My post from November 2012

What I am Learning: Continual Improvement

Original post: http://wp.me/p1frxx-29G

City Grown Seattle’s first “real” year in business included a lot of learning, adapting, and improving.  As the year nears its close, I am left thinking about the things we did well and the things we can adjust and further improve in 2013.

Starting up this year was a huge challenge.  It took a lot of time and mental and physical energy from all three of us running the business when everything was new and untested.  It’s incredible to think about how much easier it will be this coming winter when we don’t have to triple our land area and clear all that sod.  We don’t have to spend time designing and building infrastructure — our tiny greenhouse and collapsible bean trellis system will last at least another couple seasons.  We have established our basic markets, so we don’t have to deal with those nagging worries about whether folks will come to our farmstand or whether we will look ridiculous with only a tiny amount of produce at the farmers’ market.  Seemingly, all we have to do is order seed and plant, and we will be off and rolling on another successful season.

City Grown’s processing area being used for salad mix. Next year we are ready to graduate from the hand-spinning of mesh laundry bags full of greens.

But, of course, we want to do it  better next time around.  We want to be able to grow more produce, higher quality produce, and be able to pay ourselves better for our work next year.  We want to get more people involved on the farm and get more people eating our food.  We want to have food available earlier and later in the season,  and grow more of the things that sell well and earn us a high value per square foot.   This season is barely winding down and I’m already getting excited thinking about ways to push and challenge ourselves to do better next season.

There are plenty of things I know we can do better based on what we learned this year.  There were so many points in time throughout the summer that Noe or Scott and I would say to each other, “well, chalk that one up in the know-for-next-year column!”   I’m sure every farmer feels this way after every season — “If only I’d known back in April what I know now!”  But we will know it for next April.  Next year, we will plant three rows of carrots per bed instead of two.  Our method of planting salad mix will change too.  I’ll seed the fall cauliflower a couple weeks earlier, and churn out more lettuce successions closer together in the height of summer.   Our processing area could improve a lot with the acquisition of a certified scale and a salad spinner — things we will actually have the money to buy next year.

But those ideas are just the easy, obvious ones.  There are more that we can come up with by examining the planting, harvest and sales data that we did a pretty good job of collecting over the season.  Some number crunching will reveal which crops made us the most and least profit, and hopefully by combining that info with data about how long the plants were in the ground and how much space they took up, we can determine which crops to eliminate and which to grow more of for next year.  Of course some of these decisions could be made based on feel (we were there all season, we can guess who was a best seller and who took too much work to grow with measly return on investment) but I think it’s important to look at the hard numbers to back up our gut feelings.

Scott harvesting fall beets; lettuce and broccoli in the background. How can we plan for more yield out of each one of our beds next year?

And then even after we’re done with the math and the spreadsheets, I want to take some time with my farming partners to brainstorm for even more creative ideas.  It would be great if we could outreach to other urban or small-scale or SPIN farmers on this too.  Intercropping, making better use of vertical space, and who knows what other ideas are out there to be explored.  Any tiny improvements we can make could add up to big gains in efficiency and productivity.  When you’re running a market farm on 8 plots totalling a quarter acre, every little bit helps.

We are thankful for the weather we got this season.  While the rest of the country was suffering under drought, we actually got some relief from our standard too much rain.  It was far better overall than the past two years in which I’d done apprenticeships and seen farmers stress over the late spring cold and early fall rains.   It was warm and dry enough this year to ripen our tomatoes with no protective greenhouse, although I did go conservative based on the apprenticeship experiences and chose only varieties I felt fairly sure about.   We are also thankful for our amazing, supportive, Seattlite-locavore-foodie neighbors and friends who became our CSA members and regulars at our farmstand.  We recognize that we live in a spot where the “climate” can be said to favor our endeavor in multiple ways.  Through many bits of luck and our own hard work, we feel we had a successful enough first season to give it another go, and hopefully find plenty of room for improvement, next year.

Our end-of-the-season farmstand on Nov 3. Which of these crops will we grow again next year? Which will we change?

