By Zoë Bradbury
September 8, 2008
The rain drums on the roof all night and I am sleepless. This is twice in the same week, and though it means green grass for the sheep and horses, more water in the creek for the fish, and time saved not irrigating, this downpour is the ruin of the strawberries, my best summer cash crop. I lie in bed staring into the dark with my stomach in knots.
Strawberries are delicate, thin-skinned fruits. They love sun and drip irrigation. And at this time of year they make up about a third of my income every week. Every Tuesday and Friday I truck flats of berries into town: to restaurants, to the natural foods stores, even to our little Langlois Market where they find their way into the shopping baskets of local loggers and ranchers and windsurfers and bicyclists passing through en route from Seattle to San Francisco.
Last Friday there were no strawberries because it rained a bizarre 1.8 inches, starting on Tuesday night and pounding down on the farm until Thursday morning. I was catapulted from August to November, finding myself suddenly cooped up inside the house, catching up on Quickbooks and drinking tea. I dealt with backlogged emails and returned phone messages from June. My sister sewed the pieces of my wedding dress together. My horses stood dripping under a bushy myrtle tree, heads down and tails tucked. The dogs laid on the porch all day, heads resting on front paws, subdued like the rest of us.
Meanwhile, my strawberries were rupturing in the field, the ripe and semi-ripe berries developing rain lesions as red and raw as open wounds. The mold marches in close on the heels of a rainstorm like that, so on Thursday morning when there was light in the grey sky, Danny and I donned our raingear and crawled through the entire strawberry field, filling Rubbermaid totes with soggy berries.
The salvaged harvest totaled over 30 gallons, and none of it would go to market. The financial hit was not insignificant, in this first year where I’ll make all of my income in less than 50 days. (Harvesting May through October = 24 weeks x 2 harvest days/week = 48 days that money can flow in.) That’s 48 days of income for 365 days of labor. It’s a lean financial equation, suddenly made leaner by the weather this week.
When I signed up to be a farmer, I knew the small print: and ye shall accept without question, whining or self-pity the vagaries of the weather, over which you shall have no control whatsoever. Sigh. All I can do is keep an eye to the sky and try to work with it, around it, in it. As a result I am a weather zealot: my homepage is the NOAA website with its detailed point forecast for Langlois, Oregon. And in the spring, my second most-visited webpage is the 10-day precipitation forecast with its multi-colored rain maps of the entire Northwest.
But in the summer, the 10-day precip page gets less traffic from me because in Langlois it doesn’t rain in August. Or at least, it didn’t use to. The same way it didn’t use to be over 100 degrees in so many places, for so many days in a single summer. While climate change is bringing more heat to inland reaches, here on the coast it is sucking in the fog more often, dragging the cool ocean air over the farm, and is perhaps even responsible for delivering oddball rainstorms in August. As a result, our winter squash may not ripen in time this year, and I was $300 bucks down on sales last week. If the weather is trying to tell me anything at all, it’s looking like I should grow more broccoli and kale.
Which brings me to this moment, lying in bed staring into the dark while the rain drums down on the roof again. It is Sunday night and I am set to harvest the strawberries again tomorrow. The weekend was sunny, warm, and the berries recovered from last week’s storm. There is a beautiful flush of ripening berries out there – red and big like plums – getting drenched. I knew there was a chance of rain tonight – a 40% chance to be exact – and I was on the fence all day whether to harvest the strawberries two days early and hope they held up in flats, or to chance it and hope this second rainstorm would be light, gentle, and short. I decided to chance it. Which is why I am lying awake in the dark now, kicking myself.
But as ever with farming, the only thing I can do in this moment is surrender and believe that it will all work out somehow, strawberries or no strawberries. I roll over and put the pillow over my head to muffle the sound of the rain. But not before I hear a single last “pop” from the kitchen: the sound of a canning jar lid sealing onto a pint of hot strawberry jam. One of 24 pints, made from our soggy salvaged strawberries. The rest went into freezer bags for winter smoothies. Indeed: the sweet silver lining of the raincloud.
Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I love this story! Such a great view into the lives of people that feed us.