April powers

“April showers bring May flowers.”

This statement comes attached to the memory of my mother beneath the white bloom of an apple tree. Pruners in hand she reaches up farther and farther, pulling at things to snip, swatting bugs. She says the words with unflinching assurance, as if she knows it to be true beyond a shadow of a doubt, as if somewhere deep within an ancient mountainside cave there is a stone etched with indelible rules that mothers can view at will. I can imagine them filing into the moms-only cave, torches in hand, reading things like “If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all,” and “Do the best you can do and you will be anything you want,” and “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” The wisdom behind the adages is time tested and empirically sound, the results are substantiating, the cave is not on any map…

While staring down at our little kale plants, unhappy in the unseasonable heat, I found myself thinking “What does April HEAT bring in May?” and did a quick brain search for a possible rhyme there, to no avail. I thought of my mom and the sayings that in-part make up her wisdom; does this shower to flower equation have a nasty bizarro-world doppelgänger? Or more importantly, what does this heat mean for our farm going into May?

Firstly, let me speak about our farm’s defenses against drought. Periodically throughout the summer, when the rain clouds seem snagged by the White Mountains, we rely on water supplied by a small irrigation pump and subsequent metal piping that gets pieced together in zones and lies like a grid over our five acres. Putting this thing together – with its elbows, T-shaped outflow pieces, switches and varying lengths – is like putting together an enormous puzzle. Every sprinkler head must be cleaned and the flow must stay concentrated and not too spread out between zones or the whole thing will lose pressure and there will be nothing but trickles draining into the fields. There are some weeks when directing and maintaining this flow seems like a full-time job in itself.

We pump the water right out of the Saco River. When seeking out certification, Richard Rudolph (our Executive Director and founder) had to have the river around the pump-spot tested, to see if the waters were pure enough to allow on organic crops. With a little luck it turns out the Saco, which supplies drinking water to more than a quarter-million people and runs 136 miles from North Conway, NH to Saco Bay, is certifiable and clean. It is one of my great pleasures to work near this river that I have grown up swimming in, kayaking on and swinging into. To be able to take a break from the field and go fiddle with the lines or take a wrench to the pump by the waters moving cool against our bank is a privilege I take pride in.

Another tool in our kit is our extensive mulch. Even now when every news station weatherman is prattling about the heat and our irrigation is not yet fully functioning we have captured moisture beneath our heavy mulch. When planting Pac Choi last Friday I found the soil beneath our hay and leaves to be moist and a little cool. An obvious downside here is soil temperature – heat loving plants of the nightshade family would prefer it if you uncovered your mulch first to let the sun directly heat the soil – but overall we find that problem to be inconsequential in the face of numerous advantages. We keep water longer, forcing it to move slower than it would were it rapidly evaporating into the air.

Finally we try to companion plant for shade. Last year our palm-tree like kale plants provided some afternoon shade for lettuces, radish and arugula. Huge cosmos blocked the sun from frying our sorrel. This year we are delving into this a bit more, planning a perennial pollinator border in one of our fields that will bring in good bugs and help us shade our summer lettuce. We may even plant something like a Siberian pea shrub to help us put valuable nitrogen back into the soil.

The last two systems I mentioned are passive; once in place they require no upkeep from us to keep functioning. The pump and the lines, however, require electricity to function and substantial maintenance. Last week we lost the prime on the pump and an after-work full-systems-analysis ensued. I refilled the main pump line with water, I redid the washers on the input line, I checked the flush valve, I reworked the lines; I did everything I could think of. Then, in the heat of the evening, I sort of gave up and sat by the water (it was past work time of course but Marina was still seeding in the greenhouse so I said hey, why not).

I stared at the intake pipe with water streaming by it. The pump sounded fine, we were just unable to get any pull out of it. I felt dazed from the heat and the long work of the day but still intrigued by the problem. At times my curiosity serves me well and I had yet to investigate one last part of the system. I stared at that cold water and with an empty head I took off my boots and socks and pants and waded in up to my hips, which is fairly high considering on a good day I am six-foot-seven.

