The 7 a.m. huddle convenes, as it does every morning at Radical Roots, beneath the barn shed. It is a cloudy Tuesday, one of two weekly fieldwork days at this farm nestled against the Massanutten ridgeline in Keezletown. Oddly, an ocean smell hangs in the air; on Tuesdays Dave O’Neill—who with his wife, Lee, owns and operates the five-acre spread—gets up extra early to fertilize the hoop house plants with a pungent fish- and seaweed-derived brew. Nearby, the chickens squawk in obnoxious competition with the wild songbirds’ daybreak melodies, so Dave has to speak up to outline the plan of attack.

     These morning huddles are critical for keeping customers supplied and satisfied with Radical Roots’ “ecologically grown” vegetables. The O’Neills, who’ve decided to forgo the expense and bureaucratic hassle of USDA organic certification, use no chemicals or synthetic fertilizers. Instead, they build soil fertility using cover crops, compost, and other natural methods. The farm’s produce is “certified naturally grown” through a farmer-run program that provides an alternative to official organic certification. Nearly all the work is done by hand; it is a constant race just to keep up, and an ongoing challenge to identify and prioritize the tasks on the daily to-do list.

     “The number one skill of a farmer is observation,” says Dave, who is more teacher than boss. In fact, his three 20- and 30-something apprentices, Lindsey Hyde, Kitt Healy, and Robert Greenlaw, nod as Dave, today’s to-do list in hand, describes their busy day ahead. First up, they’ll transplant some solanaceae on the far side of the annual garden. Family solanaceae includes tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes. Dave is big on this sort of agri-jargon, in part because members of the same vegetable families have similar requirements, pests, and rotation schemes. After that, there’s plenty of weeding and mulching to do, unless it rains. Dave scans the overcast sky. It’s been a little dry, but there’s a lot to get done. Rain would be a mixed blessing.

     Shortly, the crew is in the field. Though peppers were all planted in late spring, tomatoes go in on a three-week schedule all summer to ensure a long, steady, and abundant harvest. Hands work quickly—laying out transplants, digging aside the fluffy soil, and patting in the young plants, all within a few seconds—but progress seems slow. After 10 minutes, they are not quite halfway down their first 200-foot row. At least a dozen of these rows run side by side just in this small section of the farm, between the eight-and-a-half-foot north fence (recently raised to thwart deer) and what was, until not long ago, the garlic patch—from which the bulbs are now dangling in the barn to cure.

     Potatoes are beyond the garlic, ending against a cluster of lettuce rows that sit along the eastern fence. Beyond that, a handful of Angus cattle graze in a neighbor’s pasture. Panning 180 degrees to the south, then west: beehives, Dave and Lee’s passive solar, super-efficient house, the barn, the hoop house—an unheated, plastic-covered frame just big enough to walk beneath, to where many springtime transplants are moved from the greenhouse so they can gradually adjust to the real-world climate of the garden.

     Then, to the southwest, the permanent beds arranged in harmony so that annual crops and perennials bring out the best in one another—nitrogen-fixers beside deep-rooted, mineral-extracting ones next to beneficial-insect attractors.

     Roughly in the middle is a wellhead outfitted with an array of valves, gauges, and hoses—Radical Roots’ drip-irrigation nerve center. The O’Neills use drip irrigation as much as possible because it allows for efficient and precise watering. For tightly packed crops like lettuce, though, they use sprinklers because the plants are too close to one another for drip hoses to be of any use.

     Radical Roots is special in that it is designed entirely around the principles of permaculture, an approach to landscape design that attempts to replicate natural ecosystems (see "Understanding Permaculture" below). “A permaculture system is designed from the heart,” says Christine Gyovai, president of the Blue Ridge Permaculture Network. “It starts with a series of ethics: earth care, people care, and fair share.”

     It’s a radical idea taken seriously at Radical Roots, and one that Dave and Lee practice and preach. “We try to make our living in one of the most sustainable ways possible,” says Lee. “By growing ecological food, and sharing with people how we do this, and how they can do it too.” 

It is mid-morning now, and the chickens, thankfully, have shut up, likely conserving their energy in the mounting heat and humidity. The sweaty crew pauses to straighten chore-hunched backs. The sky is growing darker, definitely threatening rain now. Oh, well, once you sign on to follow Mother Nature’s principles, you can’t quibble too much with her timing.

     After Dave and Lee graduated from James Madison University—1996 and ’97, respectively—they spent a few itinerant years in Oregon, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand, traveling, living, and studying farming and permaculture. By 2000, the couple was back in Virginia and founded Radical Roots on a half-acre of rented land near Port Republic. Their biggest harvest that year, Dave says, was mistakes.

     In 2003, they bought a five-acre hayfield near Keezletown. Living in their camper, they set to work coaxing abundance from land that had once produced just a few dozen hay bales a year.

