Darn the weather

 The past two days have been quite busy around the farm.  We planted tomatoes in the greenhouse on Thursday, 65 to be exact.  Relishing in the myriad of possibilites of late summer harvests, yum, nothing quite like homegrown tomatoes.  It's hard work planting tomatoes digging deep holes in the wonderful gravel soil, vestiges of an old river bed, which is our soil medium.  It has definitely come a long way in the past few years.  Especially in the greenhouse, a nice confined place where straw mulch doesn't blow away and the work is finite.  An easy place to amend. amend, amend and not feel totally overwhelmed by the sometimes never ending tasks.

Those chard you see were planted out last Septmeber, started in mid-August, they made it through the winter despite a lot of neglect during the last weeks of my pregnancy and Aya's arrival.  Amazing, delicious and tender nonetheless...Its starting to bolt now, but was a great test as to winter growing in this unheated greenhouse.  I did cover it with doubled over remay.

Back to the soil...The best part of working soil and seeing its tilth, texture and color improve is absolutely the abundance of worms; slimy and slithering a true litmus to healthy soil.  This brings me to Wren, my 4 year old...One of her FAVORITE things is to find worms in the soil, long ones, fat ones, she perpetually searches for 'the big one'

Another one of Wren's FAVORITE things...Party dresses, that's right folks, earth worms and party dresses, definitely a girl after my own heart!

She pulls it off beautifully, party dress, winter boots and mud...Just one example of the amazing ensembles she comes up with, a super classy farmy gal...

Wren, like most kids, loves water, playing in it, making potions with it, swimming, and for sure one of the best things to engage her in on the farm is to help water the plants.

Yesterday, in the warm afternoon sun, she and some boys were jumping back and forth over the acequia, in her party dress, and at some point she just jumped right in, ahhh, summertime.  Can't help but to laugh, the unabashed, without boundries of social acceptance, that swimming in a party dress is fine, no problem. Thank goodness for children, such amazing teachers of what really doesn't matter AND what really does.

Speaking of weather, who would have thought after a day like yesterday that the night before would have been cold enough, even with greenhouse protection, to freeze the majority of those beautiful tomatoes I had been babying for the past three months and that we had spent all day getting into the ground! BUMMER! The life of the farmer, the ups and downs, the bumper crops and the failures.  Its one of the hardest things about farming and one of the most beautiful, the raw interaction with life.  The lessons over and over of how fragile and how resilient it can be.  And despite my huge disappointment, I must find some gratitude, for the fact that I still have beautiful, large, healthy tomatoes to replace the ones I planted, albeit without the prime choice of varieties, and that I can foresee huge successes within the other babies awaiting their ride out of the, heated, greenhouse and into the earth somewhere to thrive and to dance their dance of life.

And here's Aya, at the end of the day, not looking so grateful to be on my back any more...What a trooper she is!

For the love of potatoes...

Nothing like seeding tons of squash, hoeing deep trenches and digging out compost for potatoes amidst lots of laughter and good friends... 

Some of the babies destined for the deep earth and our deep bellies

Broom corn + Amaranth = beautiful fall bouquets

 Cat in disguise showing off her fierceness

 Avi...the stoic french pickler

Aya slept through today's shenanigans but I thought I would throw in a picture of the sweet berry girl in all her 4 month old glory

Again, my day exceeded my expectations, gotta love it...

Alas...it all gets done

Well, so much for my dedication to writing this blog, ha!, spring time has taken over my life and obviously I haven't had the space or energy to keep up, with any of it!  Actually, to my pleasant and grateful surprise, things have been moving along on schedule on the farm.  There has been tons of help showing up and as long as I don't think about it too much or force anything, it all seems to come together.

I am in awe of this aspect of life, the power of will and intention and the lessons that I gain when I can tap into a clear flow of my intentions.  Somehow, someway, everything seems to be taken care of.  I try to envision myself as a farmer with my little one in tow, or perhaps I should say 'on tow' at this point!  At times it works great, she is content on my back or in a seat or blanket close by and other times she just isn't having it.  Those times I slow down sit with her, nurse her and usually from someplace on this land and within this community someone comes and scoops her up to give her the attention she desires and me the space I need to get a task or two completed before the next belly signal requests my cooperation.  Aya is amazing, so very patient with me and all the moving around, from embrace to embrace in different peoples arms, a sweet smile so easily provoked...

