CSA Week 8; Dig, dig, dig!

Recently I’m sure you’ve noticed we’ve been digging things up a bunch across the street from the farmstand. Farming requires quite a lot of moving stuff around, and that includes things like water, power, and heat in addition to compost, plants, and vegetables. The recent digging has been to put in hot water heating loops, irrigation, wash water, drainage, and electricity all around our new barn and to our greenhouses. Most of the changes support our efforts to grow more of the food you want (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc) for a longer period of the year in our greenhouses, without burning fossil fuels. Others get us ready for more solar panels and electric tractor/truck charging. It’s a lot of disruption for the crew and I’m sure everyone will be very glad when it is done and we can put things back together. The projects always take a lot longer because we do almost all the work ourselves, and have to squeeze it in between actually farming. Thanks for your patience with our construction site!

Amid all the hard work, digging in a long-used barnyard is definitely an interesting archaeological activity. The full history of the farm (or at least a history of its detritus) ends up buried in a barnyard. We’ve found livestock bones, old granite fence posts, horseshoes, and more. Geologically, the soils are rock-free silt with nice layering so it is easy to tell where it’s been disturbed in the past. And given this geology, we know that basically every rock we hit was hauled here by human hands. Speaking of moving stuff around, boy were people busy moving rocks! Among other rocky treasures on the property, under our new barn sits part of a curved foundation that must be from the round barn we’ve found in historical photos of Union Village.

Across the street, buried in the invasive plants we just removed as part of renovating the new PYO field, were several old ground-driven manure spreaders and pieces of equipment from circa 1930. Once a brand new piece of equipment and no doubt an object of pride, these rusted out hulks are now far beyond repair. Some interesting heavy metal gears and wheels will adorn the new fence posts as reminders of the past. The less aesthetic and more tetanus-shot inducing parts will head for the scrapyard to find a new life, along with a few miles of barbed wire fencing and some old silo hoops we extracted.

Digging through all this is a bit of an emotional roller coaster. Interesting and fun to pick through. At times a serious (concrete!) barrier to progress. And yet it’s someone else’s dream come and gone. And it reminds me that all the hard work and all the improvements we are putting into Sweetland will someday, too, come and go. So the stuff is just stuff. The important thing is that the land will continue to feed our community. And what makes any of it worthwhile is the people and community we have here among us today. So enjoy the day and the veggies this week, just as people have been doing on this site for untold years. That’s what makes all this worthwhile.