Unsurprisingly, our farm is extremely busy from around May through mid-October. Between planting, weeding, mowing, harvesting, packing, and selling, it’s full steam ahead for more than 5 months, and there really isn’t time for much of anything else. But winter is a different story.
You’d think that once our harvests are out of the field and the cold sets in, we’re just hanging out until spring, right? Wrong! During the summer, we operate on a pretty fixed schedule – the zucchini simply must be harvested before it’s the length of my arm. But from November through March, Good Dirt Farm operates instead in “to-do list” mode.
The Important But Not Urgent Tasks for Running a Farm
When I say something like “to-do list mode,” what I really mean is that our work shifts significantly from what I would call “Urgent-Important” to “Important-Non-Urgent”. Those summer tasks are all really time-dependent, and usually have to be done that very day or very hour. Thus, our days are more or less planned out for us. Thursday is harvest day, rain or shine. Every Friday, we pack and deliver CSA shares. Saturday is Farmer’s Market in the morning and cleanup in the afternoon. Repeat. These are both very important tasks for the farm (obviously!) and also very urgent.
On the flip side, in the winter there is very little urgency. All of our high tunnel crops have longer harvest windows because they grow very slowly or not at all through winter. We’re also harvesting and selling a lot less, so relatively little time is spent on those activities. Weeds? Also not an issue during the winter.
Just because most things aren’t urgent this time of year doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to do. We have maintenance tasks that are best suited to the off-season, like cleaning and repairing tools, changing oil in our tractor, replacing water filters, deep cleaning, etc. Then there’s tasks like mulching fruit trees and other areas and chopping wood/clearing underbrush that we can do best during winter.
We also always have new projects – things we want to start doing next year or medium/large changes we want to make to the farm. For example, a major step for us for next season is adding poultry to the farm for eggs. There’s a whole set of infrastructure that has to be set up and ready to go for that aspect of the farm to run smoothly next year.
Right now, our to-do list seems both unmanageably long and incomplete. How can we make sense of it all?
Breaking Down a To-Do List
We do a couple of important things to keep ourselves productive in winter without being overwhelmed. The first is that we actually break our to-do lists down into several smaller lists. At the highest level, we have a longer list for each month that we make at the beginning of the season, laying out the larger tasks that we know should be done each month. For example, we know it’s best to make repairs to our deer fence before winter winds kick up, but ordering supplies for our CSA doesn’t need to happen until at least February.
Once we have those “monthly” lists, we have something to pull from at the start of each week to get an idea of what needs to be done. Often, we will break that list down even further and pick a few items in the morning to be done that very day. This keeps things simple and flexible, so we can take the rare peaceful and sunny January day to get out and turn our compost.
The other important management tactic is that we are constantly adding to the list. In the summer season, we may walk the farm once or twice a week in the morning to look for things that need our immediate attention, and accomplish those tasks that very day. In the offseason, and especially early on, we are constantly identifying winter tasks and adding them to the list, usually to be done at some point in several weeks or months.
Having the diligence to write things down as quickly as you can when you see them or even when they pop to mind makes a lot of difference. We have a whiteboard in our wash/pack room that is specifically a repository for those quick notes, and we take time here and there to better organize those notes into our lists.
Why We Love To-Do List Season
Like most other things, we embrace the changes that come this time of year as a fun and exciting change of pace. While growing food is definitely the main priority and passion of a farmer, working on maintaining our farm and setting ourselves up for success next season always feels great!
We also love the time we can take to stop and appreciate the beauty around us. On nice days, we are definitely knocking items off our to-do list, but usually at a leisurely pace, stopping often to appreciate the autumn colors and in winter, the silent peace of a sharp, snowy day.
We hope we’ve inspired your own to-do list season!