Wren, my older daughter, was raised similarly, I began gardening here when she was just 3 months old.  A good friend got me the job where I could continue doing what I loved and have my baby close by.  It has been a blessing ever since, in so many ways.  Our whole family has benefitted from being a part of this community, I am sure in ways that we don't even realize.  We are so imbedded in the the land and family here I forget what the greater world must be like to live in...Perhaps this is insular and unrealistic but for now it feels very grounded and more and more like the life I have always envisioned for myself and my family.  Enough about that, more about the farm...

We have made a lot of progress, the amazing sevaks got both fields tilled and rows formed.  Makes it so easy to get out there, weed, plant, set up irrigation and just walk away!  As if it were quite so simple, surely we will be back to weed and fuss and most obviously and best of all to harvest the beautiful and tasty bounty.  My good friend Cat joined me last week, like an angel sent from above, she will be my second sidekick for the whole summer...We have been dreaming of the gorgeous meals and hearty juices to inspire our tongues and hands to get lots of good work done.  Carrots, beets, rutabagas, parsnips, peas, lettuces, spinach and other greens have been seeded in the ground while a few short row of kale and chard were planted and settling in from a few days ago.  I have started some of the beets in trays and transplanted out this year, a new technique I am eager to see how it goes.  They have taken quite well and are growing along, seems like a good idea, no thinning, wasting seed just an easy uniform growth and consistent harvest, thanks Carlie for the tips!

My posting seems a little erratic, perhaps too early for fine writing this morning and the house beckons to be cleaned, another neglected aspect of my life, so thats it for now...gonna try to keep it simpler with more pics in the future...maybe easier to keep up with
Ciao

Mornings

It feels so good to get up before dark. Running around the land in utter silence, turning on water, patching holes in irrigation which has sat untapped for many months.  The first creatures to awaken and the lightening horizon my only companions.  The water squealing through little tubes, the bleary eyed plants whispering a silent thank you for an in breathe of some moisture before their great initiation of new life.  My time, my only time alone and in silence, its beautiful and even 10 minutes can feed me for an entire day.

I have always been a morning person, up with the sun mostly, even when I have laid down just a few hours before its rise.  I can't really remember what mornings used to be like, but now they mean sometimes grumpy little girls to whom I am a concierge of the morning process.  The nagging can begin so early around here, its a hard way to start the day and a true test of my emotional stability.  My Wren Wren can choose to be such an amazing sweet joy in the morning or a button pusher, boundary explorer.  She is an amazing reflection for me.  A mirror of where my emotional state lies.   Can I maintain patience , in touch with all those ways of communicating which often come naturally and sometimes must be recalled from the many parenting books I have run to at times of desperation.  It feels like she has been programmed to make me a better person and yet at times I am at my worst with her.  I love her so deeply and so deeply does she play my soul.

So, these mornings that start so far before the rest of my life are such amazing treasures.  Especially when farm season has begun,  they help me remember who I am.  My adventurous, feral self that used to play and explore life with such abandon.  I reminisce the feelings of childhood again, in and out of the woods and streams, appreciating all the stillness and silence, natures songs and ease of movement, the unleashed life.

Spring is springing, kind of...

I love spring, need I say more?  The glorious weather, the potential of new life, the crawling out of winter's heavy emotional embrace, thank goddess for the SPRING!  In light of the 'heavy emotional embrace' and how I kind of turned myself inside out the last post, I will try to stay a bit lighter this time, ahem...

The farm is starting to come back to life, its interesting to watch the congruency of the farm's life cycle with my own and in fact that of little baby Aya.  Currently she has to be carried around everywhere, wrapped up securely much like the little tomatoes popping up in the sun room, babied by the warmth of the tile floors and large windows, sustained by daily hand watering.  By the time we start harvest Aya will probably be crawling about, figuring out life through the gathering of input from her environment just as the maturing plants, now in the ground, learn to gather their needs from the soil surrounding them.  A certain maturity arises at the time of self mobility, an ability to really see and feel the world and create the beginnings of perspective.  Its so magical watching children grow, it happens so quickly though, I very much enjoy likening it to the cycle of the farm as I can recreate that each year minus the lifelong intensive commitment!  I often feel like every plant that I seed or put in the ground is another baby of mine.  Another reason I adore spring so deeply, I get to see what has survived the winter, what has grown and thrived and what has passed.  It provides so much insight into my future endeavors around here.

