We want to start by thanking everyone for a beautiful year – a transitional, magical year we will remember forever.
The leap of faith we took – away from career, from life and home as we’d known them – was truly the best thing we could have done. Our days have never felt more fulfilling, our work never so meaningful, our hearts never so calm and in love with all we see and do. This has been a life-sized proof of concept for being guided by intuition and letting “que sera, sera” replace fear when faced with the unknown. It’s indubitably been the best year of our lives – we’re so grateful that you joined us and helped make this possible.
The Year in Review
Looking around us and smiling in wonder, I’ve often exclaimed to Kristin, “Look! This is our life!! Aaaaaa!!!”
We’ve made the place feel like home, and improved our processes and systems in countless ways. We built a greenhouse, a chicken coop, a hugelkultur mound, and composting outhouse, planted several dozen raspberry bushes, began doing salad mix, sold at market and wholesale for the first time, did late season planting for fall, got to know the locals and explored the ‘hood, hosted our first WWOOFers … it’s been an amazing first year here, and we’re excited to start next year with all the progress we made as a foundation.
We’d love to hear any feedback you have for us – good or bad, it will help us continue to grow and improve.
Looking Ahead
We have just a few weeks before we hit the road for warmer climes. Until then, we’re keeping busy removing and composting dead crops, cleaning and storing away equipment and materials, taking down trellises, planting and mulching garlic, preserving food, finishing the pallet fort/guest shack, and packing up.
scavenging lichen-crusted old sheet metal from a collapsed 60-year old hunting shack in the woods
Then we load up the dogs and roll out for a long journey south – meeting up with family at the beginning and end, some friends in the middle, but mostly working on four other organic farms – learning new things, meeting new people, experiencing new places. (We did this last winter too, and it was incredibly rewarding.)
Come March, we’re coming back and hitting the ground plantin’ – starting seeds and preparing the field for a new year. We’ll be planting different varieties, new greens, more spinach, starting the fall crops sooner, experimenting more with compost tea, and expanding to new markets.
The biggest change we’re planning is transitioning to “no till” farming – rather than plowing the field in spring, we’ll be leaving the existing mulch and delicate soil structure intact, and working more organic material into the rows as we plant. (We reckon that this is the best way to address the sandy soil we have to work with here in the Sand Barrens – where nutrient leaching and moisture loss are major pitfalls.)
2015 CSA
We will be keeping the CSA about the same size, so spots will be limited – but returning members get priority.
Let us know now if you’d would like to be on board next year, so that we can reserve a spot!
Whether you’re joining us next year or not, please stay in touch! We’ll be continuing to update this blog throughout the winter – let us know if you want us to keep emailing you a link when we update the site.
It’s been amazing; thanks again. Have a wonderful winter – hope to see you soon!
The cold has arrived; we were ready for it. We did a ton of preserving this week, capturing the food that needed to be brought in from the freezing nights, and maintaining it for enjoyment this winter or next year. Huckleberries, ground cherries, green tomatoes, peppers, and salsas were canned and pickled and jarred and dried.
We took advantage of All Wheel Drive and a lot of exploring the crazy dead end network of narrow two-track logging “roads” that surround us out in the Barrens.
the waxy mystery stump found in the woods off a dead-end logging road. A piece of plywood is cut to shape and nailed to the bottom of the hollow log, the thick slab is covered in some kind of black wax. WHAT
the hollowed out log may or may not have been some kind of secret cache, but the slab was definitely used by one – we found this cache of acorns beneath it
yes, a bear does this in the woods
This morning, the field was covered in sparking white beneath the lunar eclipse – frozen again. Most vulnerable crops were already dead, but even some cold-hardy plants took damage.
We finished the upgrade of the old pit outhouse, adding a window and some art as we transformed it into a raised composter.
the Weekly Box
(Well, it’s a bag this week – we didn’t have enough boxes to give out and figured this was best for everyone.)
Kristin, Mark, & Florian washing veggies & packing the boxes
Salad mix – with arugula, red and green lettuce, baby spinach, green and Ruby Streaks Mizuna, pea tips, baby kale, sheep sorrel, and baby Bok Choi
Potatoes
a Gourd or three
Peppers
Parsnips – best roasted. Most people don’t love them on their own, but they are a great component in a soup or roasted vegetable mix. We cut the greens off not only to maintain fresh crisp texture, but because they are toxic – they make any skin that they contact prone to being burned by the sun. So we didn’t include those in the box.
Broccoli – from the fall planting
Green onions
Kale (Dino, Red Russian, & Dwarf Curly Blue)
Parsley – dries well if you want to save it or later – simply tie the bundle and hang it somewhere dry and out of direct sunlight, leaves down/stems up.
Carrots
Daikon Radish – we left the greens on these so you could easily tell them apart from the Parsnips – cut them off when you get home though, to keep the radish from getting soft prematurely.
Well, the beautiful Indian Summer faded away this week, but we didn’t get frosted again – the days have been pretty nice still, with nighttime temps falling into the woodstove range. The crops that survived the early frost are happy. revitalized by the previous week of sunshine, and quenched by the occasional rainfalls we’ve had this week.
