Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her eighth entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

BARNEY & MAUDE

I’m long overdue in introducing Barney and Maude, the two Belgians who arrived on the farm in April. They are quite the couple: tireless farmworkers and completely inseparable.

Barney is the sensitive one — tall, lanky, and pigeon-toed, with a bleach-blond rockstar hairdo. Maude is mouthy and affectionate, with a personality as big as her battering ram physique. She cracks me up on a daily basis.

Each of them weighs over a ton, and they have feet the size of dinner plates. Meet my team of draft horses.

To be honest, I didn’t really intend to haul home four thousand pounds of Amish-trained horsepower in the first three months of starting my own farm. There was plenty else to tend to, but fate had its way with me.

It’s a long story that apparently started 26 years ago when I disappeared from the house as a two-year-old. My mom searched frantically for me, fearing the worst — that I’d fallen down the compost toilet. I hadn’t. Where she finally found me, though, was almost as worried: I was sitting in the dirt corral amidst the hooves of four heavy horses, entranced.

She managed to extract me unscathed, but it foreshadowed the lifetime of horse adventures and misadventures that I was destined for. By the time I was five I had two shelves cluttered with dozens of plastic molded horses, and by nine I had a little Arab mare stabled in the barn. I rode her all over the countryside, exploring old logging roads, galloping along the beach, and swimming bareback on her in the river. She was the heart of my childhood.

But kids grow up and get jobs and go to college. And childhood mares get old and stay behind in the barn. For me, as it became more and more apparent that I wanted to farm, I found myself reckoning with the reality that despite my love for horses, I wouldn’t have time to ride one — especially in the summer when the weather is good.

That's when the idea of draft horses started to tickle my consciousness. I was 16 when I had my first daydream about farming with horses down along the river. Over a decade later, after three years of training with a master teamster, here we are: Maude, Barney and me. Crazy what can happen once you think a thought.

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Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her seventh entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

IT TOOK A VILLAGE

There is water. Water on my fields. Water in pipes. Water in hoses. Water on asparagus. Water on raspberries. Water on carrots and beets and potatoes and leeks and artichokes and dahlias. There is water at last.

Of course, now it’s raining again.

But during those few recent days when Oregon was blasted with heat so hot that even our coastal mercury pushed into the triple digits, the story had all the elements of a suspenseful melodrama.

The setting: a fledgling farm on the southern Oregon coast, newly planted to produce and berries and flowers. Heat waves dance over the field. The skies are clear without a rain cloud in sight. The soil moisture is dropping, fast. A half mile of irrigation trench lies open along the edge of the field, like a larger-than-life gopher tunnel. Dawn breaks hot on a Thursday. Baby lettuce is sizzling in the field by 10 a.m., flattened and crispy by 2 p.m. Tender new strawberry leaves are scorching along the edges. Newly germinated beets push through a dry crust into a brutal glare. It’s a grim day to be a seedling.

The cast: me, alone, sunburned and tired. I’m covered in dirt head to toe, wearing an apocalyptic respirator while I rush to glue the last PVC joints in the line. Sweat is pouring down my face and pooling in the respirator with the sun high overhead. At one point the trench collapses in on itself and I break into tears while I scoop out the dirt by hand, buried up to my shoulder. I know that I’m running out of time. My body aches. I try not to look behind me at the fields where all of my plants are screaming for mercy. The next day’s forecast is even hotter.

And then, in the peak of the afternoon when I am almost to the point of breaking, they start to show up. A neighbor arrives with a cooler of cold drinks. A long-lost friend drives up and rolls up his sleeves. Danny comes home, puts on his wet suit and dives to the bottom of the creek to anchor the pump. There is a rush of progress, and then it’s time for the moment of reckoning: flipping the breaker at the electric panel.

There is a pit of anxiety in my stomach as I crack open the last valve on the line and wave at my sister to turn the switch. What if it doesn’t work? What if the pipe explodes in a catastrophic geyser somewhere along the line? What if the pump is a lemon, or the wires are crossed?

