Big Things

Whether harvesting 20 bins of onions, or just some cilantro and scallions for dinner, we try to do as much as we can with the values we started the farm with: growing food for community, creating love, and a story that allows people to gather, reflect and be part of a bigger community. Since taking on larger crew, and hiring for more experienced positions this year, as we try to step away to literally do some of those bigger things, a lot of our communication has gotten a bit, well, lost. We feel bad about that. Nurturing our people has come at the expense of Mary and I being able to step away to write — and literally sometimes get our bills paid.

Thanks for putting up with us. We are writing to say, first, thank you. We are also writing to remind you that with the first frosts near, and even with 3 coolers, we have tons of food for you. Over the past few days, I’ve harvested at least one thousand pounds of melons, and now that we are getting some more sun, we’ve got a lot more coming in that will soon push our capacity. So today we are deploying the market trailer with melons, tomatoes, and all that we have time to harvest while we get some critical winter farming transplants in. The melons — sweet cantaloupe, with both green and yellow fruits, and even some watermelon, will be on our market trailer. The farmstore remains open all the time and we’d love to see you. We’ll be hosting today, from 3-6pm to answer questions (or even help you choose that melon!), but you can come anytime.

Working Towards a Winning Spring

Arugula, covered by a thin veil of row cover to help it keep warmer and protect it from flea beetles is about to be removed. The first serious arugula harvest is at the farm.

It’s a big Tuesday coming up at the farm! Farmer’s Market opening day may be more dramatic (that kids’ parade, fantastic every year!), but at the farm it’s an exciting opening to the season too. As we delve into market and main-season membership time, we are re-starting our Tuesday afternoon hosted farmstore hours. From now through October, if you want to ask us some questions, take a little walk around, chat recipes or learn what that weird looking new vegetable is, we’ll have someone on hand to greet and visit, from 3:00-6:00 on Tuesdays.

This week, welcoming our new and returning “feedbag” members, we have a few extra fun things planned, including farm tours at 3:30 and 5:15. Farm members: if you haven’t picked up this year’s feedbag yet, come on out! New members can get the full orientation and returning members a big thanks and a great start to the season.

Spring is funny, as much as we try for a steady supply of all the produce, things come in waves….at market, we had harvested Friday from patches of greens here and there, worried about overall volume, and thought that 4 items this week was all that we could supply to the feedbags. But today’s harvest totes were heavy and the stack of bagged greens in the walk-in cooler is tall. Members who picked up over the weekend and got just 4 things, please feel free to swing by the farmstore this week and grab one more.

And if you are not a member, there’s plenty for you now too! Spinach, lettuce mix, arugula, tender butter chard, spicy mix, stir-fry mixes and bundles, chives, and a few (just a few but they are exciting), radishes and salad turnips (with more on deck for market this week as well).

Our meal of choice right now is any of those stir-fry type greens, sautéed with some garlic, maybe frozen sweet peppers or other veggies on hand, seasoned up with some curry paste and coconut milk or the favorite peanut sauce, and poured over rice or noodles. Fried egg on top if you are so lucky.

It was so wonderful to see so many familiar faces and trusty market baskets this Saturday at what was, believe it or not, our tenth opening day at the Hamilton Farmers Market. We hope to see you at the farm as well.

Yup, real radishes tokyo bekana (a great early season salad), and turnips!

Farmer thoughts on spring, from Noah

Spring is always wonderful on a farm, except when it is not. For a farm, it’s a season of re-awakening, of hopes and planning, and also a realization of daily battle between what is possible, what we dream, and biology.  We used to think mostly about the biology and the timing, when we were newer to this: the simple math of starting seeds in February, long winter nights of planning, reading new farming books punctuated by short days of winter harvests. The years have added many more layers to the mix.

In deep in winter, we start think hard about the themes and goals for the year, and we start the long process of interviewing crew and trying to build the team that can help us reach those goals. Ideally, (and I’m dreaming big here), it’s a series of talks over long hours skiing from mountain hut to mountain hut in the French alps or the wilderness of Idaho. Maybe while picking coffee in the Oaxaca forests with our old friends John and Holly and Thomas and Alvira. 

But we didn’t get that sort of time this year; though we started the winter with a good full team, one had to leave to tend to family medical issues out of state, and suddenly we were short handed and had to fudge and compress our quiet bit of time. And, it’s easy to forget too, we had about a 15-week non-stop building marathon-push on our wash pack shed before I just got, well, completely worn out and a little caught up in red tape, correcting some mistakes, and then writing our employee manual.

So, this year, the wondrous remix of spring seems hurried along by not only the winter came fast previously (and because of that our field conditions and challenges have been vastly different to other years) and even though it’s been an especially cool spring, it still seems a bit hurried.

But we didn’t scrimp on the weeks of interviews, reference calls, followup calls with our crew, and job offer letters. It consumes weeks, and I think to make sure we got things just right, I took a well needed break from building to handle all the zoom and facetime logistics.  It’s quite the thing, interviewing people who want to make a difference, and come to our valley, and our farm to make the world a better place.

We thought we did a real good job this year, actually doubling our crew size and making sure that without needing to buy too many building materials, and things in general, we could make it all work, even with some serious increased costs, of both supplies and both more crew and with also significant wage raises.

With these changes, we figured, we could have at least two well seasoned people in the greenhouse, an additional tractor expert, some real field experts, bring back the work-party shops that we trialed some years ago, and continue to improve our flower enterprise, not only with another harvest and bouquet expert, but with some on farm help to expand flower offerings,  permanent market help, and also give people some leadership roles. Sure, we said, with some good online mentorship we had this winter, we can do all of that. Our peers thought so too. We started off the season so well-staffed that we even arranged for some of our team members to help out on other local farms who were short-handed, in their first few weeks.

Sabrina drops potatoes into furrows before being burying them. We’ve got a couple new varieties this year we are really excited about.

As I write, right now, we are starting to face a near-term future with a smaller team; one person out for the foreseeable future after a car crash, and other who has decided that this isn’t the best fit at this point, and gave us her two-week notice last week. While the two week notice is a courteous practice in the US, it doesn’t really work very well on a farm; the season is already off to the races, and it’s too late to recruit new hires for this seasonal work. it’s literally a race here to re-shuffle everyone’s positions, retrain, and figure out how we can be an employer of choice (and not a farm people want to leave), and also get a break from time to time. And while it does feel like we are winning a lot of the time, (with the most tender bright green spinach, or perfect baby arugula), we aren’t winning right now. Despite the best plans (and maybe it’s been simply lack of sleep), things aren’t quite going like we visioned. It’s so concerning, in fact, that we are bringing in some outside help, a facilitator to guide us all through the conversations about how to be a team.

An old friend, once wrote to me, in a recorded letter, before podcasts and the voice memos of millennials were a thing, that in their twenties they’d park their car, and run endlessly, lost into a large field of wheat or cover crop or cornfield until they couldn’t run anymore and they’d flop down, out of wonder of nature, love, and what people who are part of a community can grow for a community. We are craving that wonder now, trying to grow and continuously learn, but the field is large and we can get a bit lost.

What I’m learning is this. In order to win, you have to lose a little. You have to cry a lot. You have to be able to re-invent yourself, while diving deep, below the soil. We are literally digging dreams. We have to find a way to have more rest, even if parts of the farm fail. We also have to teach, a lot more than we thought. When we give feedback, it’s because we have a sense of obligation for our community, and the business of our farm.  We don’t make a lot, and there are things that may always haunt us because we’ve learned: those clouds of hail; that storm that destroyed our house build many years ago; the delicate balance of seedling conditions, plant spacing, crop protection, everything matters, how efficient we harvest, and how we grow and build a team.  And we aspire to lead and to gain enough respect to be recognized as leaders. And we don’t have that with our crew yet this year, and that’s terrible.

We are so tired of being strong and being scared. There are things that haunt farmers, soil diseases, challenges with building organic matter, issues with building our crop records and responding to changing conditions on the fly, and the infrastructure. Well, even though our new build isn’t quite yet done, we are well on the way to solving that.  I feel like we are solving them all of the problems of farming.  But some things remain elusive.

And while we continue to dream, we also continue to doubt; spring is the prime season of doubt for farmers, when we can remember vividly all the ways things haven’t worked out, even as we launch the ship again. We continue to be a little scared; that time of just barely making our farm work, just barely, well, many of us will never forget it.  And even though we try to impress that secret history on our team, we know it’s how we live each day that matters.  Your greetings, love, and support mean so much.

