Tag: klesick family farm

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Spring

This week, it looks like we are going to have a decent stretch of good weather and every farmer is going to be hard at it working the ground. As much I try every year to get ahead of or prepare for the farm season, I never feel that I am quite ready for it to begin. We have been plugging along doing many non-weather-related projects, but these can be miserable chores when it is raining sideways or hovering around freezing. But we do get many of them done; albeit, all layered up and looking like the Michelin man trying to stay warm.

Although Urgency and Procrastination are distant cousins, they both can be task masters. I try to strike a balance between the two of them, between what has to happen and what can wait. Nevertheless, there is nothing like a few good days in spring to put a bounce in your step and a burst of “get ‘er done” coursing through your veins!

Much to the disdain of Cousin Procrastination, we have made some pretty significant changes this winter. We have realigned our farm fields to make them more efficient to farm, upgraded fencing for our grass-fed cattle and invested in farm equipment to help us with harvest and post-harvest handling.

I find it ironic how Cousin Procrastination lives with me, but I am not quite sure when Cousin Urgency is going to pay me a visit. Although I do expect a visit every time this year, I am just not sure when it will be. However, the thought of Cousin Urgency coming does tend to accelerate the pace of activity and the need to get ready for the visit.

Well, Cousin Urgency has arrived and the Klesick family is going to be busier than a “one-armed wallpaper hanger.” We still have fencing to button up before the cows arrive. We have 3,000 pea plants to get in the ground and trellised, plus another 10,000 peas to direct seed. There is a ton of potatoes waiting to be planted, so I need to get that ground ready, fertilized and composted, and IT ALL HAS TO BE DONE YESTERDAY! At least this is what Cousin Urgency is saying. In reality, it can be accomplished over a few weeks and everything will be just fine. Striking that balance is the hard part, and as sure as “the cream rises to the top” the most pressing tasks make it to the top of the list.

Thanks for checking in. Your good food team will be hard at it growing, sourcing and delivering organic and GMO-free fruit, vegetables and grocery items for you this week and every week.

 

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Oso Mudslide Relief Efforts

My family is from the Oso community. My cousins have been among the many volunteers on the ground doing an amazing work. Being “locals,” their understanding of the area has been absolutely critical to the relief efforts. Their knowledge of the location and usability of back roads, the location of heavy equipment and where to find local resources, like gravel, is invaluable. I have cheered them on and checked in every day. I have listened to the stories and hardships—it is heart-wrenching.

 

The news is doing a good job of not over-sensationalizing this event because it really is as bad, and might be even worse, than reported. I have worked on many disaster sites and led a few teams, but I have never seen devastation like this before. The loss of life and the magnitude of the slide and its location have created a very challenging rescue and recovery operation.

 

I am heartened by the efforts of the Oso, Arlington and Darrington communities and the work of Snohomish County, the State and the Federal response teams. We are at the point where large sums of money are being donated and used to stabilize the situation and lots of government agencies and large non-profits are in full support mode and using their expertise to help these communities. Although this outpouring of giving and help is incredible, from my past experience during and after disaster responses, it usually wanes fairly quickly, but the physical, emotional and financial impact will continue for those rebuilding their lives. It is a part of human nature to rally our efforts at a time like this, but these efforts are hard to sustain long-term.

 

So here is what I am proposing:

 

The Klesick Family Farm would like to engage in the disaster relief for the long haul. I have budgeted $1,000/month to help put families back on the ground. We will be working with local community churches that are nimble and able to quickly get resources to the impacted families.

 

Like us, many of you have already donated –thank you. However, I would ask you to consider partnering with us for the long haul and setting up a recurring tax-deductible donation on your account. Imagine if half of our customers added an extra $1 per delivery—we could raise $3,500 per month to extend hope to our neighbors in Oso and Darrington.

 

How to Help the Oso & Darrington Communities

 

  • Give through Klesick Family Farm: Give your charitable contribution through Klesick Family Farm and we will get it into the hands of the locals. You can either make a one-time donation or add the donation as a recurring item to your regular produce delivery. Recurring donations will be scheduled to terminate at the end of June or sooner if you’d prefer. 100% of donations will go local community churches and other non-profit organizations to directly help families who have been most impacted. Donations are tax-deductible. Donors will receive a tax statement at the end of the year. Please visit our website to donate. 
  • Red Cross of Snohomish County: If you wish to help victims of the Oso mudslide, cash donations are preferred. The American Red Cross is no longer collecting items. Go to the Red Cross of Snohomish County at www.redcross.org/snoco to donate. People can also text “RedCross” to 90999 to make a $10 donation.
  • Darrington Community Center: The Darrington Community Center welcomes any donations brought into the center, which is located at 570 Sauk Ave. 360-436-1217.
  • Check with your local bank, as many have set up accounts to donate toward the relief effort.

