Summer Job

This will be my new home come June.

Many of you know, but I will be leaving the farm this summer to make some cash and enjoy yet another "youthful experience". I have been trying to land this job for about three seasons now...my cousin Molly's husband, Steve, has been a commercial salmon, halibut, and dungeness crab fisherman for over 20 years, and this summer, his only crew position opened up. I jumped at the opportunity to join him for 10-12 weeks fishing in Southeast Alaska. The days will be long (about 20 hours), but the scenery will be dramatic. About 20 years ago the National Park Service closed Glacier Bay National Park to commercial fishing but said that anyone holding a permit could continue fishing until they either die or quit. No transfers and no new permits have ever been issued, and Steve was one of the youngest guys holding a permit at the time. This means that I will be fishing in one of the most pristine environments in the country without any other boats in sight! I am looking forward to Steve's humor to carry me through the exhausting twilight nights of unloading thousands of pounds of fish and crab (he is one of the funniest people I have ever met). The boat is docked in Juneau, which lies about 900 miles north of Seattle, Washington. The Southeast Alaska salmon fishery has been managed extremely well over the past 30-40 years. Each week's opening is entirely dependent on how many fish swim upstream, meaning that fishing is not permitted each week until enough numbers have entered their spawning grounds. This ensures sustainable salmon populations for the future.

The biggest question of all remains: what about the vegetables? I have worked it out so that all of the cultivating will be finished by the time I leave. I have arranged for a few friends and a few chefs to come harvest for me. There is also a non-profit called Fields To Families that delivers left over produce from farms to needy families, so I plan on telling them to stop by maybe once a week. This spring was all about installing the garden and starting to improve the soil for the future. I feel pleased with my progress.

Steve sent me the pictures from previous seasons (he is the goof ball driving the boat).

Lessons in weather

The weather has been impressively inconsistent lately....no measurable rain in about 18 days, and now I am sitting at the farm during a HUGE thunderstorm that will likely drop 1-2" in about an hour! Not the best time to plant, but my schedule says I need to get these guys in the ground before my brother Paul arrives on Friday to run the bridge race and before I leave next week for another green roofing job.

Here are some stats I got from NOAA that describe this classic spring pattern:

On Tuesday March 22, Charleston set a new record high temperature of 88 degrees F! Only one week later on Tuesday March 29th (yesterday morning), the temperature was recorded at 38 degrees F! A 50 degree drop in temperature in only a week's time! This is exactly why Charleston feels SOOO cold sometimes: we get used to these ridiculous spring days and then get completely smacked in the face with some bone-chilling, very-humid cold snaps (and these historic houses have NO insulation). Weather is all about perspective...to my cousin Chad in Michigan, 38 is considered a nice late-winter day, but to me right now, 38 feels worse than my over-night trip up Mt. Washington last year in 10 degree weather. I can't seem to shake this damp cold...constant hot tea, a warm sleeping bag, and a good book would be perfect right now, but unfortunately farming doesn't stop because I'm a little uncomfortable. Plants need tending...weeds need pulling. Instead, I look forward to a wet afternoon putting out tomatoes :)

Look how weedy the beds are! The bed to the right has been weeded, prepped, mulched, and planted with tomatoes. Soon all the beds will look like this...easier on the eyes. The other pic is the row of comfrey plants.

Long day

I spent all day prepping three beds for transplanting. This involved hoeing the beds, weeding, weeding some more, tilling (by hand), shaping the beds, weeding again, spreading compost, laying drip irrigation, spreading leaves, and finally planting into a lasagna of organic material. Thank you to Jane's two boys, Sasha and Dimitri (and friends) who helped out for about an hour hucking material around the garden. 150 winter squash plants are now getting familiar with their new homes, and a good soaking rain tonight should help their roots take hold in the sandy soil. I decided to hold off planting the tomatoes until they get a little more root bound and until the weather warms up a wee bit.

The first picture is of the irrigation system I installed yesterday. The drip lines are running underneath the mulch layer to help conserve even more water, and I decided only to irrigate 6 rows (720 feet). The second picture is one of 27 comfrey plants that have poked their heads into the sunshine. Comfrey is a perennial herb known as a dynamic accumulator. It stores valuable nutrients in its leaves via an 8 foot tap root that can reach deep minerals. The leaves of comfrey contain 2 to 3 times as much potassium as manure, thus they can be used to make compost tea to water the garden. Each plant can live for 30+ years with proper TLC, and I look forward to having them around for a while. The third picture is the pile of bagged leaves I have been obsessively stealing from the neighborhood, and the last picture is the load of compost I picked up from Bees Ferry Landfill. It only cost $10 per ton and was perfectly enough to spread on three rows.