This was the week of lady beetles and wasps all over the trailers, inside and out. The wasps look scary but are not aggressive at all. The lady beetles look cute but bite and stink, especially if you mess with them.
The two old shiitake logs sprouted from the bath we gave them, after all – we’re excited for next year, when the 20 or so logs we inoculated this spring will be ready to start producing.
The buried hole Gabe found a week or two ago was transformed into a potato root cellar, with stacked baskets on cords, capped with an insulated and vented lid.
The outhouse was moved off of its partially-buried waste barrel, and moved onto a new platform, for a new incarnation as a composting toilet … and we only ALMOST lost control of it and crushed someone.
In the woodlot, we marked big maples and standing dead oaks so we could tell which ones were eligible for Maple syrup tapping or firewood, once winter robbed the living of their leaves.
We explored the strange logging roads that meander and dead end all throughout the Barrens, and Kristin canned tomato juice.
We found a good home for our three hens, since we’ll be gone over the winter months.
final evening in the yard
Today we took a break from the endlessly rainy and hypothermic harvest to regain sensation in our fingertips with the help of the woodstove.
It was certainly a memorable and interesting harvest day, if difficult and not all that pleasurable. We were happy to see how capable we were of adapting and dealing with it, with the semi truck trailer turned into the packing house.
the Weekly Box
Weatherman sez: Winter is coming to kill the plants. Lows for the coming week may hit the 20s – so enjoy your peppers, your eggplants, and your tomatoes, because they’re done for after this!
Fall Salad mix (with Arugula, two types of lettuce, pea tips, a bit of spinach, red and green Mizuna, baby kale, sheep sorrel, and sunflower greens)
a new Gourd for your collection
Carrots
Eggplant (White or Purple)
Tomato Mix
Pepper Mix
Radishes (Black Spanish & China Rose varieties)
Rutabaga
Beets & Beet Greens
Speaking of boxes – if you want to drop yours off during the week (if it’s hard to arrange to have them with when you pick up next week), feel free to do so at the drop location whenever it’s convenient.
We’re nearing the end now … looks like next week will be the final box of 2014!
After the cold snap, this weather has been like an idealized childhood summer memory … bright, sunny, very warm but never too hot, not humid, hardly buggy … days so nice you’re sad to notice that the daylight is ending hours earlier.
This week, we finally cut down the “Ultimate Ticking Time Bomb” – the dead oak that leaned over the trailer and loomed over our bed. Neighbor Dave brought his tractor and a long cable over, and pulled the tree away from our home while Kristin worked the chainsaw.
Kristin celebrates a textbook tree-felling
The UTTB was quite picturesque, and we enjoyed its constant threat as an opportunity to truly embrace the “que sera, sera” philosophy, especially as we slept through a windy storm … but at the same time, it’s nice to have it gone.
Of course, the old tree didn’t go without a fight – after it was safely down and we were removing the branches, one of them broke under tension and came flying freakishly up off the ground, broken end spinning around to punch Gabe just above the upper lip, splitting his face open. Dave got us a razor to shave it to the skin, so that tape strips would hold the wound closed – although it was deep, it was remarkably clean, allowing it to mend nicely.
We “shocked” the old shiitake logs – soaked them overnight in one of the clawfoot tubs, in an effort to get them to fruit again … but to no avail. Little tiny numbs started to form, but they retreated after a day or so. We’re probably going to re-shock them this week and see if that will get em in gear.
We finished snow-bracing the greenhouse, visited the logging across the road & saw bio-luminescent foxfire fungi, repaired the rotting semi trailer door, made sauerkraut with support from Market Marv (advice and materials!), cut up and stacked plenty of firewood, and built the interior of the Hugelkultur mound up way higher and thicker …
our growing woodpile (all from standing-dead or recently-fallen oaks in our wood lot) seems pretty big – but we know it’ll go fast once the cold begins in earnest … and it really seems tiny next to the massive corridor they’re amassing in the logging operation across the road:hundreds and hundreds of old, live red oak logged from the Governor Knowles State Forest across the road – to profit the state’s General Fund. :(
sauerkrauting – using Market Marv’s Sauerkraut Kit … whey culture, red cabbage, plus his “rubber glove and cutting baord circle” method
the Weekly Box
Fall Salad Mix! featuring Arugula, Red & Green Mizuna, Sunflower greens, baby dino kale, baby red Russian kale,Tatsoi , Bok Choi, baby Swiss chard, Sheep Sorrel (a lemony & sour wild edible that we let grow where it appears), & Pea Tendrils.
the pea tendril & mizuna upper layers of the Fall Salad Mix
Pie Pumpkin – you can use these exactly the way you would any otherwinter squash; cut in half, scoop out the stringy stuff, and bake. Roast the seeds in salt and oil.Or roast in chunks. Or puree it into soup. Or make it into muffins or bread. Or make a small jack-o-lantern!
pumpkins curing, Cleo chilling
a Squash – either a Delacato, Acorn, Butternut, or Jumbo Pink Banana variety.
hi! I am squash
a Gourd – the Happy Meal Toy of the CSA!
