We want to start by thanking everyone for a beautiful year – a transitional, magical year we will remember forever.
The leap of faith we took – away from career, from life and home as we’d known them – was truly the best thing we could have done. Our days have never felt more fulfilling, our work never so meaningful, our hearts never so calm and in love with all we see and do. This has been a life-sized proof of concept for being guided by intuition and letting “que sera, sera” replace fear when faced with the unknown. It’s indubitably been the best year of our lives – we’re so grateful that you joined us and helped make this possible.
The Year in Review
Looking around us and smiling in wonder, I’ve often exclaimed to Kristin, “Look! This is our life!! Aaaaaa!!!”
We’ve made the place feel like home, and improved our processes and systems in countless ways. We built a greenhouse, a chicken coop, a hugelkultur mound, and composting outhouse, planted several dozen raspberry bushes, began doing salad mix, sold at market and wholesale for the first time, did late season planting for fall, got to know the locals and explored the ‘hood, hosted our first WWOOFers … it’s been an amazing first year here, and we’re excited to start next year with all the progress we made as a foundation.
We’d love to hear any feedback you have for us – good or bad, it will help us continue to grow and improve.
Looking Ahead
We have just a few weeks before we hit the road for warmer climes. Until then, we’re keeping busy removing and composting dead crops, cleaning and storing away equipment and materials, taking down trellises, planting and mulching garlic, preserving food, finishing the pallet fort/guest shack, and packing up.
scavenging lichen-crusted old sheet metal from a collapsed 60-year old hunting shack in the woods
Then we load up the dogs and roll out for a long journey south – meeting up with family at the beginning and end, some friends in the middle, but mostly working on four other organic farms – learning new things, meeting new people, experiencing new places. (We did this last winter too, and it was incredibly rewarding.)
Come March, we’re coming back and hitting the ground plantin’ – starting seeds and preparing the field for a new year. We’ll be planting different varieties, new greens, more spinach, starting the fall crops sooner, experimenting more with compost tea, and expanding to new markets.
The biggest change we’re planning is transitioning to “no till” farming – rather than plowing the field in spring, we’ll be leaving the existing mulch and delicate soil structure intact, and working more organic material into the rows as we plant. (We reckon that this is the best way to address the sandy soil we have to work with here in the Sand Barrens – where nutrient leaching and moisture loss are major pitfalls.)
2015 CSA
We will be keeping the CSA about the same size, so spots will be limited – but returning members get priority.
Let us know now if you’d would like to be on board next year, so that we can reserve a spot!
Whether you’re joining us next year or not, please stay in touch! We’ll be continuing to update this blog throughout the winter – let us know if you want us to keep emailing you a link when we update the site.
It’s been amazing; thanks again. Have a wonderful winter – hope to see you soon!
It was a cold, gray, rainy, and windy harvest today; holy crap! The tarp ripped apart in the gales twice and had to be repaired to keep the rain off of us. Fortunately, we knew this stormy-cold blast was coming, so we spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening pre-harvesting crops that would not suffer in freshness for being a day early, as well as tomatoes (to prevent them from splitting in the heavy rainfall that was unrelenting throughout the night) and ground cherries (which are best harvested dry).
The temperatures have been on the chilly side all week, but not quite as cold as this – and we’ve kept warm by keeping busy.
salamander unearthed in the compost pile
Our final two WWOOFers of the season, Jersey Boys Leonel & Marc, left on Thursday, after a final night in their tent weathering one of the wildest storms the area had seen in years. Trees fell, huge branches menaced our old Buick, missing by mere inches, and their 10-man tent was destroyed, the fiberglass poles reduced to useless splinters.
In the field, the row cover was shredded & some tomato plants and several patches of sunflowers and corn were flattened – but overall things survived.
our friend Mark’s camper on the edge of the field has a tree gently laid across it now
Leonel and Marc stopped in Minneapolis on their way westward to meet up with us, and we saw them off with a lunch at our favorite Pho restaurant and a skateboard ride around Lake Nokomis. We’ll miss them and the amazing positivity they were enlightened by!
wild plums & mushroom
Once back on the farm, we stayed busy – I can’t even remember most of what was done in the blur of days that followed … but here’s what comes to mind:
We found a buried hole, first of all! You read that right – it was a hole, which was buried – but not filled in. A sunken area behind one of the old sheds got me curious, and a sweep with the metal detector indicated something large and metal was below. A bit of shovelwork revealed the sealed top of a 55 gallon drum – which, when opened, was found to be bolted atop a second drum, down in the soil. Sadly, there was no treasure – but also no pile of old outhouse leavings. It turned out to be part of an old school DIY septic system which had never been used – so we plan to repurpose the deep shaft to store potatoes and the like, in nice underground climate control.
