Though we've been quiet on the emails lately, we've been thinking of you, and wow do we have some good veggies ready for you right now. The farm store tomato table is filled edge-to-edge, the coolers are stuffed, and we think a little August chill like this is the perfect boost to start thinking about winter eating. After weeks of sweating and watching any un-irrigated corners of our farm get dustier and dustier, we were kind of grateful for the preview of fall that came yesterday (even if it required three changes of clothes to complete the rainy epic harvest of salad greens for our growers co-operative). We're still wearing wool hats mid-morning, and we had our first little fire in the yurt last night to dry out and warm up. It gave an extra nudge to the urge we've been having to start putting up some of this summer bounty, a good reminder that our average first frost is only 10 days away, and that all this abundance is as fleeting as it is overwhelming.
I think it's a common thing for vegetable farmers in August to be simultaneously very tired and very strong. We lift hundreds of pounds of tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, summer squash and cucumbers, over and over; I have to remember if one of our chefs orders 80 pounds of cabbage, to divide it into reasonably sized cases for normal people to lift. But the vast majority of our produce goes directly to you, individuals families, farm members, market and farm store customers--and now's the time for you to do some lifting, too! We are starting to offer discounts on 10-pound and 20-pound flats of tomatoes, bulk quantities of beets, kale, chard, and summer squash. Farm members, remember you can take your additional 10% member discount off of those bulk deals, as well.
Yesterday we snuck in our first batch of tomato sauce by throwing onion, garlic, a whole flat of grade-B tomatoes, and some wilted basil from the farm store, into a huge pot while making coffee Monday morning. We just blended it all up (skins and all), after letting it simmer all morning while we worked. It's now in the freezer, and the first 5 tally marks are on our "Winter Food Dream List," a piece of paper stuck to the yurt fridge, listing all the things we'd like to have in our freezer and canning pantry, going into winter with a real kitchen for the first time in 4 years. On Sunday we managed a small batch of sweet pickled beets--not canned, just a fridge pickle batch, and we'll have no problem eating them up in no time.
It's really the time, now, to stash away whatever you can of summer for later. We both grew up in families that did quite a lot of that, so it's a natural process for us, but I know it can be less familiar, even intimidating for many people. One beauty of our information age, of course, is that even if your childhood August memories didn't include clouds of steam from the canner and a mist of boiling vinegar for pickle brine, it's easy to find directions and recipes for putting up food. I still treasure the paper cookbook from the Ball Canning Jar Company I won at the 4-H fair at age 10, but the modern version is their website, loaded with seasonal recipes and clear canning directions: https://www.freshpreserving.com/recipes/?prefn1=ingredients&prefv1=Tomatoes If canning, I do encourage you to pull recipes from trusted tested sources like the Ball website, or county extension agent websites (beware of random food blogs who may not have truly tested recipes for food safety).
But if canning intimidates you, or you lack the time and equipment, we really encourage you to take a few moments here and there to stash things into your freezer--grate some summer squash in the quantity required for your favorite zucchini bread recipe (if you're really good, write the recipe on the ziplock bag, so you have it on hand when you pull it out of the freezer in January). Onions can also be chopped and frozen, in 1/2 cup or 1 cup increments, ready to use in winter soups; or chop kale, garlic, and onions together, stuff into a ziplock bag, and freeze for adding to a frittata or a soup. Fresh salsa gets a bit watery when frozen, but honestly we still think it's pretty darn good in February. If you have time, make our roasted tomato soup and freeze some of it for winter too, in freezer-safe jars or ziplock freezer bags. We're printing out extras of many of our favorite recipes to have on hand in the farm store, and we'll be there hosting from 3:00-7:00 tonight, so we encourage you to come on out then for a chance to talk to us, get tips, or share your own favorites with us and fellow farm friends. If that time window doesn't work, remember the farm store is open all the time, self serve.
It's a great time to take a little walk around the farm and see what's happening--and if you have an urge to get your hands dirty, we even have a few not-too-strenous tasks you can jump in on this afternoon, like cleaning and trimming garlic to make room for our onion crop to come in and cure. If you linger, Noah may put you to work on the new 35-foot 4-season chicken barn--you can't miss it when you pull up to the farm store.
If you visit the farmstore, or the market this week, we know you'll eat well....and we encourage you to make a winter dream food list of your own, and start putting a little bit away for later, too.
Rainy Day Village Season: Us, Our People, Our neighbors
Overnight, as predicted, a storm front moved in. Over the next twenty four hours, we expect up to half an inch of rain, or about 5 percent of our yearly precipitation. As I write behind the soundtrack of the roof on the barn, I’m reminded of days spent under tin roofs in Borneo, and in the thunder of rain on shopping malls in Asia where I used to take refuge. It’s our own version, just for today, of the rainy season that descends upon Southeast Asia for months. I’d often think of the rainy season as marking change; helping regulate climate, and preceding feasts of fruiting seasons during the period where dolphins mate, and forest planting and harvesting cycles shift.
Our cycles did indeed shift over the past couple of weeks. We have finished all of our main planting, with just the weekly plantings to do, some flowers, seeding for fall, and some final flower plantings. Our summer crew started. And next week, summer memberships will start and if we aren’t yet fully ready, we will pretend we are ready.
I greet the summer season with hope, and with fear. Mary and I look forward to our cash balance shifting, from mostly all expenses, to more income. I track our egg production and the expenses of our rapidly growing young chicken flock like a general at war. We think hard about how we can make more time to breath on the farm, to create, grow, and nurture but we still fall asleep around midnight or 1am with piles of lists not finished and too much to do. Emails and voicemails start to pile up, and we work through them, late and early. We triage, we fix, and somehow this week, in about three days, I managed, with just a little help with Mary, some phone calls to my buddy Scott, and after some welding fabrication from Glenn, I managed to put up the bones of the new wheeled three-season chicken coop. Trusses and a roof will go on once this rain stops. We worry about the tension of managing everything, keeping our other accounts (our wholesale income is shifting, unexpectedly), but mostly, we try to rally our spirits, breath deep.
I think of our farm, these days, as a tiny village. When I buy screws at Don’s, now it’s boxes (for the buildings). When we buy wood, it’s bunks. And when we greet families that pile into the farm, on Tuesdays or any day, it’s with tired, open arms. When a friend shows up unexpectedly to visit, we ply her into a potato planting that last for hours and then cook her dinner at midnight. And when one of our more distant neighbors starts burning waste, we reach out, diplomatically, like a village concerned for it’s people, food, and health would reach out. We broke up one dog fight too this week (sorry, Amanda, Malaya is very protective of her kittens), but people in villages do this too. In an unrelated incident, Deputy Brandon stopped by to admire the new construction project and get a speech from me about our role in this village. Trudy, who after seeing what the fence project did to my hat, brought us real SweetRoot Farm hats for the crew! Amy, when she was bringing treats to our chickens left us beers in the farm store fridge! And, I almost forgot: hours before we borrowed neighbor Dorea's headlamp last week, on Friday (why we decided to plant on a friday, I don't know) Toby found us temporary collapsed in the weeds when she brought us muffins. I still can’t believe that all of us, all of you, make up this thing called SweetRoot.