I tried to shoulder the pipe as I went but could only manage pulling it up about five inches above water. It was filled and incredibly heavy, for a second I considered this and the moving river and the slippery bottom and the legend of Sokokis Indian Chief Squandro who cast a curse on the Saco that it would take the lives of three white people every year. I pushed on and about 20 feet off shore and half submerged I heard the noise: like a great victorious pressurized waterfall. I turned around to see a rip in the line. Bingo.

A wise farmer I met in Pennsylvania used to say “It ain’t farmin’ it’s fixin’.” I really liked that saying and from what I have seen it rings true. In fact, that is half the fun of this whole thing – contending with the ever-multiplying stack of mysteries woven into things like greenhouse construction, water management, tractor implements, companion planting, polycultures, fundraisers, irrigation systems and electric fences. The farmer has to be the everyman; able to transplant delicate flowers, build shelves and stairs and tables, find and snare woodchucks, design posters, talk to customers and take care of the soil all within the confines of a day. There is never want for a challenge and each day requires a full and healthy mind and body; each day requires full attention, creativity and responsibility.

I hope you can find that cave of wisdom some day and impart on others words that will serve them well. Until then, stay cool, wear a ridiculous sun-hat and good luck.

-Stowell P. Watters

April 23, 2012

My fall post

By Stowell P. Watters

It is good to have the seasons change, it is, it is. I love how fast this all happened; one minute we had seedlings shivering in the cold green house, then we had summer squash multiplying in the back room, and now we scour the eggplant area for those lilting auberginies, binjalies, eggy-p’s, or Solanum melongens (if you want to get all technical). Soon we will pull all of the plants out and drop back into mulch mode; picture Optimus Prime transforming from car to mech, locking and loading. The season for swimming and grilling is over and now we will get out the flannels, roast the root vegetables, read some fiction, cut trees out back to hone that ski run, and begin putting the farm to bed.

An update from Rippling Waters Organic Farm: we are expanding the mandala garden. If you came to see it this season and witnessed the unrelenting vegetative salvo then you know why – it was a huge success, blockbuster. In the name of progress we’ve created labyrinth-like rays shooting out from the center (sun) bed. Piled high with newspaper, seaweed, sawdust, greensand, compost, leaves and hay these beds will cure for the winter and give home to our nightshade crop next season. Our most recent WWOOFer is from a cozy home on the Falmouth coast and has kindly let us use her family’s beach access for countless seaweed-gathering trips. Thank you Eliza and family for the generous bounty.

Pulling that seaweed from the beach - up two flights of stairs and a hill, bucket in each hand – is no easy task and quickly wears at our breakfast energy. So why do it, you might ask, why not apply manure like most farmers? Why not skip the rotting slimy stuff and head inland for greener pastures? Well, I will tell you – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Seaweed works. While it has nearly the same Nitrogen/Phosphorus/Potassium (NPK) content as your typical bovine manure it lacks the potential weed seeds harbored in dung. In addition to a great nutritive base, scientists have verified the presence of at least 60 elements in common algae – as we learn more and more about soil science we see that a diverse diet is fundamental to a healthy plant, and that plants fed only your classic NPK are weak and unhealthy, on par with a child fed only pizza and soda – he will live but will he grow?

Anything dredged from the sea also contains sodium and boron. Two things most farmers typically lack in their fields. I saw a soil guru at this year’s Common Ground Fair dare a group of onlookers to dump a 55 gallon drum of sea water on their garden. After a series of “uh ohhs” and general sneers he said, with a smile, “It will thrive!” Sodium has a bad name (“Salt of the earth!”) and for an understandable reason – too much sodium and you have got a completely toxic environment. But sodium adds to soil structure and without it plants would be unable to uptake nutrients from the soil on a molecular level; think of it as a phone line from your plants to your soil. So when someone tells you to wash your seaweed off well, you know what to say.

Sea weed also contains a cornucopia of things from the Oceanside that are rich in organic matter (carbon and nitrogen), like crab shells, sand fleas, feathers and worms. The one thing we have found problematic about seaweed is the presence of dog droppings which can harbor maggots- no fun. That aside, the benefits are endless and the cherry on top might be that seaweed is free – just make sure to ask your park ranger first.

