44. Spreadsheet Season
It felt like autumn may never come; like summer would never break. But there’s not a high temp over 80°F in the 10-day forecast, so I’m comfortably breathing a cool sigh of relief. All the fall crops are in the ground (except garlic, to be planted today), and celebrations of the harvest season bounty are popping off everywhere. Our second annual Harvest Festival at Morningside Urban Farm is this Thursday evening at 5:30pm, complete with free Brunswick stew for dinner and a pumpkin painting contest among other exciting attractions.
As I close the book on another planting season, I look forward to lots of time at the computer, drinking hot tea and crunching numbers. Sales data, planting records, harvest tallies and such all come together in what I affectionately call “Spreadsheet Season.” This is when we make decisions about what worked and what didn’t, what tools we need and want, and what infrastructure improvements can get on the calendar.
Spreadsheet season is admittedly not the most exciting part of running a vegetable farm. But the regular-ish schedule and ample time for recreation make it something to look forward to from the vantage of a 95°F summer day. Winter vacations have been planned, and I’ll occupy as much of the free time between trips with fishing and boating as long as the weather permits.
It often comes as a surprise to customers at the market that we plan to continue growing through the winter. We have very minimal season extension and protected culture, but if you plant the right stuff at the right time, you can harvest great veg right through the colder months. But colder temps mean less watering, fewer (or perhaps no) bugs, and slower growing plants. So all the free time generated by fewer chores on the list means I can sit inside where it’s warm and fantasize about all the new varieties I’m gonna grow next year.
Truthfully the number of varieties GVH will grow next year should go down if I’m doing my job right. Many of my farming peers say to experiment with no more than 20% new varieties from year to year, and I’d like to abide by that. And I have to be a bit judicial when it comes to cutting items from the roster altogether. Beets and beans, for example, are on the chopping block as of today. Speak now, or forever hold your peace!
I’ll be excel-ing this winter with a very big picture lens, too. Two years in with what I would call adequate revenue from vegetable sales, and all arrows pointing up, it’s time to start making amendments and commitments to the most exciting parts of the original 5-year plan for the business. I don’t want to farm other people’s yards forever, and driving from plot to plot Is painfully inefficient at times. It also makes any prospect of growing the business and hiring employees very difficult to imagine. Chloe and I have aspirations to operate a farm business together that provides holistic growth opportunities for young people. So we’ll dream big this off-season about how, where, and when we may be able to start down that road.
We’ll also be attending our first farm conference this winter. Uprooting Racism is a curriculum taught by Leah Penniman, farmer and author of Farming While Black. The training is hosted by the food forest experts at Blacks Run Farm, just up the road in Harrisonburg, and it will focus on the important work of reestablishing food sovereignty in communities of color. Now that’s my kinda farm conference!
A market gardener could attend a different conference every week of the winter if they wanted to, with topics ranging from profitability to pollination to hydroponics. For that matter, you could spreadsheet yourself to death, too. But I don’t plan on overdoing anything this fall and winter, except maybe rest.