Earth. Mothers. Food.
I have thought a lot about mothers this week, and this spring. When Noah's dad visited last week he shared with us one day that it was the anniversary of Noah's mom's death, lost over 20 years ago to cancer. I so wish that I could have met her, and I wonder what insights she’d have into this stubborn, idealistic eldest son of hers. She was, from what I hear, really something. Knowing him, that doesn’t surprise me.
Noah met my mom just in time. The fall that we moved in together we shared a little above-garage apartment in Forest Grove Oregon, about an hour and a half from my parents' farm. The fall weekend that I took him to meet my family, we loaded a borrowed cider press, Noah’s camera, and three loaves of slowly rising sourdough bread into our car. He was so nervous about this first meeting that he insisted on the projects; sitting idle, as you can guess, is never a comfortable place for him.
But he needn't have worried; my family embraced him heartily even as he encouraged my niece and nephew to climb farther up the trees and bounce vigorously on the slender branches to bring down more ripe apples. In the midst of the wild, juicy, sticky project, I slipped into the kitchen to check on the bread that had been rising through the morning's apple gathering. My mom found me peeking under the towels, and leaned in conspiratorially. "He bakes sourdough bread. I think I love him too," she told me with a grin, and gave my hand three quick squeezes--an old signal from when I was a shy and quiet child, our secret code for "I love you."
At that time, my mom's hands still worked for most things, though a bothersome nerve condition had started to make it hard for her to sign checks or tie her shoes, and her once lighting-fast typing speed had slowed to just slightly below average. She had recently retired from her job as administrative assistant to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Oregon State University, and was looking forward to more days of gardening, canning, and watching her grandchildren gleefully risk life and limb for home-made apple cider.
When it was time for us to go home my parents loaded us up with fruits of their garden: tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, cucumbers, and beets—the gifts kept coming and Noah's eyes grew wide at the riches. Our little raised beds in the yard of our rental were fun, but the yields were nothing of this scale. My mom just laughed at his thanks, and said something I had never heard her articulate before, but that I will never forget: "I think my real purpose in life is to feed people."
She had worked as a teacher's aide, a secretary, a mom, a farmer, and then in university offices when the farm income simply wasn't enough to cover the needs of a family with three kids entering middle school sports, orthodontia, and college prep. Feeding people wouldn't be the thing you’d pick out from her resume, had never been the focus of her working professional life, and yet of course, there it was, in the background, all along.
She was the core of the group that ran the kitchen for our elementary school's outdoor camp week, the one who brought both the recipe and the 10-gallon steel mixing bowl for baking a whole school's worth of oatmeal cookies in one batch. The daily milking of our family dairy cow was both her quiet meditative time and the source of our family’s milk, butter, and ice cream. She was the one who changed her department office tradition of Friday break room treats from sweets to soup and home-made bread. "Those poor graduate students need something more substantial than brownies" she would declare, tucking a crock pot of chili into the backseat of the car on her way to work. In summers, treasuring any extra hours of vacation time to be at home and garden, she'd return to work with a basket of vegetables, tucking an heirloom tomato, a fresh cucumber or zucchini into the professors' mailboxes in September.
Of course she fed people. And it fascinates me to think of how certainly she said that, and how it made sense, when I stopped to think. That statement of purpose is particularly bittersweet, given what has happened in the years since. That hand-brain connection issue, first diagnosed as benign and non-progressive, turned out to be the tip of a more serious iceberg. These days, my mom really doesn't feed anyone else, and often needs help from my dad for even the process of feeding herself. Over the last five years a degenerative brain condition, frontotemporal dementia, has eroded away so much of the mom that I knew.
With every visit home I find another bit of her missing, a conversation no longer possible, the ability to hug no more. The secret three-squeeze signal for “I love you” is too much now for the missing neural connections. The gardening is gone, the basket weaving is gone, the wool spinning is gone, and the ten-gallon mixing bowl has not made those oatmeal cookies in years, though my father learned to make the family granola recipe in it, ands sends us home with mason jars of perfectly toasted oats, seeds, and walnuts from their tree, so unlike anything from the store.
Noah has stories, too, of his mother and food. At holiday time she’d send him and his brother out through the New Hampshire snow, harnessed to a sled, to deliver fresh cranberry citrus relish to the neighbors. Their own home garden blends in his memory with the extended family garden of her parents, his grandparents, and with the family vegetable farm down the road, where he worked as a kid.
I thought of both those mothers when I read these lines in the book "Braiding Sweetgrass" this winter: "The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That's what good mothers do." Though we miss them, we are grateful to have learned and been given so much by our mothers, and I like the idea of leaning into the land, too, for good mothering.
An indigenous Dasun mother who Noah stayed with (and photographed) in Crocker Range National Park, in Borneo, plants tapioca root in a forest farm.
Mothers day for many can be cozy, sweet, worthy of all the flowery cards. If your mom is near, I hope you do celebrate in person with some good food. For many it is not so simple—perhaps you miss her, perhaps you never knew her, or never got along. Perhaps you are struggling in your own role as mother, or wishing to be a mother. For all those for whom it is a harder holiday, what do we do?
For us, our best answer always still seems to be food. To feed each other, in her honor. To dive into some good hands-in-the-ground work, towards feeding people, and feeding ourselves. We hope you can celebrate a mother in person, by phone, or in some way that fits your family best. If you are still searching for a good way, we invite you to consider a gift that helps us continue that feeding-people purpose, and also quite likely helps a mother feed her family. In the second year of our eatership program, which provides free or reduced-cost farm memberships to those who would struggle to afford them, we have seen again that the most common type of application is from a single mom trying on limited income to provide for her family. We love having two of these families already in the membership for this year, thanks to some early donors. I know that our moms would both approve, and if yours would too, please consider making a gift, through our link here. We aim to have about 10% of our farm memberships awarded to lower income families via the eatership program, and with your help we’ll be able to offer free memberships to another 3 families this year, and meet our goal. If you'd like to apply for an eatership, just fill out this simple form on our website.
If you found us at market or if you visit the farm store for some produce, please eat it this week with a feeling of love and nurturing from the land--from the earth that manages to love us all, no matter what.