We’ve cleaned up the farm quite a bit yesterday, with the first big shifts of mowing and weed whacking, and while we haven’t quite taken all the recycled scrap metal out of the way, things are looking good and literally every day for a while now, and many days to come, more seeds and more transplants are going in. Somehow, despite it all, there is that: planting as the act of faith, the expression of hope, the best defense we know against the fear and doubt.

The Season Between Seasons

Conditions this time of year can change in an instant. Above top, caterpillars get closed tight during a snow squall but as the light lifts and the moveable caterpillars warm up, the sides of the caterpillars are raised so plants don’t overheat.

The tipping point between the end of March and the start of April might not seem like much, but somehow that moment is also everything. A single farming day in that slip between seasons can encompass it all and . I think March can set the tone for the entire season, because in a way it’s all the small things, these little moments here and there that make everything. “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” That’s what Charles Dickens said in Great Expectations. Weather-wise, we have a lot of those days, and much of this season our internal weather is just as conflicted. And, all transitions are awkward.

Iron pipe and fittings on our drip tape winder creak against the new stand as our Sabrina winds up drip tape from meds throughout the farm. Normally a November task, all of this was trapped under snow last fall, and we have just finally been able to peel back the landscape fabric and finish our fall cleanups as we work to prepare spring ground. Sabrina runs the winder which pulls tape in faster as faster as the circle of bundled drip tape grows.  I pucker my face at the joy of a new tools and furrow my brow just a little: the stand is the first version and needs adjustment. But then I have to crack a smile; Sabrina is getting into it and is picking up speed; as she cranks on the wheel, the bails of drip tape wind and bundle neatly. So much of a farmer’s work is simply moving stuff. And that’s what we are doing, trying to make order out of chaos.

Across the field, and the chatter of greenhouse plastic from our half dozen moveable caterpillars, Mary and I are busy wrestling transplants into the ground. This transplanting, with our paper pot transplanter, isn’t going as smoothly as we’d hoped. The plants are a few days too large leaves and roots tangling together, so they don’t feed so smoothly through the transplanter even though the soil is just about perfect. These are some of our pre-market and early-market greens, and there are so many flats of them that we’ve brought them out to one of the caterpillars in the bed of our truck, and it’s parked tight at the end of the field, in the headlands. Crammed in the headlands are tarps being pulled off the field, bins of stuff to sort and organize, and a small mountain of sand for the sandbags that hold down tarps and row cover. It’s not pretty. For a lot of the spring plantings, especially with the wind that bristles down Mill Creek, we’ll use the 16 pound bags, but all morning, Hannah has been making some lighter bags, for easier days, marked with red zip ties.

Back in the transplants, I look up at Mary, worried. Aside from a little bit of field cleanup, and “the daily’s,” our term for routine tasks, these transplants are really the only thing we will manage to get done today (there were a few more big things on the list). I had managed to shape the four beds inside the caterpillar, squeezing the Italian BCS walk-behind tractor into the structure, which we use to stir the soil, mix amendments, kissing the soil - whisking it, and just brushing the outer ribs of the galvanized top rail fence which we bent to make one of the caterpillars that moves across the farm. It’s very grounding, running the small tractor, and literally seeing piles of transplants appear from the truck and garden carts and just about start before the tractor work is done. This is the rhythm of spring, when our farm tries to wake up, and so often we have to stop what we are doing, to open and close a high tunnel or vent a caterpillar, making sure the spinach or early daffodils don’t get too warm. We often have to call backup on the radio, swallow hard as our team — they are both very experienced and new at the same time — learn to ask questions, call us out on our promises of what we said we’d do, and what we wouldn’t.

I hear Glenn’s four wheeler, with its unmistakable rumble, as he zooms about on the tasks of his own small homestead across the road. He came by earlier in the week to grab “Zip Tie,” the last escape-artist hen that could still somehow sneak under the 9.7 Kilovolt mobile electronet fence. The whole crew looks up at the sound; wonders if Glenn is coming over; or maybe it’s about zip tie, or the wind. Maybe it’s even Susie and Dana, new farmers that are borrowing one of our walkin coolers for the season, coming by with a second vehicle to pilot the walkin cooler that we built on a trailer base, back home to their own farm. Maybe like me, they are all wondering about the magic and mysteries of the wind, weather, and neighbors.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop saying that it’s going to be our hardest season ever. Maybe when I stop saying that, it means that it’s not hard, and that’s not the point of farming. What makes this season different is that we are taking on our larger crew than ever, and we know it will take a lot on our part to make it work. We finally feel like we have calculated what it takes to run the entire four season farm, get all the things done, get some more time to do other work (more about that in the future), and also make sure the season has a lot fun of surprises for our team and community. As we are still finishing the packshed, it all seems a bit much, but then again, a four season farm in Montana was never really a reasonable thing anyway.

And it’s spring. It’s the hopeful, lovely time, but also, especially early on, I call it ugly season, and it’s a hard one.  It’s easy to feel short on everything this time of year: time, space, resources, energy. It’s a funny time, when we are doing that field cleanup that we didn’t quite finish, preparing ground, getting the last orders done, getting ready to accept more team members that are arriving in just a couple of weeks, and working each day on the simple things: trust, culture, clarity. We aren’t just building a farm, or if we are, we are both building community and trust and love in our team, but in our greater community. And that might be why it’s also the most important time to be as generous as we can with all the things that feel short.   

Now, as I finish writing on the weekend, the snow shudders against the barn. Mary and I finish covering, making notes about the week to come. We run out to cover the plants and close up tunnels just as the second snow squall for the day finishes and bookends the day, closing the last of March for us, pushing April and Spring into us, and the farm, even if we are both excited and ready and not ready.

In one of these moveable caterpillars, the first daffodils start to blossom.

Transplants, planted yesterday, are fed by drippiness and protected at night with both greenhouse plastic and frost cloth fabric that floats over metal hoops set into the soil.

The farm drip winder, hastily built last fall, rests on a new stand next to old rolls of drip tape that will be put on a real to deploy into the gardens later this spring.

Winter's darkest days and warmest hearts

Dear Farm Friends

It’s been a busy start to winter, and a long time since a newsletter. As sometimes happens in that case, we had a lot of words built up, so there’s a long-read section at the end of the email, and shorter newsy bits up front here.

If you haven’t been to the farmstore in a while, you might be wondering if it’s worth the trip. After all, there has been snow on the ground since early November, many nights well below zero, and light levels so low that some days one more cup of coffee is the only thing preventing us all from crawling into hibernation on the couch with the farm cats. But it’s definitely worth coming to the farm!

Even with all the greens, we’ve been digging into the grated-roots salads lately. Fun grated rainbow carrot arrangements bring that summer sun back, and love a good honey-mustard or ginger dressing with sesame oil and rice vinegar.

The farmstore is stocked, even crowded, with storage crops from carrots, beets, radishes, potatoes, cabbage, to squash, onions, and garlic. There are also fresh greens, including our mild winter salad mix and a chard-kale cooking mix at the moment, with spinach preparing to return this week. We’ve gotten so used to this, in some ways, that it just seems normal to have 3-4 different kinds of greens in mid-December, but it was not many years ago that the farmstore at this time of year held, at best, some squash, onions, eggs, and potatoes.

We still have a few beautiful garlic braids available, great for gifting or just combining decoration and flavor in your own kitchen. SRF hoodies are available again too.

We encourage you to come on out in the coming weeks as we make some of our final large greens harvests for the year. With some crew taking time at the holidays to be with family and friends, we will take a one-week hiatus from greens harvests in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and anticipate January being quite a bit lighter on greens, though the spinach forecast is promising (more details on how that is possible, below).

One of things that can still surprise us about being a four-season farm is how….I won’t say easy it is to provide year-round food to our community, but at least how imminently possible it is. We are wrapping up our first 8-week winter membership session this week, in which farm members picked up weekly feasts of roots, squash, onions, garlic, greens, and more. The next session will start on the first Wednesday of January. We currently have about 15 spaces free, so if you want to start your year off with a weekly dose of local veggies, check out the details and simple signup form on here our website.

Whether you join the winter membership, or just stop by the farmstore, we are excited to have so much variety and abundance for you: winter squash, onions, garlic, beets, carrots, radishes cabbage, salad turnips, and a wide variety of potatoes.

This winter we find ourselves not only winter-farming, but also winter-building, making it still a little bit hard to achieve the winter-resting that we know we need. We’ve been managing concurrent teams on the farm and on the build. We’re extra grateful that the farm team is able to handle enough of the daily tasks that this Friday we were able to have some key strategy talks together, and also sneak away for a short little ski up Skalkaho.

