November- The Season In Retrospect

As October ends, and the leaves surrender, Rich and I typically begin to reflect on the season. However, this November, the penultimate month of our Gregorian year, it's not time to look back yet. Despite the shortening days, the mild temperatures still have us picking peppers and dodging

October-Reabsorption

There is a well-trodden path that runs from the farmhouse door, through the washroom in the barn and out to the field. I learned that this is called a desire line when I studied permaculture years ago. It is an informal pathway intuited by its user to get from

September-The Cyclospora Effect

You never know what's around the bend. Among all else that busies a person's mind, cyclosporosis inserted itself and made room to hunker down in the amygdala this summer. Food safety recalls aren't uncommon, but such an outbreak has everyone looking over their shoulders

The Farmer Who Was Afraid of the Rain

There once was a farmer who was afraid of the rain. She knew enough of the implication of water to be intimadated, but not enough to rest assured that all is not lost. Amidst a forecast of endless rain, but no indication of how much, she cowered and she hoped

August-Lest I Forget the Rain

Last week I wrote about adventure, an idea inspired by a particular sheet of rain we had weeks ago at market. Ideas are sparked this time of the year and I try to fan their flames until I can manage to sit down to write. By the time I could

There's Adventure In It

The sun called me to sleep one evening this past week, but not before giving me twenty extra minutes of daylight by which I harvested cherry tomatoes. That's a daily task this time of the year: it's hide and seek with the tomatoes and me amidst

July-Big Important Things To Do

Picking patty pans in the morning hours, before the heat of the day, it's as if only you and the radial squash blossoms are the only ones awake. One such morning, descending into the canopy of broad leaves to a cut a bulbous fruit, I found that I

Solstice! Hello

The sun is masked behind a wall of clouds. I like this version of solstice. Though it will travel through our northern hemisphere's sky for more hours than yesterday, it will play coy. A shy summer sun. The daylight hours will wane from here on. And we will

Faith

The farm just needed me to step away from it for a few days. My fears and disappointment were stifling. I had fretted over the monsoon rain that flooded the fields two weeks in a row, crescendoing in a nearly five-inch rain event. I feared the worst and put

June-Blast Off

I'm not sure that I'm built to withstand a five-inch rain. Both the roof of the old farmhouse and our field tolerated it better than me. On Wednesday, five inches of rain fell like a great waterfall with so much momentum behind it, it pours

A Letter To My Kids

May and Jack, Don't go. When you're gone, I won't conspire to stay up until the am hours to write, because the time when you're awake is too precious to use for writing. Where will my inspiration come from then? When you

May-Take it and Run

Unexpected rows of slender green tips surfaced in the northern field this last month. These plantlings in nearly perfect queues mysteriously arose to redeem themselves. Two falls ago we tucked excessive cloves of garlic in the ground and mulched them, endeavoring to bring garlic back into our rotation on the

Robins in the Hoop House

Veggies are chasing the sun in the hoop houses and to give them their best shot at beating out the dandelions and chickweed and grass, we become combative. In between harvest and delivery, field work, and weekly tray seeding at our dreamy seed bench in the barn, I make my

April-Domesticated LIfe

This time of the year you can often find Rich and I seeding trays of vegetables in the barn. It's one of my favorite spots on the farm...a table that sits against a wall of high windows facing east. When the kids aren't in school,

Meet Me at the Ice Cream Shop

It felt like summer and so I took May and Jack to the ice cream shop for our first visit since the fall. A group from the neighborhood was gathered in the back: a meeting of minds worrying about the world together. Sounds like a Joni Mitchell song or something.

March- With What You've Been Given

Did you locals enjoy thawing out at the end of February? That first course of spring was served up during the time of winter when we are becoming desperate for short-sleeved days and colorful surroundings. Of course here on the farm, we hopped to it and out of the

For the Love of the Game

This isn't about the Super Bowl! I know that title was misleading, especially writing today of all days. This is inspired, rather, by something much more interesting to me: a coffee cupping we enjoyed with our friends Jess and Michael Beans of Namesake Coffee earlier this week. We

February-That's Our Cue

The polar vortex came bearing arctic winds last week, unleashing North Pole conditions, which came creeping down the Northern hemisphere and enveloped us in a tundra. The media effectively communicated the polar plunge, and the masses unduly raided the shelves of the grocery store that I ducked into to pick

Reinforcing Calluses

Gratefully, we are finding our feet underneath us as we walk deep into January. We were swept up in some sort of holiday season vortex that only the stillness of this month could extract us from. The four of us have left lotusland: a few weeks of unadulterated time together,

Original Inspiration

In the infancy of adulthood, I moved from Dayton to the Hudson Valley, just up the river from "the city". New York City, of course. Back then, I would find myself waiting for the weekends to come, when my new dormmates, mere strangers with a common culinary school

January-An Unimportant Life

I discovered a writer this year who I became so crazy for, that I could finally be categorized as someone's "fangirl". She writes about the real depths of the human experience, most often from a female perspective. She encapsulates the wholeness of motherhood, the brokenness of

With Love

There's dirt under our fingernails from the last-minute carrot dig that Rich and I did to fill tonight's orders. We thought we had dug enough, but had underestimated how many people ordered from us this holiday week. With just thirty extra minutes on the clock

Coming to a Simmer

Just now we are beginning to take stock of a season of abundance: abundant rain, then abundant drought, and despite that, a rather abundant harvest. We discovered unbelievable resilience in the farm...and in ourselves as we rode the wave, read the signals of the soil and the plants and

December-Out to sea

The tide is retreating. A subfreezing outlook as far as the forecasters can see stipulates the ebb of our farmwork. Daylight hours are dwindling too, and some days the heavy drapery of grey clouds blanket the earth so thickly that the houseplants beg for more natural light. When I woke

Never Have I Ever

Never have I ever felt so appreciative of the goodwill people. The people who choose the benefit of the doubt approach to life, who don't see the world as an assortment of tribes, but rather as a great community. The people who understand that we rely on each