Mother, May I?
The coldest part of the night is just before dawn. I know this because I’m usually awake when it happens and for most of the night I am kept awake with persistent hot flashes that keep me alternating between pulling the covers on and off again. And so the soothing quiet of dawn is a signal for my body to cool and my brain to stop for just a moment while I catch up on sleep for the rest of the morning.
I feel conflicted because I am a farmer, and in the heat of the south, dawn is the best time to get some good work done. But for now, dealing with my terrible sleep habits is more important until I move through this journey of growing older.
It is often difficult to move through certain transitions because they carry the burden of both what is fading away and what is percolating to the surface. The month of May sits right between Spring and Summer and it is also the month of my birth. But this year, the pandemic has rendered my birthday a non-event, and as a result, I feel like I haven’t been able to appropriately mark the transition into my next year of life.
In our climate zone (6B), the tenth of May is when the threat of frost is generally over, and it’s time to transition the seedlings from the safety of indoors to their new adventure outside. While this is a time to move quickly, it is also a time to watch things closely and allow the plants to slowly adjust to the full brightness of the sun. In a perfect scenario, this would happen gradually with a detailed systematic plan. However, my plan seemed to be always changing because I am still learning what the details were.
Learning the craft of farming is a much slower process than learning to bake. There are so many similarities, but with farming the timeline is so much longer making keeping track of details much more of a challenge.
If 2020 was supposed to be the year of clarity, May has become the month where I was suddenly way out of focus. I wanted to find a way to zoom out and see the big picture. I struggled to find easy to follow instructions on how to plant, what to plant, where to plant, how much spacing to give each plant, etc. My mind was a sea of swimming details.
I had never grown many of the plants on my list so it was tricky to visualize how things would grow together. I was also experimenting with interplanting complimentary crops to help with pest pressure and create more biodiversity in my soil. You can see where this is going. So if a tiny seed is one dimensional, a row is two dimensional, a plant is three dimensional, and time is four dimensional, then a group of different plants would be fifth dimensional. With more than 1000 plants of more than 100 varieties all at different levels of maturity, I was designing a miniature forest.
Every resource I looked up had different recommendations for plant spacing. Photos of plants online were not helpful and videos seemed too time consuming. (Although I did watch my fair share.) Nonetheless, I needed to move forward and prepare myself for the mistakes I would make in order to put some experience under my belt. It was time to get to work.
So I pulled all the seedling flats off of my indoor propagation shelf and laid them out on a large table in the middle of the field. I organized them by family and double checked their numbers on my mega plant list spreadsheet to make sure they would fit where they were supposed to without too many gaps. It was like a puzzle and all the pieces had to fit together.
Additionally, this year my field was expanded from 12 to 36 beds (for a total of 10,000sqft) and in addition to the more than 150 different plants, there was a lot of space to keep track of.
In early May, it had already been warm for several weeks so I took a chance and put a few crops in the ground knowing I could protect them with a fleece row cover. The next day we got a hard freeze, and yes, a few plants perished. Luckily, I had a few spares waiting on my seedling shelf.
I waited about another week, meanwhile getting more planting beds ready. Some beds still had edible living crops, but I remembered that this was a time of transition which involves letting go of the past. Sure enough, putting those old greens into the compost was a blessing because they helped balance the excess brown material which had been stalling out my compost heap. (Browns were what was leftover from Fall.) Within a few days, my pile began to heat up and I realized I was actually feeding some important microorganisms that would improve my soil. It was a beautiful moment to see things fading away and things percolating to the surface in a circular and regenerative way. I was also thrilled to think that I may not have to rely on outside inputs of expensive compost in the future.
I continued systematically flipping the beds, removing old crops, broad forking the soil, adding compost as necessary, and raking them smooth. Then I would run a string line down the center to mark a straight line for the plants before I set them out.
One afternoon, a gust of wind wind pushed its way through the field, knocking most of my pepper plants off the table scattering their tags around the field. Shit! Because different varieties of peppers look almost identical when they are young, how would I know which was which? But I referred to my spreadsheet numbers and tried my best to match the tags to their plants. The rest were marked as “mystery” pepper which may result in future laughter or frustration, depending on the day.
But that’s not the end of the antics of May. There was what I refer to as “the day I chased one million puppies.” It was during a span of hot and dry days so I set my plants in a sheltered location away from the sun. I was busy with many different tasks each tugging at my attention and it seemed like every time I turned around, the sun had shifted and was beating down on my young seedlings. I quickly misted them with water and moved them into the shade only to have the sun slip across the sky and shine too brightly on them yet again.
Unfortunately, these poor seedlings were rescued from the brink of death more times I would like to admit, but in the end, everything got into the ground where they belonged and I sighed a very short breath of relief. I was able to give away my extra plants, and the rest were planted in various spots around the property. I smiled to think that in a few months, the chickens would find tasty treats as they meandered about.
I say this often, that walking is a controlled fall. I surely didn’t invent this phrase, but to me it is a beautiful metaphor. In order to move forward, you have to fall a little. Sometimes the step is too big and you lose your balance. Sometimes the step is too small and you get nowhere fast, or perhaps somewhere slowly. But regardless of fear, indecision, or whatever is stopping you in your tracks, taking a step is the only way to move forward. And then there’s the next step, and the one after that. But it is with great relief that May, the month that is between Spring and Summer, that big step where I may have stumbled a little bit, is now behind me.