The no see-ums where terrible all day. Flying up my nose, making kamikaze dives into my eyes, getting stuck in my hair, flying up my pants, and all the while biting me over and over and over again. A good test of patience I guess, but it sucked nonetheless. Bug spray only worked for about 5 minutes, so I am going to get a bug net for my face ASAP tomorrow. The mosquitoes are only a few weeks away....yippeee.

This is how exhausted and dirty I looked upon leaving the farm: I went to Earth Fare to buy some beer and stopped in the produce section to sample some fresh cut orange slices. Now before I go any further, I will admit that my hands were dirty, but they were more stained than actually dirty (nothing was going to crumble off my fingers). I used the tongs and was VERY careful to drop the orange slice into my other hand as not to contaminate the entire display. I shut the lid, walked away, and turned to see an employee somewhat staring at me. He promptly walked over to the display and emptied the entire thing into the compost. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt that they were simply old oranges, but something tells me he was slightly offended at my appearance. I took a hint and steered clear of the cheese platter tempting my grumbling stomach. I blame the Davis genes on that move.

Oh...the soap is ready, so if you want a sample email me your address :)

Keeping my fingers crossed for rain tonight...

Oh so close

Just wanted to update pics of the transplant trays. Amazing watching these little guys come to life over the past few weeks. I would say the winter squash will be ready in a week, hopefully just in time for some rain. I learned a lesson from an old farmer : "you need to harden your transplants to within an inch of their life." This simply means that you shouldn't put delicate, spindly transplants directly from a perfect environment in a green house into the ground. They will undergo significant transplant shock and will take longer to recover. If, however, you put transplants in the ground that have been sitting outside and seem withered and slightly yellowed to the brink of survival, they will literally hit the ground running. They will settle into their new home much quicker because the conditions are far better than they used to be. I imagine this is similar to sending your kids off to college. Maybe a certain amount of "hardening off" should occur so they can hit the ground running?

If any of you know a rain dance, start shaking! Its been ten days since any measurable rain, and the forecast does not call for any wet stuff for at least another week. This is peak germination season, and I am afraid my direct seeds I planted this week are going to suffer the consequences of a three week dry spell. So it goes...

I am planting 60 asparagus plants today that Rita grew while in Virginia last year. They have a nice healthy root mass and should perform well with some TLC and compost.

Toodle-do...

WVO

Lots of people ask about my veggie oil filtration system. I say, keep it simple.

Green Roof!

This job has dragged into it's third week, and we are finally seeing the light at the end of a very long, arduous tunnel. Planting literally thousands of plugs one-handed has gotten my body all sorts of messed up. My left hamstring is sore, my right lower back is tight, and the most surprising "over-use injury" is my left thumb. The poor guy pushed thousands of plants into very coarse soil with little to no training! Feels kind of like my nail is going to slide off in my sleep tonight. Gross image I know. For those of you who don't know the benefits of green roofs, I will bore you for a few moments with the details. The biggest long-term benefit is that they protect the underlying waterproofing membrane from damaging UV radiation (sunshine) and thermal expansion and contraction. This equates to a roof lasting 4 to 5 to 6 times longer than one left exposed to the elements. Secondly, the building's cooling costs in the summer are drastically reduced because the roof's ambient air temperature is dropped to roughly that of the surrounding atmosphere. The last main benefit is storm water control. Green roofs retain upwards of 70% of annual rainfall, meaning that municipalities with combined sewers will save money by not treating that water and they will have fewer "overflow events." Just to give you an idea of how much we're talking about: Charleston receives about 35 inches of rain a year. For a 1,000 square foot building (a very small house), that equals 21,000 gallons of rainwater pouring off that roof in a year (1 inch rainfall generates 600 gallons for a 1,000 square foot surface)! That's a shit load of H2O that the city does not have to treat because it never hit the street picking up pollutants along the way. Other benefits include but are certainly not limited to: aesthetics, carbon sequestration, increased wildlife habitat, sound insulation, and urban heat island mitigation. SO...the roofers found a small leak that they have to fix before we can officially walk away from the project. I hope the pictures do the roof (and our hard work) some justice. Remember...this baby is about 60 feet in the air and the vegetated area is 22,000 square feet. That's a lot of water! The last picture only shows about 40% of the roof...there is an entire other side of the building. The plants will spread out as they grow this spring, and we hope to reach 90% coverage in two years time. Let's just say I will be getting to know the Red Roof Inn in Florence quite well over the next two years!

Volunteer day!