We are Gourd. (Resistance is futile.)
Tomatoes
Peppers
Parsley
Potatoes – mostly that pink variety that we don’t know what they’re called.
Last week’s winds brought the first forays of winter into our land. We soaked in the wood-fired “hillbilly hot tubs” (old cast iron clawfoot tubs straddling fire pits, cannibal-stew style) as the sun set – these, together with our old iron stove did a wonderful job keeping us snug and toasty through the nights, but the crops in the field had no such luxury to keep the chill at bay.
Florian cleaning carrots during Saturday morning’s frigid market harvest
On Friday night, the weatherpeeps predicted lows in our area to dip to 34 degrees just before dawn’s rays thawed things out – a light frost, perhaps, but still potentially lethal.
sunset
We busted out every old bedsheet, bucket, and scrap of row cover in an effort to protect the sensitive crops – but supply was dwarfed by demand, and many crops were left to fend for themselves.
sunrise
Fortunately, we did get most of the most important and sensitive plants under cover. Unfortunately, the cold was quite a bit worse than predicted – the game camera we set up (it includes a temperature reading with each image it takes) showed the low drop quickly to 32 degrees before midnight, and stay down there until morning.
early in the night, it was warmer, and Tiny House Florian’s cat prowled the perimeter
In the morning, a thick fog lifted only gradually, revealing a rime of white across every surface of the field.
As the sun’s rays weakly pushed through the fog and touched the crops, we could hear the crackle of thawing leaves all around us.
It was beautiful, bringing up conflicting emotions – excitement at the turning of a page, sadness at the death of plants that we’d worked so hard to nurture from seedlings all season long.
As it turned out, many plants survived – more than we thought would, given the extended cold and icy coating.
Fatalities included mostly plants that were pretty much done for the season, or plants that had just managed to finished putting out their long-season fruits anyway – cucumber, zucchini, basil, okra, squash, and melons all succumbed.
Other plants were merely wounded – topmost leaves blackened, margins cold-scorched – but still carrying on to live for whatever little bit longer the whims of weather permitted.
crushing dried garbanzo bean shells with an oak log’s core
As our work in the field slowed, our efforts off-field intensified. We shelled dried beans, pickled water melon rinds, prepared medicinal herbal tinctures of yarrow, prickly ash, and wormwood, and infused oil with callengula & plantains.
We harvested apples & Japanese pie pumpkins, and took down a couple more standing dead oaks – adding their bark and rotten bits to the growing Hugelkultur mound, and their solid limbs and trunks to the firewood pile.
gathering apples
We planted two new apple trees and fenced them off from the reach of ravenous deer, and added interior bracing to the hoop greenhouse, so the heavy snows of winter cannot crush it.
Kristin’s dad orchestrating the snow-support construction
Anticipating the approach of the season’s end goes hand in hand with retrospection – looking back at the time we’ve spent here so far, having left behind our city lives, salaried stability, and civilized comforts … and appreciating just how fucking lucky we are. How amazing it is that we have this opportunity to seize, this experience to live, this adventure to enjoy.
This has been, without any doubt, the best year of both of our lives.
Thank you again for being a part of it.
the Weekly Box
Christmas Melons – these dark green, leathery-ridged fruits are also known as “Santa Clause melons,” because they’re storage melons traditionally said to last until Christmas. We wouldn’t bank on them lasting quite that long though. Enjoy their firm, smoother-than-cantalope flesh … we like them quite a bit, and are definitely planning to grow them again (thanks for the tip, shareholder Amy!)
Gourds – all of the gourds this week came from one sprawling monster plant. More gourds in other shapes, colors and sizes will be coming in future boxes, to add to your autumnal collection! (we think there should be at least 2 more weeks to go before the frost puts an end to all this)
Spaghetti squash – the last for the season. The mottled appearance some have on one side was from Friday’s frost – this won’t affect the flesh, but may mean they won’t keep for much more than a couple of weeks.
Tomato mix
Kale (Dino, Dwarf Curly Blue, & Red Russian mix) – kale is said to be tastier after it undergoes a frost, see if you can taste the difference.
frosted kale
Also – do you know about massaging kale? It’s a thing. Basically you beat up the leaves a bit before you use it, to reduce the strong and almost bitter taste of the raw leaves.
Pepper mix
Fennel, bagged with:
Lemon balm &
Spearmint– both can be dried for tea, or used in any if dozens of creative ways … ie:
glad I didn’t touch this zippy thing sprinting all over the greenhouse – turns out to be a female Velvet Wasp – wingless, and sporting one of the most painful stings the insect kingdom provides
beautiful but on the Squish List: voracious zebra caterpillarnot a bee
other pics of the week
cradling the baby-sized squash
our one swollen kernel of corn smut – aka Huitlacoche
Mark & Florian help harvest senposai & yokatta-na
Kristin tries out the sweet new kitchen machete that shareholder Paul gifted her
the compost monster growth
Amy enjoys a bouquet after helping with the CSA harvest