The crocus', mini iris and hyacinth began blooming around the edges of the sunroom a couple weeks ago, not only is it refreshing to see some color but makes my heart so happy to see the honey bees buzzing around.  I am constantly looking for new bee forage for the early and late season as it makes me smile to see the bees engaged and working so hard.  I have been saving the last of last years honey harvest to make elderberry, lemon balm syrup, a little late for this years cold season, oops, and love it that the ladies are out and about already gathering fodder for the hive.  The weather has been so strangely warm, I have spent a few days in the past week finishing up the fruit tree pruning before the buds decide to break early.  The fruit trees are the first huge blossoming of the season and provide much pollen and nectar for the bees to enjoy.  I would like to see TONS of blossoms covering all the trees and will pray that we get a bout of warm weather around that time to allow fruit to set.  Many of the trees around here have not borne well the past years even without the frost.  I am not an expert pruner but hope each year that what I do prune will help encourage more.  One of the garden angels came around yesterday wanting to do a walk about the front flower gardens.  She expressed a desire to work on the trees as well, digging out the grass from around the roots and feeding with the cow manure and humates piled up from last season.  I long for shelves full of jam and chutney jars to savor all year long.

With a couple others help, we cleaned out the rest of last years fields irrigation and trellising.  I worked with Aya in the Moby pretty successfully, I even nursed her simultaneously for a bit which felt like a huge success!  It gave me a pretty good idea of what I will be able to do with her during the early season before she graduates into the backpack.  A lot of the early season work involves hoeing and rototilling to get the rows prepared.  I will have to find someone else to hang with her or to do the tilling with the machine but am pretty confident of my ability to work with long handled tools while carrying her on my front.  Which brings me to another very welcomed success of the week...

In order to maintain my farming abilities and keep this little one with me I must get my strength back.  Particularly my core and back muscles.  Obviously just working with her will help but I have already felt my posture failing and the awareness of what that can spiral into as the season progresses.  Aya and I made it through two Qi Gong classes this week without incident!  Thank heavens, I pretty much abandoned my practice a couple months ago as my body became so large and uncomfortable along with the quiet time with Aya in her early weeks.  It feels so great to reconnect with my practice and my Qi family with Aya in attendance.  We spent a lot of time sharing energy, both inherently and intentionally, during my pregnancy, its really fun to continue that relationship out of the womb.  Its hard for me at the moment, to reengage my lower Dantien and to stay focused.  It will take some time but the practice has pulled me out of much more difficult situations and I know I can regain my previous strength of awareness.

Today we completed a long desired piece of infrastructure for the farm.  We retrofit an carport frame/'greenhouse' into a real functioning Greenhouse.  I am so excited, practically giddy, to have a dedicated space to raise my starts and create a potting station.  The best part is we hardly had to purchase any materials to make it happen.  The frame was here, we used the old plastic from the large greenhouse and I am going to commandeer one of the tables to make a potting bench.  We had to get some lumber and some hardware but its done, its really done, and in my eyes its absolutely beautiful.  The ventilation may become a trick as the days warm up and we shall see if a simple electric heater can keep it from freezing during these high teens nighttime temperatures but, we will make it work!  This means that we have a space to seed trays, an easily accessible water supply to both keep wet and feed, and resources to make the transition from plug to pot so much simpler.  All of my tools and supplies will be in one spot, finally.  I often spend a lot of time collecting items from one place and bringing them to another, sometimes wasting time and energy searching for specific items or unsuccessfully gathering all the components I will need.  Always I search for more streamlined and efficient ways of doing things, hallelujah the time has sprung!

Super Ma...Stressed out Ma?

Day one, farming with the little one, kind of...
Aya slept through the seeding of nine plug trays of tomatoes today. Not a huge test in my multitasking prowess, warming up slow...Which leads me to the question how can you be a Mom who is not a super mom?  I mean, how can a mama feed the heart and soul of herself, her children, her relationships and her home without being a non stop, multitasking, filled to the brim with never ending tasks kind of Woman?  And what does that in itself do to the heart and soul?

This question comes to me from a few different angles.  I started this post yesterday and laughed at myself this morning as I thought about the couple of lines that I wrote.  So telling of a huge part of me, a piece that wants to push myself to a point of almost breaking, but collecting the all the particles before completely loosing form.  I was almost feeling guilty that day one went so easily, that I didn't have to struggle or reconnoiter over and over. (As if those challenges will be void from this whole experience!)  A strange self torture that, now that I am looking at it head on, is a pretty common theme in my life, my path, but does it have to be? and what would I look like if it didn't?

