Two long months with hardly any rain. That is the dire situation we have been facing this season. Our CSA provides shares to 85 families in the Washington, DC area.  Long ago this past April, we missed a month’s worth of rain, kicking off a season of high and dry windy weather. This has been tough on everything and everyone around.  During this season’s severe extended drought we’ve been dealing with a 2-pronged “war”. On one hand, we must keep every new seedling and translant happy and moist, on the other, we must keep the deer at bay.

The deer come out around mid-August every year as their food runs out in the forest. This season, they were here in July. Entire plantings of green beans, sweet potatoes and edemame, were gone. Badly eaten were the new and still tender tomato and cucumber plants.

Earlier in the season we cought 6 groundhogs over the course of a month and a half, and safely transported them to a wooded area a few miles away. Now we have an early deer problem, and a drought like we’ve never seen before.

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My husband and I have been farming in the suburbs of Washington, DC for four years. The sprawl galloping towards us has been great for business. Families settling into new homes are eager for a taste of the countryside that lured them out here. Our CSA program has a growing wait list of folks eager to chomp on a “real” tomato and bring the kids out for a picnic in paradise. Unfortunately, much of the remaining paradise between tracts of new homes is disappearing, making way for housing developments with lofty names like “Hopewell’s Landing” and, ironically, “The Reserve at Jamison’s Farm.” Country roads are expanding ever wider with more turn lanes to more strip malls.

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Pesach on our vegetable farm is a challenging holiday to pull off. We have had seders here, with everything home made, except the matzah. The menu usually included wonderful cinnamony Middle Eastern charoset balls made by a friend, an organic free-range kosher chicken soup, sweet potatoes, and a big salad. Sometimes, I would make roasted beets and potatoes. Anyway, my philosophy for Pesach, if there were to be one, is to just stick with simple whole foods. Whether that be fruits or veggies, or fresh cheese, meat, or eggs. I buy nuts, in bulk, and make a dessert of coconut milk, with frozen berries, cocoa powder, nuts (almonds) and some maple or agave syrup and call it a complete seder meal! None of the flourless, matzah meal stuff really appeals. I don’t like to imitate cakes and cookies with complicated, multi-step baked goods. I’d rather have fresh, home made sorbet. Or even fruit.

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I just got an email from someone about Walmart being accused of something called ‘organic fraud’. People seem to be genuinely concerned about labeling practices at a supermarket giant. It is not shocking to me, having seen what those ‘organic’ choices are at the large supermarkets, that labels are misplaced, and organic items are intermixed with conventional produce to make the presence of ‘organic’ more obvious.

From the few times I have looked for organic produce at our ‘local’ SuperTarget, I have seen some disturbing things, probably very similar to the Walmart fiasco.

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The most popular question we’ve been asked by far is: So, what do you do in the ‘off-season’? True, the person asking often has the intention of continuing the conversation. But implied is the idea that farming is our ‘day job’ and that among other hobbies and past-times, we enjoy a long ‘off-season’, searching for something fun and exciting to do. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Show me a farmer who spends months traveling the world during the ‘off-season’ and I’ll say, That is not what farming is about.

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Yesterday, the second shabbat of Chanukah, our horse Terra gave birth. Like almost every Saturday, we were getting ready to go to shul. By the time we noticed something - way out in the field we could see something white on the ground, like a bag that’d blown in from somewhere - and ran out to check, it was too late. Horrified, Pablo ran back to the house to tell me that it was ‘the baby’.

We spent the day first coaxing Terra - by now we had a vet and her assistant - to let us come near her, then lead her away to check her out and examine the little foal that never got a chance. This was our first experience with an animal’s birth - both Pablo and I grew up in relatively urban settings.

Certainly, I’d known about the steps involved in birth, but never seen it up close. This was a shocking and devastating way to start. As new animal keepers we were trying to do our best. The natural way, we have researched and were guided, was to keep the horses on pasture, which we have plenty of. The catch here is that there exists a type of grass, called Fescue, that is toxic to pregnant mares and their foal at the end of the pregnancy. If they’re eating fescue while late in their pregnancy, things get confusing. The mare may never develop enough milk, her alarm for ‘time to give birth’ may not signal her at the right time and she may overcarry the baby. The fetus may have trouble developing, may be weak at birth, or have some physical abnormalities. All this is to say, we were not prepared, and it took a tragic event to shake us.

By the time the sun was getting ready to set we got the placenta out, after much struggle on both the vet’s part and Terra’s, and on my part, strong prayer. She is a strong horse, and she did a good job through it all. We ended the night by burying the foal.

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