Hi. I'm Magda. I’m a farmer. This is my fifth year farming and my first year farming for myself, on rented land.
This is Scrap Farm, the newsletter/podcast where I document starting a farm and all of the intricacies and problems that come with it.
This episode is called Dandelion Whine, because I'm being funny and also because I quite recently finished reading Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. When I started Dandelion Wine, it was in April, the book had this delicious sense of summer. Of bottling beautiful, glorious, sunshiny days. It was so good. The farm (we are starting a farm, you may have heard) was getting going. We were still waiting to till the ground but we were buying seeds and equipment.
I finished Dandelion Wine in May and by then the vibes were disastrous. Not to spoil the book but it's about a child realising that everyone dies and that summer is over. And I did not need to hear that in early May, when we still haven't planted anything in the ground and the irrigation is causing more problems than I'll go into later.
Honestly, it was a great book for April and a shit book for May. The main result of reading it was that it put me in a weird mindset of feeling like I was behind this season. If anyone has ever started a small business, you're gonna feel behind no matter what you do, even if you're doing well. But actually, I think we are quite behind, and that's fine.
Unfortunately, this feeling coincided with all the dandelions springing up. All their bright yellow blossoms covering the ground. Everywhere as we drove past, out to the farm to water our seedlings or over to go help harvest (at the farm that we had been working at last year), there they were.
I had this feeling of endless, boundless possibility.
Then all the dandelions shifted from yellow to white.
One of my favourite things to do at this time of year is to make dandelion jam, which involves yellow dandelion flowers. Obviously. Not the puffy, white, less delicious ones. In the moment they changed from yellow to white, I felt the whole season has passed me by.
Realistically, I was just being dramatic.
When I got out of the car, and actually walked around. Stopped. Paused. In between all of the the white fluffy dandelion blossoms were still shit-tons of yellow flowers. Thankfully, I have managed to harvest the prerequisite 365 flowers that I needed for my very specific dandelion jam recipe.
Despite it all, I've made dandelion jam, and it's fine.
It was a little later than I did it last year, but it was all okay. And the season has not started yet.
The SUMMER has not started yet.
So that has been my vibe; feeling like I'm behind and then having to calm the fuck down and realising I'm not.
My life advice to you is to pause. Really look at what your problems are, and then make some jam.
And yet this is called Dandelion Whine, because I do feel like I'm whining. But as I chastise myself, actually, I'm just sharing the realities of starting a farm.
Farm Updates
We have nothing in the ground.
As of I'm recording this, it isthe 14th of May, and we still do not have plants in the ground.
This is primarily because we still do not have water. The pipe that we were waiting on (we need 300 feet of PVC pipe to keep the water food-grade safe to wash our vegetables) was a week late. It got lost in transit. So that was one of the realities of farming for ya.
Because of that, we were just straight-up a week behind. For a good few days we didn't know where a pipe was on the Continental US. Then came scheduling; my partner and I are working part time jobs. Our days off didn’t coincide with out landlords, which is somewhat essential then digging a 4’ deep 300’ trench and on his land.
That means that as of the 12th, we finally dug a 300’ trench with a very specialised, massive piece of equipment (that we had to drive around on a trailer). And even I drove around on a trailer, which, if anyone knows me, that's absolutely terrifying. Long story short, we now have a trench with a pipe in it, which is fantastic! This is amazing news. I'm very excited about this.
This pipe will allow us to irrigate the blocks that we have been preparing. We have a full 24 beds ready for planting. They're beautiful. They're pristine. But we still don't have any water for them.
Interestingly, it has been a rainy May, we might have gotten away with seeding into the beds with no clue when we would be able to water them. Instead, I am thankful we are erring on the side of caution when it comes to transplanting, since we couldn’t even get water out to hand irrigate until yesterday. This caution might be a holdover from the 7-week drought we experienced two years ago that decimated the strawberry harvest but i guess that comes from knowing a place. Are we localising? Is this smart?
Now the pipe is out there, another problem has arisen. Because why would we want things to be easy? The water flow rate from the well is supposedly 12 gallons per minute (which is a perfectly acceptable flow rate for the kind of irrigation that we're doing). At the end of our 300’ of pipe, it is coming out at 2 gallons per minute.
2 gallons per minute is not close enough to provide the flow or the pressure needed to irrigate our crops. We are in the midst of coming up with an ingenious method that involves filling tanks and using those tanks to provide the flow rate. But, of course, there are some limitations on how fast those tanks can refill after we use them to irrigate. At present, our living room wall is covered in Post-its to figure out what's going where, how we are connecting stuff, and exactly how much water we need for everything. Yeah. So that's another problem. We love problems here.
In the middle of all this, we still have to start seeds.
So I've been starting seeds that will be planted in a month's time under the assumption that in a month's time, we will have somewhere for them to go, and that somewhere will be waterable. I'm no longer making statements like “next week we will be able to irrigate” or anything fanciful like that. We are taking things way slower, scratch that, we're being cautious. We're not taking things slower than anyone else. We’re taking things as fast as they can go.
I need to remind myself that the seeds we're starting are both hopeful and realistic. We are going to need plants to grow over the next few months. Caution only gets you so far.
We have also put up our first YouTube video detailing what we did in the first two weeks of April. And while we were editing it, my partner looked at me and was like, “It's a bit embarrassing, isn't it?” And I hadn't really thought about it like that until now, but I think he’s right.
Yeah. Starting a farm from scratch and making many mistakes along the way is a little bit embarrassing.
But the thing is, it's also not embarrassing. Kill the bit that cringes, and all that.
These mistakes that we’re making (then documenting and putting on the Internet) are only really embarrassing to us. People who have farmed on working farms for the past four years and have had a lot of guidance and advice on what mistakes not to make.
But I still feel committed to highlighting them so that no one else makes them in the same way. Hopefully, someone learns something, or at least feels less like they're not the only ones making these mistakes.
Embarrassment might not be the right word. We are still very much committed to learning in real time; to showing people the realities of starting a farm on less-than-ideal land.
The YouTube video is linked below, if you're interested in seeing two people point at a field for twenty minutes. Hopefully, we have another one in the works. We’re aiming to release every couple of weeks to keep our friends and family updated.
That’s about it for updates. The vibe is that things are fine even if they don't feel fine. That problems can be solved, and if you just look a little closer, there’s a lot of really good stuff going on. And I'm sure you could make allusions to that politically (but also there's a lot of bad stuff going on and we're all freaking out).
For those of you listening I hope you enjoyed the funky fresh sounds of my cunty little podcasting mic. And for everyone else, thanks for reading/following/sharing, etc. Thank you to everyone who commented on my note about feeling so behind this season, you all made me feel seen and a little less alone in this. I appreciate ya.
Right, I’m done. I'm going to my paying job. Okay. Bye.
M
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If you missed the last update, read it here:
Ep.24- Budgeting in the Apocalypse
My partner and I were out celebrating a friend’s birthday, and of course, collapse came up. Something about us having 5 years tops left on democracy. And Zach, my partner, made a joke about our budgeting. That really it won’t matter if we spend a little over the budget on food, if in a few years’ time society as we know it will fall.
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