As far as I can tell, this must have all started when I went on a month long NOLS trip at age 18.  A trip that changed my life forever, brought me back to my true spirit and instilled a lot of amazing self awareness, self confidence and evidently some self masochistic tendencies!  I suppose hiking for days on end in waist deep snow without a bath to wipe away the day can build up some interesting patterning...  The thread of this tendency strikes like a taut string in the evolutionary web of myself and my path the 13 years since that trip. From hiking alone in remote rainforest, through thick mud with too much on my back, crossing rivers up to my waist and forcing myself deeper in, to taking rides from bizarre and potentially detrimental people while hitchhiking solo all over the world.  I used to call it bravery and now, from the perspective of a mother who can picture her own daughters taking such risks, seems nothing short of pure stupidity.  And, at the same time, those experiences make me who I am and I wouldn't give any of them back for the world.  Not for the 30 ornithologists at the end of the trail counting how many species of tropical birds they saw for the Audobon's Christmas bird count or the complete relief of finally getting out of the car with all my parts and my belongings in tact.  The parts I would give up are needing to push to such extremes to know myself fully and how the stress affects my body and more importantly, the people that I love.

The part of my body that I notice being most affected by this lately is my head,  the  migraines every 2-3 days telling me I am not getting enough, most likely at this point, not enough sleep, but also quite possibly nutrition, exercise, deep relaxation and cultivation.  My partner severely broke his leg three weeks before Aya was born.  He has been pretty much laid up since, although, thankfully he is able to be up and about for longer stints lately before his leg gets too swollen to stand.  Regardless, this has left me, the past couple weeks since the amazing grandmothers left, to keep most of our lives in order.  Although this is stressful, and exhausting, at times I feel good about how much I can push myself to do, how many more loads of laundry can I fit in before completely crashing?  Apparently my ego has intentions to push me to a breaking point...strange.

The reason I am actually sharing this somewhat dark side of myself is because the more I think about it and look at it, these tendencies play a pretty large part in a lot of the disfunction within my relationships, both intimate and casual, on and off the farm.  My need to get as much done as possible, no matter what the casualties, I think I need a new way of calculating success...Not by how much, but perhaps just how things are done.   I've heard it so many times before, "its about the process, not the product" but with someone else housing, paying and offering me the opportunity to live through the dream I have been conjuring for so many years, how can I not work my tail off to make the farm as productive as it possibly can be?  Wouldn't I be cheating the spirit which has woven all this together, and the external players which have offered the anchors from which to weave if I didn't?  The balance of this productiveness, beauty and grace is what I wish to explore and what will hopefully come forth partially through the engagement with this blog, any insights gladly accepted!

Here we go!

BabyOnHerBack will follow me, and my children, through our adventures on the farm that I manage here in Taos, NM.  I have a four year old, Wren, who is quickly becoming an old hat on the farm scene.  In the past she has mostly spent time harvesting with me, lots of veggies and flowers and also sussing out strawberries and raspberries to enjoy along the way.  We now have a new addition to our family, Aya, who just racked up an entire month of life and who will be spending much of her next few years on my back or at my tow on the farm, if all goes according to plan...Ha!

Wren and a bunch of zukes

A large reason that I am starting this blog is to become a better Farmer Ma ie. learning to farm better while maintaining a healthy relationship with my kids by becoming more adept at incorporating them into the farm work with out loosing my cool.  On a good day, I have been able to have Wren by my side, encouraging her inquiry and inspiration through the life that proliferates all around this gorgeous landscape.  She has an amazing aptitude for remembering plant names and I try to fill those compartments to the brim with other little plant facts that come to mind while strolling around the farm yard.  On a not so good day, I am frustrated and uptight about how she may engage with the plants; stepping on, pulling up, bending of and all together acting her age but not always fulfilling my sometimes rigid needs for things to maintain a specific order.  Perhaps some of you moms can relate?  So, here I am, wanting to be a better Ma Farmer, wanting to have many more of those "good days" and to figure out ways to turn the beginnings of those "bad days" into productive AND meaningful experiences for me and my girls.

The arrival of the new baby coupled with the need and desire to keep on working makes this awareness of myself even more important to work on.  I am in the market for some like minded and motivated mamas to perhaps gain some insight myself into how to live this ideal farm life, which I can see in my minds eye, but can't, for some reason (???) always translate into reality.  As well as asking for input from any of you out there in blog world, I also hope to encourage and inspire mamas out there to attempt to live out your dreams with a "baby on your back" regardless of how impossible it may seem at times.  The greatest piece of advice that I have given my own self is, as a mom, to never doubt myself, to never assume that I can not do what it is I want to do just because there may be a little girl who needs me to do something else, sometime, in the middle of whatever it is I may be attempting to accomplish.