Pardon Our Absence

Most of our readers are probably aware that we got thrown a pretty significant curveball at the beginning of the 2024 season when something chewed through a wire and set our brooder house (pictured above) on fire. We lost this year's batch of turkeys, some valuable equipment, an intended surprise-addition to the farm offerings and, most of all a lot of time. 

The fire department put out the flames very thoroughly, using a lot of water. On our property, water likes to linger. The thick clay drains slowly, and where there’s heavy animal traffic disturbing the soil we can get waist-high mud pits that don’t dry out for months. Since we over-wintered the pigs next to the brooder with the intent of using that area as our garden, we created the perfect, just-add-water conditions for a 2,000 square foot mud bath. And add water we did. It was late July before we could walk on that ground without sinking in up to our knees, by which time the pig-planted cucurbits had taken over. Oh yeah, did you know if you feed your pigs Halloween pumpkins and then move them to a new area, you’ll get a very prolific pumpkin patch the next year? We do now!

Several planned projects - mostly the ones we categorized as “farm beautification” - got bumped down or completely off the list as what time we were able to get free went in to fire cleanup; a task which will finally be completed this weekend when we haul the scrap metal away and grade the site in preparation for… something. You’ll have to wait and see what. So the place is a bit of a mess. We’d like to call it “shabby chic,” but it’s a lot of shabby and not much chic at the moment.

As we clear away the last of the debris, weed out the neglected garden beds, put the year’s final turkeys in the freezer, and turn our attention to the state of our farm’s appearance, we recognize that our digital image has been neglected as well. We are so grateful to our customers and members who’ve stayed with us through all of the mess, and plan to take this off season to reconnect with you and with our land, and maybe make the place look like somewhere you’d be happy to show off to your friends as you tell them it’s where you get your food.

Here’s to a more beautiful 2025