Dear Friends,

Here at Hunters' Greens, the wet time of waiting continues.  As a man in touch with the cool, soft and yielding side of his personality, Jim is usually relatively at peace during this time, quietly waiting for the time when mother earth is ready to yield to his spade. It is usually the women he farms with, Diane and Brenda and` their warmer, firmer and focused beings who rankle at the rain and strain at the bit.  Diane waves her arms and insists that we will "all drown like rats,"  Brenda with her steam roller tenacity, endeavors to bend nature to her will.  But this endless season of rain has found even Jim pushing back against the firm sodden mud of Gaia's surface.

A farmer friend's mentor put it something like, "Jason, you have to wait for the land, the land isn't waiting on you."  Diane and Jim have always known that you can't put a tiller into wet grown, it will only make mud balls.  Worse it compacts the soil directly beneath your blades forming something called a "plow pan" through which water and roots have difficulty penetrating.   So usually Jim waits.

Now Jim isn't particularly a student of the Tao (he had to consult wikepedia to write the introduction to this piece), but he has, through experience, developed a rather Taoist approach to cultivation.  When mother nature pushes hard with storms and rains, he waits, pruning the trees, preparing the tools.  When father sun shines for three days and the earth yields, he becomes focused and aggressive working late into the evening to take advantage of the opportunity.  When father sun blazes in the August heat he retires to the basement to read, write, nap or even watch a movie, only to emerge in the cool of the evening, pressing on until darkness falls.

Perhaps it is meaningful that western traditions, and their calendar, have caused him to stray from the path.  Folk wisdom says to plant your peas on George Washington's birthday, so a few days before that, Jim scratched some soil amendments into the barely drying earth and sprinkled some pea seed.  They say to plant your first potatoes on Saint Patrick's day for good luck.  Last year the rows planted around the Irish holiday produced an abundant crop, despite the hard cloddy soil resulting from Jim's early churnings.  So this year, with his western ingenuity Jim anticipated the Bishop's arrival.  He's found that you can spade wetter soil than you can till.  So after a couple of dry-ish days he spaded up some of the barest patches where the vegetation wasn't holding the moisture in, and left the large blocks of soil piled up to dry.  When the next rain came he covered the piled up blocks with plastic row covers.  At the same time he covered the languishing rows of our founding father's peas.

Jim is not a great fan of plastic.  Early in his farming career, he would drag home great swaths of cast off plastic from a nearby dairy and try to dry the soil.  He'd cover it up from the rain, but when the sun came out the plastic was holding in moisture, so he'd drag the plastic off, spilling some of the accumulated water onto the soil bed.  A squall would appear and he would rush out to cover again.  The frustration and exhaustion of this effort was nature's way of teaching Jim yin yang.

The day after Jim set out his eighteen inch high and fifty foot long plastic hoop covers, the wind picked one up and threw it off the growing area.  Jim didn't bother to replace it.  But three others remained, and yesterday when the sun peaked out a few days after Patty's day, he sauntered out and pulled back the covers.  After an afternoon of further drying he ambled out with a flat of sprouted seed potatoes.  He started by chopping the blocks of soil with a hoe but found himself massacring hundreds of earth worms, so he knealt down and crumbled a little hollow among the blocks of soil for each potato.  Only in an effort to get in a first small planting, can we justify such an effort.

And so we yin yang, with a little western folk tradition thrown in.

Dear Shareholders,

CSA shareholders of Clark County, your farmers may require your assistance.  I address this message not just to my own CSA shareholders, but to the larger community of "supporters of agriculture."

By way of a caveat, I have to admit that I have been neglecting my relationships with my fellow CSA farmers for the last year or two, so check with your farmers to check the relevancy of my remarks to their particular situation.

Here's the deal.  The word on the wire is that CSA farmers are having trouble filling out their complement of shares this year.  Various theories are circulating to explain this problem, such as: "It's the economy stupid!", and "We're just getting too many CSAs in the county."  While these two factors may make the job of finding shareholders a little more difficult, I think it would be sad if our farmers despair on the basis of these theories.

But you can help!  Shareholders helping out was an integral part of the original North American CSA model as it developed on the East Coast, but somehow we rugged western individualists have seemed to leave that piece out of the puzzle.  As the pioneer CSA farmer in the county I stand guilty as charged as a poor role model.  But even I from time to time accept a little help and even rarely, ask for it.

So the kind of help I'm asking you to offer your farmer here is in the area of marketing.  For we introverted, "I'd rather be out in the field talking to my plants" farmers, marketing can be tough.  And its getting to that time of year that our fields are exactly where we should be.  If every CSA shareholder copied off three brochures and handed them out to likely friends or co-workers, that just might be enough to get the job done.  Our latest shareholder was signed up through such an effort (Thank you Eric and Eileen, and Clay).

Are there sympathetic businesses you patronize that might lay out some brochures?

But there is another level at which CSA members might want to help.  The traditional image of the help shareholders give farmers is spending an afternoon weeding or harvesting crops.  But might it not make even more sense if shareholders offered help that came from their own area of expertise or labor of love.  Natural born marketers might offer to help design and implement a marketing campaign, avid speakers might offer testimonials at social, trade or religious gatherings, writers could write articles for newsletters (this techno- illiterate can't even conceive of the new electronic media possibilities).

A few shining examples of this kind of help come to mind.  Our own CSA member Heather Lehman (of atrocityarts.com), first offered, and then insisted on building and maintaining our web site.  Heather claims we are allowing her to use us as a guinea pig, but the quality of her work and her known dedication to the local food movement bely any selfish motivation.  Heather's offering has been incredible.  Occasionally we show our gratitude by "allowing" her to come pick some surplus, or past prime produce that we are too exhausted to pick and market ourselves.

On a more community wide level, the work of Glenn Grossman and Sunrise O'Mahoney come to mind.  Glenn's "Clark County Food and Farm" website offers a comprehensive view, with commentary, on the farm and food scene in the county.  Whatever role Sunrise plays whether it is struggling to grow a food co-op, or coordinate plans for the 78th Street Farm, Sunrise always keeps an eye out for the welfare of local small farmers.

These folks have made giant contributions and no one expects that kind of "agricultural support", but maybe you have a skill that you could "guinea pig" on "your" farmer.  Call her and find out.

Diane & Jim Hunter, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Hunters' Greens CSA, http://huntersgreens.com
Brush Prairie, WA.  (360) 256-3788