Farm Happenings

Dear friends,The prolonged freezing temps were very hard on our outdoor crops last week. During the last winter storm we lost covering on one of our greenhouses, so the crops inside that structure also suffered. We took stock of what we have, and it's basically just potatoes and Megs Eggs. So we've made the difficult decision to close down for at least two weeks, maybe three, to give crops time to recover and to give seedlings time to grow!We encourage you to visit the Winter Farmers Market at the fairgrounds on Saturdays between 9am and 1pm. We have many friends...

Stewarding farmland in 2022 was a wet, wild, and wacky ride. Just when you think you're familiar with the rhythm of the seasons, nature reminds you that there are no guarantees! We're so very grateful that you've hung in there with us through so many uncertainties. For a while there, it seemed questionable whether we'd have our favorite summer crops for more than just a few weeks. In the spring we were often frustrated and discouraged, having to compost thousands of plants that had no where to go due to the very wet soil conditions. We hedged our bets and...

The tail end of the warm season this year brings the uncanny feeling that we're just now to the midmost. You'll remember Summer arrived in fresh foliage from cool, muddy weeks that stretched all the way back to early Spring. The slugs stuck around for far too long. The tractor mocked us in forced idleness. And frankly we had some dread from the late start, the old work piling onto the new, with missed opportunities mounting as time got scarce. In a pinch like that, you do what you can, when you can, and take your chances. I've heard all...

At some point last week we started to get a minimum of 10 hours of daylight! That marks the end of the Persephone period and we'll start to see a dramatic change of pace all around us.  We've been busy with the usual farm chores of seeding, weeding, cleaning up, watering seedlings, keeping pests like mice and hungry birds in check, and bumping plants up from their seed trays into 6-packs. Yesterday I was very happy to spend time bumping baby parsley plants and was even happier to see that we had over 200 plants by the time I was...

It's another unpredictable year when it comes to weather. Like most of you, we've been muddling our way though the pea-soup level fog for the last 10 days. The most recent cold snap was a surprise but not unwelcome, it'll help reduce the amount of pests we see later this spring/summer. You probably know we have two locations that we farm. Our Philomath plot is all outdoors and we're only harvesting a few crops there, the cooking mix and the carrots. The other items are fall harvest storage crops that are kept at Sunbow. We're tending to a few hoop...