The packshed build continues, and continues to be our largest, most complicated project yet. After an entire long week of blowing in cellulose insulation, the space now stays warm with just occasional firings of the natural gas heater; some days we even warm it up with just a simple box fan blowing in from the greenhouse. It’s exciting especially in contrast to our current setup in our old seed-starting greenhouse, thawing out hoses and sink drains and greens spinners with the pellet stove and torpedo heaters in advance of each greens-rinsing session. It’s exciting to imagine working and storing produce in there, and yet it feels quite a ways off yet, with all the stages of finishing.

In other farm news, we continue to ask that you be patient with egg availability. There are simply more of you than the hens can keep up with, especially in the darkest part of the year. We are down from 30 dozen eggs a day to 6-8 dozen, while you all have only gotten hungrier. There is hope on the horizon in the form of an order for hatched chicks to arrive in late January (still requires patience, they’ll be laying in June), to bring market-season production back up. Till then, just please be aware that eggs are sold out more often than not at the farmstore, so we do not recommend a trip if eggs are your only goal.

To wrap up this first section, we want to thank you all for an amazing year and season. Though it was a stressful and exhausting one, it has also been productive, abundant, and included lots of growth and learning both in and out of the field.

We say it so often, but we couldn’t do all of this without you, and we continue to be amazed at how deeply we have been woven into the community here over the years. This week, we combined a delivery to the BitterRoot Brewery on Thursday with a dinner. The Brewery has a special place in our history here; we used to eat there while in the process of moving our homestead-scale farm and our lives from Missoula to the Bitterroot. It was a dark and lonely winter, 9 years ago now, when we signed papers on these ten acres and started this adventure with no real idea of where we were headed. We usually felt a bit lost and alone when we’d take refuge in the warmth of the brewery. In contrast, on Thursday in the course of one beer and some great food (including some of our vegetables), we counted 5 farm members visible, recognized many more faces from market or around own, got several big hugs and a visit from Chef Toby, and discovered on receiving the bill that our dinners had been covered. It has happened gradually, slowly but firmly, we’ve become a part of this place.

Thank you all,

Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm

Read on below for some wordier news and thoughts, or scan through for the photos of winter greenhouse building.

PSA: Are you missing some ornaments? When we take in grocery bags for re-use, we sometimes find surprises, but usually just old grocery lists or receipts, the occasional pair of reading glasses. Sometime this season, someone dropped off a batch of re-use bags that happened to include a bag also full of tissue paper and Chrismtas ornaments. If you recognize these and can help them find their way home, please reach out! Many are handmade, and we are especially impressed with the moss-and-twig hedgehog, so if someone is missing them we’d love to help return them.

Winter Farming, Winter Driving, and the world’s worst roller-coaster ride.

Snow and ice were rare in western Oregon, so I grew up believing that winter driving was a complex skill requiring ninja-like reflexes and the daring of a stunt-double. Drivers’ Ed class glossed over it with some vague mentions of “steering into the skid” which made very little sense to a 15-year-old driver barely capable of smooth signaling and lane changes. It reinforced the idea that snowy driving was akin to the police chase scenes in cheesy movies. As a child excited by every rare snowfall and frozen puddle to arrive in the Willamette Valley, it was no surprise that I gravitated towards places with “real winter” as I grew up. Settling into Michigan and then Montana with my little ‘86 Subaru, I was a bit surprised to learn that 99% of winter driving is simply moving slower, planning ahead, and being prepared for the unexpected. Although the occasional incident required quick reflexes and flash decisions, the vast majority of it is simply slowing down and leaving space. Sometimes it even just means staying home and not driving, waiting for a better window, or changing the route. Of course it’s easier, better, and safer with the right equipment, but it’s not rocket science after all.

When we first met farmers who grew year-round, we felt like winter growing was also a magical out-of-reach thing done by farmers with extreme skills or exceptional locations. We were intrigued by four-season farming from the start, but for a long time saw it as a distant-future possibility, or maybe something that was easy in clear sunny Colorado, but not here. But then in 2019 a mid-season hailstorm forced us to venture into winter greens production to cover lost production from July. Following the advice of Elliot Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook, and that of two farmers we knew who were year-round producers in NE Washington and the Idaho panhandle, we were in some ways almost shocked to discover that winter growing, just like winter driving, is less mad-skills, daring, and badass-ness, and mostly about planning ahead, being prepared, and knowing that many things will just take longer. Often it means changing the harvest schedule to take advantage of a good window of weather or avoid a bad one, and it does require a lot more flexibility and planning ahead than June harvests.

Having the right equipment and facilities makes it easier and more reliable (we don’t have quite all of that yet, but it’s a big reason for the packshed build). But in the end, we don’t have all these vegetables in December because we have some wild skills or special training. While we do appreciate the compliments, we really aren’t that amazing. We just keep chugging along as best we can, well below the speed limit and always on alert. We have storage crops thanks to everyone’s hard work in the summer and fall, and we have winter fresh greens because we do some really simple basic work: we tromp out through the snow in our thick boots, break the frost on the greenhouse doors, and stick to our daily ritual of row cover off for the sun, back on over the plants an hour before sunset. We have learned how to judge when the greens have thawed enough to harvest, and we watch the forecasts with careful analysis to understand when they will be thawed enough to harvest for you. It’s not rocket science or stunt driving so much as simply continuing to chug along through any conditions.

Currently we are able to rinse those greens for you only if we plan ahead, leave extra time, and thaw out the old greenhouse we use now for our wash-pack area, and remember to drain the hoses for the next round. We are so looking forward to a day when we can wash and pack in an insulated, heated building…it might be the equivalent of getting new snow tires.

There are moments that can feel a little extreme, like when we built a new, 6th caterpillar tunnel in late November, over the 4 beds of field spinach buried under 10-12 inches of snow (photos below, click to cycle through all the images and hover for captions.).

Four beds of lovely spinach were slated for a new caterpillar tunnel this fall, but when we didn’t get it up before the snow fell and the freezes set it, we thought we might just have to wait until spring.

But when it was clear we would get no November thaw, and we had potentially lost storage crops to freeze damage in our rented cooler space, we decided to push through and build the tunnel over the frozen beds in hopes of thawing them out. The ground was not yet frozen solid under the snow, so we pounded ground posts, and fitted newly bent ribs over them while the temperatures continued to drop.

Snow is as insulator….there were some frozen spots, but rebar pounded in, though we had to dig out around each ground post in order to fit the metal ribs on and let them reach the ground (or close to it).

Abigail tightens the ropes down after we covered the structure with greenhouse plastic; we don't usually have caterpillar tunnels so close together, but we squeezed our way through, side-stepping along what we jokingly started calling “the canyon” between the mild-mix and spinach caterpillar tunnels.

One week after a Monday of bad news, we had bent, pounded, covered, and tied down…with pauses for procuring materials, harvesting other greens before deep freezes, and all the other basic farm chores. It’s the ugliest and least even of our caterpillar tunnels but perhaps the most dramatic build yet.

And then we waited….melt-out was slow, as the light is low this time of year. Even on sunny days, progress was incremental with all the white snow just reflecting the light.

We changed the game by sprinkling potting soil on top of the snow on some beds to speed up the melting….

…which eventually worked! Dirty but green, spinach is bouncing back in sections to supply our deepest winter greens. And if you know seasonal spinach, you know this stuff is the best. Leaves that froze solid, that endured weeks under snow and ice, are packed with the densest flavor, chlorophyll, and sugars. This spinach has been through it and we hope it imparts some of that strength to all of us.

But no matter how much planning and preparation, no matter how much space you’ve left for braking, winter driving always brings that risk of a patch of black ice on the corner, the dreaded feeling of floating off track, bracing for impact and uncertain how bad it might end up.

Back in late November, we hit a farming equivalent of a patch of black ice: Sabrina had gone to our rented walk-in cooler to pick up bulk beets, carrots, cabbage, etc. for stocking the farmstore for Thanksgiving, and filling our winter CSA shares that week. She called to alert us that something was very wrong: the outer layers of all the stored cabbage seemed frozen, and bags of roots in at least half the cooler had frost on the plastic bags, and some bags seemed frozen solid inside too. We felt the road, already tricky enough this winter, start to slip out from under us; almost all of our carrots, beets, and radishes were there, more than half of our cabbage. We told her to bring back some bags that seemed ok to fill that week’s plans, and to bring back some of the worst looking too, so we’d know what we were in for. We then drove over ourselves, trying not to panic, but counting up from memory the number of pallet-bins and calculating the thousands of dollars of potential loss. Trying to calculate what we could do to make it all up, what the loss might mean, all the while trying to believe it might not be that bad.

