Farm Visits

Jason and I spent the weekend off-Island, for a combination farm visit & vacation getaway. The vacation getaway was to a family friend's house in Vermont. We only spent two days there but left feeling relaxed and happy.

We visited two farms while off-island. The first one was Vanguarden Farm, a CSA in the suburbs of Boston run by Chris Yoder. Chris has some incredible systems down pat... we were particularly impressed by his smooth "remaying" skills. Remay-- a light, white cloth that is put over row crops in order to protect the veggies from pests, wind, and cold temperatures-- is notoriously difficult to put on a field. I prefer to put remay on with four people: two people unrolling the remay and two people with wide hoes burying the edges heavily to anchor it down. It kills your back if you are burying for too long and takes forever. If a wind comes up (as it always does out at Katama), the job gets infinitely more difficult. I have never even attempted to put remay on a bed by myself.

Not Chris. He grows year round and gets crops started early by using remay on a lot of his field. I got the sense that he frequently remays by himself-- he has a wheel hoe with an implement attached that digs a little trench and tosses dirt evenly on the remay edge while the operator walks along quickly. He also uses his cultivating tractor to bury the edges: the wheel of the tractor pulls the remay tight and the tines kick dirt on the remay, weighing it down evenly. Compared to the system I've always known, it takes Chris half the time and half the people to remay beds.  Impressive. And easy.

The second farm we visited was Natural Roots Farm in Conway, Massachusetts. Natural roots-- owned by David Fisher and his wife Anna-- is a horse powered CSA. No tractors anywhere on the farm. When you arrive at the farm, you park near their farmstand and then walk over the river to the field on a swinging bridge. David, like Chris, also has his systems all figured out perfectly. His fields are precisely   squared and his rows of crops straight as a pin. Hard to do, but necessary in order to be able to cultivate accurately with horses and to utilize every inch of space.

This was my second visit to Natural Roots and I was as impressed as my first. David has such an intensive system of weed control through cover cropping and stale bedding (leaving a field unplanted and lightly tilling every time weeds germinate in order to flush out multiple generations of weeds) that it is realistic that one day he will have no weeds at all. NO weeds!

The swinging bridge leading to Natural Roots Farm

I never want to be stagnant as a farmer or stuck in my ways. I want to be continually evolving and adapting and changing and the best way to do this, I believe, is by talking with other farmers and seeing other systems that work. Something I like about farming is that you can constantly do something better or different. Learned a lot from seeing Chris and David's farms, and I hope to put some of that good info to use at Slip Away.

Remay on our field at Slip Away.
And thats our mowing bunny in the center.