TAKE IT AWAY POOH:
On behalf of all of us, greetings for another year, another growing season. The lengthening days herald a warning that too soon the work days will get dramatically longer, and the leisurely weekend pace will be utterly and totally abandoned. My Dad once remarked how it would be nice being a vegetable and small fruit farmer as we would have “our winters free”, but there was only a small element of truth to that, especially after our children were born. I worked as a weekday ski patroller at Mt Ascutney and spent a year in the rental shop for 14 years. It worked out great when the farm was smaller. When the ground froze, the snow mounted up I could go to work at the mountain and draw a little pay. I actually had a lot of fun patrolling (mostly the skiing part) and met great folks with whom I never would have met in farming circles. After February school vacations had wrapped up and when area attendance started dropping, the management was more than happy to see me excuse myself to come back to farming activities. Despite surrendering my right ACL to my winter job, I do look fondly upon those days. But those were the old days. The farm is much bigger and busier now. There is much more than ever to do during the winter. Paperwork, taxes, seed orders, cutting from stock plants, H-2A petitions. Piles of desk work. Anne is welded to the desk, juggling figures and filing forms. She used to be the fastest green bean picker in the state (or so I bragged). Now a river of bureaucratic and financial obligations and forms spill out of the farm office onto the kitchen table, into the old home office and then into the guest bedroom. It’s a shit cart load of personal notes, bank statements, forms, audits, and surveys to be filled out and filed, and its all very time consuming to mop up. She does the lion’s share of it. Not the kind of picturesque responsibility one thinks of when one thinks of farming. (She does get to lord over her cut flowers and greenhouse with Sarah, so she is not desk bound all year long…) Other winter chores include (but are not limited to) greenhouse repair and maintenance, machinery and shop maintenance, packing out root vegetables until stores are depleted, organizing all manner of soils, pots and flat filling for spring, brush cutting, building repair, seed orders, blueberry and raspberry pruning when weather allows, lining up crop insurance and getting the principals who work here year round vacation and family during holidays and the dead of winter ( note: “dead of winter” is an oxymoron now, it is never dead, there is always something that needs attendance…either immediately or in the future) The winter thus far has been very benevolent to us. January is wrapping up a bit on the warm side with bountiful sun which is a godsend for the stock plants who are trying to produce cutting material for this ornamental spring season, and it has been gentle on the propane consumption. The absence of ice in the dooryard is welcomed by all of us, but especially my 69 year old shoulders which are currently missing a few tie rods. The small amount of snow has allowed us to get our blueberries pruned, a task that has been left unattended for the past two years. It has been easier for Mike to rebuild the doors on our elderly greenhouses. Pete and Dave are almost finished with packing out winter potatoes. Coupled with this is the take down of the greenhouse at Putnams and brought back to the home farm to be resurrected with 3 new ones. The only thing negative that I have any concern about is the lack of snow cover for insulation for strawberries. Lack of snow cover makes George, our tillage and tractor guy, get itchy to get to get underway. Although he knows it all too well after 88 winters, I have to remind him that we still have a lot of winter yet to wade through . But thus far the winter has been a gift, and the preponderance of sunny days keeps our spirits high. As February rolls around we start to try to line up our labor needs and positions. Petitions have to be filed to get our H2A workers from Jamaica back in the spring. By all accounts they are having good season and have remained safe from all the earthquake activity in the Caribbean. Applications have to be addressed and interviews have to be scheduled…an ordeal that takes time and is a juggling act at best. We will have to review all our food safety and employee training manuals and update them. Vacations are wrapped up and in February we start to get committed to seeding perennials, herbs, more cuttings and by March 1st four greenhouses will be fired up and on line. By the end of February-at least as far as we are concerned and irregardless of the weather and amount of snow on the ground-spring will have come to Edgewater Farm.