Food, at our scale of farm, can be measured in a lot of ways: pounds, bushels, totes, or dollars; the most poignant is the measure of hours or days, units of human effort. People worked hard for that food, much of it had already been paid for by and promised to people in our winter membership, and the thought of all that effort, the mental image of our whole team kneeling in the snow in late October pulling bulk carrots from the ground…the thought that that effort could be lost was what made the breath catch in our throats, our stomachs drop. Caused me to roar an angry scream out across the snowy field, to curse uncharacteristically in that walk-in cooler as carrots registered frozen-solid and 27-28 degrees in their centers, bag after bag. Caused me to hurl a cabbage with leaves, frozen all the way to the core, viciously into the back of our track bed where it shattered and remained for a full week.

We are as guilty as anyone of using the inaccurate metaphor of farming as an emotional roller coaster. It’s inaccurate because the whole premise of a roller coaster is tapping into primal fears while also knowing and trusting that in fact you are safe. You experience the sensations of free-fall but know at some level you will be safely brought back to earth. Farming is more like driving than a roller coaster. There are safety measures, for sure, but when you start to slide there is no guarantee; maybe you’ll coast safely to a stop on the shoulder, but you could truly fly off the edge. The emotions may go up and down as much as a roller coaster ride, but the consequences could in fact be real.

In the end, amazingly enough, after a very slow and careful thaw, it appears we only suffered real damage on 500-800 pounds of produce, not the roughly 7,000 pounds that were stored there. We got lucky that Sabrina caught it when she did, that we were able to install our own frost-protection system in the cooler, and that much of the produce that was frosted but not frozen solid, or not for too long, seems to be holding fine after the thaw.

But we really never want to go through that again. The first portion of our packshed that will be finished and functional is the new/ reclaimed walk-in cooler. The greatest, perhaps even only, Christmas present we’ll be trying to give ourselves this week is to move all of our produce back to the farm, to this new cooler that we can check easily multiple times a day, where the cooler is inside a super-insulated building with a heater running on a thermostat.

We’ll never be able to eliminate risks from farming, that’s not how the whole thing works. But as we continue to grow and develop as a farm, we keep weaving more and more into our safety net. When it looked for a few days that we might very well have lost half our winter storage roots, a substantial part of our winter income plan, we felt pretty alone. But as we emerged, with both less damage than feared, and a suite of plans in case it was that bad (and that was the final straw of motivation for building the caterpillar tunnel over that field spinach), we were reminded over and over again by people’s appreciation, warm greetings, and thanks, that we’re a deep part of this community now too, and while there are no safety rails, no guarantees, there are a lot of hands and hearts here ready to help dig us out, push up back on the road, however they can. That’s real. A roller coaster doesn’t give you that, either, so we’ll continue to stay off the rides and on the road, wild as it is.

Snowy farm tracks in the daily rounds: left, the wingbeats of a quail flushing out from under a chicken barn to take flight, crossing the heavy plodding tracks of a hen. Right: snow deep enough that any farmer under 5’10 carrying 5 gallon buckets of water to the chickens can briefly rest the bucket on top of the snowy growing beds with each step.

Thankful for all seasons as they come

What can we say, farm friends….winter arrived, and we’ve kind of just been hanging on for the ride. Most of our post-market season so far has been consumed by an intense push to finish our packshed/ produce storage space, and then with trying to keep the farm processes running through the surprise arrival of deep snow and deep cold. We’ve tried to capture some of the past few weeks in photos, below, to give you a sense of winter farming here. Not pictured: building fires in the shop wood-stove several times a night to keep squash, onions, and potatoes from freezing during sub-zero nights. We dream of the day when a thermostat and gas heater will do that job for us in the well-insulated packshed….

Amazingly enough, though, the real news is that we have plenty of fresh food for you all. The farmstore stays well-stocked with roots, squash onions, greens and more, even through this crazy cold; the winter farm members are eating well, and we are even offering (a little last-minute) a Thanksgiving week stock-up box if you are looking for a bulk veggie setup for your holiday meal, or just a big dose for the next few weeks of good eating. To sign up for that, and help us open up some space in our shop and coolers, click here for the simple reservation form.

We’ve almost forgotten what bare soil looks like already, but are extra-glad we got these beds of garlic planted in that first week of November, just in time.

Shortly after that, winter arrived, all of a sudden. A lot of field cleanup, pushed late by the work on the building, is left un-done where it may in fact stay until spring.

Some field cleanup had to happen regardless, though. Here, Hannah helps pick up irrigation pipes in the South pasture so we can pull the chicken barns in later that night. We had to dig them up out of knee-deep snow. While this is probably what many of our temperate relatives think farming in Montana looks like all the time, this was a first for us!

The hardest part of getting caught by winter-surprise was that the chickens, and their moveable barns were still out in “summer pasture” where they are quite far from the electrical hook-ups to run their heated waterers, and far from the water spigots. After a week of twice-daily trips with carts of water buckets, and a constant rotation of waterers thawing out in the greenhouse, we used the snowplow on the tractor to clear a pathway to pull the barns to their winter positions.

Rainbow chard looks extra-colorful against a snowy white backdrop. These greens , carefully covered each night inside of their moveable caterpillar tunnel (in the background) are doing remarkably well considering record-setting cold, with three nights in a row at or below -14.

While the snow piles up between caterpillar tunnels…

…the lettuce inside stayed snug and warm! Or at least alive. We achieved our goal of abundant salad for everyone’s Thanksgiving tables; this is getting washed and bagged up today for the farmstore, farm members, and a bit for the Bitter Root Brewery.

Hannah harvests mild winter salad mix from tunnel 1. The double layers of row cover for getting through the cold nights are folded up in the center pathway. The baby brassica-family greens in the mild winter salad mix are the real heroes of the winter, bouncing back from frozen-solid state over and over again, they’ll be the salad staple for the whole winter, and we just love them.

Beautiful, scenic evidence that we do not win them all….buried under snow in those beds in the foreground is some beautiful spinach. We’re waiting to see, maybe it will bounce back with a thaw, or if we manage to set up a tunnel over it after all? Or perhaps we’ll see it again in spring. Luckily some other spinach plantings in the tunnels will be big enough to harvest soon, but I do wish we had gotten these in or protected before this landed.

Clearing snow from caterpillar tunnels; this helps both to ensure we don’t have any collapses, and also lets more light in to help heat the space.

And finally, a reminder that winter eating can still be full of color and deliciousness! Top your noodle soups with grated purple daikon radish, dish up the big bowls of salad greens, bake a squash pie, enjoy a colorful stir fry or a deep jewel-toned root roast or sautéed chard dish. The farm is loaded with food for you, and we hope you will still eat well!

-with gratitude deeper than the snow,

Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm

Bring it in, team...we've reached the final market, and winter shares are starting soon!

Dear Farm Friends,

Are you ready? This Saturday is the very last Hamilton Farmers Market of the season. If you made it out last week, you know that when we say we’ll be there regardless of the weather, we mean it. Thankfully there is no snow in this week’s market forecast, and we will definitely be there on Bedford Street, with an amazing abundance of food for you.

The other big news is that the winter farm memberships are OPEN and ready for signups. The weekly pickups the first Wednesday in November, and we are really excited with the crops we have for winter members. You can learn more or reserve your spot in the winter membership by clicking the button below.

We still think it’s pretty amazing to be able to eat fresh local produce in the winter months here in Montana, and being able to grow and provide it for our community has been a rewarding part of our farm development. One of the favorite things we have heard from farm member families is that they eat healthier through the year with the winter shares. If you are used to good, fresh, local produce, it can be hard to tolerate the limp leaves from the grocery store, and many of us, without realizing it, might just eat fewer fresh vegetables in winter. But with a farm share, you are not only challenged and prompted by the arrival of a dose of fresh veggies every week, but you may just find you are eating more and enjoying them more because they are, well, just a whole lot better. We have room for about 25 more households in the winter farm membership, and we hope some of you will try it out.

It might not be as pretty as when it’s in the field, but this is local food…stored in super cold walk-in coolers for you to eat all winter. Beets, carrots, and cabbage await winter members and farmstore customers.

The theme of this past week has been to “just get it in,” starting last Friday with the potatoes. We were right to push through Friday evening, even though that meant no email last week, heavy loads of potatoes by headlamp, and some bleary-eyed farmers at market. The potato harvester would not have functioned in the muddy fields after the rain that fell Friday night and Saturday. And after many weeks of just mixed bags of early potato varieties, we will finally be bringing you all the greatest potato hits…Russian Banana fingerlings, Russets, Yukon Gems, French Rose Fingerlings, German Butterballs, and the deep purple all-blues.