Kristin donned her safety gear and transformed into Chainsaw, taking down one of the two dead oaks that loom over the trailer. Our friends Eugene and Vicky (who had camped over the weekend and helped us with the farmer’s market harvest) helped remove the remains as Chainsaw bucked the fallen giant into manageable hunks.
We sorted the solid logs into the firewood area for splitting and stacking, and the rotten sections into a pile to be used in the Hugelkultur mound down by the field.
Eugene learns to love the Monster Maul
Later, I picked up all the dry twigs and branches, both to make room to work when we drop the next dead oak, and to prepare a cabinet full of dry tinder for starting fires next spring – when all the branches on the ground outside are still buried in snow.
there’s something so peasant-core about a cart full of twigs, isn’t there?
Even the bark found a use – it was beautiful, alive with various green hues of moss and lichens. It matched the multi-toned peeling paint of the trailer (which we both quite love), so it was used to create a patio of sorts off the front door. It is gorgeous to our eyes and functional in a couple of ways – it keeps the sand off our feet as we go in and out the door), and it makes us mindful of the beauty of where we are and what we’re doing out here, every time we enter and exit our home.
You can’t ignore it – it’s easy to walk on, comfortable, but if you are walking mindlessly and in your head, it would be easy to mess up the arrangement. I have loved the impact it’s had on my awareness since it was installed … while we have no idea how it will change, break down, or hold up over time and use, it’s lovely Now, and that alone is more than worth the handful of minutes it took to lay it out!
We went to a local concert – the 10th annual “Sandbur Fest,” which was held just down the road. Local bands, free food, good people – and close enough that we could still hear the music when we went home to relax by the bonfire before turning in for the night.
Kristin’s parent’s bought us some fruit trees last week – we planted the two pear trees in the chicken run, where the fencing would protect them from marauding deer. The two apple trees are still in limbo though, as we determine where they should go; the existing three we planted last year were damaged by the severe cold, which opened their bark to black rot. We may have to remove them entirely as a result – if so, these new ones could take their places.
giant puffball mushroom: edible!
We foraged wild mushrooms, anise hyssop, plantain, mullein, butterfly milkweed seeds, herbs, cherries, and a whole lot of tart wild plums, which were made into preserves as the rains began last night.
Last week’s tomato feeding worked great – the incidence of blossom end rot has been sharply reduced.
The 275-gallon IBC container and downspout was connected to the new rainwater collection system on our trailer – using an old plastic tube, a speaker bracket, and a piece of Grandpa Sehr’s old handpump . It rained all night after we installed it – in the morning, it was filled past the brim with rainwater!
The lows are dipping toward freezing later this week – we may be battling frost in the nights to come. Don’t hate the messenger, but it has to be said; Winter is coming.
Last night, we started contacting farms down South, beginning to plan our our escape route …
the Weekly Box
Your box this week contains what is almost certainly the last of the season’s summer-kissed produce … let’s hope we get several more boxes of fall crops before the Killing Frost!
lightning bug & honey bee sharing a sunflower
Pro tip – look up a good ratatouille recipe – this will use several of the ingredients in this week’s box (basil, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini)
Eggplants – a few varieties went out – you may have gotten a Thai eggplant (long, purple, skinny), and a “weird” white one … and that’s why they used to call them “egg plants” – they were white! (Although these ones are a bit long to pass as egg)
Zucchinis
Cucumbers
Parsley
Tomatoes
Ground Cherries
Tomatillos
Potatoes
Peppers
Green beans – if they seem tough to your taste, they’ll be great cooked!
Italian basil
Green onions – would be good on the potatoes! Use up the green parts first; the white portions will last longer, in the fridge.
fungal” flower”
Any questions about anything at all, get in touch! Stay warm and have a beautiful week,
– the Sehrs
tattoo on a woman that stopped by our Farmer’s Market booth this week!
We woke up chilly the last two nights; lows are falling to almost 50. Windows are being closed a bit at night, sleep snuggling is back in vogue, and the felling, bucking, and splitting of firewood seems much more relevant than it did even a week ago.