My post from October 2012

W­hat I Am Learning: Running a Business

Original post: http://wp.me/p1frxx-22z

 

We want to farm because we love it.  We are somehow energized by the work even though it is physically and mentally demanding.  There is something in our nature that is instinctually drawn to planting, tending, and harvesting.  But we also want to farm to make our living.  We don’t get paid by the hour – our earnings are a direct measure of the fruits of our labors, in the most literal possible way.  Last winter, the three of us had no illusions that City Grown’s first season was going to allow us to quit our day jobs or fund a European winter vacation.  But we wanted to farm as a business, not a non-profit educational or social-justice organization.  We like those organizations, just as we like the businesses that exist around Seattle which make money by maintaining peoples’ edible gardens.  But those niches have already been filled.  We wanted to be a production farm, implementing techniques that we’ve learned from “real” farmers, making money by selling at farmers’ markets.  We just wanted to do it in the city.

For this to make sense, we needed to think about our venture as a business and not just do it because it’s what we wanted to spend our time doing.  We knew that we may not make much money from it, especially not our first season.  But if a certain amount of profit is not a major goal and plan, our enthusiasm to commit many hours per week to the farm will soon run out.  We knew that we needed to come up with some numbers, be realistic, and understand at least a little of the dry business aspects as well as the “fun” (for us) farming aspects of this endeavor.

We took a fantastic class over the winter last year, called “Cultivating Success,” which is run by the Washington State University Extension service.  It covered a variety of aspects of agricultural entrepreneurship: writing a business plan, choosing the right type of business entity, various regulations, financial documents, record-keeping, and the like.  It was an invaluable class and it came at the perfect time for our budding business.

Over the course of the season, we’ve come a long way in developing various systems and routines for our farming operation.  Documentation has been a really important aspect: this coming winter we want to go back and evaluate things like the dollars-per-square-footage yields of each of our crops, and how well each of them sold over the course of our two markets.  The book that we used as a textbook for the Cultivating Success class, The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook by Richard Wiswall, helped us hone our documentation systems.  A class we took with Josh Volk of Slow Hand Farm in Portland was where we originally learned the concept of using Excel spreadsheets for crop planning and tracking.  We spent a lot of time in the early spring drawing up versions of his sheets to fit our own farm.  Maybe it is the inner nerd in me, but I find it pretty fun to document seeding dates, map successions in numbered beds, and record market sales using the different spreadsheets.  Finding time to do this stuff during July and August is another matter, but if the spreadsheet is created over the winter, it doesn’t usually take too much time to add a row of data each time I plant or get home from a market.

We hope to use these tools and our experience gained from running the farm in this first season to create a plan for an increasingly productive and efficient second season in 2013.  There were many start-up costs and once-only time expenditures that were hurdles in 2012 which we won’t have to jump again next year.  Our skills have also been built up and routines established that weren’t there at the beginning of this season.  I can’t think about too many details for next year quite yet – it feels a little too overwhelming as we are just starting to wind down from the summer.  We did get our garlic and cover crop seed purchased…. Just waiting to get some RAIN  before we plant those!… so the important first steps for 2013 have already been taken.  Other than that, for the next few months it will be good enough to have a general sense of excitement about continuing with City Grown next year.  And then when the time becomes right we will again be feeling ready to start the whole beautiful cycle over again, one more time.

My post from September 2012

What I Am Learning: Changing With the Seasons

Original post: http://www.youngfarmers.org/blog/2012/09/04/what-i-am-learning-changing-with-the-seasons/‎

With City Grown’s really small land area (1/4 acre total, spread among eight plots), we are able to grow enough produce to supply our two weekly markets, but just barely.  This leads to a different type of harvest procedure than I remember from the farms I interned on.  On a City Grown harvest day, we go out and get everything that’s ready.   We generally keep the plants very well harvested, because we have to in order to have enough to sell! There aren’t very many overripe tomatoes falling onto the ground or baseball-bat sized, got-away-from-us  zucchini.   However, the month of August brought our first crop that’s really too much to keep up with: beans!  We planted six 25-foot beds with pole beans in two different varieties.  For our tiny farm, this is a lot!  And during the last two weeks of August they came on hard and fast, producing a bounty of  gorgeous, delicious beans all at once.  Luckily, the beans hold over well in the fridge compared to other crops, so we can save them for the next market when we pick more than we can sell.  But they’re also pretty much impossible to keep fully picked the way we’ve been getting used to doing with our other crops.  It was kind of a revelation for Noe and me to be out in the field and realize that it would take all day for the two of us to thoroughly harvest the beans.   Wow!  Now this is what it was like on my internship farm, where our instructions were often to go out and get a certain amount of something or to harvest for a certain amount of time, not to completely clean the crop of all the ready fruits.

Noe and I decided to spend an hour on the beans and get what we could.  In that amount of time we were able to harvest plenty enough to sell.  There were still plenty of tiny baby beans indicating a plethora of fresh tender ones next time we came to pick.  The beans that we had to leave on the vine will get over-mature, but they can be saved for next year’s seed.  Maybe we can find time  in here to can some dilly beans, too.  So the upshot is that it is great to be able to harvest most of our crops thoroughly with very little wasted food.  But it is also great to be able to adapt our harvest strategy to fit the needs of each crop.

This adaptability to the requirements of the present moment is really what farming is all about.  This is far from being a job in which every day is the same old routine.  You are always changing and modifiying based on the season, the weather, pest pressures, available markets, and a million other factors.

Our tomato plot!

To take the beans for example again: This time of year, I go to pick beans twice a week.  I walk into the leafy, shady hallway created by the pole bean trellises to pick handfuls of succulent, slightly fuzzy purple pods to fill my harvest bin.  As I crunch on the flavorful fruits, I can sort of remember planting the seeds for these beans back in May.  I know that I must have watered them and watched for germination, but I’ve forgotten most of the details of those springtime days.  And back then when I planted, I didn’t really have a fully formed idea of what the beans would be like now.  I knew theoretically that they’d be ready for harvest in August, but I wasn’t visualizing the details of trellis building, climbing tendrils, and laden vines.  This is what farming does for me: it keeps me in the now, dealing with each day, week, and season as it presents itself.  I do have a general overview picture in my head about crop planning and such, but I also have to just keep showing up at each plot and looking around and having the plants tell me what they need from me today.

Transplanting fall broccoli with volunteer, Christian

I have to adapt my daily rituals to the seasons in a continual flow of gradual changes from April through October.   Certain crops can only be planted at one very specific time.  Others can be grown during a longer window, but they behave differently and need different care in the spring and fall versus the summer.  I rarely have to water seedlings for several months in the spring, but then in August it feels like I’m spending half my time with a hose in my hand.

I love to farm and I am grateful for the opportunity it gives me to spend my days outside, feeling the change of the seasons, watching and reacting to the behavior of the plants.  As the days now get noticeably shorter around here and the feel of fall enters the air, I don’t feel sad at the passing of summer.  I feel excited for the crispness of fall, apple cider pressings, and the natural slowing down of production that gives us overworked farmers a chance to rest.  I am already looking forward to a winter filled with seed ordering, new plot development, and a little more sleep.  And then we’ll be ready to start all over again!

A City-Grown CSA share in mid-August

My post from August 2012

What I am learning: Creativity

Origninal Post: http://www.youngfarmers.org/news/2012/08/07/what-i-am-learning-creativity/

July at City Grown Seattle has seen a huge explosion of growing and producing plants.  Looking back at photos from the beginning of the month, I was amazed at how things have changed:  Sunflowers now in bloom were just little sprouts at the end of June, and the beans currently reaching off the tops of their eight-foot trellis hadn’t even begun climbing 30 days ago.  I marvel at the plants’ vigor and appreciate that their health shows we’ve been tending them properly.

At the same time, though, the past few weeks have turned up more than a few crop shortages.  I have an increasing admiration for the farmers I’ve worked for in the past, who were able to keep various crops in constant supply by careful succession planning. As our City Grown season has progressed, more and more divergences from the original planting plan have occurred.  A single planting of head lettuce, for example, gave us only enough heads to last through three weeks of markets, instead of the four weeks we’d hoped for, and the following succession wasn’t ready as early as our paper plan had predicted.  This meant a disappointing two-week gap in our head lettuce.  Many customers were excited about our romaine and would be buying a head a week if we had it available for them, but it’s not the end of the world:  We still have salad mix with baby lettuces, and plenty of other veggie options.

That’s what’s been important for our market stand: having a wide variety.  We often get comments from shoppers that our display is the most diverse at the farmers’ market.  Because we can’t bring large quantities, it’s nice that we can set ourselves apart by bringing a little bit of a lot of things.  There are lots of veggies growing out in the fields, giving us plenty of items to bring to market, even some unexpected items.  We have been learning to make use of whatever is ready as we harvest each week, and a healthy mix of creativity and neglected plants has led to some fun farmstand additions.  Mustard greens, for example, were not in our planting plan.  Then a succession of spicy salad mix grew beyond its baby state when we didn’t have time to till it in during the spring rush.  The larger leaves were still lush and edible, so we got a couple weeks of extra harvest from the bed and had some nice looking–and unexpected–bunches of mustard greens to bulk up the market stand display.  And people loved them!  Harvesting and marketing whatever is growing well, instead of trying to stick to an exact pre-planned harvest goal, is teaching us a lot about consumer tastes.  Why do people love radishes and parsley so much?  I don’t know, but it’s lucky they do. We had a lot of them this spring.

Creativity has also necessary in planning our space use.  I spend a lot of mental energy deciding what to plant where, and when.  I am getting to know all the little quirks of each of our eight plots.  Jon and Katie’s yard has the sandiest soil and needs more frequent watering, so it’s best not to sow seeds there in the summertime. Use transplanted crops instead. The Bonds’ place has a lot of snail and slug pests, so we put tomatoes there instead of lettuce.  Half of Bryan’s place is quite a bit shadier than the rest, so how do we use that to our advantage?  It’s like fitting together puzzle pieces.  Or more like playing chess, really, because there is a time dimension involved too:  If I seed these brassicas in the greenhouse now, which beds will be available in a month when they’re ready to be transplanted?  What should we plan to put in after the peas?  How long can we keep harvesting a single planting of kale?  I know that, over time, many of these things will become second-nature to me.  I could tell by watching my mentors during my apprenticeships that they were doing many things based on feel and experience that they couldn’t fully explain.  It is exciting to realize how much my own intuition has grown over just a few months of running my own farm, and I am already very much looking forward to next season.

We made our first restaurant connection this month, with a fantastic vegan restaurant and yoga studio in our neighborhood.  The chef bought a couple things from us at the farmers’ market, then we exchanged contact information and he has called us a couple times to order more.  He came and picked up the veggies from our plot, which is about five minutes away from his restaurant, and we are already discussing growing some crops specifically for him next season.  This immediate proximity is what sets our farm apart.  We may not have much growing space, but we have enough, and it’s right here.  We travel only 10 minutes to and from the farmers’ market where we sell.  One of us can quickly go harvest extra and bring it to the market if we run low on something.  On Saturdays, when we open up our farmstand, we wake up, walk out the back door, process vegetables, and then set up our tent in our front yard to wait for our neighbors to come to us to buy food.  Sure, we could grow more and make more money if we had more land.  But our expenses are few and the degree of success that we’ve been having with City Grown so far makes me very excited about the possibilities of urban farming as a viable commercial farming model.  I hope to continue expanding and improving our business, becoming more creative, efficient, and involved in our community as we go.

 

Catching up with blog posts from the past year: July!

2012 was such a busy year!   I would have loved to blog more during City Grown’s first season, but as it was I barely had time to fulfill my commitment to the National Young Farmers Coalition as a “bootstraps blogger” with once-a-month posts on their site.  I didn’t take the time to copy them over to here, my personal play space.  Now that it’s winter and I’ve got nothing but time, I’m enjoying re-reading them as I copy them over.  Here they are, starting with what I wrote in July 2012.

Original post here: http://www.youngfarmers.org/blog/2012/07/04/what-i-am-learning-interdependence/

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Becky selling City Grown veggies at our neighborhood farmers’ market

“What I am Learning: Interdependence”

I think anyone who knows me would agree with me here: I am a bit of a control freak. I try to keep it in check, but the tendency is there to want to do everything all by myself to make sure that it’s done “right.”

As it turns out, this can be troublesome when one is starting a business with two partners! It also tends to be a problem when trying to farm, an occupation that comes with an overwhelming amount of work on even the smallest scale.

This year–my first season of working for myself–I have been even more focused than usual on knowing every detail of everything going on with the farm. Noe and Scott, my dear, dear business partners, have been wonderfully accepting of my throwing myself into the venture so wholeheartedly. But they might secretly be a teensy bit sick of my micromanagement at times!

Noe harvesting chard

Scott and Noe started City Grown last season, but the nature of their other jobs meant that they had very limited time to devote to it last year. The idea this season was that I would join with a larger time commitment than either of them, and, as a trio, we would be able to be the equivalent of one full-time farmer. Because I am devoting so much more time, I have taken on more responsibility than I might otherwise have done as a newcomer. I am grateful that my business partners have been willing for me to come in and make changes and take the reins so quickly, but I need to remember that we three are all equal partners.

I have been frustrated with myself for trying to take too much control. Until recently, however, it seemed too hard to let go. I wanted this business to succeed with every fiber of my being. Of course I was going to be constantly thinking about it and trying to plan every detail.

But now that harvest season is really ramping up around here, there is suddenly too little time for me to have a finger in every pie. With two harvest days and two market days every week on top of all the seeding, transplanting, watering, and weeding that still needs to get done, the scope of the work is certainly well beyond what can be accomplished by the two hands of one person.

Scott top-tying the growing tomato plants

I know from my apprenticeship experiences that a farm organism can be a wonderfully collaborative, synergistic thing, with many pieces and parts coming together, tasks getting done by different people, and responsibilities divided up and independently taken care of. I am finally being forced to put myself into a different role within this organism. I am no longer a recipient of instructions from a boss like when I was an intern. Now I am a decision-maker and implementer, but I am not the only one. My new role has to be that of one participant in this whole organism, and one of the directors of the other participants. I can direct the flow of the farm without actually being there to do all the work myself. City Grown was the beneficiary of a much-needed “crop mob” work party a couple weeks ago, organized by our Washington Young Farmers’ Coalition. We are extremely grateful for the transformation of one of our farm plots, brought by the magic of many hands making light work. Organizing and directing that work party was a chance for me to step back and understand that I have to trust others to help me make this farm all it can be.

Now that I have made a conscious effort to I let go of some of my anxiety around farming details, it seems help is showing up from all corners to assist us. The work party was great, and City Grown will also take on our first work-trade volunteer, now that we actually have plenty of vegetables to trade for her work! During this past week alone a few spontaneous happenings helped lighten my workload: One of my best farmer friends dropped by for a fun hour of pruning tomato plants with me, I roped (pun intended) my boyfriend into hanging pole bean string with me, and Noe changed up her usual routine to work a farmers’ market so I could take an afternoon off.

The month of June has been great: full of hard work and wonderful successes for City Grown. To fully appreciate these moments as they flow by, I am learning to relax a bit in my need for control and instead allow myself to nurture and grow all the interdependent people and pieces that will continue to come together to make it happen.

A gang of awesome volunteers helped us with a work party to build our bean trellises

One more post about bikes

I’ll get back to writing about farming soon, I promise!  Just a little update on the biking scene because the Alleycat Acres fundraising ride was last weekend.

Thanks to all your generous donations, I raised $350 to contribute to the cause.  Alleycat Acres was aiming for $6K and I think they beat $10K but I’m still waiting to find out the grand total.  Thank you again for your contributions and for designing my outfit!  It was pretty damn awesome!  Click the pic below to see my set of pictures on Flickr:

Click the pic for the flickr set

I had fun putting the costume together.  The top vote-getters from contributers were pink tutu and “vegetable theme,” so I did those plus handlebar streamers and bright blue arm warmers.   The specific ideas for the vegetable theme both came from friends’ suggestions: one was fleece carrot legwarmers that Sara Covich (pictured above) helped me sew up the week before the ride.  The other was a snackable veggie necklace made out of carrots, radishes, and jalapeño peppers strung on dental floss around my neck!  I took bites out of  the carrots while I was riding, and a couple brave souls nibbled a jalapeño at different points during the day.

It was a gorgeous day for the ride.  It is just starting to really feel like spring around here, and everybody was excited and energized by the weather as we started out in the morning.  The lake loop is a popular ride for all kinds of cyclists, so I got plenty of stares and smiles from riders who were not part of our group as I rolled around in my ridiculous getup.  It was great because when people asked me what the deal was, I was able to explain about the ride and the farm.

There were over 100 riders participating so I got to meet some great new people.  Alleycat Acres really did it right: they had several rest stops organized for us with food and water; they fed us chili and cornbread and beer after the ride; they had support cars with bike racks and tools around the route for those of us who needed mechanical support 🙂  I am excited to see Alleycat run with it this season – they are a dedicated group of organizers and they inspire a lot of volunteer effort.  I think they will be able to make a big positive impact!

The ride itself was a great challenge.  I’m pretty pleased that this winter I’ve been getting into such good biking shape via my commute to work and riding to after-work activities and doing some longer rides on the weekends.  But it turns out that a big event like this is needed to make me really push myself.   In fact I did two big (for me) bike rides 6 days apart.  Sunday Feb 27 was a 33-mile ***hills*** ride on Bainbridge.  Then the 60-mile Lake Washington loop Alleycat ride was on Saturday March 4.  During both of those rides, I hit a point where I felt like I legitimately couldn’t do it.  I really, really, really wanted to stop — I was exhausted and/or in pain and it just wasn’t fun right then.  This feeling generally comes from hills, although on Bainbridge the weather also played a role.  I know that if I had been out for a ride by myself at these times, I wouldn’t have pushed myself this hard.  I would have let myself wimp out before hitting that level of intensity.  But when you’re with a group on an organized ride, an element of peer pressure comes in.  You *have* to put mind over matter and just do it, keep going, finish it.  And then when you do, you feel great.  Like banging your head against a wall, right?  It feels so good when you stop?  You can only get that euphoric sense of accomplishment when you’ve had to overcome something difficult.  If it were easy, it wouldn’t be noteworthy.

I used to have a fortune-cookie fortune that I taped to my computer monitor at work: “Any accomplishment worth achieving at first seems impossible.”   I put it there because I used to routinely get anxious when given a work assignment that I didn’t immediately know how to attack.  I would get down on myself for “not being a real computer nerd” and doubt my ability to even ask questions about the assignment that wouldn’t give away my perceived lack of knowledge.  Of course I could always accomplish these tasks by doing the right research, asking the right questions, and using what I already knew about programming to learn the new pieces required for that specific task.  And then when I finished it, it would feel good!   I held onto the fortune in an attempt to remind myself of the afterward feeling when going into something new, to remind myself to approach it with confidence instead of anxiety.  Eventually it started working a bit.  And it turns out the statement is just as true for physical achievement, which is an arena in which I have always been fairly awful, but am now getting better at due to biking.

Yay bikes!  Yay self-confidence!  That’s the main point.  Next topics I plan to write about include more on canning & preserving, as well as seed-saving and who knows what else will come up as I start at the new farm in a just a few weeks.  Thanks for reading!

~ B

 

Sponsor my ride! Admire my attire!

If you read my last post, you know that I’m planning on riding the Alleycat Acres fundraising bike ride in March.  Since we are now just over a month away, I better get moving on the fundraising part.

So, here goes!!

I figure if you give me money, you ought to get a little something in return.  So to show that I am willing to go the extra mile to encourage donations, I am hereby open-sourcing (whoring out?) my outfit for the ride.

This means that you may vote for/suggest what I will wear! Any kind of adornment for myself or my bicycle.  This outfit will ride 60 miles around Lake Washington and potentially get its picture in all kinds of publicity for Alleycat Acres.

I will wear as many as possible of the suggested items, with priority going to the votes of the biggest contributors and the items with the highest overall vote-counts.  I may have to use my discretion due to weight of objects or propriety (I reserve the right *not* to ride in only body paint, even if that gets the most votes!)

This is a two step process:  First, you get to vote!  I have come up with a couple of options to start the voting, but I’m sure you are more creative… Please do submit your own option under “other” and I will add it to the voting list.

Step two: after you select your vote, back it up with some moola.  Tell me via the drop-down on the voting page how much your outfit suggestion is worth.  Once you submit your vote, you will see a link to a PayPal form.  Go to PayPal and use your little plastic money machine to make it happen.  If you want to pay me by cash or check instead, so much the better… drop me an email at rwarner2-at-gmail-dot-com.  I will cover the PayPal fees, so either way 100% of your donation goes straight to Alleycat Acres.

THANK YOU!!!  Let the games begin!

Start here: Voting Form

Step two: PayPal Form

Shifting gears.

Critical mass June 2010

Question:  What is to driving a car as farming is to working in a cubicle?

What mode of transportation gets you out into the open air and makes you feel connected to the world the way growing your own food does?   If by farming you create your own sustenance, what allows you to create your own propulsion?

Answer: Why, bicycling, of course.  Cycling: the use of bicycles for transport, recreation, or sport.

My bike at my farm, Fall 2010

 

I have newfound loves for both farming and biking.  So of course anything that purports to combine the two intrigues me.  Last winter I found out about Alleycat Acres: a brand new Seattle urban farm.   They are run by volunteers, the food they grow gets donated to food banks, and they deliver their produce by bike.  Ding ding ding!  Yes, sign me up to support you.   I volunteered for a couple work parties in the early spring but then I had to head off to Bainbridge.   I kept tabs on the group though, via their oft-updated Facebook, and it sounded like they had a great season and got a lot of press.

This winter, Alleycat is recruiting participants for a big bike ride/fundraiser.  “Ride Hard, Grow Forth.” How could I say no?  The 60-mile loop around Lake Washington will be the longest distance I’ve ever done (probably farthest to date was about 42 miles and they were much flatter).  Each participant has to raise at least 60 bucks, but I would like to come up with  a good deal more for them.  I hate asking people for money – it was a little easier back in the day when I was a cute little Girl Scout peddling cookies door to door, but not much – so I’m working on coming up with a creative idea for accumulating donations.   Get ready, the request is coming… when I start asking you all for $$money$$,  give me some money!!  It will be going to a great cause and doing the ride will also be a big achievement for me personally/physically.

My biking history is fairly unexceptional.  I must have biked some as a kid, but my first real bike here in Seattle was a Marin hybrid, complete with kickstand and cushy seat, purchased new from Recycled Cycles.  (Much of the previous sentence will be deciphered by the bike-literate as NEWBIE ALERT!)  It is awesome when I think about the fact that it really has not been long since I first tentatively rode the Marin back and forth from my home on Dexter to my work @ the software job… also on Dexter.  Read, less than 1 mile, no turns or traffic signals.

I didn’t think I would become “a cyclist.”  But lo and behold, I got hooked.  I started making bikey friends and taking bikey trips.  I got a Seattle bike map and I bought my awesome purple steel-frame road bike on Craigslist.  I learned how to do a bit of basic maintenance/repair. (Someday I will know enough to build up my own bike from parts).   These days, my car is feeling left out becuase I bike everywhere.  I ride in traffic, I ride in the rain, I ride at night – and, since it is Seattle after all, quite often I ride in all three.  Of course I do what I can to be safe (helmet, lights, obeying most traffic laws) but part of the thrill of being out there riding is that you’re out there, in the world, and you never know what’s going to happen.  I love getting familiar with new little parts of the city and figuring out efficient routes between the places I frequent.  I love the exhilarating feeling of the wind in my face and the balance of the bike beneath me.  I love the sense of accomplishment at cresting a tough hill and coasting down the other side.  I love it when that same hill doesn’t seem quite as intimidating the next time I approach it.

While I bike around, I amuse myself by observing other cyclists and categorizing the “types” (strong-jawed, clean-shaven middle-aged man in full spandex with really expensive bicycle; scruffy young helmetless hipster boy with U-Lock in back pocket, possibly smoking a cigarette while riding his fixed gear; eccentric older fellow reclining in his recumbent with an orange flag on a stick).  I enjoy it when I see someone who doesn’t fit any type (the fellow wearing khakis tucked into tall rubber boots who said “HI!” cheerily as he passed me this morning;  a lady in a skirt pulling a trailer with her two-year-old and her groceries).

Speaking of ladies, there is somewhat of an issue around cycling being a bit male-dominated, literature has been written on the subject, and it’s true I do see fewer bikers of the female variety around about town.  But there are plenty of us out there.  I watch for the women who have mastered the art of girl biker style and achieved the “simultaneously cute and burly” persona.  If you’re truly riding to get around, you need functional attire, and the bright yellow rain gear and SPD cleats tend to stand out in other environments (at the office, at a dance club).  Let’s face it, I want to look spunky and feminine while also projecting, “watch me beat your ass to the top of that hill” and “I can fix my own flat tire, thank you very much.”

In conclusion.  One attitude toward life is to look for every possible way to make life easier and more comfortable.  The opposite approach is to embrace the motto that “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and continually seek out changes and challenges.  I discovered that a life of sitting in my car to sitting at a desk to sitting in my car to sitting at home in front of a TV was relatively easy, but felt scarily stagnant and disconnected.   It turns out that I feel better when I’m using my body and mind for things like farming and biking.  I didn’t discover these things immediately.  In both cases there was a lot of hesitancy, questions, a learning curve.   A point where it seemed too difficult.  But even baby steps will get you there.  Seek out what it is that makes you feel alive.

Oh, and support my ride for Alleycat Acres!  As soon as I get a “donate widget” put together I’ll post it here.  Thanks for reading!

~ B

Riding bikes often makes me feel like this

 

A visit to StartNow Gardens.

Bremerton, WA.

The house next door:

Bremerton: The house next door to Jean and Glenn's.

Jean and Glenn’s house:

Betsey, Renee, and Erin observe the front yard with Jean. Zucchini, peppers, eggplant, lettuce.

Betsey took us on an awesome field trip a couple weeks ago, to visit StartNow Gardens in Bremerton.  This is an urban farm built since 2003 by an amazing couple named Jean and Glenn.  They have taken two city lots (they own two houses next door to each other, live in one and rent out the other) and transformed the space from boring yard into blooming farm.  A composting system, fruit trees, berry bushes, raised beds, tomatoes in pots, an abundance of beautiful vegetables.  Solar panels.  A walk-in cooler powered by a window air conditioning unit.  Three levels of rooftop garden connected by wooden catwalks.  Everything meticulously maintained and every inch of space seemingly used.

Glenn by the greenhouses, salad bed, and herb bed in the front yard

The pictures speak for themselves.  Farming is possible in the city.  Imagine how much food could come out of Seattle if every neighborhood had a farm like this.  Alternatively, imagine if every family had a single raised bed in their yard that made up a distributed, shared farm.

Fruit trees, strawberries, and solar panels on the multi-level rooftop garden

Jean and Glenn sell their produce, and soups they make from their produce, through a tiny, new, grocery store in Bremerton called FreshLocal.  They have a secure market for their food as long as the store can stay in business.   What do the Seattle city regulations have to say about growing food for sale on a residential lawn?  What if you could feed yourself and make money from your little front yard garden?

Parking strip full of kale

I was definitely inspired by the visit and by seeing Jean and Glenn’s commitment to making a difference in their own corner of the world.   Makes me want to go out and follow suit.  Starting Now.

More pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rwarner2/StartnowGardens#

"This is super cool!" Me and Betsey with Glenn and Jean on the roof

In the news

An article with pictures from our Memorial Day veggie garden planting at City Hall… Includes pics of Brian and Betsey and me.
http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2010/may/31/bainbridge-island/

Lovely article about our “grandfather” farmer Akio who was recently honored with an award. Akio grew up in the house I’m living in on the farm.
http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/kitsap/bir/lifestyle/93729204.html

We are keeping busy, planting and harvesting despite the crazy cold and rainy weather. It does not feel like June! We had one sunny afternoon/evening yesterday, which we celebrated with a bonfire and drinking wine outside. Yay! New vegetables are coming on: romanesco, zucchini, collards. Garlic scapes are ready for harvest. First early potatoes will be for sale in a couple weeks. The baby animals are getting bigger — Brian’s chickens, whom I first met in January when they were 3 days old, are now getting their egg-laying skills figured out. The eggs are still small and often double-yolked, I’m not sure why. Eventually, out of our 50 layers we expect to be getting at least 20 to 25 dozen eggs a week.

We got to take a field trip to Sequim last week to spend a day driving horses with Betsey’s horse mentor, John Erskine. Pics of that coming soon!