Harvest Day: A Bumper Crop of Blackberries and 6 Things I've Learned about Small Farming

Ahhh. At my one year anniversary of living on this small farm property it's harvest time and I have beautiful and bountiful fruits to harvest on my little acre and a half. Thank goodness we still have some bees left in our neighborhood! I wasn't sure what to expect form the old orchard, last Fall it didn't do well and the Elk got most of the fruit we did have.

The old orchard is producing quite nicely now despite the fact I wasn't able to trim the trees properly this Winter. Oh I suffered over that and envied my neighbors who have perfectly tended fruit trees. We have two old prune trees producing a fabulous crop. We have a yellow plum tree that didn't produce any fruit last year that is loaded with fruit today. Delicious! Pears and apples are coming on nicely but aren't quite ripe yet. (See the Harvest Day slide show at right.)

This year the blackberries were late coming on due to lack of rain but after a recent rain storm boy howdy, we must have a million wild blackberries over-ripening on our place and billions ripening on wild blackberry vines that are growing on untended land in our little town. It's a blackberry bonanza. Thank you mother nature! That couple of days of rain really helped us.

I've made some progress on canning this past week. My first batch of blackberry jam ended up being blackberry sauce :-(. It didn't set because well, for a couple of reasons. I didn't use enough sugar, I didn't cook the jam long enough for it to thicken and I didn't seed the jam with several unripened berries for their added pectin. Plus, I was using a sauce pan for the 10 minute boiling water bath, it spilled over after I put the jam jars into the pot and my oven top was temporarily "off the grid." The sparks and smoke were a bit more drama than I expected from an evening of canning! I was able to get the water back up to super hot but not a rolling boil and I think (but don't know for sure) that may also have contributed to the fact that the jam didn't set. I sure made some good blackberry sauce for pancakes, ice cream and milkshakes though and the sauce will make sweet little gifts once I have time to print up my sweet little homemade labels and put them on my sweet little jars.

My next batch of blackberry jam turned out beautifully; I was able to correct all of my "jam didn't set" problems thanks to reading comments from several ladies who took the time to respond to another information seeker with the same problem I had, and share your blackberry jam success strategies on-line. Jam Makers Rock! (Hey, is that where the word, jammin' in the musical sense comes from? Does it mean the coming together of collective knowledge? Refer to creations that unfold over time and are completely time dependent as canning and music making are?)

My next adventures? Jam jars and then I'll be making more blackberry jam late tonight and my first ever plum jam tomorrow. I hope the guys get home soon to pick the trees. I don't have time to pick the trees myself before the fruits are over-ripened because I'm working on an open innovation project plan, collecting the writing I've been doing on the future of work and launching my new blog Fresh Hot Art to develop business for Pacific Ethnographic Research Center.

And this gets me to some of the Small Farm Life lessons I've been learning. I know you could read about this stuff, hear it from farmers all over the world but, I now feel what I have learned really deeply and I think this deep knowledge is what fuels the fires that drive me to do the things I do. (Ethnographers pursue "deep knowledge" as part of the cultural ecosystems they seek to generate knowledge about.

1) It certainly takes more than one passionate person to keep a small farm going. We would certainly be dead of starvation if I were depending on myself and my small acreage to feed my family. Most of my seeds didn't survive the weird wet weather we had this Spring and I personally, can't possibly do all the work that is needed and work at my profession too. I'm not strong enough, I don't have the equipment I need, there isn't enough time in the day. It just could not happen. I knew this of course, just as you know it, but now I feel the reality of this very deeply.

2) Most small farmers require income from sources other than their farms. They have retirement savings or pensions from long careers that began when pensions still existed, they work "real jobs" and get a paycheck, they have spouses that work off the farm. I don't have any of that and with the economy the way it is, I pretty much work around the clock to keep my professional work going.

3) You can't turn an unknown property into a farm in a season unless you've had time to get to know the soil and plan for what it needs. How has the soil been managed? Are there any pollutants in the dirt that are going to effect the crops? What grows well in this climate? At this place, the garden soil looked great but was depleted; I didn't know it in time to fix the problem for this year's harvest.

4) You can't realistically expect to step onto a property and transform yourself from a gardener to a farmer without a whole lot of knowledge about farming to bring to the task. How much of what crop do I need to feed my family? How much soil do I need to produce that much crop? How do I run a tractor? Where do I get a tractor? Should I plow? Can I grow crops in a wetland? Will the elk eat my crops? Do I have enough water to water the crops? How much is that much water going to cost? Is it going to cost me more to grow the food than it is worth? How many jars of jam do I need for a year? How many jars of jam can I produce from the raspberries that are here? How many raspberries are here? How much can I earn from "jammin'?

5) Farming takes time and I mean don't mean the time that it takes to tend to the farm even though it takes a whole lot of that; what I mean is that farming takes seasons, it takes practice and it takes inter-generational knowledge to develop the tacit knowledge that it takes be be a successful farmer in a specific location.

6) It is not easy being a farmer. When times are tough, times are really tough. Ask some of the American dairy families who have gone out of business this year. "Got Mile" may be taking on a whole new meaning when we don't have any local milk producers. The saying feast or famine? It must come out of farm life. This week, we are feasting on blackberries, plums and eggs from our two laying hens.

I'm all fired up now about inter-generational farming, co-operative farming, community farms, town farms, helping older small farmers harvest their orchards and about what sustainable local food economies are. I know what they aren't and that is a bunch of indepenent small farmers who have a little extra crop to share with with the community. More to come on this in another post. The guys are home and I need to go and sweet talk them into picking the plums.