Nesting for Winter and Ready for What’s Next
by Gowan Batist
On the Mendocino Coast, the first rains land in the brown thatch, which sends up tendrils of grass and little round buttons of dicot cotyledons. The ground softens and swells, drinking in the moisture. We plant rounds of radishes, peas, and sweet greens like it was March all over again. It rarely ever frosts here, and the years it does, it’s always a surprise to see it crawling across the low spots in the garden. More common is the orange slime molds that travel the damp substrate, covering surprising ground from evening to morning like ambulatory dog vomit. They may not be lovely, but they are brilliant. A famous study in Japan found that slime molds navigate efficiently between spots of nutrients laid out across a floor in the pattern of train station stops (more efficiently, in many cases, than the true municipal system does). They won’t hurt your plants and they only eat decomposing matter, so show them some respect and just say hello if they visit your garden.
Mendocino is an incredibly diverse place, in large part due to the quick changes in ecotones—from the ocean straight up into the hills and valleys. The coastal prairie soil—really just sand invested with millennia of organic matter—grows straight, effortless carrots, but water and nutrients fall through it like a rock through the air. This quickly gives way to polarized sandstone, a highly acidic compressed soil streaked in red and white and shocking yellow. This unusual soil grows pygmy trees, a phenomenon seen almost nowhere on this earth but here, a narrow ecological band with unique and fascinating implications for all the species living in it. Unfortunately, that is where our coastal county dump site is located.
Further up the geologic staircase, we have clay soil made acidic by eons of deep leaf fall. Dark foamy streams full of tannins and protein from that forest litter decomposition give rise to place names like Whiskey Springs. The redwood and fir forests have most of their organic matter in the trees above ground, but the clay soil is dense, the particles so tiny compared to sand and minute compared to organic matter. Those who farm in clay soil often love it—it hangs on to water and compost beautifully. (It also hangs on to everything else, as anyone who has tried to use hand tools in wet clay soil has likely experienced.)
Coming up above the ridge on Highway 20, the layers of green hills fade away into the fog or the smoke, depending on the time of the year. We come into the oak savannah, which is at its mildest and sweetest in the winter. The grasslands are so productive and beautiful in the winter and spring that it’s impossible not to fall in love with them. But they are harsh and flammable in the summer and fall. Up on the ridges and down in the valley, the cold gets more intense. We even have snow, which feels like a novelty to me in spite of the disruptions it can cause, like it did last year on Highways 20 and 253. We stopped and were unable to resist throwing snowballs at the top of the hill on 20, feeling silly when much of the country was under feet of snow.
Exactly what winter looks like to us depends on which of our diverse ecotypes we reside in, but I hope for all of us this coming one is particularly gentle and restful. When I was growing up in Gualala, winter meant road closures due to river flooding, candle light, and the whole family piling into our house because we had propane for heating water and cooking. Those memories are good ones as a kid excited for the board games and stories to come out around the wood stove. Now, looking at them through a parent’s eyes, I can see that there was some extra stress and work that never registered for me.
For grazers and coastal farmers, winter isn’t necessarily the deep slow time that it is in other parts of the country. Lambing is starting for a lot of us, a time of cold hands, frosty breath in headlamps during night checks, and the slip and slide into life of so many four legged little creatures. Lambing is a time of increased vigilance for predator coexistence, as the animals are at their most vulnerable, and the predators are often heavily pregnant and hungry themselves. It’s a good time to bring flocks into barns at night, install scare devices like Foxlights and Gadflies, and pay closer attention to ourwild neighbors and their movements.
Living in a twelve-month growing season has mixed blessings. I have spoken to Midwestern farm hands who all go on seasonal unemployment in the winter and travel, write, make music, and generally get a real and significant break. I have thought of them wistfully while harvesting kale in rubber coveralls that fit like a bucket (you know the ones) with chilled prune fingers. On the other hand, making a winter soup with stored roots and fresh greens while the rain pounds outside and the fire crackles is its own kind of luxury. There is a commitment to the seasonal nature of food, and the solidarity between us and our local customers. We are still farming when both the tourists and the restaurant orders have thinned out.
I have to admit that, at Fortunate Farm’s vegetable production height, winter farming was always an act of community service operated at a loss. The Persephone Period, a time when daylight hours are very short, is a time when plant growth slows to almost nothing. In order to have a winter harvest, a lot of planting has to happen far in advance, in the warm fall, or your starts will just sit there in the waterlogged and chilly soil, stalled out for weeks at a time. This planting happens at peak fall exhaustion and sometimes might even conflict with field harvest plans—if a crop goes in a little late, it could bleed into the planting window for the next one. When we did it, our goal was mostly to keep our workers employed and keep fresh food in front of our customers, and to keep our local network strong, especially during the first year of the pandemic.