Abby flips the breaker and there is a sudden whoosh of PVC glue fumes hissing out of the valve. A good sign. I wait. And wait. And wait. And then faintly, from somewhere in the belly of the mainline, comes a rumble like thunder. It gets louder. I hold my breath. Louder. And then suddenly the water jets out, coughing and spluttering and pulsing until it runs clear and fast, straight up into the hot blue sky as magnificent as the Bellagio fountain, more beautiful than Old Faithful.

It is the best moment ever.

I yell a hallelujah and we all converge in one crazy, happy, relieved high-five fest. I am grinning ear to ear. It feels like anything is possible now.

I run to turn on all the drip lines that I’ve laid out and give a long drink to half the farm.

But the saga is not quite over yet. The other half of the farm is watered with overhead sprinklers, via aluminum irrigation pipes that I don’t own yet.

Enter Allen, our neighbor. I went to school with his nephew, who I remember mostly for his habit of shooting frogs with his BB gun each spring. On his few hundred acres next door Allen runs cattle, works as a logger, and owns a rock pit. He’s been watching my little farm unfold for the past few months and stops now and then to talk through the fence. He’s happy to see some of us local kids coming home and is hoping his daughter will start up her own market garden on a piece of their bottom land.

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Posted by Laura Ford at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her sixth entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

THE DANCE FOR RAIN

You’re probably all wondering what happened to me. Two plus weeks of silence since my last cliff-hanger dispatch about the cash flow crisis. Did she go belly-up? Bankrupt? Are they auctioning off her pickup, her $100 Earthway seeder, and the steel ribs from her greenhouse (now valued at a whopping $380 per ton for scrap metal!)?

Not yet.

I’m hanging in there, but facing some major shortages. Money, yes, but there’s something that’s become even more critical right now: water.

Mother Nature must hate me. Two weeks ago it was “gripe, gripe” about all this rain, the cold, the never-ending winter. I couldn’t get out into the field to plant. I was over a month behind in getting my perennial rootstock into the ground and dealing with marginal soil conditions for doing any kind of tractor work.

Now I’m doing frantic little rain dances in hopes that the forecast, which predicts only a 20% chance of showers in the next few days, will deliver up some H20. I’ve got plants in the ground and no way to water them. After five days of sun and wind and warm afternoons, the soil moisture is dwindling and I’m racing the clock to finish an irrigation system that has been delayed all month.

As the rain poured down during the month of April, I was busy lining things up for my irrigation system (consisting of about a half-mile of buried PVC mainline feeding 18 underground valve boxes, powered by an electric pump that pulls water out of the river). I hit one setback after another. Our local irrigation supplier got pneumonia and had to check out for a while, the parts I needed had to be special-ordered, and then the whopper: the discovery that I had to have an entire new electric service dropped to power my pump, at a price tag of about $6,000. Ouch.

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Posted by Laura Ford at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her fifth entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

APRIL'S CASH CRISIS

What I’ve learned in April is that the mythic “cash flow crisis” that farmers face in springtime is no myth.

The generic plot goes something like this: farmers spend lots of money in the spring, then make it back in the summer and fall.

Springtime = money out. Harvest time = money in.

Unfortunately, there’s a months-long vacuum between “money out” and “money in,” seeing as most crops take at least eight weeks to reach maturity. My carrots promise that they are 57 days to maturity, my tomatoes 80 days, and my asparagus, well, we’re talking two years till they’re ready.

Amidst all of this waiting for veggies to grow on, size up, and get ripe, money has been hemorrhaging out of my pockets to pay for one-time startup expenses, like my greenhouse and irrigation system, and for annual operating expenses, like seeds and soil amendments. I cracked open my little piggy bank of savings last December, and now it’s all gone.

