Finishing touches on humble beginnings: farming from scratch

Last of February, 2014, white boards scratched with notes: gantry cuts; dozer site prep; verify underground PVC locations; remove upper fencing; Bob → boards, forklift; Matt transfer funds; trucking company follow up; forward bill of lading to port; receive container 14 March; call Joe; pinflags; shop vac; breaker box; diesel; file cabinet; dressers; 12V outlet; bailing wire; Rich- 22 March; escrow/closing. -----You should have seen the list this morning.

Closing date: 7 March.

A tangle of orange and yellow wires stream in all directions from the vent on a small access door on the back of our gutted fifth wheel. AC sorta, DC enough. Alex and I are calling it our job trailer to save face and stay businesslike, but we're not too earnest for daily salutations to the propane refrigerator, “oh please do stay cold just today, even colder than this rainy night time.” The telephone-pole barn roof above the trailer's seems to prevent any leaks of consequence, and the outdoor kitchen is arranged in slightly scattered anticipation of our long seasonal dry spell. Right after we dug it out, the outhouse flooded; we've since bermed and trenched it. This has been the most rain of any storm here this season and everyone around seems fidgety with hope, reminding me that this is an agricultural state too, no matter how lost its practices or its cities may be. I wonder, too, about the real effects of San Francisco and Los Angeles' water policies on this incredible country. How would it look without all these restrictions? Less drained but much more developed? As I look out past the neighbors, I think, “could be worse.”

Frankly, few farmers have less riding on this season's actual rainfall than we do. For us, we're learning this place anew and hoping we're seeing it at a far extreme of its climatic curve, planning accordingly. Some relationships can't be rushed, and one with a place takes time. Our whole garden and animal show will be provisional, and the orchards are still blinks of an eye. Meanwhile, amid a tiny-flower-speckled tender green carpet, the barn stands resolute, yet with its sturdy seeming bin of ropes and straps compromised. May the elegance of that barn outlive many more plastic bins, yet just now I remembered a poem by Mizuta Masahide from a card once sent by a loved one:

Barn's burned down –

now

I can see the moon

I get up and write CATS on tomorrow's list. Is this lush mat really the exact same place where Tribulus terrestris (puncturevine, goathead, caltrop, devil's thorn) just six months ago popped every wheelbarrow and dolly and generator tire it thought about? What? I was momentarily lost in wishing I was a ruminant.

Down below, the old pond is showing us some of his many faces too, but up here in the job trailer, me and Alex feel civilized, with our keyboards, light bulbs and padded benches. Preparing meals in an unheated shelter at a makeshift kitchen feels like old times and we chat about the finer points of 20 and 30 something adventures. It sets in slow, two months will mark ten years since we first founded our friendship as bright faced volunteer wilderness rangers. Tuolumne Meadows is due East fifty air miles. It seems neither of us have shifted very far after all. I'm glad to be back.

Two years ago, a dear sweet friend gave me the gumption to build this idea for real. For the next year and a half, we settled on place and idea, developed concepts and shaped the model that now, finally, will have its day in the sun. I've returned to this land dozens of times since the first, almost two years back, and each time has meant something new. Chrissy has left to pursue other goals, Alex has come in with skills and exuberance and fresh motivation, and I couldn't feel better about a thing. This time returning to the farm, these ideas are no longer abstractions. Now they have hands.

Things are moving along right on schedule. Just a week from today, Alex and I will own every right the state feels like granting us to these 37.83 acres, most notably beyond the lease we currently hold, the right for us and no one else to transfer those rights. To think of it this way feels weirdly monotheistic, but these days I've no time to dwell on this sentiment. Chock it up for later: this engine's switching tracks. The week after that, we'll receive eleven tons of batteries (stay tuned for that story), and shortly thereafter, things really get shaking. Between Alex and I, the old cliche seems fitting: we know just enough about all this stuff to hurt ourselves. My concern, however, is that if we wait much longer, the machinery might stick a little at just the wrong moment. Farm building is young person work (and I suspect I missed that early breeding strong boys window). Besides, risking everything is work best done without any dependents. This week, I will accomplish very much. The same goes for the week after that. Reflection is a cherished luxury I'm currently reserving for quiet rainy nights.

Before I know it, our friends will be buzzing around, sprinkling each of their little flavors around this place, every one helping to grow the meaning and beauty that will shape its very soul. In the upcoming weeks, that buzz will sound like bulldozers and impact drills, ewes and does, giggles and sizzles, pigs and gobbles. I hope all the local turkeys don't mind newcomers and that the tree frogs and screech owl won't lose their songs, and especially that the big cats keep their distance. I hope that everyone takes their time and gets here safe. I hope for every moment to feel alive like this one.

wondernut.

