Yes please.

Convivial (n.) From Latin convīvium (“a feast”), combined form of con (“together”) + vīvō (“to live”). 1. Of or relating to a feast or merry company 2.  festive; social;  jovial.

With our very first official harvest this week, I feel that the dance of our farm season has properly begun. We’ve been talking and walking through the initial steps, learning the patterns and rhythms of the farm. Now the music has started, and we try to keep up, to hold on to the enormity of the grand pattern and all the vital minutiae, weaving in and out of each other. Qayyum, our fearless farm manager, calls the steps: “Small hoes to Planting Two! Irrigators, turn on the pump! Swing your partner and plant those collards!” Sometimes we miss a step, we wander outside of our square, and our friends laugh and pull us back in, patiently and joyfully. Emila, our fierce and lovely farm elder, dances in quiet, graceful efficiency—she knows this dance and this soil intimately. Together we all move in the breathtakingly beautiful absurdity of being human.

 Despite this first harvest being a very small one (only a few boxes for the season’s first Mill Valley Farmer’s Market), I felt like the very embodiment of abundance, moving down the row with an exuberant cascade of green kale bouquets balanced from the very top of my head, down over my shoulder and right arm. With the mist hanging low and soft over the fields, in the warmth of my wool sweater, only two words sat quietly in my mind; “Yes please.”

Our formidable friend, the blue heron has been taking full advantage of the proliferation of gophers. Like an international man of mystery, he coolly saunters through the kitchen garden—tall, handsome and impeccably clad in his slate-blue suit—listening to the whispers beneath the earth. He strikes suddenly and ruthlessly, at ease in his natural role as gopher assassin. We farmers feel compassion for the gophers, but for the sake of the frisée, we appreciate our elegant ally.

I’m beginning to recognize the different varieties of lettuce, like getting to know new friends–the soft speckled redness of Mottistone, the delicate paleness of Panisse.  At night, sometimes I dream of stretching out in the burgundy crushed-velvet beds of Rouxai lettuce, sung to sleep by coyotes and owls and the brontide of the sea.

In solidarity and conviviality.

Tea, Planting 3, Practicing diligently…

“Now as we enter our day of activity, fully engaged in helping others, let us remember the one  who is not busy, and be free from self-clinging” -Our daily morning chant at the farm altar… reminding me of Robert Frost’s poem, “A Time To Talk”

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

-Robert Frost 1920

The farm crew began this week feeling settled and grounded after the one-day sitting last weekend. From 5 in the morning till dinner, we sat in silence, ate traditional Japanese oriokyi meals, and shared a sense of unity and accomplishment with one another. On Monday, we met with the Green Gulch tea instructor, Meiya, who served us tea in a formal ceremony. She described Tea as a way of life/ practice, just like our zazen practice in the zendo mediation hall. Each action and item in the tea room has a particular meaning, function, and form to it, requiring one’s full attention and concentration. A few of the apprentices are continuing to take classes with her.

On the farm, the third planting was a great success! On 24 beds (240 feet each), and with all hands on deck (and even a few on the back of a tractor!) the crew planted several varieties of lettuce (Vulcan, Red Fire, SBR, Green Towers, Rouxai, Little Gem, Bambi, Spretnak, among others…) , kale, chard, beets,  spinach, and a few kinds of broccoli. We hope to have a plentiful harvest in the coming months. The first two plantings are doing very well, especially the booming Napa Cabbage, and the fields are coming alive with color!

Good week on the farm for:

• Our friendly volunteer, Mac, who was overjoyed to climb a tree and prune a branch…
• Bird enthusiasts! Friday morning a bird walk offered some observation practice and detailed information about bird-life here at Green Gulch…
• Gophers! The early spring heat seems to have spiked gopher populations, to the farmers dismay…

Bad week on the farm for:

• Agribon Remay quality control! Our protective cloth for covering the newly planted crops is mysteriously disintegrating…
• Breen Lettuce in the Kitchen Garden! An unidentified critter or insect is feasting on the red lettuce… A potential suspect has been taken into custody (caught in a tin can) for further investigation…

May all beings be happy, peaceful, and liberated!

SF urban ag pioneers

Check out these very smart farmers who are working to ensure that urban growers are allowed to feed their neighborhoods & have enough security to make the incredible effort worthwhile.

http://www.littlecitygardens.com/

One of the important mantras to remember about your food choices:

Environment, Equity, Economics.

