​Late last November, (2023) I spent three fruitful and enjoyable days in Pennsylvania at a silvopasture workshop.  As it happened, one of our stops was at a chestnut farm, Castanea, doing much that we’re also hoping to do: growing chestnuts in their silvopasture to take advantage of multiple sheep-chestnut benefits; and processing their nuts in a small-farm facility.  I thought what they are doing is a great example of a simple, low-cost way to process chestnuts at the small-farm scale, so here is a description of what they do – to the extent that I understood it.   Digging back into my notes I found some gaps, which were filled with some Internet research, so this write-up includes some examples from other farms as well. 

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7.Cure the nuts.  After the sanitation, Castanea then cures the sorted nuts for three days - in the open containers again (I imagine this is somewhat temperature dependent).

8. Quality control nuts.  Finally, all the nuts are inspected for quality.   I saw one video with a slow conveyor belt that has the nuts rolling down it and workers sorting through the nuts as they come by.   I believe Castanea Farms spreads them out on a screen table and manually checks them that way. 

One of the plants we love to hate is the pretty Oriental bittersweet (we’re also not fond of Multiflora rose, also pretty).  It grows everywhere - in the pasture clogging up the grass; among the asparagus; up the trees; over the bushes; choking up whole forest parts – and is a noxious invasive.  When I first saw it in my garden in Needham, I cringed at the thought of the damage it might inflict.   My mother used to love the stuff and go looking for it to make decorative holiday wreaths with it.  She did know to stop short of suggesting I plant some though. 

​An early encounter with bittersweet was when Kate, a new farmer in Needham, was showing me a plot of land she was about to plant.  At that time, Kate was farming on 5 or 6 private yard plots that friends and neighbors let her use (including in our back yard).  Her farm was, and still is, the Neighborhood Farm.  On this particular plot - a big yard next to the Charles River - she was showing me how the owner had dug out all the bittersweet with his excavator and telling me how grateful she was.  It had been quite a job that left big piles of dirt and plant debris all over the place.  Still, after all his efforts, we still saw bits of the characteristic orange roots everywhere in the soil (ready to make new oriental bittersweet plants!).  My, I thought, so much work for such a futile result!
 
Digging up appears not to be the solution.  Most accounts of how to deal with bittersweet suggest the following methods.   Spray glyphosate on leaves during the active growing season, and where you have made cuts.  For a less chemical method cut back the vines and squirt herbicide on the cut.  And for the non-chemical route, repeated cutting over several seasons may be enough to starve the roots of the plant.  But no matter what method you use, bittersweet seeds are everywhere, so as long as the habitat remains hospitable, the plant is likely to eventually return. 
 
When we first bought our farm in September 2019, we heard there were blueberry plants somewhere, but we could not find them.   We did find a huge pile of bittersweet in the back of our long field.  It was 200 feet long, 30 feet wide, and about 10 feet tall – a wild, thick tangle.  It seemed something good to try to get rid of, if only to keep it from spreading.  So, we started to tug at and cut the branches.  Pretty soon, among the bittersweet leaves, we found some leaves of a different kind, dark green with reddish hue, small elliptic shapes…. Hm, quite like – blueberries!  We had found our blueberry patch!  Now the vine removal achieved purpose.   Over the course of a few weeks in September and October, and with help from various people, including my dad and his partner visiting from Finland, we got to work.  One by one, the blueberry bushes emerged, while the piles of cut bittersweet vines in the field grew.  It was a lot of work! But in the end, quite satisfying!   

​The next year, we were building our house and did not remember to cut back the bittersweet, so by summer 2021, it had grown back quite densely.  Aarghh!!!  Luckily, it was not to the same point where we started from!   It took a while to cut it back.   After that, we got a little smarter and developed a routine.  We do a winter pruning of the blueberry bushes in January/February, which includes cutting back any bittersweet vines that might have come up.   In the summer, around July, we go and cut back any vines while also checking on the blueberries and picking them.  We have done this for two years now in 2022 and 2023.   The bittersweet is integrated into our routine.  We spend some extra time during tasks we would do anyway to beat it back.  Honestly, it is quite tame now, sending up a small number of thin shoots that are easy to deal with.  It is a manageable pest – at least in those blueberries.  It’s not a complete win, and we will have to manage it for as long as we want that blueberry patch, but it’s not bad either.
 
