Meet Your Mad Farmer-Scientist

Last year, we implemented a new cropping system that totally reworked the way we plant some of our crops; we harvest mulch from cover crops and spread it on the soil to provide a thick grownd cover that can control weeds and keep the soil moist.  Then we plant...
My Year of Climate Work

My Year of Climate Work

How do we, as farmers, adapt to the ongoing climate disruptions in a way that keeps our community well-fed and our soil in place in the face of alternating cycles of droughty and super-soaked weather? This week, I have been spent several hours in Zoom meetings,...

Climate Action Plan, take 1

How are we going to keep producing food for our community if the weather goes nuts in the future?  What can we do to lessen our impact on the climate, and even draw down some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere?  Over the winter, I started on a Climate Adaptation...
Spring Forward!

Spring Forward!

While it is disappointing to miss an hour of sleep this time of year, that time change always seems to happen when we are just feeling like we could use an extra hour of work.  Here’s a little run down of what we are working on this week: The greenhouses are...

It’s Vegetable Soduku Time again!

I’m having a little trouble sorting through our records to find when this started, but somewhere around 2010, which would have been our fifth year in Amherst, we started into a new crop rotation.  We thought we had gotten our vegetable production to the scale...

Super Tasty Wings for Super Bowl Sunday!

This week, I took the plunge and made some chicken wings with buffalo sauce from scratch. The results were fantastic. I learned a great trick from the internet: coat the wings in baking powder (along with some other spices) before baking them, and this allows them to...

Building Economic Sovereignty

I am cranking my way through our 2020 financial analysis, and have come across a staggering number: $20,179.25 is the total we spent on credit card fees last year.  You can imagine that if you multiply that number by all of the small businesses in our community, it is...