The Sunflowers are Here!!!

All is well on the farm as we cope with this bizarre weather. With temperatures getting down into the high 30s/low 40s at night, we are seeing vegetables do things that we've never seen before - mainly stop producing! Our peppers aren't ripening and our melons are ripening at wierd times and the whole thing is a bit bizarre. BUT, there are lots of great things happening on the farm - one being the sunflowers are blooming!!! What a breathtaking sight to behold - a valley of yellow. A nice treat to remind us how beautiful summer can be.

Box #8!

Wicked Weather Week

After surviving 2 years in a row of getting pummeled by "100 year" floods, you can probably imagine that we are a bit on edge when the weather turns severe. Imagine our dismay when we received word of tornado sitings 7 miles from us, coming our way...

Well, luckily we survived relatively unscathed, even with a tornado touchdown about a mile and a half away. We've lost some tomatoes and most of an edamame crop; but more or less all is ok.

I wish I could say the same for my aunt and uncle, who could potentially lose close to 2/3rds of their corn crop due to one hell of a hail storm they received last Friday. I was pretty surprised at how calm they were about it all, but then again they've been putting up with nature's way for all their lives. They've gotten a little more used to it than I.

Throughout the season, when folks have asked me how the season has been going, I've gotten into the habit of saying "any year without a flood is a good one...". Perhaps I need to add to that one with "without a tornado, hail, drought, etc, etc, etc..."

Holy Man, it has been a while...

Things I've learned this year: it is damn hard to farm AND blog....

But, I am not going to give up completely and I am going to take a moment to post a photo of our beautiful onion field.

In the background, you see some of our crew harvesting Green Top beets for box #5...

May feels like August sometimes....

Sunny 82 degree days has me thinking of August....

Each month has its own rhythm - and ever so swiftly from January on, as the months cruise past, this rhythm builds to an all out onslaught of mayhem... this is August. May is somewhat gentler, although the chaos is tapping its hairy finger on our shoulders.

I want to tell you about what's going on right now at Driftless but there's so much going on right now frankly I do not no where to begin In no way can I do the farm and all of its bustle any justice in one mere blog entry. Alas, I try and give a quick overview:

All that will be in the first and even second boxes is in the ground and turning sunshine and water into food. Radishes are seeded, lettuce is growing, broccoli is doing well and has already been cultivated twice (someday soon I will post pictures of our multitude of cultivating tractors). Arugula: thriving under its protective row cover to keep the pesky leaf-munching bugs out. Fennel: looking a little sad from last Saturday's frost, but hanging in there nonetheless. Kohlrabi: already bulbing out. Kale: cultivated today by Zac and it is doing fine. Each week our crew grows and currently we are up to 9 hard working souls.

The list goes on and on.... and we scramble to make sense of it all. And we're loving it all the while. The week continues on and today we welcomed back our chef extrodanaire: Elizabeth. What a wonderful, wonderful woman and we are so fortunate to be working with her. She creates the most amazing dishes out of thin air and we love her for it. I have heard a few times how employees come back each season mostly because of the food.

In any event, here is some pictures of our new (ok, pretty old, but new to us) tractor. It is a Case International 5240 Maxxum. How cool is that? Sounds like its straight outta Knight Rider or something. We needed another workhorse for the farm and when it comes to tractors, we are pretty particular. Well, this ol beast fit the bill and we're pretty happy about it thus far. Pictured here it is rotovating some ground and getting it ready for curly parsley and basil.

This lettuce will someday soon be in your belly...

Sorry about the hiatus. We've been working like mad, trying to get crops in before the rains that inevitably came yesterday.

But, and I say this with cautious optimism, we are caught up (at least for the next 10 minutes or so) and it feels really good! This means that I'll have the time to put together that informational email I promised you about start days and such. Expect a email before the week is out.

In the meantime... the first round of lettuce is in the ground. We plant about 6 plantings of lettuce - about 1800 plants per planting. Each planting is staggered by 2 weeks to ensure that you will be getting a head of lettuce in every box for the majority of the season. That is the hope anway - it does get tough to grow lettuce in the heat of late August, but I think by then we will all be ready for the tomatoes, sweet corn and other bounty that will be offered and lettuce will be the last thing on our minds.

We continue forth on the farm!

In other news...

When I'm not helping Josh and Noah grow vegetables, I raise grass-fed beef in my spare time. My wife and I have a little farm with a nice grassy pasture and just the other day we got 8 steers to put out on it. I rotationally graze them, which means I have 9 different paddocks, or smaller pasture areas, and I move the animals to a different paddock every 2-4 days, depending on the length of the grass. The purpose behind all of this monkeying around is to provide your animals with the best quality forage (grassy stuff to eat) at all times.

In any event - I am excited as ever to have the animals back on my land - and excited to offer wholesome, healthy, delicious grass-fed beef to our CSA members. I just formed a seperate LLC and website to market the beef: www.bigriverbeef.com.

Exciting stuff!

Here's a picture of the newly acquired steers, and Mattie keeping watch over 'em.