If I had a hammer,
I’d hammer in the mornin’,
I’d hammer in the evenin’,
All over this land!
-American Folk Song

The deep echoes of Bill hammering orchard clips to the new trellises mixed in the air with the tap-tap of John and Melissa removing nails that held insulation board in the barn’s northern addition. These familiar sounds were like the voices of these friends, reminding you that they too were working toward a new year – setting up shop for new trees to be planted and barns to be re-purposed. Meanwhile Brint and I were deconstructing the eastern wing of the old pony shed to make it into a more fitting garden shed. We found bridles and horse mats, Legos and filled half a bucket of nails and screws from years of horse-related additions to this old chicken coop.

The hammer – that one tool which reaches across all boundaries; sneaking into even a grandmother’s house with a purple flower handle and filling the corners of our workshops as sledges and rubber mallets. My earliest memories of working with hand tools were trying to pound old roofing nails into firewood in our living room. My girls love to find the smallest hammers available and “help” me in the shop. They most often find scraps of wood and create high chairs and tables for their baby dolls, with lots of help from Mama of course! Last winter I bought Josh a new hammer and as I opened the gift from him we were both laughing – he bought me one too! We joke that it was the year we got “hammered” at Christmas!

As a farmer, many tools fill our sheds and benches. Over the past few years I’ve found that there are several I can’t live without. I love the scuffle hoe, the hand cultivator, the seeder, and the wheel hoe. But at this time of year all of these have been washed and put away. Out come the hammers and the sanders, the screw guns and the circular saws. During the summer these tools make an occasional appearance, but the work of growing food fills most of the day and they are merely for fixing garden tools or greenhouses. In these winter months there is more time for creative projects and demolition too.

We enjoy working with our hands in a different way, building new structures and as we disassemble others we think of those gone before and the kind of farming they lived by. In a book entitled Winter Poems I came across this one, it paints a perfect picture of what winter looks like for those of us who live in the soil:

Oregon Winter
The rains begin. This is no summer rain.
Dropping the blotches of wet on the dusty road:
This rain is slow, without thunder or hurry:
There is plenty of time – there will be months of raink
Lost in the hills, the old gray farmhouses
Hump their backs against it, and the smoke from their chimneys
Struggles through the weighted air. The sky is sodden with water,
It sags against the hills, and the wild geese,
Wedge flying, brush the heaviest cloud with their wings.
The farmers move unhurried. The wood is in,
The hay has long been in, the barn lofts piled
Up to the high windows, dripping yellow straws.
There will be plenty of time now, time that will smell of fires,
And drying leather, and catalogs, and apple cores.
The farmers clean their boots, and whittle, and drowse.

-Jeanne McGahey

After a long walk on a chilly day, I came inside to visit a friend who responded, “Mmmmm. You smell like cold!” She is an avid skier and loves a good snowy hike. If you know the smell I’m talking about, chances are you too love the outdoors and are as anxious as I am for a good snow. I can’t believe after the unexpected snow in October we haven’t had more than just a few flurries!

Last Thursday I had the privilege to weed the greenhouse. “Privilege?” you say. To which I respond, “YES!” I love weeding and it was truly a joy to work in the soil for a few hours after more than a month without it. No matter if it’s snowy or warm, rainy or dry, this time of year the soil outdoors is always moist. These past few weeks it has a nice frozen crust from the cold nights, but by afternoon it is a living sponge – moist and as soft as a pillow! It is near impossible to weed such wet soil and so we’ve left the garden to do as it will for these next few months. But in the greenhouse I pulled a wheelbarrow of chickweed and ground ivy, grass and yellow rocket, and it was GREAT! The smell of the soil and the earthy winter annuals were enough to make me hungry – yes, I occasionally enjoy “eating my weedies”. Chickweed is my favorite, it has a very earthy and yet fresh crunch. I probably couldn’t eat a whole bowl full, but a few nibbles is always a pleasure.

The greenhouse was cold in the early morning, but as the sun came up I was quickly shedding hats and sweaters. Outside it was still chilly and later that afternoon, when I was in the farmhouse finalizing the garden plan for 2012, Sophie (the dog) came inside, and she smelled like cold. I looked out the window to see flurries! I was elated to watch the sidewalk and then the grass turn white and was hoping it wouldn’t stop. Maybe in the morning I could get out the skis?

Wouldn’t you know it, but Friday morning it was warm and sunny again and the distinct smell of earthworms was in the air. It seems so early to smell something I directly link to spring, but of course worms don’t migrate to warmer climates. They are doing their job all through the year – turning a mix of partially decomposed organic matter and all of the bits of soil into a wonderful environment for growing things. Thank you worms (and all soil organisms) for all the hard work! You take last year’s bits and pieces and recycle them into the perfect nursery for the following year’s seeds and transplants.

And finally, the smell of smoke permeates each of my winter days. We heat our home with wood, and sometimes a smoldering log or a drafty day will have us opening doors to vent out the smoke. As I am outside playing with the girls or carrying lumber to the shop, a breeze will blow smoke my way. It is a comforting, warming smell that reminds me that it really is winter – even if it is 50 degrees outside!

But soon enough the smell of smoke and cold will be on the air less frequently, and instead the faint scent of worms will become a regular part of each day. This will give way to the fragrance of apple blossoms and lettuce, which in turn will make room for carrots and cucumbers, and on and on…

A farm is not an island. Well, it could be on an island. It could even own an island. Mmmm…farming on a tropical island sounds mighty nice. I’ll have to think more on that…

But what I mean here is that a farm is not an entity unto itself; it depends on the support of many others. The obvious others? The farm owners, our farm helpers, customers, and CSA members. The not-so-obvious others are the business and individuals without which the farm could not function and, well, grow.