I had the weekend off from the green roofing job, so I got some much needed work done in the garden with the help of some good friends. Thomas Florian and his girlfriend Emily came out and assisted the planting of 15 blueberry bushes, 30 comfrey crowns, and 20 various perennial herbs. We also spread two loads of leaves to help with mulching the new plantings. They were a great help, in light of my shoulder injury, and I only hope they enjoyed getting their hands dirty. The other picture is of my latest batch of soap. I used 100% peanut oil for this batch that I salvaged from vegetable oil containers (unused of course) to help keep costs down. Some google searches showed that peanut oil has great moisturizing properties, so after another two weeks of curing in the racks I will be sending out samples for feedback! Off to Florence for the week to finish planting the rest of the roof. Will post pictures of the green roof soon.

Bummer dude...

The ground in the Appalachians has been saturated from heavy rains the past few weeks, making my favorite creek run frequently. Big Creek is in the far northern reaches of Smoky Mountain National Park and has, by far, the best summer time swimming hole in the region (Midnight hole). Yesterday I met my kayaking buddies (John Webb, Todd Vinsant, and Thomas Krajewski) for a quick afternoon run. I love this river because the entire upper water shed lies within the park, meaning that no roads (therefore no cars) ever cross the drainage basin. This makes for water quality rivaling some of the crystal blue rivers I saw while in New Zealand. The put-in is a two mile hike upstream of the campground, so it also steers the light-at-heart to other more accessible runs. The day was going perfect. We were getting through the biggest class V rapids as a team, setting up safety while each person took a turn. Some of the rapids would take 30-45 minutes for the whole group to get down safely. The biggest rapid (and most technical) is called Action Alley because it consists of 6 class V drops back to back to back. I decided to go first for the last two drops (this one is called Baby Gorilla...aren't the names fun?). Everyone was set...Todd was at the very bottom with a rope and Thomas was towards the top setting safety in case I missed my line completely. The rapid has a tricky lead-in with the main drop (about 8-10 feet) falling onto some cushioned rocks. The landing zone is about 6 feet wide and all the water kicks violently to the right against a bedrock wall. Immediately following this nasty looking falls are two more drops containing some big keeper hydrolics. My approach was perfect and my boof stroke was flawless, but upon landing at the bottom, my boat kicked right and I reached out my paddle to brace against flipping. 200 pounds of bones, polypropylene, and plastic moving with such momentum is a lot to stop with just one shoulder. I felt a pop. Damnit...I thought. Shoulder is out...AGAIN. Except this time it was my right shoulder. (I dislocated my left shoulder about eight months ago.) I did not flip over, however, and had to run the next two drops with just my left paddle blade in the water. Todd couldn't tell that anything was wrong until, miraculously, I got in a eddy across the river from him and screamed the news over the roar of the river. The next 30 minutes was, in retrospect, a text book rescue. Todd is a practicing EMT-IV, John is an RN, Thomas is a wilderness first responder, and I am a certified Wilderness EMT (plus I have been through this once before.) We had to figure out how to get me to the other side of the river. John jumped in the icy water, swam across, and bear hugged my boat to stabilize it. Todd threw a rope across the river, and Thomas tied it to my bow loop. On three Todd pulled, John stabilized, and Thomas ferried as support in case I flipped. I cannot thank these guys enough...it makes a HUGE difference getting in this situation with your best friends. I knew that they would do whatever it took to get me to safety. After 4 attempts to reduce the dislocation, Todd finally weaseled the ball back into the socket. I joked with him because in the ambulance, EMT's are not legally allowed to mess with any dislocations. This was his first one, and I know secretly he was excited to get the experience.
I walked away from soccer after my ACL reconstruction, and I am sad to say that I am going to walk away from my class V boating career too. I am too young to risk wrecking my shoulders even more, and I was happy to have my last run with my best friends. My dad gave some good advice: as we age, our hobbies ebb and flow. Maybe I'll take up surfing next. Rest and relaxation are on the agenda for the next few weeks. Here are two pics from the day...John is in the red boat dropping into Midnight Hole, and Todd is in the orange boat in the thick of Action Alley.

Garden in my back yard.

This past week, I was in Florence, SC installing a GIANT green roof on a federal courthouse. The roof is 22,000 square feet and, hopefully, by the end of the week, will have about 35,000 plants growing in 4 inches of soil. Just to give you a sense of scale...we have to lift 219 crane bags of soil onto the roof one at a time. In three days, we have finished 110. Long and slow process, but I have been having fun driving around a HUGE forklift on the job site. Because of a rain delay today, I drove back to Charleston to check on the garden plants. Jane has been, very graciously, checking on the little sprouts for me, and I decided today that we should move them into the back yard to start gaining strength and size. I put together a make shift green house in about 20 minutes, placed a bowl of water under the plastic for humidity control, and walked away. I have to go back to Florence tomorrow to finish the green roof job, so Jane will resume TLC for the plants. It's amazing to think that 1500 transplants fit on just three pallets. Comfrey plants arrived today, so I will get them in the ground when I return.