Hello, Farm Friends.
Earlier this fall, trying to gauge how much time we had to finish up a harvest, I asked Joshua, a growers co-op driver, when he was usually at Lifeline Creamery these days. ). He texted: “Usually no longer exists.” Boy, if that doesn’t sum up this season pretty well. In a normal year, the week of Thanksgiving on the farm is a wild mix of fun and frantic: we’d be planning how to draw the maximum people to the farmstore for a festive Tuesday hosted day, relishing the cozy crowdedness of members and farm supporters picking out food for their feast-tables, and at the same time working through a stupidly ambitious list of projects on the farm in order to be able to travel west to spend some time with family for possibly our favorite holiday. I believe one year we even arranged for our entire family’s Thanksgiving to be on Friday or Saturday so we could finish our garlic planting. This year, if we were to travel, there would be a terrifying pressure to finish the last best mobile chicken barn—if you’ve been to the farm at all this week you’ve seen it’s making great progress, but still isn’t quite move-in ready.
Like many, though, we are showing our care for our loved ones this year by keeping a distance—we’ll be staying right exactly here at the farm for Thanksgiving this year, with just us, and connecting as best we can remotely with the folks we’ll miss. But the disappearance of “usually” doesn’t mean we have any shortage of things to be grateful for. We’ll be feasting well, if small, and we’ll take some extra time for gratitude. Here’s some of our list, this year, and we encourage you to make your own, shared or private, in this season of gratitude.
We are grateful for: ~ this work we have, to provide real food for our neighbors and friends ~ the trust farm members place in us to feed them for all the weeks of their membership ~ our continued health and ability to work ~ the crew that has joined us this year and helped us grow both food and ourselves ~ specifically, this week we both said farewell to and celebrated Alexis, her full six months of working with us through such a wild season ~ the creativity of our crew, from Sabrina’s art to Alexis’s farm poetry ~ greens to harvest now, greens for later even in the winter ~ all of carrots stored in walk-in coolers that were harvested on time this year ~ the ability to rent walk-in cooler space as we earn and build space for storage on the farm ~ the relentless passion for our farm eggs ~ the fact that in January egg numbers will go up again ~ a safe warm home ~ the ability to see at least some family, safely, this summer ~ all of the gifts that arrive as surprises on the farm: cookies, dog treats, tools, the little red van, ready-to-eat meals, firewood, clothes and gear that find someone on the crew to fit, maple syrup, honey, beers in the cooler, huckleberries, venison, more cookies, a locally grown turkey, packages of nuts and bolts outside the shop, our favorite kind of peanut butter ~ the gift of so many weeks of her summer from niece Kayla, our small farm hero, when we were short on crew ~ a camper that we borrowed but has been donated to the farm ~ the tidal wave of flowers that hit the farm this year ~ a visit from singer/song writer and first ever crew member Margo Cilker ~ bunks of reclaimed lumber from Home Resource ~ amazing cover crop and compost production ~ an endless supply of masks from farm members and gallons of sanitizer from CFAC. The list could go on. We hope you, too, can take some time to find what you are grateful for.
The humble but grand thanksgiving feast. A pumpkin, SRF salad, carrots, bunch greens, radishes, beets and potatoes.
And we hope that you can turn a stay-at-home Thanksgiving into one that is delicious, festive, and celebratory. To help you and to help us get some good farm food out to you all in a streamlined way, we are offering a Thanksgiving special pre-packed bag that you can pick up all in one go; we can even run it out to your car for a no-contact pickup if needed. We packed some bags for the farmstore this weekend for those of you who like to get ahead of the game, which you can just swing by and purchase.
Or you can contact us to order one to pick up on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week, for those who want their goodies as close to the holiday as possible. For $25, the giving-thanks bag includes:
2 pounds purple potatoes, 1.5 pounds carrots, 1 pound of beets, a half-pound of radishes, a bag of our winter salad mix, a bunch of kale and medium-large pie pumpkin or winter squash. This won’t supply the 30-person all-the-cousins Thanksgivings we loved, but we think it’s a nice diversity and quantity for a veggie-focused celebratory meal.
And of course the farmstore is also open and well-stocked for whatever assortment of veggies appeals to you. We have the very last round of cauliflower stocked, along with spinach, winter salad mix, spicy salad mix, kale, cabbage, beets, carrots, seven varieties of potatoes, pie pumpkins, winter squash, radishes, salad turnips, boc choi, and a lot more.