It seems like summer never really even started, weather-wise – strange to feel it already receding.
As usual, things have been busy.
wheelbarrow buried in bolted lettuce & weeds
We captured a bunch of red wiggler worms from the second-oldest compost pile, and started a small-scale vermicomposting experiment, hoping to start producing worm castings for starting seeds in.
We weeded & mulched all the interplanted eggplant and basil, started a test batch of sunflower greens using a new method, did a bunch of foraging for wild fruit and mushrooms, made wild cherry jelly and chokeberry jam, turned a few standing dead oaks into firewood piles, and planted peas for fall salad mix tendrils.
up a ladder harvesting wild cherries by the woodpile
edible mushrooms. and rocks
the fruit pulp matches her shirt!
Widget finally caught and quickly dispatched the rabbit she has been hunting all spring and summer – first as a baby rabbit in the woods between the field and trailer, and then out among the rows, when the rabbit got into the fence and set up permanent camp in the edible environment.
That rabbit taught her some serious dodging and evading tactics before she finally advanced in her lessons enough to put teeth to it – tactics which she now delights in using to confound the pursuit of Athena the Beagle (Sean the WWOOFer’s companion).
The porcupine came back gnawing one night, but got away before I could throw furniture polish on him in an effort to convince him to stay away from the trailer. We swam in the mighty purty Saint Croix, ate at Wolf Creek Bar, sold carrots and such at the Market, and composted Gabe’s beard.
Widget hangin at the Wolf Creek Bar
It was a good week.
The Weekly Box
Ground Cherries – also known as Husk Cherries, these look like little tomatillos but have a much sweeter, fruity taste. To open easily, squeeze the husk at the stem attachment side, letting the fruit slid out the tip end. They are sweetest when yellow, more tart when greenish. WWOOFer Sean calls them “ground candy” and gets distracted eating them whenever he comes across a random volunteer from last year’s crop out in the field. They keep best inside their husks, and don’t need refrigeration.
Fennel – this frilly herb is why your box smells like black licorice. The stalks, leaves and seeds are all edible. I like to eat it raw. Chop up the stalks and use them in a salad, or sautee them. A fennel stalk carried the coal that passed down knowledge from the gods to men; fact! Fennel stalks can also be used for soups, stocks and stews, while the leaves can be used as an herb seasoning. Good on sandwiches, yogurt, and seafood.
Potatoes – a spud rainbow.
Watermelon – most of you got Peace Yellow Flesh or Early Moonbeams (yellow) this week, but a couple folks may have gotten Sugar Babies or Crimson Sweets (red). I really like the yellow ones, I discovered this week. Pro tip for eating seeded watermelons – don’t chew, smash with your tongue and swallow the seeds.
Tomatoes – a mix of the varieties that are producing currently, in with the:
Peppers – a mix of the peppers that are ready for harvest (see last week’s newsletter for the full listing of tomatoes and peppers.)
Cucumbers – Lemon and Marketmore Slicing varieties
Broccoli
Green Beans & Dragon Tongue Beans
Okra – you can freeze this until you’re making stew this winter and use it to thicken it up, or sautee it now (but don’t cut open the pods until after you cook em, to avoid the slime-factor.
Kale (Dinosaur, Red Russian, and Dwarf Curly Blue varieties)
Beets & Beet Greens (the “greens” are only sometimes green, usually more deep red, and they’re bagged with your kale) Cook em up with your potatoes, add em to your salad – maybe a beet and fennel and arugula salad?
Arugula – salad, pesto, sammiches! The self-seeded children of the arugula you were eating this spring!
the giant moth that woke me up looked boring … but it had a surprise when I went to pick it up ….
BAM! It was brighter pink than my camera captured – hot pink. Turns out it’s a “Sleepy Underwing.”
Indian Pipe – a parasitic plant feeds on other plants instead of sunlightthis is a tiny frog – that’s his thumbnal it’s on.
This week, we placed & converted the scavenged playhouse, transforming it into the kick ass chicken coop it was always meant to be.
