"This country, it can jump up and bite you," someone said to me as I briefly shutoff our Kubota yesterday to speak briefly to someone coming out of our farmstore loaded up with bags of produce. I smiled. Because I knew he was talking about rain, hail, frost, and our short season. Life in our valley. That's just it: there are so many stories we want to tell you.
We want to tell you about the time Mary and I foraged together in our Oregon neighborhood; and how I convinced her to knock on doors with fruit trees to see what we could glean. And now our whole farm is like that, really. Trying to get to a scale that works for us, to build a place all of us love, and that gives us the life we dream.
We want to tell you how one farm customer came with soil on her jeans today. She had just been harvesting beets on another farm. And Mary told me, 'you see, all of us are not just feeding people. We are providing jobs.'
We want to tell you how tonight, with a 2x4 scrap fire (cutoffs from the market trailer), with a simple bowl of tomato pasta, with all ingredients from the farm except a little cheese, oil, and pasta we remembered when we thought we got all of our tomatoes in a little too late; we fretted about the moveable tunnel and the issues with the big tunnel. We were so wrong.
We want to tell you about new neighbors coming by: two men who came out to the farmstore this Sunday, just to see if the madness, the chaos, the life that all this food about is real.
And there it is. I'm out of time for now. We have a typed two page harvest list for the morning that we will start at with headlamps. On the whiteboards in the barn, we have a huge plantcare list going on behind the scenes and you'll see glimpses of some of that: high tunnels being turned over to fall crops, 2 acres of old ground being put into cover crop, bushes of peppers, eggplant and tomatoes. And the whole back garden, that kicked our butts this spring when we implemented a brand new soil managment system. It's really under control back there, with bed after bed of weed-free salad greens. Our winter squash never fully recovered from the hail, but if you walk back there, you'll see our best crops of beets, carrots and a few other things, too. And some of the largest pumpkins we've ever had.
But mostly, come on out, we are roasting peppers again, with our entire farm crew from 4-6pm. Farm members, this is the time to load up and bring friends. And for all of the rest of you, come on out too, bring your friends, family, questions. Our pepper roaster is amazing, and we'll help you roast peppers you pick out and be on hand for stories, pesto recipes, hot sauce tips, and a whole list of different directions we can point you in if you want to explore.
We will deploy the market trailer too and have it fully stocked along with the farm store. Since summer is fleeting, and it's important to get food off the farm, we have some bulk stock up deals too!
Your farmers,
Noah, Mary, Taylor & Erin
Setting up for the farmers market in our new rig last week: exhausted from a 3am bedtime and the exhilaration of so much food. There's also another story, about riding in the market trailer enroute to market, but we'll share that some other time.