Has a nice ring to it, no? Even a reasonable person might find it a little bit yummy, quirky and then some. (could have been dreamed by a child?) Maybe just a touch off. Don't think of an accidental bionic cartoon semi-hero: a little bit hapless, but usually falling down on the right side of things, no. Wonder? I wonder. Big wonder: awe. Smaller: uncertainty, but the good kind. I do wonder what a person might think if I use the name wondernut for a farm? A farm in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A place almost forever seasonally settled. Above the plains of almonds being grown to satisfy the demands of a growing Chinese middle class, but below the unimaginable seas of granite, granite that just this season formed a fortuitous firebreak beyond what man could or should ever construct, and just below the Nevada too. Where gold rush Chinese labor piled rocks and proved inhumanity alone could not afford to extract the sparse lusted resource. Where the grizzly met the black bear. Where John Muir learned his folly and found his fight. I wonder how all those events above and below this valley will play out. I think I've found a nice place to sit and wonder about all kinds of things. This historic ranch and carriage station was called spring gulch (neighbors got that name). A tiny watershed in a huge one. I wonder if my funny little arrangement might cough up a few odd chances to answer that one life question just a little bit differently. I wonder if the whole big mechanism can be tinkered and tweaked and fitted out just right so as to churn out sensitive, beautiful, wholesome, creative tidbits, slathered in biscuits and pear butter / a cacophonous sideshow to a regular conversation. Food. Neighbors. Waste. Community. Love. Nurture. Humanity. Compassion. Unexpected bedfellows. I wonder. Maybe I too could be a wondernut. I do know one thing, everything is just a little bit stinky sometimes.

wondernut farm: ground up, forever off grid but never autonomous: turkeys pigs goats humans methane grass fertility milk soil cheese grit water birth death compost: interdependence: proof of concept, however you slice it: heartfelt: cowboy science: experimental farm: systems thinking: details as big as universes: better illustrated than explained (but no time for that quite yet).

The place I'm building this wonder-nut is smack dab in the historical center of a thousand acre ranch, with a barn to prove it. The accompanying house is across the street with a spring in the basement and lovely and generous neighbors living inside of it. I wonder how long that street's been there. Which came first? Next ranch over is Priest Station, at the top of the Priest grade (no coincidence), where now the harnessed waters of the mighty Tuolumne River plummet for their second round of power generation and then storage in the Don Pedro Reservoir with its house boats and bikinis to be distributed to the aforementioned almond growers and beyond to the city of San Francisco, where it is ultimately consumed as some of the highest quality drinking water of any city in the world. Big Oak Flat, CA. The population sign is misprinted, four digits, should be three. Any guesses? Tie-dye jerky. Commemorative fire t-shirts while they last. Thank every higher power ever to exist that a truck sells $1 tacos in the parking lot of the hardware store. People speed through town for the postcard mountains when fire or snow or government pissing matches don't spoil the day, but wondernut is altogether sleepier.

In the pastures surrounding the barn, the turkeys and sheep and sometimes goats (who might also be enjoying their days in the oak-y woodlands) will roam, not quite free, you see, but in quickly shifting plenty to the best of my ability. We animals sure do like to eat. I'm eager for the collection of the silly turkeys' night droppings, eager to scoop them into a small methane biodigester (which will daily be fed a steady diet of turkey droppings and liquid-y food waste as well as a few gallons precious water). The products of this sometimes temperamental yet cultured farm-beast are methane cooking gas and nutrient dense liquid fertilizer. The cooking gas will be used to cook foods for us or sometimes the piggies (who will be living on the shores of my seasonal pond, hoping with their cloven little toes to plug all the unseen leaks and make the pond a place year round), and the liquid effluent will be used for nutrient solution to grow green fodder for the sheep and goats indoors to supplement their pasture and for pigs to supplement the products of my and their combined scrounge/forage. Any of that warm, viscous, earthy, greenish brown, pathogen free liquid gold that is left will be available to supplement the trees and gardens and when possible, the pasture grasses.

This inter-play will form the heart of the wonder-nut of wondernut farm and the mechanization of the system helps me keep my footprint small while maximizing my limited natural resources. The combination of water scarcity and components of an intact natural ecology playing out on my steep land oblige me to be judicious. The way I see it, if I can keep the bears and lions and coyotes and bobcats and dogs off of everybody, all I'll need to do is figure out the right ratios of people to pigs to turkeys to goats to sheep to dogs to donkeys to llamas to savannah to woodland. Something tells me that things may turn out unexpectedly.

(and who can afford good farmland anyway these days?)