“I want you to fill your hands with mud like a blessing.” —Mary Oliver
A new year, and a new decade are upon us. 2020 will be our sixth season as Even Pull Farm, which is hard to fully grasp. It seems like forever and the absolute blink of an eye in the same moment. We’ve been staying quiet and taking some time for rest and reflection since December, but now the time has come to shake off the winter darkness and get ready for another growing season.
After a unusually dry and mild early winter, and a strangely cold fall, January really rang in the seasonal shift to winter with plenty of cold, nasty weather. For us, that means rain and LOTS of it. Which means damp clothes, mud everywhere, cold hands, and farm roads reduced to slip n slides. While November and December were full of hustle as we worked on all sorts of projects in the nice weather, January moved at a slower pace. The nasty working conditions outside certainly slow things down when we are working out in the elements. And they press us to work on long-delayed indoor projects too. Sometimes it is nice to have permission to work on things like barn cleanup, computer work, ordering supplies, and the dozens of other necessary tasks that get pushed down the priority list when the weather stays mild in the winter.
L to R: Dazzling blue kale starting to form rapini. Onions springing out of the soil in the prop house. Speedwell showing off its adorable blue blooms on a warm late January day.
While we have been taking it a little slower over the past month or so, we are still staying happily busy with harvest and deliveries, both to our restaurant clients, and to stock our sweet little veggie cooler at Mac Market. (If you haven’t visited it yet, we sure hope you will! You can find all of the details about it HERE.) It’s been really fun to see all of the good veggies coming in out of the gross and muddy fields—winter farming kind of feels like a miracle every time we harvest. So much food out of a seemingly empty field! Amazing! It also happens to be some of our very favorite food of the year: bitter greens aka chicories, cold sweetened kale, delightful winter spinach, and, of course, root veggies that are sweet as candy. While the variety is more limited this time of year, and we are already beginning to sell out of some things, we really really love growing and eating in the wintertime.
L to R: Our Mac Market cooler fully stocked with winter goodies. Admiring future winter food in the high tunnel. And a load of winter veggies headed out to restaurants around the county.
February marks the real beginning of the farming season around here: this month greenhouse seeding will start up again in earnest, we will be planting all of our tunnels for spring crops, keeping our eyes on the forecast to be sure we can take advantage of every break in the weather, finishing field clean up, mowing down spent fall and winter crops, and gathering all of the supplies we need to jump head first into a new season. We also are tiptoeing toward the end of the Persephone Period (the weeks when day length is under 10 hours, and plant growth grinds to a hault). Thank goodness! Everything we have planted will start to grow again (things like purple sprouting broccoli and spinach), and the lengthening days will start triggering the growth of rapini and the blooming of spring bulbs! Yes indeed! It’s an exciting time.
We hope that your 2020 is off to a good start, and look forward to sharing more Notes from the Field in the months to come. Til next time.
—Farmer Beth