Struggles at the Genuine Faux Farm

I was looking forward to the 2023 season at the Genuine Faux Farm - no, really, I was.

This was supposed to be the season that we would be given the opportunity to figure out what we could reasonably do on the farm given our "new realities."  I realize these new realities are not so new anymore since I recently celebrated my third anniversary of taking employment with the Pesticide Action Network.

Those of you who read this blog do not also live my life, so it might help to recap so you can have a hope of understanding what I am trying to say here.  When I took the PAN job in April of 2020, Tammy and I knew it would require that we change the scale of our farming operation.  We were going to go from having me full-time, Tammy part-time and other workers during the summer to just the two of us part-time.  The number of available labor hours was going to be a tiny fraction of what it had been.

Needless to say, that year was a year of transitions as we did our best to figure it all out. It didn't help that the pandemic was adding extra limitations to what we could do and how we could do those things.  We really did NOT expect that the 2020 farming year would be a banner year and we were ready to struggle with some disappointment and changes to our expectations.

The next year was, actually, a bit worse because of my kidney cancer diagnosis and the removal of that kidney in late April of 2021.  More transitions.  More struggles to figure out what was possible and what was reasonable to expect for production at the Genuine Faux Farm.  Then, 2022 came along and it was Tammy's turn to deal with a major surgery - having to have an Achilles tendon reattached in the late Spring.  

In short, we really did not have much of a chance to figure things out either of those two years because we were simply working to get through recovery processes and return to health.

Our stamina for farm work is already much less than it was and our responsibilities for each of our off-farm jobs have grown over the past three years.  Already, the stage was set that we (mostly I) needed to adjust our expectations yet again.  But still, I was looking forward to an opportunity to not ALSO be going through the hard work of recovery at the same time.

Well, guess what?  It turns our that our assessment that the Covid-19 virus would be a bad thing for small-scale, diversified farmers to contract was correct.  Unlike other colds and illnesses, we couldn't just work through it.  And while we are recovering, we still struggle with stamina.  It set us back when we were ill and it isn't letting us catch up after we are supposedly "done with it."

So, here we are in 2023 trying to deal with disappointment that so few things have been done and we're trying to figure out what we can catch up with and what we have to let go.  

The good news is that we did get the onion plants in the ground and the drip lines are set.  This year, we decided to go with single rows so that we can use some different cultivation methods.  So, we have a success.  Here's hoping we can build off of this one so we can get others to go.  The problem is, we usually only have enough in us to accomplish one of these things a day - at a time when we need to be completing a dozen or so of them during each rotation of the Earth.

But that's the way it is and we'll adjust - because that's what we do.  I wonder what I'll see when I look back on the season in November? 

I suspect there will be an onion crop somewhere in there.