The carrot harvesting tool (an under cutter bar, also called a bed-lifter) is a lot more forgiving, and carrots are also more tolerant to a little bit cooler of temps, so they were the featured storage vegetable for harvest this week. Seven beds of storage carrots, fat and happy and frost-sweetened, are all now out of the ground and stowed away, in both our cooler on the farm, and the rented cooler over at the Western Ag Research Station in Corvallis. We worried about these carrots when an insect-transmitted disease known as asters’ yellow started showing up all around, so we actually covered the whole planting with protective insect netting, and kept a very close eye on them. They did well. Really well.

The carrots and potatoes will be joined at market by winter squash, salad greens (mild, spicy, spinach, and lettuce mixes), head lettuces, radicchio heads, kale, chard, beets, radishes, salad turnips, the last of the sweet peppers (mostly green), lots of hot peppers, cabbage, napa cabbage, onions, garlic, and more. We hope you’ll come out and load up. There are a few meal ideas below, and we have to confess we look forward already the winter, our best slow eating season and a good time for sharing more food ideas.

Eat well, we hope to see you soon.

Mary and Noah

Half the winter carrots were harvested in very wintery conditions this week. Sloppy wet snow tested the team and made the wood stove in the barn all the more valuable. This was the “little to no accumulation expected” forecast, but luckily we have learned to expect the unexpected.

Some food and recipe ideas for the coming week:

1. Super-easy hot sauce: We have a LOT of hot peppers coming to this market, as we stripped everything last week before moving caterpillar tunnels. One of our favorite ways to take 4-5 red chilies (especially any of the Asian types like Thai chilies, red rockets, Krimson Lee, etc.), 3-5 cloves of garlic, chop both (remove the seeds for mellower and smoother textured hot sauce or keep them in for extra heat), pour on enough rice vinegar to cover, and blend into a sauce with an immersion blender or food processor. If you like sweet-sour-hot combo, add a dash of sugar or a piece of sweet ripe fruit like a plum, to the blend. Put it on everything.

2. Gingery Squash Soup (extremely fast and easy, worth making sure you have leftover squash for)

2 medium onions (or one large Ailsa Craig sweet onion), chopped

2 tablespoons fresh ginger, peeled and diced or grated.

In a large soup pot sauté the onions and ginger in 1 tablespoon oil until onion is translucent.

2 apples (peeled, seeded, and chopped)

2 cups of cooked squash

4 cups chicken or vegetable broth

Add to pot and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer until squash and apples are tender.  Puree in blender or with immersion blender, until smooth.  Salt and pepper to taste, garnish with fresh parsley or chives if available (optional).

p.s. and then there is this….one of us from the farm (not yet totally agreed on who) will participate in the downtown association “inflatables” race on Monday, in this chicken costume. We chose the Bitterroot Land Trust as the non-profit to receive any donations you all toss in the jar at the market booth and/ or farmstore in the next few days. They do good, serious, work for preserving farmland…and while we take local food and feeding community seriously, it’s impossible to take an inflatable chicken costume too seriously, so come out to Main Street Monday at 5:30 for some straight-up ridiculousness for a good cause.

The Storm Before the Calm

One of the big pushes this week, which went well into headlamp territory, was bringing in all 9 remaining beds of potatoes. This was still the easiest potato harvest we have ever had, thanks to purchasing a potato digging implant from our friend Lindsay—one of the best investments we made this year! These French Fingerling potatoes will be washed up and available soon at market and the farmstore.

I know, I know, the old saying is the other way around, “calm before the storm.” We aren’t talking about literal weather here though, but the storm of farm work that we are currently swept up in, holding on to the hope of calm on the other side. And we have promised ourselves some serious rest and calm this winter.

After 8 years of farming in this place (hard for us to believe, but that’s the math), all these years of building and growing and learning and pushing ourselves ridiculously hard, we are long overdue for some real rest. But in order to get to that calm, the final few weeks of this growing season are a huge push, a true perfect storm of work and effort. Last week, even with one team member out for a family emergency, and two part-time team members having moved on to their next seasonal gigs, we managed a huge amount: three more caterpillar tunnels moved, all five covered with plastic in their winter positions, all of the regularly scheduled harvests plus many bulk harvests, a snowy farmers market, and weathering morning lows that were consistently 8-10 degrees cooler than the forecast due to our valley-bottom position and the air stagnation (aka inversion). .

A huge part of our plan for bringing more calm to the farm is our winter farm membership. We have been promising to open the sign-ups for that for weeks, and though we are late opening the gates, we are delighted that many of you have renewed, and we are already 40% full. With just 75 total membership available for winter, we encourage you to sign up soon to save your space.

The winter chard planting, hardening off during some cold nights out in the open (above), and now safely covered by a moveable caterpillar tunnel (right), will provide tasty leaves through winter!

It may seem counterintuitive that winter farming helps notch down the intensity, but it’s a key piece of the plan. Winter farming, and especially the pre-committed winter membership payments, is the way we can offer year-round employment to some of our crew. As we have grown past the scale that the two of us can manage on our own (or with helped begged in from friends and family), our team of employees has become one of the most important parts of our farm, so building and maintaining a good team has become as important as crafting our crop plan—and to ask people to work only 6-8 months of the year, and expect them to be able to fill in the rest of the year on their own….it isn’t really fair. Plus, we have found that retaining even some crew through the winter means a much smoother start to spring (three cheers for Sabrina entering third year here!!). Winter growing is helping us build farming into a more viable job for the longer term, not just something people do for one summer as they finish college, and that is good for everyone, including you, dear eaters. Because without people willing and able to do the work of farming, we can’t feed you all.

Winter members sample 6-8 different varieties of winter squash.

By signing up for a winter membership, you help us know that we have cash flow to pay our team members through the months of the year that are traditionally very slim for a farm. This year, in that dedication to secure some days of for ourselves, we have hired a larger winter team (not hard to enlarge given that the entire winter team the last few seasons has been the two of us plus Sabrina). Since we want the team to also get some good rest over the winter, we’ll be working out reasonable, maybe less-than-full-time schedules for everyone and ensuring some vacation time for each team member. Having 3-4 people on the payroll for winter is both exciting (maybe we have a day to cross-country ski while daily farm chores can get done without us?) and terrifying (is there really enough work for everyone? will winter sales fully support a crew that size? can we handle the management and training load?), but the winter membership payments, if we hit our goal of 75 members, let us know that we can cover those wages through the bulk of the winter.

The winter membership commitments also helps progress continue on the building that will make this winter farming (and summer too, for that matter) so much easier for us. If you come to the farm this week you’ll notice that the builders, Dave and Will, have been back at it, helping finish that west side of the new packshed, while Noah has been puzzling through electrical layout and pulling endless amounts of wire. We still have produce stashed at in four different places on the farm, plus two places off-site, and we can’t wait for the time when it can be literally all under one roof.

The details on winter membership are here but a quick summary is that winter members get 8 weeks of produce in weekly pick-ups at the farm, November and December. The weekly veggie dose includes both storage crops (winter squash, onions, garlic, potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, cabbage, etc.), and freshly harvested cold-hardy greens from our unheated high tunnels. This year those include head lettuces and radicchio for deep fall, plus salad mixes, spicy mixes, spinach, baby boy choi, tatsoi, kale, chard, and our favorite “mild winter salad mix” to keep you eating fresh greens all winter.

Zukes is excellent at balancing his hard work with deep rest.

As we keep pushing our way through this storm, and as we strive for a full-on Zukes-style nap soon, we thank you all for the amazing support and love of local veggies this year so far. It has been a record year, and though we are exhausted, we are also so grateful, for this work and for the community if feeds.

Members, there is still one more week in your feedbag fill-ups, so load on up through next Tuesday! For everyone else, we will be at that very last Saturday of the Hamilton Farmers Market this weekend, and the farmstore will be open and loaded with goodness right on through the winter.

Grattitude and greens,

Mary and Noah

October brings the Winter Squash Parade

Dear Farm Friends,

Welcome to the smack-dab middle of October. This morning, after starting coffee and the wood stove, I poked my head out the door and saw that our thermometer on the front steps already showed 29 degrees with another hour or more of dropping temps still to come. I slipped on the my boots and headlamp over pajamas, and went out to the tunnels to manually open all of our drip irrigation valves (normal controlled by a electronic program) before they froze shut. The afternoons still feel hot, but the frosty mornings of fall are here for sure, at least at our place, and this one was a good bit colder than forecast, catching us by surprise. It’s good, though, sweetening up the carrots, and helping push to get all the crops in.

With that seasonal change comes an extra importance of reminding you all that the Hamilton Farmers Market is not over yet! We will be there Saturday morning, 9:00-12:30, just as we have been since that first Saturday of May, and we’ll be there right up through the final Saturday of October, with just so, so, much food for you.

I thought last week (and the week before) was the end of the fresh-flower market bouquets. The flowers had other plans, so they are coming to market again! But this really is the last one; their caterpillar tunnel is moving on, and this was the final harvest.

We still have all the baby greens (salad mix, spicy mix, mild winter salad mix, arugula, baby kale, AND spinach), plus head lettuce, boc choi, kale, chard, 5 kinds of cabbage, and celery. Roots from crunchy radishes to frost-sweetened beets and carrots, to a lovely mix of potatoes. Believe it or not, there are still tomatoes, sweet peppers, and hot peppers, and possibly (we’ll see as we harvest) the last of the strawberries?

But perhaps the most significant news for this fall week is the arrival of the winter squash. If you’ve been entranced by the vivid colors shining through the greenhouse while they cured in the sun you’ll be happy to learn that the squash are ready and coming to market! We grow many varieties, some ready right now and some that get sweeter with a few months in storage. If your squash experience has been limited to grocery store offerings, allow us to introduce you to a few of our favorites:

Delicata: we are lumping together here several variations, including “honeyboat” and “sweet dumpling” but all the shapes and colors have the key features in common: fast-baking, convenient small size, thin skins that are easy to cut open, and most of all the sweetness. Just put away that brown sugar you might usually dump on store-bought acorn squash, because you don’t need it here. Being small, they bake up quickly…just cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake them face-down till they are soft when poked with a fork (can be as fast as 15-20 minutes for the small sizes.) The texture is quite smooth, and the skins on this one are soft enough that another prep method is to cut them in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, then cut them cross-ways into “smiles” to toss with oil and salt and bake like oven fries. They are still probably our number-one favorite, and with a shorter storage life than the others, they are the perfect squash for kicking off the season.

Delicata and honeyboat have been sun-curing in the greenhouse and are so sweet and ready.

Red Kuri and Sunshine: bright orange, with smooth, sweet flesh with a nutty flavor, this squash can go sweet or savory in recipes. Red Kuri are teardrop shaped, the Sunshine are the flattened round pumpkins shape, but inside they are virtually the same. They are not as sugary as delicata, but they are great just straight as baked squash (butter and salt is our go-to), while the leftovers are excellent in a soup or as a squash pie filling (most pumpkin pie is squash, pie, really). They’ll take slightly longer to bake but are still pretty quick to get to the table. You can also make a delicious pudding with these by whipping baked leftovers, scooped out of the skin, with freshly chopped ginger and coconut milk (maybe some honey or maple syrup to taste for extra sweetness); chill for a few hours in the fridge to blend flavors and eat for dessert or breakfast.

Green Kabocha “Cha-cha” : The green skin outside hides a bright orange, dense flesh inside which bakes up to a drier, firmer texture—almost flaky compared to the softer smoother red kuri. Flavor is sweet but savory/ nutty, along the lines of a sweet potato. Consider roasting this one as wedges, and sprinkling with salt, or maybe a gingery-soy dressing and sesame seeds. Or cut leftovers into cubes and stir in to a pasta or a hearty salad.

Spaghetti Squash: we grow both the traditional football size of these, and one called “angel hair” that is great for smaller meals. Cut, scoop, and bake as with all the others, but the insides on these are totally different: instead of sweet smooth flesh, they are bred deliberately to be stringy. After baking, you fluff up the strands and pretend that they are pasta. They aren’t, exactly (fair warning: they do not fuel a long day of hiking or skiing like true noodles would), but they are an excellent vehicle for sauce, pesto, or cheese. We like to use their firm skins as the bowl, and toss the sauce right it the squash-halves, sometimes popping them back in the oven after topping with cheese, to melt.

And in general news from the farm…nope, things are not slowing down yet. That is one of the most common questions we get about now, but we are actually in that crescendo time where the workload accelerates for a while yet, and if we seem frazzled as we greet you it’s true, we are. There’s a lot to handle as we get caterpillar tunnels moved over winter plantings, start to add frost protection to the field, continue watering the pastures to take advantage of the last few weeks of irrigation water and sunshine, get cover crops in and other spaces cleaned up and put to bed, continue the wholesale and market and membership harvests through the end of October, and prepare to launch the winter memberships…phew! Not to mention getting ready to throw ourselves and the team back into the big building project in hopes of getting that packshed space ready for, um, the nine more beds of potatoes and seven beds of storage carrots yet to come out of the ground. Send patience, strength, love, and coffee. (And oh mercy, thanks to those of you who leave surprise meals and treats for us, the morale boost is huge!)

Winter salad greens: the caterpillar tunnel in the background is over this winter salad mix now.

We are so grateful for the long fall window this year—”three weeks of borrowed time” as one of the Moeller's put it in a conversation recently—that is letting us get some of this done without a winter storm bearing down on us. But we know it’s coming sooner or later! But Saturday should be perfect weather for a market, and don’t worry, the Apple Day crowds have long since thinned out, so come enjoy a relaxed market morning for loading up on veggies, food, local products, and take time to visit with your neighbors. We’ll bring a mountain of food to market, and hope to see you there.

And, of course, the farmstore is open self-serve and loaded all week as well!

-Mary, Noah, and the whole SweetRoot team.

Eating Season: Pepper Roasting, Farm Tours, Getting Ready for Winter

Newsflash — If you don’t have time to read the whole newsletter, the big news is: PEPPER ROASTING is happening at the farm from 4-6pm tomorrow. Peppers (mostly sweet, but a few Pueblo chilies and other hots too) are available to purchase and our crew will help you roast. Someone from the team will be leading tours at 4.30 and 5.30. The farmstore is open all the time but we’ll have our regular farm store hosting hours from 3-6pm.

Well, it’s about time that you meet our awesome crew! Clockwise from the left: Mary, Sabrina, Jay, Tyler, Dylan, Abigail, and Hannah with Noah behind the lens. If you’ve noticed the farm looking sharp lately it is really due to the hard work of all these good folks—weeding, planting, harvesting, and turning over beds.

Every single Friday for the last five weeks at least, I’ve been busy shaping beds — not just seeding fall cover crop, but getting ready for our big farm winter transition. As our crew works on market harvests and bulk harvests of storage crops, some of us get the last winter transplants in the ground, prepping for the enormous 4th season to come. So, at the same time cover crop prepares to bloom, winter transplants are growing. On a Friday when our habit is to focus just on harvesting for market, it’s an odd shift of seasons, as we mature and grow as farmers. I call this the start of eating season, as we look forward to the longer nights and more slowly-simmered dinners (though of course dinners of goat cheese in a sweet pepper and salads loaded with ripe tomatoes have been lovely too). At night, our food dryer’s fan hums while our the hens chortle in their moveable barns, just moved to fresh pasture, everyone working on food.

Our BCS walking tractor with the power harrow that stirs the soil (and doesn’t till), idles near winter chard and kale bunch greens that we will move a caterpillar over in the coming weeks. While we still use the 4 wheel tractor a ton, this small walking tractor does all the bed shaping and is a work horse for minimizing soil disturbance.

Here’s a seasonal transition for you: Friday morning, we all harvest sweet peppers, separating the stages of ripeness (upper right), then immediately proceed to tearing out the trellising and uprooting plants, hauling them out of the tunnel to compost (upper left). By Friday evening, beds are prepped and ready, Saturday Tyler hustled home from market setup to get many thousands of transplants in using our paper pot transplanter, and the tunnel is now growing 6 beds of “mild winter salad mix” and one bed of spicy mix for the winter farmstore, winter farm members, and the Bitter Root Brewery. We try to get a little better at the winter growing each year, and more than anything it’s about timing—just two or three days earlier for these transplants can mean the different between being harvestable in December and January, or not.

LOTS of those peppers went to market on Saturday, but we do still have half of one of our coolers stuffed with crates of peppers, so we figure it is time to finally get out that pepper roaster and celebrate this seasonal milestone. We’ll have it fired up this week only, on Tuesday from 4:00-6:00 for farm members and folks who’d like to purchase some bulk peppers to roast; it works great to take them home and pack them into freezer bags for winter.

Meanwhile, the SRF farmers’ market team hustles at this week’s Apple Day market. It’s really been all we can do this year to keep up with customers at market. If you’ve been turned off by the lines this year, you can come to our farmstore anytime and with our winter transplant season now finished, we’ll have four of us at market for more time.

Oh Brussels sprouts. This crop is our achilles heel, one of our not-rocking it areas this year (again). While this photo may look impressive, we struggled yet again with a wicked infestation of fall aphids. We are going to make one more attempt at cleaning tomorrow morning, and are really hoping that we can get at least some of them clean enough to stock to the farmstore for you.

We’ve been talking a lot about winter here, so you may be wondering what the deal is…..we are assessing our winter storage crops and calculating what to expect from all these greens plantings, so we will announce winter membership signups soon, once we settle on a few of those key details. Farm members (current season and past winter-season members) get the first shot at signups, but there are usually a few spaces open for new folks as well, so stay tuned to upcoming newsletters for that.

In the meantime, the meal ideas this time of year are endless….we have all the greens, including spinach, which we think is so delicious with some warm beets (steamed, roasted, or sautéed with a splash of balsamic vinegar at the end), or with tomatoes and sliced sweet peppers. You can blend up one of those roasted sweet peppers with olive oil, red wine vinegar, a dash of mustard, small garlic clove and a tablespoon or so of chopped onion for a delicious dressing. Don’t forget the cabbage and carrot slaws, perhaps on the side of your shishito pepper burger (a Sabrina invention, she recommends sautéing the peppers as you usually do first, trimming off the stems, then enveloping them in your regular burger-patty forming, and cooking up as usual). Burritos, tacos, loaded with sweet and hot (or hot-is) peppers, fresh tomato or tomatillo salsa, shredded cabbage, etc.. Quiche of frittata with greens, peppers, and tomatoes. Quinoia tossed with diced tomatoes, sautéed chard or kale, diced red onion, and your favorite dressing. It really does go on and on!

But, in case you are wondering, the winter squash in the greenhouse are mostly not quite ready yet….they will move to the farmstore as they become available, so feel free to peek in and admire them, but just be patient for them to actually be ready to purchase and eat!

We hope we’ll see you at the farm this Tuesday, or at market on Saturday. We come to market rain, shine, snow showers, etc., right on through the final Saturday in October, so we have four more to go and hope you can make it.

Good eating to you,

Noah, Mary, and the whole SweetRoot Crew

Market these days is a bit of a blur…we stock as fast as we can, we try to tally up and help people out as quickly as possible so no one gets frustrated by the lines, and in the midst of all that try to also keep the conversations, connections, and magic growing.

Carrots may be more generally popular, but we think beets are the heart of a good winter food supply too….and wow do we have some good storage beets piling up this year, with all the goodness of summer sun concentrated for your winter eating. Tyler is becoming a root washer specialist and he may not even realize how many hundreds of pounds will be running through that barrel the next few weeks, with carrots, beets, radishes, and potatoes all still coming in from the field.

The ladies moved to fresh, lush, pasture this week, and they are working as hard as they can to keep you supplied. Eggs are such a popular and also tricky product….we can’t let them pile up, but if the girls slow down for fall even just 5 or 10%, it can wreak havoc on the market and farmstore supply. If you’ve been skunked, we are sorry and we (and they) are working to keep the egg flow steady, so don’t worry too much.

True Grit, Transition of the Seasons and the Week in Photos

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One of the farm roads, flanked by flowers, moveable caterpillars, winter squash we are bringing in to cure today, and farm compost piles in the distance. Come explore your farm.

I’m not sure if there’s any time better (well perhaps spring transplant season) to walk around a farm. Our sun ripped winter squash are coming in today for curing and more sweeting in our new greenhouse. Plants are overloaded with peppers, tomatoes (we have flats available) are still on the vine, and new crops are steadily going in for what I like to call our winter farm, but it’s really just another season. It’s the time when there’s a ton to harvest, but also a ton of transition, mentally and physically on a farm. Literally as beds of greens are harvested out, cover crop is seeded immediately. As the last cucumbers in one tunnel are harvested, beds are reshaped and weeds are allowed to germinate before direct seeding a week later. And behind the scenes, we are getting ready to get the band back together: some rockstar farm-member builders along with our team are prepping complete the next stage of our packshed so we literally have a space for everything that’s coming in. It’s a chess game and since we won’t meet all of the crucial deadlines, we’ve lined up rental backup spaces literally all over the Bitterroot for our crops. It’s both wonderful and terrible; and we’ve promised the winter team that we’ll get moved in so we aren’t moving too many thousands of pounds (but there will be some) of potatoes and onions around the valley.

Above, the aerial view of the farm from the new (well, it’s reclaimed metal) packshed roof. I always like to say we haven’t grown much over the past few years, but golly, the farm has become a lot more productive.

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That’s where you come in. We are eating our way out of the problem; with bulk 5 pound sweet pepper bags (perfect for grilling and then freezing) for $18 and some deals on bunch greens (all kinds of kale and chard), 4 for $10, as well as lots of napa and green cabbage that needs to get out of our field and coolers so other stuff can come in and there are also a lot of tomatoes. We are turning that money right back into the local economy as we work on our packshed that really is crucial to a four season farm and good, longterm farmer moral.

The new to us potato harvester, purchased from farmer’s down the road (Lindsay and Randy) literally will save us 100 hours this season and it may make the difference between getting the potatoes in on time with other pressing winter transplant and seeding deadlines.

We’ll host the farmstore today from 3-6pm, like always on Tuesday, but it’s a great time to walk the fields, the farm roads, visit the hens (they will be moved later this week to fresh pasture), and cheer on our crew. Not including Mary and I, we had five people on Friday and today we have a total of five farmers. That’s really the big evolution this year; working on managing, training, leadership and the packshed is all part of helping us get to the next level, as both farmers and leaders. Like it or not, as I say, we are all on this together and you can do your best part by just eating, supporting our farm and our farmer-neighbors.

Thank you. We cannot express our gratitude enough.

View of some potatoes from the front of our larger tractor, just because it’s so impressive.

Bunches of kale and chard for freezing, 4 for $10 in the farmstore.

Farm cat Zukes (short for zucchini) rests in the root washer.

Catch the last big melon wave, and scale peak peppers....market morning is here!

Dear Farm Friends,

Or, to use Noah’s standard greeting for crew, customers, and just about everyone “Hey, team!” We are about to head out for our market space on Bedford and Second streets with a massive load of food. Since fall weather and busy school schedules sometimes mean that market slips people’s minds, we thought we’d better remind you that holy moly, it is still going on.

The market weeks are numbered (6 more after today, to be precise) but wow they will be delicious. We have a big load of melons still today, but we think it might be the last really hefty one, so if you have been loving those, definitely come on out. A tall stack of tomato flats is loaded in the truck cab, and the harvest list included all the greens, head lettuces, cabbages of various types (ready for kraut or kimchee? we’ve got you), beans, cucumbers, zucchini, leeks, carrots, beets, radishes, hot peppers, tomatillos, cilantro, and so much more. The boc choi is delicious but record-breaking in size, so you can score a heck of a deal with one $3 head this week. And I harvested more than my own body weight in sweet peppers yesterday—actually my weight plus that of a child who no longer needs a car seat, and at least one farm cat. It’s been a big week! We aren’t sure if this was the peak of the peppers, or if it’s coming up next week, but we are definitely in high-elevation pepper territory, and it’s delicious.

Utterly loaded with sweet peppers.

And with the cooling weather (such a relief for fieldwork), we cannot recommend strongly enough that you get back in your soup game. Roasted tomato soup, potato leek soup, that Italian one with the potatoes, kale, and sausage. If you have any lingering packets of winter squash in the freezer, all you need to do is sauté some onions or leeks and a few sweet peppers (maybe one little hot one too), and blend all that up with a good broth, for an easy soup that will make way for the winter squash that is coming in soon! That is not at market yet but we’ll be bringing it in this week.

We’ll have a solid team at market to help you chose and think of what to eat, with one of us also back at the farm preparing for being the first stop tomorrow on the Farm to Fork Bike event, so please come on out and load up!

Good eating to you,

Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm

Just a few more weeks of fresh flowers at market!

September Smoke and Sweetness

We were grateful for a very clear-aired summer most of this growing season, but when the smoke arrived this week, it arrived with a vengeance. Combined with a late-summer cold for Mary and Noah (at first hard to distinguish from the smoke cough), and the first heavy frosts arriving on a Friday night, this has been a challenging week for the whole farm crew.

Not so pretty, not fun to breathe. We are glad that the smoke season arrived late, and we hope it clears soon.

As air quality dipped into “hazardous” for part of Thursday morning, many of us tried N95 masks to mitigate the impacts, and we ran into challenges with timing of our wholesale greens harvests, as we had to run extra irrigation shifts to wash ash and fallen cinders off of the leafy greens so they could come clean in our triple-rinse process. These are pretty challenging conditions to work in, but the work of growing food, seasonally, for our community means finding ways to deal with the realities of working outdoors in all the conditions. We’re hoping, as many of you are, for a clearing and cooling trend soon but we will keep at it regardless.

Light is precious for growth this time of year, and a layer of grit and ash on greenhouse plastic is not what plants need. We worry about slow-down of growth in the greens for transplanting to winter tunnels, so we’ll be peeling the shade cloth back off of part of our nursery greenhouse this week. We went from daytime nights near 100 to frosty nights quite quickly this year.

But we are also grateful that the mostly sunny clear summer has left us an incredible abundance of summer-crop produce. With everything going on this past week we did not get an updated bulk-deals reservation form up, but we are harvesting this morning for the farmstore, and can assure you that there will plenty of good stuff in the farmstore all week, and with the member hosting time today we can help pull out bulk quantities of tomatoes, beets, cabbages, and sweet peppers for you. We encourage you to comet to the farmstore during the hosted hours Tuesday (3:00-6:00), or to stop in anytime, to load up. We will have plenty of tomatoes, including whole flats, available to pick up, and we should be able to pull together salsa kits for anyone interested, if you were intrigued by last week’s offer. It’s a great time to walk the farm, too, and watch for some of the seasonal transitions starting to happen. You may notice Tunnel 1 is now empty of cucumber plants, and we are preparing it for the first direct-seeding of winter salad mix, next week. Within the next 2-3 weeks all of those big tunnels will transform, in our continued effort to meet the hunger for fresh local greens in wintertime.

Peppers, peppers, peppers! This entire cartload is flavorful sweet-pepper deliciousness, and the hot peppers are kicking in too. Great time to load up for freezing and processing, or making salsas and sauces.

The melon abundance continues, though we are coasting down from the peak-harvests. Many thanks to all of you who showed up and carted home the big loads of sweetness at our melon sale last week! We are over that particular challenge thanks to you and to a generous sharing of some cooler space from Frost Top Orchard (we are so lucky to have a generous and supportive community of fellow growers of all sorts here in the valley…and the community at large that connects us….we are pretty sure we met Al and Mary at a potluck at a farm member’s home years ago). We will have plenty of melons available today/ this week, but are in less of a panic!

We have had three nights of frost—lightly on Thursday and Saturday of last week, and down to about 28 -30 degrees in the field on Friday night/ Saturday morning. We covered enough that we didn’t lose much that we wanted to keep, and in fact we appreciate this sort of on-time frost (it’s really not early; our average first frost date here is September 1!) as it helps some of our winter greens like chard and kale (visible in the SouthWest corner of the farm as you pull in the driveway), harden up and get prepared for the cold to come. It also burned back a lot of the winter squash leaves just perfectly to help them die back and encourage the fruits to ripen.

The difference a little row cover makes: the zucchini leaf in the foreground was not quite covered by the protective remay layer at the end of the bed, while the rest of the leaves and blossom were protected by the lightweight frost cloth and made it through unscathed. On Friday night, in addition to preparing for market, we covered beans, melons, basil, zucchini, and some flowers to get them through the cold night.

In honor of frosty mornings, our meal suggestions this week do include our favorite roasted tomato soup recipe. We also think there’s no such thing as too many peppers this time of year. We do grow some familiars you’d find anywhere, the red and yellow bell peppers, but mostly we focus on the vastly tastier Italian horn type pepper. Carmen, Escamillo, Cornito Rosso, Cornito Giallio and the much beloved Jimmy Nardello, which we wrote about on our long-ago blog as home gardeners….as many of you have discovered, they are sweet, flavorful, and maybe a little addictive. Slice them into all your salads, sandwiches, burritos, etc., right now, and consider roasting and freezing some for winter too.

Feedbag members, your bags this time of year are high-value and may be getting heavy! Embrace the peak eating season, and remember your farm discount when loading up on extras or taking advantage of some of the bulk deals.

We hope to see you all this week, at the farmstore, at market, or on the Farm to Fork Bike ride this Sunday! Good eating to you all,

Mary and Noah SweetRoot Farm

Make room for September....bulk deals, salsa kits, and market trailer at the farm on Tuesday!

Dear Farm Friends,

There’s not much to say but “sorry” for the fact that our once weekly email newsletter hasn’t gone out for well over a month. It’s been a doozy of a season, and sometimes it feels like we’ve been barely hanging on. Most Fridays we’ve been collapsing to sleep far too late, often with a half-written newsletter still floating in our heads.

It’s a doozy in many good and delicious ways, too, though.  We’ve been feeling all your love at market, with record amounts of food loaded in that little market trailer, and a line of eaters we can barely keep up with even with extra help hired for market. With the new packshed not yet finished, we are still quite limited on cooler space, so keeping the produce flowing out, off the farm is so important. Thanks for all of your patience and for continuing to come on out, supporting us, the market, the farmstore, and our fellow farmers.

As we slide into September, we have a lot of good stuff, and we actually need your help making room for all the good stuff yet to come in, and making sure the sweet and perishable bits of summer don’t get lost or wasted! Read on for details and the link to sign up for picking up some bulk deals at the hosted farmstore time this week (and if you aren’t ready this week, we’ll be preparing for a few more rounds of this).

This is always such a tricky point in the year for a four-season farm like us. We could spend all reasonable hours of the day just harvesting the summer and fall bounty, but….we also have winter plantings to prepare (more on this soon, but yes, winter memberships and greens for the winter farmstore are in the plans), beds to mow and seed with soil-building cover crops to prepare for next year, and of course that packshed build to finish. August was mostly about keeping our heads above water, and this first week of September, hot and smoky, feels like August has not quite stopped yet.

But what does it mean for you?  Salsa kits, bulk deals, big piles of melons! We’ll be pulling out the market trailer this week for the Tuesday hosted farmstore hours, spreading out the shocking wealth of melons, the beautiful garlic braids that Sabrina wove, and are taking reservations for salsa canning kits, bulk bags of beets, and will have plenty of good stuff and bulk deals on things like tomatoes and cabbage, with no reservation required.

About those melons…Noah is still harvesting, as the last light fades and I type this up. We have done too many headlamp-harvests in that melon patch, for sure. We are swimming in melons—we aren’t sure exactly what we did, though we planted 30% more space to melons this year, and they went in a block that got a cover crop last summer and some nice compost this spring and really happy transplants from our new and improved greenhouse…..but still, we are a little shocked. We have totes of melons in the shop, in the farmstore, in the unfinished new packshed. So many melons it’s, well, it’s a bit of a problem. We need to gear up to finish the build on that building so it can house another walk-in cooler, and storage space for onions and winter squash, but if we aren’t careful we are going to fill it up with produce before it is done. And melons do not play well stored with ethylene-sensitive vegetables in the walk-in cooler, so they really need to get off the farm fast, before they go bad. We have been too busy harvesting to try it out yet, but a quick search revealed several recipes for melon jam, we hope some of you give it a shot. We also like to cut them up into cubes, freeze them, and use them as ice cubes in sparkling water in winter for a hint of summer treat.

You can help us by coming out this Tuesday and loading up on melons, produce in general, and if you are ready for canning, we are offering our red and green salsa kits by reservation.  Just fill out the form here and we’ll have one ready for you to pick up.

The red salsa kit makes about 6 pints and  includes: 5 lbs tomatoes, 1lb of sweet peppers, 6-8 onions, 1 head of garlic, 10-12 hot peppers, and one bundle of cilantro (optional). This is based on a Ball jar canning recipe.

The green salsa kit makes about 6 pints of salsa verde and includes: 8 lbs of tomatillos, 4 onions, 4 jalapeño or poblano peppers, 1 head of garlic, and a bundle of cilantro (optional). We have that recipe from an old blog post, here.

We also have big bags of beets for pickling (or however you like to preserve them), 10 lbs for $18, 30 lbs for $35, and bulk onions, tomato flats, and cabbage available. And to help move those melons, we are offering a one-day special on Tuesday, buy three melons, get the fourth (of equal or lesser value) free!

Have you tried Shishito peppers yet? A delicious little Asian frying pepper, mostly mild with a green savory flavor, but just to keep it interesting, one in about every hundred peppers is a little bit spicy. Our favorite way to prepare them is to heat oil in a heavy skillet, toss the peppers in and stir them a few times to blister the skins. When they have softened a bit and turned a brighter green, just sprinkle them with salt, grab the stem and eat them whole. It’s our favorite appetizer this time of year, what we eat while we make the dinner plan.

It’s also a fun time to take a walk around the farm and peek at what is happening….the chickens just moved to new pasture (a bit of a hike out, but they are happy), the flower patches are bursting as we let some beds go to the bees and the birds when they passed their ideal cutting stage, so it’s literally buzzing around here.

Chickens in some lush green pasture, thanks largely to Tyler taking on the job of pasture irrigation with the “big gun” sprinkler.

Hope to see you soon,

Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm

The planting continues….we have just two more rounds of our weekly greens seeding in the field, then it’s all into tunnels for winter!