Love and nourishment,
Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm
Honey Mustard Dressing for Mothers Day or Any Day
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup mustard
1/4 cup honey
Blend all ingredients in a blender, or a wide-mouth jar with an immersion blender. Taste, and experiment with adding more of any of the ingredients till it suits your taste. This recipe is very forgiving, and widely adaptable to different palettes. If you are diligent, record what you add and start with those quantities next time. If you free-form in the kitchen, just add a slosh or a slug of each and keep adding and tasting till it matches your mood for the day (don't worry about making too much, it always disappears quickly). Sometimes we like it sweeter, sometimes we like a vinegar bite, but it’s easy to whip up and goes well with any kinds of greens. It sounds especially good right now with a spinach and chilled grilled chicken salad.
Quack Grass Invasion and Wrestling an Eagle
Still standing. That was our motto this week. This week was a doozy. We finished our newest high tunnel, installed some new micro-irrigation, did dozens of repairs and maintenance, and tackled one of our biggest early season problems. Quack grass.
We didn't get all of our timing right late last fall (mostly because of our building) to disrupt and freeze quack grass with good late fall preparations. We've spent all week removing quack grass from a few of our gardens, in dozens of 2 and 3 hour shifts, as we plant. We will tackle this problem with a rather large labor crew Sunday, in order to keep on schedule with plantings. We are striving hard to eliminate weeds and minimize hand weeding as much as possible on the farm this year, so we are getting ahead of it by planting in beds that are as free, as much as possible, of perennial quack grass. It's really enemy number one on our farm now. Mary and I talk about what to do about it, how to eliminate it, how we will cover crop new ground this summer, and how we will innovate our soil practices pretty much all the time this week.
And then there was one eagle too. I was moving chickens at dusk, and while the flock was a little dispersed, following the listing chicken coop to new pasture, and an eagle swooped down grabbed one of our laying hens. I jumped off the tractor and took one flying leap. And while I didn't manage to actually touch the eagle, I did grab the hen, and wrestled her to safety. Her wounds are healed, and while eggs are in rather short supply on the farm now, and typically only available in the farmstore, I'll bring eggs as a celebration of sorts, that after all this, we are still standing.
We are loaded with greens, and we'll have plenty at the first market this morning. We'll be at our usual spot at Bedford. For those members who cannot wait for our first Tuesday pickup at the farm, come fill up! You can use your old feedbag or we'll provide one. If you are considering a farm membership, we still have room for a few more spring season shares, and we still have room for about 15 summer and fall members. You can signup on our website, or come see us tomorrow, sign up for memberships, and load up on greens.
If you can't make it to market, and are a farm member, you'll get a formal announcement about the beginning of the season on Monday. We'll be polishing up the farmstore slowly near the end of this coming week, but greens will be in the cooler for those of who can't make the Saturday market.
Countdown to Market, Last Chance for Spring Membership, and a Yurtwarming
There are only a few of these Saturday mornings left: the unstructured days when, if I wake before dawn to the deep rumbling purr of our 15-year old farm cat in my face, I can sleepily burrow him under the covers for a little more snoozing. Just two weeks from today, that warm spot on the bed will be all his well before 6 am, as we gather and load for market. It's a little crazy to know exactly what our plan is for every single Saturday from April 21 through the end of October. But it's true, whether we believe it or not, that the first early farmers markets and our spring memberships will be starting in just two short weeks.
Of course, un-structured doesn't mean empty. I was soon enough out of bed and pondering how to juggle today's list crowded with unfinished tasks from earlier in the week. This time of year field tasks, greenhouse work, and building all jostle each other for the top slots on a list that grows even faster than the weeds. But we are excited to be out, feeling that sun and seeing some green growth, so we're each digging in to the list with some big hopes for the day.
The baby greens in the high tunnels are starting to take off, with arugula so far appearing to win the good spring effort award. I have the urge to give them little pep talks about the markets coming up so soon, but I'll settle for getting them a good weeding, and beginning the ritual of daily on-and-off with the row cover, to keep them warm at night but maximize their light during the day.
A part of spring, too, is the crazy calculus of how much we need to get started in our season. In these weeks before any markets or sales to our wholesale accounts, we rely on the membership signups as our only income stream. Looking over some of our orders this week, we could see so clearly what members do: 1.5 members covered the upgrades to drip irrigation that will save us hours per week and yield healthier tomato plants in our tunnels; another one member covers the biodegradable weed mat we are going to try for tomatoes and peppers. 2 more cover the huge roll of white row cover for keeping the insect pests off of the baby greens we'll soon plant to the field...the list goes on. Thank you so much to all of you who have signed up already, and to those who have helped with donations to our eatership fund.
And the time to get your sign-ups in is growing tight! With the first pick-ups just two weeks out, we are closing sign-ups for the spring term on Monday. If you want to fill a feedbag April-early June, please sign up this weekend! Summer memberships will remain open, and we encourage you to reserve those soon as well. We are exctied to bring some member benefits beyond the weekly bag of veggies this year, so stay tuned for news of the first FARM-ily dinner potluck and farm tours, tentatively set for the first Tuesday or first Sunday of May.
On the table: mighty microgreens
Early spring is the time of exciting abundance of seedlings and starts, but also the "hungry time" in terms of actual produce. It's a funny paradox, to be in the starting and growth and busy-ness stage of the farm, to be doing so much farming but not yet to have the piles of vegetables to eat. We've finished out even most of our kale and salsas from the freezer. The greens in the high tunnel are growing, albeit slowly, through the cool temperatures and the dark of snow and rain. We think they'll be ready for those April markets, but we've also been experimenting with micro-greens, a very fast seed-to-harvest crop, to quell our impatience, and be sure to have some fresh green crunch to offer farm members. Radish micgrogreens are now being stocked in the farmstore weekly, as we start to get the timing figured out with weekly plantings and harvests. If you haven't used the micros yet, now's a great time to give them a try. Sprinkle them as a garnish on top of eggs, soups, or salads; use them in place of sad store-bought lettuce in a sandwich, or make a micro-salad, with just a small handfull of the greens, a splash of oil and vinegar, and maybe a sprinkle of nuts goat cheese, or a ferment. We loved a dash of our local fermenter, House of Ferments' "Little Polish Girl" red sauerkraut on top of ours.
RSVP for yurt-warming party next Saturday.
Have you wondered what our biggest winter project is looking like, or what the heck a yurt actually is? Next Saturday, our final weekend before the markets, we will be having a yurt-warming gathering to thank supporters and those who helped us get a cozy home on the farm, through last year's kickstarter campaign. An invite will go out to all kickstarter donors, but if you have helped in any way in our process, and aren't sure you'll get the messages from kickstarter, please click here to RSVP so we can make sure you are included, and know how many to expect.
