The Balance of Present and Future

End of Summer means prepare for winter...

​Life always seems to beckon us into a tentative balance between the here and now, and the things on the horizon. How do we both prepare well for the future with careful and thoughtful planning, but now dwell on the mysteries and unknowns to the detriment of our attentiveness to the present moment? We all may spend a lifetime discerning the best balance for ourselves, likely getting it wrong plenty of the time!

As farmers, we live in an even more complicated version of this balance. We have to always be thinking ahead to the next season or 2, making sure we have things lined up and prepared for a harvest to come 70-120 days away, but also tending to the things currently ready to be harvested. This may seem more apparent in winter and early spring when we are sowing seeds and preparing everything for the season ahead. But just as important, and perhaps with a bit more pressure on timing, we have to be well prepared for the Fall and especially winter or we will be without anything to harvest! This may be okay for farmers or operations that don't want to harvest anything from December-April, but we at Third Way Farm strongly believe in being a 4-season farm; having nutritious produce and other foods available 12 months a year.

September is really the last big push for our fall and winter preparation. If we don't have our act together by then, we won't be harvesting or having much in the way of fresh food all winter! And every vegetable crop needs to be planned out, (sowing the seeds, preparing the bed, and planting the crop) based on what's called the Persephone period for our latitude. This is the period of time when the daylight hours drop to less than 10 hours per day, and subsequently, most vegetative plant growth slows to almost a halt. For us in Havre de Grace MD, at about 39.5 degrees N latitude, that period begins around November 13-16. By that time, we need to make sure all of our crops are not just planted and in the ground, but that they are AT LEAST 75% mature. This is obviously a subjective and variable thing to observe, but we can use the expected “days to maturity” that is given for each of our vegetable crop varieties, and add about 7-14 days to that number since things grow a bit slower in the Fall, and plan to plant those crops X amount of days before November 15 (approximately), so that they will be 75% or more mature by that date. Basically, that means we want to plant most winter vegetable crops in our field beds by September 15, with a few possible exceptions to get planted later for quick growing crops like radishes, salad greens, turnips, and bok choi. For our greenhouse/tunnel areas, we can push our plans for winter crops a bit later (seeding and planting up through 10/5), as the warmth and protection provided by the tunnels allows for better growth through the persephone period. 

So that's a lot of planning for all of our fall/winter vegetables, right? Thus the need for this balance between present and future thinking for us farmers. It's easy to get caught up in the present moment during summer, thinking about all the challenges brought on to our summer crops by heat, pest, and disease pressure, and to think there's still plenty of time for fall and winter crops to wait. And it's also possible to be thinking so much about those future crops and the plans needed, that we neglect the current summer crops, forgetting to weed, prune, and manage them so they thrive and produce bountifully. 

Of course, this lesson of balancing the present moment and future planning is one all of us need to practice and learn from year after year. Excitement about new projects and future plans has sometimes led me to pull away from the present, and although that is ok in general, I am working on honing in on this balance. At the same time, this summer time planning for the winter and fall is often one I need to push myself to be diligent in doing when summer days stretch on later and later with all the work to do! 

May we all learn to be gracious with ourselves as we navigate the changing waterways of life that push and pull us between the possibilities that lay ahead and the realities that lay before us. Embrace deeply the joy of life and all the beauty around you each day, but don't forget to be attentive to those future plans so that you aren't left missing out on the all that you could enjoy in the “present moments” that are yet to come!