There’s no farm income on the horizon for at least another month (grow little lettuce, grow!), which means that I am officially experiencing a bona fide cash flow crisis. It sounds so grown up…

I knew it was coming as I watched my checking account balance shrink every month, forcing me to get cleverer at juggling expenses and take full advantage of suppliers’ billing terms. It’s finally come down to the point that I’m joining ranks with all the other farmers who go into debt each spring in order to afford the cost of growing food.

I began shopping around for money a few weeks ago. It was in the midst of entertaining options like borrowing against my house or hunting down a 0% credit card offer that I decided to pay a visit to the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) to see what their farm loan program could do for me.

Jim, my regional FSA agent, asked me all about my farm over the phone. How many acres, and is it leased ground, and what am I growing, and how long have I been at it? After I finished up with the details, Jim hesitated. They’d like to be able to give me a low-interest loan, he explained, but there were a few problems.

First off, if I wanted to spend the money on something permanent – like a buried irrigation main – well, they couldn’t give me the loan because my farm is technically on leased land.

The next bad news: the loan amount they could offer me, explained Jim, would be determined according to my projected income, which they calculate by multiplying my predicted crop yields by the state commodity prices for each crop.

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Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her fourth entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

GRAFTING

Grafting is the process of joining one thing to another, of taking two things that do not share a natural relationship or affinity for each other — and making them one.

In one barn, my sister Abby is grafting a hundred apple trees and as many plums and pears for the new orchard we’re planting along the creek. In the other barn where a ewe has given birth to a stillborn, a neighbor is trying to graft on an orphan lamb to make use of the ewe’s full udder. Both of them need knives to do it.

Matching apple scion to rootstock, my sister makes a careful cut to each, aligns cambium with cambium, and wraps the graft with an elastic band, urging the two halves of the new tree to fuse. Apples don’t come true from seed, so grafting is the only way to produce a proven variety.

Step One: Choose a well adapted rootstock. Step Two: Choose fruitwood varieties for pie, cider, storage and fresh eating apples. In western Oregon, look for scab-resistant varieties. Step Three: In the winter, take green cuttings of the fruitwood and order your rootstock from a nursery or dig it up. Step Four: Marry them together. Step Five: Wait five years, then feast.

Our neighbor, Wendy, takes the stillborn lamb behind the barn and skins it. She returns with the fresh hide and uses a scrap of bailing twine to tie it onto the back of the orphan lamb like a cloak. The stillborn was black. The orphan is white. The ewe doesn’t distinguish because she has evolved to recognize her young primarily by scent, not by sight.

She will reject the lamb if it doesn’t smell like her own — head-butt it, refuse to let it nurse — but wearing the stillborn’s skin, this orphan lamb has a chance. To help convince the ewe, Wendy ties her up in a pen and guides the lamb to the udder.

On the workbench, our entire orchard is laid out with names like Cox’s Orange Pippin, Northern Spy, Stayman Winesap, Goldrush, King. It seems barely possible that this collection of little dormant sticks welded together with rubber bands could be something more than campfire kindling, but it is. Even more unlikely is that in that millimeter of space between scionwood and rootstock, new cells will grow and multiply and bridge the gap. They will, and each tree in our orchard will have a scar — a bulge low to the ground — to prove it.

The next day, I look in on Wendy’s ewe. She is untied, eating alfalfa pellets in the pen. The lamb is uncloaked, white again — and nursing on a full, warm teat.

- Zoë Bradbury

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Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her third entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

GRATITUDE

I was on the tractor at dusk today, prepping beds for the asparagus and raspberry rootstock that I’ll plant out later this month, when I was struck by the realization that the reason I am able to come home and do this, and hopefully make a living at it, is in large part thanks to the local food movement.

Twenty years ago, I would have been laughed out of town for trying to hawk strawberries and golden beets to the restaurants and retail stores in town. Now they’re hungry for it. It’s also taking a heap of planning, investment, sweat, and a little blood to manifest this farm start-up, but were it not for the groundswell of interest in homegrown, farm-direct, good, fresh food, I’d be dead in the water.

