Full Court Press

Last Saturday we woke up the first serious frost of the fall. While it's gorgeous looking at how the ice crystals refract the low-angled morning sunlight into a kaleidoscope of rainbows off the grass, frost is a major event on the farm. It kills the sweet potatoes, basil, and hot peppers outright, and threatens the sorghum. The frost last Saturday meant all hands on deck.

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At Sandhill Farm we make up to a third of our income from the sale of organic food, and sorghum syrup—a traditional specialty crop in the Midwest and South—is a whopping three-quarters of that. While it varies from year to year when the sorghum is ready, it generally falls in the three weeks from fall equinox to mid-October. Often enough, the first frost of the season also falls in that date range and it's a dance letting the crop fully mature (maximizing the yield of sweet syrup) versus getting it all harvested before it's frost damaged.

Fortunately, sorghum can take a mild frost without damage, and it general takes temperatures of 28 degrees or lower to be a problem. The first frost is rarely lower than about 30 degrees, in part because of all the leaves—still green because there hasn't been a frost yet—that will give up heat as they freeze. With sweet sorghum the critical part of the plant is the stalk, because it's the juice inside that we'll boil down to make the syrup. If it gets cold enough to freeze the stalk, the cell walls will burst and the juice will rapidly sour once it's exposed to oxygen in the ensuing thaw. The warmer the weather after the frost, the quicker the juice will spoil. 

Thus, when our farm crew suspected stalk damage Saturday morning, it was a race to get as much of the crop processed as possible before the juice soured. What had heretofore been an orderly, isn't-it-a-lovely-fall-look-at-those-beautiful-colors harvest season suddenly turned urgent. 

As it happened, last weekend was also the 15th anniversary for our neighboring community, Dancing Rabbit [see my Oct 6 blog, Not Quite Old Enough to Drive], and they had 50+ friends from out of town visiting for the celebration. Thus, when we put out the call for help, our cup ranneth over. At one point Saturday afternoon, we must have had 40 people in the field, many of whom barely knew which end of a machete to hold. Not having knives for everyone (to cut the cane), we taught some of the temporary campesinos how to dehead by hand (snapping the cane at a nodal point up near the top of the stalk), and others how to strip the leaves. In all, we were able to keep everyone busy and in just four hours this friendly swarm was able to completely lay down an acre of sorghum, saving our last major field from being left out in the cold. We were awed by this amazing show of spontaneous support. The street value of that field, once processed, will be in the neighborhood of $5,000. Wow!

Today, Tuesday, the full court press continues. In addition to cooking sorghum as fast as we can (pressing the juice out of the stalks with a roller mill and then boiling it down to get the syrup), there are myriad other post-frost jobs on a farm that can't wait, such as cutting the sweet potato vines and pulling the last of the tomatoes. My niche the past two days has been wrangling peppers. 

As the pepper plants were toasted (so to speak) my job was to convert as much of the fruit into usable products as possible before spoilage. In the past two days I've diced 11 gallons of peppers (32 quarts of sweet peppers and 12 quarts of hot), and cooked down 60 pints of pepper relish. While that may seem like a lot, I was only processing the peppers that were tinged by frost. There are still another 20 gallons of undamaged peppers sitting patiently in buckets and colanders awaiting attention next week (when we'll be back to managing the farm with our normal half-court zone defense). Hopefully, someone else will have the pleasure of those peppers, and I'll be able to do things like email again.

While the pace is ramped up now, I know that it will only last for another week or so, and will be followed by the post-harvest afterglow, when the weather can frost all it wants and we can just laugh and throw another log on the wood stove. 

This weekend I'm looking forward to a respite of sorts when I'll represent Sandhill at the Fall Festival in Keosauqua IA, where I'll be sitting at a booth in Riverside Park (next to the meandering Iowa River) and selling food products for only eight hours each day. 

After a week of full court press, it'll be a sit in the park.

Six Guys on Sunday

Even though I'm just a guy (unlike my brother, who is actually Guy), I'm definitely a guy. I like to watch football & baseball, I play games to win, I enjoy butchering, I'm a competent mason and electrician, I have an affinity for action movies, and I love to drink beer (especially IPA). All of that said I've never been into cars and I love process, so maybe I'm a few genes short of a load on my Y chromosome. Who knows.

To be clear, I don't hate cars. I live in an income sharing community (Sandhill Farm) and I drive the community's fleet of vehicles like everyone else. Over the years I've done my share of changing oil, fixing flats, and coaxing a flooded engine back to life—I just don't seek it out, and you'll never hear me rhapsodize about the latest model whatsidingle. I just don't give a shit. 

It was thus amusing when Ma'ikwe participated in an impromptu query along with five other women on one of her Facebook Lyme support groups last Sunday, where the question was: "What is your partner doing right now?" Amazingly, the other five women all reported that their guys were fooling around with cars. I was the odd man out—I was working on Ma'ikwe's cistern. I was gobsmacked. Apparently it's still what guys do on Sunday afternoon (at least until football season starts).

According to Ma'ikwe I got lumped in with everyone else anyway by virtue of being caught working with hand tools. (I think if I had been knitting it would have raised eyebrows, but working with a screw gun definitely placed me in the guy thing category.) I chafed a bit at the lumping—after all, it's not common that I work on cisterns, yet I doubt it was exceptional in the least that those other guys were under their respective hoods. If the women had posed their question in the morning instead of the afternoon, my answer would have been composing a blog entry, which isn't a particularly gendered activity. Oh well. At the end of the day I reckon I'm still just a guy, even if I sometimes forget or stray a bit from the full stereotype.

Incidentally, today I oversaw the culmination of many days work (not just last Sunday's) when a group of six of us poured three-plus yards of concrete to form the lid on my wife's cistern. It was a 21'x8' barrel vault that took 50 hours to form and one hour to pour. And am I ever glad that sucker is done. I started that project 28 months ago and the hardest parts are now (finally) completed. I still have to set up a rain washer and install the submersible pump, but that's minor. This winter, for the first time since she moved into her house three years ago, Ma'ikwe will have running water. Yippee!

Crossing this large task off my To Do List was all the sweeter in that tomorrow I'm outbound for 40 days in the wilderness on the road, and I really wanted to get the lid poured before I left. I managed to beat my travel deadline by about 20 hours. Whew! Good thing today was a nice day. When I get back from this upcoming odyssey it will be October and my community will be immersed in sorghum season—when all hands are on deck and there's no time for extracurricular dabbling in concrete. So if I had failed to get the lid poured today, it might not have happened until next spring (can you hear the Volga Boatman playing in the background?).

It will be a treat to sleep at Ma'ikwe's tonight—our last night together for a while—and have the cistern lid in my rear view mirror when I close my eyes at night. While that's probably the same satisfaction that all guys feel after a knocking off a big job, I don't think there's any need to be alarmed… unless I start babbling about the payload on 3/4-ton pickups or the gas mileage on a Prius, in which case you should suspect doping or food poisoning and call for my blood to be tested.