For us there’s any number of important support others. This is like the list of credits at the end of a movie. Most people know they’re there, but they don’t really watch them. For those few of you who might be watching, here’s some of the business/people in our ‘credits’:

Stoltzfus Farm Service
Anderson Truck and Auto
Radbill Automotive
One Village Coffee
Perk
Chester County Crop Care
Nolt’s Produce Supply
Rainflo Irrigation
Bauman Family Apple Butter
Tie Dye Guru
Google
Constant Contact
Veni Vortex
Siteground
Credo Mobile
Phil Brown Welding
Kubota
Giant
Turkey Hill
Inverbrook Farm
Pennypack Farm
Charlestown Farm
Quiet Creek Farm
CCEDC (w/ Suzanne Milshaw)
Farmers’ Markets: West Chester, Phoenixville, Oakmont, Headhouse, Clark Park, Emmaus, Upper Merion – and all the people who work hard to make those markets happen.
…and more

Who’s on YOUR list of credits?

My first job ever was at a strawberry farm. At the age of fifteen I had no idea that this endeavor would be the beginning of a career in agriculture. At the time I didn’t really think I was cut out for it. I hated how my hands got so cold planting muddy strawberry plants on a frigid spring day, I was terrible with a hoe, my arms ached at the end of the day. But then again, I got to eat all the strawberries I wanted for free, and I never got sick of them. So maybe I should have seen this coming…

But what I started out to say was that when I closed my eyes at night after strawberry-picking, all I could see was red on green, as my mind’s eye continued the search for ripe berries. Nowadays, when I close my eyes to fall asleep, I see tree branches and potential pruning cuts. While I’m long done in the orchard for the day, my subconscious apparently hasn’t stopped looking for the right branches to remove from its imaginary trees.

On a good day, pruning fruit trees is the best kind of farm chore – repetitive enough that you get into a rhythm, stimulating enough that it keeps your mind active. It’s just you and the trees, the sun is shining, there’s the promise of spring in the air as the buds on the trees start to swell. You can feel your whole winterized self starting to thaw out. A pair of hawks soars and screams overhead, and time flies by as well.

On a bad day, you’re freezing, you can no longer feel your toes in your soaked-through insulated boots (good to -40°, ha!). You’ve had twigs up your nose, in your ears, and almost gouged out your eyes a few times. You’ve been whiplashed by branches in the face, and your brain has turned to mush. You stare at the trees, and while an hour ago you knew just what to do, the branches now have morphed into utter chaos. You’re tromping around, tripping over prunings, weighed down with at least ten extra pounds of warm clothing and hassled by the saw hanging from your belt. And if you were still picturing something too Zen, too romantic, add in the diesel roar of the Brownie (the hydraulic lift used for orchard tasks), the stench of the mushroom farm wafting over from next door, the slog through the rotting pears that have frozen and thawed a hundred times over.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying my first full season of winter pruning. I especially like having a solid answer to that perennial question all farmers face: “So what do you do all winter?” Working on the website, ordering seeds, and generally getting ready for the season doesn’t seem to cut it as an answer. No, I know all you non-farmers still picture us eating bon bons by the fire or lounging on a beach somewhere warm reading trashy novels. The idea of seasonal work is rather novel in our office cubicle culture, and I know it can sound pretty inviting when viewed from that nine-to-five perspective. People are curious what it’s actually like on the ground and hope their romantic suspicions are confirmed.

But I’ve learned that “pruning” is not a sufficient answer for the curious. Pruning is a bit mysterious to most people. Everyone can picture what weeding is like, but what exactly are we doing out in the orchard on a winter’s day armed with saws and loppers? Pruning is a task that needs to be done to some degree in a managed orchard every winter. You prune while the trees are dormant (“winter pruning” is also called “dormant pruning”), and while you can better see the form of tree without its leaves. Though you’re removing wood from the tree, winter pruning is invigorating. In other words, it stimulates growth, so we hope to encourage that growth to go in a desirable direction and fit the chosen form for the tree.

One of our main goals is to manipulate the vegetative and fruiting balance of the trees. The tree only has so much energy stored up, and that energy is going to be divided between vegetative growth (roots and shoots) and fruiting growth (pears, apples, and peaches!). As farmers and eaters, we’re hoping for a steady supply of high-quality fruit. If you’ll think all the way back to junior high life science and remember that lesson on photosynthesis, you can extrapolate that sunlight = fruit. One of the most important things we do when we prune is to “let light into the tree” so that sunlight can reach the fruiting wood. When summer pruning, you can see immediate results – take away a branch with all its leaves and sunlight streams into places that were previously shaded. In the winter, you have to use your imagination a bit. You also have to be able to look into the future of the tree… what will that branch look like after a season’s growth and with the weight of fruit hanging on it?

We’re also looking to correct any problems that have arisen since last year’s pruning (a beginner’s mnemonic I learned is “The 3 D’s”: damaged, diseased and disoriented). Last season was a rough year for fire blight – a bacterial disease that thrives in warm, wet weather and can wreak havoc in apples and pears – so we’re always on the lookout for fire blight “strikes” where individual branches (or worse) have died from fire blight.

Each variety of tree requires different attention, as do young trees and older trees. Just as you master one variety and get lulled into the rhythm of the cuts, it’s time to reset your brain for the next. This is not easy work, taxing on the brain as well as on the arms. Lunch is a welcome break, as is the end of the day, which often comes a little early on pruning days. Throughout the day I balance all the calories burned with steady doses of chocolate. Not quite like eating fresh strawberries all day long, but at some point I usually pull out a Gold Rush apple, stored away for winter, still firm and sweet after four months in the cooler and a fine reminder of the fruits of our labors yet to come.

(For more of Erin’s musings on food and farming read her blog, Fruits Unheard Of)