 

Thank you for your generous outpouring.

 

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Providence

I often quote to myself (and to others) that simple prayer by Francis of Assisi, “Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

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As the farm season starts to unfold, there are bound to be things that I have planned to do, but just won’t get to. It might be weather related, it could be a timing issue, or it could be just a lack of time. But one thing is for sure, I will get to a lot of things on my list and a few things that weren’t. And at the end of the day, at the end of the farming season, I will have gotten something planted, weeded and harvested.

This week, we are planning on doing something that wasn’t on my farming list. In January, I ordered 4 flats of lettuce to transplant into our greenhouse. Our greenhouse isn’t very big and I was planning on only planting lettuce in half and spinach in the other half. I planted the spinach by seed and then went to get the lettuce transplants—all 512 of them.

When I arrived to get the flats, we walked over to get them and I started to grab the 4 I ordered and the nurseryman asked, “Is that all, you ordered 40?” My response was “gulp.” 40 flats x 128/flat = 5,120 plants. I have never planted 5,120 lettuce plants in my life at one time. So much is really out of our control when it comes to farming, and this week I picked up the remaining 36 flats of lettuce to transplant.

This will be a big undertaking, because the weather has not been the greatest for preparing a seed bed. Well, when an opportunity presents itself, like an extra 4,608 lettuce plants to plant, I stop, pause and evaluate the opportunity and then I pray, “This wasn’t my idea, but Lord if you want to do that, I am game!” Then I start looking for an opportunity to plant 5,120 more heads of lettuce in the first week of spring.

This is a bold move and definitely qualifies as borderline stupid, which is why I normally don’t plant lettuce in March! But sometimes on occasions like this, you discover a new way of doing something and other times you affirm why you don’t do something. Time will tell. For now, I am going with Providence and growing a lot of lettuce at the Klesick farm!

Your local lettuce farmer,

 

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In Remembrance

I often quote to myself and to others that simple prayer by Francis of Assisi,

God, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

In light of the recent mudslide tragedy in Oso, we are remembering those who were injured, those who have tragically lost their lives, those that are missing, and those that are grieving.

 

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Chives, Crocuses, Daffodils and Tulips

The time has come. All winter long I wander around doing this and doing that almost aimlessly, but not quite.  During the winter, our family tends to rest and recuperate from the previous farm season. (We even went to Disneyland for the first time in 23 years, which was not restful, but it was fun.) But I must be a farmer at heart, because it is this time every year that the winter fog becomes a little less dense and my senses awaken to spring. I think there is a little farmer in all of us during this time of year!

I get excited when I see grass growing. I don’t love to mow, but I love to notice the nuances in the shades of green or the thickness of the blades. I am also drawn to buds on the fruit trees. I notice the leaf buds and fruit buds, I pay attention to how much they are swelling and I wonder if a hard frost will set them back this year, again. I begin to think about the pollinators. Will it rain during the time the flowers are open, will the bees want to get out and work so there will be fruit in the fall?

I notice how much water the mud puddles are holding and how much they have dried or not dried out. I pay attention to the impression left by the tractor tires—how deep, how defined or not at all. I listen to the birds, the frogs, the coyotes—each species unique, but still calling this their home too. I also notice that the swans are still here, but I know that when they move on from this winter home, that it will be time to plant strawberries, peas and spinach.

Now I am looking for pockets of weather, openings in the curtain of heaven, to begin my annual dance with this farm. In many ways it has already begun because our farm is a living eco system with many types of crops growing. We have been pruning fruit trees and seeding greenhouses, we have been in the shop repairing and building equipment to help us this season, our seeds have been ordered, soil samples taken and fertilizer blends have been created to feed each of our crops.

So it is, as our daylight increases, so does our energy, focus and purpose. Our partnership continues with this patch of earth we call home, to grow fruits and vegetables that are so flavorfully packed with sunshine and nutrients that they will cause your taste buds and mine to dance—food that will feed your family and mine!

Always organic, always GMO-free.

 

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Salmon Safe Certification 2014

We’ve renewed our Salmon-Safe Certification!

