalo mowed and turned spent summer crops under the soil, and I seeded cover crops—very different kinds of work than the weeding and harvesting we did in August and September. These kinds of work are preparatory: the cropland that grew your vegetables this year will be seeded with grasses and legumes and enter its time of rest, while acres that have been resting will be tilled, their cover crops turned into the soil to enrich it as it anticipates March planting. This kind of future-looking is what I do after periods of intense activity—why should I be surprised that farmers do, too?

Early in October, I got to the farm at 8:30, climbed up on the John Deere, and dragged the roto-tiller through two acres of plowed-up soil. This is really fun, even if it takes several hours. You get the tractor in line to start a new bed, put it in gear, set the tiller down, turn the tiller on, rev the engine up to 200 rpm, and let off the clutch.  One lurch and you’re moving, tooling away noisily down the brown earth.

That afternoon, I seeded those two acres with 50 lbs of oats, 30 lbs of red clover, and 10 lbs of alfalfa.  Megan is teaching me so much about the soil: what farmers have to do to keep their soil and crops healthy, and their vegetables nutrient-rich.  Cover crops, for instance, protect cropland from erosion while it’s lying fallow, help it to absorb more rainwater, and smother noxious weeds while adding nutrients to the soil.  It’s the best way to “fertilize” your land without adding chemical fertilizers to it.

This pairing, of oats with legumes (red clover and alfalfa), is genius.  Oat grow quickly, and, with their thick root system, can smother weeds and unwanted grasses in land you’re preparing to rest.  They die off over the winter, supposedly (they always did in Megan and Lalo’s farm in Poughkeepsie, but they didn’t die off over our last warm East Tennessee winter…), and open up the area for the clover, which will take over the next spring and flourish.  Red clover is able to draw nutrients from the air and deeper in the soil and store them in its roots, so that when it’s tilled under the next year—or the year after that—the soil will be super-rich.  Also, it loosens the soil.  Also, bees love it, and since Care of the Earth is blessed with a hive (or were—I heard a rumor the bees are getting moved), they are able to watch the cover crops and bees support each other.  How lovely.

One more thing about the legumes: you have to inoculate them—get this—with bacteria.  What.  Yes—treating your legumes with a dash of a particular bacterium will help it develop these “nodules” on its roots, which are where it will store nitrogen & other helpful things.  So you measure out 25 lbs of beautiful red clover and alfalfa seeds, splash in some water, dash in some bacteria, mix it with your hands, pour it into the seeder backpack, and start walking.  I walked every other tire track, spinning the seeds out in a spray.  Trying to turn that handle pretty fast while trying to walk pretty fast on uneven, soft ground is a lot harder than it sounds.  After seeding two acres with legumes and those two 50-lb bags of oats, everything hurt.

But, of course, I loved it.  What’s not to love about this kind of work?  There I was, using every muscle group to give richness to the soil, to prolong its life and the lives of all who draw life from what’s grown in it.  It was hard to feel like I was very helpful to anyone, including myself, in my last job (I was a grad student and First-Year Composition teacher at UT).  I had to dig a little to come up with reasons that teaching punctuation rules mattered.  I’m not knocking academics, of course—learning and teaching are some of my favorite things in the world—but I guess I needed to do something different, I needed to see a little more tangibly that what I do nourishes people. And seeing Megan and Lalo do it every day inspired me, and still inspires me.

Seeing cover crops growing this winter, the acres re-shuffling themselves, queuing up (and resting up) for next season, is a beautiful thing: see? 

--Anna Laura