Greenjeans Farm

Went to the grocery store today to buy a couple of things for dinner.  I got in line in the ten items or less line  feeling good that my purchase was less than ten items and bruised that that I only had 20 dollars to spend.  January is a tough time for our farm and our bank account!    

There was a woman in front of me that I noticed had two frozen pot pies, a loaf of bread, and envelope and a newspaper.  She was waiting for her daughter to come back into line that she had sent for something else.  The ten or less line is always very urgent and I actually enjoy going through it, because some people are so weird about fast, and I like to make comments that screw around with their heads.  Her daughter came back with a gallon of non fat milk and she was looking at it like it was  a twelve pack of coke to one of my kids.  The clerk rang it up and she was two dollars short.  I could feel her fear and her pain as she paid her cash, (like 15 dollars and then told the clerk to put the 2 dollars on her ATM, I know she was sweating whether it would go through or not. I know that she knew how much a gallon of milk meant to her daughter at that point.   It worked for her, but I tell ya I was ready to give her my 20 and walk out of the store with nothing.  I actually regret I did not give her one of our cards.  And  hope that I see her again sometime.     

I pruned the orchards last week.  I picked up most of it, but left some in my wake.  It has been an extremely nice January this year.  Warm afternoons and sunny skies.  The grass is growing and Jeff decided to mow last week. 

He picked up a few of my stray trimmings to get them out of the way and stuck them in the metal arbor in back.  I noticed them this morning and went AHA!  Soon the arbor in the rose garden was covered and shored up with cherry branches and the finch sock was full and the finches were happy with plenty of perching places.  I had a yellow and black arbor and it was great!

One thing farmers know how to do like nobody else, is reach out to each other. 

I remember the first year we lived here in Potter, during the fall and winter we made the house livable, we had our first greenhouse (a growhouse sent from heaven which blew away in the storm the next year (another story)) and our first Christmas, and then we borrowed our friends Barbara and Skip’s tractor to plow up the area where the garden was going to go.  This was in March and we just couldn’t wait to get it all ready. 

Well March in Potter Valley is not exactly the best time of the year to decide to plow.  The Tractor got stuck, really stuck in the wet soggy ground.  I remember looking out the window and watching Jeff standing in the field waving his arms up and down out of frustration like he was doing jumping jacks.  I put on my rain boots and we tried the ol’ stick a board under the tire trick.  It didn’t work.  We stood and stared at each other trying to fathom how the heck were going to get that thing out, and how the heck we were going to pay for any damage we may have done to it.  Suddenly, like the cavalry arriving our other neighbors came up the driveway with their tractors and ATV’s and chains!  It seems they’d been watching with just a little amusement the scene at Greenjeans, and decided to help us out of our misery.  At the same time Barbara was driving into our driveway to see how we were doing with the tractor!  The neighbors got it out and Jeff drove it back to Skip and Barb’s.  Everyone got pickles and jam for their efforts and I will never forget the outflow of neighborliness for the newbees. 

I think this year will be much like that year.  Many of us are feeling a pinch, but with each other’s help we will get through it! I hope to be one of the "calvary" neighbors, but you never know...  No matter how hard you have it, you just have to look out your window!    

I did a smart thing earlier this year and managed it in a very dumb way.  I transferred my banking accounts to paperless reporting via the internet.  I patted myself on the back for not wasting all that paper and helping to reduce both ours and the banks carbon footprint, marveled at the way you can categorize your expenses right on line and print off the neat little reports, and went on my merry way.  Each month I received an email from the bank reminding me my paperless statement was available on line.  “That’s nice”, I would think to myself, “it’s ready”.  It really wasn’t necessary to do anything, I’m paperless right?  And I can check my account on line anytime I want…..  My little three ring binder where I would usually put my statements and check copies stood empty all year save for the first statement and the pretty reports I put in it.

Then day before yesterday I sat down to do my taxes.  Pretty straight forward here, income from my day job and Jeff’s part time endeavors and the farm.  Expenses tracked via statements, check stubs and receipts.  I quickly realized I had no statements saved or printed, no pretty reports, no categorization.  Eight hours, a stiff neck, a good ol’ excel spread sheet and a bottle of wine later I had captured the year, completely run out of black ink in my printer, and our taxes were 99% done! This year I will remember the stiff neck and the entirely wasted day  and send myself little annoying reminders regarding due diligence. 

The interesting thing that happened as a result of all this is I categorized not only the expenses for the farm, but every expense we had over the past year.  Some 1200+ transactions.  I am not much of a budgeter and we tend to live feast or famine, we are very frugal and always live well, but I’m into effortless these days and preparing for worst case, and let’s face it, when you are a farmer, some months are better than others.  Please indulge my feeble attempt to explain my utter disregard for saving money for a rainy day here. 