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This means that Klesick is:

  • Maintaining a buffer of trees and vegetation along the stream banks
  • Controlling erosion by cover cropping bare soil
  • Improving the passage for migrating fish
  • Applying natural methods to control weeds and farm pests
  • Using efficient and non-wasteful irrigation practices
  • Protecting wetlands, woodlands, and other natural areas
  • Promoting on-farm plant and wildlife diversity

Learn more about Salmon-Safe on Stewardship Partner’s website.

 

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Time to Prune

Last year, we “top worked” some Comice pear trees in our orchard—36 to be precise. We saved 12 of these trees to pollinate the Buerre Bosc pears. I planted the orchard five years ago, but the Comice pears have not performed well and seemed unhappy in our microclimate. The Bosc pears, however, took to the microclimate like a duck takes to water. So this winter, I cut some scion wood from the Bosc pears and am going to “top work” the last 12 Comice pear trees. Last year, we grafted the Comice pears over to Conference pears and four Asian pear varieties. The picture in this article is Stephen cutting off the “nurse” limb we left to stabilize the tree from the aggressive pruning.

Definitions:

Top working is a term that refers to grafting a new variety onto an existing tree. In a sense, you are working on establishing a new “top” for the tree. It can save a few years in establishing a new variety  and  lots of dollars.  “Top working” makes sense if you are happy with orchard layout, irrigation tree spacing, and if the new variety is compatible with the existing root stock.

Nurse limbs are designed to allow the tree to funnel energy to the new shoots that have been grafted onto the top of the “stump.” It works well because the “nurse” limbs are lower and the tree begins to put energy into building a new top. In the following spring we come back through and select the best of the grafts and cut off the “nurse” limbs.

Grafting is the process where one variety is grafted into or onto another tree. As mentioned earlier, it can really speed up the process of getting back into fruit production by 2-3 years.  It is a relatively straitforward process, but you need to be ready to do it when the weather is right, towards the end of April. You also have to gather the scion wood in the dead of winter and store it at near freezing to keep it dormant.

Scion wood is the wood that is grafted onto the existing tree. We typically use a 4-6 inch piece of wood with 3-4 good buds (buds become the future branches). Amazingly, as the main tree adopts the grafts, they will grow 2-4 feet over the summer. And now we are selecting the best “grafts” from last year to grow the new tree.

If all things go as planned, we should see a small crop next year of Conference pears and a larger crop of Buerre Bosc pears in two years from the “top worked” trees this year.

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Three Types of Farming

healing-through-nutrition-01-300x300I have been preparing for my upcoming talk at the Celebration of Food Festival at the Lynnwood Convention Center this Sunday, May 19th. My topic is Healing through Nutrition. I will probably tackle this subject from a soil health perspective—something akin to healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy people. In the 1900s, America’s health ranking as nation was #1. Americans were the healthiest, but by 2007 we had moved from the top to the bottom, ranking 95th in overall health. What has changed in those 100 years? The way we farm!

For centuries we have had food primarily raised “organically.” People ate more locally, had more diversity in their diets, raised their own food and got plenty of exercise in the process. (I can only imagine how successful a CrossFit gym would have been during the early 1900s.) Americans also ate a lot less processed foods and consumed a lot less animal proteins.  

Back then, New Jersey was called the Garden State for a reason. When the country was run by true animal power—everything from police to fire to transportation—every sector of society generated animal waste and it all had to be carted out of the city. And guess where NYC’s animal waste went?  New Jersey. Copious amounts of barnyard waste were plowed into those farm fields to grow more fruits and vegetables. A beautiful picture of a symbiotic relationship between cities and farms, where the farms fed the cities and cities, in turn, fed the soil.

After WWII, agriculture moved away from barnyard wastes to chemical solutions. Initially, the chemicals were used more like a supplement and they worked reasonably well, but that was because the farmland was heavily fortified with nutrients from the “organic” farming practices of earlier generations.  But as time marched on, the ease of chemical usage enticed many farmers to leave the time-tested practices of building soil health. And eventually our national treasure, the soil, became depleted and disease and insect pressure on our crops dramatically increased. Of course, the chemical mongers developed stronger killers to wipe out the new problems that their chemicals helped to create.  

As our national health continued its decline, our nation embraced Genetic Engineering (GE) or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). So, having moved from organic farming to spraying our crops with synthetic herbicides, fungicides and pesticides, we are now actually inserting the pesticide or herbicide into the genes of our food. Now, a farmer can spray his crops with an all-purpose indiscriminate herbicide like RoundupTM and kill everything but the crop or insert a pesticide into the plant itself, so that when a corn borer or Monarch butterfly starts to nibble, it will die, saving the crop, so that you and I can nibble it later. YUCK! 

