Here come the greens

Get your pans oiled and your knives sharpened, because another harvest season is upon us.  Deliveries will begin next week—a week earlier than scheduled!  Luscious greens, fragrant herbs, garlic, strawberries and more will make a short trip down I-71 to rendezvous with you.

First Wednesday pick-up will be May 16 and first Saturday will be May 19.

Shares are still not filled up for the year, so we will still happily accept new members after the season starts.  Thanks for spreading the word.

The New Farmer Movement

Your very own CSA farmer was among the farmer-authors published in Greenhorns: 50 Dispatches from the New Farmers Movement.  Many of you would recognize “The Ambush” as the story of my discovery of our massacred flock of chickens in November of 2010, when Courtney was 41 weeks pregnant.

The various samplings of young farmers’ stories from around the country offer rich glimpses of why we are farming and what challenges we face.  The proud and humble voices in this book are encouraging about the future of agriculture.

This is a link to the trailer for Greenhorns:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8J9Ciuxoac&feature=youtu.be

It is available from storey press at: http://www.storey.com/book_detail.php?isbn=9781603427722&cat=Animals

and also through Amazon.

Baby chicks

One of our hens became the proud new mama of seven this past Sunday.  Nature is beautiful.  She, like every hen (that has ever been allowed to hatch eggs) before her, hardly moved for 21 days.  Stoic and patient, there she sat every day, seemingly watching the world go by.  Sunday morning she was still there, but in the afternoon there was a family where there once was none.  And she now has the ineffably precious gift of life cheeping beneath her, something spectacular to show for her three weeks of sitting.

Caution: Mama gets feisty!

Getting busy

May is a mad month on most farms like this one.  Brief planting windows open and close too quickly.  Planting is clearly critical, for if you don’t plant it, it certainly won’t come.  But meanwhile weeds are gaining speed as the days lengthen.  When harvest begins, you should be in three places at the same time.  May is full of manic movement on the produce farm.  Here at A Place on Earth, Courtney is still in school, and the moment she gets home in the afternoon I need to hurry and make hay while the sun shines.

It’s a whirlwind, and it won’t let go til Fall.

Fortunately, there are still some fine evenings when, before Clark’s bedtime, I work in the presence of my family, when my wheelhoeing is accompanied by my son’s sweet singing and my wife weeds nearby, when the endless (loco)motion stills for a second, and there is perfect peace on this place on earth.  It’s hard in our busy lives to devote time to stopping and “smelling the roses.”  But you don’t even have to stop.  I was still moving, still pushing that wheelhoe, but I could feel that “Love is all there is.  It makes the world go round.”

Next week we will start sharing the results of nurturing this earth with work and love.  We look forward to being a source of deep nourishment.