After deciding to leave Rattle's Garden after one month I was spending the weekend in Conway seeing friends. Madeleine accidentally came to visit. She is a great friend, we lived together in the eco-house last year and it's is totally true to form that she would leave her farming internship a weekend early to meet her parents in Memphis for 4th of July plans. Realizing she was a week ahead of schedule she just decided to take the opportunity and visit Conway for the weekend.
So Madeleine's explaining the farm that she works on: they never till the soil, they have grass between the rows, there are six interns that only work six hours a day, three days a week, and the head intern lives in a yurt. It sounds kind of like a fantasy make-believe world. So I decided on the spot to go up to this farm with Madeleine. I had to scoundrel out of three days of work at Rattles garden and also dinner plans with Britt Murphy which hurt, but it was worth it to see Foundation Farm. By the way, Britt is the librarian at Hendrix, my link to Hendrix while I am traveling and studying food. She helped me all along the way to this fellowship and I really hated to cancel dinner plans with her family.
Madeleine and I drove out to Rattles Garden on Sunday morning and packed all my crap into her car, then we headed north to Eureka Springs and this no-till organic farm. This sight greeted me upon our arrival:
It was only when I beheld this kitchen/veggie-washing station/cold-room/greenhouse/classroom that I realized I had been suffering a lack of clutter. To me, an 'in-use' looking sort of place like this really says "make yourself at home". (Potential wwoof hosts, please know that I can keep space neat too). After we walked around the farm, it was time to make dinner so we ate this:
Greens from the farm and white pumpkin that launched out of the compost piles at the Hendrix garden. I met Andrew (the arm) and learned that he had been on the farm for over a year and he had built his yurt from scratch. He went to a lumber mill and picked out the cherry trunk that the wall lattice is now fashioned from. I liked Andrew a lot. That evening a really windy thunderstorm blew Madeleine's tent to pieces so I we all slept in the yurt that night... we still had to carefully pick out the dry spots in there though.
Monday is a work day so I got to see what 6 interns could do before lunch. I also got to
meet Patrice, the owner of the farm. He's from France, made his money in finance or computer
s or something and now he spends his time doing things like spearheading the creation of the farmer's market in Eureka Springs, getting the local highschool to build a full kitchen and offer cooking classes in which students prepare lunch for the school from fresh ingredients, and working with the local time bank (You need to learn about this NOW! http://www.timebanks.org/). Patrice is a really cool guy. He is saving the world. He was telling me that he tries so hard to teach people how to appreciate real food, but the showing at the farmer's market has plateaued, some people get it and others don't want to it seems. So he was saying that he is getting tired and sometimes he wants to just give up and move back to France. Just above, that's him mowing the grass in front of the hoop-house. On work days he zips around mowing and checking on teams of two and three toiling on their different tasks. One moment really draws Patrice well: Madeleine and I are harvesting yellow waxbeans and Patrice comes up a neighboring row of fennel "Now this I love." We look to see what he's on about. "This cucumber, I did not even plant it here, it is like the umbrella and the fennel, they are like the people on the beach, they like to be near the umbrella so they do not get burned"..."Next year we will have to do fennel and cucumber together because this is beautiful... I love this"
Lunch was a pretty joyous affair. Something about cramming too many people around a
table that's not quite big enough is a nice feeling. I think it reminds me of shabbat at the eco-house. We ate tons of greens out of the garden that day and laughed a lot.
After lunch on Mondays it's class time. Patrice's interns are also students, they have about an hour of class a week during the whole March to October term that they commit to. After the work and class sessions they are supposed to understand every facet of the operation. The day I was there Patrice explained the chart he uses to record and compare the planned cropping to the actual dates of planting and harvest. It is a good system but looks like gibberish in a grid if you don't know how to read it. I wish I had a picture of the big white board by the sink that was the running log for that season.
Alright, I'm finally going to tell you how this crazy notion of no-till works (and believe it or not, it does). The key is straw mulch, tons of it. They pile the mulch on the beds like crazy, there's no such thing as too much unless the plants are getting covered. Look at the very first
picture to see us dumping bale after bale of straw on that row that's been lying fallow. All this stuff decomposes and the bugs create
networks of tunnels through the soil this is an important part of "soil structure." When it's time to plant you rake the mulch aside, sprinkle some fishmeal on the soil and plant starters (lettuce in this case) If the plants need wider spacing you just move the mulch aside where the plant will go. The soil was amazing, it was obviously one piece, not friable because it is sandy or recently tilled, but friable because it was full of organic matter and riddled with all different sizes of tunnels and decomposed roots. When you prepare a spot to put a transplant, you don't dig a hole, you just slide the spade into the ground upside down. That creates some chunks that the seedling can nestle between without turing the soil into tiny pieces that would compact together. Weeds come out easily and are thrown into the center of rows on top of the mulch so as to become mulch themselves and in time their nutrition goes into the ground. Why the grass? Doesn't it invade the beds constantly? Patrice says "why walk on mud?" But more than that the grass holds the soil (prevents erosion), creates habitat for beneficial beetles and other bugs, and when it is mowed it gets sprayed onto the beds for a little nitrogen boost. It actually invades the beds less that the stray wheat sprout whose seed did not get threshed off the straw.
The bottom line of this farm is this: half an acre of bed space is farmed by six interns paid 100 dollars a month for eight months and the gross sales last year was $50,000. The only farm machinery is a lawn mower. Britt, we'll have dinner one day, but thins time I'm glad I seized my chance to see this farm.