Klesick Family Farm, along with many other farms across the nation and around the world, has decided to grow real food from soils that are nutrient-rich—working with nature, not against it.  But we can’t do it without “eaters,” so thank you for saying “yes” to real food.  

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Lets slow down and enjoy the holidays

Did you find enough time to enjoy Thanksgiving? One wouldn't want to slow down and actually talk to someone during a meal, let alone consider swallowing and digesting our Thanksgiving meal before heading out to SHOP Thursday night! Let's be real, what is the big hurry? You would think that Americans couldn't wait to stand in line to support the Chinese economy. Heaven forbid that Americans would have to, well, relax with family and friends for an entire day.

On the other hand, Thanksgiving had been dominated by football for far too long, but now the other half of America can enjoy their favorite sport—shopping. Before long, I am sure that Congress will allow you to "Itemize" shopping as a deductible expense from your income taxes. Why you ask? Because soon the lofty legislators from the hallowed halls of Congress will realize that to actually go out and physically shop requires exercise and when one shops they buy, buy, buy, and that is good for the economy. And voila, the Anti-Obesity Shopping Stimulus Act will be overwhelmingly passed and enacted by Congress.
 
But there will be detractors, like Amazon and other fine online retailers, clamoring for their fair share of stimulus dollars. Feeling left out, they will appeal to Congress to pass the Overeaters Stimulus Bill that would encourage Americans to shop from their pajamas and conserve fossil fuels, since they are no longer able to button their skinny jeans and take advantage of the Anti-Obesity Shopping Stimulus Act.
 
Yes, Americans everywhere can rest assured that Congress will do all it can to pass very little meaningful legislation. So it will be up to us fellow Americans to buy only those gifts that will add value, not to overspend, and not to go into credit card debt this Christmas. And just maybe our congressional legislators will take a nod from main street and not Wall Street, when they see us average Americans making good financial choices—the kind of choices that help our family live within our financial means.
 
My goals for the Christmas season are simple: enjoy family, friends, and good food. My goal for New Years is that my scale will say the same as it did today (give or take a pound).
 
Cheers for a wonderful Christmas season! 
 
 
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Farmland = Food

The other day, I was driving through our valley and noticing the diversity of crops and farms. Our valley in the lower Stillaguamish hasn’t changed much since the 40s. We are, relatively, newcomers to this section of the river, having arrived in 2003, which is longer than any other place we have lived.  When we found this farm, we were super excited and got to work restoring an 1892 built farmhouse and building our legacy of farming. 
 
Surrounded by several generations of farmers, we moved into the “old Martin place” and started the process of learning how to farm this ground. We knew the ground had potential, we studied the soil maps and talked to farmers who had farmed it and gleaned stories about when to work it and when not to, and most importantly how it floods!
 
The reason we were able to buy this farm is because the Stillaguamish River frequently overruns its usual meandering path and covers the whole valley. Oh my, what a shock to actually experience the power of the Stillaguamish River. But it is the Stillaguamish River’s propensity to flood that has actually preserved farmland or else I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter.
 
But isn’t this the crux of the issue, we have a farm because the river demands us to share the land, otherwise it would look like a city! It is more though—our farmland is a community resource.  No farmland means no food and no food means no people.  We, as community, have a personal and collective interest in preserving our farmland.  More than food is produced on our farmland. There are other creatures that have their homes and lifestyles preserved because of the river and the farmland. I believe we need to switch from chemical farming and GMO farming to organic type farming. It will be better for our health and the health of our world.
 
From the beginning of civilization, farms and cities have coexisted in proximity and community. The Klesick Family Farm and you represent the future of farming and the future of good nutrient-rich food for future generations. Organic farmers and organic consumers are providing sanity to a system that is bankrupt, where farmers act more like miners robbing our soils of the nutrients we need to live.
Your weekly support of home delivery service impacts the future. Essentially, consumers of organic food today are preserving the healthy farmland for tomorrow (with the help of the Stillaguamish River, of course). 
 
And maybe, just maybe someone will look at my farm in a 100 years from now and pick up the soil and look at its tilth and smell its life and want to farm the “old Klesick place” and continue to feed their neighbors nutrient-rich food.
 
My goal is to raise nutrient-rich food and one day leave this farm more fertile and more friendly to all those who call this place home.
 
Farming “the Old Martin Place” with an eye towards the future,