I can’t say it was a great business decision. We came into spring tired, worn out from doing twice as much work for a quarter of the income, and broke from paying the same costs for less return. Most farms lose money in the spring when everything needs to be purchased and all the work frontloaded, and we don’t start making it back until late spring or early summer. Some of the most financially successful farms I know jumpstart their seasons with business operating loans, taken out and paid back in the same year, that their strong track records allow them to qualify for. This means they don’t have to limp through lean months. Some of these loans are available from non-profit organizations set up to support farmers, like California FarmLink.
This winter, I will not be farming. The sheep will be out grazing, ignoring the shelter we make sure they have access to, aware of their roots in Iceland and Finland and dismissive of my worries about the cold and damp. My partner’s three goats will be hiding in a warm dry bedded stall, imperiously demanding room service. Some kale will stand leggy and thick stalked in our little backyard garden. Xa Kako Dile: is an indigenous women-led and -directed non-profit which will be growing at Fortunate Farm and will operate the farm stand onsite as long into the cold season as makes sense for them, in collaboration with our adjacent neighbor farms. Our family will be around the wood stove, surrounded by wool in every form—from the pelts that cover our couch cushions, to the textiles we wear—still faintly scented of lanolin when we come in from the rain, to the blankets our baby wiggles across, to the ribbons of roving processed from our flockby Mendocino Wool and Fiber, spinning into yarn through my fingers as the cherry wood wheel turns in time with my treading feet. My elderly border collie loves to lay just close enough to the pedals that they gently graze his head as he sleeps. He’s turned my cottage yarn industry into an automated dog petting machine. Our baby loved the motion of spinning wool, even from the inside of my body. Their little kicks and stretches would quiet right down every time I sat at the wheel, moving us both in the small but surprisingly muscular movements required to turn the wheel.
Spinning is deeply seasonal for a lot of us. I usually never spin in the summer and fall; pregnancy was an extenuating circumstance for me. Most of the shepherds I know save all their spinning up for the long steamy afternoons indoors, a habitat we don’t spend a lot of time in most of the year. A friend warned me that, while her baby loved watching her spinning from a safe distance when he was in the immobile grub phase, as soon as he got the ability to crawl, it became a bit of a liability. The turning parts of the wheel look so smooth and inviting, but are in fact not safe to stick a baby fist into. I have been duly warned, and will take that as it comes. But for now, spinning is the grounding act that connects the outside life walking across fields with my flock, with the inside cozy nesting space we’re making as we incubate the fourth trimester of becoming a new family. The wool still carries all those memories. I feel so blessed by the gift of baby blankets made at our local mill by my friend Kat who works there and does their weaving. The complexity and beauty of what they can make on their looms is astounding, and recently they introduced hats as well, of tight knit, good local wool that will shed the rain and keep you warm even in the snow.
Celebrating local cycles in agriculture should always include textiles, and alongside kale and bins of stored potatoes, the queen of winter is wool. If you haven’t made it to the Mendocino Wool and Fiber, Inc. storefront, get yourself over there to Ukiah and see what magic they’re spinning and weaving. Many local grazers, like Headwaters Grazing and Full Circle Wool among others, keep us safe from fire in the summer and safe from cold in the winter, all through the everyday alchemy of a sheep—grass grown from atmospheric carbon, converted into bacteria cultivated in their magical rumens, and grown on their backs as the soft blanket of wool.
We plan to spend this winter all wrapped up, feeding ourselves from summer and fall stored bounty and winter’s resilient offerings of greens and mushrooms, swathed in wool. This year of local eating is coming full circle, back to the chilly short days it started with. This time, though, there is a new family member with us, whom all the farmers in the county have nourished, through me, all year. In the spirit of deep wintering, and denning with our little one, this will also be my last “Farmer’s Voice” for a while. I have loved sharing this journey with all of you through the pages of this magazine, and I hope to come back and visit some time. But there are other talented writers among the farmers and ranchers of this county. It’s their turn to speak up, and it’s our turn to tuck in.
Have a blessed and safe winter y’all, and remember to check out MendoLake Food Hub for your bulk orders for those big holiday meals.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.