It’s that time of year–the beginning!–when we get to recap the past year and look forward to this one.
Last season was our seventh one growing together on this 22 acre farm. It’s wild to think of what all has developed since spring of 2017, when we dug a well, built a greenhouse and yurt, and had a deer fence put up on a hilly hay field at the end of Hidden Falls Road.
In those past seven years, we’ve raised almost half a million dollars worth of food, selling it a few dollars at a time. In 2023, roughly 40,000 pounds of food left the farm and ended up at schools, food pantries, restaurants, and in your kitchens! And we still have over 4000 pounds of vegetables in storage, not to mention 500+ pounds of lamb and pork in the freezers (you can access these foods through the Iowa Food Hub online market!). That’s a lot of work that four bodies/minds/hearts accomplished!
New in 2023 was an exploration of growing vegetable seeds, and we had a great time raising a few species for Fedco. We’re going at it again this year, with Fedco, Seed Savers, and hopefully also Driftless Seed Supply. It’s rewarding to see the life cycle of a vegetable through to completion, and to imagine all the places that the seeds will be grown! May they fall on fertile ground.
This week on the farm the sheep and cats were fed and watered, the cooler full of storage vegetables was monitored for temperature (holding steady at 35-37 degrees!), Hannah cleared fallen trees out of the property lines with a fresh chain on the chainsaw, and we ordered our seeds for the year! Hannah’s the primary worker on the farm at the moment, because Emily is heading in for surgery this week and will be recovering for the rest of the winter. That’s the big work of our 2024: bringing Emily back to full physical capacity, and keeping Hannah motivated and whole as she tends the farm solo!
Looking forward to the growing season ahead, we’re really excited about our CSA collaboration with Sweet Season Farm. If you want a steady flow of vegetables from both of our farms to inspire your meals from July through October, please join us! And, if you like the market share, where you pay ahead for credit at our farmers market stand (no cash needed!), we’re accepting sign ups now!
We’ll also be putting a large planting of blueberries and raspberries in the ground this year, have seeded a diverse mix of native plants for the sheep to graze, and have submitted a grant to plant hundreds more trees and shrubs on the farm in 2025. It feels exciting to push ever more toward biodiversity and perennialization.
Thanks to each of you for being in community with us as the year turns. It is such a joy to work at the intersection of land regeneration and community provisioning. We all live from the intricate web of life that our miraculous earth supports, and we get to witness and participate in it every day.
Wishing each of you and yours joy and connection and strength, this year and always.
humble hands harvest 