• Farming & food production must protect & build soil, caretake watersheds & purify the air.
• Healthy food must be available to everyone.
• Producers of food must be sustainably paid. From field workers to landowners.

Supporting local, sustainable, non-polluting agriculture is critical to changing the way food works in this country! Supporting farmers directly by shopping at markets is the shortest route to getting more farmers farming with an eye toward a diverse, resilient future.

Thank you for supporting Green Gulch to do what it does!

New Planting Moon

Green Gulch Farm hosted a community squaredance & CSA sign-up for our Muir Beach neighbors on May 9th at the Muir Beach Community Center. A live caller & string band set the new moon mood.

It was intended as a benediction on the purity of planting & inauguration of the flood of cutting that will ensure salads through the summer. Each lettuce neck leaks a little white milk. May’s moon is also called the Milk Moon. Both planting & milking represent effulgence: the unending giving of the natural world, both inner & outer.

So it is the season of Generosity!

Mother’s Day celebrates the root of giving in which giver, receiver & gift are intimately changing roles, dynamically intertwined relationships. Each one of us in each moment births the world anew. Breathing life into life.

I love dancing in joy, moved in a circle by old enlivening melodies, looking into the eyes of other beings, figuring out the steps together, ending the flirtatious night in the melancholy of a waltz as the lights come back up & we clean confetti, flowers & goat cheese from the floor.

And then we begin again. Giving all we’ve got.

between mountains & the sea

Today it comes to me: the apex of the annual roller coaster has passed & now the galloping, effulgent scramble to reproduce has begun. This chaotic dance is especially evident among the row crops on this beautiful farm. Red chard thickening in girth, rising up to produce a host of chardlings. Lettuces going alien in the field, frazzled mop-tops with boing-boing tentacles half as high as our tallest apprentice.

The impatient weeds amaranth, groundsel, shepherd’s purse & pigweed all racing to produce offspring among the seeds of civilization: the more deliberate spinach, sober kale, reserved broccoli & wallflower scallions. Tendrils of chickweed forming a juicy joyful (tasty) mat on the soil interrupted here & there by the blushing edible succulence (pillows-for-tiny princesses) of purslane. The farmers & members of the community are weeding regularly to distinguish between opportunistic local & preferred (marketable) cultivar. Bless their hearts!

All to say that life cultivates itself. Life uncouth in its primal urges, its willingness to transform in response to changing circumstances. We might learn something from the open treasurestore of grass heads. And of course we do. We learn through the available evidence that we are not alone. We are in relationship with the old lights overhead, with the gracious host beneath our feet, with the inconceivable variation of biology.

The elephant heart plums have swollen & are reddening hour by hour. These venerable old trees!

The apple tree outside the Luther Burbank hut propped up with one of George Wheelwright’s old posts is having a grand year. The tree was planted as a memorial to a daughter/sister who died young many years ago. We can plant trees, too. We can tend to our gardens. Our infinite legacy in lignins & in beauty.

Young skunks have been exceptionally present this summer, like well-dressed, near-sighted mendicants bumping into the customs officers of foreigner lands, innocently on the lookout for a good compost pile to scratch a nibble out of. The latest crop of fawns is bulking up on the host of windfallen fruit. One of the farmers noticed that the mile long intermittent punctuation piles of horseshit on the farm road had each been precisely topped by a curlicue of fox dung! Everyone is keeping tabs on everyone else.

We farmers are enjoying our 4th week of providing veggie boxes to our neighbors at Muir Beach & continuing to go to two farmers markets, as well as hosting our post-dharma talk market stand 11 o’clock on Sundays at Green Gulch. If you haven’t already, please come & enjoy the fullness & generous offerings of this gulch. The GGF Bakery is authentic. The teahouse garden has undergone a radical transformation that continues—please investigate quietly behind the new gate. The garden has many native plants, herbs & jams available, too.

Always know that you are invited to bring the family & friends & experience a quiet day of keeping tabs on the wind, the ocean’s rhythm, the play of light & the gratitude thump of your heart pump.

sunday july 8, 2012

We wish you well world! Happy solstice & beginning of the tumble toward the balanced night.

We have not forgotten you, we have just been too busy to assail you from the digital realms. Instead we’ve been harvesting kale & chard, broccoli & spinach, baby lettuce & salad mix, fennel, dill, parsley, cilantro, mizuna, mizuna, mizuna, cabbage, edible flowers, arugula, napa kaboka & minuet, leeks, fennel, hakurai turnips & mizuna.