I took the total of every expense and divided it by twelve to get our average monthly expense. (I would love to say I always knew these figures in the back of my brain, but that would be a lie) I then compared the expense against our average monthly income after taxes insurance and house payment.  I then added in our projected refund from our taxes and portioned that out on a monthly basis.  Sure we will soon have money in our savings, but over the course of the year that will go out and not come back in.  We were still 200 dollars a month short!  At this point I panicked!  I can’t demand a raise!  I am lucky to still be working!  I could sell 20 more CSA shares….. but where would the time come from?  Jeff could get a full time job, but who would take care of the farm?  And there goes the CSA!  We could give it all up and move into town into one of those “Bank owned houses” that are now selling for about ¾ of what they are worth, totally not an option.    

So I sat in my wine induced eureka moment and thought of ways to shave it off the expense.  

I looked at the phone bill, and realized we don’t really NEED call waiting or caller ID or long distance for that matter. And we have a good ol’ fashioned answering machine.   We all have cell phones which combined are cheaper than our ATT bill.  However being in a rural area we do need basic local service for internet.  -75.00. 

Our electric bill has been the bane of our life for the entire time we have lived here.  We heat our home with wood, but somehow our electric bill is always huge.  We do have a hot tub that we enjoy most mornings and we do not wish to give that up.  We have to run 2 freezers and refers to preserve and keep the harvest.  I have given up fighting with PG&E and am going to put us on an automatic payment plan that averages your expense over the course of so many years.  -25  at least. 

Then I had to look at our grocery bill.  We love to eat, and eat for fun and enjoyment!  It is our entertainment, we don’t get out much.  Jeff is a fabulous cook and I am a fabulous eater and a food junkie.  Food to us is wealth.  And our expenses show it.   Food is the bulk of our expense other than our house payment.  I made the commitment to myself to save 400 dollars a month on food BANG, just saved it.  I know there is room in there, and we have all the veggies and fruit that we need from the summer, that is as long as we keep the PG&E going to keep the freezers running.  Thus the Toni and Jeff challenge.  Oh yeah baby, there will be more to say on this topic!

From the Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

A pesticide is a substance or mixture of substances used to kill a pest.^[1] A pesticide may be a chemical substance, biological agent (such as a virus or bacteria), antimicrobial, disinfectant or device used against any pest. Pests include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, molluscs, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms) and microbes that compete with humans for food, destroy property, spread or are a vector for disease or cause a nuisance. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, there are also drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals.

I don’t know about you, but as an organic farmer I do not list birds, mammals, fish, worms, microbes or most insects as pests.  I gladly welcome them to our farm, in fact we worry when they are not present.  That would mean that their would be no good bugs and birds to eat the bad bugs, no worms to enrich the soil, no fish or frogs to eat the flies and misquitoes.  I have yet to feel the rife competition for food, and there is very little property destruction caused by those nasty little microbes.  If pests include mammals as it does in that definition, does that not mean humans too?  Oh great, lets kill each other so we don’t compete with ourselves for food!  AND lets get those little suckers while they are young! 

I have just read an article in the Seattle P.I., regarding a study of the levels of pesticides in the system of 21 children in Mercer Island Washington.

“The peer-reviewed study found that the urine and saliva of children eating a variety of conventional foods from area groceries contained biological markers of organophosphates, the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II.

When the same children ate organic fruits, vegetables and juices, signs of pesticides were not found.

"The transformation is extremely rapid," said Chensheng Lu, the principal author of the study published online in the current issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

"Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets," said Lu, a professor at Emory University's School of Public Health and a leading authority on pesticides and children.

Within eight to 36 hours of the children switching to organic food, the pesticides were no longer detected in the testing.”

Nuff said?  You would think!  “Well chalk one up for the cause!”, I thought to myself,  “Yet another study with the same findings”.  I then went on to read the comments.  Some 40+ comments!  Some stating the article was a “non-story”, not unlike global warming.  Some of the comments stated that Organic food is just too expensive, and is not an alternative since the yields are so low.  There was a lot of talk about washing and peeling being a viable cure to the situation. 

Hmmm….. If organic yields are so low, why is there always a time each year that even after the 20 CSA bushel baskets have been filled some 30 times over the course of the season, I fall in a heap on the kitchen floor and declare if I see one more basket of fruit or vegetables that need to be processed I’ll go into a coma.  And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t peeled a vegetable for over 20 years, conventionally or organically grown! There are vitamins, fiber and most importantly flavor in that skin!  Peeling a vegetable would be like eating a boneless skinless Chicken breast from a chicken that was grown in a cage and fed antibiotics all of its life, what’s the point? (but that’s another story).   Most of all as a farmer I enjoy watching the quail walking across the yards, and the crazy Killdeer that lay eggs in the vegetable garden and then act like they are having a heart attack if you come near their nest.  I love the beautiful colored spiders that take residence in the rose garden.  And I even love the toad families that hide in the rocks and come out at night to eat those nasty little slugs. There’s something exciting about going out before light and feeling having the bat that eats it’s weight in insects each day whiz over your head.  Call me crazy, but I think it’s sweet that my husband has named the tree frog that sneaks in through the open window and visits the overflow drain of our bathroom sink from time to time.  Sure, sometimes there’s a worm in a tomato or an ear of corn.  And a pesky little earwig or two hiding in the cabbage, but you know?  They wash right off, and they haven’t been treated with “pesticides spawned the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II”, so it really doesn’t matter if you eat them anyway!