Being able to rent my sister’s shiny, orange 32-horsepower tractor helps, too.

It was long after sunset that I finally took my last pass and cut the engine. There were the sounds of the creek playing over the gravel bar and a hoot owl calling across the valley. There's something about that spot on the property — where the river comes out of the canyon and begins to meander along the bottomland and the steep timbered coast range gives way to pastured hills — something that feels good and calm and centered. My fiancée, Danny, practices Chinese medicine and he says it’s the way the qi flows there: not too fast, not too slow, just right. And you can tell. It’s easier to take deep breaths.

Looking out at my fields and the valley, I took one and then mouthed a slow, silent thank you.

- Zoë Bradbury

Posted by Laura Ford at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her second entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

JILL OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF NONE...

So here’s the reality: farming is one of those things where you do a little bit of everything. Carpentry, botany, soil science, Microsoft Excel, plumbing, accounting, people management, marketing, grunt labor, welding, mechanics, etc. A lot of farmers get really good at all of them — after enough years. I haven’t had enough years yet, so my skill set break down looks something like this at the moment:

Good (enough) at it:
• carpentry
• botany
• marketing
• grunt labor
• Microsoft Excel
• plumbing

Needs improvement:
• accounting
• soil science

No clue:
• welding
• plumbing gas
• mechanics

The thing is, hiring someone to do the things you have no clue about costs money — usually a lot of it — so I tend to take what I know from the “good enough” category, apply it to the things in the “no clue” category, and cross my fingers. A lot of times it works, and I learn enough to move from the “no clue" category to “needs improvement.” It’s a good, self-reliant, empowered kind of feeling.

But this week the experiential learning model backfired when I went to plumb a gas line from my propane tank to my hot water heater in the greenhouse.

Given that “plumbing gas” falls into the “no clue” category, I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that the combination of explosive hazard and installer ignorance would be a good reason to bite the bullet and hire this job out, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of paying $500 for someone else to run 10 feet of gas line.

So I did it myself.

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Posted by Laura Ford at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

Recently, Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She’ll be blogging here about her experience as a young farmer for the rest of the season. Below is the first entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.

ARTICHOKES

Thirty-odd years ago my parents headed north from San Francisco on Highway 101 and ended up in a little town called Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. What started as a weekend road trip ended with them dropping out of college and buying a short order restaurant.

After six months of serving milkshakes and greasy burgers to the after-church crowd on Sundays, they traded the dumpy little restaurant perched over the Pacific for 40 acres and a run-down farmhouse on Floras Creek.

It was my dad’s idea. My mom cried when she saw the place. They weren’t tears of joy.

The place evolved. With some friends, my mom took a chainsaw to all the interior walls and opened the house up. In the yard she built raised beds, put in a pyramid of strawberries, and got a couple of artichoke divisions from a friend on Short Street.

The garden grew. My sister and I were born. Once we had teeth, we ate artichokes each spring.

When I bought my own house in Portland five years ago, my mom dug into the artichoke bed, pried a few loose, and gave them to me along with some raspberry canes. I turned over all the grass in the backyard and put her plants in the ground—the same genetic stock that had fed me for 25 years.

They divided and grew and chokes shot up each spring like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. I don’t have a clue what the variety is: pointy-leaves tipped with sharp spines, dark green fists, the world’s best vehicle for melted butter.

Last week, I was in Portland packing up my house to move, and I took the shovel to the artichokes again.

I pulled up to my new greenhouse on Floras Creek today with a riot of saw-toothed artichoke divisions in the back of the truck, teased them apart into one-gallon transplant pots, and officially began my first season farming for myself, next door to my mom and sister. It seemed like the perfect thing to do on a leap day.

After our five-year stint up north together, me and the chokes have finally come full circle back to home turf. We’re planning on staying awhile.

- Zoë Bradbury

Posted by Deborah Kane at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )