and woodstove-huddled, we must look deeper to find winter’s gifts of solitude and rest while we yearn for warmer times. In the last, lingering rays of the solstice sun descending over the blue shadowed foothills of the Rockies, the long snowstice shadows throw a mantle of stillness over the land, as if the world has slowed for a time, like the solstice sun stuck in its rise and set until the earth’s insistent circling sets it free again.
In early spring, flats of seeds germinate quickly in the warm greenhouse.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
—Lao Tzu
The first workday with the bartering crew at Stonebridge Farm falls in early spring with snow almost invariably on the ground. But this year the day is uncharacteristically sunny, although the mountains had threatened to send snow our way the day before. We need moisture, but the warmth is welcome too on this first day as we set the new farm season in motion. Here we are again, ready to make soil and plant seeds and clean the winter-deadened debris from the land.
Before we get to work, we gather around the woodstove in the Sunflower Community Room with cups of tea and coffee, saying hello after a winter’s absence and sharing stories after four months of Saturdays not spent in the garden together. Sometimes a new baby, new job, travel overseas, or, sadly, the death of a loved one, have brought us to an altered phase of our lives, yet the farm and its cycles of care mark a continuity for all of us. Because Stonebridge is a community supported agricultural farm, we like to say we emphasize the “C” in “CSA” since the work we do here is as much about people as produce.
Spring at Stonebridge wasn’t always such a joyous return. In earlier years of the CSA, the fall fields were often left unturned and no cover crops were sown to prepare the soil for the next spring’s planting, as if the farmers had thrown down their tools one autumn day and wandered off for warmer climates. In those earlier times, before the barterers provided stability for the farm, the strain of finishing the season was so great, no one could imagine doing it again just a few months later. With full-time jobs outside of the farm, John and I couldn’t do all the work ourselves after the partners we’d had along the way left for jobs or farms of their own. We knew that we wanted to keep the community focus of Stonebridge, rather than market our produce off the farm, so we turned to that community for help.
In 2000, John and I initiated a bartering structure at Stonebridge that asked a handful of members to exchange farm work for their seasonal share of vegetables. We had read about bartering at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts, the first CSA in the United States, and it seemed to us the perfect way to build the social structure of the farm. To our surprise and delight, some exceptional people took us up on the offer and the bartering crew began. The barterers work four hours a week for eight months a year, from March through October, in exchange for their share of vegetables, starting two months before the official CSA season begins. Now a community has formed around the work, and, come mid-March, everyone is excited to farm together once more.
Hands and hearts warmed by fire and friends, we turn to the morning’s tasks. After we list the possibilities—some folks can do this, other folks can do that—one seven-year-old “barterer” adds, “And some people can climb the big tree over the ditch!” Chores chosen, we finish our last sips of coffee and head out in groups to begin the new season’s work of waking up the farm in the spring sunshine.
With the bright white peaks of the mountains to the west reassuring us that we will again have water to irrigate the fields, some of us set up a seed-starting assembly line in the cozy greenhouse. While Sarah, Andy, Mike, and Jenny make the mixture we use for starts by combining peat, sand, compost, and soil dug from the fields, Jay, Michelle, and Joe make blocks with a tool that compresses the moistened mix into four cubes that look like chocolate brownies with dimples on top to hold the seed. Last but not least in our assembly line, Julie, Eva, and Deirdre drop and cover the seeds in the dimples of the newly blocked flats.
Since we’ve already seeded the alliums in February, the earliest plants for the bartering crew to start each spring are the brassicas: cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, and cabbages. As we work, we can’t help but sing a line from our friend Coyote Joe’s song, “The Things You Do”: Kohlrabi just tastes a little bit funny. And it is funny-looking, like a round spaceship with antennaed leaves sprouting from its dome. Together, we fill 38 flats with 50 blocks per flat: 1900 new plants that will be transplanted when the weather warms. Before too many weeks have passed, flats will fill every nook and cranny, shelf and ledge, of the entire greenhouse. With our hands in the soil, we gain a first work morning’s satisfaction of creating nice, neat rows of starts that will provide food for us later in the season.
While some barterers get seeds started in the greenhouse, others work outside in the spring air. The “Garlic Apostles”—Peter, Paul, and Timothy—took a vow years ago to keep the garlic beds weed-free, so this first day they pull the hay mulch back from the shoots to open the field to sun and assess the garlic’s growth since planting it last fall. It’s a little slow to emerge this year after such a cold winter, the green tips just starting to poke through the soil. Some of the soft-necked bulbs will be harvested in early June for green garlic, while the hard-necked varieties will send up curly scapes, thick middle shoots that carry the plants’ seed heads, which we’ll harvest in mid-June.
Scapes are one of the farm’s surprises: we didn’t figure out for many years that they can be pulled from the center of the plant and used in recipes instead of garlic cloves. Equally important, after the scape is removed, the plant then puts energy into larger bulbs below rather than into flowers at the tip of the scape’s curl. The barterers love to harvest the scapes as they compete to pull the longest scape straight out of the stalk with a pop before it breaks off. While the children make scape bracelets by curling them around their wrists, the adults cry, “Look at this one!” when they harvest one they think is the longest. Scapes are an extra gift from an already generous plant—we pick hundreds of them each June.
While some barterers have adopted the garlic, others have embraced the raspberries, which need yearly attention in our perennially grassy plots. Headed by Jan, our raspberry expert, the raspberry crew not only weeds, but prunes the old canes in anticipation of summer fruit. On that first cool spring day, in gloves and coats, Lisa, Emily, and Lindsay make another valiant attempt to clear the plot of the rhizome grass whose roots crisscross the entire farm.
March in Colorado is still intermittently winter; we get our heaviest snows this month, sometimes even into April. A spring snow is wetter than a snow in December or January; it’s the snow that ensures the mountains’ snowpack and readies our soil for the season. Our first gathering in March is usually snowy, but if the ground is clear of snow, some folks spend the morning raking the ubiquitous sticks scattered across the farm by winter winds. With three irrigation ditches running through our land, Stonebridge is thick in towering willows and cottonwoods that grow along the banks. Kunga and the two Amys fill wheelbarrows full of sticks to dump on the burn pile for a spring bonfire, and as they rake, they find new green grass stretching its blades toward the sun.
Before we know it, noon arrives and the first bartering day is done. We’ve achieved much this spring morning: flats of seeds will soon germinate in the warm greenhouse, garlic and raspberry beds are ready for new growth, and the farm has been tidied for another season. More planting, weeding, and watering must be done if we want fresh vegetables this season, but together, the work will be accomplished. Today we have found again the rhythm of the farm, a rhythm that does not hurry but reminds us why we do what we do here at Stonebridge.
In
