The March of the Maples
As Tim and I were making the winding journey up 185-N to visit the farm, Saturday, we experienced the yearly wonder and blow that is fleeting fall. After Friday’s rains finished pelting autumnal hues to the forest bottom, Kentucky’s deciduous impressionistic landscape was turned a spindly grey with echoes of the artist’s last color, a fleeting yellow fog here and there, the last of the maple leaves. Though a solemn view in contrast with the prior morning’s splendor, we knew that this new monochromatic sketch was truly a dinner bell, ringing in our garden’s annual feast. True, gardens don’t bother with the holiday hooplah: scrambling over the last bag of cranberries, Black Friday strategics, or stressing over The Bird. But, my oh my do our gardens know how to give thanks. If you don’t believe me, come see our purple sprouting broccoli still gnawing on lush leafy spread in early spring, or our green zebra tomatoes licking their chops in high summer. Vegetative life returned to the earth, to provide shelter against the chill, and slowly decomposing to compose a symphony of life again. Pshaw to the Thanksgiving Day Parade–“Make way for the March of the Maples!”
*Ode to Him Who Aches O’er the Rake*
Would that your grass were so green in high spring
as to disguise your yard’s lacking prize—
a composted pile of memories.
A rich healthy loam of all things once grown,
in which to plant a delicate seed.
A promise, I say, for wild array
of flora and fauna and nowhere a weed.
Hear the wet crunch, delectable munch–
peas in early spring.
Await the ripe pluck, the rich wet suck–
tomatoes of heirloom breed.
Was it you I heard feverishly scratching bald grass
with that sad rake of yours in October?
What a bother it must have been, my friend,
to make way for those curbside loafers…
Look how they crouch, indignantly grouch–
yellow ties to the skies and black-angry goodbyes–
bags of your many trashed guests.
“Don’t worry,” they rile, “we’ll be back!”
You wipe your wet brow
and turn with a growl;
the city pick-up roars away.
Then you look up, a brisk wind chucks
a flurry of leaves in the fray.
Public service announcement: Festina Lente Farms is now accepting bagged leaf donations. For pick-up service phone 714-865-7662 or email us at t.kercheville@gmail.com.
Festina Lente. Hasten Slowly.
Roughly three-quarters of what we eat we grow ourselves. Therefore, at Festina Lente, you will find a bent toward high calorie crops. Farming is constancy in physical art–we need to eat sufficiently or we will faint. What you see at our tables is the main portion of our food–that, coupled with what we grow and put into storage. So, throughout the year, you can see our diet. And by my beard, we are not malnourished! This is the diet that strengthens us for our tasks.
We seek a life won through a relationship with nature, our main instructor in the creative art. In our gardens we strive to imitate a forest’s diversity and regenerative principles: as with humans, plants are augmented by community. Both through the growth of nutrient-fixing crops, and the physical addition of composted plant residue, or other organic soil amendments, we have learned to regenerate our growing spaces. Physical amendments already available on-site, something as ubiquitous as these falling maple leaves painting our world today, may be used, for instance, in the techniques of mulch gardening, which help reduce the need for water and which allowed us to grow corn successfully in this year of historic heat and drought. (In fact, we are still harvesting corn). Generally, our gardens are a system of raised beds with a mixture of compost, or a cover crop worked in, then intensively planted using the methods of companion planting, including and especially the “three sisters” gardening technique, a technique in which we are both students and innovators.
A traditional “three sisters” garden was a Native American practice of growing corn, beans, and squash together in hill systems on a broad field. Sunflowers, too, were sometimes included in this system. We will be growing precisely one such system at our location next spring (come and see!). We have modified this practice to include any upright firm stalk (like that of corn but also of sunflowers and of amaranth, our high-protein, gluten-free grain), a climbing legume (beans and peas) or vine (cucumber, vining spinach) that uses the stalk as a trellis, and a spreading base-layer plant (like sweet potatoes, winter squash, peanuts, mint), which, in its spreading, forms “a living mulch” –or some other low-lying, shade-tolerant vegetable (arugula or chard, spinach or lettuce, broccoli). The spacing of plants and the time of their planting are critical for successful partnerships. We would be honored to show you what we have learned, and how we are experimenting still, in these methods. Organic farming and companion planting are ongoing discoveries.
We began two years ago in 19th century stone-terraced garden beds at our cabin in downtown Bowling Green, the ruins of which we uncovered after an invasive weed pull, and which Tim restored and added to using the skills in stone masonry that he had learned from his best friend, Nathanael Kramer, an ex-Mennonite mason with whom Tim constructed a number of stone works at Western Kentucky University. This last year we expanded from our stone-terraced garden to five garden plots on family land, an expansion which led us to the Community Farmer’s Market.
Our hard work and the success of our gardens have yielded still more opportunities. Currently, we are transitioning to a 14-acre, uncultivated farm off 185 N, in Bowling Green, near Richardsville and Anna, KY, whose owner desires someone to cultivate the land using soil-improving techniques. Already we have built nine raised beds, approximately five feet wide and sixty feet long, into which we have planted five hundred ever-bearing strawberry plants, over two thousand cloves of garlic, along with spinach, winter lettuces and greens, and winter peas. Come and see! We have sown cover crops over the four acres that we will be cultivating next spring, using, but modifying, the same growing practices that we learned in a few hundred square feet of an urban, stone-terraced garden.
For a farm visit, or any requests, please contact Tim at
t.kercheville@gmail.com (714) 865-7662
or Meg at Meagan.Harris647@topper.wku.edu
Festina Lente Farms 