Tomorrow is the first mean storm of the season. I alternately think of them as smashy storms, Russian roulette storms, or staring-down-the-barrel-of-a-gun storms, but whatever you want to call them, we are kind of over them. They are not over us. Here in upstate NY, our latitude and water access insulates us from the worst parts of climate change. Sure, we can get flooding and drought and an occasional brush fire, but nothing in the apocalyptic realm of what much of the world might see on that front. When it stops raining outside like these glorious last weeks, we can make it rain inside. But ..read more

It’s January, which means it’s the season of farm conferences. In this pandemic year, it’s the season of a LOT more farm conferences than the one or two events we normally would attend in person, since all education is now online. My monthly calendar looks like I’m back in school, with at least one class three or four days a week for the next couple months. Wherever I am on the farm, if I’m within Wi-Fi range and have my headphones on, I’m probably listening to a webinar. One thing that I love about being farming is this sheer bulk of information we need to process, and the different things we ..read more

First Looking Back - 2020 CSA in Review! Every year, we do a CSA wrap up to assess the season and think, “Hey, we should send this to our members!” And then in the bustle of the holidays and travel and seeing family, that grand plan drops by the wayside. Enter 2020, where we ain’t got nothing but time right now. (Okay, we actually have fairly little time because it’s a busy winter on the farm, but since we aren’t driving halfway across the country and back twice, it feels like more time than normal.) In the midst of all our normal winter thinking and planning and prepping, we wanted to share s ..read more

I have to confess, most years I don’t blog as much as I want to in the summer because I’m too tired to write. But this year, it was more like I was too down to write, and I didn’t want to take that down-ness out into the world (because in 2020, who needs more of that?). But I wrote, just keeping the less happy pieces off line, and I’ve been working on pulling them into something more like a look back onto the season. It feels easier to do, after this first round of frosts, when the fields are a little bit quieter, but I’m also a little bit more relaxed and able to breath—the brilliant sun that ..read more

So, in the realm of things I never thought I’d have to write an email or farm post about, global pandemic is pretty high up on that list. And yet here we all are. For our CSA members and market customers trying to figure out your future eating, we wanted to let you know our farm plans. First of all, we are doing a LOT of the things that come naturally to us as vegetable farmers—washing hands, social distancing, and planting all the things. The greenhouse is up and humming, high tunnel planting started, and we are seeding up a storm, because that’s what farmers do. We all need to eat, and our ..read more

The start of this year has been a haul for a lot of us, and I realized that in the bustle of early spring and the gloominess of everything going on this winter, we haven’t shared the more fun things we are doing on the farm for 2022. The big deal this year in terms of projects is that we are going to do something very different… NOTHING new! We are trading out equipment that isn’t working well in our farm system! We have a fancy rototiller, but it doesn’t like to be used on hillsides (obviously not great up here in Fenner), so we are swapping it out for a more basic model that doesn’t care ab ..read more

I ran into a neighbor last week who said to me, “Oh, you must be excited about this year and how good it’s going to be for you with food prices rising for once.” I know they meant well, and I might complain up a storm as a grumpy old farmer about how food prices haven’t kept up with the cost to produce them over the past decades (and this was BEFORE this past year’s craziness), but the rising food prices are actually much more terrifying to farmers than they are to customers. The problem is, all us farmers—even us little “resilient” and “adaptable” ones (more next week on my anti-resilience st ..read more

We’ve been pretty MIA on the internet world these past few weeks. Farming goes on no matter what, but I haven’t been able to dig in and share much from the farm, as it seems so pointless when people and places that you care about are going through hell. Our sunflowers in the snow, kind of feeling their vibe this month. I think I started and then erased a dozen posts and more than one blog. I just can’t seem to find the oomph to highlight CSA week or the opening of the greenhouse season amid these insane wastes of war. From 1997 through 2000, I had many gifts of opportunities to travel and wor ..read more

This week I’ve taken a detour from our normal winter planning activities to work on a presentation for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of NY’s annual conference, which is happening this weekend in Syracuse, NY! PS—local folks, you can come see us as part of the Farm Share Fair, happening on Saturday from 2:30 to 5:30. We’ll be there with other local CSA farms, as well as chefs demoing some delicious local food prep! I’m talking about “In-Season Troubleshooting on a Vegetable Farm,” seeing as dealing with trouble seems to be my main skill set (or maybe it’s just we have the bad luck t ..read more

I wanted to name this “Ignoring the (Crop Rotation) Experts,” but that title is way too loaded these days! However, in terms of crop rotation, I increasingly find the rigidity of ideas on how to do it chafing. This past weekend, I sent in our organic certification application. A lot of that application is submitting records and forms and attestations and showing how you can trace products from seeds to end sales. I know that there’s lots of talk that organic certification is all bunk and not very uptight, but I can guarantee that our certifier (NOFA-NY) is strict enough there is always a lot o ..read more