Full Sun Farm – Polyester Knit Spin Cycle
Without question, I believe farmers have always been inventive, creative individuals, perhaps taking on one of the hardest jobs of all – working with the ever-changing conditions of Nature. It requires a lot of ingenuity.
I have been kicking around farms and gardens since my early restaurant days in Highlands, NC and continue to do so, partially in hopes of some sort of magic “gardening dust” rubbing off on me, maybe helping me to grow my own garden successfully.
Over the past few years, Venessa Campbell and Alex Brown of Full Sun Farms in Big Sandy Mush have humored me and let me visit. I have always been impressed with the quality of the vegetables they grow. I was out there this week, enticed by Vanessa’s description of the lunch she fixed. It sounded delicious. I offered to work for food.
Tuesday and Friday are harvest days, preparing for the Wednesday and Saturday tailgate markets – and those are the days that Vanessa cooks, so I headed out North Turkey Creek through some of the most beautiful mountain valley land in western North Carolina. I arrived mid-way through the morning’s work, as I had an early business meeting downtown. Most of the day’s harvest was complete and now it was time to wash and pack the produce.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
The task I was given by Alex was to wash the chioga beets for the CSA boxes and the tailgate on Wednesday. Over the seasons, Vanessa and Alex have collected various contraptions to make their farming task more productive. As the era of equipping small farms has passed, at least for the moment, much of what they use is refurbished, antique equipment built before either of them were born. For my assigned job, I was introduced to the Torrent Bunch Washer circa 1940. Two counter rotating brushes, belt-driven by an electric motor and a Rube Goldberg arrangement of two spray nozzles, this small machine would scrub the remaining earth from the mornings pickings. Alex was clear and direct in his directions of how to wash the beets. “Don’t press to hard, the motor can overheat, if you push too hard. Be careful, there is a tendency for the brushes to pull the beets into the machine. Be sure to get all the dirt off the beets.” Using it was sort of like working with your grandmother, she knows what she is doing, but she’s not too quick about it.
So, I washed a-bucket-load of beets. I liked it, very Zen. At one point, Unnoticed, I caught Alex inspecting my work. I had to chuckle to myself – I have spent 38 years picking and cleaning vegetables and inspecting others work – to meet my own high standards. It was wonderful to see someone else as attentive to quality as I have been. It seems I passed, he said nothing. It is one of those hidden, essential qualities for producing something of value. Often it is unappreciated, but one of the reasons Full Sun Farms has always produced outstanding vegetables. This trait would show up many times in the day.
Without question, I believe farmers have always been inventive, creative individuals, perhaps taking on one of the hardest jobs of all – working with the ever-changing conditions of Nature. It requires a lot of ingenuity. To achieve what they do, which is to run a small, successful family farm, Vanessa and Alex have had to search far and wide for the tools of their trade. The 1940 “Grandmother” Torrent Bunch Washer was only one example. The barn area was littered with other, fine examples. (Somewhere in all of this is the seed of a revival in small equipment manufacturing -as we MUST rebuild our local food systems). These photos tell that story.
My task almost took until lunchtime. Checking his watch, “we have five minutes”, Alex directed us to a few tasks, and one was clearing some straw from underneath tomato plants. At Full Sun, tomatoes are grown in a greenhouse “tunnel”, in order to control moisture on the plants. Excessive moisture and soil splash back from falling rain is the cause of a late season blight, which essentially kills the tomato plant. One strategy is to plant them as they do here. More work, superior product. Our particular work, just before lunch, was to remove the straw mulch from some plants that inadvertently had some herbicide on them that was affecting the growth of the plants, causing them to spiral in on themselves, leading to destruction of the plant. Additionally, this straw was suppose to be organic and had apparently slipped by from their source provider. This done, time for lunch, the reason I was here.
Lunch was delicious, but, surprisingly, it was not about the food. There were ten of us – Vanessa, Alex, their two daughters; Ada and Bella, Joseph and Joy (who are part of the Full Sun CSA and work 6 shifts on the farm as part of their payment), their 3 interns, Megan, Maggie and myself.
It was a very civilized – we sat together, ate lunch, talked about everything in the world, including farming. When we finished, everyone pitched in to clean up and then headed off for hour of “private time”, letting the heat of the day pass until mid-afternoon. I sat outside, while the kids climbed trees – the world slowed down.
I had an inkling about all these implements and recycled devices. While I was washing the beets, I noticed an old washing machine. I did wonder what it was doing out here in the barn, knowing full well, in the winter, everythng out here would freeze. I was about to find out.
We were washing lettuce, filling two large sinks with water. First we removed the root ends of the plants, discarding any bruised or rotten outer leaves, then a good soak in the first sink to remove the dirt and a final rinse to make sure all the grit had been removed. (Trust me on this one, getting clean, grit free lettuce is not just a luxury, it is a necessity – too many times at the restaurant we had to reject lettuce that arrived unclean.) Then the lettuce was allowed to drain on a drain board. 
Next, Vanessa told me to me to fill nylon “onion bags” with five handfuls of the salad mix. She moved over to the washing machine and told me that they had figured out that if they spun these bags on the Polyester Knit Spin Cycle, it was exactly forceful enough, without bruising the lettuce, to remove all the water! I howled – a giant salad spinner. So Nick and I proceeded to spin and bag lettuce for Wednesday’s CSA boxes. 
Like almost everything about this farm, and the others like it – returning to small scale, family farms requires making do with what you have or what you can find. Alex and I discussed the fact that there no longer are small scale, durable farm implements being made, just like the Torrent Brush Washer, or the tractor attachments. Returning to a rural farming lifestyle, one needs to be a pioneer, indeed, it may be the new frontier – the post-industrial, post-digital world.
Finding the tools to do the work is one thing - keeping them working is another. In addition to being able to actually grow something – in and of itself a daunting task – a farmer also must know how to maintain and repair equipment. This is another dimension of Full Sun Farm, keeping things working. Full Sun is also a “teaching farm” – each year hiring paid interns to help run the farm. More important, they are learning how to farm and to keep it going. I witnessed this exchange of knowledge and skill often. At one point in the day, Alex was teaching Megan how to change the oil on one of their tractors. 
After preparing the lettuce – it was time to pick blueberries. And so the afternoon went – until it was time for me to head back to town.
Beyond the exquisite tranquility of Full Sun’s setting in Big Sandy Mush, the relaxed working conditions, the pride and attention to growing food – I came away, again, connected to the food I cook and eat. Still lingering is a sense of hope, seeing this wonderful family prosper in a way that dollars will never be able to measure.
In the big picture, we are surrounded by a broken food system – virtually every facet: corporate farms struggling to exist through hugh subsidies, chemical inputs, and food transported thousands of miles, to name a few – but here, on this farm, in this region of Western North Carolina, those essential “provisions of nature” are flourishing. The connection to life itself is alive.
“Once we lose touch with the spendthrift aspect of nature’s provisions epitomized by the raising of a crop, we are in danger of losing touch with life itself.” Honey From A Weed - Patience Gray
-Mark Rosenstein
