Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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Pickett and Prueher on stage.
Back in 1991, the duo found a discarded McDonald’s custodial training tape in their home state of Wisconsin, and since then, they’ve been collecting all the VHS tapes they could find and mining them for untapped comedic gold. Today, they are the undisputed champions of lost media, having collected and archived over 15,000 videocassette tapes.
The Found Footage Festival is a “celebration of the videos that time forgot.”Provided by Found Footage Festival
Prueher and Pickett’s brand of comedy values the missteps and accidents that come with amateur video productions more than it does the carefully crafted wordplay of the comedic superstars of our time. But it’s not just bloopers from birthday parties that they find. Some of the most popular clips come from instructional videos, taped religious services, fully produced movies, music videos and, of course, the ever-popular news bloopers.
For more than eight years, Pickett and Prueher have been hosting a video podcast they call “VHS Party,” complete with their own rabid fans who send them tapes and comment along online with the streams. Their YouTube page is chock-full of interesting clips, many of which are featured and discussed on “VHS Party” with their two co-hosts and occasional guests from the comedy world, including Jon Glaser, Jo Firestone and David Cross.
The duo started the Found Footage Fest in 2004 as a way to raise money for their documentary, “Dirty Country,” about a vulgar country music performer looking for a bigger audience than his garage. Since then, they’ve taken the show on the road, bringing new selections of their favorite clips and their signature comedic stylings to theaters around the world.
For tickets to the Found Footage Festival, visit thetriplex.org.
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