We have been deliberately concentrating on the earth. All these miraculous long days, all of our working bodies, stretching bodies, re-used boxes, careful town trip & Tuesday visit to Seacape Drive for a burlap wrapped delivery of veggie boxes.

Recently the crew gathered to sing, eat, toast, kayak, joke, mingle, murmur, sun dazzle, dessert & relax with one another aboard a houseboat in Sausalito. Everyone’s feet brought them there to be together.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

the cost of neatness

One of my favorite author’s books is subtitled “beauty and violence in the desert southwest.” A fitting exploration for a fraught landscape, I thought, handing a twenty across the bookstore counter in Durango, Colorado.  At Green Gulch, too, beauty and violence come up together.

Recently, I’ve heard from a number of people that “the kitchen garden’s looking great!” The kitchen garden’s a part of the farm that tractors aren’t used in – all the beds are hand dug and weeded, and have been for decades. By “great” I assume it’s meant well cared for. By design, the KG is an ordered space – most beds are either 30 or 40 feet long, and 4 or so feet wide. The paths are mowed. Weekly. This time of year, most beds are planted in red or green lettuce, or arugula, and the green lettuce is covered with a white cloth to protect it from the nibbling quail. The KG’s a fastidious space of straight lines and solid colors, a patchwork of red, green, brown and white. I promise a photo, soon.

As kitchen garden manager, I can’t take much credit for the tidiness of this rectangle of garden that’s surrounded by tractor-tilled field on two sides. On Tuesday, the day most the work  in the KG is done, it’s guest students and apprentices who labor, and I try to keep track of everyone and everything that’s happening. Every week, the farm managers help me figure out what we’re planting, picking, turning under. I watch and work and feel the transformations we bring to the space in a day. Recently, I’ve come to a perspective on the violence of neatness, of all the small, even graceful acts that carve this farmland out of the tangle of blackberry poison oak wild radish stinging nettle poison hemlock willow newts mice slugs crows coyotes and coyote bush that this creek valley would be without us.

During the sesshin in early April, I walked down the farm road one evening and lay in a remaining stand of cover crop at the bottom of the third field. A former farm apprentice and friend paced in the next field over, looking, I later learned, for crystals and arrowheads. I wasn’t looking for anything much but a position other than cross-legged. From earth-level, I peered up at the evening sky, the unfurling cottonwood leaves, the borage that had come up in this damp patch of field where the cover crop grew sparsely. I felt the clayey soil beneath me. It occurred to me that within weeks, coming back to this section of ground, an entirely different configuration of earth would be there to hold my body’s weight. And that transformation seemed to me a sort of violence.

Tractors disc and dice and disturb the soil, making it fine for our purposes of planting big-leafed crops. It’s easy for me to see the violence of industrial agriculture, the miles of fields tended to let just one thing live. But I hadn’t come to a position on using tractors in a small-scale, feel-good organic sort of way. Of course I’d considered the petroleum use. I hadn’t considered– and I’m not, now – taking the permacultural position that says, “leave that soil in place! Mulch! Mulch! Mulch!” (Though I may come to that.) What I’m willing to say is that there’s a violence inherent in farming, with or without tractors. As neat as the fields look once mowed and disc’d, and as healthy as the soil looks (and is), broken into clods smaller than a child’s fist, farming exerts human will on a land of wild things. And in doing so, it kills some of them.

I’m getting better at evenly distributing a slug-killing substance (neutral to humans) over all our newly planted beds. The pellets falling from my gloved hands, I don’t recite the names of the slugs it “controls,” but perhaps I should. Field slug, smooth slug, dusky slug, gray garden slug, black field slug, large red slug, large black slug, spotted garden slug, slender slug, banana slug. The death of these beings contributes to the perfect head of lettuce you’ll soon hold in hand.

In the kitchen garden, we cut with spades into the scythed covered crop, turning it under to decompose. In my first days at Green Gulch, last spring, I cut into a mouse turning cover crop. I saw a mouse and I saw blood and I felt the slow and sinking realization that no way of life is beyond reproach. In that, is there any relief?

And what accounts for the joy I feel anyway, walking into a field of lettuce cabbage dandelion kale leeks parsley beets, all just coming on?