We here at Rippling Waters hope you can get a little seaweed in your life as we head into winter- pray for snow!

that storm

By Stowell P. Watters

Our farm manager received an email from MOFGA last Saturday that said something to the effect of:

“Dear farm, make sure to remove all plastic from your hoophouses before Irene hits.”

Great advice, really, considering the enormity of the thing that was, at that time, ripping its way through towns and homes along the Outer Banks. We huddled by the computer in the farm house and looked at those nail-biting photos of the maelstrom; all computer-projected in blood red and fire orange and spinning like a tornado the size of Siberia. We could feel, collectively, the pressure of the bullseye which was lowering itself to cover all of New England, could feel it bearing down, foreboding and heavy upon us all. Paul LePage was telling us to take care of our neighbors and Kevin Panics (thanks to Glen Ellis for that one) was telling us to pretty much cancel the future, call the whole thing a wash in the face of Irene. We were informed of grocery store lines.

And Julee, our ever vigilant farm manager, was telling us to leave the plastic on the hoop houses.

“Oh,” we slowly unbent our bodies from looking at the computer screen and stared at her, “OK.”

Marina and I have learned - through countless situations in which Julee’s advice has proved, regardless of seeming initially backward, right on the money - that this woman has got it in her bones. So, like any good employees, we did what our boss said. We trusted her.

As it approached, the storm was downgraded and talked about like last year’s Boston Celtics – oh what it could have been. It was demoralized, made fun of behind it’s back, and treated like a mere tropical when once it had catagories and offshore swellings and News Alerts.

When we showed up on Sunday the wind had proved to be the only real punisher. Wind had knocked out power to the farm, and as a consequence we had to use water from a neighbor’s Artisian well to give all of the green-house babies a drink. Bucket by bucket we did this. In fact, at the time of writing this (right after work on Tuesday) we still do not have power and just today harvested rutebegas, potatoes, kale, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melons, and everything else we grow without the use of electricity – aside from a generator leant to us by Bill Ellis (thank you sir!) which powered our water pump for washing the veggies.

Some branches fell here and there, a big thanks goes out to Creative Trails; their group hacked and sawed some of the larger pieces from off of our fences, exuberantly I would add. Water carved a gulch in the main route from the processing shed to the rest of the farm, an easy fix with a rake, and some of the tomato trellising fell over in the wind.

Oh, and of course the hoop houses were fine. Julee just smiled, she already knew it without having to check the farm. This might sound like I am kissing….err sucking up, but no, I am actually just sharing with you, good reader, my sense of utter flabergastment with this lady. She knows things in a deep way that is hidden from me, she can tell things about a field from touching the soil, she knows when people are feeling this way or that, and on top of it all, she is one hell of a prognosticator.

Our farm staff hopes you fared as well as we did during the storm, and our hearts go out to all those less fortunate than us - we know the storm was not as mild for many families on the East Coast and many families lost things which cannot be replaced. With fall and ruin comes new growth, new victory and rebirth and all things are at mercy of a constant ebb and flow; this is perhaps the most bold-faced lesson the farm teaches us all every single day we work.

MANDALA

by Stowell P. Watters

So first a quick update – busy busy with wrapping up the first massive planting wave, diminishing the woodchuck population, beginning our Food Connection Corps program which puts six bright-star Bonny Eagle highschoolers into the field to work and learn where their food begins, Garden Crawling (a smashing success despite the weather), meeting awesome new CSA and CSA-SNAP members at the farmer’s markets, Kale Festing, and attending MOFGA sponsored classes at far-off farms. That just scratches the topsoil but you get the idea, dear reader – we are full-swing-dancin’.

In the spring our farm manager, the venerable Julee Applegarth, was looking out over the top of our field D (the field closest to River Rd.) and musing out loud to a gathered crowd upon the fact that previously she was unable to get much to grow in the hard-packed soil there. She stamped her foot, I recall, to illustrate the hard-packedness of this particular quarter-acre field. She said it would be planted with members of the brassica family but because of years of tilling followed by hard rains the topsoil would probably not yield much. She said with its scattered hay and dappling of punky weeds it was no place to foster the life of our much-loved and cared-for broccolis, kales, cabbages, and collards.

