Mark Wu and the CTTB Farm

Mark Wu, the principle farm volunteer at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, invited me to see the campus farm.  Most of the 10 acres had been tilled in, save a 20'x20' patch of broccoli that rose to the chest and were still being harvested by volunteers.  Densely vegetated areas alternated with expanses of fallow zones.  Rows of towering tomatoes and green beans still stood shadowing over bell peppers.  One or two peppers remained on each plant, but all the plants had scars from cut stems.  Mark told me that they harvested the leaves which are difficult to find in markets but are highly desirable for soups.

Bell peppers

When asked about how they deal with foraging animals, they said they plant more.  Matthew and Corinne of Lovin' Mama Farm told me the same thing.  Both sets of farmers said that they found that not only did the proportional loss decrease (e.g. losing 10 plants out of 100 is not as big a deal as losing 10 plants out of 20), but that the animals seemed to eat less (e.g. 10 of 100 plants were eaten but only 5 out of 200 were eaten).  Originally, a deer fence lined the perimeter of the vegetable field, but unruly blackberry bushes engulfed the posts and were difficult to remove without destroying the fence.  The fences and blackberry bushes were removed, making the farm vulnerable to deer.  Mark said that they gave up on keeping the deer out and, in turn, found that fewer insects besieged crops.  He believes that a balance is struck when everyone and everything is free to come and go.  Mark mentioned a method he uses for deterring deer to eat new transplants: to make the areas surrounding the transplants more lush than the new sprouts.  "The deer see the new transplants as appealing, bright green growth and want to eat it, so I make the weeds around them seem more appetizing.  I want the deer to think I'm poor with my meagre sprouts and that everyone else is rich, so they should rob the others!" he said.  How sensible.  There's also something novel yet obvious about this notion of creating bounty for everyone, humans and animals.

After touring the fields, Mark showed me storage barns.  One by one, each barn door opened to reveal neatly stacked shade cloth, starts trays, fence netting, etc. Mark said that most of these things were donated because the CTTB is frugal and tries to reuse as much as possible.  This mentality is pragmatic, but also means they usually get faulty equipment that requires much time to repair and maintain.  "The tractors, for example.  We have three but they have many problems such that we only use one, really."  Tractor, huh?  I told Mark about my desperate and fruitless two-month search for a flail mower.  Mark suggested that I borrow CTTB's tractor and mower if it was right for the job.  Curious about what I needed to mow, we went out to my field.

Only two or three days passed since I was last visited the field, but I was surprised by what I saw.  Blackberries came back from the fire with a vengeance!  Mark and I shook our heads at the sprawling brambles in my field and the adjacent area where all the new blackberry growth were equidistant from each other.  Blackberries are terribly difficult to rid of because of their deep root structure and rhizomatic propagation.  Cutting them up is no good because one broken branch could easily become a new plant.  Perhaps I should start a blackberry farm.

Sigh

Adjacent field

The sight of burgeoning blackberries stirred Mark to insist that I borrow the mower and make a dent in the blackberries.  We figured that afterwards we could take a back-hoe to the roots and try to get a handle on this.

Here's to mowing tomorrow!