We learned a lot about how to gradually”crib down” large loads in the move, and lots about the joys and pains of working with hardware cloth in the conversion. The results were worth the strain, and we both are in love with the coop – and with the fence that will allow the chickens to roam a good-sized patch of partially wooded outdoors. Especially, perhaps nerdily, excited for the chickens to climb or hang out beneath the ladders we arranged as a chicken roost playground / hawk shelter, and to see them exploring the ferny undergrowth.
crib turned chicken run gate
They’ve been in their new coop (with the screened porch and ground level) for two nights so far, and we’re pretty sure they’ll return to roost upstairs rather than try to make a home in a tree, now.
the girls were the younger siblings in the family we got the playhouse from – we guess that they painted the interior pink when they took it over from the boys. we got the walls painted over but didn’t have enough of the leftover paint supply to do the ceiling …
Tomorrow morning we’ll let them out for the first time. Pumped.
Let’s see .. we were awakened Tuesday night by a some monkeys screaming from the woods around the trailer – to Gabe’s ears. Kristin was startled from sleep with a dreamy belief that it was owls conspiring to get into the coop and murder our new chickens – by calling in coyote reinforcements.
we did not take this picture, but that’s what a Barred Owl looks like.
She was right about the animal though – turned out to be a couple of Barred Owls, making sounds a bit like this – but louder, wilder, and MUCH CLOSER. Pretty neat. The same black bear we saw last week was again sighted down on the far edge of the field – he ran away when he saw a human.
Also: We weeded the beets; 150 feet of hand-picked to beet greens cleanliness. We went to the farmer’s market. The folks that had their tent blown to death last week had not been able to salvage it, and sat out in the direct sunshine all day. There are worse working environments. But we’re grateful for our pop-up canopy.
Gabe and Abe on diatomaceous patrol. “I am a diatom diatom diatom I will make you DIE.” – Kristin’s song lyrics
Because diatomaceous earth is powdery stuff made of diatom skeletons. They’re tiny and sharp at a scale that bothers nothing but very thin-skinned insects and mites, abrading them between their exo-joints so that they dehydrate to death. Killing nasty potato potato grubs with dead diatoms is both bad ass and organic. It’s also refreshing – to be kill bugs without squishing them individually, by hand. WWOOFer Abe earned the nickname “Choppy” by continual practice with the splitting maul. Kristin and her chainsaw kept him in oak rounds.
Oh, and we went to a real live tractor pull!
It was down at the Wolf Creek Bar, which is close enough that after we got bored watching the tractor division compete and went home to the Farm, we heard the bellows of the truck division, pulling to their mechanical limits, until the sun went down and the whip-poor-wills came out that night.
Inside the Box – “Prime stir fry time is upon us.” – Amy
Rainbow Chard – We packed it with the kale, both to reduce bag waste and because you can use them together/interchangeably . They’d be perfect together for this recipe that we both enjoy quite a bit. Also, note that you can totally eat the red, pink, yellow, and white stems.
Zucchini – young & tender. At this stage, just add them to something else – your stir fry, your breakfast hash, your salad, if you like them raw (we don’t much).
Also:
Peas – We have been eating a lot of peas at home. We really enjoyed them today on the harvest lunch break – sauteed lightly, whole, with some garlic and dill. We’ve loved them them chopped them up in salads. We’ve chopped em up, cooked them briefly in a little oil, cracked fresh eggs over them, covered it, finished the eggs sunny-side up, and then seasoned/herbed them. NOM.We find that this is a great (simple, tasty, variable) way to enjoy almost any vegetable for breakfast.
Kohlrabi
Basil (two kinds)
Kale (Red Russian & Dinosaur varieties) – bundled (& shown) together with the Rainbow Chard. Use them together, perhaps.
Turnips (purple top & salad varieties)
Broccoli
Salad mix – red ruby lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, arugula, & some pea tendrils too.
Also – it’s big leaves this week – chop it up with a good sharp knife if you prefer your greens in a more readily-managed format.
some other images from the week
in the daytime, a cooler full of ripe, fresh strawberries is a good social hub to replace a bonfire
deeper than “knee high by the 4th of July”
can you spot the pea-pickers?
The weather is just about perfect, and the sky is beautiful. Hope you are enjoying it too!
What a rainy week! Thanks to our sandy soil we never flood, so the deluge has been nice for the crops … but it’s also been a joy for the weeds, which can seemingly quadruple in size overnight. So, it’s no surprise that we did a whole lot of hand weeding this week, as well as mulching like crazy to prevent future weedsplosions.
We also scored two free massive rolls of paper from Craigslist (each weighs 450 pounds!), and rigged up a hanging spool system beneath the semi trailer “barn” on the edge of the field.
This will allow us to easily pull out 200 feet at a time, to serve as weed barrier beneath the mulch, in the walkways between rows.