Wishing you all the spring sunshine and green,
Mary & Noah
The Tool Heist of 2018: Neighbors, Implements, Employees, and Feed Bags.
Every minute of spring is precious on a small farm, so when our neighbor Glenn asked me to stop in Idaho and pick up a tractor implement he'd found on Craigslist, while on my way to pick up a trailer base for the next best chicken barn, I was a little leary. But it's hard to say no to the kind of neighbor who wanders up on a July evening to pass a plate of barbecued ribs and a packet of cornbread over the fence while we move irrigation pipe. (And Glenn is from Lousiana, so when he says he made barbecue, you take it seriously, trust me.)
He assured me that I could make it a quick stop, didn't need too much mental energy, and that if the envelope of cash he handed me wasn't enough to convince the seller, then I could just continue on my way. Of course it ended up a little differently than that, and not just because the old rancher I found turned out to be selling most of his place, "keeping the house and a couple of mountains, but selling off the rest."
The moment we guided the old s-tine cultivator off the tractor tines, dropping it into the truckbed with a thunk, I knew I was sunk. I wasn't sure what Glenn had been planning to use it for, but it was exactly what I wanted to try for cultivating beds of broccoli, squash, cabbage, and kale, this season. The whole drive home I fretted and schemed, wondering how I could convince Glenn to let us buy this tool instead of him. From a rest stop, I texted Mary "I've been scheming."
Coffee is pretty much my go-to tool for convincing anyone of anything, so I asked Glenn to join us in the yurt the next morning for a cup. A little nervous, not wanting to offend or outbid him, but knowing Mary is a tough negotiator and had my back, we chatted about all sorts of neighborly things for a while before going to check out the tools. I showed him our "quacker" first, a burly iron clawed tool built by our friend Leon, and informed him I'd drop it as his place later, for him to use whenever he wanted. By the time we had perused the assortment of trailers I've collected, talked a little more about alfalfa and seeding, he was pretty easy to convince to sell the cultivator to us for exactly what he paid for it. All he wanted was to take a quick look at "the implement I just bought and sold" in our truckbed.
We hope that hauling season is winding down, but as we get closer to planting season it seems that the season of wheeling and dealing may just be ramping up. Which reminds me, we are still signing people up for our farm "feed bag" memberships. Whether you reserve one for yourself, or convince your neighbor to get one and then hustle if off of them, it's all good for us! We have about half our membership slots filled, and hope to have the rest reserved as soon as possible. If you know you are ready to join, you can jump right to the online registration form here. Or read details of this years membership here.
In the finale of wheeling and dealing, we could also use your help finding our final team member for the season. Glenn doesn't have any employees we can steal, he's done some fabrication for us, and we already hijacked the youngest daughter of some of our closest local friends, so we need you to help spread that word that we are hiring one half-time employee for the full growing season (early April through mid-November). If you or anyone you know is interestedin a season with this scrappy farm team, have them email us for an application.
Hauling Season
Quail, chickens, the farm tractor, and us along a farm road.
The ancient Maya believe that you won’t successfully make it past forty unless you have one true superpower. Mary’s superpower is that she is completely stubborn. When she grips a tool to pull a nail out of a board, she might just break the tool before the nail comes out. Sometimes when she gets ready for a task, like when she gripped a shovel to move compost yesterday, her muscles flex and she gets such a determined look that I’m blown away by the raw power, the determination, the grit of this woman. Working this way with her, building our farm, is intense. You have to know when to step in, when to step to back, when not to speak. Mostly I just jump in, and try to catch up with her. Our season of winter building together, just about every day for four months except Christmas, has come to an end. Now it’s the season of shoveling compost, preparing, cleaning, getting ready to grow. Although we are well into shaping our first beds and starting our first seeds, I call this the-time-of-hauling.
One funny way we balance the intensity of this long hard winter building at the home farm is with road time. The road time is long and, like my old days of international travel working with farmers overseas, there is a certain romance about it. The hours slip by to the rumble of our diesel truck, hooked up to a trailer, pulling resources back to the home farm. We do this a lot as a young farm, bringing in equipment that will help us save time, build soil, and literally shelter our plants. As I write today, I can see from the time stamp on some photos that this time last year we did back to back trips, with Mary hauling steel for our unheated tunnels 600 miles and then me, the following week, hauling in our new-to-us Kabota workhorse from Oklahoma.
Mary unloading totes of organic potting soil with one of our favorite tools, purchased with our first real bank loan in 2017.
Sometimes the hauling is, unexpectedly, right here on the home farm. On a day recently, I woke up ready to move chickens. I knew that the mobile chicken was starting to freeze in to one of our growing spaces, and I needed to move it out. Mary had started reminding me about the intervals between raw manure application and harvest mandated by our food safety plan, and I knew I was pushing it. I’ve been moving the chickens all winter--if I not physically hooking up and pulling the triple-axle rig I built, I’d was shuffling the fence to a new compass point, or adding fresh bedding as part of my weekly chores.
But this time, when I hooked the drawbar of the tractor up to the building, I couldn’t budge it. I drove around to the chicken-door side of the building and hitched up to my emergency “pull from the other direction” backup option, threading a chain through a gap I cut in the human stairs I use to climb into the building. On even firmer, sandier soil, I couldn’t pull the building. I next fired up the truck, and then called Mary, because I was in trouble. I had her try to pull the building with the truck, while I attempted to push with the tractor forks from the other side. We were frozen in solid. I waited a week, and then on the coldest morning, with the ground a bit firmer, I tried again, without success. While I was under the coop, jacking up part of building and cracking a beam, a Bitterroot farmer texts me and asks me about a shipper and I text him back a Bitterroot trucker’s phone number. Like the changing light levels, the lengthen days, these are signs that hauling season is here—all of us who garden and plant and grow are working in earnest to get ready.
We brought in Glenn’s tractor from next door. His shop window has a front and center view to our farm, and I need to joke with him that he should consider a pay-per-view webcam business of our shenanigans. As I went to call him, Glenn was already rolling in through the farm gate, having been on alert since morning that we were in a jam. On his larger tractor, I thought he’d be my superhero and my spirits lifted. But even with all the push and pull combinations we could muster, both of our tractors still spun out. I finally called Phil down the road, and borrowed his battery of 20 ton jacks to try to get the building up out of the frozen ground. Hours later, I called him again, and he brought his four-wheel drive tractor down, and we managed to get the chickens moved. I thanked him, picked up pieces of our broken chain, a gallon jug of hydraulic fluid I had ready for the neighbor’s tractor, a small army of jacks, and started moving chicken fence. Whe I looked at my watch it was 9pm and I hadn’t finished that one first task I’d planned for the day.
I do this, I suppose, because we love the animal system; we love chickens; and we need the winter income they can bring, to make it to hauling season. But yesterday when I moved chickens, I realized that the third axel I welded up from an old truck was not strong enough. The chicken coop is listing to one side, um, rather dangerously. Or, as I told Hannah, our friend and seasonal employee, the other day, when you walk into the building, “it’s basically like you are skiing down a bunny slope” She and her brother and I all laughed, but mine was only a half-laugh.
Yesterday, I had farm friend and fellow maker and fabricator out to look at the situation. It’s the first time he’s seen the 400 square foot structure close up, and his eyes widened as he approached. When he said it’s big, I explained the needs chickens have, our approach to complying with organic standards, the physics of the building, and my desire to have just one structure, and not two or three or four. He got it, but as soon as he started listing the engineering solutions: adding two wobbly rear “crazy” wheels (read: large training wheels), maybe a wooden wheel, and potentially even cutting the building in half, I knew I was in trouble. Mike is seasoned Bitterrooter, he’s lived here his whole life and has learned an impressive array of skills. He can run any piece of heavy machinery one can dream up, it doesn’t matter if it an old tank that he happens to have on his property or an excavator, and he can weld anything. I tend to believe his assessments. ‘Yeah, you might get another year,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know. I’ll look around and see what I might have.’
Without thinking, I said, ‘I need to get through hauling season.’
He looked at me, eyebrows raised.
I explained that I was still working on my December list of things to do; it’s making and gathering season; it’s when other farmers like us, all over are bringing in stuff all over the country, all to make, to imagine, to start this dance that goes from spring to the edge of winter, something we push out each year, with passion, with luck, and it all starts, it all depends on hauling season. Now.
Hays and Vince from Shelter Designs help load our yurt on the farm truck November 10th. While the structure took about 4 days to put up, it was more than 15oo hours of finish work this winter.
He got it.
So about that building. I’ll nurse it along for a little while. I’ll pick up one of the frames that will be more um, movable, from that’s a few hours away as soon as next week. Late in the growing season, and way past spring, we’ll get a couple smaller mobile chicken coops built. It’s all rather devastating to me, having put so much into that ark, and over the past couple of days I even wondered if the cost of getting sustainable infrastructure up for chickens to be integrated to our farm was just too great. When I expressed my deep doubt towards Mary, who is generally our farm’s chicken skeptic, she surprised me by voicing her support about this crazy endeavor of mine.
On the road today, hauling old irrigation pipes to Missoula to recycle, returning with more farm supplies, I broke down a bit, shedding a tear not so much about the re-building of one structure that took 40 days and a lot of help, but of the enormity of this project: to build a farm, soil, community, part of a food system, however small. We haul; we re-purpose. We know, or at least we learn, what needs to be built better and stronger.
I remembered holding my tongue at one of the early spring markets last season, when some of this stress and the worry comes to a head, when one of my now favorite market customers said that “it’s always tough for all of us.” I almost lashed back, but quickly I realized it was just my worry, my own insecurity that would be talking.
When I visited a successful farmer friend last spring, to get some advice about the flame weeder last hauling season, my friend Luci confided to me that she always worries about failing, especially in this part of the season. I got in the truck and started crying and let the wave of tears wash over me, driving home to Mary, my stubborn woman superhero, confessing with relief that even our most trusted and gifted mentors in our community worry. We all do.
While I write, working on this desk-farming, Mary is out digging beds in our no-till hoop house and putting the last of the finishing touches on the greenhouse organization so my task of starting some seeds, while she makes a long distance trip to Oregon and back, over the next few days, is a bit easier.
And whether they are road miles, or I’m just hauling here at the desk, I know that it’ll be hard. It is for all of us. As we grow up, and our farm gets more mature, we’ll have less building (and re-building). Some of the hauling we will avoid all together: not needing as much compost as we improve cover cropping systems; an end to the steel rib hauling when we complete our fourth hoop house someday. But there will also always be hauling. I wish we knew what the mental equivalent of two neighbors’ tractors, chains, and jacks was- the surefire way to haul ourselves out of the fears and worries before we freeze in too deep. Because we could all use that; it’s always hard, for all of us.
Mary shovels compost from our tractor bucket.
This odd time, of getting ready, of preparation, of anticipation, of fear, of wonder, it’s probably what makes me human, it’s part of a journey of becoming a farmer, growing up, and hopefully, just a little bit, digging deeper into this community we call home. One of my favorite things about the farm may surprise you. It’s the relationships that this creates. It’s the light of your eyes, it's the confessions, it’s that we all get a little bit more connected.
I can’t promise that it’ll get easier, but I know that hauling season ends soon, as it does every year. It just has to, because spring is about to start. And as we work to get back on solid financial footing – mostly from investments and challenges last year – we are making some steps for the farm to be more enmeshed in the community we want to help grow. The best thing to do, really to help us get past this hauling season is what any good community organizer or farmer may say: come on out, start thinking more about local cooking, get ready to support your farmers.
Join the Farm. Be part of the solution. Keep going.
If you know you are ready to join the farm, you can jump right to the online registration form here. Or read details of this years membership here.
We will see you soon.
With love,
Noah, Mary, SweetRoot
Farm friend Joanna caught this image of us in our shop this winter while we were building kitchen cabinets.
Persephone and Potatoes: Tilting Towards Winter on the Farm
Fall tends to be a time for high drama. We neglect to check the weather for 18 hours, and the predicted low for Wednesday night has dropped by 12 degrees (cue a scramble to re-cover dozens of beds that had lost row cover in the last windstorm). Days swing between lows in the low 20s and highs in the high 60's, and what can seem like the frozen end of the world in the morning is, a few hours later, a glorious harvest day--one in which we are simultaneously excited and exhausted.
People have been asking us for at least a month whether we are “winding down” or “starting to button things up” or “wrapping up for the season.” Depending on the mood we are in, and the task we are in the middle of, people may have gotten a laugh, a long list of everything we are still harvesting, or a snappy “No! We are still working just as hard as ever!” It’s a bit of overreaction, in any direction. Some of that comes from the funny seasonal tension of being tired enough to be ready, in some ways, for things to slow down, to be done whether we like it or not. But at the same time we want just a little more time, a little more nice weather, to have one more shot at a goal we set way back in the dark of last winter, or just one more round of greens and cabbages. I drained the irrigation pump this week, and pulled the intake valve from our little lateral ditch that has now dried up. I felt a familiar both-and pang, as I was pulled between the sadness of already missing the burbling of that ditch and the possibilities it brings for watering, warming, and keeping our whole farm alive in an arid climate--but also feeling the relief of knowing that it would be months before I would again be racing back to the pump house to restart the pump after a blown gasket, puzzling over where a leak might be, or laying face-down on the plank above the ditch, shoulder-deep in cold water, clearing the intake screen. If we believe social media, it seems that all the other farmers we know are neatly wrapping up their seasons: garlic is planted and mulched, cover crops are lush and established, interns have been sent off with farewell parties, and the farmers are enjoying their drink of choice with their feet propped up by the woodstove.
We are sometimes still so young and bumbling as a farm, despite the fact that SweetRoot will soon turn four. Here we are, just maybe getting to our garlic next week, finally making the call that a fall-seeded cover crop won’t establish in time to be worth the effort by next spring, scrambling to put our row cover back onto those greens for the fourth time after a windstorm, and trying to figure out how to contain the husky who can now break out of the barn by jimmying the cat door. Getting our last market harvest in as the temperature drops below freezing, even though we don't have quite the multiple truckloads to bring in that we did in the peak of the late summer season.
For a while this morning, when the turnip leaves were frozen solid even under their two layers of cover, it felt like the end of the world. This is part of my personal fall melodrama, enacted several times each year with the first big freezes, and Noah was graceful enough to just wait patiently for it to pass. Because in fact many of our little tender-looking greens are so much tougher than they seem. They thawed out, we harvested, spread leaves, and moved chickens to a new field block where they are perhaps the happiest they've ever been.
As we find our way through the ups and downs of the days, seasons, and yearly rounds, we are so grateful to have you all on the ride along with us. Please come out and celebrate the end of another market season tomorrow (Saturday) morning. Though things were frozen this morning, and though it is the last market of the year, we will be bringing a wild abundance and hope that's ready to eat.
We'll have more eggs than I think we have ever brought, and plenty of advice on how to use them in good combination with the mountains of potatoes, greens including salad mix, Asian mix, arugula, baby kale, and baby spinach. Onions, garlic, sweet peppers, hot chilies, cilantro, the last tomatoes (including some harvested today), winter squash, beets, carrots, cabbage, salad turnips, and more will join us for this final Saturday morning market. We hope we'll see you there.
-Mary and Noah
p.s. If market doesn't work for your Saturday, rest assured the farmstore will also be stocked all week!
The world doesn't end at 22 degrees, but this is your last chance at Farmers Market for the year.
Hannah harvests cilantro at the end of October!
We may be snowed over, but we're still going! Above, our fall farm helper, Hannah, harvests cilantro after peeling back its snow-covered frost protection fabric.
Happy November, local eaters! Thank you for a wonderful last farmers market last week! For us, at least, it certainly proved that the extension to the end of October is well worth it.
The first week with no market is always a big transition for small farms, and when it couples with the first winter storm warning of the year, we really notice! With our extended market seasons this year, we had 28 Saturdays in a row of late Friday night harvests, early Saturday morning market setup, and the wild nine-to-noon festivities of market itself. We will miss seeing you all at market these next few months, but have to admit that sitting in the barn drinking coffee and watching the sun come up and the snow fall is rather nice this morning.
The good news is, you can still get plenty of local produce even though market season is over! Believe it or not, we are still harvesting, still delivering to most of our restaurant accounts, and still working in the fields. The farmstore is open all the time, and loaded with goodness: baby greens, onions, garlic, cabbages, boc choi, carrots, beets, salad turnips, and potatoes (so many potatoes, we have enacted our fall potato special: buy 3 or more bags, and each bag is $3 instead of $5!) hot chilies, and more. There are always eggs now, as the young flock revels in cleaning up the field blocks after our final harvests. Feel free to swing by anytime that is convenient! The farmstore is always open (the sliding door sometimes gets a little sticky in wet weather, but it's never locked--just pull harder if it's stuck), and we will keep it stocked as long as possible. If you haven't been to the farmstore before, you can find it at 76 Bell Lane; just pull on in the the driveway past the house, and enter through the sliding glass door at the front of the barn. Our roasted coffee beans are currently out of stock, but will be back on this week as soon as we pick up our pallet of raw beans from the shipping dock in Missoula, probably on Monday.
We have been focusing most of our work this week on getting good progress on the yurt that will be our new, everything-under-one-roof home starting this winter, preparing the platform to be ready to set the yurt up hopefully late this coming week. We'll be out there today, enjoying the clearing weather that's coming in, and will be posting some updates to the Kickstarter campaign soon. Thanks, again, to all of you who supported us there or cheered us on along the way!
The Case of One Eye, Strong Women, and A Soup Doctor
Mary and Hannah, on one of the many trips to gather farm firewood in Roaring Lion.
As the receptionist for the Big Sky Eye Clinic unlocked the deadbolt on the entrance and took a look at Mary and I, she remarked, ‘I think you are the dirtiest people to ever come in here.’
It wasn’t a funny comment, really, just a fact. I nodded, and looked at her with my one good eye.
Mary gracefully smiled, and then quickly grimaced from her rapidly swelling upper lip.
We were a sorry pair, coming down from our third day of gathering firewood from a Roaring Lion side canyon, in between harvests and farm tasks. We were blackened from felling trees in the burn, bruised from lugging and wrestling rounds of fir into into our truck, sometimes with straps hitched to the truck, but mostly by sheer determined might. We were wide eyed from the adrenaline of a 4-wheel-drive and odd angles that reminded us of when the wheel came off our Kubota this spring. We were tired from another long day, one that was supposed to be recreation, but left us rather beat up. Mary had gotten whacked in the lip when the branch she was using to hoist a big round gave way, while I had injured my eye with a chunk of wood that had someone managed to fly at me, at an odd angle behind my glasses.
In the chair, after a few gasps by the doctor as he pulled the offending debris out of my eye and prescribed some ointment, I profusely thanked him for his pronouncement that I’d most likely be back to normal within a day or two — or so.
I promised to shake his hand the next time it was clean, and we assured the receptionist that we were farmers, not full-time professional firewood gatherers. After we wrote a check for the most expensive cord of firewood we collected this season (last year it was tire chains and half a tank of truck fuel), we reminded our two newest acquaintances that the farmer’s market is, well, this Saturday. Tomorrow.
It's hard to believe it's been six months since the first spring markets, and the load we'll bring tomorrow is far more than that first early market in the park in April. As I write, Mary is washing and packing the last of what we have. It’s more than you might expect, given the prediction of cold October day in Montana. One entire side of our walk in cooler, a long row, is lined with waxed boxes of food — broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower, potatoes, spinach, all our greens, turnips, carrots, celery, peppers, tomatillos, so much food. Crates of winter squash and fresh tomatoes sit at the ready in the farm store, waiting to load tomorrow morning.
Even though we had our usual rush of tasks, plus some wild high winds this week that lofted some of our row cover all the way over toward the Pharoplex (really), I still think of the farm as a refuge. You keep coming out to the farm, with so many of you this week buying produce, sharing with us gifts like the box of apples, the hand-me-down insulated overalls in near mint condition (those were in use tonight). And even though we were deep in our own world of tasks like cutting firewood this week, (so we don’t run out before the weather turns) the news, of the hashtag #MeToo, didn’t escape us. Our farm wouldn’t be what it is without my strong Mary, and as I listened to her stories, those of her friends and our community, it was a reminder of how often our world is not quite how we want it to be.
Although we don’t know everyone as personally as we like, we like to think of the farm as a refuge for everyone in our community. Often it’s proud families, moms that tote kids and households around the farm. One of our new members, this week, chasing her boys outside the chicken coop, like a giant mother hen. Toby and Amanda, both farm members, know our place well enough to give a guided tour. And even if our current kitchen is short on hot water, Hannah, our fall crew, knows just where to go if we ever need hot water to clean up and scrub washing and packing tables. And sometimes, you are the ones that make us cry, telling us about your own sweet victories from deep within this space we call home, the Bitterroot. To me, that is why we farm, it’s a refuge of sorts, it makes us better than we are, it makes us realize what we can be.
So, even though the weather is sure to be terrible tomorrow, come on out. Farmers markets are democratic places, where ideas and voices count. Mary will be doling out soup recipes with a new twist. Let me be clear: this is a prescription. Tell us what looks good, what flavors you like and what you don’t, and we will come up with a soup recipe, on the spot, just for you, based on what we have on hand. Mary says that if you don’t like what the soup doctor prescribes, we’ll buy back your soup, or your produce! After a long day in the fields, she says she has far more inspiration for soups than time to write recipes, but would love to be challenged to come up with the perfect soup for your week. Mostly ingredients in the booth, under $10, directions easy enough to fit on an index card, and we get a conversation to boot. If you are up for the soup-scription challenge, stop on by the booth tomorrow morning.
Heroics and Hangovers: Wild Farm Week
Our compost spreader, coated with frost on a 20 degree morning last week.
Left alone last week with our part-time helper away on vacation, we found ourselves in a sort of bizarre farm party spiraling out of control. By the end of the week we were dodging piles of storage crops in every corner, cleaned out of frost-protection materials, and fighting a serious chicken hangover. I don't remember what project it was, but I do remember once coming across Noah in the midst of something and asking, only half-joking, shouldn't there be some kind of adult supervision on this?â€
It was kind of just a perfect storm; another night of frosts on Saturday after a market drenched with rain, and then a deep-freeze on Tuesday with temperatures around 20. Sizable orders for the growers' co-op, our local wholesale accounts, and the farmstore needed harvesting. The transitioning of the old laying flock to stewing hens, which we'd been stalling for over a month, reached a state where it could no longer be ignored as the new young flock clamored from their moveable chicken tractors, demanding their move to the big-house and larger pasture spaces, mobbing the feed bucket and cracked door more excitedly each day.
Graham, Maria, and Emily help bag our most recent potato harvest.
By the time we reached Friday, and needed to harvest for the Apple Day market, we’d already weathered 2 nights of being up past 2 a.m., a number of early mornings, and were trying to count up the number of heroic farm acts we'd accomplished in that week.
Our final onions brought in as the freeze settled on the ground (3 more full "giant" bins). Thousands of bed-feet of frost protection. 64 chickens butchered. Fixing a flat tire on the 6-wheeled mobile chicken barn. An epically rainy market last week. Demolition of an old platform in preparation for building the base for the yurt. It was hard to keep count.
Luckily we had help from a spate of small-farm heroes through the week: Greg, who came on Sunday to help finish shingling half the roof of the farmhouse, and begin deconstruction work on the building site for the yurt. Toby, who brought food more than once, and her able hands for harvesting on Friday night, staying, as a wild-party guest might, well past the time when she’d planned to get back home. Graham, Emily, who showed up with a friend shortly before dusk to weigh and bag 200 lbs of potatoes. The un-identified customer who grabbed on to one leg of our canopy as I held another, when the worst of the wind gusts came through on Apple Day, toppling one of our display shelves and tossing neighboring canopies all up and down Bedford Street. Graham, who threw us a tub of Tucker Family Farm chocolate ricotta mousse as we packed the truck to go home from Apple Day. And of course all of you who consistently support us, coming to market in the rain and wind, adding a stop up our gravel road to your grocery errands to buy from the farmstore, or boosting us with a hug or a keep-the-chin-up pep talk at market when we could barely do math through a cold sleepy stupor. We are grateful for you all!
And after our wild week, we collapsed into bed before it was fully dark on Saturday, and slept an incredibly long time, but still both stumbled around a bit Sunday. I can’t remember the last time either of us suffered from a classic drink-and-party hangover, but it turns out that over-indulging in hardcore farming and too many chickens can leave a person with a similar feeling. We are vowing to be more temperate in our chicken butchering and fall farming in the future. This weeks' cure was more sleep, a good walk with the husky, chicken soup, and generous helpings of pickled beets.
We're back on track folks, with a farmstore and member shares packed with goodness, and three more Hamilton farmers markets left. Come on out and see us, load up with fall produce, and see what kind of farm-fueled party of your own you can throw!
With love, gratitude, and winter squash,
Mary and Noah
Noah and Greg do demolition work for the yurt platform.
Winter squash cure in our proportions house.
Summer Camp Nightmares
It was more than 15 years ago, but I remember my own summer camp nightmare like it was yesterday. One summer, back when I was writing my master’s thesis, I spent four weeks teaching in Costa Rica. This wasn’t an ordinary teaching assignment.
I arrived in Costa Rica ready to embrace high school students looking for a challenge. What I got, was 14 high school girls expecting a tropical vacation. We were assigned to a tropical bird sanctuary. And that doesn’t sound too bad at first. But our main task was to wake up at 4am, before the heat of the day, and weed acres of maize — essentially food for the birds. As we hacked our way through the underbrush, watching for snakes, I could hear the girls cursing me out. It wasn’t that they hated me. They despised me. To make matters worse, we were all roommates. We were housed, in one tiny, one room cabin. I would fall asleep to either giggles, or grumbles as I got out of bed, or a cautiously knocked on the door, a small courtesy to check if everyone was decent.
I’d like to say that I learned a lot about organic agriculture that summer. What I did learn, though, was how to live, or at least cope, with teenage girls. I was surrounded by them, and none of us had hardly any personal space.
Weeks, later, after having received terrible evaluations, and being placed with a group of coffee farmers, and an amazing group of students, I realized that I had made it through the worst.
This week, with many of our farm members and friends just back, or literally just off to summer camp, we are waiting for the stories to come in. This week on the farm, we are trellising, staking, and pruning some of our most important and valuable crops. We are all working overtime, kind of a nightmarish camp re-enactment. At market we’ll have some of these crops tomorrow — the first peppers and some eggplant. And one of my favorite, a large abundance of heirloom summer squash.
As I write, Mary and Kayla are muddling through the work. We’ve just done a limited harvest for tomorrow since the plant care and maintenance this week is so important, even vital to good production of tomatoes, where each fruit week counts, just like the days going by at summer camp.
Since we have to get out and finish work, and we need the entire team on board, I’ll be brief. We’ll have our own summer squash recipe at market, but if you can’t wait until tomorrow, or want to swing by this evening, we highly recommend our distant friend’s blog, Dishing up the Dirt. Since we will have basil at market tomorrow, we recommend the Roasted Summer Squash Pesto.
You are family. Like it or not.
It's marathon weekend in Missoula, and even though it's been a few years since I've run that race, it's an event that feels like a family holiday. In the first five years, as the race grew up, I ran three fulls and two halves, and it's still my favorite road race anywhere (sorry, Portland). My sister and her family have been to visit for that weekend for the last 8 years or more. Amazingly, they continue to come out from Oregon each year, even though we now run this farm up the Bitterroot, and even though the second Sunday in July is pretty much when the weeds start to get out of hand in a most desperate way. But even though they'll be running 13.1 miles on Sunday, they happily pitch in to bring order and releif to whatever beds we point them towards. Every year we wish we were more on top of it, wish we could host them better, apologize for the rough accomodations, our frazzled state, and the wall of weeds we simply have to tackle. Every year, they tell us not to worry, they put up with our chaos and our late Friday night, take us to dinner at the brewery, and remind us that we are loved.
Marathons have been on my mind all summer, and especially since the wheel came off the tractor, back on Memorial Day weekend. It was my old runing coach Anders' voice that I heard when I looked back at the parked Kubota on a Saturday evenign in late May, and realized that the wheel was coming off the tractor. We've made analogies from farming to marathons before, and this year more than ever, it feels apt.
In the training class for my first marathon, Anders dismissed the notion of "the wall" at a certain mile. For every runner and every race, he emphasized, the hardest moment would be different. The phrase he used instead was "when the wheels come off the bus.." If you go out too fast at first caught up in starting-gun excitement, if you fail to fuel properly, or if you don't adjust your pace when suddenly the temperature is 20 degrees hotter than most of your training runs, you can end up at mile 12 or mile 23, with the wheel starting to come off the bus. When the wheels come off the bus, it's hard to recover.
That was how the farm felt, in late May and early June; we'd started off strong, but perhaps we tried to do too much, with the infrastructure, labor, and systems we had. There's plenty of analysis and thinking and planning to do to avoid this in the coming years. But like in a marathon, we also have to figure out the best way to get through the season. In the running class, we talked about how to prevent the wheels coming off the bus, but also how to deal with it if it did happen. And that was when I started to understand I wasn't training to run just one marathon; I was learning to run, for the longer term. If you're in it for the long haul, you don't want to just blast through and stumble to the finish line, swearing never to run a marathon again. We talked about how to avoid hurting yourself in the long term, how to salvage the race with perhaps not the time goal you'd set out with, but maybe trying to enjoy the course, the community, the event. And, most importantly, to plan for the next one.
We had to adjust our race goals for this season. It's not that one bad tractor wheel thew us off; that was more of a symptom, really. Tryign to do too much, not on top of everything, we missed some basic maintenance. The tractor out of commission for a week slowed us down, made many tasks harder, but it wasn't the thing that threw off the season; it was a slow-down that forced us, in a very good way, to look at our whole system and strategy, and recognize we were not on a very good path. If we continued to push, we'd maybe manage to limp through the season, but we'd likely be too burnt out, exhusted, and depleted, to be able to manage other season of farming. We'd be the kind of runner who suffers through one marathon, and never ever does it again. That's not what we want to be as a farm; we want this to be an annual marathon, enjoyable even though it's challenging, and something that we are in a habit of for life. To get there, we realized, we needed to have some help, and we needed to face the fact that we weren't going to hit our income goals, and that creates some problems. At some point in a race, you simply can't go fast enough to make up for some slow middle miles; when 15 beds of greens fail, and a few more crops are paltry compared to the plan, we know it'll be hard to reach the income goals set in February.
But it's ok. We reset to realized that we could recover, we could continue to do it again, if we ended the year just breaking even (paying for the many improvements to the farm, like new fencing, new hoop houses and propagation house), and with a secure and comfortable place for us to live. It was, in some ways, like changing our race-time goal to a half-hour longer, but seeing that we'd be much happier in the long run. This is not our year to set a personal record, but it is a year for lots of learning, and a good bit of growing up as a farm.
When I joined the Run Wild Missoula training class to prepare for my first marathon, I assumed I'd train for and run one in my life, check that off a list, and move on. Instead, I found a whole family of runners, and a regular lifesaver of a passtime. I haven't run much at all the last few years, but regular running again is one of the benchmarks of success that Noah and I have set for our farm. If you start to see us at the meetups of the Bitterroot Running Club, or loping along forest service roads with our happy husky, you'll know we're starting to run a truly succesful farm (and life).
Over the years, and especially over these last few weeks, we have felt love from our farm-family too. We can see all the ways we have fallen short of our goals (there should have been an earlier batch of carrots, there should have been another round of peas, and half the time this summer, we've not quite had a recipe insert ready for member pickup up day). We've apologized, wished we could host you better, and yet just like the family-family, the farm-family has come back again and again, put up with our shortcomings, and reminded us that we are loved. We've heard from you, sometimes with teary eyes all around, that we matter to you, to your families and your dinner tables, and to the community here. We've been completely amazed at how you have pitched in, raising more funds, and more quickly, than we'd really ever expected. If you have not been following our kickstarter campaign to fund our yurt, the good news is, we passed our goal on the 4th of July, and are within $1,000 of the top-up goal that gets us an insulated panel floor that (most importantly) saves us probably 10 days of fall building time--time that can go back into the farm, bettering things for this fall and next year, too. We are just amazed, and so grateful.
Next year's marathon will come again in July, and we'll be doing our best to keep the wheels on the tractor, and the wheels on the bus. A home will be a huge part of that, and we thank you all.