So after a few seconds of thought (I would say minutes but inspiration seems to come explosively quick to Julee) an idea came volcanically forth.

Julee spun around with both arms up in the air and shouted: “MANADALA!”

In his epic Permaculture, A Designer’s Manual, author and permaculture prince Bill Mollison talks about “Gangamma’s Mandala,” a polyculture garden built in a cyclical shape. The word itself first appears in early Buddhist and Hindu vocabularies as a mystical form suggestive of the cosmos and the different relationships established between the material and spiritual world. Influenced by the curves and spherical patterns used in Taiwanese and Philippines gardening, “mandala” is now permie-speak for any bed utilizing keyhole shape design, radiating circles, ovoid patterns, et al.

The mandala is powerful, I will probably write this more than once. Beyond it being an aesthetic improvement (who likes to gaze upon long straight lines of monocultured vegetables anyway ?), the mandala allows for a very dense planting so crops that otherwise would be rows apart can abut one another. This neighborly association confuses pests (no more straight line buffet), allows for easy companion planting, and makes harvesting much easier.

The mandala decreases the amount of pathway you need in the garden and therefore increases production. The mandala cannot be tilled, so the soil will always be increasing in ecological diversity and strength. Because they are usually designed in a raised bed fashion the mandala helps to decrease water waste and runoff as it channels rain to the base of each bed. Finally, the mandala helps us focus on all of the plants and not just the weeds on the north or south side or the bugs invading one crop here or another there.

Armed with all of this knowledge we set to planning and designing our own raised bed mandala to reinvigorate the failing field. With some luck we were able to make a connection with the Portland Permaculture Meetup group and David Homa at the Urban Farm Fermentory in Portland (go there, it rules) and get the project off the ground. Dave showed up on a balmy day in late April with a trailer full of rotten seaweed like some sort of deranged/victorious patriot of decomposition and then a day later he and other permaculture people showed up with their boots on and we got to layering. Our shape – a radiating clover with beds deepening to five feet in some areas. Our layers – recommended soil amendments lime and potassium magnesium sulfate (SPM), sawdust for moisture retention, the mineral laden kelp, some high nitrogen alfalfa meal, our own compost, rotting leaves, Benson’s compost (great Oreo cookie stuff with little claws from sea-creatures mingled throughout), and finally a thick hay mulch. Cheers to all those who helped us on that day, it was a ton of work.

In a week the mandala was planted with every kale we could pack in it along with some nasturtiums, collards, and an outer ring of cabbage. Bam.

And how is it doing you might ask? Well, my friend, you should probably just come and check it out. But bring your sunglasses because this thing is radiant and strong, beautiful and supercharged, healthy and evocative, lush and powerful, triumphant and righteous and the vegetables we are pulling out of it are Beethoven’s-fifth Jurassic-era mega flora.

May-mulch madness
by Stowell P. Watters

At a time when the word “automobile” is, in some circles, synonymous with peak oil, climate change, and supreme-wanton-disregard-for-all-things-sacred-and-green, and the roaring sound of an engine seems to impress only the attendant at the gas station or the oil tycoon picking filet mignon from his teeth with one of the thinner bones of an Ivory Billed Woodpecker, I am going to attempt a risky metaphor: our farm is currently a vintage beast of an automobile, cherry red, with a snarling, carnivorous engine thundering on all eight hemispherical cylinders and powered completely by - what else - vegetable oils.

The market season is fully on and we have salad mix, spicy mustardy stir-fry mix, spinach, electric lettuce heads, radishes, eggs, organic vegetable starts, and flowers flying out of our store on River Rd. and off the trucks at the Portland and Bridgton markets. The seven-layer mandala (clover shaped fifth-of-an-acre vegetable bed) is built and planted thanks to some friends from the Portland Permaculture meetup.com group and every passing day another few beds are given happy, humming plants, mulched, and set to prosper. The sun came back out and we were ready for it; time is flying and vegetables are everywhere.

