January, 2025

As we slide to the end of January, here are some of my notes from this month.  There are fewer roots in this winter’s share.  Besides the intense drought this summer, half of my contemporary farmers in the region  have quit in the last couple of years for better pay and health insurance in off-farm jobs.  I used to partner with a variety of growers for parnsips and celeriac, among other crops.  I am shifting my growing plans to have more of these myself in the future, but the loss of farmers is alarming.  Why this is part of a larger trend in American agriculture is a topic for another post, but what I will say here is that Community Supported Agriculture is such an important component of having a viable local food system.  I am full of gratitude for all my CSA members!

Everyone was snug in the cold days, including me.  The chickens have stayed inside their winter coop, where they have a heat lamp and nice lights to mimic daylight.  I used the cold weather to give them some spa time —- extra kelp and hay and lard to snack on, a bucket of cold wood ashes for dust baths, and some extra diatomaceous earth for mite control.  They get hot water twice a day to keep them hydrated.  The pigs stay buried in their hay nests out in the field, with the two boars peaking out to let everyone know when I am coming with food.  We feed them double amounts just once a day so they aren’t spending a lot of time in the cold.  Everyone is pretty happy to keep snoozing and eating their houses.

I used the time to reorganize my craft room, which badly needed it.  For the next cold snap, it will be my workroom in the basement.  It’s nice to finally get a winter cold enough that I can catch up to these tasks!  The real cold kills insect pests also!

I’ve put together my seed order, and boy have the prices jumped.  I expect this will be a trend for the next handful of years.  Luckily I am saving more and more of my own seed.  I will comment more on this in my next post about 2025 goals.  The two challenges that I want to work on next are saving squash, and saving carrots.  The carrots are tricky because they take a full two years to mature, so that bed can’t be used for something else in the second year.  The squash are tricky because some of them cross with my summer squash, or with each other.  I need to grow some of them at our cabin, which is deep in the woods where they won’t cross with a neighbor’s plants. 

What's easier is lettuce.  I used to grow quite a few varieties of head lettuce.   I will be cutting this back to one or two... or three.... gosh, I can't help myself... so that I can save the seed and it won’t cross with itself.  I can keep the populations isolated by time in my intensive rotation.  Because I am such a small farm, I make sure to avoid inbreeding depression by mixing seed from two different years so that I have the necessary genetic diversity.

After about a decade of working on this, about half my seed supply is from my own seed-saving efforts.  This last summer set me back some, with the incredible late summer drought -- I lost two whole bean crops and a number of potatoes among other things.  But I will persist because it seems clear that this practice is foundational to my farm's resilience.  It was also helpful to see which potatoes _did_ do well in such a severe drought.  I did not renew some of the varieties that failed.  Increasingly I have looked to practices of farmers in the high desert out west as we get more extreme droughts generally coupled with cooler temperatures.  This is not getting ready for climate change, this is adapting to climate changed, to borrow a phrase from Dan Egan in his book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes."