Long Time

It has been a very long time since we made a blog post. Our intention when we started this blog was to post something every week. From late-Fall through late-Spring, we are able to stick to that schedule pretty well. Sitting here now, looking through the morning fog at fields of vegetables and cover crops, I’m amazed that we mustered the energy this summer for the few posts we did write.

This has been one hell of a year for Siri and I. Mostly, this has been a year filled with phenomenal good fortune combined with an ungodly amount of work. Thrown into that mix have been a handful of tragedies and misfortunes. These deaths and illnesses somehow felt both more poignant and less poignant than they otherwise might have, due to the compressed time and mental space we’ve had to process them.

Now that we are entering a slower season, we can finally stop and reflect on what we’ve accomplished this year. Until now, all of our attention has been on Felix and making sure the most important tasks were accomplished. So focused on our daily and weekly work, that the day we finalized the purchase of this farm, we didn’t stop and celebrate. We didn’t do anything. In fact, we just went back to work and didn’t even remember to tell anyone that we had completed the purchase.

And now, it’s fall. Time to finally slow down and think. I’m not trying to be self-congratulatory, but as I sit here writing, I’m amazed by the list of things we did this year. On top of raising Felix, a full-time job itself, we navigated the very tenuous purchase of our new farm, securing our low interest Beginning Farmer loans between government shut downs and threatened budget cuts aimed at our loan program. Luckily, we knew the loan process would be long, and began leasing the property in January. Once we had a signed purchase and sale agreement, we got busy moving our whole farm to this new property. Somehow we made the transition almost seamlessly. In so doing….

We built 5 greenhouses

We tried to baby-proof the fixer-upper farmhouse

We survived a big flood

We bought a couple of tractors

We grew eight acres of vegetables

We harvested a lot of food

We grew our CSA by 20 families

We had our best farmers market season ever

We grew almost 14 acres of cover crops

We took a lot of pictures of Felix

We have never worked so hard in our lives. Still, we often took shortcuts or let some projects go unfinished, or unstarted. Yet despite the fact that we haven’t had a real day off since March, I’m looking forward to next year. I know we can do a better job, and I’m oddly excited to get started. On the list for next year includes planting an orchard, fixing up the farmhouse, getting better at killing weeds, plowing 5 more acres, growing more cover crops, growing new and interesting varieties of vegetables, and, of course, spending more time playing with Felix.