But back to my automobile analogy; just as a finely tuned roadster depends on continued fuel combustion and oil viscosity, so too our farm requires some key processes. The bulk of physical labor during the early summer is devoted, therefore, to the mother of all farm tasks - mulching (vroom vroom). It is not possible for me to overstate the importance of mulching here at Rippling Waters Organic Farm.

If you look at plants growing in a field or on a forest floor you will observe nature's mulching (effortless) efforts as leaves, pine needles, golden rod stalks, and rye all fall to the earth and facilitate new growth. Every crop we plant is subsequently mulched with decomposing leaves and hay, this covering is anywhere from two to four inches thick.

First, this bio-mimicry allows the soil to retain moisture - think of a bare field of tilled soil baking in the sun with the moisture rising up and away, paving the way for desertification and soil erosion. With more moisture locked into our soil we can water/worry less about plants crashing in the field.

Mulch also suppresses weeds by blocking sunlight to their creeping rhizomes or seeds. In some cases where the Bermuda grasses have a presence like old phone wires in the soil we start our mulch with newspaper or cardboard. The fight against weeds is good, important work and mulch allows us to maintain a game-long 10 point lead - something every organic gardener needs.

Better than black plastic - which requires yadda yadda amounts of petroleum to produce and is more than slightly annoying to purchase, put down, find drip tape beneath, maintain, clean up, etc - mulch is nearly free and does something black plastic does not - it gives back all important organic residues into the soil (not to mention it is well loved by and frequently packed with worms).

When microbial life (various bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms) already present in the soil comes into contact with this mass of carbon compounds in the mulch a veritable feast is kicked off. The microbes chow down on carbon for their own metabolism and transform the organic residues back into plant food and nutrients as microbes have mutualistic relations with plant rootlets in the soil. The undigested portion accumulates as readily available plant food known as humus. For more on this topic I refer you to "The Waste Products of Agriculture and their Utilization as Humus" by Albert Howard (http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/HowardWPA/WPAtoc.html) - he does the subject justice like I cannot.

Fueled by mulch we are forging on into June, but May isn't over as we are having an open house this weekend and a Pumpkin Planting Blitz this Saturday May 28th 9:00am-3:00pm, and we are inviting you, good reader, to join us and get some vine crops in the ground - oh yea, and we'll be full throttle mulching too! See you there.

Potato Planting Day

Come on out to the farm Saturday April 30 at 9 or 10 a.m. and help us plant approximately 1 acre of potatoes. Learn different varieties and different planting methods - some of which help reduce pests and improve soil! We'll be wrapping things up probably around 1:00 p.m. and you're invited to stay for a pot-luck lunch. Hope to see you here!

Spring Fever

by Stowell P. Watters

Winter is now a waning moon; each one of us will be olive-skinned and river bound before we know it. The life in the soil will soon explode into the sunlight, our meals, and our bodies, and at this point all we can do at Rippling Waters Organic Farm is just try to hold on.

Both greenhouses are bustling, as of the week of March 28 we have everything from arugula to tomatoes to kohlrabi seeded and growing in warm trays and potting soil. With field mice politely locking themselves up behind the bars of have-a-heart traps our peppers and spinach are showing their true leaves, and the kale transplants are standing stalwart and ready.

This weekend we shoveled the snow out of two of the hoop houses and have since brought the plastic down to heat the soil for planting next week - this is very exciting for us as it heralds in this year's first foray into the soil. A host of carpentry projects and weekly visits from friends and volunteers have also kept us busy amidst seeding, watering, seeding, and watering.

It is easy to get lost amidst this flourish of activity and to think of the months ahead with more than a tinge of anxiety. When I worked for a local newspaper I remember the (dreadful) onset of dread, of not wanting another minute of work to present itself to me. I remember wanting to hide from the cavalcade of to-do's and deadlines - crushed under their unending weight.

But at the farm this dread is simply not there. The growth of the plants, slow and steady, gives us a foil for our own work, that - whether you worry, hope, fret, or totally forget altogether - life and work goes on, and good things come from small things and pile up until all of the sudden, one day in midsummer's heat, you turn around and there is a great success flourishing in your wake. So join us at the farm in not worrying about the work to be done, but enjoying the time spent doing it.