From then, until Now.

Time seems to have a way of both elongating and collapsing in on itself lately. 

In many ways it feels like an age since Christmas — when we packed up the last veg boxes and did the last market of 2020 — but similarly the days in between have congealed into a quick and blurry thing, and I’m not quite sure how we got to here and now.  

It’s the middle of March and many people have been asking us when we’ll be back at market, when we’ll be delivering veg boxes again, and when the wholesale season will begin. So, by way of answering all those good questions, I thought I’d fill you in a little on what we at Springtail have been up to. 

I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot before I’ve even begun, but I’m going to attempt to write a regular-ish newsletter going forward, so let’s just say this is me attempting a beginning at these things. But, just a word of warning, who knows how many words I’ll have when we are surrounded by thousands of plants to tend and (hopefully) piles of vegetables to harvest, but let’s see…

If you don’t fancy reading a little of my rambling, then the short answer to the questions of “When….?” is: we’ll be back at the market on a regular basis from the end of May/beginning of June. We’ll do a couple of markets before then too, but will let you know as and when those happen. Our veg box season will start at the beginning of June too. We’re expanding the number of veg boxes that we’ll be offering this season, so if you’re keen for a home delivered veg box when things get rolling, do get in touch. And wholesale, well we’re doing little bits as and when we have the produce whilst the season gets going, but our official wholesale season will start right around the same time too. 

Ok, back to working out the recent in-between-ness of time.

So, originally, our Covid dependent plan for January had been that Tomas would return home to visit his family for the month, and Clay (the dog) and I, would stick around here, enjoying time off and space to think about things other than food and farming. But, as you may have guessed, Tomas couldn’t go to Canada in the end. But, what with the wet of January, and trying to avoid the farm anyway, so as not to trample the ground amidst all the mud, we did manage one part of January’s plans — time off and space to think about, and do things, non farming related. 

People say many things about the realities of running a business with your partner. Our experience is consistent with some of these things said. What we experience most is a blurring of boundaries between work and the personal. We love what we do, we’re excited by what we do, by what we’re learning, and yes -- we’re learning so we’re full of questions, uncertainties, and failures too, and these play out constantly between us. Specifics relating to the market garden are most often on both our minds. A reel of to-do lists flickers internally and this means that at times during the season, as embarrassing as this may be, it becomes hard to talk about much else other than the work that our hands and minds have become absorbed by. 

All this to say, January signifies a different kind of pace, and in the farm-less-ness quiet of it we remember how to talk about things other than growing food. And this remembering is an incredible relief. So yes, January was a welcome rest.

And February? The work that fills our days returned as a prominent figure in conversation and we began planning the season ahead. We were glad for the work of the season to begin, but were also very aware of the transition. Much of February’s planning — variety research, crop plan and sowing calendar creation, and learning (diving deeper into the ever nuanced world of plant and soil health for instance) — was computer-based. So we did a lot of tap-tap-tapping to bright screens and though this makes us both restless, or more accurately, delirious after a while, I really believe that investing so much time into the computer-based planning side of the season before it begins helps us immeasurably when the physical work of vegetable growing is in full swing. 

It may be surprising to hear that come high summer we are often quite overwhelmed. I tend to feel a little like someone whose brain has been replaced by a sieve. I hope to switch out my high-season brain for a less porous one as the years go by and we gain more experience, but, at least from where we are now, growing vegetables in the way that we do requires a lot from us. So all that February computer time, having crop plans pinned down and translated into a handful of spreadsheets and documents, is pretty much our past selves’ version of an insurance policy for when “Peak Porosity” hits. 

February also involved cutting and chipping a lot of willow.  A stand of willow runs the length of our main growing area. In the summer it is beautiful, lush and shimmering, creating a nice feeling of a microclimate enclosure, but it also hadn’t been coppiced for a long time, and whenever a hard wind hit a fair few of the saplings would snap, and it had also begun to block light to part of the garden. So, cutting it down and chipping the brash had been on the job list for a good while, and in that way, it had become one of those jobs that grows a little unruly and gangly in one’s mind. But, when we finally got to it, it really wasn’t that bad, many hands made light work and a mega-chipping machine helped too. The garden now has many piles of wood chip dotted around its edges, all to be used for mulching beds and pathways, and making compost.

And for now, with the willow down, the garden has a much more prominent sea view (new shoots will soon grow though) and we’re really enjoying the openness whilst it lasts, I often catch a moment or two to stare across at the newly expansive views of the hills on the other side of the valley to us and then along to the shimmering sea, mesmerized.

Once the willow was chipped and the landscape transformed, I realised that it was one of the first jobs that we’d done on this land that we rent from friends, that felt like tending to the land in a more significant way than in our most often quite micro and very focused actions of attending just to the exact patches where vegetables grow. It felt a little like we were briefly more intertwined with the larger landscape of the farm itself, and that felt good.

Now, (many more words than I had imagined later…) I think that’s enough of an update for now. The first seeds of the season have been sown, just this week we’ve been busy putting up moveable polytunnels to increase our undercover growing space, which will mean plenty more summer and autumn crops, and we’ve just heard that we’ll be receiving an exciting grant as part of a whole host of farm-based pilot projects whose aim is to increase food security and improve access to good food within local communities. 

But all that can wait ‘til the next chapter. 

Thanks for reading along, 

Lally