     They gardened in summer and built each winter. First came the greenhouse, covered in plastic and given an extra boost by the propane furnace in the spring, when the first of the season’s seedlings are started. The next winter, they built the barn, a multifunctional “farm center” with storage space, an office, and a shaded packing shed on the north side. Last winter, they finished off the house—one of those passive-solar deals built with extra-thick walls and positioned to harvest warmth from sunlight, such that the O’Neills turned on their heat only about five times even amid the blizzards of last winter. On the sloping south and west sides of the land, they dug gently curving swales on contour with the grade to retain rainwater.

     “We’ve totally changed the structure and the function of the land,” says Dave, hunched over his transplants, fingers covered in black dirt up to the last knuckle. Six years in, the former hayfield bursts with around 100 varieties of 30 different vegetables, not counting the hundreds of young fruit trees or the 100-some species of other plants they raise for sale from the nursery.

     Finally, the solanaceae are all in; Dave and company move on to some cucurbit transplants (Family cucurbitaceae: squash, melons, cukes, etc.). Dave reminds the apprentices that they can bury the cotyledons—the first “leaves” to appear after germination, but which technically aren’t leaves, botanically speaking—but not the true leaves. “It’s just so amazing how much knowledge goes into this,” says apprentice Healy, standing straight for a moment to give her back and legs a rest. “Dave and Lee just know so much.”

     By the time the day’s cucurbits are planted, dirt is pretty well up to everyone’s elbows, or maybe even shoulders.

“Boo!” Isaiah O’Neill, 5, springs a late-morning ambush on the apprentices in the potato patch. Giggling, he emerges from hiding to announce that “potatoes eat grass with ketchup.” When he’s not doing agricultural stand-up, Isaiah’s already capable of giving a pretty thorough farm tour.

     Miranda, 3, follows Isaiah out of the house, skipping toward the group at Lee’s side. Lee and Dave usually tag-team childcare during the week, switching mornings and afternoons in the fields and at home with the kids. On harvest mornings—Wednesdays and Fridays—a babysitter comes out to free extra hands.

     Radical Roots keeps a busy schedule of sales and deliveries. There are Saturday morning engagements at the Harrisonburg Farmers’ Market and Charlottesville City Market. On Wednesdays, they haul 50 CSA shares to Charlottesville, where they set up at Farmers in the Park in Meade Park. On Mondays, 50 more CSA shares go to Harrisonburg. Radical Roots also has a small contract with Charlottesville’s Local Food Hub, has a few restaurant accounts, and does some sales online in the Charlottesville area through www.relayfoods.com.

     To make it all happen, the farm workweek is governed by a routine of workdays, harvest days, market days, and apprentice education. Thursday afternoons include on-farm lectures that address some aspect of permaculture or ecological gardening, plus field trips to kindred farms in the region. Sundays and Tuesday afternoons are off.

     “We’re pretty into the schedule—so that we can all have a life, hopefully,” says Lee, who spends her free time hiking or practicing yoga. Dave’s indulgence is cycling, ideally two rides a week.

     Lunch break begins at noon. The O’Neills gather with their children at the picnic table in front of the house for pasta with pesto. Today, the apprentices wander off to forage for themselves; they eat with the family on Mondays and Thursdays. Come 1 o’clock, the lunch break is over, and the apprentices return, ready to work.

     After lunch, Dave and the kids spend the afternoon together, while Lee and apprentices head back into the field until 5 p.m. Summer fieldwork days like this require constant triage. The crew moves down a priority list of planting, mulching, weeding, watering, or otherwise attending to the neediest bits of Radical Roots. When a gentle rain finally begins to fall by mid-afternoon, the four in the field pull out raincoats and soldier on with mud caked around their boots like snowshoes.

     As the workday (and rain) ends, the soggy apprentices head off for the evening and the O’Neills gather for a “farm supper.” One of the family’s summer rituals is preparing meals using only ingredients from the farm: a quiche with roasted potatoes topped with homemade salsa, hard boiled eggs on a salad of greens, and tomatoes roasted with garlic. They eat outside on the patio south of their house, after the heat has broken and an early evening calm has arrived in Keezletown.

     Dave and Lee put the kids to bed early, and then head out in the cool air for one of the most relaxing parts of their job: the crop walk. They start in the greenhouse, examining the trays of seedlings, checking which ones are ready and which ones need a few more days. They wind through the contoured beds, monitoring, note-taking, bouncing ideas off each other, practicing the all-important agrarian skill of careful observation. It all takes about an hour. They sweep back up behind the house, admiring the new solanaceae and cucurbits. Once back inside, as darkness falls, their crop-walk notes become the priority list to be disseminated beneath the barn shed tomorrow morning at the 7 a.m. huddle, when this will all begin again.