I find there is a simple insight here.  If we had tried total eradication, we might have gone in with a big bulldozer and taken out the blueberries along with the bittersweet.  Or we might have taken out the glyphosate gun, again killing the blueberries with the bittersweet.  And in both cases, the bittersweet would have come back with no blueberries to show for it.   I am not even sure the less-chemical option would have been very useful here, because that still results in the need to return and cut the bittersweet back.   Our low-tec, manual, and somewhat persistent approach has left us with healthy plants and soil, while we are also no longer bothered by this pest.   Live and let live! (albeit letting it live at a small, unobtrusive level)

​Often, such wandering takes the mind away from the task at hand.  You might start to daydream about your next vacation or worry about some payment.  If you are sharing your task with another person, you are likely to find yourself in a conversation, usually of a pleasant meandering kind.   This leads to a certain amount of mental distraction from what you are doing – which would certainly not be the Buddhist way of course – but if your work is simple and you are not trying to improve upon your methods, it suits well enough. 
 
The other day though, when I was cleaning the eggs, my mind did not wander away.  Instead, I found myself focused on scrubbing the little bits of schmutz on the shells and finding the right spot for each colored egg in our rainbow egg arrangement.  I had decided to see if I could figure out an egg cleaning process that was a little more time efficient.  Sometimes, we clean and put our eggs away one carton or just a few cartons at a time.  Or we might save up the eggs from multiple days and then do them in one sitting, but not have an efficient flow of eggs from the collection buckets to the cleaning bucket, to the cartons.  It didn’t feel quite optimal.
 
On this afternoon, I had set up a flow with the buckets of uncleaned eggs on the left, my cleaning bucket in the middle, and six cartons open and in a row on the right.  That made the egg flow strictly unidirectional: I would pick up an egg with left hand, clean with scrubby I held in my right, put the egg in a carton on the right.  Because I had six cartons set up adjacent to each other, I could place the eggs to make a consistent color arrangement in all the cartons.  Our ideal color arrangement is one that starts with darker, olive-green eggs on one end, then we have light green and blue eggs, then light cream color, a medium cream and we finish with dark brown eggs on the other end. 

Now, often the eggs are somewhat sorted by color in the collection buckets because one flock lays mainly olive, green and blue eggs, while our other flock produces the cream and brown eggs.  After we finish collecting the eggs, usually all the green/blues are on the top or the bottom of the bucket and the cream/brown ones are in the other half.   
 
When you are cleaning your eggs, you will usually find either the blue/greens or the cream/browns at the top.  Say you have a bucket with blue/greens at the top and you have only a few empty cartons out.  Then you end up putting all those green/blue eggs in those few cartons.  When you come to the bottom half of the collection bucket with all the cream-colored eggs and you are on to your next small set of cartons, you don’t have any green/blue eggs to put in them.  In fact, all summer we have been bemoaning a shortage of green/blue eggs and have had to resort to making some all-cream-colored egg cartons.  Which is sad because part of our brand is serving up those nice rainbow eggs. 
 
With six cartons out, I could easily spread all the olive, green, and blue eggs from the top of the bucket over all the cartons, then spread out the cream/brown ones when I got to the bottom of the collection bucket.   And I found out this amazing thing.  We don’t have a shortage of green/blue eggs!  In fact, I made 18 dozen eggs that all had a nearly identical rainbow arrangement – and not a single cream-colored dozen!   Wow!  What a surprise!  I was elated! 
 
OK, yes, this is just about some dumb eggs and a silly color arrangement.  But at a very, very small scale this is about improving product quality and consistency.  By changing part of the process, without any additional investments, I was able to make the quality and consistency of our product better.   On top of that, the new process improved the time – the combination of the unidirectional flow and working in larger chunks with the greater number of empty cartons reduced the time needed by about 30 percent.  Actually, this finding is nothing new – we all know that it’s possible to improve outcomes, not with technical changes, but by making tweaks to process (how we do something).   It was of course, fun to get there with this little exercise.  But what struck me was how I got to the improved outcome, which was through focus.  It was not a deep analysis, or long thinking that got me there. It was just focusing on the work, not letting my mind go all around the world, that allowed me to see how to improve things. 
 
So, do we always need to focus while we’re doing simple tasks?  Well, yes, a Buddhist might say because then you are mindful, and mindfulness calms and opens the mind.  But I think it’s not always necessary.  It’s fine, once you have a process, to have an enjoyable conversation over joint egg cleaning or leaf raking or trench digging.  But if you want to make simple things smarter and better, then yes, a little focus may be your key.