Farm Friday, August 2nd, 2024

Explaining not complaining

I tried adding some compost to perk up the sad squash in our three sisters garden. All photos by the author.

Farming is a continual lesson in humility.

A couple weeks ago I gave a farm tour to some folks from an urban farm in Minneapolis. The leader of the group had brought a different group out to see the farm last summer and she had been excited to bring more people out this year.

All during the tour I talked about the struggles we have had this year. It was one crop after another that I declared “sad” or “disappointing.” After the tour was over, our summer garden intern asked me why I had been so negative about our garden. I hadn’t thought it was so bad. I was just talking about the year we are having.

It has been hard.

During May and June there was too much rain and our gardens were like swamps. The potatoes we planted in May took forever to come up. When some finally came up, I dug down in the gaps and found rotten seed potatoes. It had just been too wet.

In other areas of the garden, the plants just sat there after transplanting. Instead of greening up and growing, the leaves turned yellow. The marshy conditions stunted growth and sometimes killed the plants. We replanted all the gaps.

We have a seed-saving garden full of open-pollinated varieties. We tried direct-seeding those varieties instead of…