You might think that moving to the sticks from South Minneapolis would result in some comparatively silent nights; nope. The nocturnal sounds here have been off the hook and fascinating, especially recently with the bright moon and the increase in animal activity this brings. We live on the upper edge of the Saint Croix River valley, pretty much surrounded by wooded state land. The nights here are busier than Chicago-Lake Liquors. There are foxes that scream like possessed babies, coyotes that yelp and howl, black bears that are silent until you startle them and they go crashing through the forest like drunken sasquatches, whip-poor-wills that loudly call their own name all throughout the night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTATW8H8zpQ), several types of owl, choruses of crickets & tree frogs, and some downright mysterious sounds.
For example, there was the mystery of the all-night drumming we heard coming from the direction of the river, on multiple nights. We would’ve thought it was hippies camping out and having a drum circle, if it had not been so continuous – going on steadily all through the night, and if it had any discernable rhythm. But the more we listened to the constant drumming sound, the more convinced we were that it was not likely actual drums being played, and that itwas coming from more than one direction along the river. If it weren’t for a lucky result when I tried Googling “drumming sound Saint Croix River, we would likely have never figured it out …
So, sheepshead fish live in the river, and they spawn in June, preferring exactly the type of environment found directly across from us. Sheepshead are the only freshwater member of the Drum Fish family – so named for the loud drumming sound the males make when spawning (http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/fish/freshwaterdrum.html). This is little-known phenomenon is almost certainly what we’ve been hearing, drumming up from the river bottoms.
The weather was also quite the noisemaker the last few night – the wind was insane Monday night; we woke up Tuesday morning to find that the mosquito fortress my sister gave us as a wedding present had been utterly demolished, as if by a truck. Fortunately, the mosquito population has really been decimated by the swarms of dragonflies, and we won’t need the shelter just to avoid death by insectile anemia.
And last night, we were bombarded by hail – which is plenty loud on our metal roof, as well as on the shipping container and our collection of 55 gallon drums …
Hmmm, in other news we saw a dung beetle on the side of the field and Gabe was amazed, not knowing they existed around here. There was a giant spider that caught and killed a cricket. A carrion beetle with orange symbiotic mites A pair of pileated woodpeckers, Fresh black bear tracks. Sandhill cranes, dinosaur-bird style. We painted a banner for the Saint Croix Falls Farmer’s Market.
Our first WWOOFers moved on after helping out tons, headed for the gorgeous Michigan Upper Peninsula.
Widget hunted rabbits. We got the well pump to run off the solar power system instead of the generator (thanks to a friend of the farm that donated both a second battery and a powerful inverter!). The broccoli pulled a sneaky trick and went to flower under the row cover when we had our backs turned – the few days of heat kicked it into warp drive – we’ll still get smaller side shoots from it, but we plan to plant a second wave of fall broccoli to come up after the heat of summer has passed by.
The Weekly Box
It’s salad season – enjoy your fresh local greens while they are here, because soon the summer heat will come and end many of these … the bag of spring salad mix this week contains oak leaf lettuce, beet greens, sunflower greens, pea tendrils, baby swiss chard, baby curly & red Russian kale, wild spinach, mizuna (the frilly, spicy stuff), and a little bit of amaranth leaf.
Some stuff you had last week is back this week, including:
Radishes(Hailstone, Easter Egg, & Champion varieties) – spicytastic if eaten fresh, mellow & mild if roasted – kind of like small, slightly radishy potatoes.
Radish greens – these make great pesto – you could combine them with the arugula for an absolutely delicious pesto. (You can also use pea(nuts or sunflower seeds instead of spendy pine nuts!) Try to use them in the next couple of days, and don’t try to eat them fresh – they need to be cooked to be enjoyed.
New stuff this week:
Broccoli – the sneaky stuff started flowering on us while hiding beneath the row cover, but don’t fear – the yellow flowers are not only pretty, but pretty tasty … every part of the broccoli plant is edible, including the entire stalk. You don’t see the flowers in grocery stores because they are fragile and don’t keep forever or ship across the country. Enjoy eating the flowers; they are a hallmark of fresh and local broccoli! You can oil up the entire broccoli bouquets and grill them whole, or cut them up – the thicker parts of the stalks can be chopped up and stir-fried, or add them to soup.
Baby bok choi – steam or stir fry! Would be good with the radishes and broccoli for sure.
