Farm Happenings

The tail end of the warm season this year brings the uncanny feeling that we're just now to the midmost. You'll remember Summer arrived in fresh foliage from cool, muddy weeks that stretched all the way back to early Spring. The slugs stuck around for far too long. The tractor mocked us in forced idleness. And frankly we had some dread from the late start, the old work piling onto the new, with missed opportunities mounting as time got scarce. In a pinch like that, you do what you can, when you can, and take your chances. I've heard all...

At some point last week we started to get a minimum of 10 hours of daylight! That marks the end of the Persephone period and we'll start to see a dramatic change of pace all around us.  We've been busy with the usual farm chores of seeding, weeding, cleaning up, watering seedlings, keeping pests like mice and hungry birds in check, and bumping plants up from their seed trays into 6-packs. Yesterday I was very happy to spend time bumping baby parsley plants and was even happier to see that we had over 200 plants by the time I was...

It's another unpredictable year when it comes to weather. Like most of you, we've been muddling our way though the pea-soup level fog for the last 10 days. The most recent cold snap was a surprise but not unwelcome, it'll help reduce the amount of pests we see later this spring/summer. You probably know we have two locations that we farm. Our Philomath plot is all outdoors and we're only harvesting a few crops there, the cooking mix and the carrots. The other items are fall harvest storage crops that are kept at Sunbow. We're tending to a few hoop...

The gesture and act of giving thanks feels sacred to me. In giving thanks we recognize a person or thing. In doing so, we create a connection between the two, an acknowlegment of each other. Growing up, I learned that Thanksgiving was about pilgrims and indigenous peoples sharing work and celebrating the bounty that it brought together. As an adult, I see now that it's another example of erasure. It's another example of the ugly truth, this land that we live on, was taken in brutality from others. I know, it's difficult to face the suffering caused in the past but if...

Anyone who makes a living working outside will tell you, you can't count on the weather to do what the predictions say it will. Last week the predictions proved correct and it was unreasonably~er, I mean unseasonably hot for several days. When we planted the majority of our crops inside the hoop houses (fields are usually too cold and wet until May), we had no idea the "dry down" would come on so quickly. We seeded all manner of cool weather brassicas that are now in the compost heap because they bolted (started their reproductive cycle by setting blossoms and...